ETH/BTC strength, Scalar revealed and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #105 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sozano and today's the 22nd of april 2021 all right everyone all-time high day for eth ah very very exciting time of course um you know i guess like not much more above our old all-time high you know the old all-time high was 25.50 and we went to about i think almost 2600 uh just before but still very very cool to see such a strong recovery from eth i guess um you know we went down to uh what 1990 i think like just a a couple of days ago a few days ago and then we've bounced it back up but not only has eth bounced back up against usd it has also bounced back up against the

ratio here so the btc ratio and the last time the ratio was at this price was august of 2018. that's a long time ago it's almost three years ago now when you when you kind of look at it like that and you're like wow you know it's crazy how long uh you know kind of like each valuation against bitcoin has been i guess like down in this is one in this one range and if i had a chart here i could show you but essentially this range goes all the way back to august of 2018 uh which is which is quite insane there so uh you know that's very positive people getting really excited about that and you know there's a lot of people who ask me you know why are we excited about each valuation against bitcoin well i mean it's just from a pure market

structure perspective where when you look at bitcoin and you know everyone looks at bitcoins like the top dog or whatever and they think you you look at that you're like okay well bitcoins where the trillion dollars but all this stuff's happening on eth right and all this stuff's happening with ethereum why is ethereum valued so so low compared to btc and that's kind of like what i look at it for and you know there's always like people just poking fun at others about you know i said yeah thanks btc maxis because you know no matter what kind of direction the ratio is going in like one group of people is like annoyed about it right if the ratio is going up the btc maxes are annoyed about it if it's going down the quote-unquote ethmaxis you know are annoyed about it so it's always fun just a little bit of fun to

kind of watch that um but yeah i think that's kind of like the main reason people just like to watch the ratio here and you know i'm one of the people who believe in the flipping i believe ethereum should be worth more than bitcoin i don't think that the the tam or the total adjustable market for bitcoin is very large you know if it does become like a replacement for gold yeah okay it could be worth 10 trillion dollars right but as i explained in yesterday's uh daily great refuel video and in my newsletter i believe it can also be worth 10 trillion dollars um or more probably probably more because ethereum i mean i believe ethereum is going to be the backbone of the new world economy right new world financial system an incredibly neutral one at that where everyone in the world is going to be

building on it and then 8 is going to stay or be and stay at the heart of that whole entire ecosystem and i put out a tweet today saying you know in case you haven't been paying attention ethereum's fundamentals are stronger than ever and the market is now pricing that in and that's another reason why you look at the the hbdc ratio because you kind of look at uh if the market's actually pricing in ethereum's fundamentals or not i think it's just started to i don't think it's anywhere near done um you know i don't think it i don't think anything's ever priced in but if you kind of look at the fundamentals of ethereum and i wrote about this in the daily newsletter today they are literally stronger than ever all of them are pretty much at all time highs and you know i explained in the newsletter

like what do we mean by fundamentals i mean it i i think like if you if you kind of look at it at a higher level it basically includes everything that right it includes like things like eth locked in d5 it includes like heath lock and staking it includes protocol work you know what kind of protocol upgrades are coming like eip1559 and eth2 and the merger all that good stuff right the nft growth the growth of enterprise ethereum adoption the growth of ethereum's metrics like active addresses and you know total transactions on the network total fees paid and all of that feeds back into itself to increase the fundamental value of ethereum which increases the fundamental value of eth and i explained why in yesterday's reflow i won't go on about that again actually

quick shout there to everyone who contacted me and said thank you for putting that together i'm glad it was very helpful because i'd been meaning to go through i guess like the fundamental bullish case for ethereum and eth for quite a while and uh you know i've been meaning to make a standalone video about it but i guess like yesterday i just got into got into a bit of a a mood and decided you know screw it i'll just i'll just lick all the alpha now but those kind of things aren't new right if you've been watching the refuel if you've been reading my newsletter if you've been following me on twitter for for years these are the same things that i've been talking about for years and not just myself but a lot of people in the ethereum community even on the ether podcast with eric like

him and i have been talking about this stuff since since we started the podcast in early 2019 uh actually we started sorry started it kind of late 2019 there i think or am i losing my my my mind yeah i think late 2018 wow it's been a while so you know that was like the bear market right the middle of the bear market sort of thing um so you know that that is where kind of like the real alpha comes from is you kind of like follow these long-term thinkers um who who basically base their investments on on the fundamental side of things over the long term um that's why i think you should kind of like follow and and listen to but again like you know nothing i say is investment advice nothing anyone else says is investment advice but if you just kind of like follow

along and and you know i guess like do your own research by following along i think that's that's the healthiest way to to go about it for sure so yeah fundamentals are just stupidly strong i mean i haven't been this bullish on eighth ever like i say this every kind of like few months but just like all the bullish catalysts coming for eth right now it's so hard not to be bullish i mean i explained it yesterday but again just to reiterate 1559 and the the the merger are two of the most bullish things that are ever going to happen for ethereum and they're not just a one-time thing they keep feeding value into each other in what i like to call the eighth super cycle one five five nine because it keeps burning fees in perpetuity which i'm actually gonna tweet here maybe i should

talk about that now um you know i should talk actually i'll talk about this uh in a sec after i i um and we're staking right and with the merger coming through um we reduce the block rewards by 90 once the merger happens and then each just keeps getting staked because their ap apr is going to be high due to the fees that aren't burnt being paid to stakers instead of miners and on top of that stakers don't have to sell the eighth because they don't have like ginormous um costs to cover like hardware maintenance and electricity but back on 1559 here i put out this tweet today and it seems to be very popular i just think this is not something that people really think about and the tweet reads once erp 1559 is implemented every single transaction on ethereum will burn eth every liquidation every

eighth transfer every layer two pre proof every dex trade and even every rug pull it doesn't matter what the transaction is eth will continue being burned forever now i used some like kind of like hopium language the language here forever doesn't literally mean forever it just means as long as the ethereum network runs and you know there is the non-zero chance that for some reason we remove one five five nine in the future i mean i highly doubt that's gonna happen but like it's not like it's 100 not going to happen i i like to think about i think of it like if um bitcoins 21 million kind of hard cap you know they're saying it's never going to be changed right and like that's what it's going to be forever um and and that's fine but there is still that non-zero chance that it

could be but anyway why i said this is something that people don't think about is because when you hear you know eight fees are gonna be burned you don't really think uh from what i've noticed maybe not you guys i i'd like to think that that the refuel viewers are kind of like more switched on but in general kind of like when you think about it you don't think like uh about like the nitty gritty stuff right like from and i i mean i don't even do it like i just thought of this like uh i think a couple of days ago maybe i was just kind of thinking about this i'm like wow like when you really look at this and you really think about it every single transaction on ethereum doesn't matter what it is right it can be literally anything contract deployments token transfers

whatever like the same stuff that i've kind of like outlined here um it will burn either it won't burn the whole transaction fee um estimations put it at like 70 or something like that so most of it but we won't know until it goes live of course but that's going to go on every single block right because a block contains all the transactions every single block as long as the ethereum network exists or until we or until a time when 1559 is removed which obviously i don't think is going to happen i put it like a pretty much zero percent chance of it happening but i guess as a qualifier i'll put that there but if we just kind of like ignore that and focus on it being implemented and you know everything's running smoothly and everything's fine then forever and the ethereum network runs 24 hours a day seven days a week

365 days a year and it has had a 100 up time so no matter the amount of activity that happens on the ethereum network no matter the amount of fees paid there will always be eth being burned it doesn't matter if it's a bull market doesn't matter if it's a bear market it doesn't matter it doesn't matter at all ethie's always going to be burned no matter what's happening on the network and if you go back obviously during bear markets transactional activity drops but i actually don't think that's going to happen during down markets at this time in in in such a big way because when you actually look at it you know d5 is a real use case for bull and bear markets it's not like people are like um you know it's not like people are going to exit the ecosystem everyone that i know that's cashing out

right now and just taking profits is going to stable coins and he's yield farming they're not going to fear i mean i've talked about this before i've said that you know no one's going to fear why would you go to fiat 0.5 percent in your bank account who cares about that let's get some 10 you know at least stable yields in d5 baby let's go right um so from that perspective that increases network activity too right so it doesn't matter if it's a bull or bear market i think people are just going to stay in the ecosystem people are going to keep using ethereum if the the transactional kind of like demand for ethereum is going to keep growing exponentially it already is and the fact that people are willing to pay you know the high fees still right on ethereum is such an amazing

kind of vote of confidence and then we have layer two coming right and the layer two operators are not gonna care how high the fees are they're gonna pay the the the really high fees and we're gonna potentially one day as i've said before get to billions of dollars a day in fee revenue for the ethereum network which is potential potentially billions of dollars a day of eth being burned so i mean a little i guess that's a little follow-on from yesterday's kind of like bullish case but i mean when you really think about it and really understand the implications and really kind of understand how this translates into exponential growth very hard to not realize the power here anyway i will move on from that for now uh justin drake had a really great tweet here pointing out that 10 billion dollars

is now staking in eth2 as he likes to call it economic security uh because there's almost four million eighth staked and obviously the eighth price went up here so really cool to see that he says 100 billion next which i mean we can get to right we don't even need the eighth price to ten times from here to get to that we can have like an eighth price rise and the eth in staking increase and you know as coinbase staking is now coming online slowly i expect this number to to um to go out more staking service would be services are becoming more popular more people are buying eth to stake it you know i can see this number going to maybe not 10 million before the merger happens but it's still going up like maybe another one to two maybe three million or something like that

but then once the merger happens right and everything's a holistic ethereum and you don't have to worry about that one-way bridge anymore and the apr goes way up because of the fee revenue i do think that we're going to get to 10 million plus e-staked which would be an enormous amount of eth and you know depending what the price is right the price could be like 5 000 which which would which would which would translate to like a 50 billion dollar kind of like um you know economic security so really really great to see that here um and you know kudos to justin for pushing this along and pushing this kind of meme of economic security and ultrasound money along i i'm fully on board with all of that so never mind and uh taku uh kind of like a client another client um

sorry i should say never mind and take you are both kind of uh ethereum one and 2.0 clients here uh they have uh been running together the realism uh merge spec which i've spoken about before this is the the kind of project that's being worked on by a bunch of eth1 and e2 researchers to spec out and build the merger right on a test net um or like as they call it here at devnet so um they basically got this uh this up and running and it's now ready for uh the the devnet here ready for the eighth one to e2 devnet which is really cool to see and obviously you know a lot of this kind of stuff on this screen is not going to mean much to most of us but still there's progress being made like at a lightning fast pace on the merger

and as i said before expect it early next year i don't think it's going to happen late late this year i mean as much as i would love it to i just think that's too ambitious at this point in time i think early next year is is it's going to happen and that's fine i mean like honestly i just i mean i i'm patient right we can wait i mean we've waited this long like we can wait a bit longer and then once that happens we have shouting to look forward to after that as well but in the meantime i mean it's not like we're waiting for this merge to happen for like ethereum to keep growing i mean ethereum's growing as i explained like fundamentally across like everything right now so it doesn't even matter but still good to see this uh from these

two awesome teams here so the first real world assets um in make a dao went live and basically this is the first real world asset based loan so i spoke about this when it was released then it was called uh these are these assets that were called like silver series or something when when they kind of like were released and it's not actually silver i said it on the refill at the time that it was that it was silver but that the name's a misnomer here it's actually something else and i can't remember what it is now man i i should have like read this before making the refuel but i it's definitely not silver it's some some kind of other real world asset here and what that means is basically an asset that's not native to ethereum it's a tokenized version

of an asset that exists in like the physical kind of uh meat space here so i think what it is is um basically i mean obviously allowing people to take out maker loans using these real world real world assets and that's what happened here and this is what's being tweeted about here basically depositing the depositing this new silver kind of thing here um into make a doubt and drawing stable coins against it which is really really awesome to see i mean and i mean i don't know if you guys have seen lately but but maker is finally getting the love it deserves the mkr token is increasing in value rapidly i don't own any i should have maybe bought some when i saw it the other you know i mean everyone that that in the in the kind of defeater system has been saying that mkr

has been undervalued for a very long time and i made a silly comment on twitter where i basically said you know i i don't want to buy it because the price action has been so bad for so long against both usd and eth but at the same time um the the uh the fundamentals of makeup have never been better which makes the uh which makes mkr one of the most undervalued assets in d5 uh and that you know that tweet got like a bit of confusion from people they're like you know how can you be saying that uh you don't want to buy it because if it's bad price action if you're you think it's the most undervalued thing and that doesn't make sense right but that's just like kind of what a lot of people thought about it they're like i'm not going to touch this

because it's not a great asset even though it's like super undervalued um or it doesn't have great performance mind you that's what a lot of people think about a lot of assets and honestly i love buying those assets i've spoken about it before where i usually buy assets that no one's looking at but for me even though i i i was bullish on mkr for me i look at a maker as like a core ethereum protocol and if mkr or if make is doing well ethy's doing well so i may as well just hold eth plus i had some other assets that i was looking at that were kind of like higher risk but you know potentially higher rewards so i just went with them but for me mkr is another kind of asset that you can just sit on for a while and just like forget about it same with

eth right i feel like ethereum and maker are extremely symbiotic um maker allows people to take on cheap debt to buy more eath and that allows them to do to do that with their eath right and 50 of maker is still eth so from that perspective um you know i think that mki is a great portfolio kind of like allocation not investment advice of course but you know i think just that the previous kind of like price action over the last few years has turned a lot of people off which is fair enough i mean its price action was like really bad for for for quite a while but now i guess the market's finally waking up and seeing that maker has been growing its fundamentals are our all-time highs die has been growing like it's at all-time highs as well and now they're doing like really exotic

stuff like real world assets in maker here so yeah really cool to see that uh coming out of maker and centrifuge for enabling this so the immutable x rollout is continuing this is the layer 2 nft exchange from immutable based on starquest technology they're on to stage three now where minting has been reactivated for trial of the gods cards so if you want to mint these cards you can now do so on layer two which is really cool and there's uh three more phases left of this kind of main rollout with genesis minting which is uh i think like the genesis set for god's unchain will finally be minted on layer two uh core minting which is the i think the core set and forge

which is a feature for the now for the um kind of game here will reopen and then beyond here so as i've described before immutable x isn't just the layer 2 exchange for god's unchained it is a layer 2 platform for all types of nfts and it enables up to 9000 transactions per second so really cool to see them progressing through this rollout i've said it before i'll say it again at layer 2 is here it's just not evenly distributed yet and we're getting to the evenly distributed stage i mean you know next month we have unisoft v3 to look forward to and they did tease a layer 2 implementation coming out on optimism if we say that next month things are going to get real crazy people i don't think people are expecting it honestly and i'm just making an assumption unisop didn't confirm that it's coming out next

month or whatever but they did say shortly after v3 goes live which is may 5th and we're you know we're on april 22nd here so only about less than two weeks out so i think that's going to be a game changer i wrote about that in the newsletter the other day and then of course we have optimism's main main you know launch targeted for for july we have arbitram launching soon as well um you know we have zk sync teasing stuff star wars still rolling out but over the next few months is when the evenly distributed happens and it's going to happen much faster than people think so yeah really really really bullish to to see this yeah so the graph announced after two nearly two years of research and development on state channels they have unveiled something called scalar which is a micro transaction

solution built on connects networks vector for fast and cheap query fee transactions in the graph network now this is really awesome to see like i think state channels were one of the original kind of like layer two scalability technologies ever since the lightning network the lightning network is like a i guess like a form of state channels um but ever since that um you know it's been worked on by different projects like ryden and and kind of like connects tr and a bunch of others it has been kind of like i guess relegated to a kind of i guess the niche use case compared to a generalized use case like what roll-ups are but that doesn't mean that that's a bad solution or a bad kind of technology it's actually going to be used a lot by i mean it's been it's been used by k'nex

as part of their core kind of um kind of core uh infrastructure there and then it's also going to be used by the graph here as well so this is really really fun to see the graph for those who don't know is a massive uh i guess like back end protocol like middleware protocol for ethereum apps and things like that you know you might have seen that sometimes the graph will go offline uh briefly because they get overloaded with the amount of activity on ethereum and some of the d5 apps that you interact with the front ends at least will will act weird or not show the correct information and everything like that and that's because they're getting the information from the graph and the graph queries are different kind of archive and full nodes on ethereum to serve up that data so that it's nicely kind of displayed on

different d5 front ends so the graph is a core middleware protocol like chain link right with oracles i believe connext is going to become an awesome kind of middleware protocol as well here basically going between layer twos and bridging between other chains with ethereum and stuff like that so really awesome to see this partnership here i'll link this in the youtube description you can go read more if you want more details on that one so zappa yesterday announced zappa learn which is basically a new section of their kind of website here where you can learn all about different kind of like d5 things like different d5 basics tutorials and even alpha leaks here now i had the honor of writing one of the first pieces here describing how you can earn 38 apy

farming with the metaverse index from the index cop so you can go read this if you want to check that out but there's going to be so many so much more stuff happening here i'm pretty sure defy dad's running it i mean he's been doing such great default education for quite a while now on youtube on on twitter um and now he's um they're kind of i guess working at um at zappa so he's kind of leading this effort here uh but yeah i can't wait to see like all these articles come together i mean they already have like a bunch here you can see right like such as what is a bridge right um from from ellen nader here who's another person that works at zappa and they want to do guest posts like obviously i'm the first guest but they want to do

more guest posts here and become basically an educational hub for people which i think is really smart because it actually means that they can drive users to use zapper as well which i consider to be an awesome uh tool and dashboard that everyone should be using and i guess the disclosure that i'm an investor in zappa but i invested in zaba because like all throughout defy summer i was using zappa every single day and now i use zappa every single day to keep track of my portfolio zap in and out of opportunities i mean yeah i won't show zappa too much yeah but their learn section is awesome and should definitely go check it out if you haven't already so a bit of sweet day uh i guess announcement here from hudson jameson now for those who don't know hudson jameson has been a long

time ethereum community member since the early days and he's been assured particularly as part of the eth1 core devs the old core devs as they're known for quite a while now and he announced on twitter yesterday that he was having his last day at the ethereum foundation uh so he put a thread together here basically thanking everyone and was very grateful for all of the support over the years and you know there's an embedded tweet here where he actually joined the ethereum foundation back in june of 2016. so he's been there for almost five years which is a which is a massive effort here from hudson and i mean this picture just makes him look so young right if you've seen hudson before you can see he's got like a longer beard now and looks uh looks a bit older here maybe that was all the um the stress he went through

with ethereum because he experienced all the stuff right the dow right because uh the dow happened around this time the shanghai dos attacks right all the the other core dev related kind of um drama that had to be dealt with through the years and obviously the the market kind of movements and stuff so i i mean you know i think uh the ethereum community has aged us all a little bit but it's just funny to see like i wanted to you know i actually thought of doing like a before and after photo like before kind of like the down after the after the dow um but yeah anyway i'm going off on a little a little bit of a tangent there but hudson's a good friend of mine i mean he is one of the most caring people in the ethereum uh community he's not leaving the ethereum community he's

just kind of like leaving the ethereum foundation to pursue pursue other things he wants to do uh he also helps out z cash as well so i mean you know i said here like i thanked him for all his kind of like tireless work over the years he's been instrumental in kind of like ethereum uh in the ethereum community and doing so much uh within it for and touching like you know literally thousands of people's lives with his work which is really awesome uh so yeah i guess like it's bittersweet but you know people people move on right people move on from roles they want to try something new i mean i it was it was very kind of like hard for me to leave kind of full-time work at at set uh you know i'm still an advisor to them but i i left because not because i didn't want

to work there anymore but because i felt it was time to kind of like move on to doing other things such as the daily way right like i was finding it hard to kind of balance full-time work and the stuff that i was doing with the daily grey and all the other projects that i'm helping out and kind of like to you know everything else that i'm trying to do so that's kind of like why i i kind of left full-time work there um but you know i think the same is for hudson here i think he's just like at another stage in his life another stage of his journey where he wants to basically move on from what he was doing right and maybe do something do something else here so yeah i guess congrats to hudson on kind of like um moving on to this new

stage in his life and i wish him all the best so starkware put out this blog post detailing how their uh how chain links oracles work on their layer 2 solution called starkx now this is really cool to see them using chain link i think a lot of people in the um not a lot but like some people within the kind of crypto space like to reinvent the wheel when it comes to oracle's and i actually think that's incredibly uh misguided because it represents a very big security risk um i think that chain link is the most secure oracle on ethereum besides maybe the make a day out oracles and i think they have been battle tested for quite a while now the team you know is always doing great work i spoke about the other day how

chain link released their 2.0 white paper and things like that so they've you know they're working hard they're doing a lot of good stuff so i'm glad to see starkware using using chain link here and in this post they basically detail how they do that and how it kind of uh all works on their stockx layer 2 solution here so yeah definitely go read this post if you want to get more details about that i'm not going to go over it on the on on on the refill of course but yeah i just thought it was really positive to see starkwear supporting such an awesome oracle solution in chain link here so alpha finance yesterday announced that they are relaunching alpha hemorrha v2 on ethereum uh and this is one of their milestones towards their mission to build and incubate

an innovative alpha ecosystem in d5 so the details are in this blog post here and basically goes through what's included in in the v2 launch so essentially uh for yield farmers there's more leveraged pools included uh like balancer curve sushi swap and uni swap more assets available to borrow a usdc usdt and more uh you can use lp tokens as collateral uh from all your favorite amms uh and then for lenders there's many more i uh interest bearing tokens um uh like they're famous for their eighth interest bearing token which was paying over i think ten percent uh and that might still be paying over ten percent haven't checked it lately um earn high yield on your own um on these kind of like ib tokens as i was

just describing opportunities to earn more yield on top of those tokens uh and a new oracle solution here uh i think they're using train link maybe uh maybe let me have a look oracle oracle aggregated contract aggregating prices for multiple trusted oracle providers okay maybe they're using like chain link and a bunch of others here so i'm curious actually to see see what they what they have there they're saying here stay tuned for for more details of course as well so yeah really really bullish on alpha of course i i hold alpha tokens just the disclaimer there but you know i've held them for quite a while they're one of the best projects within within ethereum and within d5 and they're doing a lot of innovative work here so really cool to see them kind of relaunch v2 on ethereum and kind of like add a lot more value to

the ecosystem here all right everyone that's it for today's episode thank you again for watching and listening be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up join the discord channel subscribe to the newsletter and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone