ETH price moves, Dark Forest v0.5 live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #24 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 28th of december 2020. all right uh it's been a very interesting last two to three days uh i think you know a bit of a slow i guess newsweek over the last week since it's been christmas and i think the most interesting thing happening in the ecosystem right now is the price action actually um i don't talk about i try not to talk about price too much on on the refuels here like to focus on project updates but there wasn't that much that came out over the weekend so i'm gonna focus a bit on you know i guess like the price and the general sentiment that i've seen on on kind of twitter and light and read it

and just within the community lately so i guess first things first is back up above 700 the last time it was at this price level was may of 2018. so quite a while ago now um definitely not uh sorry may of 2018 definitely not something that we've seen um uh recently that's that's two and a half more than two and a half years ago now uh which is quite crazy right and that was during i guess like the bear market um you know when the price was coming down if you think about when eth was 700 during a bull market it was end of 2017. so it really has been pretty much three years since we've seen this this kind of price level here um so that's really awesome to see and that only happened over the past like

couple days before that you know for the last few days we saw you know bitcoin going up a lot right uh and in turn the eighth btc ratio was going down a lot as you can see here right you know we had this kind of like what is this the 13th of december where you know bitcoin started going like really crazy got to its all-time high and started really really raging up and that's when you know eve started to bleed against it and you know particularly this section here over the last couple of days is kind of when i saw a lot of people quote unquote capitulate in that they kind of you know lost a lot of hope i saw a lot of sadness everywhere on on twitter and things like that i saw a lot of people kind of like you know seemingly giving up hope

they're like you know why am i holding eight if it's not performing against bitcoin you know this is this is crap like ether signed to valued all this stuff and i was just sitting there and i'm like you know i mean i felt it too right but at the same time i've played this game so many times i've been in this position so many times over the years where this has happened and every time the sentiment is that bad it's literally a matter of hours before it reverses um so last night i was sitting um in my computer i you know i looked at the price and i looked at the kind of like hbtc ratio and i was like wow this is this is pretty brutal right now um you know i can i can understand why people are feeling like this and then i think it was like maybe

midnight my time or something like that i noticed like the prices started moving up it started going up pretty quickly and the ratio was recovering and i was like okay this is new right this is this is something we haven't seen in the past couple days uh and then this is what we saw right here you can see on the chart here right uh 8th btc just exploded up after bottoming out at around 0.22 sorry 0.022 it just exploded up so quickly in a raise the last i guess few days worth of losses and of course if usd went up a lot too so yeah it just shows you how fast sentiment can change in this space like if you were on twitter just yesterday the sentiment was completely

different uh i was out i was doing some shopping and i was just scrolling through twitter as i was waiting for for something and i just saw these memes being posted i saw these people complaining they're saying you know you know jokes about like if you say ethies money the ptc ratio is going to keep falling and all this sort of stuff and and it was really gloomy i was talking to some friends and they were quite gloomy about it and i was just like okay and i kind of feel like this is like the bottom right i feel like this is it this is you know people kind of lose all hope and they get to this position and and then they kind of like and then the market just reverses right this is what markets do they love to do this to people

i put a thread out about this uh that'll that i'll go over in a sec but but basically um that was basically i think it was three o'clock my time in the afternoon so just a few hours later uh it was you know the price reversed and then twitter the sentiment just reversed completely and then today it's been even for today for me i guess um it's been even like uh even greater right people just you know tweeting about eve you know saying he's going to the moon it's going all-time high all this sort of stuff so it's just insane how fast the sentiment can change in this space um and i like to call it the sentiment pendulum and i spoke about this a while ago in one of the daily gray pieces i wrote and i spoke about it again in today's daily grade newsletter so if you want to

check that out uh the link's in the description but basically it's this concept of this pendulum right that swings one way and then it swings too far one way and has to come back it always has to come back that's what a pendulum is right it can't just stay one way so what what ended up happening was the pendulum kind of swung and then it stayed here and here was basically the btc eth ratio the eighth bjc ratio being like really bad right and the sentiment being really bad and then you know the next instant it swung back and now this side is btc recovering and if usd going up to levels not seen you know in over two and a half years so that's how far sentiment can change it's going to change again

it's going to keep changing it's going to change every you know it can change from every few days to every few months you know it depends what time scale you look at uh if you're looking at like the multi-year time scale eth btc for example is still um you know very much down against if i adjust the chart here you know this is the monthly chart very much down against uh bitcoin you know since since 2017. you can see here down there and then a little bit up recovery during 2020 and then down again and hopefully we keep recovering up but if you you know if you watch these kind of trends you know they can play out over you know days weeks months years and you kind of have to come to terms with that not just in the markets but like sentiment in

general like you know in 2018 and 2019 ethereum not just the price but ethereum itself was coming off of like the ico mania and it was you know coming down off that people were like okay what's ethereum good for now you know crypto kitties clogged the network icos are gone who cares and it was a pretty brutal bear market not just for price but for like uh in terms of um sentiment around ethereum like it was a very small niche community we were building out all these things that we knew were going to be big but we had to convince others of this and i think the convincing happened in 2020 uh with the growth of d5 especially i don't think that it happened in 2018 in 2019 outside of the core ethereum base and now we have like people outside of ethereum new users piling in we have

not just d5 we have you know dows heading up crypto gaming heating up bringing in new people uh nfts and art as well you know art especially is bringing a lot of new people i've noticed crypto art so we have this you know very vibrant ecosystem now where no one's really doubting ethereum anymore there are still people doubting eth and you know its value kind of accrual as well uh but they'll the market will prove them wrong in time i'm very confident of that um but yeah so we've come a long way and that's kind of like the multi-year kind of pendulum shift going from you know ethereum is useless after 2017 to wow okay ethereum is settling more value than bitcoin in 2020.

so you know as i said there's different kind of time frames for different pendulum swings but it will always swing back in my mind um you know maybe the rare occasion it doesn't swing back for some particular kind of projects right or some particular thing and that just means the pendulum is broken but very much like the ethereum bitcoin pendulum in terms of like you know i guess the the um the dichotomy between those two is very much intact so yeah and that's what you see play out in the in the chart that's why i actually like looking at charts right because you can actually view the sentiment of you know the community and settlement of people over vast time frames if you look at the kind of monthly uh i guess eth usd chart here right and we scroll out here

let's zoom in there and you you know packed within these monthly candles is a range of human emotion right range of sentiment you know you have uh down here right this was after the dow hack so you can imagine during these months what the ethereum community felt like it's it's right here you know this red is telling you exactly what the ethereum community was feeling at that time so despair depression is ethereum ever coming back you know is it a failed experiment blah blah right and then 2017 you had this euphoria right you can see this playing out on the chart here this is all green going up so much it went up from like what 10 or something to 1400 in 2017 right and then of course you see this here

right you see downtrend in 2018 very very brutal bear market where kind of you know um a lot of despair then 2019 we saw us tick up again bit of hope here right people felt a bit of hope uh that the bull market was back and then bam we we just went down again right so lots of despair again into 2020 um and you know this was particularly bad 2019 because eth basically started and finished at the same price of the year i think it was 130 or something 130 dollars at the start of the year and end of the year while bitcoin actually posted a i think a 100 gain or something like that so that was a particularly bad year for for ethereum in terms of price and sentiment around that too and then we've had 2020 where after this

outlier here which is basically the um the coronavirus related dump right that affected all markets outside of this outlier month you see we go up and the sentiment is just getting more and more crazy right you know we see june here um where basically d5 summer launched and you can see how how much that propelled each and the sentiments going up and now obviously we're painting another monthly green candle here and the sediment is as you know as bullish as it's ever been so that's why i like looking at these at these charts these long term charts uh because even if you haven't been within the ecosystem at that time you can kind of like you know think about uh what happened during these these periods of time and how people felt uh so that's just something that i like

to look at but in general i mean i put out this this thread uh yesterday it was actually um what was it 7 40. so like four hours before the ratio reversed so i thought that was quite funny i didn't want to publicly call a bottom i didn't want to say hey guys i think 8th btc has bottomed because if it didn't i would have gotten dunked on forever so i wanted to actually wait but in in saying that i actually wanted to put out this thread because i was like okay i have to say something like i'm a you know i'm viewed as like a community leader within ethereum i'm always bullish on eth you know people are looking to me for kind of like guidance that they're damning me you know i need to say something so that's why i put together this thread which is basically

talking about these kind of like sentiment it's basically the sentiment pendulum and the market pendulum and how it can shift right and i mentioned here our markets are very cyclical they can kind of like you know screw with you and beat you until you capitulate and then keep beating you right and your job as an investor is to figure out how many beatings you want to take you know and for how long you want to take those beatings and you know plan that out and that's basically how much risk you want to take um so i think that that is a is a good frame of mind that's not an investment advice but that's just how i think about things uh and then basically down here i just mentioned that i'm an if permabull and always will be my thesis on it hasn't changed in two to three years

uh and ethereum has had an amazing 2020 regardless of the ratio action um and on that note uh yeah ethereum has had an incredible year right there's so much that's just just happened within ethereum i'm going to go over all of that on a yearly recap video i'll be publishing soon so keep an eye out for that but in general i think that in these kind of markets it is very hard to have a long-term thesis on most things because if you think about it right the only two networks that i consider to have any sort of future at this point in time are bitcoin and ethereum every other single network needs to prove itself right and prove that it can get to a scale that rivals or comes even anywhere close to bitcoin and ethereum before i'll consider it

a you know a success or even start to consider it as a kind of success so for with that frame of mind it you know it's very hard to hold on to something that is you know advertised as something like an ethereum killer for two to three years you know even the things that try to compete with bitcoin like bitcoin cash bitcoin sv go look at the ratio against btc on that they are dead right they may come back here and then during a quote unquote alt season or a retail driven driven mania but in general they are they are dead against these other projects and that's simply because they don't have much usage they don't have a huge community they don't have they don't hold a candle to bitcoin it's the same with your theorem killers against ethereum so investing in this space is incredibly

hard you know d5 projects especially right you know d5 is so new that there's projects popping up all the time you don't know which ones to pick you know you don't know if you're going to pick the pets.com of d5 or you can pick the google of d5 you've got no idea at this stage even the projects that people are incredibly bullish on like rv synthetics wi-fi all these sorts of things they are still not guaranteed winners i mean i personally think that that you know synthetics rv and wi-fi are pretty pretty great projects right um you know i hold uh their tokens but you know there's no guarantees right another project will come along from a more experienced team right uh you know a team that's done this before with more capital uh you know it's hard to compete with those but you know this could happen

or you know another traditional finance company could come in and just like and for some and somehow like you know make a better product than them and maybe that gains more traction than the existing ones and then your the tokens you're holding bleed out against this new project so it's incredibly hard and this is why for me the only thing that i am comfortable holding long term is eth uh you know if i if i mean i i'd be comfortable holding btc as well to be fair i just don't hold any for various reasons but you know btc and ether are the only things that i would feel comfortable holding for a long period of time uh in terms of preserving my wealth through bull and bear markets uh rather than trying to do speculative bets

and that's all it is basically so keeping that in mind and keeping in mind that it's not investment advice of course this is how i think about things um keeping that in mind uh is is is is a way to protect yourself from kind of getting wrecked right it's it can't feel like a casino at times there's a lot of different things that are going on there's a lot of different voices that you're going to be reading every single day right if you visit twitter and read it every single day you're going to be reading basically everyone being like anguishing and bearish one day and everyone being super bullish the next day and that's literally just like whip soaring because of the price that's not how to do things in my eyes that's not how to invest that's not how to follow markets unless you're a day trader and you're

trying to play that that's fine but in terms of like an investor a fundamentals based investor that's not how you do it you need to have a thesis and you need to stick to it you cannot be flip-flopping between all these different things expecting them to pay off i've seen people try to do this as investors right they have the investor mindset and they try to flip-flop every month or so with different investments and it doesn't work right it just does not work it's very hard to beat the market um as evidenced by just looking at the ratios of of all these other things as compared to btc and eth a lot of them find it really hard to to long term outperform these two and that's just simply how it is in the traditional markets as well a lot of people don't outperform the index you know the s p 500 for

example so yeah i know i'm going off a little bit of tangent there i've spent a lot of time talking about about the price but i think that's been the biggest thing over the past couple of days um and just something that i really wanted to to talk to you all about and to get you thinking about because if you're gonna survive this bull market and if you're not gonna if you're gonna try and not get caught up in the mania of things and try not to lose money um you need to keep these things in mind i mean i've been through you know i think well i i was around in 2013 during the bitcoin run up then i was around during 2017 during the eighth run up and bitcoin as well i guess but um you know i've gone through these ball and bear cycles i know exactly kind of

how they feel and how easy it is to lose money in them you know in 2013 i mean how old was i back down seven years ago i was like 21 years old back then i was young and naive i was jumping in or as the cool kids call it these days aping in to all these random things and i was getting you know i was getting dumped on basically um you know i was buying these random tokens and people were were pumping them up on you know reddit it wasn't much twitter back then read it um and i and on um on like a media as well i remember watching something about quark coin um and i fell for that i bought into it it pumped up a little bit but of course i didn't sell right i was a complete noob and then you know it dumped and i was

like ah okay so it was just like this whole thing and you know that that experience taught me a lot right and it probably takes that for a lot of people right you have to experience it for yourself to learn from it uh but that's just some words of wisdom i guess as we close out 2020 i hope that you've all had a great break uh up until this point i know there's a few more days left of a lot of people's breaks um and i think that we're going to have a really great 2021 for not just the eth prize but ethereum in general as well but on that note uh i just one more thing i wanted to show you about the price the jimmy rogosa here has a github section where he tracks like when people say ethereum is dead and he

says that its price is now over every instance of when people called ethereum dead which is pretty funny you can see the stars on the image here so that i thought that was quite funny i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check it out it's basically a link to all the times of an ethereum hater called ethereum dead and it's basically you know probably a who's who list of like bitcoin maximalists and a few other other people who don't really understand ethereum and like to bash on it but yeah still pretty pretty funny to see that all right some positive news out of zappa uh so zappo is actually one of the biggest beneficiaries of d5 summer i think and full disclosure here i am an investor in zappa uh just so you keep that in mind while

i'm talking about them but basically they reached one billion dollars in transaction volume during i think i guess it would be 2020 would be the majority of their growth here now for those of you who don't know what zapper is it's basically a portfolio kind of um i guess you could call it like tracking tool where you can input your address and you can see your portfolio you can see what d5 farms you're in you can see kind of like how much yield you've earned all this sort of stuff and on top of that they also allow you to use these things called zaps which is basically ways to get into different in you know investments within d file different opportunities within d5 so for example if you want to add liquidity to uni swap uh you know you have to add fifty percent a or fifty percent other token

and fifty percent you know whatever other token you wanna liquidity provide for so you have to you know if you bring 100 eth you need to go manually uh swap that for the token and then manually lp it uh whereas with zapper it's you can import what you want to do on the interface and it's and it lets you zap in basically to this opportunity with one kind of a transaction and one click for liquidity providing for an example there so that was really popular especially during d5 summer with all the new default opportunities coming out people just wanted a really easy one-click way to get into these opportunities they didn't want to have to go through all these different things these different complicated things and that's what zappa offered so really great to see that not just i guess the d5 protocols we think of such

as rv and synthetics compound and all that but you know the zapper itself in terms of like being an interface layer has experienced such amazing growth in in 2020 and i think they're going to have a really big 2021 as well because we're going to get a ton of new people coming into the ecosystem and they're going to need this stuff right they're going to need these tools they don't want to go and use the complex stuff they want in a simple and easy to use interface to access all these opportunities so really really great to see that out of zapper right another thing everyone's been raging on about the past couple of days is dark forest so for those of you who don't know dark forest is a decentralized real-time strategy game built on ethereum with zero knowledge

technology and running on uh it's i mean it's built on ethereum but it's also running on a layer two uh called x die chain um so the transactions are extremely cheap because of that uh sorry exercise a side chain not layer two i'm gonna get in trouble for saying layer two but basically an ethereum scaling technology uh and this has been really great so what you can do in this game uh basically i mean why they're in the news is because they released version 0.5 of their of their game so they've released like previous versions and they reset it every time but what you can do in the game is you can basically you know build um and collect planets so you start off with one planet and then you can go and like capture more planets right and the goal i guess is to become like

the the you know the user with the most planets within their arsenal um and i've already seen like over the weekend a lot of people must have spent a lot of time on it there's people with like vast amounts of planets that have been able to capture you know other people's planets and knock other people out of the game and things like that and the universe is quite large so you know that's really really really cool there but yeah the game sorry the game itself is is really great i was playing around with it uh you know it it it's really fun to play you know there is a bit of a learning curve to it because of the fact that there's some new concepts and things like that you have to be aware of it's not something that you need to be tech savvy for or anything

but it is you know something that you know you might need to kind of make sorry um you might need to get the hang of and on top of that don't expect to win because the game is already i think dominated by a lot of bots so you know bots obviously more efficient than humans so what people are envisioning is that this game is going to turn into basically who can build the best bot you know who can build the best bot player who can amass an army using a bot and it's going to be like you know it could have been it could end up being ai versus ai for example instead of humans so that's going to be really interesting to see play out but still humans can play right you know humans can still have an edge i mean i don't know if you've seen

any of the the kind of like chess games i guess that people play against ais the the people sometimes win right the ai isn't all knowing it's not you know it's not going to win every single game and that might be what happens here in dark forest as well so yeah you have to so to check this out you have to have a key i have i think four beta keys left so if you really want to check this game out dm me on twitter or or ping me on discord in the delegate discord channel and i will send you a key but yeah first come first serve as i only have four i think four left to give right this just happened about half an hour ago before i started recording uh so popular default protocol cover which is

which is an insurance protocol ironically uh they have been exploited so the protocol itself has not been exploited the token has so there's still kind of information coming in about this it's not a hundred percent uh uh sure about what's happened maybe if i refresh this luciano would have updated this um no he's just got a tweet here talking about um they're not affecting the protocol but basically what people think this is is that it's an infinite minting bug where people can mint an infinite amount of cover tokens and sell them into the market now what this has done is it's caused the cover price to when i last checked the dump about 80 instantly because the person who used this exploit just dumped them on the on the open market right so this is a pretty bad exploit for

the token holders um i don't know what the play is here like you panic dump because you think the project's dead or do you think the project team is going to save the project and everything will be fine you know they'll roll it back or something and everyone's tokens will be fine and the price will eventually go back up these situations are really really shitty because of that um you just don't know what to do um you know i don't know what i would do in this situation to be honest would i kind of like sell out and be like okay you know i've had enough of this i'm just going to get out or will i hold on and hope that the team kind of fixes this i mean i i think the carbo protocol team is pretty good uh you know you know every team no matter how good

they are has bugs in their contracts so just unfortunate that this happened but yeah i'm curious to see how they tackle this uh and i think the gen spartan actually had here if i refresh his page maybe he's updated it but basically he had a look into it and he said as far as he knows the hacker drained the affected balancer pool tokens of all their cover and then dumped all of it if that's the case then there should be no more cell pressure from the hacker so in that case it's probably not an infinite mint bug then because if there's if it had to come from somewhere like the balancer pool tokens then um it wasn't obviously minted out of the supply but as i said i'm not sure um you know this is still evolving i

haven't seen the cover team address this yet maybe they're maybe they're sleeping that's always the case when these things happen right i think the hackers might actually time this if they know what time zone the developers are in you're better off doing it when they're kind of you know asleep right and they can't react to this as fast so maybe as devs you shouldn't be make known what time zone you're in but at the same time it's kind of hard because you know you can just spot it by how active they are at what hours because obviously if they're not very active for a few hours they're sleeping so yeah that's that was an interesting observation as well uh but yeah i'll keep you guys updated maybe tomorrow's episode i'll have more information for for all of you on on covers hack uh well i mean the cover

token exploit i'm not gonna call it a hack just yet but the token exploit but yeah this story is definitely evolving so i'll keep an eye on that for all of you i guess that's everything i had to talk about today uh thank you for listening to me talk about the price i guess for most of the episode i i tried to make it relevant i guess to eat investors in general and like you know the sentiment in general i think it's very important you know even if you're kind of like don't really care too much about the price or whatever i think it's important just for sentiment in general and keeping that in mind that it does affect the overall sentiment of the ecosystem um you know not long term but like at least short term uh is always something good i guess to

keep in mind so yeah but yeah that's it thank you for listening subscribe to the youtube channel if you haven't yet be sure to hit the thumbs up on the video subscribe to the daily guy newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone