Ethereum on CNBC, Bankless DAO and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #114​​​​​​​​​ - 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 sosano and today's the fifth of may 2021 all right everyone let's get right into it so yesterday on cnbc they did a crypto segment and they brought on gary tan here from initialized capital to talk uh more specifically about ethereum so what i really liked about this segment as i watched it uh yesterday i kind of i watched it live um gary mentioned a few things so first he said that he believed ethereum was going to 10k or it was going to 10k and he also mentioned ultrasound money on on cnbc on national us television here which i thought was was surreal right these are inner circle ethereum memes these are not things that you will typically ever see mentioned on

mainstream media they they may talk about ethereum sometimes but they definitely don't give these kind of like massive price predictions or they don't talk about ultrasound money and it's really cool because gary actually has the ultrasound money emojis in his twitter name here and for those who don't know initialize initialize capital is quite a big um uh investment firm here they've backed companies like coinbase and instacart and they're very involved within crypto and one of the co-founders is alexis one of the reddit co-founders as well so there's a lot of history there with um with initialized and crypto and kind of i guess like the internet era there but essentially i thought this was just cool because ethereum doesn't really get much good mainstream coverage right at the end of the day like a few

weeks ago we saw when visa announced that they were settling transactions on ethereum a lot of the mainstream kind of coverage had bitcoin in the title and had nothing to do with bitcoin but they were still saying bitcoin and one of them even said you know a bitcoin partner uh basically uh did this thing where uh that they were able to um uh uh sorry sorry got my words mixed up there but the bitcoin partner they said that and i was like what bitcoin partner it doesn't make any sense right like why would you say bitcoin partner when ethereum is not a bitcoin partner and it's got nothing to do with bitcoin and it's because they just don't have this understanding that you know they they should really i mean it doesn't take much to i mean this is like surface level stuff but they really don't have the understanding

of the space to differentiate between bitcoin and ethereum and even like stuff like those right and i think having people like gary tan go on and educate not only the the the news host and things like that but also the wider audiences listening to these people that audiences that i can't reach and that um you know uh i guess like ethereum media can't reach because we're very inner circle ethereum and i guess that's the whole point of the content that i do and the content the bankless does and you know uh the define and define that and all that sort of stuff like we're probably not going to reach those audiences like we we are not going to reach the quote unquote boomers right but cnbc will so if we want to educate as many people as possible and want to cast a a wide

net right around all these people then we definitely need to uh get on cnbc we need to get on the mainstream media and not only get on it but we also need to make sure that they know what they're talking about because it's all well and good for us to go on there and you know talk about it theorem whatever but if they're like hitting back with some really dumb talking points and not even just like uh you know i guess like learning about it and and misinforming their their viewers maybe not maliciously or not on purpose but if they're doing it in such a way where they don't actually know what they're talking about then that's even worse than the theorem not being mentioned at all so yeah kudos together for getting on here he's very well spoken as well which i really liked

because when you're on these kind of i guess mainstream segments you definitely want to have someone well spoken and knows what they're kind of talking about and knows how to get the message out there to it to a different audience here so yeah i'll link this in the youtube description you can go watch the whole clip if you haven't yet so something that i forgot to cover in yesterday's refuel was me bits which is a new nft project from lava labs here now this caused a bit of a wave in both the ethereum and of tn crypto ecosystems basically as a whole where people are on the fence about this right you know lava labs is known for crypto punks and autoglyphs some of the earliest nfts in the ethereum space but people kind of viewed that looked at the me bits thing and they were like okay well

this is cool i mean they're like avatars and you can kind of like get your own and use it within the metaverse and things like that and there's different rarities as well you can see here i think the um the the bones on the on the left here are one of the rarest but most of these are pretty rare like there's an elephant or a pig or anything like that um but yeah so it was very similar to crypto punks i guess there's 20 000 unique models here obviously some rare than others uh but i think a lot of what a lot of people kind of i guess had an issue with was that they felt like this was a money grab they felt like this was lava labs making up for not making much money from crypto punks um and they made a lot of money here i

mean i think if they sold out i think they made like 70 million dollars or something on on this which is which is insane right and obviously uh you know they may have some plans to to do more with me beats and stuff like that but they're under no obligation to like they could just take the money and walk away so i think people kind of like look at that and they're like okay well was this really necessary that do they really need to raise this much money like why are people aping in so much money and it's because the nft mania why while it's it's kind of died down a bit it's still kind of up there right nft the nft mania reminds me a lot of icos from 2017 because there's a lot of stuff that will not hold its value like ever there's a

lot of nfts that will go to not necessarily go to zero but there just won't be people willing to buy the nfts off you um you know and in that respect it's probably maybe even worse than icos because at least with icos you had some sort of exit right you could sell into like some sort of liquidity but with nfts if you own something and then no one wants to buy it off you there's nothing you can sell it into like you can't just sell it into some liquidity pool on uni swap unless it's part of like a an index or something and the indexes are only made for the projects like um that actually have traction like crypto punks and things like that but i'm not i'm not saying that like me beats us are going to lose their value whatever and people aren't going to

value them i do think that they're pretty cool and i i do i do think that it was cool how they did like a retroactive kind of airdrop to punk and autoglife holders where you could basically claim a free me bit or multiple ones if you had multiple punks or whatever um but yeah i think for me i'm just like on the fence because i want to see them do more with this i want to see them kind of like uh you know do more of these characters maybe create like a metaverse themselves and like add more value to it rather than just kind of like issuing these things and running away with the money because that's exactly what happened with ico is that they promised the world right they promised that their project was going to do everything but then in reality they just ran away with the

money and basically faded into into you know into the distance right and if everyone forgot about them during the bear market so i hope that doesn't happen here um you know lava labs i don't think they're malicious or anything like that they're a known team it's not like they're anonymous or whatever but uh yeah i i know on the more positive note here at the end of the day if people are enjoying this and they're having fun with it then you know who am i to say like you shouldn't have put your money into this or whatever and i'm not saying that at all um but just in general with nfts i always kind of warn people that um you know just because you buy something don't don't and you want to sell it later don't expect there to be a a buyer later right there could be no

one that wants to buy this off you and no one that values it or they'll they're willing to buy it off you but at a much cheaper price than you bought it for so from that perspective always good to trade carefully with nfts um but lava labs has a reputation behind them uh they've got like a few big people on board i think helping them out too so i'm curious to see where where meebitz goes here so a guy named mark on twitter put out an interesting tweet thread today where he basically talked about how um btc has uh historically had a periodic four-year bull and bear cycle due to its block reward halving schedule um which has dominated the wider cryptocurrency market right and you can see this play out on the chart if you look at it the four year cycle it's a well-known

thing in crypto now what mark says here and this is an idea that i've kind of had as well where with the rise of ethereum and d5 and ethers and economic asset with erp 1559 and staking could we see a i guess change in the market here could we see a kind of breaking away from this four year market cycle and i think we can i really do think we can like i i've said before that i think that this cycle is going to be longer but i also think that the concept of you know these massive bull and bear cycles is probably not going to to play out like we're used to i don't think there's going to be another two year bear market like i just don't see that happening especially i mean maybe there is for a lot of the useless crap that's out there

pumping right now but not for something like ethereum i think that ethereum's utility and use cases now uh uh you know a lot of it's within d5 a lot of it may look like speculation but it's providing real financial services to real people and that's not going to go away in a bear market yes the yields will come down and the you know the the gains and stuff will come down but uh if if we go into another kind of like quiet market i do think that those kind of apps are still going to be being used you know maybe not as much but still being used uh and i do think people are still going to be staking in their eighth right the east is still gonna be being burned with one five five nine so i think the market structure definitely changes because of that

and i think that we're seeing this play out with eighth out performing bitcoin lately where more and more people are waking up to this um um you know if if as mark says here if um if eth is no longer susceptible to bitcoin's um four year cycle then the bear market um will uh uh will basically be shorter i um you know and and basically not take much longer because if we're going off historically um i guess kind of like when you would expect a bear market over after a bull market uh you would expect i guess bitcoin to cool off in december of this year and east to cool off in january or around the same time essentially and then going to another two-year bear market i don't think that's gonna happen and i you know i could be wrong here and this obviously is an investment advice

but i just don't see it happening this time around because no i mean it's not only ethan ethereum that has adoption you know bitcoin obviously has adoption from institutions and things like that and obviously it's being integrated with a lot more places now traditional finance is getting on board in a big way so if you go and kind of like look at the way i like to compare it if you look at the tech bubble the the kind of like dot-com bubble in the early 2000s or late late 90s early 2000s after that you know there was a there was a massive crash just like there was after the 2017 bubble and then there was like just a slow grind up from there basically over time and then the only crashes there were were because of economic crisis is like 2008 and things like that

um so if you kind of look at what happened with crypto like you know the jury's still out but could 2017 be have been our dot-com bubble like and now we're just going into the you know i'm not going to say up only but basically over time we just because we're so ingrained with traditional finance and there's so many use cases now and it's not not as speculative at least ethereum as um kind of i guess like things were in 2017 there's a lot more fundamentals and stuff do we just see that kind of like slow growth up over time with little kind of like bull and bear cycles in between maybe you know the market goes quiet for six months that's nowhere near two years right it's like a quarter of what we've seen in the past but maybe that happens so that's what i'm kind of betting on um

you know and i'm betting on uh the use cases and utility is just gonna trump that that kind of like four year bull and bear cycle and i think that if ethereum can truly break away from bitcoin in terms of i guess like uh price action with eth but also narrative i think narrative is very important if the market can start looking at ethereum and bitcoin are separate things or like totally separate things then i think we're in a much better position than the market just looking at crypto as if it's like one whole thing and don't get me wrong if bitcoin wants to crash right now right ethereum would probably crash with it but at the end of the day that's short-term stuff i think looking at the correlation over the long term is the is the good way to go about it and right

now i mean since the covert crash the correlation for i guess b to c and eight over the long run has been like very minimal ether has been outperforming bitcoin whenever bitcoin kind of like is quiet eth is going up but even when bitcoin's pumping if he's going up against usd as well so maybe we are seeing that kind of decoupling play out that we've all wanted to play out for a long time now but we'll have to wait and see what pans out here but yeah still very interesting to think about so i put out some random thoughts on on dogecoin today and a twitter thread i'll link this and you can go read the full thread here but i did want to tldr this because i know that a lot of us are watching dogecoin pump right now and kind of puzzled by it right like okay

why is this happening and i think it really does break down to just memes at the end of the day like memes are the fastest way to disseminate information ever like you can post a meme on the internet and it could be viewed by basically anyone in the world with an internet connection within minutes of you posting it there's there's no kind of blockers there they can share it they can edit it they can make you know different memes they can basically add to it whatever right and then also you can't discount the elon musk factor here i think elon played the biggest role in in in kind of like getting doze into the mainstream and kind of like pumping it but the memes carried it from there and you know elon obviously you know he likes memes he posts memes on twitter and stuff like that he's pretty like

i guess you could say down with it like as as i guess like um you know uh people would say when you're kind of like appealing to the younger audiences yeah but um essentially uh i think elon coupled with just those being a meme to begin with is what kind of like made it explode and i think i think it's going to blow off at some point i don't think it's going to be like um where it can hold its value for very long because a lot of people playing in doge know that it's very speculative right like even the newer people know it's pretty speculative but and none of the bigger holders want to hold dose they're just using it as a way to stack more you know btcl eat or even usd so from that perspective i do think that eventually those will

calm down people lose interest right like just like to do with everything i mean if we look at even and not to compare chain link to doge but i see the same thing playing out in terms of hype where chain link went up really really fast right during a bear market too and that lasted for quite a while it was known as like this coin that couldn't go down for quite a while against like usd btc and 8th but then eventually it went up just so much and then eventually it blew off on its top and it had its own kind of little bear market while the rest of the market raged up now that that can change again because training actually has fundamentals backing it but at the end of the day nothing goes up forever and things can go into their own bear markets uh without the wider

market being in its own kind of bear market so i think we might say that playing out with doge but the reason it's pumping is literally just elon and memes like there's no more to it i mean it's available on on robin hood 2 which it's just a very easy access people to buy it it got added to etoro it's on you know major exchanges and things like that it got added to gemiini and on top of that it's just like uh the unit price is very low as well so people kind of think that they're buying something really cheap because none of these new investors are looking at market caps right um but yeah it's very speculative very dangerous but i don't think it's too hard to understand why it's pumping the positive is that i think it's bringing in a lot of new people into

crypto more than you know bitcoin and ethereum can but on the flip side a lot of these people are gonna get burned because they're gonna buy the top like that always happens right always with these things the majority of the people come in when it's super speculative i've had people contact me about doge and asked me if they should buy it and i'm like why are you asking me about doge like you know i'm really into ethereum you know i was into ethereum in when it was like a hundred bucks like why didn't you buy it back then and you know i never tell people to buy something whenever people come to me and just start talking like this i'm just like this is just i mean you know those are i mean normally i wouldn't use social signals as top signals but for something like doge i kind of do

like because i think with ethereum it's a bit different where people may hear about the use cases like d-file nfts or whatever whereas with doge they just hear about the price going up that's the only reason why they're interested in it is because they've heard about this ridiculous price rise that they've had um and then you know the smarter ones say to me well this is like going up so much um you know i i think buying in now is a mistake and i think you know obviously um you know i'm of that opinion too but in general like things can keep pumping harder than you think they can at the end of the day like there's a lot of people who thought that those would stop at 10 cents and now it's at 70 cents so who knows right but i do think eventually it'll kind of phase out

people lose interest that always happens with every single coin no matter how bullish it is um but no one knows when that's gonna happen you know it could go to a dollar like those could get meme to a dollar which is a hundred billion dollar market cap for dogs which is absolutely ridiculous but i think more than 100 billion actually it's at like 85 billion now but anyway i'll leave it at that you can go read my full thread here if you want it'll be linked in the youtube description below so the ethereum cat herders put out update number 43 uh yeah uh today and i mentioned on yesterday's refuel that i that you can now subscribe to their newsletter as well and i linked that yesterday too um but basically what these cat herders updates are is basically eth1 and eth2 protocol updates and they're pretty

dense as well and and quite technical too so if you're someone who who kind of like um you know likes to dive into this stuff this is definitely the best resource for you but essentially the tldr is that they went through a bunch of updates got to do with rayonism which is the eth1 to eth2 merge project going on right now which is basically the the testnet project uh the eth2 mainnet incident retrospective so what happened with the prism client uh the latest on the eighth one and these two kind of core protocol upgrades here and and much more i mean these updates are absolutely packed like i can't believe this is free like this is this is awesome it keeps me really up to date with what's going on with eth1 and eth2 um you know i i definitely try my hardest to keep up with

everything but i don't uh i i miss a lot too because this a lot of this stuff is technical a lot of this stuff is buried in github threads and and research foreign posts and stuff like that so if that is something you're interested in definitely go check out these updates and if you want to stay notified the newsletter sign up form is down the bottom of this post so you can go check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description so loopering has been on fire lately uh in the past 24 hours they did eight million dollars of each volume six million dollars of lrc volume and 1.1 million dollars of uni volume on their layer 2 exchange here and the average fee to swap 100 worth was 20 cents and no gas paid uh which is really cool i mean i've spoken

about loop ring so many times before on the on the refuel right but it's just really cool to see the continued growth here uh i think you know unison v3 launches today i doubt they're going to launch a uh a at the layer 2 version today but but they they said they will launch it soon after and i remember yesterday i mentioned how hayden was teasing something and some of you pointed out in the comments that there was like a a an art palette or a or a painting palette in emoji in his tweet which probably references nft so probably there's something to do with nfts coming out today um even though my guess yesterday is that they do a simultaneous l1 and l2 launch but a man can dream at the end of the day but anyway back to loop ring here i think they've been grinding

away building their own zk rollout protocol for quite a while now and it's just good to see them getting more and more traction here uh and actually speaking of lip ring as well i've got another update here that their lubric smart wallet is now available to download on ios so if you're an iphone user or i guess like it might even work on ipads and things like that you can download their smart wallet which hooks directly into their layer 2 uh kind of exchange here so yeah definitely go check that out if you haven't yet but kudos and congrats to lubring on the continued growth here so staying on the layer 2 theme diy dx is also their perpetuals layer 2 exchange is also growing very rapidly they've done 700 million dollars of total volume uh on on l2 with 57 million dollars over

the last 24 hours which is an all-time high now uh this is with zero gas fees of course on layer 2 powered by stockwear and i've spoken about uh dydx a lot in the past about i kind of like their volumes and how they've been growing i hadn't checked it in a little while so 57 million dollars is really cool and as i said i expect this to be billions of dollars sooner rather than later may take a few months to get there but it's it's getting there the growth is accelerating and they're almost at a billion dollars of total volume as well and they've only been out for i think two or three weeks at this stage so yeah really really cool to see the continued growth of dydx in addition to loopering on l2 right this is what we need even though gas

prices are cheaper these days like hovering between 30 and 40 grey that's still not cheap enough for most people it still costs like 15 dollars for a uni swaps uh kind of transaction on layer one so on day or two it's zero or near zero so that's definitely better than fifteen dollars even better than a dollar right i mean even if player one fees were a dollar i think it would still dissuade people from using it because um you know nothing beats free or like cent or subset transaction fees yeah so yeah definitely go uh go check out layer 2 on diy dx and loop ring if you haven't yet so mira posted uh this update today that they're introducing something called splits and what splits are is basically a way to route ethereum or

continuously to an unlimited number of ethereum addresses according to a set of percentage allocations here so basically i guess how this works is that you'll be able to uh stream or route kind of like eth to any amount of ethereum addresses that you want um i'm not sure if this is on layer 2 or layer 1 because i know that these kind of like i guess um streaming i guess uh protocols or streaming kind of things here have suffered being on layer one because the cost to claim is very high um but i'm not seeing anything about layer two here uh just yet uh no just just kind of reading through it here yeah but this is still really cool i think um uh basically the way that they're selling it is splitting is the new tagging um if you know and they're describing it if

web 2 was about social graphs where a tagged photo connects each participant who attended last night dinner party web threes about economic graphs connecting entities whose influence is baked into a work uh so essentially yeah but this i mean what what mira basically allows you to do is monetize your content and things like that through through tokens and nfts and stuff like that so essentially what um what what this kind of like split allows you to do is basically stream eth uh to i guess like a number of addresses with percentage allocations here unlimited number of ethereum addresses with percentage allocations here but this this post will of course be linked in the youtube description you can go read the full uh full post here but i think it's really cool that more of this web 3 stuff is coming out because you know

some people can argue that d5 is web 3 and you know it kind of like crosses over but i think the true web 3 stuff like actually reinventing the way the web works whether that be decentralizing it or creating new ways for people to to fund themselves or creating new kind of like economic engines within the content i think that sort of stuff is extremely valuable and something that has been under explored uh to this point um so yeah i'm i'm very happy to see mira kind of uh releasing more products around that here and on that note the last thing i'm going to talk about today is something to do with that which is the bankless dow so this was uh obviously released by bankless which is an ethereum media organization um you know i'm sure all of you know bankless i actually see in the um

the youtube analytics that pretty much like all the people who watch the daily great also watch bankless so i don't think i have to explain what bankless is but essentially uh the bankless dow uh includes a token of course called bank and if you did any of these things down the bottom here um you were kind of gifted bank tokens in an airdrop so if you held the bankless badge from 2020 or 2021 you funded them on git coin you owned a bap zero which was their merch kind of token here and if you're a premium member you basically get bank tokens so definitely go check out i mean all the links are in the youtube description youtube description um where i'll link the post and all the links are in the in the post and you can go check and claim your bank and everything like

that but what i really wanted to talk about was i guess this notion of a media organization issuing their own token and becoming a doubt because i don't think we've seen this before obviously we haven't seen it from the daily way right i don't plan to do this just mind you so sorry guys there's not going to be a token or any airdrop and i'm pretty firm on that but not because i think it's a bad thing but just because i just don't see the point but anyway there hasn't been one for the defiant or defy dad or anything like that and maybe there will be i don't know what what their plans are for the future so i think bankless is the first kind of one to do it here in at least in a really big way so essentially um i guess like

the bankless doubt is what a doubt is right a decentralized community um it wants to coordinate uh you know media and education and culture and things like that by using the bank token as a governance token um and you know there's there's also kind of like this uh little chart here that shows like how the bankless doubt works so you have the bankless they are sitting in the middle you have individuals all around it and then you have different entities sitting on the side of it too and bankless llc which is the corporation which obviously um you know i guess controls the the bankless kind of like a company here but on that note the token distribution i thought was uh was pretty fair there's a 30 was through a retroactive airdrop uh 40 was the vested treasury and 30 was the uh to the genera genesis treasury um but

there was also a genesis vote to allocate 25 to the bankless llc company here which i think is in favor of yes by a lot right now so essentially it would it's like a team tokens i guess you could say and then essentially uh that would come out of the treasury here so that's that'll be vested over time unlocks over three years i think uh to the team here personally i think this is okay maybe a little bit too high i did kind of tell uh david hoffman himself i said i don't know about this it seems a little bit high but you know it's up to the community the the bank token whole attempt at the end of the day if i was doing that i'd probably issue maybe 15 maybe 20 max to to to a kind of like centralized company

i guess they are the founders right bankless llc is the founders and kind of like a genesis team here and that's all fine and dandy but token distributions are always going to be like this kind of thing where everyone has their own opinion on it and how it should have been done so i won't kind of like go go too deep into that but i think i i've spoken to a lot of teams about how to do token distributions and i've i've put a lot of thought into it myself and there is no perfect solution at the end of the day there's always going to be someone that's unhappy there's always going to be someone who's telling you that you shouldn't even done a token there's always going to be someone who's like oh i didn't get enough tokens like you didn't air drop enough or whatever

but at the end of the day the people that we have an ecosystem right now there's not many of them right and there's not many of them that would have gotten this airdrop so what we need to do is we need to prioritize getting tokens into the hands of the right people over long periods of time rather than doing just a one-time airdrop and hoping for the best so that's why i think these treasuries come into it where you can actually do work for these protocols or for these kind of dowels and get paid in the token and then you know as the as the dow grows and as the products that that the dow kind of manages grows the value of the token also grows as well so yeah i think from that perspective it's fine but um you know it's pretty cool to see a

media organization doing this right i think that um this is like equity and they're not going to call it equity of course because it's uh it's legal and regulatory issues whatever but i i can say it right i view a lot of these tokens as just like equity in in and you would essentially you have equity in the bank list down and if the the bankless dial kind of does well then you know if the logic flows that the bank token should do well as well and that's not to say go buy bank or anything like that um but you know that's that's kind of like how i think about it here um so yeah and then they've described what they're going to be kind of like doing in terms of distribution here where they're calling them bank seasons so essentially bank will operate in one

to three month distribution campaigns called seasons with the goal of driving participation and functionality to the bankless community so this is their way i guess of getting the bank tokens out there and distributing it to people who actually do work for for the dow which i think is really cool so bankless season one has has already started and serves as a one month bootstrapping period here um and then obviously they've got banquet season one and beyond uh coming here so they've got a few ideas around this as well so if you are interested in joining the bankers dow you can of course uh go follow all the links here in the uh in the post which will be linked in the youtube description um and obviously as i said a lot of you already watch bankless and are aware of it and are are aware of uh ryan david and

the rest of the bankless team i'm sure so yeah uh and you're probably already very involved right i mean the bankless community is really great i i like the discord sometimes i don't have time to kind of like chat in there but there's a lot of good stuff getting done and obviously bankless produces an amazing amount of content especially for beginners which i think is is critically important here so uh yeah from that perspective if you're interested in getting involved with an early stage dow can't think of it you know a better one than bankless right now and it's also bankless isn't like a defy project either it's like a media project and it's you know they can do a lot more funky stuff with their dow structure too i think and a lot a lot more experiments so you know it may even be more fun than joining a defy

dare or something like that but anyway i will leave that choice up to you whether you want to take the red or blue pill as they say and i'll leave it at that for today's episode so thank you again everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone