Immutable/Playco team up, Ethereum's purpose & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #245 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sozano and today's the 4th of november 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i put out this tweet today basically where i said if your goal in this industry is to profit at all costs then we're probably not going to be friends if your goal is to change the world using revolutionary decentralized technology then i count you as part of my squad money is nice but it will not buy you a purpose now for those of you who've listened to my layer zero podcast that i did with david hoffman at bankless you'll know kind of like my thought my general thoughts on having a purpose and kind of like uh doing things and kind of like participating in the ecosystem and in

life in general for things more than money and you know in crypto it can be hard because i i kind of like get it there's a lot of people out there who come into crypto they're relatively new and they're like okay well i have a starting bankroll of maybe a few thousand dollars i want to get rich off this because i've heard all these stories of all these people kind of like getting rich of crypto and i want that to be me look i thought that way too once upon a time uh back in when i first got into crypto in 2013 when i got into bitcoin i had heard all these stories as well of people kind of buying bitcoin at a dollar and it was like when i got in it was i think it was like 60 70 or something like that and that was a huge

gain right still at 60 or 70 x and i heard all these stories and i'm like oh yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna buy it and i'm gonna be rich and i was so naive i was so young and naive it was so dumb and then i ended up just selling like the near the bottom of in kind of like 2014 of my bitcoin um probably not too near the bottom i think i sold it around 400 and it ended up bottoming somewhere in the hundreds but still i didn't sell it at like a thousand dollars or whatever what it went to and i didn't have much to begin with either now and then i you know i kind of like i came back in early 2017 into ethereum bought my kind of like first bit of eighth and then kept buying for a little bit then but i didn't really have much

back then so i tried to to use that east in within icos to flip and everything like that and to earn more eight it worked until it didn't right it worked until kind of like the bull market ran its course and the icos just got absolutely destroyed and slaughtered and you know i ended up losing some eat on them so fast forward to today and there's like a lot more opportunities to make money now right you have yield farming you have like all these token incentives happening all the different chains you have all these tokens that you can buy that i mean it seems like everything's going up these days right against usd at least and it seems like everyone's making you know lots of money around you now i can pretty much guarantee that most people aren't making lots of money around you most people will actually end

up trading away a lot of their gains because they'll try and chase that one pump that they rode and they'll just kind of like uh trade away what they've what they've made they'll probably end up underperforming or ethan kind of like btc over the long run you know there's a long list of things that kind of happened there but as i said i totally understand that and i totally understand a lot of you guys kind of like tuning in definitely fall into this camp of people that are you know newer to the ecosystem and you're making your first kind of investments and you're hoping that this can lead to obviously some making some money over time which is which is totally fine i have no issue with that at all what i take issue with is people who are what what are called quote-unquote profit maximalists where

the only reason that they're in this ecosystem is to make money they care about nothing else they just care about extracting as much money as they can from the ecosystem and then when they get what they want pretty much like when they've got enough they'll uh they'll probably like exit right and just like take their money out and go do whatever they want with it uh look if you want to be that type of person then feel free to do that like no one's going to stop you from doing that but i personally don't want to associate with people like that because it's just not what i what i vibe with i i've never been like that like even in 2013 when i first got into bitcoin my i wasn't a profit maximise yes i wanted to make money of course uh but i i was still

very very interested in the technology um you know the funny thing is i actually stopped being interested um half because the price came down but half because the the tech was so limited and there wasn't anything like ethereum uh uh back then uh so like i kind of lost interest but you know the there wasn't really much going on in kind of like the market during 2018 2019 and even like early 2020 and i i think i got more involved than i ever had been with with crypto so for me at the end of the day like i am literally in it for the tech i think but at this point like if you've been watching the refill for a while reading my newsletters it's all free right like i'm not here to suck the value out of this ecosystem and go buy lambos like the funny thing is my

lifestyle hasn't even really changed that much since i uh you know since kind of like the bull market began and obviously my investments paid off the biggest lifestyle lifestyle change for me was that i quit my job at set uh well i didn't quit set entirely i just like stopped um being their product marketing manager and i moved into an advisory role uh and you know so i could do more of this stuff so i could do the daily stuff and and everything else that i try to do within the ecosystem but other than that i haven't done anything else like i haven't got i haven't gotten bought a fancy car or anything like that yeah i buy my figurines which you guys know about you may see it on twitter but i was doing that before uh you know while working at set as well so

um yeah from from that perspective for me uh money was just always a means to an end to get to to to what i want to do which is change the world using this revolutionary decentralized technology i i want to educate about this i want to spread the word i want to get more people involved with that i want to get more people involved with it for the tech rather than the money but in saying that i am talking from a privileged position here where i've kind of like i'm kind of like the point where i've made the money i wanted to make and then i can just like kind of like coast along whereas a lot of you guys who are new to the ecosystem are definitely trying to find alpha and trying to kind of invest and make money elsewhere and as i said no issues with

that at all and i count every obviously all of you listening and watching every day as part of my squad because you wouldn't be listening and watching my videos if you all you cared about was money because i don't show you tokens right i don't go through price charts all the time i'm not telling you when to buy and when to sell there's plenty of youtubers who do that but you watch the daily way because you want to get the kind of like most up-to-date information on the ethereum and wider crypto ecosystems without all that fluff and shilling so uh from that perspective i already know all of you are in it for the tech uh and it's okay to be in it for the tech and the money i mean i am too like i'm not gonna say i'm not like i'm i still make investments i

still buy things you know whether that be angel investing or buying things on public markets and obviously i'm expecting a return i'm not just doing it a as an altruistic endeavor but um they're what i mean by profit maximalists and how they differ from that is that they literally don't care about the tech they'll use whatever is necessary to get money they may even go as far as kind of like creating their own tokens and their own things to scam people out of money which pretty much goes much further a lot of them really are just like i mean it's a big part like traders right a lot of the people who are just like mercenary farmers and kind of like getting as much money as possible and then not caring about anything except that for me that's a hollow existence really at the end of the day like i i couldn't

do that even if i wanted to uh even if i tried my hardest to to force myself to do it i couldn't i'd probably just end up getting depressed about it it is such a hollow existence because as i said in the tweet money is nice but it will not buy you a purpose it's money is a means to an end it's not going to you know making all this money say you make like millions of dollars it's not going to automatically uh lead you to a uh or allow or basically tell you okay well now you've made millions of dollars here's your purpose in life go do that and you'll be truly happy no money is an inanimate object it lets you get have more free time to to maybe pursue your interest and pursue kind of like finding your purpose uh so as i said it's a means to an end but it

is not going to buy you that purpose it is not going to tell you what it is it is not going to uh kind of like make it any easier to figure it out other than kind of like freeing up some of your time so um and then you know if you if you do something with uh what's called a lifestyle creep where you know you may like spend lots of money on different things because you've got a lot of money so you you start like creeping up your lifestyle and start buying you know lambos and like fancy houses and fancy things and whatever um you know trying to kind of like chase that uh that happiness or trying to like uh get you know get kind of like chase um a purpose i don't know i just feel like it's not gonna work but i'm not here to

kind of tell people what they should and shouldn't do i'm just giving my perspective and i think this is critically important you may be wondering why i'm even talking about this on the refuel but at the end of the day like ethereum is a social movement as much as it is a technology uh the ethereum culture and the ethereum ethers and mission is all about the social contract constructs and all about the social layer um the technical stuff kind of like follows on from that but first and foremost ethereum is a social construct and we all kind of like are reliant on properties of decentralization openness permissionlessness um doing things the right way based on hard science rather than doing things um by taking shortcuts and as i said that all stems from the social layer which stems from the fact that a lot of people in the ethereum

ecosystem uh i mean i would say that the the the hardcore ethereum community members pretty much none of them would be profit maximalist they are literally kind of like in it for the tech they want to help the tech along they want to do different things whether that be building uh educating uh you know investing and investing doesn't have to be just like a pure profit driven endeavor there are a lot of funds that will obviously invest their money but they'll also invest their time their knowledge and they'll help these help these teams out in those regards rather than money and they'll do it because they enjoy doing it they want to do it they want to see these things get built and succeed so it's not just about profit for them at the end of the day as well so so yeah anyway i got up like a

little bit of a i wouldn't call it a rant maybe just like just that kind of like open kind of discussion about how i feel about these things i'm curious to obviously get your you guys thoughts on this as well so if you want to comment on youtube or go into the discord channel and kind of like probably talk about this some more i'm always happy to do that i think that it is critically important that the social layer gets talked about a lot more than it d than it has been because people think this stuff's just like purely technical when in reality the social aspect to it is probably more important than the technical stuff and it all flows from the social layer anyway at the end of the day so so yeah anyway i'm going to move on to the rest of the updates

so another ens token update so over the last 24 hours someone on twitter spotted that there was a cluster of accounts that uh that appear to be designed to farm the ens token airdrop and then nick says here nick johnson the developer of ens said here that they've taken a closer look at the account and they considered several options and then he outlines what they've described uh and their their reasoning here so you can go read this thread for a full breakdown of this but essentially they've gone with option uh kind of option four here which was basically blacklisting that the the accounts that they've identified as trying to game the airdrop so i thought that was the best outcome for sure i think there was a 748 784 accounts associated with this

definitely the best outcome definitely a really good move by them um and you know it's funny because there's a few reasons how this could have happened one is the obvious reason someone had insider knowledge of the airdrop they decided to kind of like uh essentially create all these different accounts get these ans names in order to maximize how much of the airdrop they could get the second thing which is actually you know pretty likely probably not maybe not as likely because i think being an insider is probably more likely than this but but secondly could be someone speculating that ens was gonna have a token and basically saying well you know if they do have a token i'm gonna just like spend some money to spin up all these accounts and try and game the airdrop that could definitely have happened and i think someone mentioned that ens had a

job advertisement for a governance lead a few weeks ago so you know it doesn't take as rocket science rocket scientists to figure that out either where you see governance lead you're like okay well enos it doesn't have a token it doesn't have a dao doesn't have a governance process right now so what does that mean well i mean it means that there was a token and a governance kind of like an edo thing coming which which is exactly what happened so i think there are merits to both um kind of like stipulations there or kind of speculations there but if i had to guess i'd probably say it was an insider because the thing is is that when you launch a token there are surprisingly a lot of people that need to know about it for various different reasons and any one of those people

could go tell someone else right and then they could go to someone else and it quickly becomes a thing where there's hundreds of people that potentially know about this and any one of them can easily uh try and game the system uh pretty pretty much anonymously uh you could send funds to an ethereum address and then watch them through tornado cache uh and then basically uh you're free to do whatever you want the chances of you kind of like getting traced back to a destination address is extremely low if not pretty much like impossible for it for it to be traced back there so from that perspective i would say you know maybe more likely that it was an insider but it's not too far-fetched to say that it was just someone also trying to i guess game the airdrop uh by by guessing or assuming

that there was going to be an airdrop so so yeah anyway go read this thread for a full breakdown of the reasoning i thought the way that it resolved it was was was pretty cool pretty admirable as well so amin uh solomani the ceo of spank chain here had a really great tweet uh well i guess like one part of his tweet that i really resonated with but essentially he was quote tweeting uh raul here who uh recently joined kind of like reddit's crypto team to build uh reddit's kind of like crypto integration on arbitration which i'm going to talk about in a sec anyway but essentially a main quote tweeted it and said the end users of ethereum are no longer individual humans it's a roll-up dev team it's roll-up dev teams building ecosystems let 1000 roll-ups bloom and then he goes on to say this is my

favorite part of what he said ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor now this is what i wrote today's delegate newsletter about you can go check that out for some more context around this but i mean this is exactly what i've been preaching for a long time now about how ethereum layer one is not for individual humans or end users anymore it is for bots whales um and layer two kind of like proofs and cool data which is what roll-ups are of course but then i mean you just put this in some you know a really really great quote where he says ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor that like got my head got my brain spinning today and really what what it kind of like says to me is that ethereum is a global network right it is

it spans you know every country in the world it spans every civilization in the world it is truly global in nature and because ethereum is truly global in nature it can globally scale trust settlement assurances um and security and decentralization which is exactly what ethereum's layer one is doing right now and is being designed to do even better in the future obviously with the merge coming up and switching to proof of stake and also we're still going to be scaling at this layout through sharding and statelessness but at the core of what ethereum layer one wants to be is a trust anchor for things like roll ups because what ends up happening is that roll ups can have very very very strong guarantees pretty much like the strongest guarantees on the planet

that if they post their proofs of their transactions and their data of their uh from their roll-up to ethereum layer one they have extremely strong guarantees that it is going to be there when they need it and it's going to be secure because in a proof-of-stake world ethereum will have finality which makes this even more secure and and makes the settlement assurances even stronger and the notion of finality is basically that every 12 minutes the ethereum network under a proof of stake will finalize and that means that two-thirds of the ether stake which would currently be around five or six million eighth tens of billions of dollars attest to the uh what has already been uh kind of like validated uh in the past on the chain and basically say uh you can't

real past this point or you can't go back past this point or what ends up happening is that two thirds of eight that has kind of um attested to this is at stake of being being slashed so you have tens of billions of dollars potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in the future of uh of capital at stake if that someone was to go back and react the chain you know uh more than 12 minutes uh or someone wants to go back and and try and kind of like change something about it or or or kind of like do um surgical state transitions and things like that so essentially uh what you have is the only system out there um that is extremely secure extremely resistant to basically a re-orgs and stuff like that

and gives you incredible incredibly strong settlement guarantees because of that as well so that's what i took from i mean saying ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor because these rollups are basically trusting ethereum layer one to both be to both have the availability right the data availability have the uh have the kind of like proof speak cement it on there and come to consensus on and secure it on there and they're also uh trusting them with their uh bridge contracts too right getting in and out of these kind of roll-ups and this is why or one of the reasons why rollups have chosen ethereum as their trust anchor because of this like think about all the other chains they have way less security than ethereum

many of them are not decentralized many of them have very very centralized points of failure uh many of them don't have uh the notion of finality like ethereum does many of them are uh uh depos networks which are inherently uh uh turning to cartels over time and it and many of them are taking extreme trade-offs to achieve scale at layer one whereas ethereum is doing scaling at layer one over the long term in the proper way um and also ensuring that layer one can stay as decentralized and secure as possible so that uh we can we can still remain this civilizational trust anchor so anyway i've got more information about this in today's delivery newsletter if you want to go check that out but i figured i'd just quickly talk about it now because it really means a lot to me and it's at the

heart of what i think ethereum is today and what it can be better at in the future as well so here is rahul uh who i was talking about before his thread on um joining reddit's crypto team now you remember that reddit is building their own instance of arbitrary to scale their community point system and in this thread rahul goes over uh what he's doing uh what is sorry what reddit is doing in crypto and it's three words decentralized social media and then he goes on with you know details about it and how to kind of like make this all happen uh this this tweet that's been kind of like quote tweeted a lot is about how reddit has 500 million monthly active users and when reddit pulls off this kind of like arbitrary instance they could potentially onboard 500 million web 2 users into web 3 and then

there is no going back so basically potentially on boarding 500 million new crypto users which is absolutely massive right incredible amount of users to onboard and read it i think you know i've gone through it before they're very progressive in true in choosing a kind of like ethereum based scaling solution here they definitely care deeply about or seem to care deeply about the web 3 movement and decentralization and ethereum's kind of like placed in that as well so definitely go read this thread for some further context here but it's really really great to see that uh that kind of like um that reddit is taking this approach rather than going to one of the kind of like more quote-unquote scalable other chains that have sacrificed those core properties of decentralization and

security in order to achieve that scale they're taking the proper approach here so big props to reddit and respect to reddit for doing this of course so i missed this i think it was two days ago but uh metakartal launched the padawan dao which is basically a dao that is going to fund scholarships to young padawans to attend their first crypto conferences high school and college students etc um and and uh peter pan here one of the founders of metacartel will be personally pledging funding to this um as well so this is something that rick burden actually has been pioneering um lately basically sponsoring people and sponsoring particularly young people who don't have much money whether they're in high school or in college to go to uh

crypto conferences because for anyone who's been to a crypto conference specifically in ethereum conference specifically in ethereum hackathon like eat denver for example you know just how much kind of like alpha is there i'm not talking about investing alpha i'm talking about knowledge like the smartest people in the ecosystem are like concentrated in one space for a few days and there are kind of like builders everywhere there are um there are um uh kind of like scientists everywhere researchers everywhere and it's just like uh i mean it really is a kind of like uh a kind of like center point for a few days where people can just like learn from each other and get to know each other and it's not fair that younger people have to miss out on this just because they can't afford to go so this is really cool you can read

this kind of like forum post for more details about this um but yeah awesome to see this and i hope to see some of these people at conferences in the future myself as well maybe they're listening to the refill right now if you are uh that's awesome but yeah i hope to see a lot of these people kind of attend these conferences going forward so the metaverse has obviously been a big topic of discussion lately and the funny thing is is that a lot of people may not be aware of this but polygons pos chain or the polygon ecosystem is very heavy into the metaverse um things that have been kind of like in the spotlight lately like the like the sandbox and um decentraland and uh you know decentral games other gotchy all that sort of stuff uh yield guild

games they they live on polygon they are part of the polygon pos chain ecosystem and you know what i actually think that's the one of the best places for them i know there's other kind of like ecosystems like immutable x building um stuff and building nft and gaming stuff and they're doing really well as well but i think that polygon has a really really great kind of um way of doing this because as you guys know the pos chain isn't a true layer too it's not a roll-up it's a kind of like a commit chain on to ethereum and it has less security because of that unless decentralization because of that but the thing is a lot of these kind of like uh metaverse things uh especially the the gaming side of it they don't need the maximum decentralization and security of ethereum layer one um especially not for

kind of like a lot of the the maybe lower value assets that they have what they do need is a way to do cheap transactions which is what the polygon post chain gives them so yeah this is really cool i just wanted to point this out that a lot of this kind of stuff lives on polygon it's a great ecosystem i mean obviously i'm an advisor to polygon so i'm just kind of like talking about this because i pay attention to this ecosystem but i mean i i put out a tweet today saying that i figured gank crypto gaming is going to be much bigger than people realize it's still very early days for it of course it's still something that he's definitely are going to require a lot of tinkering with to get right but there are a lot of kind of like really

cool games out there and a lot of ones coming online soon that's uh that are going to be big and you know the fact that they're on polygon as well is really really cool because polygon basically uh has a really great little metaverse ecosystem developing here so if you want to check any of them out you can i'll link this in the description you can just google each of these see what they're all about and go play around with them so another bridging protocol that i came across today i don't think it's new i think it's been out for a little while but i hadn't heard of it before it's called the bridge or de bridge um and the reason why i heard about it today was because they've deployed their updated version to the to the test net so two i think it's on covan test net

but this is just another bridge uh for kind of like l2s and four side chains and all that sort of stuff um there's so many of these things right like it's insane how many bridges there are but it makes sense because everyone wants to go from like everywhere to everywhere and you know this is only on test net right now this isn't on mainnet just yet but with kind of like this new testament deployment they've got like an improved ui gas optimizations uh are kind of like um they're doing kind of like things with with ipfs as well so i mean you can read this blog post for full details here and try it out on testnet as well but i wanted to point this out because i know you guys have been listening to me talk about bridges for a long time and i want

to kind of like try and stay on the on top of all the bridges and kind of like know which ones are out there know which ones are specifically doing things kind of like differently as well which ones are cheap which ones are the most trustless um as i said like each of these bridges have a lot of kind of different designs to them you know i spotlighted across protocol the other day which is already a new design where they do short-term loans you have cross-chain dexes you have like arbitrary message relays you have multisig bridges you know there's a world of different bridges out there and they all have their own different kind of trust assumptions and trade-offs and i think you know dbridge is just another one that's kind of like come across my my radar and seems to be making waves here as well so definitely go check out

this blog post for more details about that so immutable has announced that they've partnered with another big kind of like i guess a traditional gaming firm called placo so 500 million players apparently uh are in the play co ecosystem and now they'll get access to gas free and carbon neutral nfts um on their favorite games across facebook tick tock snapchat and more all powered by immutable x of course which is built on stockwear secured by ethereum immutable is just making extra like i mean i know i've said they've probably said this before on the refill but they're making so many big waves here with basically bringing the non-crypto companies into crypto because i think that that is the biggest opportunity for

especially for these for these layer twos um where they can essentially bootstrap uh kind of um i guess like new users or get users into the ecosystems um without having to kind of like tap into the existing users because the existing user pool is very small like i actually put out another tweet today where i basically said everyone's fighting over the few million on-chain active users that we have and if i'm being honest i don't even think it's a few million on-chain active users and i'm talking about like people who are active you know at least weekly doesn't have to be daily but like you're active at least weekly there's probably less than a million of those kind of kinds of people at this stage um maybe it's it's probably probably grown since then maybe it is a few million but we have billions left to onboard so why are we fighting

over like scraps essentially we should be working to grow the the pie like so much bigger and i think that's exactly what happens when immutable does this and when other kind of like obviously um infrastructure projects uh kind of do this where they basically bring in these massive user bases sort of like what uh what reddit is doing right they bring in their massive user base into the ethereum ecosystem via arbitram immutable is bringing in the massive user bases of things like tick tock and placo and you know those other ones out there as well like i can't think of it right now those other ones they're bringing in and they're doing it um while also appealing to the existing ethereum user base as well that can use this stuff but they realize that the existing ethereum user base is tiny

compared to the amount of users they can bring into it so this is why these sorts of stuff get me excited because it just means more and more people are going to be using ethereum and they're also going to be using a theorem without realizing it like how many people are going to use immutable x without uh and kind of like associate immutable x with nfts but not realize that it's secured by ethereum in the background that is kind of like what ethereum is being built to be in the background sitting in the background being that you know trust anchor that i talked about before uh and and kind of like uh the layer twos at the user level can offer that better experience offer their own ecosystems cheaper transactions faster transactions all that good stuff and these users would never have probably used the theorem layer one

anyway so as i've said before immutable is unlocking more value unlocking basically new transactions and new kind of like economic activity that just simply wouldn't have happened at layer one ethereum so awesome to see them partnering with placo i'm sure they've even got more partnerships coming they seem to be knocking these out every other day at this point but uh awesome to see that and disclosure i'm an investor in immutable x uh very proud investor because they're an aussie based team i love supporting aussie based teams um but yeah just wanted to add a disclosure there all right uh final thing to talk about here is starkware has announced their strategic partnership with argent so i think i spoke about this on the refuel but there was uh kind of like a bit of hints about uh the fact that argent was working with uh stock net already but i

think this is kind of like formalizing a strategic partnership between starkware and argent to bring starknet to the argent mobile wallet so this is basically arjun confirming that they're working with both the zk sync and stark net um and i'm sure they're going to be confirming a partnership with arbor trim and pro probably optimism as well uh in the future too so you know they want arjun wants to be connected to every layer too and why wouldn't they they're trying to be the most kind of like user-friendly normally friendly ethereum wallet out there and to do that they can't do it at layer one um for all the reasons i've outlined previously right they have to do it at layer two and they are and i think i mean they've been teasing it for quite a while now i'm sure it's coming very soon i'm hoping it

is because i really want to play around with it uh but all these sorts of stuff is just like making moves everything's happening in parallel and i'm super excited to see more stuff like this happen here um but yeah i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone