Market craziness, Synthetix growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #389 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony's designer and today the 20th of june 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so a interesting weekend that's for sure a lot of news to get through but i figured the first thing i would kind of like touch on was eighth going to triple digits now you know at time of recording the price is back up to around 11.35 but yeah we went to triple digits we went to i think 870 or 875 um before we kind of like seem to have bottomed there not like a kind of low up macro bottom more like a local bottom not sure if that will be like where it ends you know where the pain ends so to speak but i you know i

think like doesn't matter how much i kind of like thought about what the next bear market would look like it didn't look like this you know thinking back to previous bear markets that i've kind of experienced especially in 2018 it was a much slower kind of bleed and you know it was it was very different in how it kind of like went down but the last like you know three months like i guess what eleven weeks so almost three months has just been down only for eighth and it just felt like it just wasn't stopping and that kind of was what it was like the end of 2018 during november and december but for most of 2018 uh or pretty much the whole whole thing it was it was kind of like much slower than what we've seen so i think the speed at which things

kind of collapsed to caught everyone off guard and i think 8th and btc going below their old all-time highs kind of killed some precedence around the fact that you know they couldn't go below their old all-time high you know it's impossible well i mean it's possible right anything's possible uh and i think that when you kind of look back in hindsight and look at how the bull market played out it played out very differently to how previous bull markets have played out as well because we obviously had the the top in in may and then we went and set a new all-time high in november but i think that it wasn't really that much of an all-time high right it was only i mean eighth went from 4 400 to 4 900 right and it just wasn't much there so i think when you kind of like take all

that into consideration the bull market was also very different compared to previous ones so i think just the fact that markets are always evolving the crypto markets especially as they kind of continue on as they get more robu robust in terms of more kind of players more liquidity uh it seems like the cycles are just changing and changing in a really big way so i don't think we can rely too much on historical precedent going forward i think that uh you know this is good that a lot of things getting washed out i like bear markets because it washes out a lot of the excess but at the same time uh it's it's you know bear markets i think the most scary for people is when it keeps us dropping you don't know where the bottom's gonna be right because there are a lot of people

i know that want to buy eth but they don't want to buy too early but at the same time trying to spot the bottom is like near impossible for most people so i i you know that my strategy has been to dca in as i've gone down i managed to get some buys in around 900 i didn't snipe the absolute bottom but i was asleep when that happened so i just had some resting orders to kind of like get some orders in and i've been buying around a thousand dollars uh you know for the time that we've been there but i'm not buying with the expectation that it's just going to go straight back to like 3k or something or that it can't go lower than that 870 that we've gone to i'm buying with the expectation of well i'm you know i like stacking validators

i want to be able to hold this you know but with my perma-eat stack i want to be able to validate with this and it's not really of concern to me how long it's going to take for that to you know have like an roi or return on investment the fact that i can even buy ether around a thousand dollars again is astonishing to me i honestly never thought that i would get that opportunity again not even close to it honestly like 1700 like when you really think about it you know 17 to 100 to 2 000 like a thousand dollars is 50 off 2 000. like i don't think many people realize the percentage difference in these things it's the same percentage difference as a hundred to two hundred dollars like it's fifty percent so you literally can buy it um by so much more eight if you bought it a

thousand rather than two thousand uh you know which is just crazy to me so i've definitely taken that opportunity to buy as much as i can but at the same time i i still have you know some money left to see if we go lower than that 870 i can buy even more down there but again it's it's kind of like hard like it's not something you can time there are very very very few people who can actually pick tops and bottoms and they're usually people who've been around for a long time so they already have a lot of money and they don't actually care they about it they're doing it as kind of like a tr uh um just for fun they're not actually doing it to make money because to actually get to that point where you can spot these things and you can kind

of like read all the signals and have relative confidence in a top or a bottom you have to be around for a while and i think for me uh like this was the first cycle where i actually took any profits really and i was able to take a lot near the top because i just i saw all the signs like i didn't sell any of my eats but there were a lot of other things and i was like come on like these things are not worth what they are like here and a lot of the things that i sold are down 80 90 now and that's simply because i saw the signs like this is just so much froth right now and you know at the same time i saw ethan i was like okay well i'm really really bullish on eighth but like if everything else crashes eight is

not gonna be spared but uh i don't wanna kind of like try and trade my eighth or anything like that so and also was taking profits to buy things with it you guys know i bought a house and i kind of um uh uh kind of i bought by figurines and things like that but you know i didn't cash out any of my eight but i think that the longer you spend in this industry uh and the more cycles you experience you get better at it i don't know of many people who have actually been able to make substantial money during their first cycle unless they got like really lucky because at the end of the day a lot of people will just hold it down because they don't know i mean that they know that the that um i guess like things can go down 80 to

90 percent but they've not felt it themselves and they typically buy into the bull market narratives which basically uh kind of like things like this bull market narrative is like super cycle right and the institutions are here and you know we're never going to to go down 80 90 again or anything like that well eighth went down 80 guys like you know what i mean so there's always those narratives that persist in the bull market and even the the veterans can kind of like get tricked into it in the veterans can can start to believe the longer the bull market goes on especially when we had that uh new all-time high set in november after crashing in may so hard i think people started really to believe in the super cycle and that was when it was the perfect time for the market just to be like nope there's no super cycle

guys uh you know and even the the champion of the super cycle suzu got blown up so i think taking all all that into consideration um you know every cycle is different there are different uh sorry there are similar signs uh just because humans don't really change i mean humans are always going to be greedy and fearful and all that sort of stuff that i've spoken about a bunch of times but uh yeah personally i didn't think i didn't see it going to triple digits but i would definitely take advantage of that and i'm sure a lot of you are as well and as i said i don't know if 870 is the the bottom of this cycle just you know it's kind of funny how the last cycle bottom was eighty dollars and eight seventy is on you know just over 10x that could you ima could

you imagine if that was kind of like um uh that was kind of like the the bottom and then that's kind of like how bottoms form from now on so you know the next kind of like uh bull market bottom or sorry the next cycle bottom would be like 8 000 or something i don't know i don't think it works like that it's just kind of like funny when you look at these numbers and sometimes kind of like draw conclusions that's another thing people do as well they kind of like look for patterns where there aren't any patterns it's just coincidence and there's actually a there's actually books written about this where there's all these kind of like things that people do in markets to kind of rationalize stuff and that's how they get themselves a little bit wrecked from time to time but yeah guys like if

you've got you know if you are kind of like scaling into eighth and you have got the capital to do so uh uh you know then i guess like that's your strategy right that's the thing that you want to keep doing and you can stick to it i never give investment advice on on the refuel but i i have been you know pretty clear the fact that i'm buying eth yeah i'm like i'm buying a lot of ethyl i'm buying more eath than i've bought in a very long time like for me buying now feels like buying back at the kind of like depths of the last bear market as i said it can go lower i bought a lot of ether 200 bucks and it went to 80 bucks after i did that just like and long term it was fine right so that's kind of like my

logic when playing these things and it won't work for every asset of course it won't work for probably a lot of the most popular assets of this this cycle but i'm only buying eth right now i may buy other things as i kind of like see them as opportunity presents itself but yeah i just can't like for me i just can't look at triple digit 8 and be like no i'm not going to buy that especially after we've gone down like so so much for like almost three months now i don't know for me it was kind of like something that i need to take advantage of and i'm sure you guys did as well but anyway enough about the markets there's a bunch of updates to get through here so i'm gonna continue on with them so i think the biggest thing over the

last couple days has been two decisions that protocols have made which have been kind of like pretty wild to see play out so there's this protocol called soul end on solana which is basically the ave of solana and there's bangkok which a lot of people will be familiar with and i put out a tweet where i said soul end is a joke and bangkok is a joke and for a different reason so let's start with what soul n did there's a kind of tweet here from fat man terror uh referencing this governance vote that solon put out this is the first governance vote which is basically to uh uh kind of like gracefully liquidate a really large position on soul end by uh taking control of the kind of like positions account so taking control of their their

uh their position essentially which i mean is just insane when i say it out loud as insane as it sounds in my head like that's not defy at all like that is the very opposite of d5 and that is exactly what tradfi does right like where they have the possibility of freezing your account or taking over your account i mean this is even worse like normally you hear about accounts getting frozen in tradify you don't that you don't really hear about accounts getting taken over and the money being kind of like taken unless it's seized as part of some criminal case or something like that but this was just someone using the protocol as it was intended to be used and the sole end team got scared because this position was going to get liquidated at i think at about uh 20 sole or something

like that um and then the whale was uncontactable they weren't paying their debt back because they had over 100 million dollars a debt and the position was 170 million dollars worth of soul and i think for the whale it was kind of like well there's no point paying this back because i why would i have why would i take the sole because liquidating 170 million dollars worth of soul wouldn't net them 170 million dollars because the books aren't that thick so for them it's like well i have all these stable coins i'm just going to keep them like it's actually worth ironically taking that 70 million dollar paper loss uh or realized loss i guess because of the fact that they're selling that much soul just wouldn't work out for them at kind of like at this point in time so that's pretty funny to see play out but

the the fact that this was even proposed should basically mean that soul end completely fails because why would you ever trust your capital with soul and ever again like if they are willing to do this right so there's that aspect and then there was kind of like a second vote uh so this first vote passed of course it did because like the team voted for it to pass uh then there was a second vote that got spun up because the sole price went up saying oh well actually that was a mistake let's reverse the decision there and let's kind of like invalidate the first vote so it really was a complete joke as i said like in my tweet complete joke and if this happened to it doesn't matter if that these protocols on solana if this happened to a protocol on ethereum i'd be calling it out just

the same and i would personally never use that protocol ever again like you the the the thing about these these protocols guys if you want to be a d5 protocol you have to build up something called credible neutrality now credible neutrality i've spoken about a bunch of times before but it basically describes the concept of you see this kind of like protocol let's let's take a theorem for example ethereum uh the network right it doesn't have on-chain governance or anything like that but it still has a governance process like if all the nodes agreed to do something and all the kind of like ecosystem agreed to do something and community and everything it would happen and we do this from time to time through hard forks like it's not an alien thing to ethereum so for example if the whole ethereum community decided to take someone's funds which actually did

happen in 2016 during the dow hack uh but like because that happened very early on with ethereum because that was like happened when there wasn't really any people around ethereum uh kind of like continued on from there and the people who disagree with that decision went to ethereum classic but ethereum didn't really suffer any long-term damage but if something like the dow hack happened today or something happened today where the ethereum network confiscated someone's funds well that would very quickly kill the credible neutrality that ethereum has been able to build up because you could not trust ethereum the network again not to do sorry the network not to do that to someone else not to do that to you i want to do it to another person so the credible neutrality kind of like fades away there and as i said i was i was i

was defining credible neutrality it basically describes the concept of being able to trust that uh that kind of like ethereum as a network can't censor you can't take away your funds can't do anything funky with your funds and we'll kind of stick to the rules that has code encoded into the protocol so there's more to it than that but that's kind of like the high level view of it um but yeah i mean and then there's like the application layout which is different to kind of i guess like the protocol itself so that's ethereum the protocol and the applications themselves if they want to actually be default applications they have their own credible neutrality and their own things that they have to stick to while uh you know if the solo and team is basically saying well look we need to kind of like take over this

wales account because they uh present a threat to the protocol itself uh that is just not on at all and that's not d5 at all so that was kind of like the i guess the tldr of what happened there uh and then when it comes to bancor what they did today again killed the credible neutrality of bancor where they basically uh paused their impermanent loss protection uh because of i think celsius and three arrows capital they they paused the employment loss protection uh because they didn't want three hours capital and celsius dumping the bnt tokens that they were getting paid out uh for the liquidity provider positions and for those of you who don't know how bangkor's impermanent loss protection works it basically as hazu describes here the protocol prince new bmt to compensate underwater lps and

they call it in permanent loss protection it's basically a ponzi for liquidity providers and uh bancor has always rubbed me the wrong way i've been bearish on bangkok for a very long time they very often observate away the truth of what they're doing here and at the end of the day all they're doing is printing new bnt to cover impermanent loss for people providing liquidity and the fact that they pause that today and they and and just to kind of like make sure that that bnt couldn't be dumped by 3lc 3ac and celsius um is is just killing the credible neutrality of the protocol because they didn't just pause it for those addresses they also put they did a global pause until they could identify those addresses and then kind of like isolate them which still

it still kills the credible neutrality as well so yeah it's just it's so bad guys like this sort of stuff is not d5 this sort of stuff is gonna invite a lot of regulators into uh into the space as well and they're gonna get so confused by this they're gonna be like okay well you know okay let's say that regulators got to a point where they understood the difference between c5 and d5 so let's say they understood the difference between celsius and and kind of like unisop for an example right well then they have they take a look at other other apps here and they kind of look at bancor and they look at solo and they're like okay well these things are on chain they don't you know they don't look like celsius they look more like unispot and then they kind of like see that well

okay bancor uh they kind of like do these global pause on these tokens that they were paying out to people that doesn't seem very decentralized and then look at soul end and they're like oh wow this protocol wanted to take over the account of this person that doesn't look very decentralized at all and then from there their mind goes to well why can't this happen on uni stopper why can't this happen on rvan compound things like that and then they just bucket them all together and we have blanket regulation across everything that that harms the industry now of course truly decentralized protocols cannot be regulated uh you know uh i guess like regulated themselves but everything around them can be regulated which which would really suck such as kind of like the the centralized front ends uh the any kind of like on-ramps any protocols

integrating with them any protocols that sorry any front ends integrating with them uh so any wallets and things like that as well that can all be regulated and stable coins and stuff like that too so it's not just the fact that the protocol itself is decentralized that's not enough it has to be everything around it as well and to resist like regulations that are for sure coming i mean guys like people are kidding themselves if they don't think the regulators right now are taking a very hard look at this ecosystem and picking out things that have happened over the past few months especially the terrors of the world celsius three or three ac uh block fight which i'll talk about in a sec as well uh you know bangkok soul and like all this stuff together they're gonna look at that they're gonna build a very

strong case to present to whoever they need to present it to to push these regulations through um in order to stifle some of this stuff and it's going to look pretty bad um for some for some kind of like protocols now that might be a bleak kind of i guess uh a view of this but i'm just being really realistic here guys like if i was a regulator looking at this stuff especially stuff that has collapsed and taking retail investors with them i would be looking at it being like okay well you know this is this is up like we need regulations right now this is really bad blah blah blah right if i was putting myself in their shoes do i expect regulations to hit c5 harder than d5 yeah i actually do i i think places like celsius um are going to get

hit very very hard they're going to be regulated out of existence pretty much like there's no way celsius would be able to do what they did with user funds if they were regulated like a normal entity like a normal financial entity which they will be so you can say goodbye to a lot of those kind of products out there and if they do happen they'll be happening offshore they won't be happening in any of the first world countries like the us or or kind of like the the uk or much much of europe they're going to be happening in kind of like tax havens and and maybe you know the countries where you can do regulatory arbitrage and stuff like that and then there's even less reason to trust these platforms i mean you shouldn't trust these platforms at all but that's even dodgier right

from from that perspective so that's the kind of like tldr on soul and and bangkok and how i feel about it again i will keep building the d5 drum but these protocols are not d5 if they do this like they're the furthest thing from d5 they're not even c5 they're trad fight which is even freaking worse to me because it's just extremely bad uh behavior on on the part here and i i i hope we don't see more of that going on but at the end of the day you need to just be aware of what protocols you're using what you know what the actual thing is like at the end of the day bancor's not going to tell you that their permanent loss protection is just them minting new b t to cover it they're going to obstacle it with marketing and with fancy words and everything like

that so it's got on you to kind of like dive deeper into it and ask questions always be asking questions guys especially you can ask them in the daily grade discord channel people will reply to you there don't just blindly ape things because that's how you get yourself wrecked it's worse than probably get being on leverage i know you guys know that i don't like leverage but i think just blindly throwing your money into things is worse than leverage because at least with leverage you probably have some understanding of what you're doing i hope but with these kind of like c5 things you just you know if you just threw money into celsius they hid what they did from you you didn't know what they were doing with your money so i think that's actually worse than than something like leverage which i consider to be really bad to begin with um so

yeah i'm gonna leave it at that a bunch more stuff to get through today before we wrap up here i'm already at 20 minute mark well um oh yeah just quickly here uh just on the note with block five which is a kind of like similar platform to celsius frank shapiro from the block shared an excerpt here that said crypto lender block fire struggling to raise cash despite offering to take a steep discount on its valuation raising the risk that it could be forced into a financial restructuring the jersey city nj based startup which last uh full race 500 million in a funding round that valued the company at 5 billion has for at least a month been trying to raise 100 million at a valuation of just one billion a haircut that amounts to 80 over half a year according to sources briefed on the situation this is

obviously because of the fallout from places like celsius um and also of obviously the crypto price is coming down generally but block fire is another one that i've thought has been dodgy for a while i wouldn't put any of my funds there this is the the one that bitcoin maximus maximalists love which is just ironic but i just yeah these kind of things is is is not great and when i saw their last raise at their last valuation i thought to myself that's insane like it doesn't make any sense to me these companies all they do is repackage yield and block fire actually dropped their yield they weren't as bad as celsius and they actually dropped their yield they were paying out because of the fact that it was unsustainable but a lot of these platforms guys like they're just they're not great they're very very much not great they're not

where i would park my money but i just wanted to kind of like highlight that here that's a very very steep decline in valuation there which i guess i expected it but i don't think a lot of people did i think a lot of people looked at block fire and thought that was some really super strong business but at the end of the day they're affected by the crypto fallout as much as anyone i think all right so uh daniel hong here a user on twitter uh posted something interesting before where he said stop asking me why i couldn't make it to nyc friends this is why the korean government imposed an exit ban for all ex-terror employees today holy guys that's that's actually quite crazy an exit ban on the country so people who live in south korea can't leave the country if they worked for terror or

still work for terror so i guess like terraform labs um that's insane like like how is dokuan not gonna end up in jail from this like seriously the guy has destroyed so many lives and not and not just kind of like people who invested in in i guess like luna and ust and everything surrounding it but also the people who worked for him like they can't leave the country now i met like that's just that's crazy that's overreach for sure like the fact that you know people who worked there and and ex-employees especially because a lot of them probably uh were working on different parts of of um of the protocol of the ecosystem probably a lot of them had not had absolutely no idea uh just just how fragile the protocol was they're now caught up in the fallout of it because

of of of what doe and kind of i guess like the higher ups that terra did now i really really hope though lands in prison guys like i think he needs to be made an example of like i know people go on about the fact that oh we need to self-regulate or you know calling on the government to throw someone in jail is kind of against the crypto ideals no i think that's against bitcoin ideals um well at least the original bitcoin ideals i'm not about that i'm actually not anti-government like i i think people get the wrong idea they think all the crypto people are anarchists or libertarian i'm actually not in that camp at all i'm not anti-government i actually think that uh you know i think there's a much more nuanced view to the the view on governments the people people kind of like musta especially

within within the crypto ecosystem um but i definitely do think that if we're going to hopefully recover from what happened with terror and rebuild trust there needs to be consequences for the people that were heavily involved in it especially the founder himself especially because he was just kind of like uh you know gallivanting around calling people poor doing all this i mean we all know what he did right so i just thought that was kind of like a very scary thing here that daniel posted was that he's barred from leaving the country because he worked at terror uh i guess like that means south korea is taking this extremely seriously so we're gonna have we're gonna probably see more fallout from this as as time goes on all right so liam from the op labs team or from the optimism team here uh shared

i guess kind of like a screenshot of a call that they were doing with coinbase on demoing a working end-to-end uh the upload download test of blob transactions on a post merge 4844 devnet aka a proto dank sharding devnet here now tim bico uh i guess like um uh quote retweeted this and said if you're following because you weren't on the call the recording is now live here on the cat herders youtube channel there's also some work in progress notes available here now for those of you who don't know what erp 48 44 is and pro dang shouting is and all that good stuff there it's basically uh a way to make layer two transactions dirt cheap and i'm talking like a cent or less for layer two transactions for

swapping and things like that especially on optimistic roll-ups now the the really really cool thing about this is that um this is coming after the merge so this is i think going to be the biggest upgrade after the merge one i'm looking forward to the most and it's already being actively developed on test nets it's already kind of like being actively developed with a bunch of different people working on it um and it's going really really well from from what i can see here so very very cool to see this i love this sort of stuff guys like honestly the merge is cool but i think at this point we're all just kind of like in waiting mode there's nothing kind of like new about the merge that we're going to need to kind of i guess um go over we all know what it looks

like we all know what it's bringing we all know kind of like what's happening there so now you know i've personally still monitoring the merge but i personally moved a lot of my kind of like uh i guess what i'm paying attention to to stuff like 48 44 which is proto dang shotting so go read this i'll link in youtube description below i'm gonna power through the rest of these updates because i've got five minutes left here so the sepolia beacon chain is launching today uh obviously there's a polio test net uh will kind of like be being merged hopefully by the end of this month early july i'll be hosting a call for that for that so i like the robston call i'll be hosting it with eth staker uh as part of the daily gray uh look out for more information on that one there but just

wanted to kind of like shout out here that's the polio beacon chain is launching today so if you want to i guess get involved with this you can i haven't got the links handy right now but i'm sure you can google it and find the links for that one there uh another another kind of i guess um update here uh or a reminder i should say uh the great glacier hard fork is happening on june 29th on the i guess like eth1 chain in order to delay the difficulty bomb by about two to three months if you haven't upgraded your eth1 execution layer full node yet be sure to do so if you aren't running one you should definitely run one i updated mine just before uh you know you need to be ready for the fork because if not you'll be set on a minority chain and your i

guess like execution layer client will either freeze up or break so definitely go update that if you haven't yet um an interesting tweet from anti-pro synthesis today that i wrote a newsletter about where he says it's easy to build a frail centralized protocol on a robust decentralized blockchain like ethereum however it's impossible to build a robust decentralized protocol on a frail centralized blockchain i guess like putting it another way if the foundation is fragile and centralized then nothing built on top can be decentralized so for example terra the blockchain was frail and centralized and very very fragile due to its relationship with the ust stablecoin so the terra blockchain actually collapsed in three days along

with everything on it right so it doesn't matter how decentralized the protocols were on top of it they all went with terror because terror was a centralized very very weak protocol whereas on ethereum there have been countless protocols that have either blown up zombified failed whatever you name it that hasn't affected ethereum at all because ethereum is robust ethereum is decentralized ethereum is built in a sustainable way and there is no ust kind of like ponzi stable coin i guess like on the protocol layer of ethereum so i thought that was just a really great way of putting it is that it's kind of like when you build a skyscraper you make sure the foundations are extremely solid because if the foundations aren't solid uh the whole building can collapse if the foundation you know collapses

whereas uh let's say the building has 50 floors if the 40th floor uh go sets on fire or kind of like it's completely destroyed by something um uh it's not going to take the whole building with it it may take the 39th floor and the 41st floor a little bit with it but it's not going to take the whole building down sort of like how a d5 app on ethereum it may take some other apps with it because of some kind of like dependencies but it's not going to take ethereum down with it because it's just not the way ethereum is built so i thought that was really great i just wanted to highlight that from anti-pro synthesis um arbitrary odyssey is going to be officially starting tomorrow june 21st at 1 pm est so obviously a lot of you have been waiting for this for quite a

while and it's finally here i think this is going to be great for arbitrary i think it's going to lead to a lot of nice growth for them and i'm hoping a lot of you are going to get involved with it you can get more details here of what this is all about in the twitter thread on this kind of i guess like the discord server as well that you can join too so just wanted to highlight that that's going live tomorrow um immutable has announced a 500 million dollar developer and venture fund to accelerate the adoption of web 3 games and projects it's funny i was actually talking to a friend about crypto gaming recently i think it was yesterday the day before and i was saying to him that i i'm very very bearish on crypto gaming as it exists today uh in general you

guys know that but i think if any team is going to make me bullish on crypto game is going to actually change my mind on it it's going to be immutable and i'm not just saying that because i'm an investor in immutable you guys know that i i i'm saying that because everything that i've seen from immutable has been good like i think that they're doing it the right way they're they're building the solutions that need to be built in terms of the scaling solutions they're building actual games first and then they're kind of like doing it in such a way that uh the crypto primitives are sprinkled in there rather than it the whole game revolving around this crypto primitive so i i think if any team and any product is going to convince me that crypto gaming can be more than just ponzi's it's immutable

and that's pretty much exactly why i invested in them because i i was like okay well this team is very strong this team kind of like has their heads screwed on they know what they're doing and they can probably prove me wrong so i hope they do obviously not just for for my investment sake but just because i want crypto gaming to work because i'm a gamer as well but i'm not going to uh bury my head in the sand and look at the current state of crypto games and be like okay well they're not all ponzi's because they are or even if they're not ponzi's a lot of them are pay to win and i don't like pay to win games i really really hate pay to win games i haven't like i used to play some of them on my phone and and i was like wow these

things are super predatory like then they're just not fun they're literally like it's basically like a casino with like a video game paint on it like it's it's the same kind of like concept right so i'm hoping they can prove me wrong here but i guess congrats to them or good to see them launching this fun because that's going to help them towards their mission of making a more sustainable crypto gaming ecosystem all right finally i'm sure a lot of you have noticed lately that synthetics has been growing uh and they've been doing 100 million plus a volume of daily uh kind of like volume here and the merged or eighth has put together a great uh twitter thread on why this is happening and why the increase in volume uh it's a threat on synthetics as atomic swaps now this is a great little thread here and i

do want to add that i think synthetics is seeing a lot of uh attraction lately because of the optimism ecosystem that's been built out around synthetics and because optimism has allowed them to scale whereas layer one ethereum actually hampered synthetics a lot and they've been an early adopter of optimism and they've just been grinding out building and it's paying off they're seeing record volumes huge volumes they're seeing record usage it's really really great to see so i love it i don't hold any snx right now i was actually gonna buy some the other day but i didn't because uh i'm an idiot if you've seen the the price action recently that's not investment advice there but i often talk about the tokens that i'm looking at and looking to scale in at and i haven't talked about which ones individually so maybe that's a little bit of an alpha leak there but

snx was definitely one that i'm looking at and still looking at but again non-investment advice guys i don't hold any right now but i was looking at it because of this fact that i noticed synthetics growing i had been very impressed by the ecosystem that they had built out on optimism and i looked figured i looked at it all and i'm like well d5 1.0 projects if anything they're the ones that are probably going to do well going forward because they're still around they've built up a very robust ecosystem and their tokens have been slaughtered like synthetics is still down 90 from its all-time high even though it's gone up a little bit the past few days so yeah that's kind of like my thinking around that but no more on that last thing to talk about was someone wanting me to talk about what's happening with uh the fear of

revenue being generated by unisop over the last few days they're generating more fever and well unisop is generating more fear revenue than the ethereum blockchain now you can see synthetics on here as well on arbor and stuff like that but they're not ahead of ethereum first thing i want to say here guys is that i don't think it makes sense to compare fear revenue of ethereum to unisop and the the clearest example of the uh sorry the clearest reason of this is because they sell different products uniswap is a liquidity pool provider right it provides liquidity pools you can put uh money into it and you can earn fees off the trades right it's it's a decentralized exchange at the end of the day right it provides a very different service to what ethereum provides ethereum the blockchain sells block space it doesn't matter who it

doesn't care who it sells it to doesn't care uh you know who's using it it sells block space that's all it is that's the only product ethereum sells so a unicorn doesn't sell block space unisop doesn't do anything like the ethereum protocol does and ethereum doesn't do anything like uni swap does so those compa it's comparing apples to oranges it just doesn't make any sense to compare the two but why is this happening why is unisoft doing more fear venue well because uni swap is one of the most used if not the most used applications on ethereum and beyond i mean you can see the breakdown here it's not just being used on ethereum it's being used on polygon arbitrary optimism and all the other places that it's been deployed to now obviously the vast majority of volume is on layer one ethereum and it actually ironically

enough when ethereum gas fees are lower it more people are going to be using uniswap because they're probably going to clear dust out of their accounts or they're going to clear low value tokens out of their account so they couldn't afford to swap into other assets before on layer one because of the high gas fees so uh that in my mind doesn't really mean anything and at the end of the day i would actually expect a lot of these protocols especially as they move to layer two um even at two kind of like uh vastly uh i guess like generate more fear of when you then the the the ethereum kind of like layer one blockchain would now the reason why is because uni swap on layer two is still charging the point three percent right for liquidity as an example that doesn't change between

layer one and layer two but on layer two you're paying a lot less in fees i think the fees right now if i go to l2 fees.info on optimism it's 18 cents for a swap whereas on layer one ethereum it's still you know a few dollars for a swap so but the thing is the fee is exactly the same on on the liquidity pool whether it's on layer one or layer two so because of that there's gonna be more activity on layer two eventually and then i i do real i do reckon that these applications are going to be generating at times more fair renew than ethereum layer one would is that bearish for ethereum layout or for eighth of course it's not because they're selling different products ethereum uh has eighth tied to it uni swap has uni tied to it but at the end of the day uni

token holders don't get any of this right now because there's no fee take for them the only place that those fees are going is the liquidity providers on uniswap whereas with ethereum uh about 20 to 30 percent of the fee goes to miners and the future validators you have the other 70 80 percent is getting burned which is like a pseudo dividend to all eath holders so they're very very different things guys so i don't think comparing the two makes makes any sense um and i and you know on crypto fees you can actually just kind of filter this out you can go okay layer one layer two let's look at how that breaks down obviously it filters out all the apps obviously ethereum is still leading by a wide margin here and the reason why i would say layer one and layer two is because layer twos do the

same thing they sell block space it's the exact same thing as layer one so that's how you should filter it out and then you can kind of get rid of these and go okay well let's look at the centralized exchanges right let's look at lending crosstalk let's look i like kind of like look at all the apps and see how the apps are faring as well but again it's not really right to compare different apps to each other like you don't really compare unisop to maker because uh make a dow the fees are completely different right they own fees of people taking out uh positions leveraged positions or sorry taking uh taking out die from the vault so not necessarily for leverage but just in general um and it's just a kind of like a whole different thing there uh and that's make the protocol actually

making those fees it's not the liquidity providers because no one provides liquidity uh i guess like two maker they provide collateral so again it's different so when comparing fear venue you have to compare the things uh kind of to like for like you can't compare them to other ass because it's all to other kind of like things that are not like for like because it's very very different so that's my comments about that hopefully that clears it up for for a lot of you guys there but i've gone way over time here so i'm gonna end it there for today thank you 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 newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone