MasterCard to support crypto, sTSLA coming and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #55 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cesano and today's the 11th of february 2021. all right everyone let's get into the news from the last 24 hours so a bit of a crazy time right now especially in the markets i guess it's been like that for a few weeks now but yeah it's just feeling even crazier and crazier and i put this tweet out today and i'll read out what i said i basically said uh uh quote just gonna put it out there social signals like celebrities shilling crypto ain't going to work as a top signal this cycle crypto is mainstream now in 2017 we didn't have billion dollar companies putting btc on their balance sheets embrace it respect the pump and clo end quote so obviously respect the pump is a

is a reference to a meme where ivan on tech was saying this in one of his videos you haven't seen that yet it's quite funny but i guess the general gist of this tweet is basically to say you know i see people always messaging me and you know being like you know all these celebrities are shilling everything like is this a top like are we gonna crash like this is crazy and i i get that but you know there's a lot of different top signals you can kind of look for right and and i think celebrities shilling crypto is not one of them at this cycle simply because of the reason i gave right wick i i believe crypto is mainstream now where it's kind of in the mainstream consciousness and a lot of people are paying attention to it now you know we had the tesla elon musk news

the other day right we've had other companies put btsc on their balance sheets we have uh traditional for investors like talking about eth and talking about defy and we have like all these other celebrities coming in through nfts so you know i think that um you know and i followed up this tweet saying that i i don't think that this means that everything's going to go up forever and that this time is quite unquote different or anything like that but i think trying to pick a kind of cycle top based on celebrity signals is gone um it's just it's just not going to be effective you know in saying that like i i have my own kind of top signals that i look out for but i don't i just don't know like no one knows right you don't know it was the top until kind of way after because if you

actually look at what happens at the end of a cycle we have like a massive crash right and then we have what's called a dead cat bounce so what this references is that the price will kind of bounce from there you know you'll get a lot of people buying it up right and it'll kind of bounce and it won't go back up to all time higher like just go below it right and that'll give people hope that you know oh that wasn't actually like the crash you know that wasn't actually the cycle top we're actually going to keep going up but but the reason it's called a dead cat is because it bounces right but then it goes back down after that and that's when you know that when it goes back down and every time it tries to bounce it keeps going down that's when you kind of know that you

know that we topped right because we've seen the crashes right we've seen the 30 crashes in a day not in a day but like over a few days right in a bull market and they happen frequently but you know there's a bounce there and it's not a dead cap bounce it continues up right it continues higher and that's because people are still feeling really bullish right uh there's by pressure there it's it's you know people aren't feeling bearish right now so there's that side of it for me you know a big top signal in 2017 for me was when absolute kind of trash was pumping right when these things that are like dead no one even cares about them and they're just pumping for no reason and i'm not talking about like the other kind of i guess like chains like the ethereum competitor chains i'm literally

talking about things that are literally dead right there there are like old forks of bitcoin and you know no one cares about them they're essentially almost scams but they pumped at towards the end like really hard because people were like feeling invincible right everyone thought they were gonna win no one thought they could lose so you had this kind of i guess i i like to call it like a swan pump where it was like the last pump and that was a clear signal back then but in saying that the same thing is happening right now and it's happening in a pretty big way too but i just i'm not feeling like we are at a top yet i'm still very bullish i i think that the reason why it's happening sooner this time is because we have just so much new money and new people coming

into this ecosystem right now it's actually mind-boggling considering that i actually think we in 2017 we had less people sorry more people than we we have right now but we're quickly approaching parity and i think we're gonna pass that and i think the fact that the traditional finance system is like more involved this time and bigger money is more involved like i talk to people all the time and they they're like you know the institutions are actually here outside of btc now as well they're interested in e they're interested in d5 they want to know how to get exposure so that from that angle like it's very hard for me to be bearish like on the kind of macro scale because the way i look at it is like a scale on the one scale you have like the euphoria you know the end of the kind of

bull market um you know all the crappy stuff going on that you think are like top signals and on the other scale you have the new money flowing in so as long as the new money is kind of heavier than the you know the top signal so to speak then it's we're going to keep going and no one knows you know when the new money is going gonna stop coming in i mean the only way you could actually figure that out and kind of look for a good signal is if you were like a centralized exchange and you obviously had data on how much new money was coming in what your you know new user signups were like those kind of places are best positioned to to kind of look at that but even even still like i i mean i just thought of something

coinbase is ipowing this year right coinbase hasn't even ipo'd yet and that's going to bring in a ton of fresh interest in capital i think too and you know i just i i don't know where we're gonna top i all the signals that i used to use are moot right now none of them work right now um because of the fact that we've just like basically widened the the reach of crypto to basically everyone now and i think we're gonna see you know a lot of people coming in because of that so yeah just a little bit of thoughts on that i know yesterday i might have sounded a little bit bearish and i kind of was in in because like i was looking at queen gecko and i was like this is just insane like this is how i felt at the end of 2017

and we all know how that ended up happening but then i took like today to kind of really think uh about like you know think it through like from first principles and think about all the stuff that's still bullish about the ecosystem and still kind of like lasting and what we still have to look forward to and it kind of counterbalanced that like my scale tipped back to okay like i'm pretty bullish even though all these other crap's happening i'm still bullish so yeah i just maybe wanted to clarify a little bit of what i was talking about yesterday too because i had a couple of people messaging me about it and saying oh you're bearish i'm like no not nonsense necessarily bearish just like cautious i guess you could say because you know you always want to be cautious you always want to kind of like

make sure that you know you're you're in a position that if we do go into another bear market that you're fine and i actually live by a rule that um you know you never want to be a hundred percent out of the market but you never want to be zero percent out of the market either right so you want to kind of strike a balance and what a lot of people like to do is i like to sell on the way up which i think is actually like totally fine even though you're still bullish you're just taking risk off the table essentially right you're you're you're you're basically potentially going into stable coins and just yield farming with it i mean that that's something you couldn't do in 2017 now you just cash it out the stable coins you know pay your taxes if you

have to and then earn some some yield on it which i think is really cool as well so yeah i i mean i had a i mean i've gone through why i'm still really bullish on ethereum obviously in one of my refuels the other day i think it was last week i went through like 20 minutes of just why i'm extremely bullish on ethereum and ethan that nothing's changed since then i just think that you know we could have like local tops where the market dumps 30 again and you know everyone thinks is that it was that it right and that happened seven times in 2017 i think until it actually was it so this isn't unusual this isn't foreign um this is just par for the course and you have to be prepared for it basically all right so an interesting tweet from band teg today one of the uh wi-fi

core developers so he and i'll read out the tweet so he said people really underestimate how alluring to builders ethereum's credible neutrality sounds there is simply no way the next visionary project is launched on an ethereum killer uh they will remain a home for heavily subsidized low effort forks with genuine genuine innovation coming from ethereum now obviously lately we've been seeing a lot of these i guess other blockchains kind of come to prominence in the social sphere because of ethereum's high fees right and one of them is binance smart chain which i've mentioned before and that and i've been talking about on twitter a bit and you know for those who don't know what it is binance smart chain is a straight up clone of ethereum like a legit clone fork it's using the exact same kind of

code base it's it it's just kind of ripped out proof of work and replaced it with these kind of uh distributed nodes there's like they say there's 21 of them but in reality there's like one and that's binance they can they they control the whole thing so it's just a centralized version of ethereum and and i kind of find it funny because there's a deep irony in that in that the only thing that's been able to get any kind of traction outside of ethereum is a centralized clone of ethereum and you know outside of that to ban tech's point here about people wanting to build on a credibly neutral platform this is why i'm the most bullish on ethereum why haven't i ever remained the most bullish on ethereum is that the developers that come into our ecosystem are developers that are basically like the best of the best essentially

they are coming in for all the right reasons they want to build something right that's going to change the world they want you know the genuine innovation as bandage says is that it's happening on ethereum because of that these people don't want to come from like the old centralized world and then just build on one of these other chains that they don't consider to be credibly neutral and decentralized so that's why with binance smart chain all you see the apps on there are just clones of the ethereum apps and they're low effort clones as as kind of banter says here they're they're nothing special and you know i'm not trying to like crap all over it but for me being around for so long binance smart train chain reminds me of eos from 2017 and it was the same story back then same playbook you know we're more scalable

than ethereum we're doing more transactions than ethereum come to us blah blah and it it literally exact same playbook exact same kind of like architecture as well where you have these kind of centralized nodes essentially um and back then i was dealing with the same thing with people kind of like shilling this thing being like it's going to kill ethereum blah blah blah and we all saw what happened right the i mean not just the price of eos but like the platform itself just there's there's just no community there there's no developers there there's just nothing really um from what i can see and you know the markets moved on now they're they're they're on to the next ethereum killers and it wasn't just eos it was like neo and there was like q term and there's a bunch of others out there and i'm not trying to single out any

projects but like there's no denying that these other projects don't really have any traction and i'm not saying maybe some of these newer ones don't get traction sometime in the future but there's a reason ethereum has remained the leader you know even though it has all these issues right ethereum is the least scalable blockchain besides bitcoin right i i i think actually litecoin is is probably less scalable but in general like no one cares about liquid but in general like um there's a reason why the people still use it the network effects is just so strong and i've spoken about this a lot on like yesterday's refuel and stuff and you know maybe i'll do a dedicated video on this because i feel like i'm getting so many questions from people about why ethereum is going to win why i think ethereum is going to continue being the

dominant platform and i need to just kind of put my kind of all my thoughts out there because i could go on about it for like an hour so it obviously needs a separate video um but yeah i think i wrote about this in the daily guy newsletter today as well about ethereum spirit and that can't be replicated by these other platforms and that's because the ethereum system itself kind of lends itself to those kind of community members and brings them in and and you know kind of forms that spirit within it so yeah just a little bit of thoughts there i'll digress for now i probably will put out a video with my full thoughts on like competitors and why i think ethereum is still going to win um and that's probably going to be a long video because there's so many pieces to

this puzzle that you really need to kind of dig deep to understand you know the the most surface level argument is saying ethereum's going to lose because it's got high fees and other chains are more scalable if that is your entire argument for why ethereum is going to lose right then you to me you've just got no idea what you're talking about if i'm being frank because there is so much more to that and we've got so much evidence years and years of evidence of this and if i'm being honest the most the most valuable network by far that's almost a trillion dollars in market cap is bitcoin and bitcoin does not scale at all it's like three or four transactions per second their layer two system is basically like the lightning network is is meh right their layout two system is crypto bank centralized exchanges

but bitcoin is still worth a lot for all the reasons that ethereum is is still worth a lot and still kind of like as a platform in my view so also like a leader as a platform but anyway i'll i'll probably cover that in a video sometime soon when i've when i've got some time to sit down and do it but i digress for now so really really bullish news out of mastercard over the last 24 hours which i actually missed initially this morning and then later this evening i was like wait where did this come from um but basically what it is it's mastercard saying that they're going to be supporting cryptocurrency on their networks so this is pretty insane i mean visa has already announced this i think like a few weeks ago that they're going to be supporting crypto specifically like usdc and stuff like

that and mastercard you know put out this press release and basically said the same thing but they didn't kind of note what currencies they're going to support they just said that they're going to be supporting cryptocurrencies i mean we can already guess that it's going to be btc and ethrite straight up but i think they'll actually follow the paypal playbook as well so they may support like ltc and bch things that are like not considered securities i think that's like a a pretty um a pretty big thing for these companies they have to be sure of that but i'm curious to see if they'll support stable coins i mean i i i think they will right like this it's a no-brainer for them to support usdc for example they probably i don't know if they'll support tether it's a bit of a gray area there

but usdc i'll be over the moon if they support a die that would be really awesome um but yeah it remains to be seen but the fact that they're actually getting involved it's just i mean as i was talking about before the amount of traditional finance people and companies coming into this ecosystem now is what makes me the most bullish because that's where all the money is it like literally 99.99 of the money is in that system d5 is still a rounding error crypto still a rounding error and if that money is kind of making its way into krypton if only like 10 of that money works it makes its way into crypto crypto can go to like a 10 trillion dollar total market cap essentially um which is insane because you know if we're going off like the long tail distribution that would put ether over

10k for sure and btc would probably be 200 300 000 or something so this is the kind of power of that money coming in and and all these companies signaling that they're going to support crypto is the same kind of signal that um elon sent when when he bought btc with tesla in that this is legit this has lasting and staying power jump in with us right this is safe now you know we're cool with it so yeah very bullish news out of mastercard today so heath global's uh market make hackathon finished and there was judging that i actually was a part of a couple days ago it was really fun to judge all these projects uh the finalists have been listed with uh the winners kind of being announced i

think today at 12 eastern time but yeah you can see all the finalists here there is a bunch of different projects i think there's about 10 projects here i'm not going to go through them all but you can check out this tweet thread in the youtube description but what i do want to talk about is that the 8th global events are some of the best for finding new projects and new talent building new ethereum projects so uh for those who don't know each global is kind of like run out of the ethereum foundation or at least is like i guess part of the ethereum foundation but maybe they've spun out at this point i mean i'm not totally sure but like they definitely started in in that kind of in that in that arena there so they're always very high quality events um very high quality hackathons if not

the most if not the highest quality hackathon we have in ethereum uh maybe eth denver is a close second there but there's always projects that come out of this that are that are super you know innovative and super and and some of them end up changing the game so i mean as i'm scrolling here through here you can see like all these projects basically and as i said you can check them out uh yourself uh but it's cool to see i mean there's stuff like you know what's this orca protocol a flexible and adaptable dow implementation so you know it's not just defy that's being worked on right it's dowels as well uh this thing called paladin powder is a governance lending protocol uh this new money lego allows users to benefit benefit from additional apy while helping governance activists use a uh

activist user inactive voting rights um so yeah i mean like what else is there here like arbitrage like i mean lev rv i mean a lot of other projects here gearbox protocol under collateralized protocol for margin trading i mean a lot of it is d5 but there's still dows and governance stuff happening too so yeah anyway i'll let you guys check it out because i i don't want to butcher kind of like the the kind of overview here um but yeah be linked in the youtube description for all of you to check out so i've spoken about loopering a lot over the last uh few weeks i guess on the refuel and how they've been growing and i looked at their tvl today and i didn't realize it was up at over 200 million actually which is which is amazing and you can see the growth here has just

been explosive right from like 30 or 40 million at the beginning of january to over 200 mil now and i put out this tweet and i basically said necessity aka the the need for cheap and secure transactions is the mother of invention and loot bring has has been there to answer the scalability call and they have right the only reason why i mean maybe not the only reason but the main reason why loopering has been able to get this traction is because there is a need now people are being priced out of layer one they need a solution loopering is there to help them so that's why we've seen this tremendous growth here and it's not just loopering you know a lot of the other ones are getting growth too there's a lot of i mean everyone's pretty much talking about scaling in layer two right now

which is actually one of my thesis for why gas fees being high was actually a good thing and i wrote a piece in june of 2020 arguing that gas fees being high is basically a shelling point for the entire ecosystem it affects every participant right and and because it affects every participant they're all going to work together to fix it so i'm really happy to see that thesis playing out because um i'm pretty proud of that that i was able to kind of call that um but for me it was just like you know going back to what i was saying about the ethereum spirit it's also got to do with not giving up right the builders aren't going to just give up on ethereum because it's got some problems and some scaling worries they're going to stick around and fix them and and work together to do it so the fact

that we have this shelling point in the high gas phase just kind of strengthens the bond of the ethereum community and the developers and kind of gives us a more healthy and better network i think as well so synthetics have voted to approve the first i guess creation of a synthetic asset for tesla shares on on their protocol which is really really cool you can basically do zero slippage u.s stock trading using synthetics when this is implemented uh there's also kind of another protocol i think called mirror protocol from the terra ecosystem that's doing kind of these uh synthetic stocks but you know i i'm an snx holder so i've always been bullish on synthetics doing this and this is one of the main reasons i actually kind of bought snx is because uh i think

synthetic assets are amazing but i think there are even more amazing for uh assets that aren't blockchain native right because you can have a synthetic acid for eat and that's all well and good but atheism is ethereum native stocks and bonds and equities and all this kind of stuff there aren't they aren't kind of um native to the chain but all you need is an oracle and a and then a synthetic implementation on synthetics to kind of trade it so and i don't want to trade stocks in the traditional system i want to trade them on ethereum like i trade any other asset and that's exactly what synthetics is going to enable now with s tesla and i'm sure like other ones coming down the pipeline too so very very excited about this and you can go check this out as well i'm not sure when it's going to be

implemented it says with the first available deployment window so it should be sooner rather than later but once that happens i might pick up some some s tesla i'm pretty bullish on tesla in general but we'll see you know the tesla chart looks like a crypto chart if you go look at it it's just like straight up but yeah we'll see what happens there so frank chaparra from the block has put out this tweet today saying that and i'll quote alliance bernstein a 600 billion dollar asset manager is explaining to clients the importance of sushi swap and uni swap and he's got a slide here of of them explaining it um this is stupidly bullish right like i was just saying how traditional finance is coming into this ecosystem and i didn't think they would be at this point of the kind of

cycle where they're explaining not only uni swap but sushi swap to to people and they've got one inch listed here and balancer and bancor and they're using tvl as a term total value locked that's not a traditional finance term that's a crypto native term or a defined native term so i mean again this theme of new new kind of institutional traditional finance money coming into this space is what is counteracting all my other top signals that i've looked at before because this money comes in you know slower than other types of money but it comes and when it when it comes in they allocate to fundamentals based things they don't allocate to just crap and they don't just sell right um like like a retail investor would sell like during their first crypto kind of rodeo

they make concentrated bets and they hold them and and they make sure that they don't just like panic sell or anything like that so this yeah and as i said this is counteracting all the other top signals that i'm that i'm kind of seeing which is kind of um kind of uh pretty funny here and then there's another tweet here and frank's quoting the the kind of deck and it says d5 apps currently offer a variety of financial services including lending borrowing and financial exchanges in this sense defy competes with banks and financial institutions though defy is nowhere close to their size yet and then um and then frank just adds his ads yet with like a monocle with the monocle emoji yet right uh that's that's a pretty key word there because

it doesn't say that they never will get there it just says that they're not there yet so yeah this is just as i said this is the thing that's making me the most bullish right now is that they're not i actually figured the traditional phoenix system would fight against this more than they are but i think they might just be seeing the writing on the wall really early for some reason which is kind of insane um and you know we've had banks actually work with with crypto before like we had jp morgan be a pretty early adopter of um of of kind of like this technology doing uh they actually made their own ethereum client that was forked from go ethereum called quorum but i mean this is just so bullish like i would rather them not fight us and just embrace this tech and

learn to work with it because that just means we'll get adoption much faster and we'll kind of like get this reality um that we want to see with kind of d5 taking over the world we'll get that out a lot faster and i mean they're a 600 billion dollar asset manager like they're not going to put 600 billion dollars into into d5 right you know but even if they only put like one percent of that in to d5 that's six billion dollars right one percent into d5 i mean i can see that that's not that's not anything too crazy and that's six billion dollars just from one asset manager coming into to d5 and you might think oh you know d5 has got a really large market cap it's like 50 billion or something like that yes but the market cap doesn't matter um when you compare it to like the the new

money coming in buying six billion dollars worth of deficit assets just for as an example right um would move the daily fi total market cap probably up to like three or four hundred billion dollars because not only is it buying um buying the assets pushing the price up and pushing the market cap up as a as a multiple so for example for every one dollar maybe pushes the market cap up by five dollars but it also signals to the rest of the market that there is this incredible buy pressure on these tokens and everyone else starts bidding it up so yeah that's that's the most bullish thing happening right now in my eyes for for this space and gonna keep watching this because the more this happens the more bullish i kind of get here so there's a a new uh yearn interface

out today andre just tweeted out this link didn't say anything about it but if you go here you can see that there's a new new interface here for the different yield farming uh kind of uh i guess like opportunities you can sort by like v2 v1 um earn like things like this and active vaults and stuff like that or active like what what you're kind of in with your own wallet so yeah it's good to see them kind of experimenting with new interfaces here uh i think this isn't perfect but it's better than what they had i think one thing that yeon has kind of struggled with is is definitely ui and ux um because i think a lot of them definitely are very powerful kind of uh builders in the back end sense like smart contract developers and

building out strategies but they seem to have a little bit of weakness around the ui ux but this is a step in the right direction for sure so yeah really really happy to see this so hayden put out a pretty snarky tweet today which i thought was quite funny um so cz from binance tweeted out that uh there was kind of an issue with the binance centralized exchange um not the bsc chain the actual exchange where it was down for about 30 minutes i think and so hayden adams put out a tweet where he said you need to and he's the founder of uni swap and he said unisof will be coming back online soon after a temporary outage oh wait never mind it has never gone offline and then cz responds with worry about pancake swap which is like

a uniform clone on bsc and hayden um kind of responds with like a laughing emoji here but i want to focus on that kind of parent tweet for a second here even though the gas prices are high right and it's expensive to use the ethereum network is still usable if you can pay those fees right it has not gone down in i don't think the ethereum network has ever gone down like going offline even during the shanghai dos attacks in late 2016 the network didn't go down so from that respect the fact that ethereum is such a highly available platform um that you can use if you obviously if you can afford it right you can pay the fees i think is really special because you know no matter i guess like how much activity hits the network it's

bounded by the gas limit as i've described before right and and because of that yes there are other trade-offs here where it's expensive to use but the higher availabilities is the trade-off and i like that i would rather us have high availability for these systems where they're always available as long as you can pay the fee then have like you know zero fees or whatever or cheap fees and the system goes offline every now and again um because i think as i said we're scaling by a layer two i've said this plenty of times i think you know the cheap transactions can happen there but we need this highly available main chain that's highly secure as well which is why we're scaling by layer via two for for example now i mean obviously comparing a decentralized

blockchain like ethereum to a centralized exchange like binance is maybe a little bit of a fool's errand but these are the people we're trying to disrupt these are the companies we're trying to disrupt so yeah just i just wanted to make a note there i thought that was quite funny all right last thing here from dc investor on the layer 2 subject so he says okay gemini coinbase and kraken whoever brings direct whoever bridges directly to ethereum layer 2's asap gets my business if you do it i'll prom uh i promise i'll bring friends uh like or rt if you're in ethereum l2s include loopering optimism zk sync what say you tyler cameron brian jess just power from a jessie power from um pow wow pow wow sorry his twitter name is jesper from kraken and tyler and cameron from gemini

and brian from coinbase um this is what we need for layer two kind of adoption as well we need these centralized exchanges to all adopt the same kind of layer two payments infrastructure and then they can all talk to each other so you could imagine them um adopting something like loop ring pay for example where instead of having to send ethereum based assets through the ethereum main chain coinbase can just send it through loop ring to to kraken or to gemini because there's a lot of arbitrage transactions that go on or to like an ethereum user's wallet on loop ring or whatever solution they choose this needs to happen it needs to happen asap in my eyes i i know that for these big companies they move very slowly and it's harder for them to just do it

right they can't just like say one day okay we're doing layer two and then the next day it's done they have to go through like a whole product life cycle which i totally understand but they need to to have get started on it like yesterday then it's already working on this and i hope they are i know coinbase in their mobile wallet already supports optimism as i think as a test net for now um they were one of the first to adopt that but we need all these exchanges to agree on maybe maybe one or two l2s to to kind of like really get that adoption there i know that i may say goes plasma chain was adopted by bitfinex uh with tether but there's i don't think any other exchanges have adopted it yet so there's not really any use for people to use it right now so we

definitely need more exchanges to kind of adopt this tech which i hope to see kind of this year as we as i guess the ethereum network remains expensive and more users will probably demand it because at the end of the day if enough users demand it these exchanges will implement it because it will be worth their time worth their money worth their kind of resources to put towards something like this all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching if you haven't subscribed yet be sure to do so give that video a thumbs up join the daily great discord channel and subscribe to the delegate newsletter and i will catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone