Merge update, Balance v2 live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #119​​ - 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 sosano and today is the 12th of may 2021 right everyone uh before we get into it today you will notice that my webcam is different that's because my normal camera is not working for some reason uh and i obviously need to record today's episode before i can i can't spend too much time you know trying to fix my my normal webcam so this is my backup one so apologies for the poor video quality hopefully i'll have it fixed by tomorrow but you know i guess maybe a lot of you don't stare at my beautiful face during the video anyway so let's get into the content uh so some really exciting news out of the merge devnet to number two here

called uh nocturne so this is uh a test net or a devnet as it's called developer network for the eth1 to e2 merge that a lot of the eth1 ii core developers and researchers are working on um and you know they what happened today was they have this um kind of devnet called nocturne and it finalized which means that it was able to produce blocks up until the point that the chain um justified and and finalized itself as well which is a huge milestone uh for any of you who follow eth2 and know all about what's going on with eth2 there so and on top of that there was also the first executable transaction uh was confirmed on uh on this devnet as well which is huge and you know this just signals that the merge is coming a lot faster than people

think it is as i've been saying you know some people are kind of uh thinking that it might happen like end of this year like as early as end of this year but i'm more betting on like q1 next year just to be conservative here but still what the work is progressing you know we're already in may so it's not too long away now um and it's going really well i think it's going better than most people thought it would uh these teams just work so well together they know what they're doing they understand the protocol they have a really good grasp of all of this so that is super super exciting and i'm really happy to to see that this is all playing out very nicely and kudos to to the team here i mean this is bleeding edge cutting edge work i mean

about to use an analogy of what the eth one to eth2 merge is like it's like changing the engine of a car while the car is driving or changing the engine of a plane while the planes in the air it's a big task because we're essentially swapping out or hot-swapping proof-of-work for proof-of-stake with the merge that's essentially what the merge is um and so to do that we need to make sure once it's done it's done right the first time like you you know there were some questions in the daily grade discord the other day about you know what's the worst that could happen it's like okay well there's technical issues that could that could come up where basically for some reason the merger doesn't go through correctly and we have to basically revert back and do it again that would be very messy um i don't

think it'd be it'd be clean at all to do that so avoiding that at all costs is actually of high priority i think i think having like a really smooth launch or sorry a really smooth merge um you know like we had with the beacon chain launching so the smoothness of that like i think is going to be the ideal scenario here and the only way we get to that is by doing lots of test nets making sure that we're covering all the edge cases and stuff like that and testing it as much as possible so yeah i'm gonna obviously keep an eye on this stuff and keep you guys updated with it so i think this uh kind of token launch uh rocked the the uh i guess like d5 twitter over the last 24 hours so it's a new token uh well not technically

a new token but i mean it is a new token but i'll explain how it works it's called woofie from uh yearn so essentially what uh woofy is it's a token that has a bi-directional peg to to wi-fi or wi-fi uh which means you you can basically trade wi-fi um with the for wolfie one-to-one or trade like woofie for wi-fi one to one the reason this was created was kind of like a social experiment i think or like an a b test as band teg calls it and essentially what it is is the wolfie token has uh one million uh more supply uh sorry one million times more supply than wi-fi so if wi-fi is is 80 000 um dollars which it is right now the wolfie token is like 0.008 i think it was or

0.08 uh so basically 8 cents yeah and the reason why this was done was to was to basically one piggyback off the recent dog coin uh dog themed coin mania that we've been seeing in the markets play out and two run an experiment and see that if we create a token that is you know running on some height but also has a low unit cost where it costs 8 cents instead of 80 000 would people buy this and they did this is this is a big reason why wi-fi went up so much over the last 24-48 hours is because people are buying this token not knowing that this token is essentially buying the wi-fi token it's the same thing because you can trade this for wi-fi through the through the peg

um the the the the bi-directional pegs sorry um so from that respect it's like it's funny because um i call this on twitter uh chaotic good um so the woofie token is like a chaotic good where um this is just like uh i i believe it's a it's doing a good thing because you're essentially forcing these speculators and these people who just want to bet on like low unit price coins to actually buy a fundamentally sound coin like wi-fi that's actually got a product behind it instead of just something that's just created for the sake of it and it's chaotic because like it's it's really like tricking people at the end of the day into buying this stuff like i would bet there's a lot of people who have no idea that woofie is linked to wifi and they're just buying it because they

believe that you know it's a low unit cap sorry it's a low unit price um coin it's dog themed that you know it's going to go up in value and it's just i mean honestly it's it's amazing watch having watched this play out i think it's a crazy experiment i love it i love everything about it i love the fact that we can run these global kind of human behavioral experiments um um you know within behavioral economics at such a large scale with so many people and so fast as well i mean this only played out as i said over the last 24 or so hours um and has already given us enough data to go off and say okay this works right you can basically make a coin or a token that is basically that is pegged to a higher

unit price token and people will buy the lower one think uh thinking that that you know they're getting more for their buck and not even knowing that it's that it's um linked to this higher unit price one so from that perspective it's really crazy i mean i i this just blows my mind seriously i love this uh i wrote about it in the delegate newsletter as well today if you want to go check that out but i just thought i'd explain kind of like what this was and how it worked so you know don't go buying woofy thinking that it's going to go up in price on its own the only way it does that is if it you know there's like a massive mania and it can lose its it can lose its by its peg until someone kind of like arms it or whatever

um but that happens right well uh rather quickly um and you know people putting pressure on on the wolfie token makes wi-fi go up as well which is hilarious so yeah kudos to i guess yearn uh i think banteg in particular who came up with this very cool experiment uh i think you know there are some moral questions here like is this morally right to do i'm not here to answer those i'm not here to impart my morals on you i just think it's a cool and fun experiment to watch play out and a very interesting one at that so balancer v2 is now live this came out just after i recorded yesterday's refuel actually and this is really exciting so i've gone through the main features of balancer v2 before

but essentially the i think that one of the biggest new features is the reduction in in gas costs here so you can see here that v2 reduces gas costs by 40 from v1 but when they do when you basically have v2 with internal balances so basically internal um token swaps it does a 53 reduction so essentially half of what the current gas cost is here and i think 73 000 gas for a simple swap is the lowest on any amm i believe i don't think unisop is this low and i don't think any others are this low so that's super exciting and there's a bunch of different kind of um launch partners that that kind of launch with balancing here including rv gnosis uh element finance and a bunch of others here

and then they've also got this nice little overview of all the uh the features here so dynamic feed pricing gas efficiency as i mentioned um two different protocol fees for trading and flash loans and oracles so really exciting launch from balancer and they've got a new new ui i believe that i i mean i was shown an early preview of the new ui but i haven't gone to it on on here yet yeah it is it's live um this is this is really awesome i mean for me balances ui was the thing that was letting them down a lot uh because the ui was uh was very technical very not user friendly uh now they have a very user-friendly one and i don't think it's loading here because i haven't connected my wallet but yeah i mean i've played around with it and everything and it's very simple

so kudos to the balancer team for getting this out here so ethereum miner revenue is now higher than what's on bitcoin and this does not include mev profits so ethereum is at 73 7.3 million per day versus 67.3 million for bitcoin miners now obviously a lot of this is coming from the fees and a lot of this we don't want going to minors we want the fees to be burned but it's still funny to see just like how much you know money these miners are making and no wonder they didn't want eip1559 right no wonder they don't want the merge um and both of those things are going to happen regardless but i still think that this is just absolutely insane and you know what

i'm 100 sure that there's going to be a fork of ethereum a minor lead fork i've talked about this before but at this point i'm i'm 100 certain as there's that there's going to be a minor lead fork and you know it's going to be opportunistic no one's going to know what's going to happen with it there's definitely going to be people minding it because there's a lot of miners that are going to have to change obviously from the ethereum chain to something else and the fork is not going to be ethereum you know i don't expect really any projects to support that fork or anything like that so it's going to be dead but what i can see happening is maybe the miners raise the gas limit right maybe they don't really care about decentralization on this minor lead fork so you raise the gas limit you speed up

the block times and you essentially don't care about decentralization anymore and you know you could probably raise it up to a certain point until it starts getting you know until the chain starts getting um uh uh uh unstable but i think that can go for a little while here you don't care about state bloat or whatever so from that perspective it just becomes like a bsc then right so that may and then there'll be like a bridge between the two chains as well so what if this ends up happening where they fork it and then they actually encourage people to come over there and it just becomes like a bsc and and that toke and because like um it's so profitable to do that uh if it's in a bull market that token that fork token actually becomes worth

something because of it now i don't know if the miners are going to be able to basically coordinate this and band together to do this maybe they will or maybe it just takes one big mining pool to do this i just i i mean at this point i can't see it not happening it's just it's actually not in there it's actually stupid for them not to do this if i'm being honest considering how much money they could make from this and i'm just thinking from a pure rational actor perspective i'm not going to say whether this is right or wrong or whatever that doesn't matter right it just what matters is if they what they can and can't do and all they need to do is get one exchange on board and if they do a big fork exchanges are going to be forced to list it

because their users are going to be demanding it because their users are going to be like well i had my ether on this exchange and now i want my forked coins this is exactly what happened with bitcoin cash and bitcoin back in 2017. so um i do think that's gonna happen at this point and you know free eth for us i guess like at the end of the day like even if it's not worth much i'm just gonna dump that stuff for eighth and and that's it like i don't think it has any long-term future or anything like that it'll be exactly like ethereum classic where people you know may just buy it as a super speculative thing you know maybe the miners even say okay we're gonna you know redenominate eth and make it worth like cents on the dollar to play off that

unit price bias as well so i don't know what's gonna happen there but at this point i am pretty much 100 certain that we're going to see a fork regardless so going to be interesting to see how that pans out and on that note i put out this tweet today just saying insane when looking at crypto fees dot info my favorite site to track all the different fees being generated on across different protocols ethereum over the last 24 hours did 117 million dollars worth of fees that is absolutely insane and the most insane thing is that all went to miners and none of it was burned because 1559 is not live yet i am so upset about that because that's a lot of dumpage right at the end of the day miners are just going to sell like they might stack some

but they are going to sell because they have costs to cover um so it's just i mean that's insane and if that was burned i think like it would be 70 or 80 million um dollars worth if we're um assuming a 70 fee burn so it'd be 80 maybe a little bit more than 80 million dollars worth of eath burned that's a ton of eth right so yeah i mean i complain about this a lot i'm going to leave it at that i don't want to complain too much about it but what i did want to go into just for a sec is how hilarious it is that unisop v2 which doesn't include v3s um fees is above bitcoin um and the other d5 protocols are actually catching up to it as well like are their sushi swap and compound um bitcoins losing its dominance on

everything right it's lost its dominance on fees for a while and i should state that the fees listed for these apps are actually the protocol fees so for uni swap it is that 0.3 fee on every trade for rve it's uh fl fees on flash loans and and uh loan originations and stuff like that sushi swap it's it's the same thing as uni swap um and and compound similar to rver and stuff like that uh it's not the gas fee so some people might get confused and think that that's the gas fees that unisop is taking up 7 million that's not correct it's only gas phase for ethereum um but in saying that uni swap v2 and v3 are currently um uh taking up i think like 40 million dollars worth of of the fees like for like almost 40 of the network

um or like around 35 of the network so that's that's even crazier but um and then you've got bitcoin here which is obviously bitcoin fees paid but at the end of the day the only reason to move your bitcoin on btc is to go to your cold storage or to arbitrage between exchanges there's not really much reason for this that's why we're seeing ethereum explode it's because there's so much more to do on ethereum and a lot of people like to swap and dex is extremely popular so that's what we're seeing there um but uh yeah and then the other protocols obviously are very popular two but yeah i just can't wait for one five five nine it's just over two months from now hopefully you know i mean see i actually should say that july 14th is a target date it is not 100 set in stone it is definitely

what the core devs want it want to happen um on july 14th but there could be something unforeseen that leads to some sort of delay um because it is just the target date but we'll see and i don't think it's going to be delayed by too much it has to i mean ethereum has to fork anyway because of the ice age but we'll see how it plays out there but yeah let's just say it's about two months left until one five five nine goes live and we can stop paying all these fees to miners they are making so much money so argent um put out this screenshot of a blog post that they did a while back that i covered which is uh talking about their layer 2 wallet here so they basically just reshared it here and i did want to reiterate what arjun has coming with

their l2 wallet so they're going to have direct onboarding to l2 through their wallet so you don't have to go through l1 because typically that's the highest cost of getting onto l2 is going through l1 having to pay those gas fees and then you know having to do that for every asset you want to get into onto l2 yeah there's going to be trading of key tokens available on uh zk sync as uh with uh with five pairs to start i think and growing over time you're going to be able to earn yield on ethan stablecoins uh we're using starkware's default polling tech which is with connects uh not connect sorry i'm uh i've lost the name right now um seller network uh so you'll be able to do that i believe

um you can buy crypto with fiat directly to get to l2 and there's a bunch of other integrations here this is exactly what i've spoken about and what's needed for l2 adoption here and i'm super excited to see argent leading the charge they are one of the best if not the best mobile wallets out there right now i'm i am partial to rainbow wallet as well um but argent you know leading the charge on l2 is really really cool to see here so yeah definitely looking forward to seeing that go live soon so man i i've been getting some questions about dfinity lately and i'm not gonna say that i know a lot about dfinity the underlying tech or anything like that but what i do know is that the marketing and the hype and

the narratives around dfinity are gross like i'll just be straight up i actu i just it's so bad and this tweet from dominic williams the founder of dfinity encapsulates that perfectly so he put out this tweet with the tweet block heights bitcoin at you know this amount of blocks ethereum at this amount of blocks and internet computer aka dfinity at this amount of blocks this is and then he says this is only 36 hours in and it's accelerating scale to infinity this is pure marketing this doesn't make any sense to compare this is comparing apples to oranges in the very literal sense because bitcoin has 10 minute block times right ethereum has 13 second block times i'm assuming their internet computer has like one

second or sub second block times so of course they're gonna have more blocks than ethereum or bitcoin and you know the the reason why uh uh bitcoin's block times are slow is because um it's it's uh bitcoin optimizes for security right and all that sort of stuff it doesn't necessarily need super long block times for what it's trying to do which is just literally trying to be like a digital gold asset or whatever ethereum obviously needs faster block time so that smart contracts work and things like that but if if you're invite because it uses proof of work because it's extremely decentralized if you speed up the block times it can lead to instability of the chain uh because of uncle blocks and stuff like that um and yeah i'm assuming i mean i i think uh from what i know dfinity's distributed proof of stake so

again it's just like super nodes at the end of the day it's not decentralized it is just uh you know i mean they claim to have all this fancy tech as i said i'm not an expert on it but from what i've seen and all the marketing and everything and this sort of stuff coming from the founder is just gross i mean if i saw vitalik tweet out something like this i would call it out too but he wouldn't because he's not trying to do this he's not trying to do this fake marketing or whatever um so yeah and that's why i quote twitter by saying there are bad takes and then there's this because this is one of the most terrible takes and i used to see eos do the same thing where they said we have more blocks than if bitcoin and ethereum

okay who cares that you have more blocks like it's just the most insane comparison uh when when comparing these different networks i mean ethereum could have you know hundreds of millions of blocks too it would just drop the block time down and give up on decentralization and all that sort of stuff so yeah just thought i'd point out why that was insane to me to read today so the index co-op has launched their next featured leverage index product here called the btc 2x fly which is essentially the eth2x fly but just for bitcoin so you can get two times leveraged exposure to bitcoin by simply holding this token and i really love those promo videos i'm not going to play the video but you can go to the link in the youtube description and check out the video there but i really really love these promo

videos they got me really hyped on it not that i would ever buy this because it's btc um uh but like i i think that anyone wants who wants two times leverage exposure to btc which is i i assume a lot of people this is the product for you and this as i said works in the exact same way that the eth product works it's run by default pulse or should i say managed by d5 pulse it targets two times leverage here it uses compound to do this and obviously use a set protocol under the hood as well so yeah if you're familiar with the eth2 x fly then you're familiar with btc twex fly just swap out the assets here and this isn't the uh i guess um only one that's coming uh there's gonna be i think there's gonna be a dpi 2x fly as well and then other

assets i mean it makes sense to do them for all these assets that are on compound no dpi is not on compound yet but you know that's not i mean i don't even know if it needs to be on compound necessarily um maybe it does to kind of maybe i'm just going to confuse everyone here going just thinking out loud here but we'll see how it plays out maybe just for safety reasons it does but at the end of the day this is really cool to see and uh excited to see this i mean index cobb is one of my favorite d5 projects you all know that excited to see them bringing out more products here so uh ash from two prime uh two prime i think that's what they're called two prime digital assets here uh put out this tweet today comparing wallets with more than ten thousand

eight and while it's with more than ten thousand bitcoin are going in opposite directions um now i i saw this and i was just like okay well that's cool but there's a price difference here right um ten thousand eight and ten thousand bitcoin uh basically i mean you basically have to double uh that um you have to basically look at in dollar in dollar terms because um ten thousand eight is not equal to ten thousand bitcoin right but still i think it's very interesting to see how fast ten thousand eight uh uh sorry well it's holding ten thousand eight is going up and while totaling ten thousand btc is going down now as someone comments it here it might be better to say 100k versus 10k btc um i don't think you would need that much because ether is

much closer to btc's price now um but i would expect that to be going up too because there's a lot of eighth accumulation going on right now but yeah just an interesting stat here maybe i'll cover this more in depth in the next daily grade data pump which is due out next month of course um but yeah just an interesting stat that i thought was was cool to kind of look over here so christie's had their crypto punk auction which ended up going for 17 million dollars here almost 17 million dollars uh essentially this was lava labs's the creator of crypto punx's own stash it was nine rare crypto punks including one alien punk i think the reason why it went for so much was definitely due in large part to the alien punk which alone is worth at least 7.5 million dollars

which is crazy right there's a bunch of other rarer ones in here like a hoodie punk and um some some different hats on punks and sunglasses and things like that so uh yeah cool to see this but i think um i saw on twitter someone was complaining that like it was just a very boring auction you know christie's could have done so much more here and also other people saying that why are we even doing this on something like christie's which is like a traditional world thing we should be doing this on ethereum in d5 in like a much bigger way and i agree with that we should be but i just don't think there's anyone leading the charge and i think having the traditional world kind of i guess come into define ethereum is pretty exciting because it means that it's just validating what we're doing it

lends legitimacy to what we're doing so that was cool to see but yeah i think uh it's funny if you actually look at the nft market that's it's cooled down a lot but crypto punks have retained their value and actually gone up so the floor on a crypto punk last time i checked was like 76 000 for the cheapest one and i think this is because crypto punks really do have an allure and a culture to them that a lot of other nfts don't so this is why playing the nft market is so hard is because you don't know what's going to hold its value i mean really crypto punks and who knows if me bits is going to hold its value or anything like that i don't even know if hash marks hash masks has held its value in what they're going for these days um

maybe they will when the nft market heats up again but yeah just something to think about for sure so bankless published their latest podcast with suzu and kyle davies from three rs capital here this was basically uh sue and kyle talking about why they're extremely bullish eith why they are really bullish on the flippening and why they are overweight eth right now so i listened to this today um and the whole time i was just like smiling because they are just on board totally with the narrative with the um ethereum kind of like i guess um bull cakes with the eve bull case with ultrasound money all that good stuff and it's just crazy to hear them say

this because i don't know some of you may remember the end of last year they were very bearish on eth they were mega bullish on btc which was the right call at the time mind you but they were very bearish underneath and i remember um going through twitter threads and seeing them you know give their reasoning and stuff like that and thinking you know this is wrong like i i 1559 is going to happen the merge is going to happen people are going to realize i don't think the meme of ultrasound money was back was around back then but people are going to realize these things they're going to realize how scarce ethan is becoming and they're going to change their tune and i respect sue and kyle a lot because they do change their tune when the market changes they don't go against it

they're very good investors i mean they're billionaire investors for a reason um so they did change their tune and they did uh kind of like go along this eighth trade and now they believe in in the flipping uh and they actually think it's going to happen i mean they both said they believe ether is going to 25k uh which is you know just hearing this from people that aren't you know known as quote unquote eth maxis or or hardcore ethereums or people that have been saying this for a while just completely validates everything that we've been saying over the years as early ethereans i mean i went over the other day how a lot of a lot of us early believers were calling this in late 2018 early 2019 so to see it validated and legitimacy by these people who i consider to be not ethmax's is is huge so obviously i

highly recommend going and giving this a listen and or a watch whatever you prefer here it is so bullish and the my main takeaway from this outside of their bullishness on eth is that um sue was talking about uh how someone said to him the most interesting thing is when he flips bitcoin and he's not when he flips bitcoin but it's when something else flips btc and so that's something else being doge or bnb or one of the the top five assets right because once bitcoin goes to the number two spot what's stopping it from going to number three or number four or number five but nothing really nothing bitcoin's main value prop i believe up until this point or at least a big part of its value proposition has been that story of value narrative

has been that bitcoin um maximalist uh narrative not just around uh the blockchain but the asset itself and people saying well you know bitcoin's always going to be worth the most because that's the money people prefer to buy and that's been kind of challenged and being challenged right now and i believe that if eth permanently flips bitcoin like there can be a temporary flip and then it drops back down but if eighth or when eth i do believe it's going to happen when eth permanent permanently flips bitcoin we're going to see a lot of weird things happen because if there's nothing stopping bitcoin from going down after that really at the end of the day like what is the value of it i mean there's the hardcore believers there are a lot of people who believe in it but is there enough of those people to

keep it at number two i don't believe so what are the catalysts for bitcoin bitcoin doesn't evolve it doesn't change it's static the the biggest catalyst for bitcoin this year is an etf and it's going to get that shortly after the i mean i said the same thing when bitcoin was being bought out by um by public companies and put on their balance sheets and these treasuries that doesn't matter it's not unique to bitcoin ether is going there as well i mean there's institutional bid on eth right now you can see it in the markets so when you look at what bitcoin has going for which is essentially nothing right and i'm talking about unique what's unique to bitcoin nothing but what ethereum has going for it that's unique to ethereum is everything we have eip1559 we have the merge we have sharding after that

and while all of those three things are happening we have defy continuing to explode we have nfts and culture continuing to explode on ethereum and we have layer twos continuing to roll out as well and everything else like daos and human coordinates i mean everything it's all happening on ethereum so at the end of the day ethereum the way i look at it ethereum has much more of a value prop and a much more of a total addressable market than bitcoin has and it's going to flip it and it's going to permanently flip it eventually and it's going to stay there and then after that i truly do believe that one day bitcoin will be out of the top 10. i don't see how it stays in the top 10 when you have super hyper productive d5 assets which are going to take that spot eventually

because the market is inefficient in the short to medium term but in the long term it it definitely uh catches up eventually right and especially because institutions are going to buy d5 tokens because they can evaluate them very easily so there's going to be that and then think about all the meme coins like dogecoin and stuff like that that have these really strong memes they're going to be filling up the top 10 as well or or something like that so yeah the the flipping happening is the most bearish thing for bitcoin in its existence i mean i would i'd actually say that that's more bearish than like some large nation state or government banning bitcoin um i think and and honestly like i believe this for quite a while and i'm never been shy about it i've always been vocal about it

but it hasn't been popular to be vocal about it until recently now it's the popular narrative and that's what it is that's how it works but anyway i'm going to leave it at that for now thank you again everyone for listening and watching sorry about the video quality we'll hopefully have it fixed tomorrow but if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet be sure to do so give this video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the daily great discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone