The Merge updates, Immutable raises $200mil and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #330 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's 8th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so we have a new emerge update today so parathos here put out a tweet saying after four days of proof of work merged devnet five which i mentioned the other day hit ttd today the chain continued finalizing post ttd as expected this means uh the merge was successful we ran a few zombie miners miners ran older versions that don't know about ttd and just continue mining post ttd no issues were found and then he continues by saying we should be releasing information about the kill and test net in the next few days so this is a big deal because um as i mentioned before this kind of like

devnet was uh it was to happen before the next kind of like test net was to be spun up which is killing which is hopefully going to be the last test net uh and if all goes well with the with the kill and test net then we will have a kind of like main net window i would say which is super exciting right i mean the hilarious thing is is that so many people talked about the merge for for you know the last few months and then the market went quiet and we had way less people in the ecosystem and then people went quiet about it um but you know obviously i've been talking about it every other day i've been talking about the effects it's going to have everything that's coming down the pipeline with regards to it and keeping you guys updated because there's still i

mean as i've said i've said this plenty of times not going to repeat myself again go into it too much again but there is still all this work happening in the background whether you're paying attention or not so very very cool to see that there were no issues found on the devnet five and as i said if there are no issues found on the killen test net then we're going to have a main net window which um you know as i've mentioned plenty of times june uh is kind of like the target could happen in july but it happens around then that's just absolutely massive right that's a huge kind of like vote of confidence for ethereum's ability to ship and ship major upgrades without with kind of like no issues attached to them uh you know not to mention all the downstream effects from that so very very excited

for all of that uh and yeah keep an eye out or keep an ear out for the kill and test net details which i will be covering once they're released in the next few days all right so some news out of bloomberg today uh that says president joe biden is set to sign an executive order this week that will outline the us government's strategy for cryptocurrencies now for those who don't know this has been in the works for quite a while this is not an overnight thing this is not a thing that's in kind of like um in response to the stuff happening in in russia and ukraine and the sanctions and all that sort of stuff this i remember hearing about this a while ago but it seems uh the biden administration is ready to sign and this exec at least joe is ready to sign this exec executive

order uh and i think this can be a good thing people expect this to be a bad thing they think crypt is going to get so heavily regulated and it's going to be really really shitty and you know everyone's going to kind of like lose their lose their money because crypto's going to dump i don't think that's the case guys i think what's going to happen is that this should give us more regulatory clarity which will actually be better for the bigger players in the ecosystem and give them more clarity and make it just clearer about what can and can can't be done especially within the us where obviously a lot of especially d5 teams based in the us are really scared of regulators so scared in fact that they won't even airdrop tokens to u.s citizens anymore which is just crazy right so if this

executive order can uh can can basically reverse that trend and make it so that u.s people are treated the same as kind of like anyone else or as them as most people obviously there are still a lot of countries excluded from things due to sanctions anyway uh uh you know obviously like north korea korea and russia and all that sort of stuff but the us is normally lumped in with those kind of with those types of countries and it's just crazy whenever i see the list of of banned countries from things and it lists the united states and north korea i'm just like what the hell and like obviously there's a bunch of middle eastern countries in there as well um and i just think you know this is just very very weird um not not obviously not trying to get political here but obvio obviously the us is

really as far as i know the only uh first world developed nation especially on the kind of like developed superpower that that suffers from these sorts of things especially for their own citizens like there are teams in the us doing tokens and aren't air dropping the token to their u.s users or investors or anything like that which is which is obviously very very crazy so i'm looking forward to to seeing what this is as i said i think it's going to be a positive i don't think it's going to be a negative we have a lot of people in our kind of like uh court here especially in the arena of the political arena because if you think about it think about all the us-based funds the billion-dollar funds that have massive skin in the game to make sure that this industry doesn't become over-regulated

there's not you know there's not bad regulations put in place but not just that there are you know think tanks like coin center that do a lot of great work and they have the funding to do that as well they've they've been given a lot of money recently which is cool to see there's a bunch of others out there i mean there's no kind of like shortfall of money here and people in crypto are getting more involved with politics as well so as i said i think this is going to be a positive i don't foresee this being a negative but we're gonna have to see how it shakes out maybe it happens uh this week as i said maybe it doesn't happen till next week obviously um you know uh biden has a lot more on his mind than this sort of stuff but we'll see if it

happens this week all the better all right so immutable has announced an absolutely massive raise of 200 million dollars in syria in a serious c funding round uh which values immutable at a 2.5 billion dollar evaluation here now this is big for multiple reasons obviously but i want to just disclose here that i am an investor in immutable i didn't invest in this round but i invested in their series a round which was a little while ago now um but yeah just a disclaimer there so obviously obviously i have some skin in the game but essentially uh why this i think this is a big deal firstly it's another layer two scalability project for ethereum getting massive funding you know always a good thing uh secondly it's a uh it's got a bunch of investors that haven't

actually invested in crypto before such as tencent as far as i know tencent hasn't invested in crypto before especially not in the kind of like nft gaming area which is huge because tencent is an absolutely massive company they have they're massive in the video game industry and they're doing a lot of um a lot of investments there but they're kind of like making their way into crypto now uh and there's a bunch of kind of like other investors here these are the typical investors you'll see in these later rounds like the series b series c series d sort of thing because they have you know a lot a lot of money um and they're not they don't they're not they're not the funds that kind of like take the early risk or at least majority of their funds don't take the early risk of the seed and the

series a's and stuff like that um but then you can see there's some other investors here like alameda research which was disappointing to see as you guys know alameda is uh is ftx's thing uh and they're big on the salon ecosystem so it's always bizarre to me that they one invest in layer twos on ethereum when they're all in on on solana and um and two the the fact that these kind of like uh teams kind of give them the allocation and you know it could happen for any reason out there i don't think it's like bearish for immutable that they got money from alameda just like i don't think it's buried for stockwear but uh yeah just kind of like the way it is at these kind of like levels here but anyway very very cool to see this obviously immutable is you know kicking

tons of goals they're scaling nfts they're doing a lot of great stuff there um i know people have been kind of like complaining about the token price i can't comment on that as i have obviously a direct conflict of interest there um but yeah i mean you know just checking out the pricing that it's kind of like been down only for a while is unfortunate um but i think that's just the sign of both the you know the kind of like the market in general and uh and the fact that it's a risk your investment right end of the day but uh as i said i'm not going to go into detail on that due to my conflict conflicts of interest there and the last thing i wanted to kind of like discuss about uh this not particularly the rays but just like immutable in general

is that when i look at kind of teams and projects in crypto i look at the ones that have been like and kind of like rank them and and look at them and kind of like uh try to figure out which ones are you know long term kind of like sustainable going to be around long term going to be around no matter if it's bear or bull market and you know mutable is one of those companies one of those projects because if you track immutables history back they've been around for quite a while now um you know four four ish years i think probably or maybe more than that um and they've been building all that time and they haven't given up on their projects they're still building god's unchained which has been what you know they're basically their earliest project they've been building uh immutable for mutable x

for quite a while now they're obviously raising large funding rounds to keep doing that they're hiring like crazy they're on boarding a lot of the traditional gaming space into the nft ecosystem and they're doing this through as i said bull or bear and that's what i look at and you know at the other at the kind of like other side of things though there is that there are projects out there who kind of seem to like feign as if they're building still building or they're kind of like faking it and this is true for a lot of the 2017 era projects that their projects are dead they're zombie projects they're completely failed they found no product market fit it's better just to kind of like kill them off and stop wasting your time but obviously given that they have tokens there's a bit of conflicting uh things there maybe

they feel an obligation to token holders to drive value back to the token or maybe they don't they don't want to kind of like um have regulators after them if they basically say oh well it failed and uh you know our project's over and then and then kind of like the token goes to zero and then everyone just kind of like blames them and you know sends lawsuits their way and things like that there are obviously multitude of reasons here but don't mistake projects building for a while as being a good project like my point is that you know there are projects that have been building for a while that are seeing lots of success but there are also a lot of projects that have been building since 2017 or even 2016 or earlier that are complete and you know objective failures and they really should just like you know stop

beating the dead horse and stop but a lot of them don't for the variety of reasons some of them i just outlined there but anyway absolutely massive raise for immutable congrats to them on this curious to see what they do with this money and who else they're on board into the crypto ecosystem um and speaking of i guess like funding rounds for layer two's polynomial had an interesting tweet uh today where they said just two stockx application specific volitions have now raised close to one billion dollars makes you question narratives from the alt l1 mania a few months ago smart contract chains devour application specific chains vcs will only find alt l1s and l1s are most valuable uh fpt and then polynomial goes on to say another tweet in reality app specific roll-ups evolutions are far and

away the most efficient solutions not all applications uh scenarios and users require synchronicity like defy vcs will throw money at the kitchen sink applications accrue most value exception monetary premium i've been banging on about this stuff for a while for you know your regular refuel listeners out there you'll know exactly uh uh exactly what i mean but i want to address each of these points uh just like specifically here because i think it's interesting so there is a lot of i guess or was a lot of belief that smart contract chains would make app specific chains completely obsolete it wouldn't make any sense and then people would argue and say well no that's not going to happen you know we have cosmos we have polkadot they're doing app specific chains it's going to be good

but my thesis was that app specific chains need to be done at layer 2. i don't think that it makes sense for an app to have to worry about its own sovereignty and by that i mean spinning up its own validator set because it is wildly inefficient it is hard and it takes focus away from actually just building the app at the end of the day so that's why i've always been bearish on the cosmos and polkadot models and really bullish on the ethereum plus l2 model even if those l2s aren't generalized they're just as specific obviously diy dx and immutable are kind of like proving that out and there are going to be other projects out there as well that prove that i mean loop ring diversified they're all proving it out that the model works and then pioneer says vcs will only fund alt l1 there's another

narrative out there of course they're not only going to fund ltel ones guys they have billions of dollars they've got to throw it at the kitchen sink as paulina said but also i think a lot of these vcs they i mean the way they operate they always have to spread out their bets right they can't just like go all in on one investment and that's it because that's just not how a vc firm operates and that's just not how vc works generally um so they're spreading their bets out but i there are some vcs out there that get it right they don't just kind of like do the spray and pray approach they actually get that the modular approach to scalability especially with within ethereum and its layer 2 ecosystem is obviously very very healthy and then probably in our third point that l1 will be the most value valuable

or are the most valuable i've talked about this plenty of times on the review i think that there are very very few l1 tokens that are going to be valuable long term eth obviously um btc i mean you could argue i know i personally don't think btc is going to be super valuable long term especially once it flips it but you could argue that it um it's obviously gonna be more valuable than most of the other kind of like layer one chains out there but i i yeah i just don't think long term a lot of these l1 tokens are going to hold their value especially not against eth because at the end of the day eth has natural demand eth has natural use cases eth is a amazing assets it uh you know and aneeth is kind of like a shelling point for the

ecosystem um especially on the smart contract side so so yeah i mean the thing is though a lot of these i guess vc's in funds they're able to get in on these l1 tokens really early on and you can obviously make a lot of money um you know a lot of the early investors on avalanche and terra and solana made a lot but at the same time those were available at public markets too and you could have you could have made a lot there too but it's it's all well and good to make a lot but like a lot of what a lot of people end up doing is that they'll make the money but then they'll just keep holding they won't actually take profits and then over time these things just kind of like bleed out especially during bear markets i mean you go look at some of these charts i

believe solana's down 70 from its all-time high avax is down 50 percent um terra terra is faring a bit better but i think that's just because they raised money recently so i'm not sure what's gonna happen there and as i've said before to you guys i don't view terror as similar to ethereum really they're doing like one thing um or at least one ecosystem of things we just sent it around there they're stablecoin obviously but you go and look at the others like phantom for example that's just completely destroyed especially against eath um and all these other ones like kind of like near adam they're all just kind of like bleeding out because the the market doesn't can't sustain that many and and people aren't interested in holding those sorts of things especially because they know that there's not natural demand for them

they're just narrative trades so so yeah i totally agree with pollinator here that the narrative of l ones being the most valuable is not true for like most l ones out there um and as polynomial says except for the ones with the monetary premium which is exactly what ethan and btc have at the current time i am not convinced there'll be any other smart contract platforms that will be able to accrue monetary premium for their native asset i think that there's only going to be one or two and you know there currently only is two maybe there is only one in the future but you know two two i think will sustain for a while but i don't view any of these other ones being able to kind of like get up to that uh that level basically all right so i guess i think the rest of

the refill is going to be about layer twos guys so a bunch of exciting layer two news today uh first out of argent uh so now their layer two uh kind of like account and features is available to everyone no longer in beta so as they say here you've got low gas fees super fast speeds trades they can earn bulletproof security and 100 times less carbon emissions which i i like i like the fact that the um kind of like teams working with layer twos are actually talking about this because of the fact that you know a lot of people are concerned about the environmental impact of of crypto which is fair enough so let's kind of like hop on about that and be like look uh these layer two is obviously um much more efficient because uh they are not running proof of work and then

obviously post merge ethereum is gonna be in that arena as well but but anyway if you uh have argent and if you kind of like been waiting to have arjun i guess like to um to play around with arjun now's the time to do so because you can do it using a layer 2 account no need to use layer 1 ethereum no need to use the high fees uh i mean even at 20 way like the fees are relatively cheap compared to what they've been but that's still too high i mean a swap is what still like ten dollars i think uh you know if i'm doing my math correctly in my head that's still way too much right so get on the l2s get on the l2s now guys because it's cheap to bridge in uh it's never been a a more perfect time i think

uh but yeah uh good to see arjun come out of beta here with their l2 integration all right so arbitram announced today they have released research.arbitrary.io which is a forum for arbitrary research development and ideas for improvements now obviously it's quite bare right now because it was just launched but this is kind of similar to the eth research forum for those of you who have seen that basically this is the same kind of like website templates and this is all about arbitrarium uh you know as an ecosystem and there are a couple of open topics that arbitrarily wants to tackle such as compression in nitro which has obviously got to do with coming uh doing gas fees um and cool data compression and getting those gas fees down in their nitro upgrade l2 compute gas of pricing and support for bls signatures in nitro so

you can go here and actually look at these threads like there's an l2 compute gas pricing here there's a discussion here i mean ed felton has started it which is one of the founders of off chain labs who builds arbitrim and then you have like a bunch of others here so obviously as i said pretty bare right now but i expect this to kind of like heat up over time i'm very excited to see an open research forum for a layer two that's definitely uh you know a welcome thing to see in the ecosystem and i think that this is just the first step towards decentralizing these things because changes to the protocol should be done out in the open um it shouldn't just be up to the off chain labs core team for these l2s going for and just l2's in general shouldn't be up to the core team

and this is how you get to that point this is how you get to the point where you decentralize over time not just with a token but creating a culture of uh open building open development and and publicly at that so very cool to see this i'll link it in the description for you to check out all right so lee.file or leafy protocol here today have announced that they built a cross-chained app that allows you to donate any token from any evm chains to the ukraine cores so you no longer have to worry about the eighth gas fees you can donate any amount and every dollar counts so if you want to do this you can go to transfer to dot xyz ukraine and kind of like donate there you know look the reason why i kind of like bring this up is because i wanted

to kind of talk about how i really like how the crypto community has come together really quickly to to do this for for not you know for ukraine obviously but just in general i think people underestimate not understanding people forget why this industry was kind of like founded or what the the principles that this industry was kind of like founded on with bitcoin then with ethereum and then with kind of like um you know other things out there one of the major principles is helping those who have been either kind of i guess like uh oppressed or uh suffering from from you know war or kicked off the traditional financial system or you know sanctioned or kind of like banned from using the existing kind of like um monetary estrogen instruments all that

sort of stuff those are kind of like the things that this industry is built on right um and on top of that getting money to where it needs to be really quickly is another core principle that isn't talked about enough and you know i know it's because we're all used to it by now but the fact that we can send value instantaneously around the world um with relatively kind of like cheap fees especially at layer twos is um is amazing i think it's it's truly amazing i think it's the most underrated aspect of this industry and i think that uh you know we it just kind of like shines when we kind of see like stuff like this where ukraine can accept donations and get instant money without any government in the middle without any like else without any other government obviously the ukraine government is is is a

recipient here but without any kind of like other government in the middle and without them having to kind of like spin up any complicated infrastructure or get permission or anything like that uh which i think is obviously a a vastly underestimated benefit of of ethereum and just you know blockchain and crypto in in general there so if you would like to donate this is just another option for you to do so so i'll link this in the youtube description for you to check out all right so starkware announced today or yesterday that they have uh kind of formed a strategic partnership with alchemy which reflects the shared commitment of their teams to build stock net and provide developers with the full suite of alchemist proprietary platform infrastructure products and services now i've talked about alchemy recently uh when i was talking about the inferior drama from the other day uh they provide

infrastructure for ethereum for i think other chains out there and also for l2 so this is just kind of like formalizing a strategic partnership between starkware and alchemy which is which is really really cool um at the same time you know these centralized services are all well and good it's all it's all totally cool and everything but like i i want to see more of these decentralized infrastructure providers spin up i know about pocket network and i think maybe there's one or two others that i'm just not i'm not remembering the name of right now but really at the end of the day this is like a massive thing as i mentioned last time when i spoke about this if all we have is like centralized infrastructure providers on top of these decentralized chains it kind of defeats the purpose so we definitely need to do more work more

work there and i'm hoping starkware maybe can um can help alchemy with this there's no reason alchemy can't decentralize out or create like a decentralized version of their of their product offering maybe maybe they don't want to because they make a lot of money from from their centralized offering but i don't know i feel like there is something there that can be done and maybe starkware can help them with that but cool to see this i guess formalized strategic partnership from them um on to the next update so can next have rebranded their ex pollinate service to connext bridge to consolidate their brand identity and to make it simpler for end users to use the network i'm glad this was done because whenever i was talking about connects with people i would say oh yeah you have to you use x pollinate and they're like what's x

pollinate you're just talking about telling me about connects and i'm like okay well yeah it's connects but like it's just a different name you know it branding is extremely important guys like i think this isn't this is kind of something that people don't realize is especially if you're deep into crypto branding is is everything and if you kind of like confuse users with your brand they get upset they get frustrated they get very very um lost very very quickly um so i'm very very glad to see this and i just wanted to kind of like give a heads up to you guys because if you see connex bridge from now on that is basically what x pollinate has been just with the new name and the name is just simple right connects the brand and bridge it just describes what it is straight away no

need for users to get confused which is obviously what we want to see here um and they have a little thread here just kind of going through the context around this but obviously a very very good decision from connex tr all right finally in the l2 news diversify have launched a bridge to arbitrarium uh so you can move your assets between arbitrary and diversify without ever touching layer one which means no delays and no hefty gas fees this is really cool because for those of you who don't know diversify is a volidium built using starquest technology and now they have a bridge between them and arbitram which is obviously a totally different network of being an optimistic rob so not only a different network but a totally different architecture as well which is absolutely awesome to see so

as i said guys these bridges they're going to keep coming there's going to be bridges between app-specific l2s and other ecosystems and generalized bridges and blah blah all this sort of stuff you won't have to worry about moving between these things for really any uh very much longer and this was actually a drawback people kind of like stated about l2s they're like oh there's going to be so many l2s and they're all going to be fragmented and liquidity is going to be fragmented interoperability is going to be hard blah blah and i always used to say that i'm like no there's going to be bridges there's going to be plenty of these bridges yes there's going to be extra risk i'm using these bridges but over time that risk will get lit get um get less but we weren't even talking about risk we're just talking about the

other factors and they were like oh you know that's going to be too complex for people people aren't going to use those bridges it's like well they are and they're using them a lot people you know there's billions of dollars in these bridges for better or worse so i think that the more of these that come online especially um you know tapping into lead.finance which i just spoke about which is actually a bridge aggregator it's just going to be seamless and then wallets are going to integrate with it they're just going to have one button you click everything's going to happen in the background it's going to be totally seamless and i think people who don't realize that it's going to be seamless in the future are just completely missing the forest for the trees so i think kind of like when you can kind of

consider all of that and you're taking it all into account these problems are just kind of like fading away they aren't even problems they never were problems but i'm glad to see that narrative shift narratives change based on the you know you know the current information and the developments and and products and services that kind of like get released all right finally here we have uh something i just wanted to give a quick shout out to so there is going to be a bankless ethereum down under panel happening on march 21st at 3 pm pst 5 pm est and 9 a.m australian eastern standard time so this is going to be a kind of like ethereum panel with kane from synthetics robbie ferguson from immutable pat mcnabb from mycelium and tracer dao and sid powell from maple finance all-star

lineup right guys and these are all australian-based teams that's why i'm promoting this obviously you guys know i'm australian and i'm actually going to be attending uh as i said the um the kind of like events in real life so i'm actually going to be in sydney on on the 22nd of uh of march here australian time uh and i'm going to be getting up at 9am for those of you who have listened to the refuel long enough you know that my usual wake up time is like 11 a.m i never really get up at night because i'm i stay up late because i go i'm actually recording i record the reef you at like 11 p.m my time and then i by the time i put it out and everything go to bed it's like 2 a.m so um yeah yeah like getting up at 9am or even

before 9am is going to be a struggle but i'll do it for ethereum guys but anyway enough about my sleeping patterns um what i wanted to say as well is that uh i know uh you know i spoke about kind of like the blockchain week yesterday and how those real life events and virtual events and everything like that i and as i mentioned like i think it was last week about the kind of like eighth down under event happening in december i'm super excited about all of this because we need more stuff happening in australia i know i promised the daily grain meetup in melbourne sometime that's still gonna happen eventually guys i just don't know when i am trying to find time i am so so busy right now you know it's funny um kobe is in is in melbourne right now and he's been trying

to kind of like meet up with me i'm like dude i'm so busy i'm sorry i'm just crazy like doing stuff around the house and everything like that and you'll probably hear my dog barking he's annoying the out of me lately i've got to try oh man it's just it's just a bit of a disaster with him lately but he's alright he's healthy and everything but um anyway enough about my life story here my point is is that i hope to see much more of these australian-based things happening this year i really want to obviously do the daily grade meet up and if you know of any other meetups or any other things happening in australia especially in melbourne obviously where i live please let me know i would love to love to attend love to kind of like even speak out love to meet people there uh and

everything i like that but anyway i think on that note i'm gonna finish it there for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone