The Merge updates, Optimism sybil hunters and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #371 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 24th of may 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so we had a few merge updates to actually get through over the past 24 hours so first off i want to start with what terence from the prayer labs team kind of shared here something called bopstone now what is bobstone it is a semi-major semi-major version release candidate uh as we move into upgrading the long-standing public public test nets for the merge there will be no breaking changes between the bobstone release candidate and the final v 1.2.0 release unless late unexpected issues are found in the testnet upgrades additionally this release came a few it contains a few important phase zero uh thus

affecting all phases fixes uh deprecations and clarifications please review these and ensure our software releases contain these updates prior to mainnet bell tricks now beltrix is going to be the main net kind of like fork on the consensus layer side that's the name of it and paris is the consensus layer side uh sorry the execution layer side and these two forks are going to happen uh you know kind of like at mainnet but in terms of like the test nets here this is what we want to see right this is the release candidate that we want to see kind of like uh going on to on to robsten obviously as the first public test now to go through the merge yeah so if you want to kind of get more details about this you know about kind of like what it changes and things like that you can kind of read

this here but i mean we're close guys we're really really close um at this point in time and also uh main net shadow fox six so i i mentioned yesterday that i wasn't sure if there's any more shadow forks before robston i think there there's gonna be one more and that's main net shadow fork six which is scheduled to happen around the 31st of may using the same configuration as roxton which is going to be that bobstern configuration there uh and then around june 8th obviously the robston public test that will go through the merge transition and the merge is coming we're getting so close guys like i think you know what i think is funny how like the markets are obviously super quiet right now like there's literally nothing happening i mean it's crab season we kind of like go up a little bit then we

go down a little bit and like everyone's kind of like what's going on like where we're gonna go it really feels like 2019 again this was the exact same feeling i had in 2019 where there were so many positive developments with ethereum happening but the price just did nothing it just sat there and you know the funny thing is i think that i mean there's a few differences between then and now but in terms of like the price action the major difference is the fact that eth isn't down like 94 or 90 from its all-time high like it was in 2019 right uh it's it's kind of like it is down obviously from 4 900 quite a bit but i mean if it went down from there 94 percent it would be at 300 bucks so you know let's let's count our lucky stars that we're not repeating

that or at least we haven't repeated that yet obviously i don't think we're going to go that low but you know anything can happen but anyway i don't want to talk about the price too much here but i just want to kind of like say how just the feelings are really really similar and the thing is in 2019 we didn't really have any major upgrades going live for ethereum i mean the beacon chain didn't launch until december 2020 um there was just a lot of heavy development going on during that time they're obviously test nets and things like that but you know it's looking like as i mentioned yesterday august is is a kind of high chance for main net merge to go through and that's obviously a major thing for us all to look forward to so i think that i mean i haven't really been

looking at the price at all kind of like lately i mean you know i always have kind of like the chart up but like i've kind of like minimized it a lot lately because i'm just like why do i even need to kind of look at this thing like there's no point at the end of the day i mean i don't even know why i look at it normally but considering i i don't really kind of like uh you know my my bullishness on ethereum isn't dictated by what the current 8th price is like i i don't look at like the day-to-day stuff my i obviously look at the five to 10-year time horizon uh but the thing is is that if you look at the day-to-day stuff in terms of like developments happening on ethereum itself outside of the price there's always something happening i mean i do a daily show on it

right i don't have to prove it to you guys that are kind of like religious watchers and listeners um but yeah i mean the merge is going to be here before we know it i can't wait for this just june 8th as i said yesterday i'm so ah i'm like a kid waiting for christmas like i'm just so excited but uh yeah that was kind of like that update there and then there was something here from tim biker around testing the merge this is basically more targeted at kind of like the application uh kind of layer testing or level testing and kind of like developers that run applications uh as far as owner i know that kind of like the the change that i guess um affects developers from the merge is basically the the changing block time so obviously blocks go from 13 seconds to 12 seconds

and any any kind of i guess um developers that have kind of like maybe hard-coded a block block kind of like timing into it or anything like that might be affected by this but you can read this thread from timbico to kind of like get an idea around that there's a bunch of great great things here um and if people are kind of like using the difficulty kind of like uh op codes in order to kind of like build their smart contracts and stuff like that i mean yeah you'd obviously want to know that but as i said this is for developers tim has a really great thread here going kind of like through all this and i guess for just for curiosity's sake for any of you tim has a tldr down here where he says testing the merge is the priority for all client and testing teams that said

client teams in the ef can't single-handedly replace quality assurance for ethereum projects so if you're building on ethereum and now is the time to pay attention and make sure you are ready so obviously there are kind of like the protocol level testing and application level testing the ef and core devs are pretty much all focused on the protocol level testing as they kind of like should be and app level testing should be done by each of the kind of like developers in their communities and things like that so just the kind of psa there um taken's theorem has a really great little visualization that they're calling watering the merge here so you can see this represents the deposits into the eth2 contract for spring 2021 here so this is really cool they've done a bunch of this account taken's theorems have done has done a bunch of different kind

of like visualizations over time you can see if you just scroll through them and basically like i mean most of the time they only tweet out different kind of visualizations of things that they've done i think it's just really cool to see these sorts of things and seeing them kind of like i guess shown in a different kind of like way here like just seeing kind of like kind of like deposits going to kind of uh the the beacon chain or the eighth two sorry d2 deposit contract which obviously goes to the beacon chain it's just really cool so that's just something i wanted to kind of like highlight for you guys here and i always think that i always i just love seeing these so technical theorem is actually a great follow if you're into kind of like visualizing these sorts of stuff as i said like you can

scroll through you can see all the visualizations that they do here um if you would like to to do so there all right so josh stark uh shared this new dashboard from stablecoins.w2a wtf built by dennis and mike here so what this dashboard shows is a bunch of different metrics so if you go to stablecoins.wtf uh kind of like you can see uh slash about i mean this is the what they've linked here you can kind of like see what it's all about what they're tracking and things like that but some of the screenshots that josh kind of like shared i want to i want to show you guys so you can see here stable coin market caps over time so this only shows the last kind of like month but you can see the dip here right and that's that's the dip that everyone's

been talking about it's like well you know stable coin supply isn't going up anymore that means that people are actually cashing out stable coins to fiat and kind of like exiting crypto and that is pretty much like i guess expected in a bear market right so i mean i wouldn't expect any anything kind of like uh more than that um and then you can see stable coin volumes below here which is interesting because that spike there one guess what that spike is well of course it's when terra collapsed right it's when the the ust drama happened because obviously people were just trading the ust stable coin for other stable coins and all that sorts of stuff and and you know that that volume spike there which is absolutely massive by the way we went from an average of about ah got what 50 to 75 billion uh kind of

like a daily volume to almost 200 billion dollars in deadly volume so obviously a huge spike there but yeah that was due to the kind of like terra stuff going on there and there's a few other metrics here like the dire price and dive volume and market cap and velocity again volume spike was due to the ust stuff but you can see here the price is pretty stable around a dollar market cap has come down because a lot of people mint die uh because they want to leverage their eat so they'll put their eat or i guess like other assets these days into maker and essentially what they'll do is they'll draw die to kind of like leverage uh eighth or leverage on another asset uh and that's kind of like its primary use case a lot of the time so obviously the die supply is going to go down when the

market's buried and people are closing positions by paying back die and essentially destroying dai rather than creating it in order to kind of i guess uh uh kind of um uh kind of get on leverage there uh a few other charts here i think there's uh one one other chart here it's just what i was showing you before this kind of like landing page that kind of like shows you all the stable coins their volume their current price market cap all that good stuff there so definitely check out this website if you're interested in stable coins it's at stablecoins.wtf about so an interesting little tweet thread here from hell press uh today that kind of like caught my attention because uh i think how hal is funny because he's saying he seems to be saying things that i think maybe the people that have been

in this industry for a little while such as myself just can't be bothered saying anymore like we still believe this sort of stuff but we just can't be bothered saying anymore we've been saying it for so long we get attacked anytime we say it uh and yeah there's a lot of that going on there but anyway what did hau say so he starts off his thread by saying the reality is the btc narrative is dead there are no new nation states adopting it and for those that have already adopted it things haven't gone so well there are no large institutions successfully using it as a store of value as a result there are no convicted buyers and then uh he goes on in this thread um where kind of like with a bunch of different tweets saying you know the only buy the only buyers are

bottom pickers and crypto native whales who have learned to buy panic as a monkey making uh as a money-making trading strategy however these parties only buy weaknesses and not strength i know this is why it struggles to hold price above 30k but has a pretty good support below it if crypto is going to emerge from the bear it would not be these bottom pickers who drive it out there needs to be a new narrative people believe will actually derive sustainable upside in the long term the only chance for this to happen is with ethan the merge i believe this does have the potential to drive sustained upside because it directly impacts structural flows has the potential to drive a fresh narrative can lure institutional capital back into the space furthermore i think in time eth will be a superior story value anyway and last tweet here i do

not have a strong view if this will prove to be a durable bottom in crypto broadly but i do believe if it is going to be one the rally out of here will have to be led by eth and not btc now on that last point the rally out of 2020 there is a lot of debate around it but i mean i i think so looking back on 2020 and what kind of like really kick-started us there was a bunch of kind of like buyers uh kind of like coming in like sailor for example institutional kind of like buyers and that was like a big narrative back then but there was also the narrative of d5 which drove a lot of eth-buying pressure and then the 8th btc ratio just skyrocketed from there right and kind of like went up a lot and then it kept going up

during i i guess like uh you know btc going up as well like with the institutional stuff with tesla buying btc and all that sorts of stuff but hal is right here like i've been saying this for quite a while but like where is the kind of like interest going to come in like btc and i wrote about this in the newsletter the other day but btc hasn't done what its proponents said it was going to do in the kind of like perfect situation so let me put it to you this way btc for the longest time has been memed as an inflation hedge and as a digital gold right well what happened during the last couple of years or i guess like even just during the last six months during the really high inflationary period btc has gone down with everything else it is still trading like it is a

risk on tech kind of like asset rather than a risk off inflation hedge and because of that i think a lot of people are going to see that and be like okay well you know why would i buy bitcoin when originally it was uh kind of like said to be an inflation hedge and that was the upside potential in it and you know that's where all the upside would be during times of high inflation well that didn't materialize at all and hasn't materialized at this point i don't think it's ever going to materialize i've always been bearish on that i guess kind of narrative around btc because it's just it i i mean it's gotten less volatile over time but it's just not in my eyes something that can be used as kind of like an inflation hedge or a slow value especially over the short term right

it just it relies too much on faith in my eyes like obviously everything relies on faith to some degree but btc itself just has no real utility and i've always been a utility maximalist when it comes to kind of like the most value that will be driven to these assets that's why i'm so bullish on eighth because eth has an enormous amount of utility right has staking it has defy collateral it has uh you know obviously being used to pay fees which are really kind of like quite high on ethereum uh kind of like uses money within the ethereum economy there's there's just so many different ways to use eth right and that gives it a really really strong monetary premium so from my point of view i've always believed that eighths utility kind of like properties will drive the most value to it and will lead to the

flipping because i don't think btc has durable and lasting uh buyers at the end of the day and especially as hal mentions here with the merge coming up now you have a massive issuance reduction coming but it's not about the issuance introduction per se it's about how that issuance is being reduced right and i think you know more people expected eip1559 to do more for the price than what it did i never really expected it to be short-term bullish i expected it to be long-term bullish because of the fact that while the ip1559 burns ethan removes it from from the supply it doesn't impact as how likes to put it the structural flows of the asset right like a lot of the eighth being kind of like burned uh kind of like isn't coming from from miners or

anything like that but when you look at the kind of like the merge and what it's doing for the issuance reduction that's directly coming from uh eth that we know most of it gets sold like it's market sold because miners have to sell it they're forced the sellers they don't have a choice i mean they can hedge their positions but at the end of the day they still have to pay for electricity for hardware for maintenance all that sorts of stuff so they are forced sellers that we know with 100 certainty they are and it we have plenty of proof of that for every proof of work network right so once you remove that once you remove millions tens of millions of dollars depending on the price of kind of like eighth of cell pressure then that really does start to impact the structural flows as hell is kind of like mentioned

in his bankless uh interview there and when you do that uh kind of hal had the great quote in banquet in the bankless podcast he did which i always refer back to you go from needing those millions of dollars a day of buy pressure to just sustain its price as kind of like at a kind of like um at a sideways level to needing uh that much kind of like cell pressure to stop pro stop the price of eth from going up i've butchered that kind of like quote there but essentially what it is it basically means that if we uh sideways right now and demand stays the same well if we're removing all the structural cell pressure and demand stays the same as it is today then logically we should go up then what happens during demand spikes what happens when we have another bull

market where demand really goes up and we have both that massive issuance reduction where we don't have those kind of like structural sellers anymore and we have one five five nine and we have all the other things that make eighth bullish what do you think is going to happen to the eth price like people i i think they look too short term i have some people kind of like coming after me these days being like you're so bullish on eighth and you know it hasn't done what you said it was going to do it hasn't gone to 10k yet or anything like that like i've been calling eighth to 10k since 2019 since it was 100 bucks i was talking about the issuance reduction since jan 2019. don't come at me with this of oh you've you know nothing you said materialized you guys know like five to ten years

plus is my outlook in these sorts of things i'm not in this for like let's you know get rich quick overnight let's you know let's kind of like um i think that a within a month is going to go to these ridiculous prices or whatever no if ethereum succeeds like i think it will at being that global settlement transfer layer and if eighth accrues the value of that which i think it will then as i've said before guys like i haven't been shy about this i think it could be worth 10 trillion dollars eventually which is uh you know around i guess depending on the easy supply at the time it's like a hundred thousand dollar eighth right like i have full faith in that like i i'm not just saying that because it was a bull market i am saying that because just looking at

everything and taking everything into account and if ethereum succeeds at what it's trying to do then there's no reason why it can't get to that so i always get like a little bit annoyed when people kind of like come at me with that and i know they're probably first cyclers and they probably don't know about the history of me kind of like calling this you know and calling for a ten thousand dollar eight since 2019 or anything like that but i'm not just saying these things because it was a bull market i will say these things bull or bear you know unless something structurally changes with ethereum's fundamentals um i'm not going to go you know turn bearish on eighth and there's i'm not seeing any reason to turn bearish on eight even in the amidst all the kind of like i guess um uh late other layer ones that kind of

like took a bit of market share away from ethereum i mean to me that was still kind of like bullish in a way because of the fact that it just meant that ethereum was kind of like you know in extremely high demand that we actually needed a release valve people that needed to go to other networks to kind of like get that ethereum experience because there wasn't enough room on ethereum and that's really bullish for the layer 2 ecosystem which is which i believe is going to be better and and you know more scalable or more secure than than all the other layer ones so that just makes me even more kind of like bullish on on eath so yeah i mean i i totally agree with hal here i actually suggested to him that he we should talk about that on our daily grade drive

through episode and he replied saying uh you know uh we we we it'll only be worth welfare if we have someone there to articulate the btc case as well i i think i don't i mean i don't really want to have like a guest episode with with kind of like a btc kind of like maxi um and kind of like the 8th max's because i i feel like i mean i just recently listened to the debate between um between justin drake and lynn alden and while it was a constructive debate and while both sides presented kind of i guess like good points um i just feel like these things i don't know i kind of like feel like no one's mind's gonna be changed like things are so tribal maybe you change some people's minds but i don't know i don't know how like i don't

know how much i want to do a debate with her but i'd love to have hal on just to talk about not maybe not so much kind of like versus btc but just like ether itself and how we both kind of like obviously have the same views on things but how he looks at it from a different lens we'll we'll see we'll see i'll probably have him on eventually but we'll see how we'll go with that but yeah just wanted to kind of like talk about that little thread that that hal put together today because i think it's very relevant especially in times where atheists kind of like crabbing the structural kind of like bull case the fundamental bull case for eth hasn't changed just because the price went down from the all-time high guys like if anything it's only gotten stronger so so yeah i just wanted to kind of like get

that out there for for you guys but anyway i'm gonna move on to the next updates here so metaportal uh dao has been unveiled today which is a research dao focused on decentralized governance and token value accrual models across the crypto gaming ecosystem so they're not just uh focused on kind of like doing governance doing decentralized governance and token value accrual for anything they want to do it for the gaming ecosystem now you guys know that i've been quite bearish in general on crypto gaming because pretty much all of them just look like ponzi's there's this really popular one right now called step in which i mean i wouldn't consider it really a game but it's basically you you kind of like walk uh and or exercise and you earn some kind of like uh uh some

some kind of like tokens or nfts or something like that but it's all dependent on kind of like new players coming in so it starts to look like a new kind of like pyramid scheme because people are only doing it because they're earning money from it and for those that money and that yield to sustain itself requires new entrants and yeah you can see where i'm going with this it just basically becomes a pyramid right um so i'm not sure how sustainable something like that is i mean i don't think it's sustainable at all to be honest because actually infinity wasn't sustainable either and i think that's because okay on one hand creating a good game and a game that actually keeps players interested is really really hard and i went through this with world of warcraft i played world of warcraft not from day

one but from like two years after it came out i started playing in 2006 so i experienced like the peak of the player base which was which was in 2010 during the wrath of the lich king expansion i think they picked it like 12 million players uh in kind of like the west kind of market that i was servicing i think it was more if you included um maybe china and russia and places like that um but uh the after that what ended up happening was they couldn't keep the momentum uh the game degraded in quality people lost interest in it over time obviously and didn't develop all the good developers and good people at blizzard kind of left and what you were left was with basically a husk of its former self and these days the people i think there's more people playing kind of like the

classic version of world of warcraft then there is playing the what's called the retail version which is like the current version they're still releasing new content for it but yeah i mean so i've been i've been through this i've been through kind of like what it's like to create a and i've been a big gamer in general what what it is to create a good game especially a game that keeps people kind of like entertained for for a long time and it's really really hard now throw in kind of like these ponzi mechanics it becomes even harder because to sustain the kind of like i guess ridiculous revenues you might see for those two or three months of mania i mean it's it's basically impossible you can't sustain that and what ends up happening ends up happening is you have kind of like this you know slow slow

slow growth spiking growth and then come back down again and then kind of like slow slow growth again and it's not just unique to kind of like crypto gaming i guess you could call it or play to earn or whatever you want to call it it's also happened with d5 a lot too right because this industry has like a has an obsession with um incentivizing things and obviously that's just kind of bringing back a bringing forward growth and you have to pay for that later on um but in saying all of that i still think it's cool that something like metaportal dao exists because of the fact that if we want to improve what you know everything that i've just kind of like outlined then we need a structured way to do this and focusing on things like governance and token value accrual design for for crypto

games in particular i think is a good way to kind of like do this so if you're interested in learning about how they're actually going to do this you could check out this kind of like blog post here which i guess is a newsletter that you can subscribe to as well so you definitely should go check that out but uh but yeah i mean i'm cautiously optimistic on the future of kind of like crypto gaming i want to see it see kind of like more i guess like creative games more kind of like games that actually are fun to play rather than just kind of like ponzi ponzi's with uh you know a gaming skin on top of it because that's what a lot of them are and i don't like that i don't think that's fun i think it's actually pretty predatory and i

think it gives the kind of like whole crypto ecosystem a bad look because gamers already hate nfts they're probably gonna hate it even more with you know if we just keep ponzifying things right so anyway go check this out i'll link it in youtube description all right so optimism uh has an update around their token airdrop today so they started this tweet throw by saying optimism is for the people not the cybers we've been carefully analyzing op airdrop number one for civil attackers that slip through the cracks we're happy to announce that we've removed an additional 17 000 civil addresses and recovered over 14 million op tokens which have been distributed to uh kind of like the the rest of the um the people that were getting an op airdrop here 17 000 addresses guys that's that's pretty insane right like when you think

about it and at the same time it's expected because everyone's trying to farm air drops for for things that haven't got a token yet and i i think at this point in time guys all of the teams are pretty much hunting for these these kind of like uh these addresses now and there might be some that fall through the cracks but i think at this point in time the days of kind of like uh sibling and airdrop pretty much over like it's dead like you're not gonna be able to to succeed most of the time with this sort of stuff and um i think you know when you when you kind of think about it like that it's actually really healthy because obviously you don't want a tokens going to people who are just kind of like farming it for the sake of it you want tokens going to actual

community members and the people who actually care and as i've discussed before i think optimism's airdrop is one of the better ones because of the fact that they're air-dropping tokens to a bunch of kind of like different uh people that did different things now is it perfect no surely it's not perfect and obviously i have a bias here because i'm getting a healthy op token air drop and i'm also an investor in op as an angel so just to disclose those but my my airdrop isn't informing the way i think about kind of like air jobs what i like about it is the fact that they took various different i guess criteria and didn't just say okay if you used optimism you get an air drop right they took it you know if you have a multi-sig if you used git coin if you did all this

sort of stuff but there has been a bit of um i guess feedback on the git coin thing where they're only rewarding people who donated on layer one with git coin which i actually think is kind of crappy i i hope they kind of like uh change that and actually reward people that did it on layer two as well uh like zk sync and and and then obviously the polygon pos chain but i guess it makes sense since those things are competitors they maybe don't want to promote the competitors but at the same time i don't know i feel like that's not really a excuse i feel like they should kind of like reward people who did it at layer two but we'll have to see i mean i i think the op token is due any day now at this point right like i think they did

say you know in the next few months a month ago or so i mean yeah i mean could still wait you know they could still wait till june or july we'll have to see like i don't know like i i i did say i'm an investor but i don't know when this is going to go live or anything like that we'll have to see when they kind of like decide to do it uh but yeah i guess at this point if they're kind of still hunting for for kind of like these addresses and stuff like that maybe it's coming later rather than than sooner uh but we'll have to see i don't know uh but anyway good to see that they've kind of like filtered out these civil attackers uh very very positive all right so just wanted to give a quick shout out to swagtim asia who i've given

a shout out to this before but i just wanted to kind of do it again he maintains something called the stark net roundup which is a subset that you can subscribe to which basically every week uh sphagnus goes through and and kind of like gives you an update on what's happening in the stock net eco system or the starkware ecosystem here and there's a lot happening as i've pointed out before so if you're interested in keeping up to date with starkware and starknet this is the newsletter to subscribe to you you really don't need to subscribe to anything else except this i would say at this point in time at least to keep up with starkware and starknet and all those sort of good things there and definitely follow swaggamus on twitter he's a great follower i'm following him i'm really entertaining uh basically an ethnoxy i

maybe he maybe um he won't kind of like like being called that but you know he's got the ultrasound money going on there does a lot of layer two stuff talks like an ether maxey so maybe maybe he is but yeah if you're interested in kind of like anything ethereum style queer layer two related as well definitely give swagmas a follow here all right final thing to highlight is that arbitrary put out a tweet today saying they're hiring so they're looking for talented builders who enjoy working on cutting edge tech you can go to jobs.leaver.comchainlabs to see all the roles they're hiring for they're hiring for people across engineering uh partnerships uh finance marketing people ops products basically hiring for lots of different roles here so if you fit into any of these you should definitely go check this out i mean getting a job

in the bear market like a crypto job in the bear market it's probably the best time to be getting a job there's less competition for them um and you could secure yourself uh and you could stack more fear to stack to go buy more either as well right um you know during a bear market so so yeah i mean i started working in the in the depths and the heart of a bear marketing crypto mid-2019 that was like the the depths of it there um and you know i joined set july yeah july of 2019 i think like a few days before my birthday which is pretty cool um and i stayed with them for 18 months pretty much until like 8th broke new all-time high again um and then kind of like i left obviously to do to do my own stuff but i those 18 months were you

know working at set was one of the reasons why i was able to go through the bear market as well i mean they kept me financially stable they'll you know allowed me to kind of like pay attention to crypto without him to worry about a non-crypto job um you know and kind of like obviously they paid me so i was able to stack more eat as well right so that was that you know all those sorts of things i think that's what i tell people it's like if you want to focus all your attention on crypto in a bear market and you're working a non-crypto job just get a crypto job and there's so many people hiring right now so many teams hiring for different roles you shouldn't have an issue at least kind of like finding something that you can apply for obviously you have to compete

with other people for the roles but you know don't doubt yourself guys like if you're listening to the refuel and if you've been a listener for a while i'm sure you've picked up enough knowledge by now to go kind of like um go work on one of these teams especially the ethereum based teams but anyway i think on that positive note i'm going to end 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