Nomic Foundation detailed, StarkNet updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #312 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel wary cap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 10th of february 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so i came across this meme from coin mamba today which i thought was actually pretty pretty funny um it's just me with uh with i guess like a human or a kid and a dog playing chess and then on uh captioned on the kid it says me watching youtube videos on how to get rich with crypto and then the dog is kind of like looking back at the camera and he's captioned with the youtuber getting rich by making videos so the reason why i thought this was was quite a funny meme is because there's so much truth to it right i mean think about how many youtubers

are out there all the clickbait ones all the ones that kind of like have those really ridiculous thumbnails or the ones that have the really clickbait titles and think about what they're selling you right they're not selling you um you know knowledge a lot of the time that what they're selling you is just uh what what they've you know a token that they've already bought they're trying to get you to click on referral links they're trying to sell you a trading course or something or or other right and these days it's nfts they're not actually trying to help you get rich in crypto or you know find alpha and crypto they're not doing i mean what i'm doing right they're not giving you pure knowledge like i obviously um shy away like majorly from doing any kind of clickbait i don't want him i don't even

want to draw that crowd and i try to stick to kind of like the fundamental stuff happening and look i'm not going to sit here and say that watching the refill of your day is going to make you rich i mean there's so much more that goes into investing than just kind of kind of like research there's i mean there's so much more that goes into it i think people really do kind of like this false sense of security during bull markets or even just in crypto in general where they think investing is easy guys investing is the furthest thing from easy it is actually really really hard especially if you want to make outsized returns like you can easily just go buy some eighth you know and hold it for a few years and you'll probably do well right like i believe that you'll do well doing

that but if you're looking to get quote-unquote rich in crypto and you're looking to start with a few thousand dollars well i've told you guys before eighth isn't going to make you a millionaire right if you've only got a few thousand dollars to invest not any time soon anyway maybe far into the future when i mean maybe a millionaire doesn't mean much anymore but um you know if you want to you know get rich in crypto you have to go down the risk curve you have to invest in other things you have to kind of like uh you know find find your own alpha so to speak and that this is the topic of today's newsletter actually where i titled it seeking alpha and alpha is this kind of like thing within crypto or not not within crypto within the investing world it basically describes

you know having tangible information you can act on to make an investment or trading decision now i try to strictly keep the definition to be publicly available information not so much insider information because obviously as we know insider trading is absolutely rampant within crypto it is extremely hard to stamp out if not impossible because of the fact that uh ethereum addresses or just crypto addresses in general is pseudonymous so just say you're an employee at an exchange for example and there's a policy not to kind of like trade based on a listing coming up well how are you going to stop your employees from doing that they can literally go home to their own computer they can spin up a brand new address they can fund it and i mean on a theorem they can just fund it through tornado cash or they can get their mates to send

them some some funds on it uh and then they can kind of like do the insider trading that way and it's pretty like much impossible to catch them and there's a lot more of this stuff that goes on as well i mean there's a lot of information that gets passed around inside of circles it's not publicly available and it's rampant i mean uh maybe it comes as a shock to some of you but i mean it shouldn't like it really is kind of like rampant here and that's not to say that it's not as rampant in kind of like the stock market as well it sure is and the funny thing is is that in the us at least it's actually legal for uh for politicians to trade based on this information which is just even more bizarre but when i talk about kind of

like alpha and real alpha within crypto i'm talking about the publicly accessible information and the funny thing is is that you can get so much good alpha from public information and uh because people are just lazy like you can actually get amazing alpha from just watching a project's github repository or joining their discord channel because a lot of people are either too lazy to do that or they don't have the time to keep up with it and by the time the information is you know right in their face it's already too late uh and this is all publicly public information this is not insider trading this is you just doing kind of like your due diligence and digging in and things like that and that's how you kind of like find that good alpha to potentially make you money down the line now is it going to make you rich

who knows as i said investing is more than just finding the alpha like once you find it you have to make a bet on it how many times have you found a piece of information or you've or you've been bullish on something and you haven't actually bought it and then it's gone like 10x i've done that so many times it hurts to think about how many times i've done that but that's the game right if you don't have conviction to actually purchase uh something after finding like some alpha on it well then you're not going to make any money on it right it's just as simple as that and this happens to everyone guys it doesn't just happen to to you or to noobs or to you know or to me it happens to absolutely everyone not no one has a 100 hit rate most people don't even have like a 50

hit rate it's actually quite low you know a lot of people actually just get one big win um and you know they ride that up and they're like okay well how do i do this again and a lot of people actually trade away their big win which is even worse because you made a lot of money and then you traded it away trying to chase that high again and that's i guess like you can you can refer to that as kind of like over trading or over investing where you know in that situation the the smart thing to do if you want to stay in the market is to to diversify or at least kind of sell into less risky assets of course you can go to stable coins and do stable coin yield farming that's all well and good but in my case like when i've made a return on

a super speculative asset that i put money into i go to eth like that's what i take profits into because eth to me is just like a much safer bet than anything out there i consider everything other than ethan btc to be at least 10 times more risky to invest in at least and then you go further than the risk curve and it becomes just it's just exponentially more risky to go into these things so we're taking all that into account you're not going to be able to watch bitboy you're not going to be able to watch all these other youtubers like i don't even know most of them because i don't even pay attention to any of them but you're not going to be able to watch them and essentially kind of like get the alpha you need to get rich all you're going to do is make the youtuber

rich because you're going to give them more views they're going to go up the rankings people are going to click their referral links they're going to buy into the tokens that they shill and they're going to get rich off the back of you and it's really it's really disgusting but i mean i don't even know what the regulators are doing they're going after honest actors while this goes on so we can't even rely on them and not that i even want to rely on them but you know we've seen that we try to self-police there's a guy on twitter called zack who does a lot of kind of like highlighting of these these people who promote scams and things like that but they get away with it every time like the law enforcement i mean has caught like 0.1 percent of these people and and as i said i don't want to

have to rely on them either but self-policing doesn't seem to fix it um either so it's kind of like a rock and a hard place here but i think that you know it's there's different kinds of people out there there are definitely channels that are quite large that do provide uh some some some good information or don't try to show you too much you know it's funny i talk about like trade course a trade um i pay sorry paid trading courses and things like that there's actually one youtuber that i've been watching since 2019 since they were really really small um a lot of you i i know watch him as well uh benjamin cohen so he's the only uh trader that i watch i don't watch any other traders out there and i don't actually trade based on his information him for me is like church you go to him

to be told everything's gonna be okay the market's gonna be fine the long term is gonna be fine and to be honest i mean i know a lot of people do that i don't personally do that because like i already i already have my conviction on eth and everything i only watch really his eighth videos i don't need him to tell me that everything's gonna be okay with eight from the markets going down but a lot of people do that and he you know has a lot of good good insights into things he has a lot of good videos i mean there is a lot of repetitive stuff going on there but i repeat myself all the time as well and as i've explained before i think repetition is actually fine as long as it doesn't get to the point where it's just like crazy

amounts of repetition um and then he you know he has a paid kind of like a group that he does he he has kind of like um staking pools with i think cardano he has he's a big kind of like staking pool there where he owns a commission all these sorts of stuff um but like his content's all free and i honestly think he's he's kind of he's an honest actor you know at the end of the day i don't think he's trying to scam anyone or shill anyone or anything like that but that is someone who i think kind of just sits in the middle there he's you know he he's kind of like not doing everything for free and people shouldn't be expected to do everything for free um but like he has a large following and he's kind of like providing information and people can

kind of get the information if they want he's never shielding kind of like low-cap tokens to people and telling them hey go buy this because this is going to moon blah blah blah so that's the only one that i really pay attention to in terms of kind of like trading and then other youtubers i don't even really watch any other youtubers guys if i'm being honest i mean justin brown does a lot of great videos but for their they're a lot of them a newbie friendly videos i don't need those for example like you like just now that i'm thinking through it like i don't watch a lot of it because i don't need to watch a lot of it but there's a lot of people out there that obviously do and those videos are really good for them um so i you know i think it's still

worthwhile doing that and there's a bunch of other channels i mean obviously there's bank lists and and and a bunch of other media out there uh but for me most of the time like i don't even have the time to watch or listen to these sorts of things uh and you know the funny thing is is that like uh when i'm recording the refill it's like i'm watching it right like i'm going through it all and that's kind of like my daily dose of of video um i i i do listen to a lot of podcasts i think that's a really great source of alpha listening to podcast with with guests on them and things like that um especially like obviously as i said bankless does a lot of good stuff there but again if you want like the real alpha the real deep dive stuff

you need to go basically dumpster diving essentially you need to go and weed through all the find the real alpha uh and then act on it acting on it is the hardest part but you got to do it uh but anyway i'm going to leave it at that just wanted to kind of ramble a bit about that sort of stuff obviously none of that is meant to be me giving you guys investment advice and i hate saying that because like i'm like i've said it so many times at this point i'm not giving anyone investment advice i'm not telling you you should buy this you should buy that and i'm never going to tell you that i'm never even going to tell you to buy eth all i'm telling you is that this has been my experience in the markets over the many years this is how i how i've played it

you know obviously i'm extremely bullish on eighth and and that's it like so uh it's always funny when like i'm saying on investment advice and then you have these other youtubers over here saying this is gonna go 100x or buy this shitcoin because it's going to go 1000x blah blah and they're just fine doing that i honestly can't even morally bring myself to do anything like that i would feel disgusted in myself if i did that but i mean they're different people they're doing it anyway i'm going to stop ranting there um before i get stuck on that i think i'm going to move on to the next piece of news here from walter bloomberg who's a pretty big account on twitter you've probably seen him before but he shared a post today about from coindesk about blackrock planning to offer crypto trading so for

those who don't who don't know blackrock is the world's largest asset manager trillions of dollars of assets under management here and i think that there was rumored that they were planning to offer crypto trading a few months ago and obviously being a big corporate entity they take a while to move here but i mean this doesn't come as a surprise to me at all i was actually talking to someone the other day about this and how one of the uh the banks here the biggest bank in australia commonwealth bank announced a few months ago that they would enable crypto trading directly on the on the bank so they basically become a a pseudo crypto exchange and i believe it's because they see lots of money flooding out of bank accounts into crypto exchanges like probably billions worth out of um you know commonwealth bank and probably

other banks as well going outside of the bank to these crypto exchanges that really are offering a service that the banks can offer as well because the banks already have all the licenses and regulations they just need to set up uh uh you know a lot of the crypto crypto native things but they could partner with an existing kind of exchange for that and and and you know bring some stuff in-house so i think the same is true for like blackrock they probably see all this stuff going on like holy like we need to get our hands on this this is a massive new asset class uh you know it's i mean i say it's a massive new asset class but the total crypto market cap is only 2 trillion i'm pretty sure the equity market cap is 150 or 200 trillion or something like that

much much bigger and that's just equities and you go you know you have like precious metals you have the bond market you have the currency markets you have all this sort of stuff going on it's a and and crypto is so small but the demand for it is insatiable so that's why i think these big firms are just like looking at this and being like yeah we need to get a we need to get a piece of this we need to do it now we can't wait any longer it needs to be done now because this is where i guess quote-unquote the alpha is the alpha is being early um you know getting these products ready i mean okay let's take a step back here what does an asset manager do well i mean in this case a blackrock being the biggest asset manager they have a lot of

um i mean i'm pretty sure like at some point um in your life or at some point in an at all times their assets are kind of like being managed by a blackrock or another kind of like asset manager especially for your retirement accounts so what they're going to do is and i was talking to a friend about this the other day what they're going to do is they're going to wrap all these crypto products up into this stuff that they're going to call whatever and they're going to sell it to their clients as simple as that they're going to take their fees they're going to make an absolute killing on this and the funny thing is is that the products aren't actually going to be anything special they're just going to be kind of like nicely wrapped boomer versions of crypto and people buy this like

imagine telling someone hey you can earn 10 on on this thing right whether it's like kind of like a staking asset or a 5 10 on a staking asset um and then like uh the real return is more than that and you're just taking the difference there plus you're taking your own fees these people aren't going to investigate that they're not going to go looking they're going to be like oh i can make five to 10 percent yeah right i'll buy it and then they just get raked on fees right so that's exactly why a lot of these firms want to get involved in this i would never go through an asset manager or any kind of like financial services uh indus uh company to invest in crypto on my behalf never ever ever because it's just unnecessary fees obviously i already know what i'm doing

but most of the world is going to do these guys like most of the world already keeps their crypto and centralized exchanges they already trade on centralized exchanges with real really high fees so i guess from that perspective you know blackrock was looking at this and being like there's so much money to be made here let's do it so not a surprise at all um i don't know if there was a kind of like date in here uh in the coindesk article about kind of like when they would do this uh but yeah i mean i think it was just according to sources that this knowledge came from yeah three people with knowledge of the plans uh and yeah i mean if blackboard manages 10 trillion dollars in assets guys that's five five times more than total crypto market cap like it's crazy right you guys think we're big now no

we're not uh the market still have a lot to run here but uh yeah i i don't know if there's actually um yeah there's no kind of like date here but i guess like it's probably going to happen this year if it's if it's already kind of like being talked about so so yeah pretty cool to see that coming so i missed this the other day but git coin grants around 13 dates were announced so march 9th to march 24th is the dates for grants around uh 13 which is coming up i mean i just realized today for some reason my brain hadn't included into this yet it's february i for some reason i thought it was still january and i'm like holy where has the time gone it'll be like in a week's time it'll be two months since i moved into my new

house i'm like what the hell two months already crazy right um but yeah i mean you guys know git coin grants i shield this to you all the time this is pretty much like one of the only things i'll tell you to go directly do and that's go donate when these grants round uh matching rounds are on because obviously your funds get matched quadratically and your donation goes much further than it normally would but uh yeah around 13 9th to 24th i will definitely keep you guys up to that date on that and obviously kind of uh tell you about it when it's live because you need to go donate to all your favorite projects once it's live all right so terence from the pry labs team put out a tweet yesterday about the merge saying optimistically syncing the consul test net another significant merge feature closer to completion with

a screenshot here so as i said before guys i love these screenshots like even if they might be totally meaningless to you i love seeing the core devs be excited about stuff like the merge sharing screenshots about it keeping us updated with it even if it's kind of like a small update or something that you don't consider to be a big deal i still love seeing this sort of stuff so this is great um as i said like the merge still seems to be on track uh still seems to be going really nicely i mean it's funny i was looking at kind of like some of the the specs and some of the github stuff and some of the checklists and everything and it's come such a long way i mean we are pretty much there guys like it's actually crazy how close we are

we're pretty much at the finish line it really is just kind of like dotting the eyes and crossing the tees as i've mentioned before but i think that's um you know no one is more excited for it than the core devs and researchers this is the culmination of so many years worth of work and we're finally going to get there and i explained the other day why this is also bullish for eighth as an asset it's stupidly bullish for ether as an asset and i actually think the markets right now given that eth is outperforming uh bitcoin the 8th btc ratio is going up and it's going up nicely i actually think we're feeling the rumblings of the pre-merge kind of like run-up that i've spoken about where i believe that the run-up in each price leading up to the merge is going to be

quite quite you know quite crazy because of the narrative around it so i believe we're filling the first rumblings here and it's funny because i the reason i was so bullish on eighth after it crashed in may of last year was because we had a catalyst with one five five nine coming up and it's kind of hard to pinpoint a reason why something pumps and why it doesn't i mean you know we did uh recover in august or i guess like in july and august we recovered pretty significantly and then we kept pumping after that up to 4900 all-time high and 1559 really you know i think played at least a narrative around that played a big part in it now leading up to the merge this narrative is going to be even stronger because of that massive issue introduction and i do think that it's going to play a

significant part in in its kind of like price here but i don't know where it's going to go in the short to medium term i don't know you know i don't know what's going to happen at the merge or after the merge as i've told you guys there's so many misconceptions right now the two biggest ones i mentioned the other day the merge you people think the merger lowers gas fees on layer one and people think that uh all the staked eighth just unlocks automatically both misconceptions both completely false but we're gonna have to see how the narratives play out uh there all right so a big announcement out of the nomic foundation here today uh they announced that nomiklabs the team behind hard hats which is a ethereum development environment is becoming the nomic foundation a non-profit ethereum public goods organization backed by the

ethereum foundation vitalik coinbase a16z consensus and others now you may be wondering okay if this is a non-profit why did vcs invest in this well they explained that in the blog post as well they basically said well vcs are investing in the future of ethereum by investing in uh i i guess or don't i mean it's not technically an investment it's a donation but by dominating to the nomic foundation here so this is awesome i mean you guys know i love public goods obviously i'm a big promoter of get coin but what i really love about kind of like public goods funding is that you can have these non-profit organizations you can have these tools that add a ton of value to the ecosystem in a roundabout way for example hard hat being an ethereum development environment

uh if developers use this develop their apps that bring billions of dollars worth of value to the ethereum ecosystem well then that already paid for itself so to speak right there's already a massive return on investment there but they have other uh kind of projects as well they have a a slang which is a new solidity development compiler they have evm tooling with rethnet uh as i said they have the developer environment hard hat and they have a ethereum connect connection library web3.js as a as a front-end platform so these things are things that developers are going to use to build the next best and greatest products that could become billion dollar companies so by investing in public goods infrastructure you're investing in ethereum you're investing in the future of ethereum and you're investing in the

billions hundreds of billions maybe potentially trillions of dollars worth of value that are going to be uh kind of like created here and you know this is exactly what they said in the blog post they said they uh that vcs are not making an investment where they expect a direct return since this is a non-profit venture they want to support the ethereum ecosystem and and us us being nomic so they're making a small contribution and most importantly making the operational support resources available to us so direct return you know this is this is the kind of like term that i wanted to kind of focus on direct return as i just explained there's no direct return here it's not like they're getting a token out of this or anything like that but there is an indirect return where the easier they're making for developers to

build things and the more kind of like uh other portfolio companies use these sorts of tools to to make their products better then they make a return that way and um you know i i forgot to mention that 15 million dollars has been donated so far and they're looking to raise another 15 million dollars for 30 million dollars um up front for their first raise so i think the donations are open to everyone as far as i i'm aware uh donations website so the number four pro sorry donations welcome the non-profit nature of yeah so i think that if you want to donate you can get in touch here um but as i said it is a donation it's not an investment directly in uh but it is a investment indirectly in the ethereum ecosystem so very very cool to see this so uh immutable announced today that on

immutable x you can now enable instant l2 usdc credit card purchases on your immutable x uh new immutable x power platform with moon pay so i think i spoke about them integrating moon pay a little while ago but now you can buy usdc directly with a credit card on l2 so just another way to on ramp onto immutable xcr with fiat of course um i think last time i spoke about this i said that there might not be kyc with moonpay but i think there is kyc with moonpay maybe i forgot but i mean this is the same as a centralized exchange like unfortunately kyc is everywhere these days i think it's i mean i'm bearish kyc it's such a stupid thing but it's everywhere but i still think it's bullish that we can now kind of like go directly uh you know to immutablex but with usdc using a credit

card so definitely check that out if you haven't already so starknet is actually one year old today so there's a recap blog post put out by starkware basically an update on the next challenge facing starknet so the tldr is that they've been building stark netting steps starting with establishing usability then improving performance and finally moving on to decentralization so they've achieved their first goal usability this means that they deliver general computation in an ethereum like state years before it thought possible uh they are now moving to stage two of their three-part plan three-part building plan performance focusing on throughput transaction cost and latency and then next up will be decentralization so in this blog post they detail all these kind of like phases here but i mean next up

decentralization means a token's coming guys like that you can't decentralize one of these kind of like networks or at least you can try but i mean it's kind of hard to do without a token so they want to do so that they have to have a first decentralized version by the end of 2022. so starclass token i mean i would put a high chance on it coming this year as i said when i've talked about l2 tokens before starkware seems to be the one that's kept the most tight-lipped about a token i haven't seen them even talk at all about a token or heard them talk about a token at least with kind of like the others they've mentioned it or they've mentioned uh that they aren't thinking about it right now um but like starcraft as far as i know hasn't really talked about it at all but when you say you're

going to decentralize the network token comes here so probably an airdrop will come with it as well i'm not sure what the distribution is going to look like but yeah that's just kind of like a little bit of an alpha leak there see that's what i'm talking about with alpha this is publicly available alpha right now you farming an airdrop on kind of like starkware stocknet startware related apps is just like alpha that you've been able to get that other people may not have a lot of other people may not be aware of this and as i spoke about yesterday most people just buy things on exchanges they don't actually use on chain stuff so that's uh that's some kind of like alpha for you for you there but definitely go give this blog post a read it's full of awesome kind of like information about

uh starkware's journey with starknet and kind of like where where they've been and where they're going so uh dr carl creator here from grid plus shared an update on phonon so he said in this tweet welcome to the new paradigm of blockchains without blocks or chains uh daniel from the grid plus team mined the first native phonons today imagine tokenizing hash shares without without aggregating back to a blockchain here come felix crypto payments and micro payments and he's got a kind of screenshot here now if this whole thing means nothing to you don't worry this is pretty technical and pretty in the weeds here but essentially from what i can understand here what they're saying is that you can basically uh you know tokenize anything and you don't have to put it on the blockchain you can do it

off-chain but still have the the security um of a blockchain without kind of like you know the blocks all the chains here so i mean you guys should check out phonon it's uh as i've described it before it's an off chain uh kind of like protocol for transferring digital assets uh i've said to you guys before the way it can work is that you can actually securely transfer a private key across the internet without anyone being able to snoop on it so and there's a bunch of other really cool use cases around this and as you guys know i'm an advisor to to the phone on dow as well here and i'm really excited for what they're building because i mean again as you guys know my two big themes for like next few years are privacy and scalability and and phonon is working on

both so very cool to see this uh definitely go you know check out phone on down see what they're building uh read some of their blog posts to get more context around this so do analytics has announced a program called the wizards grants program which is a way to kind of like grow their community and help their community achieve their goals so the wizard grants program sorry wizard grants will be awarded to the uh the dude analytics most engaged and active community members and to those with talent that they want to help nurture and grow those who are awarded a wizard grant will become resident wizards so if you're very involved in the dune analytics ecosystem and you want to become a resident wizard well this is for you and you get a grant out of this as well so you'll be awarded a

grant of ten thousand dollars for a three-month uh kind of like residency here and they'll be getting education coordination partnership efforts as well so this is kind of like i guess an intern program which i think is really cool especially for people that are still in college or something like that and that can't don't have the time to take on a full-time role and you know but it's still learning how to kind of like code and how to do things like um sql and stuff like that this i think is a really cool initiative so if this applies to definitely go check out this blog post and uh i guess apply for this grants program all right last up here we have sismo their discord is now open to all so there's no more wait list or whitelist or anything like that uh and they've got

more updates kind of like in this blog post here but if you've been waiting to join their discord channel to keep up to date with this ismo uh kind of like uh project definitely a go do it now so but dow onboarding is still on hold so yeah you can find the link i guess in the in the blog post here which will be linked in the youtube description and you can learn more about cismo here and what they're kind of like working on and all that sort of stuff refresher they're trying to use zk proofs to basically allow you to prove anything without having to reveal that so i mean this is the way zk stuff works and i've given the example before that you can kind of prove to someone that you own a uh you know a specific nft but you don't have to actually tell

them which address you own the nft on so you would get like a sismo badge on your public address that basically attests um with cryptographic proof that you own this in another address or own something in another address but you don't have to reveal what that address is so there's a lot of cool use cases of this sort of stuff and now you can get more involved with it by joining the discord channel you know checking out this blog post of course and getting more involved with the ecosystem there and i think on that note that's gonna be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone