Optimism delayed, Rainbow major update and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #86 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 26th of march 2021. all right let's get into it everyone so just before we do that actually i just wanted to give a huge congratulations to git coin on another successful git coin grants matching round this is this was the biggest one yet and of course a big thank you to everyone who donated to me at the daily gray and also to ethub's bitcoin grant i hope you all got your donations in in time um you know it was as i said it was a big round right uh you can see here a walkie from from get coin get coins founder basically put out this kind of uh chart with some stats here uh

in in round eight 1.1 million was raised in round nine 1.9 million so another 800 000 on top of that obviously kind of like smashing the record there and you can see you know we've been kind of like i guess the earlier rounds started off quite quite small you know round one at 42k around 256k around 396k but you know there was there was growth there right um some of these happened during a bear market too uh i think one two and three happened during 2019 from memory um so yeah so keep that in mind as well but yeah since then it's just exploded up and particularly the last three rounds of where it's where it's been really big right like 763 000 for round seven 1.1 million uh for around eight and 1.9 million for round nine so

really awesome to see this and there's also you know much more people contributing now as well i think which is which is very positive too so yeah um thanks to everyone for for donating to to myself and all the other grants out there uh and aukey also put out a uh tweet here basically saying that 82 percent of the grounds around nine contributions were done via layer 2 which is zk sync so you probably would have used dk sync if you were donating because it's much cheaper to do that then uh you know donate on layer 1 ethereum of course so that's a that's a pretty you know hefty number 82 doing it on layer 2 which is which is awesome i mean it just shows that this technology kind of works you know people are willing to use it once it's um you know rather seamless i think you

know it can be more seamless than what it is there's still a few kind of like steps that you have to go through but once you've kind of like set up your wallet and everything and funded it it's very seamless so uh but i think it'll get better with time and you know i'm looking forward to a big round 10 as well here so the i guess the biggest news from the last 24 hours and as i was talking about yesterday i thought this was going to happen um but i guess like the trdi here is that the optimism public mainnet has been delayed until july of this year now obviously we were all expecting this to go live in march uh which obviously i i mentioned on the refuel i think a couple of times now where i thought that it was going to be delayed

because we hadn't heard anything for a little while and also um uh uni swap launching in may kind of like was the kind of for me was just like okay well they're very close to the optimism team and they'll probably want to go on layer 2 as well uh it's probably not not ready yet so july is is i like i mean that's like what three months away that's an eternity in crypto right but again i mean i wrote about this in the daily grain newsletter so i won't i won't kind of like go too deep into my thoughts here but i did want to kind of give the thoughts for those just viewing and listening basically this is probably the one of the hardest decisions a team ever has to make is whether to go to mainnet with a product that they don't feel is ready to

go to net with that they don't feel is something that they'd be proud shipping right or delaying it by three months and dealing with the kind of short-term fallout from that because obviously optimism you know their their kind of layer two solution has been hyped to no end right everyone's hyping it up you know it's gonna it's gonna save ethereum blah blah blah um you know i've probably played a little bit of a part in that too but at the same time you know delaying it would not have been an easy decision here and they would have only have done it for critical reasons and they explained some of their reasons in the post saying they want to make sure their partners are you know up to speed on it that the bridges that they're going to be able to bridge in are are working you know that uh all the

wallets and everything are like compatible so basically they want to make sure the user experience is as good as possible before before going live here which i totally get right i know i i understand people's frustrations and disappointments here but at the same time this is bleeding edge technology this is stuff that's never been done before this is stuff that he's dealing with real money so i'd rather like the teams move slower and um you know and make sure everything's okay uh and you know safe for people to use rather than rush to mainnet just for the sake of it now in in saying that it's not like optimism isn't doing anything now i mean they have a public uh sorry a private main net i guess you could call it that's live right now it has been live for a little bit and synthetics has been using it uh i'm

sure there's other teams building on it in stealth right now but the way the private main networks i guess you could call it is that it's basically a white list process so unless you are whitelisted by the team you're you can't deploy any smart contracts to their network um and it's completely centralized the team obviously has complete control over it they can reverse kind of transactions if they wanted to they could pause it they could shut down the system and and you know there wouldn't be much you could do about it so from that perspective uh it's not the dream right it's not what we want like we want basically a public permissionless kind of layer two system that anyone can build on uh but that doesn't mean no one can build in it right now and in the post optimism also mentioned that they have uh you know about a dozen

projects going live uh on their technology lined up so far so if you consider that those dozen projects uh are already working on getting their implementations going um they're obviously gonna be whitelisted we can say that two of those are synthetics and uni-swap i i still think you know unisop's going to go live on optimism in may uh you know and that'll be like a nice experience for people to to kind of like get them uh uh i guess like using the technology before it goes live to a you know in a public fashion in july um but yeah just a bit of disappointing news bit of sobering news but at the same time i think it's it's it's going to be okay in the long term and you know on the same note i guess you know if you look at the rest of the layer 2

ecosystem we have a lot of things live right now you know loop ring of course i talk about a lot zk sync i spoke about arbitrage main net candidate being on on the kovan test net um i'm expecting them to go live in april with on mainnet with a fully public maintenance that anyone can build upon uh and that's just you know competition that optimism has to deal with and they've kind of like seated some ground to now because as i said three months in this space is an eternity so they and they would know this as well the team they would realize that delaying by three months is they're going to lose some market share because of this um you know they're obviously going to lose a little bit of community favor but they're doing what's best f uh what they believe is best then i

can't fault them for that of course so we'll we'll see what happens i mean i know immutable x is also going to go live soon they've been teasing it for for a while now any day now we bring diversify already live zk sync already live a lot of you have used it uh you know but at the end of the day we can say that it's already live and everything like that but unless it offers like a very similar experience to layer one then most people aren't gonna kind of like use it or care about it now loot brings great and everything but of course um you know their dex isn't anywhere near as liquid as unisop is for example and you know it's becoming more liquid over time uh same with diversify but it's not there yet it's like we're rebuilding d5 essentially um you know and we're trying to like

speedrun it which i think we will but at the same time um you know people were hoping optimism would go live with a bunch of star apps like synthetics and uni swap and even chain link and stuff like that uh and then you know there would be like a an ecosystem on there from day one and you know there probably will be by the time we get to the public main net release they probably will already be synthetics and uni swap and chain link and maybe it's a bunch of other apps on there so that when you know we go to the public mainnet there's going to be plenty of uh things for builders to tap into when they're building on top of optimism so yeah uh i mean you can go read the full post it's little link in the youtube description uh but yeah i

personally i wasn't surprised by the delay i was surprised by the fact that they related to july you know it seems like it's weird because like i know teams can get ahead of themselves but the fact that they said march and then they had to delay it by three months means that they weren't ever gonna launch in march basically um so from that perspective i i get like sometimes teams can get ahead of themselves and do these announcements but if they had just not announced that they were coming in march it would have been a lot better right i think uh maybe this is a lesson to a lot of other builders out there and this is unless this is something that a lot of builders don't do that you know they don't really give dates they don't like to give dates you know everyone always asks for dates

and things like that but you know anything can happen for a number of reasons and you know by giving even a rough day and then missing that kind of target and having to delay it you inevitably lead to disappointment now you know is it worth the disappointment of delaying something or is it worth the kind of like just not giving a date right and just dealing with um people may be complaining about that i think it's worth just not giving a date right and then giving a date when you 100 know you're going to launch um or just launch it right and instead of even you don't even need to give a date just launch it right get it out to mainnet and surprise everyone um you know i i think that's probably the better way to do it but anyway i i understand how difficult of a

decision this was for that for the team they've been working non-stop on this for quite a while now and i think it's the future still bright for them i think they're gonna they're gonna kill it uh we're just gonna have to wait a little bit longer for that to play out i think so robert lesnar posted on twitter today just a bit of a teaser here that he said he had the opportunity to present defy and compound to the federal reserve staff and then he goes on to say eventually the banking system will run on shared open ledgers each day we get closer and he gave a bit of a teaser with with a few slides that he presented to the federal reserve here basically like very simple slides kind of explaining how compound works uh kind of explaining how the interest rate model works on compound

and kind of like how i guess like users can interface with banks which can interface with d5 protocols which i think is interesting as well and on this note here in this image you know i've said it before but i think we're going to have a bunch of centralized services tapping into these decentralized services to offer um you know certain kind of things like yield and and other kind of apps and you know some people might call it ced fire which i think is a dumb term but i mean i guess like it it describes what this is you know centralized defy i mean it doesn't really make much sense but you know it's just basically the concept of centralized institutions tapping into the d5 ecosystem and offering a uh i guess like a solution to to end users right and that's what this all this is all

about at the end of the day i think it's fine that this happens and this is inevitable inevitably gonna happen but the point is having choice here so you know you obviously want to have the choice whether to go through i mean it's probably not even going to be a bank just any kind of like centralized institution you know that's offering you this stuff you can go through them and you can have the peace of mind of that right there's probably going to be built in insurance and things like that um and and that's fine for for users who want to do that but then you're also going to have the opportunity and the um i guess the option of going straight to the protocols themselves right um and and that i think is what a lot of users are going to trend towards you know maybe not most of them for at

least a short to medium term because a lot of people do trust these kind of centralized institutions but as time goes on and the more i guess the easier we make it for them to tap into default protocols without uh you know difficulty i think is going to be really bullish there but yeah i hope leishner kind of shares the uh i guess the deck the full deck that he showed here and maybe goes into a bit more detail about what he presented and how they reacted to it as well i mean as as ryan sean adams says yeah like sorry what was their reaction i mean i would love to know that as well i don't think he replied uh down here but anyway um you know on that note uh really cool to see this i uh you know the federal reserve probably

was just like very cautious they're gonna move like super slowly on this sort of stuff i think but you know the fact that leishner was already talking to them and he's obviously the founder of you know big d5 protocol in compound finance and an investor by uh via his robot ventures kind of fund he uh he he's probably one of the best people to kind of like i guess quote unquote red pill uh the federal reserve on d5 so yeah really really cool to see this from from robert today so a few upgrades came to loop rings layer 2 exchange today so they have uh basically made it 30 cheaper to add and remove liquidity on their amm uh in general all blocks are between 10 uh two to ten percent cheaper due to transaction data compression um so yeah i mean this is their layer

two getting um just more efficient over time which is really cool to see there are some other upgrades here they added a fee for amm deposits but this actually reduces the overall amm lp fees since pool exits are cut by greater than this amount so essentially like just reshuffling the fees here but making them lower uh all fees on layer one and layer two are now identically adjusted with gas and the eth price and uh the wallet is available the mobile wallet app is available in spanish so i mean you know i've spoken about loopering so much and i i know i say this every time i speak about loopering so much but they just continue to silently you know kill it and i don't think they get enough appreciation because they've been live on layer 2 for quite a while now and i was just talking

about how you know before i was saying there's plenty of layer two solutions that are live today they just need more users they need more liquidity and that's slowly coming over time and i think loopering is one of the kind of like forerunners here along with diversified which i'm going to talk about a little bit um a little bit later uh but yeah i mean if you haven't used them yet i mean i highly recommend going and just trying it right even if it's just like a test transaction maybe just like a hundred dollar swap or something like that just to see how cheap it is and how fast it is um and like getting back to i guess that feeling of you know when ethereum may net or layer 1 when the fees were like i guess you know one way or something like that

so yeah i mean i i mean i use lip ring whenever i can it is definitely a very very smooth experience they've done a really good job um you know and they're always improving it so kudos to them for this speaking of gas fees uh one of my favorite websites and i use their chrome extension you can see in the top right is gas now.org now this website uh a lot of you would have used that basically forecasts gas prices so it tells you rapid fast standard or slow and it updates in real time because what the gas now website does is it actually looks into the ethereum mempool to see what the real-time transaction cost is now what they've added here um in you know the bottom of this picture here they've added estimated costs and transfer of transfers and interactions for

popular kind of things so an eat transfer of course is listed there in erc20 transfer such as usdt diet transfer or nft transfer and then on the right hand side they have like what a uni swap trade it's going to cost you um want a uni swap adding liquidity is going to cost you removing liquidity is going to cost and then uh compound and open c so this is i mean really cool for a reference kind of thing like if you want to kind of see okay you know gas fees might be low right now it's maybe a hundred what's my uh i guess like uni swap trade going to cost me right now and and right now i mean at time of the screenshot i guess which is which is relevant to right now uh it would cost 22 to do it in a rapid

fashion so basically to get it into the same block um or about 21.70 to get it within one minute so this is really cool really important here i think that's now i mean they're doing great great work with this it's my favorite kind of uh i guess like gas website to look at to estimate prices i mean it works pretty well like whenever i need to wrap a transaction done i always reference their rapid kind of amount here i set it and then and then it basically works so yeah great great little feature that they've added here so the rainbow mobile wallet app has added a new kind of a section called discover so basically what this allows you to do it allows you to explore all the best opportunities across defy so you can see here in the picture

they've got like a top movie section at the top here uh they've got like uh you know a little banner here with the default pulse index which is really cool to see so you can quickly tap in and buy it uh different lists um and you can add like favorites and a watch and a watch list here uh or what's trending uh then you scroll down you can kind of like add and remove liquidity to like unisop pools and things like that uh so yeah pretty big upgrade here pretty big feature uh thing here if you haven't kind of checked out rainbow yet it's it's a mobile wallet app i highly recommend going and checking it out i think i've spoken about it before but it's really cool it's one of the most beautiful if not the most most beautiful ethereum mobile wallets i've i've used i mean argent is

is definitely up there too um but you know i think this is just really great and rainbow uh you know he's definitely a theorem native like the founder and and the team is very very deep into the ethereum ecosystem and i i suppose yeah i spoke about yesterday on the refill how they're going to be supporting layer 2 specifically optimism like out of the gate now you know i think the wallet space is pretty crowded in general there's a lot of mobile wallets but i think what rainbow's doing is they're taking the approach to becoming like the best ethereum mobile wallet app right and having like everything you want in there from d5 to nfts to layer 2 all the good stuff so yeah if you're interested in trying out a new wallet especially on on mobile definitely go give rainbow a look here so cl

on twitter put out a really great tweet today basically saying uh he basically says why isn't anyone talking about how nft is being settled in eth means eth is now potentially the base currency of all internet culture history memes and digital art i mean i think i've spoken about this before and i kind of replied saying i tweeted something similar to this um you know this is something that a lot of people seem to be under appreciating the nft economy is priced in eth right that's a that's a big part of it but also if you look at a lot of the nfts they pay homage to eth if you look at the art pieces there's you know a lot of them have like an eth logo in them somewhere right or like the videos they have an eth logo a lot of the nft like collectibles

have something to do with eth um so it's becoming like a like a i guess like a cultural symbol within the nft space because a lot of these nfts are on ethereum and you know that's basically kind of like saying and and i guess like coupled with the fact that it is being used as the currency or the money of this ecosystem it's basically cementing ether as this is this kind of beautiful base currency of uh of this kind of like as cl says it's internet culture history memes digital art all this good stuff here very very very important i think for like the narratives around ethers and asset i mean you can see here that for scantis basically said ethy's art money is better than as ultrasound money and it's funny because i i like the aether's ultrasound

money mean i think it's fine but i think you know every time the ethereum ecosystem comes up with like a new meme for some reason people think it's cringe and i i kind of often joke that i say like the actual good meme that ethereum has is the fact that um our memes are cringe now you know take that as you as you will but in general i do think this makes a lot of sense and this resonates with a lot of people because if someone hears ultrasound money they're gonna have no idea what that means right um that's like a very insider meme but if you tell someone that like you know ether is like um you know the the nft economy runs on ethereum right it's it you know ethics is used to buy and sell these sorts of stuff that's a lot easier to digest because

you can make like a i guess a comparison to video games and say okay well you know if you're playing world of warcraft what is the economy there well i mean it's gold right you have gold silver and copper and then there's a whole economy built up around that as currency uh and then you know someone asked okay well you know the ethereum there's an economy on there there's like nfts okay what do i use it's like well i mean technically you could use anything right you can use stable coins you can use other tokens but you know what most people use is eth and that's because it's the most widely held token most widely widely liquid you know the largest market cap uh we're most well known and just easiest to kind of accept here so i think this bundles together a bunch of the different memes that we've kind

of i guess tried to make happen over the years like eat his money and i think ethy's ultrasound money falls into that um ether is like a base currency for this new economy on ethereum and i think sale just put it really really really well here and i mean you can see the popularity of his tweet a lot of people seem to agree with this as well so yeah i mean it makes sense and it's i think it's just overall bullish for eth in general too so epns announced that they had raised i guess like a an extended seed round here an additional 666 000 from a bunch of different investors now for those who don't know epns is it stands for ethereum push notification service they're basically building a decentralized uh notification service for ethereum

uh disclosure here i am a seed investor in epns here uh they're a great team i mean i spoke to them really early on they're really really passionate team out of out of india uh working on something that i think is actually uh needed in the ecosystem right i mean we all have like notifications that come from i guess metamask where our transaction is confirmed but metamask isn't giving you confirmations about um certain things like it's not going to tell you when you receive tokens in your wallet it's not going to tell you when your cdp is at risk i know there's some solutions that already do that but i think we need a standard for it and and epns is building this standard and i think we need one that's decentralized as well so obviously aps is gonna have a token and they're gonna

try and decentralize this whole kind of ecosystem out here um i think they're going live rather soon but basically congrats to them on on this race it's gonna give them a bit more kind of runway here and they brought on a bunch of different like i guess uh vcs and and investors here and you can kind of read this in the i guess youtube description below but yeah really great to see this here um and and i can't wait to see them kind of i guess uh keep pushing forward here uh okay you know once they get the token out i'm sure they're going to get a lot more uh you know attention because that's what happens when you launch a token right people pay a lot more attention to your project but if you haven't been paying attention to them yet i definitely go

recommend checking them out they already have a mobile wallet as well you can check out too uh so and you know you can set up some alerts and things like that so you know the product is definitely live but i think they're going to kick it into high gear over the over the coming months so speaking of tokens uh diversify have announced that they've they're introducing their new token called the dvf token now for those who don't know i guess like the diversified ecosystem has a token already called nectar or neck uh but this was like a token that came over from um ethernets before they were known as diversify so it kind of had a bit of baggage there i think um and so they're doing kind of like a token swap from from what i can see here uh based on a snapshot um uh 77 of the

dvf supply will be distributed as an airdrop to to neck holders you know and then you know they're basically going to be using this as part of the uh the diversified platform here so they go through their kind of like i guess logic here and why they're doing this and stuff like that and and what the distribution looks like essentially here so you know neck holders get seven percent uh usage air drop so retro plus future is up to eight percent strategic supporters got 10 to 15 liquidity labs uh the company that created diversified aka team guess 25 and liquidity mining future community distributions get up to 60 here uh so i guess strategic supporters are the investors and i'm i really like this 10 to 15 to investors is i think on the lower end which is which is great

uh 25 of the team i mean you know pretty standard thing so if you take 15 percent and 25 that's a 40 split uh for for team 60 for for community here which is you know i mean obviously it's not like the the the you know the 9010 split you see some some projects do but at the end of the day you know there's so there's a lot of ways to do token splits here and i think you know just getting tokens into the hands of as many people as possible is cool you know these strategic supporters can be a number of people as well doesn't just have to be like the evil vcs right or the evil funds it can be you know people in the ecosystem that have have participated in these rounds that can actually add a lot of value i mean

personally i've participated in a few strategic rounds um and there's lots of people in them it's not just like five people right there's there's like um you know sometimes hundreds of people in these rounds that are like key ecosystem people that you want on board and you know from that perspective i think that's really really great here and you know they're dropping seven percent net holders as well which is really really cool and i mean just the caveat here they do say this is not not final uh but this kind of just gives you a basic estimation here on on that so yeah definitely go check this out if you want more details about what they're doing here with the dvf token so it's funny i you know i mean i was speaking about kind of like layer 2 just before and about how there's like lots of hype

behind it i think one of the most hyped layer 2's right now is immutable x because they've been hyping it on twitter for like i mean pretty much this whole month they've just been going really hard about it so at this point i mean i'm expecting it to launch like any day now you know possibly i mean definitely in april but like i maybe it could be in march i don't know but i'm expecting them to launch ev any day now and for those who don't know just a refresher here immutable x is going to be a decentralized exchange focused on nfts at layer 2 they're going to be using starkware they're going to have instant trade confirmation 9 000 plus transactions per second and zero gap gas fees obviously as a layer 2 they inherit ethereum's security and decentralization which is extremely bullish and i spoke

about the other day how starkware demo that they were able to mint 600 000 nfts at a cost of 10 gas per nft on layer 2 which effectively is a 33 000 time cheaper minting of nfts than at what it is on ethereum main net so yeah this is incredibly bullish i mean you know even though we have to wait till july for an open public kind of uh optimism there's still a lot to be optimistic about right there's uh immutable x i mean i mentioned before arbitrary and zk sync and and loop bring and diversify all that good stuff uh and you know if you're not using them today i suggest definitely going and just checking them out as i said before i think that you know you can probably feel uh layer 2 is not here because you know

optimism is not here i just don't think that's very accurate and i think that you should definitely um try out you know all the ones you can and and kind of like don't leave it uh especially when gas is cheaper on layer one because the i mean unfortunately you have to spend gas fees on layer one to get funds onto layer two i think eventually that'll be ironed out with like you know batched onboarding from layer one you know uh fiat onboarding and centralized exchange onboarding and things like that but you know we're all pioneers here i mean i've said it before like the fact that we're pioneers means that you're gonna have to just like i guess you know it's it's a bit a little bit maybe a little bit crappy to save you we all have to kind of deal with this for now right um and you know

the kind of opportunities come with this and you know i guess like the the yield being high comes with the fact that normally people know about this it comes with the fact that a lot of people actually priced out of this um you know the fact that you can buy tokens really early because not a lot of people know about it is is really promising too so i guess when you really think about it the high gas fees are basically just like the price of alpha in this ecosystem the price of the high yields the price of um you know the the uh the token prices you know being just being early in general to tokens and things like that um that's not to say like it's a good thing necessarily um and that like i think that people should be paying hundred dollars you know fees

um just to do like a couple of uni swap trades not at all but i think you know in the meantime you know this there's already solutions you can use and and of course there are like other kind of like chains uh that you can use as well like the matic pos chain is is very popular xda is very popular um you know and there's other layer one blockchains that have you know some kind of like uh you know things you can do on there like yield farming and stuff like that so that's all going to happen and you know i've kind of warmed up to the idea of the last few months of like the quote-unquote multi-chain kind of um ecosystem playing out i do believe the majority of the i guess net network activity is going to remain on ethereum in on both layer one and layer two but

there's no denying that these other kind of networks uh layer one networks are gonna find their own niche they're gonna find you know what what they're gonna basically be good at and what they're gonna you know offer users that ethereum can't and they're gonna lean into it which is which is fine uh you know a perfect example of this is the utility uh chains like filecoin and r weave that are doing decentralized file storage i think they're super interesting right i think they're really really great i think they add a ton of value to ethereum specifically because ethereum uh you know with layer 2 is data hungry so if layer 2s can tap into these other kind of like places for for data that uh maybe cannot be stored on on ethereum layer one data such as uh i guess the um the nft kind of like

images and things like that because it's too expensive to store it on layer one ethereum then you know that that's even more positive so yeah definitely i mean people call me an eighth maximalist sometimes i mean i don't think so i mean i've gone through why i don't think i am before and you know if i was i would think everything else is a scam but ethereum i think very few things are actual scams in this ecosystem i do think that there are just a lot of ill thought out projects and projects that are kind of pointless but at the end of the day the market will decide you know users will decide what they want to use and you know maybe a lot of these other projects act as like a a way to kind of like um you know breed this competition between

you know ethereum the other chains uh you know and and layer two and things like that so yeah i definitely think it's all positive um but you know i'll leave it at that for now i won't go too down too deep down that rabbit hole i'm in i could talk for hours about what i think about the competition in in the space right now but again it is a completely open question right now i'm placing all my bets on ethereum of course in the ethereum ecosystem uh in terms of like the time i spend and the capital i deploy um but that's just because it's it's where i can spend most of my time and get the most kind of value out of both at the social level at the kind of like i guess um intellectual level and the uh i guess like monetary level as well and i think

you know a lot of you watching you know especially if you're watching me do daily ethereum recaps every day would feel the same way about this so yeah really really bullish times all across the board i think and i can't wait for more of these layer twos to go live all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for watching and listening be sure to subscribe to that 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 next week thanks everyone