Polygon acquires Hermez, StarkEx growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #187 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 16th of august 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so a lot to get through today so just wanted to start with a tweet that i put out over the weekend where i said it's been about 18 months since 18 months since covert started and the global mental health toll that has followed has been extreme though i'm really happy that crypto has been so exciting over the last 18 months because it's helped a lot of people stay positive during a really shitty time now i mean the reason i say it's been about 18 months is because i really think covert kind of like started entering the mainstream consciousness at least like really early on um into the mainstream

was about february of of 2020. um i remember i was i was actually at denver in 8th denver in february 2020 and no one was really taking it seriously back then it was kind of like this thing that you heard about that was like in china and like it seemed so far away and then i got back to melbourne uh and then into march like that's when it really started picking up right like we had all the the the news kind of like articles coming out the media going into a frenzy over it governments going crazy like you know we saw videos of um of what was happening in china and things like that and things just went it went insane uh and you know and during that time different governments and different countries have had different kind of like responses to it there's been

lockdowns and mass you know restrictions here and there obviously borders were closed and all that sort of stuff but you know it's been a while now since we've been dealing with this and unfortunately down here in melbourne we're still dealing with uh with lockdowns now just today they extended our lockdown again by two weeks and have put like a curfew in place uh you know can't go out after nine pm sort of thing uh and to give you some context here we only have 20 cases a day so we've taken a very heavy-handed approach to this sort of stuff because our our vaccine rates are actually quite low i think it's 25 of 16 plus year olds are vaccinated right now and it's ramping up over time you know i think by christmas we'll have a decent chunk vaccinated but you know it's just been such a it's a

hard thing to deal with for i think everyone right the mental health toll ha like especially for for people who uh you know are extroverts or kind of like enjoy going out uh to whether that be like to parties or to to restaurants to you know just traveling all that sort of stuff which i think is a lot of people um you know and and just socializing in general not being able to do that has taken a really big toll though i think for us in crypto we've been like really lucky i mean honestly the bull market i think started in earnest like early kind of like 2020 right where we had the covert dump but that didn't really stop the the train that was that was still going with crypto and then we had defy summer through like pretty much the peak of the pandemic

where like everywhere everyone was locked down in their house whatever all the borders were closed you couldn't really do anything and we had defy summon i think you know that played a big part into why we actually had a d5 summer and then coming into the end of the year uh you know i think at least here where i was we didn't have any lockdowns anymore things were quite normal throughout like december you know had a normal christmas and stuff like that uh and obviously like crypto sorry ethan btc were hitting all-time highs uh through in through to january and you know crypto just generally throughout 2021 as well has been just really hot and and really distracting i guess like you had the nft stuff the layer 2 stuff and everything like that so i'm just really really glad that uh we you know uh that all of us like

all that uh i have been able to experience this and kind of like i guess this is kind of like therapy right i mean maybe that's not the right term for it but the way it is for me is definitely kind of like therapy being able to log on kind of like feel like i'm still kind of interacting interacting with the world and still have stuff to do i'm not bored or anything like that um but there's plenty of people out there who you know sitting at home uh they might maybe they work from home but other than that they might be bored they can't go out they can't do like all their normal hobbies and things like that maybe they go to the gym and stuff so yeah it's taken a really big toll and i know much of the world is like opening up now because they have

like good vaccine rollouts but there's still restrictions and stuff like that and you know i i guess for them it's been it's been great but like you know for me in melbourne for the you know most of australia right now it's kind of like uh has restrictions around it and we still can't travel overseas or anything like that or even interstate right now which is kind of shitty but i think without crypto uh for for a lot of us right it would have been a lot worse uh and you know i'd like to to think i played a part through the daily gray and of course through my work at ethub and my twitter posting and keeping you all entertained and getting through such a difficult time because i launched the daily grain newsletter in july of last year and then i launched this youtube channel towards the end of last

year so kind of like not probably not been the youtube channel probably hasn't been through the peak of it but i think like a lot of us still i know a lot of aussies watch the watch the show i think you know uh uh hopefully i've helped you all with with kind of dealing with this sort of stuff because it's definitely been a massive mental health kind of toll for most of the world i mean me personally i've stayed quite distracted with ethereum and everything like that but it's still gotten to me on some days it's really shitty and people around me i know as well like you know my fiance kind of like lost work and things like that and i have lots of friends who have lost work and just really not having a great time with it so yeah i hopefully i

just wanted to kind of like give i guess like a bit of commentary there because i think you know it's just good to reflect on kind of like what's happened over the last 18 months how the kind of world's evolved but how also that crypto has evolved alongside it and the fact that i actually think you know as shitty as it is like the pandemic was actually quite bullish for crypto i think the reason why crypto went so crazy and when and you know the prices have gone so high is due in large part to a lot of the the money printing that's been going on and that only happened because of of covert so you know i'm sure all of you have seen like the pictures of the u.s balance sheet where uh you know they've just printed like a crap ton of cash and

obviously that's led to inflation and assets go up during times like that and all that sort of stuff so i think crypto we've just been very very lucky from both i guess the entertainment side but also if you've been invested for for a little while now especially over the last 18 months you would have done very very well you know if you had held on so uh you know even if you're just investing in each you didn't have to touch anything else you know 18 months ago it was like 100 bucks uh but uh yeah i just kind of like wanted to give some commentary uh there so yeah i hope wherever you are in the world that you're doing okay uh that you know mentally obviously mentally and physically as well and i hope to keep entertaining you on the daily gray and on that note i'm going to

move on to the actual crypto news now so uh 50 000 eath has now been burned it's been 10 days around 10 days since 1.559 went live and we've already burned 50 000 eth which at current prices i think is 170 million dollars something like that which is a crazy amount of money um now i was actually talking to a friend today and i i you know he was discussing with me kind of like what i think you know the real effect of kind of these burn ears and like uh i i think like i'm coming with exact conversation but what i said was that essentially there's a lot of eth that gets bought off the market to be used for gas fees because if you want to do anything on ethereum you have to pay gas fees right so if you're you know onboarding via nfts and you're a new

user well you're going to quickly discover okay well i need eth to buy the nft but i also need to pay the gas fees so in doing that what ends up happening is that fresh eat gets taken off the market like uh and basically doesn't ever go back to the market at least most of it doesn't because most of it gets burned which i think is like the most bullish aspect of this is the fact that i i mean i said i said it the other day i think a couple weeks ago where i said 1559 was launching into like perfect launch conditions right obviously the gas fees spiked again because we had like an nft mania going on but also not just the gas fees being high but the fact that we had all those new users coming in that were buying eth using it

on the network you know getting getting used to things uh and kind of like uh onboarding to to ethereum was really bullish as well but also we have like the lates who's going live to um you know progressing through i mean i'm gonna talk about layer twos in a bit but like they've been progressing through and stuff like that so yeah i mean it's just insane to see how much either has been burned already and it's just really cool to see i guess like this is coming from probably a lot of i guess like ether it's getting freshly bought up it's not just you know being uh kind of i guess like used i mean it is but like it's not just only either from people who have been investing underneath for a while it's also fresh eat being taken off the market and being

burned which i thought was really cool um taken's theorem put out a great little um chart today showing kind of like the variance in in or the volatility in gas prices pre london or five five nine and post one five five nine you can see here pre it was a lot more volatile a lot more spread out uh and then in post it was kind of like a lot more flat right it's definitely a lot more controlled it's not as not as volatile not exactly where we want it to to be just yet uh you know we want more one five five nine transactions to be adopted and things like that but still a very interesting little chart here uh and token terminal also put out a little uh a little chart here again showing the eighth revenue versus like kind of the the supply side

revenue versus protocol revenue what this does it basically splits out the total fees paid to miners and the total fees burned which is protocol revenue and then they said you know the state of ethereum and eth fundamentals sky high recognition very very low and i mean it's funny because today uh i don't know if a lot of you have been watching the markets a lot of these other layer one blockchain networks are pumping so it's kind of like layer one season right now which is bizarre to me because uh i guess like you know the theorem's fundamentals are so strong ethereum's usage is so strong we have nfts you know layer twos defy still out there growing and everything like that but its recognition is so low and i mean i could go on for a while about this but i'm not going to because it would take me a while to go

on about it but really i just think that um maybe i'm maybe i'm just saying this because i'm so involved with ethereum but i really do think ethereum is like in the middle of of kind of like the entire ecosystem it's like sandwiched between you know bitcoin and all the ethereum killers and it really has like such you know has these strong fundamentals but doesn't get the recognition for it because on one hand you have the bitcoiners or the bitcoin maximalists who don't really care about anything but bitcoin and they're obviously just going to focus on bitcoin they're going to talk about it blah blah blah then you have uh all the ethereum killers where there's a lot of people that buy into these ethereum killers are buying into a story or a narrative or kind of like a fantasy uh and a lot of

them are buying into it because they feel like they missed the ethbo and they see that these things are a much lower market cap and they're like oh well i can buy into this and you know i can outperform either whatever which is fine like i have no issue with people doing that but then you have like eighth sitting in the middle where the bitcoin maximalists are always shooting on ethan calling it a scam because you know that's just what they believe and then you have the ethereum killers also doing the same thing they're not calling it a scam but they're they're like you know attacking ethereum for its weak point saying you know high gas blah blah all these sorts of stuff so i think that's why you have like such little recognition for ethereum at times but over the longer term ethereum has shown like amazing

resiliency against this sort of stuff and it just grows and becomes stronger for it so i'm not too worried there but just i thought token turner put this a a great way by showing kind of like these bars here with like fundamental skyrocketing recognition very little but i don't expect that to last for very long at all i actually think that the market is not pricing in the fact that we've burned fifty thousand eighth in ten days um that is uh you know as i said 170 million that is a lot of eighth and i think the market in the short term is just playing the speculation game you know doing you know playing in these l1 and things like that and that's fine traders doing this whatever but eventually that that money kind of like comes back to roost right it comes back to eth i think you know we've seen this

play out plenty of times before so you know obviously i'm still long ether and everything like that not that's not changing but it's just funny to see the market chase these kind of short-term things uh you know so so i mean so predictably because it's just like you have like this kind of like one layer one that started pumping i think it was solana that started pumping and then like i looked a few hours later on coin gecko and all of them were all of a sudden pumping so it's like these traders they just see these kind of narratives um start playing out and they're like okay well it's l1 season now and it's the same truth it's true for everything right it's like defy season nft season log nft summer whatever you want to call it like it's always like these little mini cycles that play out

but eventually the money flows back to what people actually want to hold and i've said before that i think that people truly want to hold things like eighth they don't want to hold long term a lot of these ethereum killers because a lot of them frankly are worthless right like i saw things like eos still pumping eos is completely worthless there's nothing happening on that network it's been around for how long now like three four years and then it's got no traction there are other ones out there that have some traction uh and whatever but you know a lot of them pumping they're just plumbing for the sake of it so a lot of that money actually ends up flowing back to things people want to hold whether that be cash or like eath or beat or even btc or things like that so i think

that's that's kind of like the way it plays out over over the longer term so hayden adams from unisa put out a fun fact in this tweet over the weekend he said in spring of 2018 six months before unisop v1 launched omisogo expressed interest in hiring me me being hayden and having unisov v1 launch under their brand uh hayden asked for 2 million of omg tokens and they ghosted which means they basically you know disappeared and ignored him um this was funny because for those of you who have been around since especially 2017 and misogo was this thing in 2017 it was the scaling project it was the thing that was going to save ethereum that was going to scale ethereum you know they had like plasma stuff going on i think

they had some state channel stuff going on they had like partnerships or whatever and it was like this huge thing and if you go back and look at the price chart of the omg token it performs really well back then there was like this massive air drop as well where they air dropped omg tokens like every address on ethereum which in hindsight was a very naive air drop as well because you ended up sending uh these tokens to like dead addresses or to people that just like didn't care about them and not people didn't really get many uh much of these tokens so this was like the old style airdrops but it's just funny that kind of like hayden was rejected uh you know uh by me say go i didn't know about this and you know he asked for two million dollars of omg tokens and i think uh you

know you can see down here i think he answered a question as to why i guess like he asked for so much or kind of like you know it's not a surprise that you were ghosted um because you asked for so much i remember what his reply was i think he said something like uh he was comparing it to another protocol at the time and thinking that two million dollars was actually not that much and it actually wasn't i mean if if a mesa go ahead onboarded hate and he you launched unisop under that umbrella i mean they would have done very well for themselves but just funny to see how these kind of things turn out and of course you know hayden went on to get the ethereum foundation grant of a hundred thousand dollars and then he used that grant to develop unison v1

and then he went on to raise money uh as part of like uni swap labs from paradigm and the rest is history of course right the you know the uni airdrop and stuff like that uh so yeah just a fun little story there and i i put out like a little bit of a smart ass comment here where i said it's okay they seem to have ghosted the entire theorem community at this point and i mean i kind of really feel like that because i haven't really heard anything about me seagull in such a long time and actually responded to my tweet here where they said is this an invite to join on your podcast and obviously i don't do guest spots on the daily way um but i was happy to talk to them about any updates they had and i've been a big

fan i was actually a big fan of them back in the day but i just haven't heard anything from them they've been too quiet and they said you know we learned it it's best to make noise after shipping and this is good timing we'll dm you they haven't dm yet so you know maybe hopefully they do um but yeah i mean i don't know like it's funny because the layer 2 space is much harder than it was back then in 2017 there wasn't really many teams working on stuff i mean i think you know maybe there was plasma group or maybe they weren't even known as plasma group back then um but there was a kind of like a bunch of stuff happening around plasma there was uh uh ryden or raiden however you say it was me say go i think there was a couple other things going on

you know uh there wasn't roll ups or anything like that or at least it wasn't like a public thing that people were talking about uh but now kind of like i in this day and age you have like how many i've lost track of like there's probably like 20 different l2 teams right now so i don't know what a mesego has i don't know what you know what they're going to ship or whatever or what kind of like traction they have there i just haven't heard much from them lately but it's just funny to see like how things can go from you know being the biggest thing in the ecosystem and and to basically not being really heard of in just a few short years but yeah anyway interesting story from hayden there uh immutable has uh provided an update on the imx token rewards

so this is another unfortunate u.s rug here where they've said due to the ongoing regulatory uncertainty in the us uh the middle team had to adjust the reward terms and what this means is basically the imx token cannot be distributed to u.s residents or citizens but to make up for this as part of the air drop but to make up for this they're going to be air dropping an equivalent amount of eighth based on a 10 per per imx kind of like token price here now i did hear there was some frustration from users about this where they said uh ten dollars is is you know is too low like that gives i think immutable it gives immutable 200 million dollar fully diluted market cap but people were doing like relative valuations where they said well actually infinity has like a what you know 15 15

billion dollar cap and then you have the flow block chain which has like a massive 20 30 billion dollar thing and people saying well you know mutable's got to at least be worth a billion dollars which is like 50 per token so they were kind of annoyed about that uh which i get but at the same time i think you can use a vpn when using the immutable kind of like uh roll up with your address and you know make sure you your vpn is not bet he's not using a us-based server using kind of one out of another jurisdiction and still be able to get the airdrop so maybe that's a little bit of an alpha leak there but again this is just stupid draconian kind of um regulations out of the us of course that make no sense to me it's kind of like

punishing users once again and it's just really really shitty to see that but still i mean this is an immutable's fault i don't think uh you know obviously i'm still very bullish and immutable and immutable x and everything like that um but it's just really really sad to see that they've had to make this decision here and i'm sure they didn't make it lightly but still good to see that they're kind of like at least making up for it by saying they would air drop in eighth instead of imx but maybe they adjust that price from ten dollars per imx up to up to more than that or or maybe you know people can just use a vpn to get the imx tokens anyway and speaking of immutable x they have built a website called built on immutablex.com which shows all the projects that are either on immutable

right now or that are coming to immutable so you can see here the marketplaces open c token trove kinguin people will know of that uh collectibles they've got a a few big brands here like rtf kt uh epics uh uh gg i think that's pretty big uh yeah i'm pretty i'm pretty sure i've heard of them before uh games such as animaka brands you know god's unchained alluvium uh all these sorts of things and then they've got a d5 thing here as well called superfar never really heard of that but it's there so this is kind of like what arbitram did i guess with their kind of arbitration one thing which i thought was really cool where they showed off all the apps that are coming to arbitrary so this is the same for immutable here so yeah really really cool to see that from from the team

all right so uh this tweet from the po app kind of like twitter account here or at least a little bit of a tweet thread i thought was very interesting they basically started the thread by saying not all popes are created equal so today we present the pope taxonomy so popes can be put into like three broad categories collectible the holders enjoy them on their intimacy private usage reward the holders get benefits for owning them private public usage and recognitions the recognition sorry the holders flex them at public usage and they go on to say you know collectible pope is a pope or poe app is enjoyed despite how many of them exist because for the collector it's just an item to remember a past event scarcity is not a concern i have a few of these popes definitely like the things like devcon you know

going to defcon getting a pope like that's definitely just a collectible for me it's something to kind of like necessarily flex about or it's not you know something that i'm i'm concerned about the scarcity or anything like that so that definitely makes sense next would be like a reward pop a male may not need to be scarce depending on how the incentive has been laid out by the issuer so you may get like this part as a reward for doing something on a on an app or kind of like doing something uh you know early on in kind of like a i guess a project or whatever and then you have like a recognition pop which fundamentally necessitates scarcity because it's bragging right strength and the more exclusive it is so for example there was a part for being a genesis validator on the eth2 network now

there's only kind of like a handful of those people because there was only a handful of genesis validators uh there was there was a fair few genesis values that is but you can never go back and be a genesis validator again right you can never retroactively get that and that's extremely scarce so you definitely uh you know what i want to kind of like separate these these different kind of pop-ups here and that's one that i would i would flex right my um my my uh my uh sorry my my my genesis validator pop-up which i thought was uh was really cool really cool and i guess like in 10 years time when ethereum takes over the world people are going to look at that and be like wow you were there at the genesis and you can prove that you were there because you have this pop which i think

is really really cool and then you know this can be used for um for kind of like governance i guess someone yeah yeah someone uh did this yeah genus pre-genesis depositor pop as well yeah and you know people have spoken about this before how you can basically use pops as like some sort of on-chain identity and you can basically uh i guess assign kind of weights to different people so if people have like all these rare po-aps then their weight or their governance weight in a protocol should be higher than someone who maybe doesn't have any power-ups because you can prove that they've been around for a while uh that they've been part of the ecosystem for a while and they actually kind of like airing night for the tech sort of thing or or kind of like have more fundamental understanding of things so

yeah i think that's really really cool to see this this thread put out by pop kind of explaining the different categories here so uh polygon and hermes network uh merged this was the i guess biggest news and this came out i think an hour after i recorded friday's refuel so obviously a lot of people have been able to kind of like digest this over the weekend but essentially uh hermes i've spoken about before on the refuel there are zk roll up layer 2 uh polygon has acquired them so polygon acquired them for 250 dollars uh and basically what ends up happening is the hez token is is going to be uh able to be trans uh transferred or transacted or i guess like tran whatever you want to call it like changed over for the matic token uh which i thought was a really good way of

doing it but not only did i guess like polygon announced this merger with with hermes here and kind of like acquiring them they also announced that they're putting a billion dollars towards zero knowledge based scaling solutions so obviously a lot of you will know zk roll ups and optimistic rolls are the two leading roll-up technologies and zk roll-ups are commonly thought of as the long-term winning uh kind of roll-up uh because there's going to be it's going to be better than than optimistic roll-ups for a number of reasons but one of those being that there's no withdrawal delay or anything like that uh or at least it's not a seven-day withdrawal delay and and people argue that it's more secure and stuff like that but i'm not gonna get into that for now what i did want to talk about was my thread here which i put together and i

said you know it's really exciting to see two powerhouse teams kind of working together here the hermes team you know i spoke to some of the guys at polygon they said they were extremely impressed by the hermes team they're kind of like their team i think it's 26 people working on zero knowledge kind of like scaling tech for ethereum and they already had something that was live by the way like hermes was live and there was a lot of stuff going on there was activity on there i think they were doing air drops and stuff like that um so it wasn't just something that was like theoretical and this basically adds uh i guess uh zk rollups two polygons kind of like uh i guess a sweet now of scaling solutions that they that they have obviously they have the pos chain they have uh the plasma chain they have

avail which is their um availability blockchain and now they have like uh hermes uh and i'm sure there's gonna be more in the future of course uh but actually i should pause here and say i'm an advisor to polygon just for those who don't know um but you know the reason i'm kind of like talking about this is because i'm super excited about this was a long time uh a long time coming uh in in terms of like polygon supporting uh true layer two technologies and things like that so i'm super excited about that but you know i went on to say in my thread that i think polygons pos chain has been and will continue to be an important piece of infrastructure to keep users within the ethereum ecosystem while the layer 2 rollout continues because i have a lot of people asking me

they're like okay what's the point of the polygon post chain we're in a layer 2 world because the pos chain is a side chain and layer 2 is obviously obviously better because they inherit security blah blah i i don't think that that's like viewing the whole picture here i think that the pos chain has uh has been like a great way of getting users to basically experience ethereum with low fees yes there's trade-offs there it's it's it's nowhere near as decentralized as ethereum i had you know kind of like has those various trade-offs but it basically uh prevented users from going to like these parasitic chains like bsc and stuff like that and kept them within the ethereum family and you know what's to say the pos train doesn't get turned into a roll-up eventually there's no st you know there's no uh there's kind of

like nothing stopping that from happening which i think is really bullish but at the same time you know you could imagine the pos chain becoming even like a testing ground for for a lot of different apps it could be a live test network uh for for ethereum at the end of the day because we have test nets in ethereum but they don't see much activity it's very hard to test on there especially for defy apps because uh the compressibility is not there there's not liquidity all that sorts of stuff whereas you know you could use the pos chain as kind of like this test net for for ethereum and you can get real users using it and things like that maybe that's the long term kind of thing for for the pos chain but at the same time as i said i think that uh the polygon

team would want to turn this one to a roll up when they can uh but in the meantime they will continue to roll out kind of like other layer 2 solutions and you know as i said i think with this merger polygon is perfectly positioned to now be a major force in the l2 space because hermes is already live like it's already out there it's not like it's we're gonna have to wait you know six twelve months for this all to come to fruition and with with you know this billion dollars being put towards all this research and development we're gonna see stuff come out of polygon and i mean if if polygons you know uh uh good at anything it's shipping that's for sure i mean they ship like crazy and then i said you know my next tweet here on that note the battle for ethereum

scaling is really hitting up with many solutions already live and more coming soon though i don't think it's going to be a winner take all scenario there will be many different l2 solutions and a world of bridges linking them all together and i've said this many many times in the refuel the la al2 space is not a winner take all market there is not just going to be an optimism that takes all the market share there's not just going to be an arbitrarium or a stockwear or whatever they're all going to live together harmoniously with bridges all you know connecting them i've talked about bridges you know tons lately and that's how we're going to scale ethereum and that is the way like that is i mean i think that is is the only way to scale a kind of like a theory at the end of the day and obviously we're

going to have sharding at layer one but sharding just works to enhance layer two so i think you know that's kind of like how i'm viewing it and and the last tweet here i said in the end those who will benefit most from these solutions will be the end users and that can only be a very positive thing uh i mean yeah i mean we're all going to benefit from this this ruthless competition between the different teams even though i think they're all going to succeed or at least most of them will succeed and get usage and things like that um i i don't think that uh you know they're not going to compete with each other of course they're going to compete with each other but that's going to be good for end users at the end of the day so and you know polyglots just entered

the arena now of the the roll-up space and i think you know it's going to be a very very interesting fight over the next coming years like this is a marathon not a sprint uh scaling ethereum is a big undertaking it's going to take you know pretty much everyone in the ecosystem to do it and i'm just really glad that we have so much money being put towards these efforts it's really great to see the funding uh you know really picking up pr and teams taking this much more seriously so yeah i guess congrats to polygon and hermes on this merger i'm really bullish about it i'm really excited about it um but in other layer two news uri from starkware put out this tweet where he said this past week being i guess like from april 8th to april 15th starkx settled 617 000 transactions

over ethereum that is 7.2 percent of ethereum's r1 capacity l2 isn't coming it's here and this is because there's a lot of apps right now using starkx you can go to l2beat.com and you can see them there is dydx which is probably accounting for most of this stuff but diversify and then there's like things like immutable x and i mean these sorts of things are all live and and working today and that's why uri is saying it's not al-2 isn't coming it's here now i think when people say like l2 is coming they're talking about these generalized things like arbitrary optimism and right like the generalized kind of roll-ups aren't here yet they're coming like imminently like arbitrary is launching this month to the public optimism i'm probably going to guess is not far

behind zk sync has been teasing themselves like they're due any day now for kind of like some news or some kind of release um obviously like um you know polygons in the game and things like that so yeah i think when people say l2 is coming it's really about the generalized l2s but still good to see these kind of like app specific l2s uh just you know gain so much traction already and and begin to use ethereum's block space because this is what this is how it kind of plays out over the next few years is that the l1 block space is going to be reserved for whales and layer two proofs and then all the end users will just sit at layer two so the end users will get to benefit from the cheap fees and the fast transactions and all that good stuff whereas layer one will get to

benefit from the fact that i mean the fees are going to be high which means the eighth is going to be burned um you know to you know as part of that and all these layer twos are going to be uh kind of like uh secured by by that as well so it's kind of like a symbiote symbiotic relationship going on there all right so chop chop put out uh chop shop from i guess like the core contributor and ftx put out a really interesting tweet that i wrote a newsletter about today where they said um well basically they were replying to a rick ling from uh uh discord who he's basically he says he's leading online communities at discord he must be the community guy there where he said how can discord better support dows and chop chop replied with a bunch of different things here he said you know

you can integrate metamask and wallet connect integrate snapshot voting and be able to vote from discord connect web 3 identities like ens i'm not going to read these all out but you can kind of see them on the screen or the link will be in the youtube description you know show real time down balance sheets ability to reward community with nfts based on their discord activity etc etc now last week's newsletter i think on friday i wrote about how and i actually talked about this on friday's refuel how i think that we need to build rebuild social media from the ground up for it to be truly decentralized and truly like you know web 3 crypto but in the meantime i think that we can enhance the existing web 2 experience with these web 3 crypto features for example just integrating a snapshot of vote directly

into discord chats would be incredibly powerful could you imagine the discord kind of like announcement channel saying hey guys we have a new vote rpr you can vote directly using your wallet in discord you don't have to go to a new link or anything like that it's just seamless for users um you know and on twitter right now if you install something called um mask book or mask network you can google that it actually injects things to your twitter uh kind of like um news feed where my cursor is there's kind of like something where you can go exchange or swap and it'll actually bring up like a unisop window and you can actually do a decentralized exchange swap directly on twitter and there's other kind of like uses there but that's the kind of stuff like where you have like web three features or crypto

features enhancing the web to experience and i think we can do that until you know it's probably gonna take five to ten years before we get any kind of like mass scale decentralized social media out there so until that comes along we can definitely enhance the existing web 2 tools with our new fancy crypto features so yeah i mean i'll link this thread in the youtube description you can go check it out and just realize the time so i'm going to get through the rest of this stuff here um ben edgington put out his latest what's new in eth2 edition uh for those who don't know you can go to ether2.news and this is the best uh kind of like resource for keeping up with uh what's happening in eth2 hands down i mean there's no other better resource out there in this issue he talked about

all the usual things like the beacon chain the coming altair upgrade uh the merge staking uh decentralized staking research all that good stuff so you can go check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description um yeah chainling god i kind of put out an interesting tweet here over the weekend where he said congrats your smart contract blockchain will finally have smart contracts after five years this is obviously taking a shot at cardano and he says you know to catch up with ethereum now you just need and then he lists all these sorts of things you know smart contract debs smart contract frameworks ui frameworks block explorers keeper networks uh stable coins nft marketplaces margin train yield aggregators like all these sorts of stuff and if you look at all these sorts of stuff this is exactly what ethereum has and this is ethereum's network

effect when you kind of look this is why ethereum is so powerful because it has all of these things this is everything that you need no matter you know if your cardano if you're solana or polkadot whatever other chain you need all of these things now that's not to say that you can't build them out but you're starting from like a much further position away from where ethereum is and ethereum isn't like stopping it isn't like uh pausing hasn't stopped innovating it you know it hasn't stopped shipping it's it's shipping faster than ever so you're basically competing with something that's still running it's not like ethereum stopped in place and also fired like bitcoin ethereum is still well and truly in the lead and the lead i really do feel like the lead is just kind of like widening there because of these network effects

but yeah i thought this was just an interesting tweet from chandling got to point out uh you can go read all of this it'll be linked to the youtube description uh xerox mons uh uh announced his nft lottery uh kind of like tool here that's now live on the ethereum mainnet it's powered by chain links vrf for randomness and now anyone can create a fair on-chain rng drop for any nft of their choice so basically what this allows you to do as xerox mon says here is you can pick an nft that you have get two link tokens and head over to the create page and you can essentially create your own lottery where people can go buy tickets into this lottery and it's provably fair via chain links vrf for randomness and you can kind of like uh have this lottery and draw the winner

and then send this nft to the winner so i think it's just like a really cool way of distributing nfts as i've mentioned last week i wanted to see much more innovation within the nft space and this is exactly what i'm talking about uh you know the profile picture stuff i am so over it at this point i think most people are over it at this point i want to see this innovation so i'm really really happy to see this from xerox months and it's live like it's not like it's a theory or a white paper it's live so if you want to play around with this it'll be linked in the youtube description for you to do so uh damn.eth from the rainbow team here uh basically put out uh that they've launched rainbow dot me slash learn which is basically a learning portal for

uh basically you know basic ethereum things here you can see here you know what are ethereum and gas transaction fees you can click through and you've got like a really great explanation of kind of like how that all works uh you know beginner's guide to layer two networks how to protect your ethereum wallet i mean the reason i'm pointing this out is because i always like to point out educational resources that are available for new users so if you're you know you're still confused about things you want like just a dead simple explanation of things um you can definitely go check this all out and check out the rainbow wallet as well i mean the rainbow has become my favorite mobile wallet like by far i mean i i love it i mean i don't use mobile wallets too often obviously because i'm stuck at home because of these bloody

lockdowns but generally like i'm a power user so i'm just sitting on you know on um i guess i've got my pc with my hardware wallet and all that sort of stuff but if i was to use a mobile wallet like while i'm on the go if i'm traveling whatever rainbow would be it like i mean it's got so many amazing features you know especially with in the nft kind of like space where you can see all your nfts browse all of them and you can actually import your metamask wallet into rainbow by using kind of like your secret phrase and they have a guide here of how to do that so i'm really happy to see this learn section uh you know that dame has put out here so great work uh dame there and then finally this interesting kind of uh announcement from

slingshot where they said that you can now um trade fractional pudgy penguins on slick in on slingshot and you can unlock a special uh uh yeah penguin profile picture with uh 100 peng 458 4815 tokens which is like the fractionalized tokens um and there's like an airdrop if you have other ones here now you know i just said that i'm sick of like the profile picture nfts and i think it kind of like topped out with the penguin stuff even though i love my little penguin that that um that uh that crypto wifey made for me uh i i just like you know i i still think it's cool to see some of this stuff going on because this actually still falls into the innovation stuff just because it's a perfect picture nft doesn't mean that i don't think you can do stuff with it and what

i mean by doing stuff with it is basically getting these penguins fractionalized and then trading on things like slingshot which i think is really really cool so yeah anyway check that out if you haven't yet but i think i'm going to finish it there for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone