Unpacking the Saga 2 and Arbitrum Long Term Incentives Issues | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

is this a consumer facing phone is this an nft is this like a a scarce value thing like there's no clear product strategy for what the Saga phone is at this point and I feel like it's just been like really forced like in reality I do not want to use an Android phone right now I like the blue text that's all I have to say about this what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerox research marches just around the corner and I want to make sure to give you a quick reminder to not top tick your prices of your D London tickets if you use codes 0x10 at checkout you can lock in a 10% discount on your ticket don't miss out

on your chance to get ahead of the curve I'll see you in London what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerx research the blockworks research team is back to give you another episode of an analyst round table today is Tuesday January 16th and today I am without my co-host Dan he is uh getting so much need a vacation but we do have Westy effort capital and zerox pibbles joining us this week so I was thinking we could start this off by I guess going through some news and governance updates and I can I can kick this one off for us so over the weekend we saw a rabbi wallet uh teasing a snapshot on Twitter for what people are speculating will be an airdrop I actually saw a pretty good take on this one on Twitter from crypto condom saying that uh a lot of the swaps

are me protected and use aggregators by default so uh the cow protocol could potentially benefit from some increased Rabbi wallet adoption thought that was kind of a cool little uh takeaway from that I don't know I think some of you guys on the team use Rabbi I admittedly have not so curious if you guys have any insights there yeah I'm a big user of Rabbi for my ethereum transactions and I I love the user experience they do a good job in showing you exactly what you're actually interacting with uh like how much is being withdrawn or deposited like it's really really straightforward and good for sort of the the crypto dgen who wants to know exactly you know what

they're uh doing with their wallet so obviously I'm super happy that there's potential air drop coming my way is it pronounced rabbi did I just butcher it calling it Rabbi for like the first three minutes of the episode the first coacher wallet in R three that's actually pretty good I love that okay uh on to the next one though yeah I think that a lot of people like for you know rabby have been um like I don't I don't think people actually thought there's going to be an air drop so people have just been chilling that product because it's genuinely a good product which is obviously a pretty good sign so maybe check that one out that's on my to-do list as well um tangentially to cow protocol uh they're also renewing

their grants program with 700,000 xdi and 1 million cow tokens with an additional 3 million cow tokens for a volume incentives program so that's worth about roughly 1 Mill million uh with 30 33 cents cow token price so kind of substantial um hopefully that can drive some more volume there I feel like there's like renewed interest in cow swap so that's pretty cool to see I know everyone here on the team is pretty big fans of what they're doing um any anything else you guys got to add there or should I move on to the next one I just like to point out that Cal swap is a great protocol and was one of my best aird drops in crypto so always here for more Cal aird drops you love to hear it plus the the moo

sound everyone gets all hyped up about is is always a nice bonus kind of reminds me of pseudo swap days when we're were all having fun over there but uh onto uh igen Lair they're adding some new lsts uh January 29th and they're also reopening the reaking window for assets between January 29th and February 2nd um kind of self-explanatory if you want in on that airdrop I guess presumably deposit some some lsts into uh igler and uh yeah I mean I'm seeing some huge expectations for the airdrop value on my timeline given the igen da and wider da narrative The reaking Narrative all the protocols popping up there does anyone have anything they want to say on on that

narrative yeah it's going to one quadrillion fully diluted valuation day one I mean based on my timeline I would I would take it as fact to be completely honest everyone's doing the moon math already but hey it worked out for d when he was doing the the goto calculations with the The Flash Bots premium so maybe it'll it'll actually launch it quadrillion um another one here we' talked about this a couple times sorry e did you have something there I was just gonna say I'm convinced nobody still understands what IG layer does like what an ABS actually is but yeah it's absolutely going to a quadrillion dollars because nobody understands what it is yeah I had to uh embarrassingly like someone dropped abs like that acronym in

the chat and I had to look up what it was cuz I swear there's like a new acronym every other day in this space it's really annoying actually but uh on to Avo we've mentioned this a couple different times probably got some salty team members here who fumbled some bags there because everyone knew this was going to happen but uh again we were probably too early uh the tge for Avo which is again the the ribbon token migration over to a new token on the op stack uh derivatives chain slated to occur before February 1st in it's my understanding that the tokens when you enter the migration will be locked for three months as s AO and sa AO holders get numerous perks such as boosted rewards uh two times voting power the ability to submit proposals as well as

discounted fees on the product or products I should say that they offer um and on top of that it looks like they're planning to do a pretty generous incentive program once that token migration occurs so I assume the rewards for the people who do migrate the token will be pretty fat they did a ton of volume last week they brought in like half a million fees which was pretty cool to see uh and just for extra context dydx V4 did about $750,000 of fees over the same time frame so um yeah I mean pretty bullish on on Avo I it's hard for me to distinguish if this is organic volume or people trying to game an incentive program with the rules not clearly defined yet or if people are genuinely

using these products because it's pretty good because admittedly I have not used it so I don't know if anyone can add some extra color on this one the secret to the high fees is creating the worst spreads in crypto you rank in the most fees but the actual platform itself is awesome it's it's crazy to see ribbon pump like this or to expand in value like this because um the liquidity to fully diluted market cap was insane for a long time like they dipped sub seven figure liquidity on the token and then it just something happened there someone added a bunch of liquidity which is great like I think

it's a great product but they really need to ramp up the market making on there to make it an actual enjoyable experience yeah I mean I'm coping right now uh you can actually see my capitulation wick on the coinbase ribbon usdc USD chart I held that thing bought bought it at a good price sold for a decent profit held it for probably like three to four weeks while Tia and everything else and the market was ripping while this thing was completely staying flat in low liquid shop and then like one or two influence influencers like tweeted about uh ribbon like last week or a week and a half ago and it preceeds the pump I don't know like 30 to 40% since so um overall good Pro good product I'm just a little but hurt I

think that the uh the ribbon team has really just demonstrated how Lindy they are because I remember like ribbon ER was a product and I thought that was super cool in the beginning but then I think something terrible happened with like uh credera lending platform because it was like under collateralized lending and then someone blew up somewhere and like the ability to recover from that and then pivot to like oh we're gonna make a roll app like just hats off to the team for staying alive not blowing up yeah one cool feature they have that I'm hoping they improve upon is like the pre token trading where you can trade tokens before they're live so I know when I'm looking trying to look at what

the price of Jupe or Dimension is going to be it's the first place I go in first place a lot of other people are going um I wish there was maybe more liquidity and trading volume but obviously it's a new product and people are testing it out but I think that's obviously like a really cool Innovation that they're they're working on all right on to the next one then um Instagram intern on Twitter toj is what I have written here on uh on my my note sheet uh they basically tweeted out a low cap coin and it went 6X immediately so I don't know if the Twitter was hacked like the sec's or if that's like a legitimate thing does anyone have like actual information on what happening there or is this just typical

Shenanigans in another day in crypto the ticker is swag and it fully retraced already but yeah they did they did tweet out about these these nfts for some like metaverse monster thing but I think they're like miniature Collectibles too which like I mean I can actually understand like consumer appeal for miniature Collectibles because my girlfriend is going insane over these things called like Calico Critters they're like these little tiny fuzzy things that like girls will just carry like five or six of them in their purse and like whip them out at a bar or something and they just like take pictures of them so I'm here for the the Minimon narrative

that's hilarious I'll have to have to get myself a furry little creature to carry in my wallet or something I don't carry a purse so I don't know where else I'd put it but anyways um exploit on H Bungie I'm probably butchering that just as bad as I did Rabbi but Bungie exchange as well as socket it's like some bridges um not really completely sure on exactly what happened here but it sounded like it was people who had infinite approvals on a certain contract uh basically were able to you know get their funds drained unfortunately so socket already came out publicly today on Tuesday this episode will probably air on Thursday and said that they paused the effective contracts sounds like great decentralization but side note um be careful with Bridges is the the main takeaway there and we've kind

of beaten that one to a dead horse so I'll just leave that one at that wesy I was actually curious on to get your thoughts on this next one vitalic posted I believe it was on Reddit that he would be for increasing the gas limit on mainnet today uh which was kind of a bit surprising obviously this isn't like a serious proposal or anything he was just kind of making a point like you know we can do you have any opinions on that or are you not too familiar with the scenario yeah I actually talked a bit about it on bell curve last week but yeah it's super interesting to come from him because it seems like there's this whole narrative push for all of the users on ethereum to jump to l2s that the L1 is just basically hosting rollup

data and settlement um and this is sort of antithetical to that where it's trying to create better performance on the L1 um so it seems kind of weird but at the same time you can understand where people are coming from obviously you see salana and high three foot chains do really well recently and obviously you want to attach yourself to some of that and gain liquidity mind share activity back and this is one way to do it um and there's also questions around client diversity here as well where you you know if you increase the gas limit then all of a sudden people are going to jump to the majority execution client because bayu which is like the second biggest execution client is way way way less

performant than gu and so it just gives more of a reason for people to just center around one client so those are like the two biggest issues but yeah to me it seems weird and I'd probably be slightly against it but like you said it's not anything super serious at the moment okay yeah I actually do remember someone prominent in the ethereum community coming out and and basically saying like yeah like let's not hold back ethereum performance for one you know really minority client uh execution client Bess I believe is what it's called um just yeah trying to maintain that in the client diversity because only like less than 1% of validators run it anyway so very helpful context thank you Wy and then I've got one more for

you guys and then I promise I'll stop rambling dydx V3 incentives are officially over with the conclusion of epoch 31 so now 90% of trading fees can be rebated on V4 for users on top of the six-month incentive program uh that's active and and was introduced by chaos lab so on top of that I saw Antonio tweet over the weekend that his goal for 2024 is to get 500 markets on dyd xv4 which is super cool they just registered an alltime high in Daily volume on V4 which was like 1.2 or three billion something like that if I'm recalling correctly so things are huming along over at dydx so that's that's pretty cool to see honestly it's nice to see the app chain thesis actually

proliferate and a lot of that volume starting to migrate over to the cosmos ecosystem effort I don't know if you have anything you want to share on dydx I know you're the cosmos bull out of us yeah I mean it's just good thank God that this the transition actually was smooth because if it wasn't I mean the cosmos ecosystem is starting to see some increased mind share again and increased liquidity like noble usdc uh um I think Native usdc issued on Noble and as like the conical usdc of the cosmos ecosystem uh is actually surpassed like optimism native usdc and a couple other major uh l1s in the crypto space so there's definitely it's almost at a hundred million doll market cap today so um

increase liquidity in the cosmos is good for ecosystem that was always like good Tech but just poor uh liquidity since the post USD collapse but I mean a Cosmos app chain is currently the largest deck and crypto by market volume uh so that's pretty huge I think and really a testament to the outch thesis yeah cheers to the dydx Believers that's pretty awesome to see in live production um but yeah okay so we'll head over to the hot seat cool Throne section but before we do that we got a quick word from Chorus one thanks to our fantastic sponsor dydx we're going to be doing five minute short clips with uh I guess Founders and relevant parties within uh I guess the ecosystem of dydx and parties that are relevant to you

know what they're trying to accomplish over there so definitely let us know in the comments if you like uh this this format and if you find the content valuable because that's ultimately the goal here we're not trying to be shilly we're just trying to have more of a fun take on advertisements so it's not as boring as listening to Dan or I or Ren or or someone else on the team basically just you know reading off a boring ad read so definitely let us know what you think we'll see you guys in a sec thank you this week we're starting a new segment which is a dydx segment in this segment we'll be inviting participants throughout the dydx ecosystem to talk about everything and anything happening in there for the first week we have Brian crane co-founder and CEO of corus one joining us thank you so much for

coming on Brian yeah thanks for having me yeah to start us off I mean course one has 50 plus supported protocols and nearly three billion dollars in stake assets you're one of the largest players in the validator space so throughout all of that what have you learned about the complexities and challenges that come with staking yeah I mean I think staking is really sort of at the core of running all of these crypto networks right like today like most uh networks are proof of stake networks and so you know doing what we're doing it really means you know running like a a big variety of different crypto networks with different consensus mechanisms all kinds of different stuff so I think uh definitely

one of the important things and things that you know really care about is to understand the technology deeply you know have really amazing Engineers uh you know we run our infrastructure on bare metal so you know really kind of control it fully uh care a lot about security of course another thing that's really crucial about running Val is I think is contributing to the networks we support and that can have many different forms of course running the nodes is one thing it can include contributing to governance decision making giving feed feedback we invest in protocols there's like many different ways we try to uh kind of help the network contribute to networks and then the maybe the third thing I mention

here is of course the the sort of relationship with the token holders because in the end the customer is uh and who who helps us generate our revenues right are the people holding tokens but it's not just people right it's people it's VC funds it's wallets it's you know ETF it's um exchanges it's custodians so lots of different parties and they have different requirements they need different products they need data in different ways some need API some need user interface so yeah I think dealing with all that figuring what you can do in the best way supporting all these protocols I think those are kind of the key things for I think for doing this

well so you mentioned how you support a lot of different chains and validate a lot of different chains what is the main differentiating factor factor for dydx one that comes to mind specifically for me is the the usdc revenue component as opposed to um the native token issuance potentially uh but I know there's also uh fragmented order books um amongst the validator set so maybe if you could just speak a little bit to at yeah I think you're absolutely right I think off the proof for State protocols I think DDX is probably the only one that I'm aware of that does not have any token issuance right so all of the revenues on dydx for the stakers and for us as validators come from the trading fees that people

are paying when trading on dydx and you know are paid in uscc so that is super super cool and I think that's and actually the sort of the staking returns aprs are pretty substantial at the moment on the dydx you know purely coming from Trading fees of course there like a lot of other things I mean just as a product dyx is is very unique right because you have this um incredible user experience for for a decentralized uh order book based deck so I think that's a it's just a super crucial product and I think it's really one of those projects where you know in the future you could imagine thousands tens of thousands of assets all over the world all being

traded in this one Exchange in a decentralized way so I think it's a it's in terms of the ambition and the scope of what uex is doing it's very unique and it's just very exciting and and find the user experience of the idx chain is just fantastic yeah with those unique features that a validator has to be in charge of also comes unique complexities right one of which is how me is managed on dydx I've read the papers that corus one has produced surrounding M on dydx and to be honest they seem like completely different games than the sort of me that one would think of on say salana or ethereum so what are your

thoughts on me in general and how do you kind of see that play out in the future especially pertaining to dydx so in general right me basically revolves around uh taking the transactions or the blocks and uh kind of using those in an optimal way to you know produce the most value right when those blocks are created and of course let's say if you look at ethereum there's a whole bunch of different parties that in that there's these block Builders then there's relays there's validators where this all is going is that each party sort of tries to do the thing that's profit maximizing and that's where the equilibrium is right so in ethereum when me kind of came up there was people were

like ah this is a bad thing it's a bad thing and of course not long later everyone was running flash BS right and everyone is doing it in the dydx case right dydx case basically came to us and they wanted to work with us on figuring out how to do me optimally for dyd xchain and the thing that's very different about idx is they control the application as well as the chain right they basically felt that um no you know we concluded right that if you're going to have me uh and people for example sandwiching uh users then this it's not a great thing right for the user experience and what what we came up with as a solution here was basically looking at what the

validators uh basically using like statistical measures to detect when a validator is doing something other than just taking the transactions in the order received and proposing the blocks like that and if that happens they basically get penalized so the idea here is that some kind of monitoring of what are all validators are doing and the potential slashing of validators who engage in some Meb um that kind of creates the incentives for a validator not to do that and and that's kind of the equilibrium we have on on dydx at the moment yeah that was super interesting Brian thanks for explaining how me kind of differs on dyd xchain versus others

and it's really cool and I'm interested to see it progress over the the coming years as to how that system to mitigate M Works um but thanks so much for coming on Brian we'll be sure to drop a link in the show notes to your Twitter do you mind sharing with people uh where they can learn more about chorus one yeah sure yeah just go to chorus. one so c h r us. one uh you know you can learn everything about the networks we support uh we produce a lot of research as well uh you know including on topics like Meb DX um and so you can also find all of that there or you can get in touch if you want to uh stake or have any other questions you want to discuss with us awesome and next week we will be talking with Kepler so uh listeners be sure to

put in the comments if you have any questions for them and we will be sure to ask uh thanks again Brian we'll talk to you later let's get started with some hot seat coolth Throne I'm going to start my hot seat off with a disclaimer I respect the salana foundation I respect salana mobile I I respect the the ambition it takes to launch a crypto phone um but I'm going to get into the the second drop of saga phones so I think the original price for sagas about a year ago was like a th000 or 00 and one of the perks of getting being you know one of the first to buy the

phone was you got this like Saga Genesis nft which made you eligible for all kinds of aird drops and like I think the dollar amount is like you got like at least $1,200 worth of airdrops between like Bon cleanosaur nfts and different things like that so sales came to like a complete halt for probably like a 3 or 4 month period um before 4 Q4 of last year and people were like oh my God this thing is dead but then Souls price started going up and you had a couple of manipulative people on Twitter like these are scarce nfts essentially like The Saga is a scarce fungible token

because it's a it's a physical thing so um people started aping into the phone and um they sold out which is like great like awesome you sold like 20,000 phones or whatever um but now they're launching the second wave of phones and you can pre-order them for I think $450 but they don't ship until the first half of 2025 and to like to add some cific to this they're like if you order the phone you get this referral link and the more people you refer to buy the phone the more points you get which can later be used to count towards like your Genesis nft which was initially supposed to go

to the Genesis purchasers of the first Saga phone and this is actually the third price decrease on the Saga phones because they dropped the price like halfway through last year because like sales completely stopped so like the the strategy here for the Saga phone is just kind of ambiguous at this point like it's like please salono devs if you're building something air drop something to The Saga phone people so they have a reason to buy but it's also like by the way please refer people after you buy your Saga like we'll give you points we need to end points points are so overdone and so like is this a consumer facing phone is this an nft is this like

a a scarce value thing like there's no clear product strategy for what the Saga phone is at this point and I feel like it's just been like really forced like in reality I do not want to use an Android phone right now I like the blue text that's all I have to say about this yeah I definitely want to reiterate we're done with points please like I feel like I see a new point system pop up every day and it's it's really getting annoying as a user but at the same time I can I can understand why team want to do points because it incentivizes more activity but at a certain point

people stop caring and they leave your application you need to obviously launch your token at the correct time but yeah I'm definitely just done with points but on the Saga phone specifically I I'd be curious if there's a lot of the original phones being sold on eBay Etc I'd wonder if obviously like the floor prices of the phones started dropping once once this went live because I mean you had basic basically what uh 2X and then total number of phones being launched um but I do think at the same time like you said this is sort of a little bit forced but I do think a lot of projects that are going to be focused

on the mobile aspect of things are going to air drop to Saga holders and so I think at a price of 450 probably could be lucrative on in that sense but at the same time you have to wait a whole year to even get your phone you're probably not even going to use the phone anym way you're just going to take the airdrop tokens sell them into usdc yeah I definitely have a lot of question marks too on this I do think though like even though it's probably forced I Salon is definitely trying to play this Playbook of being like the dpin chain and if maybe not this version of of saga phone but I could definitely see a future iteration of saga phone uh obviously

like partner with helium I think the first Saga phone did that and what one way shape or form um maybe like leveraging like Hive mapper like I can definitely see a bunch of deepin projects they building on salana starting to build their own sensors and then kind of like starting to actually help build like the parts of the Saga phone overall so it actually becomes like a um I don't know like a salana phone that's like built by the developers of major dpin protocols on salana so like there definitely is something there I think um I mean I'm not a really a big fan of points either but I also see the idea of like trying to gamify growing the adoption of of The Saga phone U I haven't looked into any of the details like is this version it's cheaper but does it have like better any

new features or anything cool that is like unique or is it just like another Android phone I think it's just another Android phone okay I mean I I do think like mobile adoption of crypto is like the future um I would really love to see like coinbase try to create like their own coinbase phone eventually that's leveraging like the full pin stack leveraging like R we ref file coin for like storage instead of using like Apple Cloud like the there's definitely a product there and I think it's really Brave that salana kind of went out originally to try to build this maybe it's a little too early and they're trying to just catch a narrative and raise raise Capital uh which I also get to um it's probably just too early but at the same time like the original Apple

iPhone was way too early it was way ahead of its time it only spoke to a really niche market but look how big the Apple iPhone ended up being like you got to dominate you the their their marketing campaign is like extremely Crypton native but that's exactly what you need to do you need to like get your initial uh you know hype fans that are like gonna you know live and die by The Saga phone and then eventually like it becomes like worldwide phenomenon so um you know probably overdone to the points play but I also see like why they're doing it let's be honest all of us are crypto DJ and this is what we like to see I also think the air drops kind of ruined that aspect of things because you have people buying like five of these

phones just to get the airdrops so any organic activity coming from mobile I don't think it's really going to be there and back to the uh the coinbase mobile point I think it is really interesting because Bas had a couple of apps that launched that you could add to your home screen on an iPhone so like obviously there's friend Tech and then there was like friend pet and clearly this security was not great on that compared to like saga's like MPC wallet that they have but I think that's kind of the way for mobile strategy right now is to do something where like you add it to the home screen you're getting past the Apple App Store and you're still getting like distribution to basically

anyone with the phone so I think there's like way lower barriers to entry doing it that way versus going and creating this like kind of like prehistoric Hardware that just can't compete with anything else yeah that's that's where the case kind of gets lost for me it's like I you're not going to take away my blue text messages it's just not it's not going to happen like I love the iPhone all my friends have an iPhone like it works with all of my devices seamlessly like airpods iatch mac like there's no way that's getting replicated but I will say like I'm excited about salana trying to do something different it's just very exhausting seeing a million of the same amm pop up the same per dexes the same nft marketplaces so I'll at least give

them a hat tip for for trying something new but uh effort what do you got in the hot seeder cool thre this week yeah I'll put the cosmos Hub and the atom asset on the hot seat um so there's been a lot of talk obviously about igen lay and and E3 staky and abs and what have you uh again I think think 99% of the crypto population has no idea what any of these actually are but they're going to bid I layer to a trillion dollars but um just this this week uh a project named ethos which I believe was incubated by polychain but don't hold me to that I could be wrong there uh there a Cosmos app chain that came out of stealth that's going to be built pretty much an

igay AVS that's going to offer shared security to Cosmos app chains um so pretty much you can be an eth uh you can delegate your eth restake it to ethos and then e ethos can pretty much uh ethos operators can offer shared security uh cheaper shared security to Cosmos act chains and potentially the cosmos Hub can so you know this is obviously really worrisome for the cosmos Hub as like the original vision for it was to become a shared security provider um there was really no you know that ethereum uh is offering shared security to rups but there was there was always like external competition for the cosmos Hub outside the cosmos ecosystem but now there's like internal compet

competition if ethos comes in brings eth liquidity brings eth security uh and it's going to be really interesting to see like will caos app chains and Cosmos developers it really becomes an alignment game at that at the end of the day and also a cost game too but I'm really curious to see like what's going to be a cheaper solution and what is going to be like uh what Cosmos developers decide to align with the Hub uh regardless of all the drams historically had or will they decide to align with like a newer Shiner uh shared security solution that has the promises of you know Pro potentially aligning themselves like ethereum ecosystem and ethereum capital um you know again I'm I'm a cosmos Hub bow overall uh but I

definitely think like ethos coming in and I think they're going to be launching sometime in like late q1 early Q2 with a couple consumer chains uh right off the bat um so definitely something to be worried about if I was like soing in Adam um but you know Adam also does have a couple things on the horizon like opt-in security which is going to offer like permissionless security shared security so uh today consumer chains have to like ask Cosmos Hub governance uh to join the the Shar security offering uh but I know in the next like couple quarters it's GNA be completely permissionless operators can decide what consumer chains to secure and what what not that should lower the cost of security that should make the cosmos hubs offering more scalable but

it doesn't have e you know a lore uh and also Ian layer like the whole narrative is brand new and shiny so um definitely worrisome for the cosmos Hub um and I I think you know even though shared security is g to be a commoditized market at the end of the day uh brand is a powerful thing and I would say like right now Adam's brand is not as strong as it really should be uh and it's even though it has like all the fundamentals in my opinion um it's just lacking like that clear narrative is that the only thing these app chains are going to be think thinking about when deciding between something like ethos and the Hub is it just like brand and narrative are there other specific differences between

implementations or between sort of eth as an asset and Adam as an asset yeah I think um I mean obviously eth is it's eth right it's like it's like the Unicorn outside of Bitcoin for the the entire crypto space so I mean outside of like brand um and Alignment it also is going to come down to cost so if you're an eth Staker today you're already getting you know 3% plus yield just from staking your eth and you're maybe willing to uh offer your e security at a cheaper cost per capital than an Adam Staker because an Adam Staker is not getting like this 3% plus yield like they're only strictly getting

yield through inflation and not uh transaction fees or what have you so I definitely think cost is going to come into play um and I also think like people don't want to deal with governance so uh you know I'm really looking forward to see what the optin security solution looks like for the cosmos I've been talking really closely with Jan who's like the lead developer uh for the cosmos Hub in that aspect um but I I think it's G to be interesting to see like dual security models so um like if you're osmosis you can actually leveraging ethos you can H have not only osmo token secure your app you can also have eth sec uh e uh securing your app chain as well so you're going to start

seeing like security aggregation where multiple assets are securing uh given avss or giving given app chains and at the end of the day like what would you rather have secur app chain today would you rather have eth or atom even though I'm an adom Bowl I probably take eth just because it's a more Lindy asset overall even though I think Adam is still an incredibly Lindy asset given it hasn't done much historically and still has a multi-billion dollar market cap but um it's really hard to just like fight the network effects what are some reasons why an app chain would create sort of a cosmos chain and then pay for security from Adam or eth versus having a rollup maybe a sovereign rollup that iner in security from Celestia or maybe eth and doesn't have

to pay inflation over time are there other considerations there yeah I mean I think right now like until I I've said this a lot like I think until we actually see a decentralized rollup I'm not ready to call like rollups cheaper than app chains all rollup I mean I might get like flamed for saying this in the comments but all the rollup is going to be is an app chain with like three or four validators or like 10 validators that are sequencing the transactions like yes you have like maybe different um security assumptions uh a sequencer versus like a full stack uh validator uh but

um yeah I mean obviously right now like I would say if you truly believe in decentralization like rollups just aren't ready and I would also argue that like a lot of rollup Frameworks aren't ready yet for mainstream um the op stack is probably the closest to compete with the cosmos SDK but the cosmos SDK is still like the best uh app specific blockchain framework uh in crypto today and I think for the foreseeable future that's going to remain the case um but I could definitely see a point where you launch as an app chain you find somewhat some product Market fit leveraging whatever shared security security solution you want and then maybe as these uh roll app Frameworks like through Dimension or through roll kid or something find maturity and economics

are a little more figured out then you kind of pivot to like a sovereign roll up over time but um yeah sorry we're kind of hammering your questions here eort but whatever happened with Adam 1 is that like getting any traction like is that fork the community and any sub substantial way since we last spoke about it nothing's happened uh it's I think the jquan is still kind of working on it there's like GitHub forums going back and forth where the community is talking about it but I I think that there's a pretty like big delineation or a big separation between those that are for Adam one and those that are mostly for Adam and I would say like a very very very small minority is actually like

interested in Adam one even though like the decrease inflation proposal was like a pretty even split 50/50 I think a lot of people that were against lowering the inflation that ultimately led to like the separation and the the creation of Adam one I think a lot of people that are were against the inflation prop weren't so against it that they're willing to kind of like leave Adam they're more so just like voicing their opinion like hey we don't want to decrease inflation but I also think they know that like you know uh I think Jay has kind of spread his resources thin and probably doesn't have the same uh not not just the bandwidth but like the ability and resources to actually stand up like a legitimate uh competitor to the hub um so I'm pretty Beed from Adam one

everyone was trying to like every all the narrative shills on Twitter were trying to say like how Adam one air drop is like bullish The Hub I mean look I'm like a big mid I mid curve everything I I just don't understand how that's a narrative at all there's so many other real narratives for the Hub but uh I sometimes don't understand like how this Market thinks that's pretty funny actually I think that uh narrative in quotations I'm I'm for the listeners I'm doing quotations with my fingers I think that was just on your timeline effort because I I didn't see that like literally at all what's up everyone March is approaching fast and I want to give you another reminder not to miss out on D London it is coming it's right around the corner and it's in March from the 18th to the 20th we have

three full days of content this is your chance to bump shoulders with some of the world's top Executives and have open dialogue with both attendees and speakers we're going to be focusing on a range of topics that I'll let Ren discuss for you first on the list we have Bitcoin Catalyst the Haring and spot ETF next we have a view from the buy side from investors on things like strategy portfolio allocation and more we also have a topic on AR Ras tokenization and stable coins which I think we can all agree are going to pay a large vot in crypto future we'll also talk about global regulatory Frameworks like compliance best practices and the evolution of global standards that are shaping the global investment landscape well also have someone from the institutional front to talk about infrastructure such as Banking and payments with financial giants like visa

and JP Morgan and last on the list the macro case for digital assets so don't miss out on this Monumental event seats are limited so be sure to register today by hitting the link in the description and using the promo code 0x10 to save 10% on tickets see you in London wesy who you got in the hot SE cool Throne yeah I can take over here um I actually have arbitrum in the hot seat um I full disclosure we're big delegates we love arbitrum but there's something that passed snapshot the other day which was a new longterm incentive program so L tip as they're calling it and they voted basically to put out 45 million ARB which is roughly hund million to give as

incentives uh for these protocols um so the pro proposal looks locked in to pass snapshot right now but we'll still have a substantial process before the incentiv actually start so you have like a 3-we tally vote a six week application process between then and then unknown operational overhead um yeah to me the reason why I put them in the hot seat is this kind of seems like frivolous spending especially after the STI program was just a few months ago and the whole point of that program was to figure out what kind of incentives drove the best outcomes for arberson as a whole uh this program was I feel like something like this program should build on the the previous process this one

only builds off the application process itself which do have did have a lot of issues but it has did no work in figuring out what the outcomes were how incentives affected certain outcomes Etc which I think is the most important part um so whether you're not but whether you're not you agree with this mending is still something you need to keep your eye out for just like the steps were last year where we can see which protocols stand to benefit at the most from having these incentives so it's going to be something to look out for but overall not the biggest fan what do you guys think about it I think we can see a good example of what happens with um this last round of op retroactive rewards and how like some

of the bodies came to the surface and it's like these totally fake causes and like fake initiatives come out and it's like oh they got paid like a quar million dollars to do what like the the website's not even active anymore for their project and uh I think this opens the door for a lot of that to happen later down the road I mean it's probably happening right now so it's not a great look but at the end of the day I'm I'm glad this ARB is vesting into the community instead of vesting into VC wallets yeah I think that's my like stamp of approval on it honestly it's just kind of more evenly Distributing

the supply to users because this is specifically targeted towards the end users which I think is a pro I also like spending treasury more so in Bull markets than I do so in bear just to get the most bang for your buck and I think you know arbs run up pretty substantially since lows like 3 4X so I don't mind spending a little bit but it does feel like there's quite a few cooks in the kitchen over in the arbitrum Dow it's there's like new proposals up every other day and a lot of it involves heavy treasury spending like wesy said we don't really know know with the last diffs program like what the real conclusions were on Effectiveness and I also have a question because I don't know why it's called a long-term incentives program are they like looking to yeah why is it called that it's the

same thing they have to spend it within 14 weeks right yeah I think it's just longer than the short-term incentive program and I think they're also implying that this will be continuous right that they'll be funding once this is over and to me that just indicates the treasury a revolving door of spending more money and spending more money and until there's a process in place of seeing where the clear outcomes are or incentives are being best spent until we do that then the spending is frivolous in my opinion I have a request that someone who receives this this L tip creates like an an rwa platform on arbitrum where I can stake some stables for 5%

apy but also get ARB rewards on top like make make something useful for me that like sweetens the deal on some stable coin yield one thing I'm thinking about is like all these incentive programs that like optimism throwing at developers and Builders and users arbit them as well obviously how does Bas combat that how does Bas like like Bas I don't think coinbase is going to be spending h100 million uh unless they come out with like a Bas token which obviously I think they've said no but i' have to speculate they do that eventually uh like uh assuming that they don't launch a token

like what is the incentive to build on base over uh you know over arbitrum giving out100 million in a 14we period That's crazy and we're calling that a pilot project which is not a pilot uh but yeah curious what you guys thoughts like how does like do you think developers are actually going to choose to build up Bas just because of The coinbase Branding or do you think they're going to follow like the incentives I think the incentive is distribution in a world where Bas gets a ton of users but like that experience needs to be beefed up substantially but distribution is a far greater incentive than cold hard tokens in your wallet if you're truly passionate about what

you're building and want to see like genuine usage of your platform well that's that last part is the ask risk that I agree I agree with but do whatever I'm not a builder in web 3 I'm just a researcher and I love the space but like do we actually think majority of De developers are actually here for a long time or are they here for a good time the meaningful ones have a huge ego in they're here for the for the long run Fair yeah I'd agree with pbl's take I think it's distribution over short-term incentives but it'll it'll be interesting to see how that actually plays out yeah I think like on something like

arbitrum the whole idea is to attract users to the chain whereas with base the whole idea is that coinbase has the users already they just need to take them and onboard them into web 3 and with that they'll go to base so either way as a developer you're either hoping to attract new people to the chain you're building on or in basis case be at a place that the users hopefully are just easily funneled to the whole idea is we want users as an application it'd be pretty cool to see arbitrum when they launch these incentive programs to juice the amount of fees that they charge users and then just take the extra Delta that they're earning as Revenue because then like you're kind of getting some of the value

of your ARB token back and it's also in an exogenous collateral and eth so it's a bit like selling tokens but without selling tokens just an idea if anyone in arbitrum is listening to this maybe uh throw it on the Forum but uh anyways I can did anyone else have anything else to to add to that right there or do you am I ready to go into my hot SQL then the only thing I'm gonna say is there's some there's two really lengthy uh Forum posts on arbitrum forms around like treasury management one by like the era Finance Gauntlet team uh and the other one by katki that I think everyone should definitely read um because I think when you're talking about100 million Grant programs when you're talking about the steps I forgot exactly what the amount for sips was like they're paying an ARB like that that's a

considerable amount of sell pressure for the ARB token which obviously is like reflexive negatively reflects a flywheel like more sell pressure on ARB ARB goes down that's less Grant capital for future initiatives uh but really well thought out and th over uh for and post around like how to allocate the treasury properly how do you actually leverage like protocol and liquidity create like deeper liquidity for ARB that it can fund these initiatives for a longer time frame uh but just wanted to bring that up because I thought they were really good reads this morning yeah we'll be sure to link to those in the show notes I'll have to grab those from you effort after the after we stop recording here but I'll move on to my cool Throne I guess actually the only cool Throne of the day

uh I've got blur about $30 million worth of tokens unlocked yesterday so that makes 18% of the total Supply having uh vested and unlocked since June 15th which I saw that from woo blockchain on Twitter and was pretty surprised that's like a subst amount of tokens but the price is up huge it's up from a low of 15 cents about a year ago or so up to 72 cents today so that's been a fantastic trade uh and all of this without Revenue share yet and I think that this is just a generally really good play if you're bullish on nfts at all I think that funds will probably use this as a proxy index token for nft exposure which pibbles has actually called out for literally since the token honestly

before the token launch so hat tip to you pibbles but um I think uh they'd rather hold those than than no liquid jpegs um but on the other hand that's less buyers in the market so maybe that's kind of more bearish for nft volume so maybe those two balance each other out but I think generally speaking nft marketplaces have a huge uh Redemption Arc this cycle we have never seen Revenue share with nft marketplaces during a bull run and uh I mean for for some context openc was bringing tens of millions over $40 million a month of Revenue during a bowl and all that was just going to the company behind openc so for extra context on top of that dydx put in like 80 million dollars of earnings over the last year so I mean

that's just like nft marketplaces were bringing in way more Revenue than than perss even so I think put a revenue share on that and you kind of get a a really nice uh nice setup for blur basically and then on top of that the same founder packman I believe is behind blast please correct me if I'm wrong there I might be botching that but I think that kind of plays into the blur narrative a little bit even though blast will probably launch its own token I think that there'll be some synergies between the two um so yeah generally speaking like tzer blur like these Pro style nft marketplaces that are genuinely better than the competition on their chains I think they'll do really well because they have genuinely good products um and I think that funds that want exposure to this stuff will will

definitely be opting for the token over the nfts but uh not sure if anyone here has thoughts on blur yeah I would just say add to that um blast test net actually got announced so that's probably like a huge Catalyst for why blur is doing so well this week and obviously people knew this last week and you can see it on the chart um but also like they're doing this contest for dap developers on blast like there's actual judges and they'll be connected with investors so blast is kind of taking all the necessary steps to have usable things on day one um so I think most of the price auction or action ties back to blast for now but doe second that all

the uh the nft index thesis and everything else with Blair is super good reason to have exposure to Blair yeah yeah I'll also reiterate that Pacman is the founder of Bol blur and blast and the whole point at least from him of building blasts is to create a better environment for trading nfts so having it on a roll up and have native yield for the eth that's bidding these assets he thinks are just a better uh just platform in general and eventually it'll migrate to blast but I wonder what that looks like because obviously you're trading noots that exist on Main net so how would you ex you trade them on a rollup maybe you have some sort of like

IOU that represents your ownership of the token on L1 that maybe is locked in the bridge contract not really sure what that's going to look like but I'm you know interested to see that design designs as they come out but yeah as P said they're they're doing their best to try and have on day one of midet a lot of applications things to use on mainnet and with $1.3 billion dollar in the bridge I believe right now obviously there's enough incentive for Builders to try and Port their application there and try and you know gain some mind share some activity Etc and I do think once this thing launch launches as much as I don't really like how they went about their whole announcement Etc I do think

it's primed for a lot of weird and interesting activity uh probably a lot of uh debauchery meme coinery Etc there $ 1.3 billion do in capital people are just looking to utilize on the chain and so yeah A lot's going to happen and I'm definitely gonna be looking forward to that that launch just around um not specifically blur but like nft marketplaces in general uh also want to quickly put like bad kids on the cool Throne uh so if you guys don't know bad kids are like the nft collection for the cosmos ecoystem um and I think stargaze is like the The nft Marketplace app chain of the cosmos ecosystem they're like OG Builders there

um I think it's GNA be really interesting to see like how how star Stars which is like the stargaze native token trades uh along with blur especially like if there's this whole narrative that like blast is like the blur L2 and it gets like an L2 valuation and you're seeing Stars so Stars right now is fully diluted at like 135 million Val blur is at like 2 something billion right now and obviously blur has like the Aller of being an Ethel to it does a I'm sorry an ethereum nft Marketplace it does a lot more volume and revenue than stargaze like for sure ERS of magnitude but I do think that um stars could be like a catch-up play uh or a it might get a reating uh with with blur like continuing to increase in value

especially like off the back of blast and also bad kids has become like again like the nft collection owned in the cosmos ecosystem they've already if you own a bad kid you've already received a TIA Air drop you've you're gonna receive a dimension air drop you're you already received a namada air drop and I think you're starting to see that like everyone that is launching a cosmos sa chain is air dropping to bad kids holders uh and there's a couple other um collections tied to the bad kids collection as well like bit kids is one um they're pretty cool I've owned one I think the floor right now is like $4,000 I think it was like a free mint when it first went live uh so just really interesting something interesting to see

and I'm pretty bullish overall like the stargaze platform and the developers over there uh but thought it was Rel you know uh since we were talking about blur I thought it was good to bring up stargaze and bad kids I used stargaze one time to me stargaze Troopers like two years ago they were like a stargaze validator I just checked their Twitter account they have not tweeted since July 2022 so you know I think I'm done with stargaze I just bent the knee and bought one actually so that means all the airdrops are probably in the rearview mirror um so full disclosure for anyone looking to buy one and I think I

actually I just said a bid in to and I think I got the ugliest one in the entire collection so that was that was pretty unfortunate honestly that's bullish do you know what the token like um I guess Supply looks like for stars out of curiosity effort like how much of that is vested slash is anything set aside for incentives I'm not gonna lie I don't know off top of my head um but maybe we can include it in the show notes uh in a link if I can find the supply contract or like Supply schedule cool cool that sounds good all right well I think that's a good spot to end it West E pibbles effort thanks for for coming on as always and taking out out of your day we will chat with you guys next week hey everyone thanks for watching today's zero X research episode

I wanted to take a second and remind you about an upcoming 2024 digital assets Summit in London this March seats are limited so hit the link in the description and use the promo code 0x10 to save 10% on tickets see you in [Music] London