USDC leaving Tron, Airdrop chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #735 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of delway refuel where C latest news in etherum ecosystem I'm your host and z and today the 21st of February 2024 right everyone let's get into it so before jumping into the news over the last 24 hours just wanted to give a quick shout out that the daily guay refu or I guess like the daily gray Channel SL podcast is uh growing again now obviously you guys know that the content I do on this show is I would say very involved and very kind of Niche it kind of caters to the people who are really into the ethereum ecosystem have a lot of background knowledge about what's going on and it's definitely not for for the newbies out there now I have said before that we were at about 4,000 daily listeners Slaters of of the refuel and that's since been trending up now of

course I think this is a natural consequence of the fact that the market has been trending up things are getting you know more exciting from that point of view and I'm curious to know like how many new people are part of that cohort so if you are new to the Daily gay uh show be sure to let me know in either in the YouTube comments or in the Discord Channel I'd love love to hear from you uh but yeah we're up to I think uh 4,500 per day now so as I said like because the channel obviously is not anything that's going to be catering to a mass audience and I've purposly done it like that because I don't really care to cater to a mass audience uh that kind of growth is actually pretty substantial and pretty noticeable uh and I do notice that when I look at the stats on the

podcast and on the um and on the YouTube shows here so it's really great to to see that and that's just the refuel when it comes to the drive-thru the episode that I did with Eric had over 6 thousand listens and and and watches on it which was just awesome and you know I really hope that we can do more of those episodes I really love doing the episodes with Eric I know it brings a lot of people back to the Into The Ether days when Eric and I used to do that podcast uh back in the day and as I said before Eric and I just bounced really well off each other and it works really well so I'm hoping to do more of those going forward uh but yeah that got over 6,000 views so I still I feel I still think the most viewed kind of episode or

listened and viewed episode I've done was the one I did with uh with Kobe which was a while ago now and I think they got like 10,000 or something like that um but obviously Kobe has a really big presence within the ecosystem not just within the ethereum community but within other communities out there so that makes a lot of sense there but maybe we can Dethrone that episode one day me and Eric or maybe even the refuel dethrones it uh but yeah as I said refi was at about 4,500 a day average uh and that episode with Eric did over 6,000 which was really really great to see uh and you know I had people kind of messaging me that don't ever really watched the refuel saying that they kind of listened and watched the episode with Eric and even my dad actually called me

and he's like so I listen to the episode you did with Eric and I laughed cuz I'm like well did you understand anything we were talking about and he's like uh yeah kind of uh but not really because he also follows me on Twitter which is even funnier because he'll sometimes bring up my tweets and he's like who are these people that just like come at you with this with this stuff and you kind of hit them back and I'm like well we call them reply guys uh and he doesn't really understand but it's kind of funny when he he says that he's kind of following me on Twitter and he sees my tweets I'm just like yeah that's just the way it is I said to him it doesn't really affect me anymore these reply guys I I I understand and you know they're just

kind of a lot of the time they're just noobs to the ecosystem they don't really understand what they're saying and sometimes they even just Bots right uh but yeah it's kind of funny when I got that but yeah I I'm looking forward to doing another episode with Eric on Friday as I said the other day we're going to be talking about how to take profits in the in the bull market uh because Eric has a lot more experience there than I do and as I mentioned the other day he is he is very very good at doing it but I'm going to give my kind of thoughts in it too uh and also on top of that we're going to be answering uh hopefully all but it depends on time but like hopefully all the questions that have been asked in the AMA series channel in the deade Discord channel uh

so yeah maybe it'll end up being a pretty long episode there just depends on kind of how that shakes out but anyway spent enough time talking about that stuff let's dive into the news from the last 24 hours so as you guys know client diversity is a huge topic within the ethereum ecosystem and right now it's all about the client diversity on execution layer side of things we're trying to get gu to below 66% which is that critical threshold and ideally down to you know below 60 50% sort of thing and I mean in the in the perfect case scenario we would like them to be at around 30 maybe 40% sort of thing but let's just get them below 66% before we start thinking about perfect case scenarios but the reason I bring this up today is because Thorston here who is very involved within the ethereum

staking an infrastructure space being around for a long time I've actually met him really really nice guy uh but he tweeted out this uh this tweet today basically saying that according to this other website that tracks client diversity gu is at around 75% right now now remember the other day I mentioned that uh client diversity. org has gu listed at 69% but that doesn't have 100% coverage and that I think it has about like 60% coverage and it's also based on publicly available information and the uh I guess maintainer of Cl the client diversity website going out there and asking each operator what they what they're running here and with this resource that Thorston is using I think is using network crawlers uh because it has about 93% network coverage here it might be a mix of both Network crawler

and uh and publicly available information and I remember I I kind of highlighted this website but I can't remember what the website is but it was a website that allowed you to basically change the sliders here for the client diversity share of each of the node operators and you could actually see that if you know these node operators got off 50% G for example and went with 50% something else what that would actually have what effect that would actually have on the overall gu dominance here now Thorston replied to his own tweet by saying if coinbase Kiln and Kraken committed to running only 50% death we are very close to solving this theoretical with 50% % gu for those three it brings us to 64% G so as I said the other day coinbase is uh basically going going to give us a update by the

end of Feb and if they don't we're going to put pressure on them to give us an update there but yeah it only takes a few of these big players to really really move the needle here so I just wanted to give an update on that and as I said the other day when I covered this the any of the data sets that we have are not going to be perfect the best we can do is try and get the super majority clients uh kind of down as much as possible even if we have certainty or relative certainty that they're already at like 66% or below 66% we need to get it you know lower than that we ideally no client has over 50% market share I think on either side there and I think that it really is only gu right now because if I go to client divers

unity.org and I bring the website up for you guys here I scroll down you can actually see that no consensus layer client is over 40% right now uh and that's based on I guess uh the sigma primes data but then if you go to megal laabs and rider. network they have you know there's different data here but they're all around 40% or lower which is really healthy obviously because they're nowhere near the 66% mark and it doesn't seem like that's going to be a problem going forward because all the clients are really really great but as I've said on the execution layer side of things you know these big operators have been kind of hesitant to go with some of these other clients because they didn't think they were up to scratch but they definitely are these days especially ones like nethermind and and even Basu I

think Aragon is still a little bit uh I guess behind here on that front but they are definitely kind of catching up there but but uh yeah we just want to have get below kind of 50% I think is like the goal for the next maybe year or so but in the goal like within the next few weeks should be below 66% ideally we get that to that Milestone before denune hits like that's the kind of thing that we should be aiming for denune is not far away now you know it's a few weeks away 3 weeks or so whatever it is so yeah hopefully we get to that uh part there now uh related to this topic as well there's another client that you guys know that I've talked about before called WTH which is being developed by the Paradigm team this is a CL an execu

layer C client built in Rust it is still in kind of like Alpha Beta uh I guess uh mode right now where it's basically not recommended to run in a production environment and that's why you really don't see it run in a production environment there are people running it uh on the I think there are some brave people running it with validators attached to it but you're not going to see any large providers running this client just yet but the reason why I mentioned reth today is because Georgio uh the I guess lead developer I think on re at Paradigm tweeted today that re that re's audit has commenced so they're getting an official order done here which I guess would coincide with maybe like a a proper Beta release and then maybe like a public release but still once it's kind of release like that

there's still going to be a while like I would I'm going to have to say like a very long while before any of the large providers are comfortable running that client because at the end of the day these clients are going to have validators attached to them and they're going to need to perform well in order for the validators to be profitable in order for the services to be profitable to be competitive right so we will see more adoption there but I think that you know the audit will get done it'll release either in a beta fashion still like the next version of the beta or it will release as kind of you know public release a full public uh a permission list kind of release there or at least not a Beta release there but we'll have to see how that kind of shakes out but anyway you can go check

out Thor's tweet about client diversity I'll link it in the YouTube description below and looking forward to hearing more about this uh I guess like w audit as time goes on all right so I spoke the other day about how we don't really have any good lists for solo Staker airdrop so basically we don't have any lists that have a definitive list of solo stakers because it's really hard to get one of these lists now there's been two efforts that have been uh I guess like tried so far one of them being from the rider. network team and the other one being from I I can't remember the exact name I think it's GLC something I linked this the other day uh and that list was or at least for my my kind of um anecdotal evidence was more comprehensive than rider. Network's list because rider.

networks list only went up to 500,000 validated the first 500,000 and validators right but the reason why I bring this up today is because Alias here allias sorry I should say here from uh the rad Network team has uh put out a tweet today saying we have updated our curated solo stakers list to include another 1,000 addresses that the first run did not classify appropriately Downstream Stark net has updated their distribution logic and another 6.9 million Stark will be claimable by the newly tagged addresses and uh you know as you guys know the Stark token went live and was trading and was claimable over the last 24 hours as as well and this uh this definitely uh played into that and I saw people tweeting out and kind of talking about in the Discord Channel saying that their eligible validators were counted this time and

they got the airdrop so that was great to see but I'm liking this I'm liking this fact that we're getting you know these lists uh and refining these lists because they're going to inform a lot of aird drops going forward and I'm going to talk about some of the upcoming ma massive air drops at the end of the episode today I've got a I've got a list that I want to talk about there but I feel like that stet has started a trend now and it's going to be basically expected now that the at least the the the um big ethereum kind of aligned projects are going to be airdropping at least a portion of their token Supply to solo stakers and of course we also want them donating up to 1% of their total token supply to the protocol Guild as well which is kind of related to I guess

uh what I'm saying about ethereum alignment I mean not not kind of related it's directly related here uh but yeah it's great to see that we're refining the list because it means we have more coverage it means that uh we can have more confidence that people are going or people can have more confidence in spitting up their own solo Staker nodes and solo Staker validators and and becoming a node operator themselves in order to get access to some of these aird drops and I've already seen some people tweeting about this saying that they've they've specifically become a solar Staker because of the fact that they want to be eligible for these airdrops so I mean this is great guys this is financial incentives at work right but as I said we need to have a really good canonical and kind of like wellde well I guess respected list that

is able to cover the vast majority I mean there's always going to be ones that sleep through the cracks we're going to be able to cover the vast majority of solo stakers both existing and uh new uh but anyway yeah you can go check out uh uh basically the updated list here I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so some news out of circle today so Circle are is the company behind the usdc stable coin uh now the news uh from today from them is basically that they're discontinuing usdc on the Tron blockchain in a f phase transition effective immediately we will no longer mint usdc on Tron transfers and redemptions of usdc on Tron will continue to operate normally through February 2025 and then you can read the details here of course now people were

kind of speculating about this today about what the reason for Circle kind of pulling out here on Tron uh and honestly I don't think it requires much speculation I am like 99% confident about the reason I'm about to give as to why they actually did this but I do want to give a little bit of History here first I remember saying on the refu I I'm pretty sure I said this on the refu if I didn't say it on the ref I did say it to my to my uh to a lot of my friends in in the ecosystem I said I didn't understand why Circle was doing this strategy of putting usdc on multiple chains like they were trying to get usdc everywhere basically instead of sticking to like the top chains right and the ones that they can actually compete on and doubling down on those because

there's usdc on pretty much like every chain or every chain that's I guess like somewhat relevant or somewhat talked about and I always thought that that was a mistake and I think that them pulling out of Tron which is one of the bigger chains is uh pretty pretty uh I guess like uh pretty big evidence of that right and pretty much validates my thesis around that so that's the kind of context there in the background uh now the reason why I believe that they go they're kind of pulling usdc off Tron is because Tron uh has a very very big user base of tether of usdt usdt is extremely dominant on Tron it is more dominant on Tron than ethereum for smaller payments like there are so many people that use it in South America in Africa and I've talked about this on the refuel plenty

of times before but I think that is the sole reason that circle is pulling out here now is this a good or bad thing I think it's a really good thing because as I said I don't think that they should be putting usdc on every chain like the shotgun approach I really think they should double down on where they're going to be the most successful now of course this begs the question where are they going to double down on now that they've pulled usdc off Tron where are they going to make up for this loss of market share well to me that's obvious because if you connect the dots coinbase owns I believe 25% of circle coinbase and circle work extremely closely together usdc is basically considered the coinbase stable coin so what else does coinbase have that could act as a nice payments layer for usdc well the

base a layer to blockchain right so I think that and I hope that honestly I mean I I think and I also hope that circle is now going to put in a lot more effort into scaling up usdc on bass because usdt does not have a foothold there bass is a coinbase owned product right now it's still centralized right it's not decentralized coinbase has a extremely vested interest in both Circle and base doing well so it is an absolute no-brainer to me that they should be getting usdc to be the dominant stable coin on Bas now how can they do this well the most obvious and the something that they've already done is offer free transactions on base for usdc that is something that they can offer right now

it's obviously something they have to pay for because it's not quote unquote free but they're the ones running the sequencer so they're basically just paying for the execution costs uh and obviously the cost to settle down to ethereum L1 but really uh uh most of the cost falls into the execution here that they have to kind of do in the background and it just becomes a line item on you know on their kind of like company company I guess like uh how they run their company right as coinbase yeah and by doing this it basically gives usdt or or or tether zero chance of getting a foothold on base because tether is not going to be free to transfer so if you're going to be using a stable coin you're obviously going to want to use the one that's free to transfer you're going to use the one

that has you know the deepest liquidity that has the backing of the you know the the companies on the chain that you're using so I think that they're going to be doubling down on on Bas and I mean I hope that they're going to be doing that because they can very quickly scale up base to be an absolutely awesome payments chain that can be integrated with all of the existing Integrations that Tron has so that we can finally supplant Tron uh with a layer two uh and the reason why I say this is because Tron obviously is another layer one blockchain it is something that I don't consider to be decentralized at all and it has zero plans to be decentralized it is obviously run by or at least kind of was created by Justin sun which is not you know who obviously is not a great

character in the ecosystem he's an a lot of shady things in the past of course uh and uh bass is just much better it's a layer two it's backed by Queen base a very legitimate company right uh and and as I said like TR tether does not have a foothold on Bas yet so getting usdc uh to have a foothold on there is a no-brainer to me and I really think that uh Circle should pull usdc off of some other chains as well that are that are just completely irrelevant at this point I mean as I said they have usdc on pretty much everything I feel like they should redirect their efforts all to pretty much bass honestly if they just redirected all of their efforts to base they would be able to capture an absolutely massive amount of market share because they already have pretty

big market share on ethereum L1 as well but if they want to keep growing if they want to really compete with tether they're going to have to uh basically make Bas the payment chain I think that's really one of the only ways or maybe it's actually the only way for them to compete with Tron uh and compete with usdt on Tron is basically make a better payments platform which is what Bas can be and because bass is also much more than just a payments platform right it's integrated with things like farar it's integrated with the entire op stack because it's built on the op stack it's part of the super chain there are so many Network effects that can be gathered here and if usdc is the default you know deao stable coin of Base it's going to get a lot of growth so I hope

that they're doing this I hope they're doubling down on this we'll have to see but I'm very glad that I feel like my thesis has been validated around the fact that I thought it was a mistake that Circle was doing the shotgun approach of putting usdc everywhere because one I mean tether already is very large and has a foothold uh where it matters on on chains like Tron right for things like payments uh and two uh it just it fragments your kind of attention it fragments what you can focus on uh and I believe that with stable coins you really need to be laser focused on uh on maybe one or two chains uh and and kind of getting a foot hold there then you can maybe expand from there but eh do you need to expand probably not I feel like Circle did it

as a defensive move where they're like you know let's have usdc on this chain so people just use usdc instead of tear instead of another stable coin and it didn't really materialize like that because these other chains basically um either failed they got no usage or usdc lost in a really big way to tether which is what they did on Tron so yeah but I'll keep you guys updated on on what happens here but I really do hope that they double down on on base uh now that they've pulled out of Tron hope they they put all their effort into that because I feel like that's the best use of uh their time and uh and money all right so another layer 2 has joined the igen layer ecosystem so today uh that is fluent so fluent for those of

you who don't remember is a zkm L2 that's being built on ethereum and a disclosure a disclosure here you guys know I'm an adviser to fluence so just getting that out of the way but you can see here they announced in a tweet thread that fluent base has integrated with igen layer avss and they've announced a partnership with IG layer to integrate this Frame framework with several actively validated services including igen da and espresso systems and just a refresher fluent base is a modular framework for building ZK WM based Computing environments the framework is customizable and will support 100% WM and evm compatibility modular chains and arbitrary verifiable programs and different flavors of chains including Roll-Ups and validium I'm really glad to see that more and more projects are using Igan da here because

obviously IG da is the flagship product of igen layer it is going to be their biggest kind of product or biggest abs for quite a while I believe uh because of the fact that the IG ler team has been building it for a while it's go it's something that they're going to be putting all their effort into and it's something that obviously has already has product Market fit because we already know that these layer twos that don't necessarily want to pay to store their data on eth L1 maybe because it's things like a payments Network or maybe it's like nfts doesn't doesn't really need to be spending all too much on fees doesn't need to be a full rollup doesn't think the full security of ethereum right they can put their data elsewhere and we're seeing some of them uh you know Cho Celestia but as I've said before I

believe that Igan da is the better solution because of the fact that da costs are erased to zero and with I da at least you get e Economic Security uh uh sorry the restake e Economic Security there instead of relying on some new token that's that's part of a chain there so I'm I'm really glad to see that happening but I'm also glad to see that we're soon going to be seeing uh some of these WM uh or ZK WM kind of environments on the l2s because as you guys know my most bullish case for l2s isn't necessarily that they're scaling ethereum because that's table Stakes I mean if you're an L2 of course you're scaling ethereum but the most bullish thing about them to me is the experimentation that's happening because this experimentation used to happen on layer ones you know a big reason why a

lot of layer ones got spun up outside of the griess of doing your own kind of like layer one token in order to make money you had no plans to like beat ethereum to begin with right um but like a lot of uh people were frustrated because they couldn't change ethereum layer one right or if they wanted to change ethereum layer 1 it would take a long time because the governance process is slow so what they would do is they would spin up a new layer one and basically be like okay we're going to like do everything that we think ethereum should be doing and we're going to fix like What ethereum U should be fixing and we're going to do it maybe not using the Eva maybe using something else and there are multiple examples of this right cardano doesn't use the evm uses the U EU utxo uh kind of model

salana uses the svm you have um uh uh a few other chains out here like polka dot doing their own thing as well I think they were doing WM stuff too but they had like the whole relay chain model there um there's there's a few others out there and the funny thing is though is that the most successful l1's uh uh well most of the most successful l1s that basically had a bit of activity on them and a lot of them have died off now but they had a bit of activity on them were a BSC that's an evm Network Tron evm Network Phantom evm network avalanche's uh evm sub net which is the most used by far right evm Network um what else is there I'm missing other chains here I'm just going through the list list on on coin gecko there's there's other ones here that I'm missing

right now that were evm networks right uh and then obviously the l2s as well the most successful ones are evm too but in saying that I think that just because the evm is dominant and has been the most successful doesn't mean this experimentation isn't worthwhile isn't worth doing and doesn't mean that some of these other networks aren't going to uh you know attract um activity in their own right as I said Solano is svm it's attracted activity in its own right it it's not evm at all it's it's built from the ground up to be something new and they were able to to kind of like get an ecosystem going they were able to get obviously uh liquidity and and and trading volumes and all the good stuff that we see on on ethereum L1 and l2s and now essentially with the l2s what we

get to do is we get to do that um without without fragmenting uh the the kind of community yes we fragment liquidity and all that and I've talked about that before but we don't fragment the ecosystem we basically keep it inhouse right and and I talk a lot about this actually with um the uh the people that I did the layer 2 podcast with with bankless we recorded it the other night I don't know when it's going live live actually I forgot to ask when it's going live but we recorded it the other night it was great honestly like it was a fantastic discussion it was one of my favorite podcasts to do uh I did it with just a refresh here Mike iolo and um Jordi Alexander uh and obviously the bank list host David and Ryan uh it was a fantastic episode we dived very kind

of deep into these things and we kind of talked both about the tech and the tokens themselves right uh you guys know my opinions on the tokens so probably nothing I said on there is going to be news to you but the tech discussions were really interesting because I think the main takeaway and not to spoil anything from the podcast but the main takeaway for all of us from that podcast is that there's so many open questions around l2s right now about like what's going to be the most successful are people actually going to use things other than the evm you know is something like the zkm or the svm as an L2 is that stuff actually going to take off long term and really uh you know outside of the open questions around Tech it was also open questions about value acral too so we all basically agreed on that

there's so much kind of unknowns but it's so exciting because of that like this is basically like ethereum uh back in 2015 or even 2014 where there was just so many unknowns about what people were going to do with ethereum right what people are going to do with this new primitive of a world computer uh and I think we got the answer to that like most of it is defi right a lot of a lot of it is DJ stuff but then uh we we basically came to the conclusion that ethereum is a root of trust right it's a settlement layer and now we're building these l2s as experimental environments to basically build anything we can dream of so that's what I'm most excited about when it comes to l2s but anyway I rambled a bit there you go check out fluence announcement about their

partnership with iglay here uh great to see that happening there all right so optimism has announced another airdrop today this one goes to I guess a niche or unique uh set of users so they announced uh airdrop 4 which is allocating over 10 million op tokens to 22,000 unique addresses now the eligibility criteria for this is different to I guess past eligibility criteria basically uh it's basically going to a lot of the creative on the optimism kind of I guess like op stack not just op main net but I believe kind of Bas as well uh and you can kind of go and read the blog post to see what the eligibility criteria is but it was mostly around creators kind of nfts you

know the social side of things um and you know uh basically um uh uh bringing nft collections on chain and kind of minting them stuff like that so yeah you can go check this out if you see if you're eligible for it if you didn't know about this air drop but that is a huge sum of money guys that's like I think almost $40 million us right now or something like that uh in terms of kind of the amount of uh dollar amounts on the op here so yeah that that's huge right to uh over 22,000 unique addresses unfortunately I wasn't eligible for this because you guys know I don't really mess around with nft stuff too much but if you do and if you think you're eligible you can go check this I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do

so all right so last thing here was a cast that I put out on farcast and I did mention this earlier in the episode that I'd be talking about this with regards to to airdrops so I put out a cast where I said some big airdrops still left to come and this is obviously in the wake of the Stark net air drop uh where I said that I I gave a list here of a few uh projects igen layer ethery puffer swell scroll zyink Tao and Athena and then I continued and I said I'm obviously definitely missing some here but that list alone will have billions of dollars flowing to ethereum users now I I did stick to really the ethereum based projects that are airdropping obviously there are other projects in other ecosystems that are going to be airdropping as well but I feel like this list here is

probably going to be worth the most and look I'm not just saying that because everything on this list I'm either an advisor to or an investor in I have to disclose that obviously and you guys know if you just listen to the show but I'm not just saying that because of uh because I've got a vested interest in it I'm saying it based on a number of different factors now I I want to outline those factors for you guys so you guys can get an idea of how I came up with this billions of dollars number right so let's do a baseline assumption here are and it's it's going to be more or less for different projects but let's do a baseline assumption that these projects air drop 5% of their total token Supply each of them right 5% of their total token Supply uh to their

users or to whoever else right that's the total air drop it it it probably likely is going to be more than that but I'm keeping it on the conservative side here so let's look at igen layer for example so if you want to try and evaluate what igen layer should be worth or it's going to be worth when it launches you have to do a relative valuation now okay what's the closest thing to layer right now that's publicly traded I would argue that it's Celestia okay what's Celestia is fully diluted valuation last time I checked it was like $8 billion right so you would make the argument or those people like to make the argument that once igen ler launches it's going to be worth1 18 billion fully duded at least like that's the basically the flaw or I guess like the the starting point now that argument

seems pretty sound I think uh not you know obviously it being worth that much is going to be very good for a lot of people but uh I think the argument is sound because we see see these relative valuations happen all the time and we see this play out like all the time within the crypto ecosystem so yeah you could argue I layer you know uh 18 billion as the floor but then people will say well Igan layer is much more than just da right Igan ler isn't just I da there's a lot of other things going on and there's like six billion or whatever it is 8 billion tvl in Igan ler right now and um Igan L has a lot more hype than Celestia does and Igan has is part of the ethereum ecosystem which has more money than the other ecosystems do

so you could argue that and you could say well maybe IG L opens more than 18 billion but I'm not going to put a number on it I'm not going to tell you what what I think here because I'm getting into very speculative territory here and as I said I am an investor in igen ler it is my largest Angel investment to date I think I've said that before so obviously if it opens to that that kind of evaluation you know i' I'd be a happy camper uh but also I investing in things like that obviously but regardless of that I don't want don't want to make it about me of course um if we say just clean nice clean numbers ananl is worth 20 billion out of the gate right well if they air drop 5% that's a billion dollar air drop right there right that right out of the gate

it's a billion dollars aird drop to people right there if it's just if it's a 5% air drop if it's a 10% air drop that's $2 billion but let's just s at 5% it's a billion dollar air drop to obviously Ian layer people that were getting the points people that that um restake with Igan layer people maybe solo stakers um you know maybe other users of ethereum I don't know what the criteria is or anything like that I I actually purposely avoid looking at anything like uh when I'm invested or or an advisor a project I try not to look at any of the criteria or any of the kind of stuff around the token I also don't participate myself I don't do any aird drop farming at all in anything I believe it's a it's a deep conflict of interest and I refuse to to do that I I

would not be able to live with myself if I did that obviously have to trust me on this but I don't I don't do any of that that that stuff um because I am invested in these things and I do sometimes have access to privilege knowledge because maybe the team wants my feedback on uh you know what the token's going to look like or what the distribution is going to look like of course I always advocate for things like you know 1% non-negotiable protocol Guild please do it right and some of these teams have actually already agreed to do it because of me saying that um but then on top of that as well there's other things like and know who else should you edge up to and obviously I've been advocating for solo stakers and things like that but I'm just kind of like giving my feedback

they're not going to model it off of what I say Obviously or you know they're not going to model all of it off of what I say uh but that's how I kind of think about it there and then we can move down the list here and we can look at e thei puffer and swell which are all LST LRT protocols closest comp for that is I think Lio as the most valuable one so if you look at Lio you can say lao's fully DED valuation right now is 3 billion um and then you can look at rocka poool is the next closest comp I think if you go and look at RPL that's worth around $600 billion Fu diluted valuation uh then you can do like a naive tbll thing where eifi has I think $1.5 billion tbll puffer about billion SW 800 million or

something I think uh so I mean they're pretty close to each other rela here but then you look at lios tvl and it's like 20 billion or something so doing a naive kind of tvl to fully diluted valuation it's probably not going to give you much signal there so let's just take a nice middle ground and let's just say each of these things just for the sake of argument either F puffer well they all open at like I don't know a billion dollar flu dayed evaluation right so then you have 5% of each of those would be uh 150 million all up right $150 million all up so I mean we're already obviously with IG L at a billion but now at 150 million for for these three um I don't know if they're going to open more or less than that but those are those

are pretty sizable air drops and maybe they air drop 10% instead of 5% as well right so there could be even more there but those are still pretty pretty sizable air drops next you have uh the layer 2 right scroll zky and Tao these are even harder to evaluate because people again do the tvl kind of thing here but if we just look at Stark net for example which launched I believe at $30 billion tvl it's down to about $20 billion right now and then you look at Stark Net's tbll well it's very low like I'm actually just looking this up on my other screen right now because I don't know if the top of my head but Stark Net's tvl is 200 million and it was worth 20 billion it's worth 20 billion tvl which is about the same as arbitrum which has 122.5 billion tvl in it right

and the more than op which has $7 billion tvl so you can't do a tvl analysis here this is this is obviously not how the market is treading these things okay then what can we do well we can do a comp what are most of the l2s worth right now are they worth over $10 billion fully diluted valuation all of them uh well not all of them but most of them yes okay let's say that scroll zky and Tao all launch at a $10 billion valuation each well 5% each of that is 500 million or added up is 1.5 billion so Ian layer and the l2s at 2.5 billion with the LST protocols you have a 2.75 billion and then the last one here is Athena this is a relatively new project there's not really a a comp that you can

do here but given the hype given the fact that um it's talked about a lot in I guess like a negative way which actually funny enough does add a valuation to it because we're in an attention sorry does add more valuation to it because we're in ATT attention economy I I don't even know what valuation to give Athen of what it would open at let's just say to be safe it opens at like I don't know $2 billion for I mean I don't even know like I honestly can't value it right now but let's just say 2 billion fully eluded they a dropped 50% that's 100 million there right at air drop 5% that's 100 million there so you you're almost at $3 billion here guys from just these projects and as I said there are more projects than this there's other massive kind of uh I guess not yet l2s but in

the future l2s like blast right that are going to be doing an airdrop there's wallets that are probably going to be doing air drops like rainbow right and and and rabie like and and maybe metamask I don't know that's a wild card as well right uh infura has well still hasn't done their token they signal that they were going to do that a while ago so there are still all other air drops that I haven't even listed here so that's where I got the billions of dollars flowing to ethereum users number from I would say that I'm extremely confident in Igan Lea launching at basically the same valuation that Celestia is whenever Ian ler launches like I'd be very very surprised if it didn't launch at that valuation given the fact that it is uh basically a the same product as Celestia and more right

I da is is a similar product but much more than that right uh but then the other ones as I said like it's it's much harder to kind of uh comp these things it's much harder to value value these things the L2 easier than the LT protocols uh and all of them are easier than Athena but that's my general view on things and this is probably one of the only times I'm going to talk about this sorts of stuff uh you guys know that I don't like to speculate too much because you're going to take what I just said and you're not going to take it as investment advice but you're going to take what I just said and you're going to be like okay that either makes a lot of sense or it doesn't and then you're going to either consciously or subconsciously make investment decisions

based on that and I and or not just investment decisions but like airdrop farming decisions based on that and I don't want you to do that that I know that me saying I don't want you to do that is not going to prevent you from doing it because you're just going to do whatever you you want and that's fine like obviously you can do whatever you want uh but I just want to caution against doing anything based on what I'm saying I ran through my logic of how I'm doing the valuations of these things and how I think about it in my head you know that I'm either an investor and advisor in literally all of these projects which means that I stand to benefit from from from all of them obviously right and also uh I I I I I think that um you know

I'm more bullish than most people on the ethereum ecosystem so I have a bullish bias too so with those disclaimers in mind there that's how I think about these things but as I said that is a rare look into how I think about things I probably will talk about more of this stuff with Eric to be honest but on the refu I like to avoid talking about it too much for the reasons I just outlined there but anyway I've gone over time again I mean as I said at the start of the episode The refills are getting more and more listeners and Watchers and the refills are now apparently getting longer as well which I guess you guys are probably not too sad about because there are there have been rug fuels before and you know what there actually might be a rug fuel tomorrow I'm just

thinking now it just depends on a couple of things but I I'll try my best for there not to be but we'll see and unfortunately I haven't recorded the podcast with Eric yet so I wouldn't be able to put that live uh if there was a rug field tomorrow but just fair warning there might be but anyway you've probably been spoiled over the last few days with the content with the extra long episodes but anyway I'm rambling ranting enough for me today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all hopefully tomorrow thanks everyone