Vitalik donates $60mil, Elon pulls the rug & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #120​​ - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 13th of may 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so what a crazy last 24 hours huh i woke up and i was like wow what the hell just happened right we had uh vitalik and dog coins and elon and rug pools everywhere so let's let's go into it right let's let's break it all down let's see what happened here so i woke up to i when i went on twitter and i saw this tweet from larry that basically said vitalik is starting to dump dog tokens now i gotta give a bit of background here for those who don't who aren't aware of this but essentially you know all those dog coins that have

been pumping lately on the back of the dogecoin pump that happened so essentially a lot of these projects would send these tokens to vitalik just for free for marketing purposes right like because vitalik's address is tagged don't eat the scan everyone can see it and it's just an easy kind of way to do marketing i guess because the tokens are free to print and all that sort of stuff um but the flip side to this is that these tokens aren't locked or anything so vitalik could dump them at any time that he wanted to and he did he basically ended up dumping all the dog tokens i think he had in his in his wallet for eth uh and then he donated that eth to charity so you can see here hudson jameson put together a um a summary of all the eight that went to

charity here so he donated uh over 13 000 to givewell which is coinbase's uh a charity drive here uh over one thousand eighth plus all the elon tokens which was another kind of i guess dog token uh to the methuselah foundation uh he donated over a thousand eighth to miri an ai safety organization a 500 eighth plus 10 percent of the ship another dog token to crypto relief and 500 to charter cities institute all up it was about 16 000 eight which equals 60 million dollars at current prices so he basically just gave away 60 million dollars now when we dig into this and we say okay where did this money come from well he sold it into uni swap pools and

obviously he was quote unquote dumping on people by doing that right but you know that's the framing that i saw a few people kind of use on twitter and they were like metallics dumping on people he's like harming people you know he's rug pulling them and i'm like well i mean this is a free market right like this is not he didn't start the thing he didn't you know request tokens they were just sent to him um and and he didn't profit from this he sent all the money from to charity and you can see it all on chain and it's all provable so when i see people saying oh you know this is really bad vitalik did something really bad here i'm just like what do you mean like this is what do you mean he deciding bad just because the token price crashed after he

kind of dumped it i mean these these investors um and these people are like speculating on this stuff like this this could have happened anyway like there could have just been bigger kind of whales doing the same thing um the metallic and there were a lot of um people who had a lot of tokens as well so to to that i just say like this is the game like you don't this is investing you don't buy something and then like you have a guarantee that it's not going to fall and it's not going to dump like even the um the quote unquote you know defy tokens the the good things they can fall like 30 40 in a day as well there's there's literally no guarantees here and if you're buying into a dog coin thinking that it has a future well i mean maybe you have to learn the hard

way that it doesn't have a future they're scams most of them or at least um you know just opportunistic projects being put out there to make money from that the kind of like i guess theme of the week or whatever so from that perspective i just really thought it was just so dumb to to see people saying that this was a bad thing that vitalik did i think it was an amazing thing i think essentially what he did was what i was talking about yesterday he did something that would be classed as chaotic good so essentially he he chaotically you know um went out there and basically swung his swung his arms around like i'm gonna dump all these dog tokens i don't care who gets in the way i'm gonna take this eighth and i'm gonna give it to charity that is chaotic good

and i think that what vitalex done here is awesome uh i have no problems with it at all uh so yeah kudos to vitale for doing this i mean we're lucky to have vitalik not just in ethereum but in humanity he does so much good good things he donates so much of his money he i mean we anyone who knows vitalik knows that he's not someone who really ever cared about the money he has over a billion dollars of each just sitting in his account he's not out there buying lambos or fancy houses or anything i mean he basically wears like meme t-shirts everywhere he doesn't care about money um you know and he works harder than he ever has right he's always working always doing stuff in the background of ethereum research and development and things like that so yeah kudos to vitalik for this and

actually the last thing on the on the dog coin thing here is that when vitalik was doing this uh all the the the groups that had i guess like the shibuya new group which is the most popular dog coin on telegram was asking you know who is vitalik because a lot of these people don't know who vitalik is because a lot of these people as i mentioned you know a couple of refuels ago they're playing in the casino coin market they're not investing in crypto for the fundamentals they're just here to make a quick buck so why would they know who vitalik is and i actually think this is super important because it means that ethereum has users that have that that don't know um these users don't know who created ethereum which just speaks to ethereum's like decentralization and all this sort of good stuff and

and really really i guess like was one of the most positive things to come out of this i i think for ethereum in general is that we have users who are getting value out of the platform yes they're just speculating on dog coins and whatever and you can debate whether that's valuable or not but they for themselves they think it's valuable so they're getting value out of this platform without knowing who the creator was and this was kind of a constant thing that people would fight ethereum about where they'd be like it's all centered around vitalik vitale can do whatever he wants you know everyone knows vitalik created it and that's not true there's i mean i've met people before who had no idea who vitalik was and they just thought that ethereum was cool and and looked into it they didn't care who created it all they care about is that

they can use it and do stuff with it and that's how it should be so that's really cool um on the contrary i would love to know if bitcoin was used by people who don't know who satoshi is or sorry no one knows who satoshi is but like they don't know that satoshi created it because the allure of bitcoin really is that origin story that no one knows a satoshi is so that is part of the reason why people buy it whereas with ethereum there's a lot more things you can do on it than just like i guess follow the narratives and stories so you know there's there's obviously going to be a lot of people that come into this ecosystem that don't know who vitalik is so i thought that was really cool so the second rug pull of the day i guess if you want to call the

what vitalik did a rug pull was elon musk putting out a statement about tesla and bitcoin here and i'll read out the whole statement just for listeners so he basically said tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin we are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions especially coal which has the worst emissions of any fuel cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels but we believe it uh it has a promise and we believe it has a promising future but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment tesla will not be selling any bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions transitions to more sustainable energy we are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use less than one percent of bitcoin's energy per transaction now this obviously opened up a massive

massive can of worms it got the bitcoiners all triggered it got the ethereum celebrating because they're like wow finally elon is clueing into the massive energy use of bitcoin and you know ethereum is moving to proof of stakes soon and all that good stuff i'm of the opinion just generally as an aside here that ethereans shouldn't be celebrating uh or shouldn't be like pumping up ethereum's move to proof of stake until it's actually done because right now we have no kind of like lake to stand or we'd be hypocrites because ethereum is using a ton of energy as well so from that perspective i don't think we should be cheering just as an aside but focusing back on the main point here um i think this is not the whole truth i think i mean eric connor put out a good tweet about this i think tesla stopped

accepting bitcoin for purchases because no one was buying teslas with btc and this is always the same thing with all these kind of places that accept btc as a currency um to purchase something why would anyone use their bitcoin right people don't buy bitcoin to use it as money at least most people don't and i'm talking like 99.99 of bitcoin investors and users do not buy bitcoin to use it as money there is no point it is inefficient it doesn't it it's not a good money because it's not volatile it goes up and you know obviously as i said it's volatile so it goes up and down a lot um and in general you want to hold it because you're expecting it to appreciate that's the main reason you buy bitcoin now people will say okay people are buying bitcoin to escape

currency controls and escape inflation and all this good stuff and that's fine at the end of the day but they can buy other things for that they can buy stable coins on ethereum for that they can buy stable coins and exchanges for that us dollar stable coins if they want to um you know and buy die and stuff like that right decentralized stable coins so from that perspective i think that's the real reason here and i mean i don't think elon went into this not knowing how much energy bitcoin mining consumes i i would be very surprised if he didn't know about this i think what ended up happening was that they bought i mean tesla bought btc and then because you know tesla's a big organization um i think uh some maybe some executives in the company are now questioning this and being like

well bitcoin actually uses like so much energy and we have all these people uh coming at us are coming at tesla and questioning us for doing this is this really a good strategic decision for our company now i personally was surprised when when you know tesla invested in btc i don't have a very strong opinion on on the proof of work versus proof of stake argument or if proof of work is a waste of energy or whatever um so i'm not going to debate about that but i do think it doesn't matter what i think what matters is what the majority thinks and the majority hates proof of work we saw that play out with the nft mania they absolutely hate it it doesn't matter if you believe that proof of work comes from renewable energies and it encourages renewable energies none of

that matters what matters is what everyone believes to be true and unfortunately that is the reality of the society that we live in you because facts you know facts are facts but the narratives are what are more powerful than the facts a lot of the time so i always thought that bitcoin is fighting back against this energy fud as i like to call it was a losing battle because even if they're right it doesn't matter what matters is the narrative and i'm very very very happy that ethereum is moving off proof of work but until we do that we don't have course to celebrate here the merge is obviously coming and i've spoken about it a lot but we cannot be celebrating and resting on our laurels and thinking we're better than bitcoin because we don't use as much energy because we do and i think we actually

at this point would be using you know um a a high percentage of bitcoin's energy or at least um maybe even more one day because as i showed yesterday ethereum mining is now profit more profitable than bitcoin mining so you know we might see that play out there but anyway i'll leave it at that as i said i don't have a strong opinion either way here on the energy use debate but i think it is something that's going to be more and more it's going to be a talking more of a talking point over the coming months and on that note i guess i'll finish off by uh there was a tweet from zerohedge today quoting jpmorgan on why they think ethereum over bitcoin so they basically said ethereum 2.0 shifts from an energy-intensive proof of work validation mechanism

to a much less intensive free of stake validation mechanism as a result less computational power and energy consumption are needed to maintain the ethereum network now what i find funny about this is what i was just saying whether you believe bitcoin um you know is energy efficient or encourages energy efficiency or whatever encourages renewable energies it doesn't matter what what matters is what everyone else believes now if everyone else sees proof of stake and they're like to themselves oh wow proof of stake actually doesn't use any any uh any sorry it uses some energy but it doesn't use like um anywhere near the same amount of energy that bitcoin uses why aren't we just using this and and i think that's what's going to win i do not think that bitcoiners are going

to win their arguments against uh against all the all the kind of like detractors here i think they're going to lose i think they are losing and i think the only winning move is to try to transition to proof of stake because in that world there is no like um uh there's no narrative that that the detractors can form and say well you know it's using all this energy because you can say well it's not and you can just refute that very easily because refuting the um proof-of-work high energy cost arguments is a lot harder than simply saying well ethereum doesn't use proof of work right because you have to go through the motions of of uh going through you know okay how much of bitcoin's energy uses proof is renewable um where where is it located okay can we quantify it can we quantify

how um how much uh renewable energy is uh research is being done because of bitcoin uh mining and all this sort of stuff it's a lot harder than just saying well ethereum doesn't use proof of work but anyway just another data point there something to keep an eye on i'm going to move on from that for now so connex network the interoperability protocol for layer twos and different blockchains here is now doing 25 million dollars in weekly volume which is up 35 x in the last five weeks so this growth is awesome to see obviously because cross chain cross l2 cross everything is growing i think as i've said in the past things like connex and hot protocol these bridges between different chains and different layer twos are going to be the real winners of a multi-chain future here and

i you know i think it's still up in the air about how a multi-chain future actually um you know comes to fruition is it going to be like hundreds and thousands of blockchains all talking to each other or is it just going to be a handful of them all talking to each other i do think it's going to be a power law distribution where even if you have hundreds of blockchain blockchains talking to each other most of them will be very low value and it'll be like 90 will be like a handful maybe five blockchains talking to each other and then maybe you know a bunch of l2s around that and things like that and then you'll have like hundreds of smaller ones that are all vying for that top dog position that's just how i see it playing out but yeah great to see this growth from

connex network here i'm loving i'm loving uh the the growth here so the eighth global uh scale scaling ethereum hackathon finalist wearing out so there's 12 finalists here i'm not going to go through all of them there's a lot of good projects i was actually one of the judges for a bunch of projects here so definitely go check out each and every one of these but i think just but judging on the retweets and likes here uh the most popular ones were zenith which is a tool that uses flashbots to enable arbitrary meta transactions so externally owned accounts or normal ethereum wallets can enter l2s without eth that's really important right onboarding into l2s is going to be a very hot topic going forward so any solutions that can i guess like

uh make this easy for people is is really good in my book um i think there's another one down here that i saw before uh eath sorbet which is again another smooth transition to l2 uh protocol which um i'm not sure how they're doing it i haven't looked at the project yet but i just i was just going through this thread before so definitely check that out there another one i think this is the most popular one is called ray tracing and what ray tracing allows for is it allows uh tracing mev hiding between the glass shards of the one to e2 devnets and test nets uh that's pretty cool as well so i mean mev in general is really cool so definitely go check out the whole finalists list here uh there's links to all of the projects you can play around with them there's

live demos for some for most of them i think and all that sort of sort of good stuff there so yeah definitely go check it out so maple finance uh announced on twitter yesterday that their upcoming mainnet launch of the metal pro mobile protocol is uh it has been published and the details of the liquidity mining program have also been published here so they're going to be deploying to mainnet on may 14th which is tomorrow which is really really cool here and they'll be doing a liquidity mining program as well so if you are interested in doing uh or taking part of this on may 21st which is the liquidity mining program start date um then definitely go check this out you can see there's a bunch of key dates here as well so yeah really exciting um kind of developments here from maple

protocol gnosis safe or gnosis announced yesterday that the nurses safe is now supporting multiple networks they're going to be supporting well they are supporting uh polygon arbitram and a binance smart chain here so i guess really cool to see them supporting more than just ethereum gnosis safe is becoming or has become this staple uh multi-sig wallet for ethereum it lets you do so much i mean i use it i'm part of a bunch of different multi-sigs and i use it frequently and it's just really smooth it works really well um it's it's um you know it's still a little bit technical on the technical side of things but you know for someone like me who's a power user i can get through that but they are they will definitely i guess improve that over time which they have been and

the one thing i do really like about the gnosis safe is that they have this apps ecosystem where there's all these different apps and and like default apps for example that you can use directly in the notice safe so you don't have to do like wallet connect or anything like that you can just use it directly from the safe which is really really cool here so yeah i guess kudos to gnosis for rolling this out and on that note uh polygon had a really big day yesterday uh obviously they had the nurses safe announcement but they also had infuria and truffle announced that they're going to be supporting the polygon network here which is just really awesome and as a lot of you guys know i am an advisor to polygons so i'm very happy whenever this stuff uh this stuff happens and more support comes from the

ethereum ecosystem projects here so that's three killer projects that are now supporting polygon which is going to make developers lives easier it's going to make users lives easier and it's going to make the whole system more robust here so really awesome to see that and a final note here slingshot a project that i'm actually a seed investor in just a disclosure there but they are live on polygon in open beta so slingshot is a decentralized exchange aggregator um so essentially you can go on there and uh i think they're one of the they're going to be quickly one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on polygon i know that curves on there uh m stables on there uh sushi swap and quick swap so slingshot just acts to aggregate all these sorts of things uh and and give you kind of like the best prices on a

polygon here so really really cool to see that arbitrary had a major announcement today so their main net is opening to developers on may 28th yeah so essentially arbitram for those who don't know is an optimistic roll-up solution they have beaten uh i guess um optimism to the panchayat and getting to public mainnet so developers can start building on and deploying their apps to arbitram on may 28th and i'm assuming that shortly after this release and once there's um there's a bunch of uh apps on here the albert trim will be opened up to the public and people will be able to use it and use these apps on layer two and as i announced the other day ok x a very popular uh centralized exchange out of china

announced that they're doing l1 to l2 transfers with albatrom so essentially uh you can go sorry not l1 to l2 direct centralized exchange direct ok x transfers to arbitram which is amazing like you can basically what you can do is you can go from um you know any centralized exchange to to ok x and then you can go from ok x to arbitrary there's your onboarding there and i'm sure a lot of the other centralized exchanges are going to follow suit here and and basically add support but really good to see that arbitrary is coming out um you know with their devnet here uh and then i'm assuming that the users will be able to uh use the arbitrary mainnet after developers actually get apps on there so

really cool to see that and they have teas that they have a bunch of announcements coming out over the coming weeks about which projects they're going to be building on i have already been confirmed to be building on arbitram so that's going to be exciting um i think if i had to guess i would say that arbitrary has some of the major projects they're planning to deploy there and major d5 projects especially so definitely keep an eye out on that one so uh frank chaparra from the block put out a tweet yesterday where he said i just spoke to a large investor one billion plus who said that the retail market is underestimating the amount of institutional capital sitting on the sidelines for ether by one to two orders of magnitude i tend to believe him now this is bullish but at the same time

it makes me question like why are they sitting on the sidelines are they waiting for a dip i mean we just had a dip right to 3 500 overnight um and i don't know what the 8th price is right now if i check my chart i think it's like 3 800. um so were they waiting for that or they waiting for a further dip or they're waiting for approval because i know institutions have to work within a framework to purchase things i don't know but this just speaks to what i've been saying i guess over the last couple weeks is that institutions are buying eighth and they're all going to make announcements in the coming months whether that's part of their earnings reports or just like naked press releases and stuff like that it's happening there is no way ethan's been able to move up this fast

on pure spot bid because most of it is spot buying it it's not leveraged or kind of like margin buying here because funding rates have been have been really low but essentially uh you need billions and billions of dollars to move the eighth price up like that and that's exactly what's been happening and institutions are taking these off exchanges as well and going into uh custody or cold storages and stuff like that so all of that is just obviously incredibly bullish but i'm i i am curious to know why they're sitting on the sidelines here and frank followed up by saying that he'll be uh there's an episode that drops tomorrow which is today um if you're listening to the refuel um on on the scoop podcast here so i definitely think there's gonna be a bunch of more information there and maybe frank's just he you know uh

just hyping up his podcast that he had here which is pretty smart i think it's it's pretty smart but uh frank's usually really usually a really great source of information so i don't think he's lying uh definitely i mean i'm gonna be listening to that episode to see what other alpha nuggets fall out of it here so ryan watkins from rasari put out a great tweet and something that i've been thinking about lately but i've actually avoided tweeting too much about the flipping because i feel like i'm going to make the flipping not happen by tweeting about it uh so i'm just gonna avoid it and then if it does happen and i tweet about it what's gonna happen is it'll be just like the the death of eighth party that was hosted on clubhouse and it will just like completely reverse right but anyway what ryan watkins put

out today was a tweet that said not sure there's ever been a stronger setup for eight flipping btc in the coming months we have eip1559 proof of stake and the eth2 merger d5 and nfts uh institutions announcing 8th positions and the esg tailwinds or the low energy use tailwinds meanwhile there's an unclear catalyst path for btc i agree i wholeheartedly agree i was talking about this on the refill i think a couple days ago where i said that we have major catalysts coming for eth in five five nine and the merger but we also have d5 and layer two stuff happening and he didn't even mention layer two stuff but we also have that happening at the same time and we also have institutes buying eth

we have the esg tailwinds so and i actually think btc has one more major catalyst coming up and that's the atf i think that's that can be huge and i think if an atf gets approved in q3 or q4 of this year eth would definitely bleed against bitcoin for a little while there but and for me the flipping has always been an inevitability these days i think it's even more inevitable than it was in the past just because of all these uh reasons that ryan is outlined here but in saying that you know there's always those euphoric periods it is going to be very hard just based on i guess like uh the the charts and traders and traders and and kind of like the sentiment around this for eth to permanently flip bitcoin the first time i can see like a mania-led temporary

flipping happening and then like you know bitcoin taking the number one spot again but i think once it happens the you know i i think that kind of like breaks a lot of narratives and i've spoken about this a lot in the past so i won't repeat myself here um but yeah something to keep an eye on that's for sure so ego from the block uh covered the x token exploit that happened yesterday where almost 25 million dollars was stolen uh igor was one of my favorite followers on twitter actually because he is very smart and very quick at breaking down what happens with these hacks so essentially i think from hack to this thread was maybe one to two hours so it was very very quick here um but unfortunately this is just another defy uh exploit and this exploit was actually very

i wouldn't say it was very complex but you had to be very smart to to kind of see this and you know this sort of stuff's going to happen all the time because what these hackers can do is that they can essentially um uh uh basically simulate this using something like i guess um you know a simulation platform like what block native has or basically do simulations on their own kind of computer and just see okay would this transaction work or would these transactions work if i did them on mainnet and how much money would i come out with and that's exactly what's happening at all times here and what they came out with was almost 25 million dollars of user funds which is really really sad to see here but i think you know as more of these kind of hacks and exploits happen we learn from them

we get better um but but the thing is is that because there's so much more activity now and there's so many more apps you know launching and things like that the the hacks are probably going to be more frequent than than they were in the past but i think if you look at the reputable d5 projects or at least the big ones the ones that have been around for a while uh a lot of them have never been hacked or you know are very i guess like hack and exploit resistant because they've been through like you know lots of different audits like rv v2 for example had five different audits um they've been through formal verification like maker and they've just got like a lindy effect that they've been around for a while so you know i mean it doesn't mean they won't be hacked or can't be hacked but

the fact that they've been around for a while like especially maker and um you know it's it's been kind of like um you know chugging along just fine uh it means that it's less risky than some of these newer protocols and x token isn't like a new new protocol but it is relatively new so yeah but uh i hope none of you listening or watching lost money in this and if you did i hope it wasn't too much there i'm curious to see you know if x token if the x token team compensates users here i think they will not sure how the hell they'll do it but you know i'm sure they will find a way to try and uh compensate users for this hack finally we had a major major alpha leak from stani last night on twitter where someone put out a tweet that was

actually deleted now i see here but the tweet basically had a picture of arves saying that their account had been flagged as part of some aml or kyc thing um but that was actually an error so what actually happened is that there's a private pool on rv for institutions uh that are still practicing with d5 before aping in to you know the open d5 protocols so as you can imagine why this is a major alpha leak is because it means institutions are actually now playing with d5 and it confirms it and you know people have been speculating on this for a while and so have i i've said you know once you're into eighth you're into d5 it's just like the default thing that happens but this is just a huge alpha leak um but on top of that i think a lot of people were debating

whether this is uh you know a good thing or not like are we inviting regulation into defy and i don't think we are because as long as the um smart contracts remain decentralized and and you know open to everyone and kyc and aml less on ethereum then it's fine and some people are saying well you know it's a slippery slope because eventually you know the more of this we invite in the more of it we're comfortable with and then eventually just becomes like the traditional banking system and it's all regulated i don't think that's possible on ethereum ethereum is a credibly neutral neutral platform if someone builds something that has you know regulations all over the place then users can choose not to use it and use something else that's why we have multiple protocols that's why we have multiple protocols doing the same thing

we have rv we have compound we have cream we have other money markets we have vari capital refused and things like that um we have different amms unisop sushi swap right uh we have amm aggregators we have all this sort of stuff so by decentralizing out the different apps and not monopolizing it and you know relying on just one app we can resist this a lot and i don't think it becomes a big problem because of that so i don't i just really don't buy that argument from people but that's a you know that's a whole probably a whole episode in and of itself i won't spend too much talking about that but i do want to talk about um you know the fact that institutions institutions are coming into d5 and what this means for i guess different defy apps now i don't think institutions are going to be

touching any of the newer apps what both because of the hack risks and because of the the fact that um they're much smaller i do think institutions are going to be touching avere and compound and maker and uni swap and all you know all the top apps the ones that have been around for a while as i just explained the ones that have lindy it just makes sense from that perspective but at the same time uh i'm sure that that uh they're gonna be uh smart about it they're probably not going to announce if they purchase any d5 tokens until a later date uh they're definitely gonna be loading up on it because there's no way they come into defy and they see the prof uh pe ratios on these things and think to themselves i'm not going to buy that that's under that's overvalued because it's not a lot

of d5 is actually undervalued because it's generating so much cash flow that's actually a lot of it's flowing to token holders like mkr and harvey and sushi and stuff like that that i think this is something that could kick off a d5 season two and i've spoken about you know defy season round two before and i've been saying that i thought that the high gas fees would actually mean that um i think a lot a lot of people can't participate so we can't get new investors in but if those investors are institutions then it doesn't matter because institutions will buy a lot of these d5 tokens and then people will buy them on centralized exchanges and stuff like that so that's just the speculative side of things i still have my core d5 positions that i've held for a while um but we'll see we'll see how that kind

of shakes out there the market's a bit shaky right now i think it's just short-term noise so i'm not too focused on that but yeah i think this could be a big tailwind for for d5 in general all right that's it for today's episode everyone thank you again for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the youtube channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone