Why The Merge is bullish, Starkswap announced - The Daily Gwei Refuel #309 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 7th of february 2022 alright everyone let's get into it so a bunch of drama over the last 48 hours to say the least around uh one figure from ens uh brantley milligan who a lot of you will know as one of the faces of ens he was part of the core team until recently actually um he's he's kind of been let go by the centralized company that um he's behind ens or at least kind of like one part of ans which had the founding team in it uh but yeah i'm not gonna rehash all of that today i'm not gonna go through all that today i'm not gonna give my opinion or anything or anything like that but i

felt like it would be like ignoring the elephant in the room if i didn't talk about it at least today but so i put out a tweet that just before i said you know the ens community consists of ten tens of thousands of people working to build an awesome decentralized product that everyone can use i'm not going to remove my.eth from my name nor am i going to boycott ans over one person's views beliefs i stand by the ens community i put this out because i saw saw you know some people advocating for a boycott of ens or to remove your ethnic and i was like why that doesn't make any sense like ens is a protocol uh brantley's just one person of the um eons community yes he was in he he wasn't probably and i would consider him still is an important uh

part of the e s community um and he's you know views beliefs doesn't matter how how shitty you think they are they don't dictate what ens is as a protocol ens is much bigger than just one person i mean the whole reason we're building decentralized systems is so that we don't have figureheads we don't have leaders we don't have like you know centralized leaders there's there are different forms of leadership but you know the whole point is that it's a protocol so i think that um you know from that perspective i'm definitely not going to boycott enos i'm going to keep supporting them because there are so many amazing people in the ens community that um that are doing amazing work and it the project shouldn't fall apart just because of of one person's view so that's kind of like my view there but just generally what i wanted to to say

about this situation is that it really is a no-win situation at the end of the day you're damned if you're doing damned if you don't like obviously i said that brantley was let go by the centralized company tld that has the founding team a part of it uh so this company isn't is kind of like just one part of the ens ecosystem uh but they're totally centralized and they don't ever plan to be decentralized and they don't don't you know they don't hide the fact that they're a centralized company it's just like any other company you know firing one of their employees for whatever reason right now you can debate if him being fired for his beliefs he's right or wrong i'm not here to debate that i'm not here to kind of like tell you how i feel about that um but as i said what i am here to say is that

it's just a basically a really shitty situation all around you're not going to be able to please everyone in these situations you have you know some people on one side saying that uh people are canceling uh brantley people on the other side saying well his words really hurt me and i you know he should face the consequences of that so you know you're never going to please everyone in situations like this and i think that obviously this is a bigger issue than just kind of like uh what you know what will happen with with brantley and and and and kind of like the last 48 hours this this extends to basically a lot of like what happened what's happening in real life a lot of politics in general and it's not going to get sold by a few twitter threads let's be honest guys it's not going to get solved

by us everyone's sitting around and and kind of like debating whether you know this person should have been cancelled or fired or whatever cancel culture you guys know my stance on council culture i absolutely hate it and i to be honest i don't think what happened here was was necessarily uh the strictly cancel culture or anything like that i think what happened here was that you know someone had views and beliefs that a large number of people did not agree with and they face the consequences of that essentially right so from that perspective uh simply put like uh you know everyone's gonna have a different view on this not gonna be able to please everyone and i think that when you just get back to focusing on building systems like if you actually want people to be able to resist people kind of like you know i guess like if

you want to resist quote unquote cancel culture build systems that can resist that don't complain about the existing systems not allowing for you to resist it it's like you know people always complain that twitter the platforms people and bans people for for um certain views well build a better twitter guys but we haven't we actually have the technology to build decentralized social media systems but the reason why it hasn't really materialized yet is because it's bloody hard to do like there's been attempts before but what happens with these decentralized social media platforms is they get overrun by just really shitty content i'm not talking about like shitty beliefs or views i'm talking about just content like just spam basically because there's no content moderation there's just nothing going on so um you know not to say that decentralized social media can't work but the the attempts in the past have

just been kind of like you know subpar not really up there and that's why we haven't seen one take off yet but i think when someone or whenever someone and or a team or whatever cracks they're not there it's going to be a pretty big deal and then we're actually going to see what happens when you can post anything you want online you can say anything you want you can spread any message you want with literally no centralized organization able to ban you or blacklist or anything like that we're going to see a pretty big fallout from that i think and it's going to be a pretty wild ride when that happens uh just like we're as big progress through i guess like decentralization in general decentralizing finance and stuff we're already seeing a lot of regulators a lot of uh shroud fly players are pushing

back against it trying to get it like more heavily regulated that's their way of trying to if you want to say cancel us right they're trying to cancel d5 because and that's the way of doing it by controlling it because they know it's a threat same way you know in actual cancel culture people try to remove someone from the conversation because they've viewed their opinions or beliefs as a threat to the status quo so so to speak right so i think it plays out in various ways within the within the ecosystem and it doesn't matter where you stand here if you believe that people you know i mean i mean okay but we shouldn't say it doesn't matter where you stand here i think we all stand on the side of decentralization and building decentralized systems but if you do stand on that side you have to

realize that by building decentralized systems you're essentially saying that people can do and say whatever they want and they're you know and they won't face any consequences for it now you know in in this case bradley faced consequences with the centralized company uh he faced consequences in the decentralized world by people taking away their ens votes from him um as a delegate which is working as intended like i mean the whole point of the the delegate system is that you delegate your tokens to people that you want to vote on your behalf it's the same as in politics you vote for someone who you want to represent you and if you no longer like that person or if that person doesn't share the same views as you anymore if you you know you don't want to put your support behind them you vote for someone

else you delegate your tokens to someone else that's literally that delegate governance working as intended so if you're complaining about that and thinking that's a shitty governance process well then go build something better uh or at least advocate for change within ens i mean i'm sure you could do that as well but at the end of the day you know the whole i mean we kind of like spent how many years like tens of thousands of years of humanity getting to a point where we came up with democracy which is like the least worst governance system so if you think you can solve governance issues and things like that overnight i mean yeah you're kidding yourself right but i i think this is as i said much bigger issue than just what's happened over the last 48 hours it is everywhere there is i mean

the the i mean they call it culture wars and things like that it's going on everywhere guys like so and i think crypto obviously plays a huge part in this but in the context of what happened over the last 48 hours i just think that uh there's really no winning the winning move is kind of not to play but there's that's not an option for a lot of people the people that this directly affects they don't really have the option of not playing not playing to them is basically giving in and and and you know letting it um letting it kind of like spread and letting and and feeling excluded and feeling isolated so i mean i totally get that but uh you know if you the the thing is for for most people the winning move is probably just to just uh you know uh trying to try and ignore it

and get and and um and move on from it but even then like you could argue that that's actually a losing move so it gets it gets complicated really quickly but anyway i'm going to move on from that there's plenty of other stuff to talk about and uh and i've got actually one thing i'm going to talk about soon where i'm going to get you guys really bullish for for the merge and proof of stake but anyway first before i do that i'm going to jump into the thread that tim bico put together around the latest all-call devs call and this was an absolutely monster all-core devs call and thread all about the merge and shanghai which is the first upgrade coming after the merge you can check out tim biker's recap here obviously he highly recommends going and watching the 90 minute video which he

links in the thread as well but there are so many updates here guys like i just want to highlight this for you i'm not even gonna i'm not gonna try and um and break it down on on the kind of like refuel here i'm just gonna say go read it because it has as i said updates on the merge updates in shanghai updates on the eips within shanghai updates on a bunch of other things that are going on on the core development side and as you guys know i've told you plenty of times that ethereum core development is in the best place it has been in ever uh and it's moving so you know nicely for a network as big as ethereum is and there's so many major upgrades coming that i'm super excited about them even if you may not think that they're major

things i i you know i i definitely think they are and i think that there's a few user-facing major things in there as well like the erp 4488 to get the merge um uh sorry to get the uh not the merge to get the um the roll-up costs down that's obviously gonna be felt by end users some things about ux like erp 3074 which you can read about and stuff like that so yeah definitely go jump into this thread give it a read and there's links to a bunch of other information you can check out as well all right so as promised here is the tweet that i put out just before where i said ethereum's transition to proof of stake is not priced in now i have spoken about the merge the insurance reduction the burning the proof of stake the you know demand shock supply i'm sorry the

supply shock for eighth i've spoken about this so many times for you guys before but what i want to kind of like bring it all together again today is because i need to kind of like put the bullish energy out there for you guys it's been a tough last 48 hours it's been a tough last you know a few months with the market not being very very bullish i mean we're back over 3k as of as of time of recording which is nice but we're still not out of the woods just yet so to get you guys bullish to get you guys excited again to get you guys feeling like okay you know it isn't going to be at 3k forever let's talk about why the transitions proof of stake is not priced in the simple fact is is that there is still at most a few

thousand people maybe that fully understand the implications of the merge coupled with the aip1559 and i would actually say that it's not even at a few thousand i would i would still say that it's much less than that but we also what we have a lot of um people coming out of the woods now advocating for uh you know putting together models and advocating for a much higher eighth price based on everything i guess that i've been saying over the last maybe year or so everything that the people like the bankless guys have been saying other hardcore ethereums have been saying and the message is reaching more people but in saying that i would say i would still say that most people have no idea i mean almost everyone doesn't have any idea how big this is going to be and uh because of that it

there's kind of like a massive asymmetric bet here i believe i'm obviously not investment advice but i believe that the fact that so little people understand the impact of this the impact of the 80 to 90 issue introduction coupled with the burn the impact of a negative issuance with eighth and the impact of the fact that six until six months after the merge we won't even have withdrawals so there'll be like net uh there'll be basically no new supply entering the um entering the uh the the ethereum ecosystem or entering the eighth supply i think yeah the amount of people who actually fundamentally understand that is very very low do i think that more people are going to understand that as time goes on of course of course they will and that is why uh it you know it's not priced in today probably won't be priced in for a

very long time but price thing implies that like there's no more future upside left or there's little upside left there's plenty of upside left because by the time uh uh you know most of i wouldn't say the world but like investors and people who invest in not only crypto but just invest generally understand how ethereum and each kind of like dynamics work if your ether will be at a lot higher price so you don't want to get to that point yet you want to be at the point that we are right now where you have the massive opportunity to buy at this price which i you know i think obviously think three thousand dollar eighth is a steal obviously i'm i'm buying you know i put out twitter out the other day where i said that uh i stopped my daily buys that was a sign up guys like and i was

gonna buy under 2k that was literally just me posting because everyone said stop posting bullish things so i stopped posting bullish things right i started posting various things and then people took it seriously and then kobe ratioed me and i'm like uh okay uh maybe maybe i'll just stop bear posting for now which i did of course and now we're bullish again i'm not bullposting yet but obviously i'm being very bullish right now um but uh yeah as as time goes on we're going to have more and more people like uh i believe his name was ryan alice i think who went on bank list and talked about the three trillion dollar case for eighth we have um arc invest talking about a i think 180 thousand dollar eighth or something like that like 20 trillion market 20 trillion dollar market cap and things like that these

are becoming uh you know more and more widespread views they're not consensus views there but they're more and more widespread and you'll have you heard it first on the daily way you heard it first on the refuel i spoke about a hundred thousand dollar either ten trillion dollar eight ages ago i spoke about a ten thousand dollar eighth in 2019 when it was a hundred bucks so by kind of like uh uh realizing the opportunity really really early on and um having conviction on it so you can actually weather the storm because you know uh before kind of like we saw eighth all-time high again from when i believed that ethan was going to 10k i believe i i started kind of like thinking about it in early 2019 where the first signs of real defy came to to light we had one five five nine in the

pipeline and then i started realizing that the the issue introduction from proof of stake would be so grand i'm like okay well if this all plays out like i think it will and if demand for block space goes up like i think it will then we're going to get to a point where it's going to be a ridiculous kind of shock for for ether as an asset when we get when we get to kind of like the merge which obviously wasn't called the merge back then but it was the same kind of thing um and and and back then you know until kind of like 8th broke its all-time high again it was over two years so i sat through basically two years of of believing this i mean if if you want to argue the the the kind of like sideways action that we saw one to

three hundred dollars that was a year and a half where basically i kept buying eight with that same belief in in kind of like play there uh even though it and obviously wasn't going to play out straight away so that's how i view it right now i that's how i kind of like view the current uh dynamic where i'm buying between maybe two thousand and three thousand dollars and then eight is thirty to fifty thousand dollars in the future that was the the perfect opportunity to buy it right now because then it goes much higher uh and i just don't think uh uh uh people kind of like understand this and that's why it is not priced in so obviously just stupidly bullish leading up to the merge i actually think we're going to have quite a large run leading up to the merge it's

just an amazing kind of like narrative catalyst for people like it's getting closer there is a consensus view that it should happen around june julyish kind of thing you know it's the target at least right now and i think the markets are going to start slowly pricing that in and then i think leading up to it it's going to be everywhere everyone's going to be talking about the merge it's going to be a massive narrative everyone's going to be talking about you know quote unquote eth2 even though it doesn't make sense every youtuber is going to be pushing it every trade five person is going to be pushing it it is going to be you know an amazing trade and then after the merge it's kind of hard to tell what happens immediately like short to medium term after the merge do we dump really hard

because everyone just sells the news sells the event could be all right do we continue because uh the supply shock was so grand that um that actually offsets that selling i don't think that happens immediately i think short-term medium term is is very different to the longer term dynamics so we're going to have to see what happens there like i mean for example if eighth runs up to 20k by by the merge if and if the merge happens in june then of course it's going to come back come back down from that because that's a very very uh quick uh rising price i don't think that you can maintain such a quick rising price especially at each market cap without some kind of pullback after a massive narrative trade but does that mean that eth is going to crash and never kind of recover to 20k and beyond no of course

not and as i said like the the proof of stake coupled with one five five nine coupled with the natural demand for each going up coupled with um you know staking and becoming such a kind of like material part of ethereum is going to be absolutely massive so there's your kind of like i guess uh uh bullish refresh there uh for what to be excited for with with regards to ethers and assets because i mean june is not far away guys it's like five months if it doesn't happen in june like i don't expect it to happen much later than that maybe july or latest kind of like august unless something critically goes wrong but as far as i know the timeline still seems to be june and that's going to definitely start being uh being kind of like pri price theme but again it's not going to be priced

until the point where all the alpha and all the all the kind of like gains are gone that's not going to happen for a very long time like it just it's it's like if you want proof of this like i some people kind of like push back on this sometimes and say to me how can you say that it's not priced in everyone talks about the merch everyone talks about uh about proof of stake it doesn't matter if people talk about ethereum proof of stake because they've heard about it for eight years how many people like like think about it how many people actually realize that there's an eighty ninety percent insurance reduction coming that one five five nine already makes eighth deflationary on uh you know sometimes for weeks at a time that demand for each block space is only going to go up because ethereum is

scaling by a layer twos which are already growing really really quickly um how many people realize that the supply shock is going to make a perpetually deflationary which is a strong narrative driver how many people realize that ethereum's people of stake is is completely different to almost all other proof-of-stake implementations because pretty much all the other ones have high inflation rates that's like over five percent at least that's five percent on the network whereas with ethereum proof of stake right now it may be five percent but that's only two stakers it's not to the entire network so actual network inflation i think is 0.6 if you were or 0.7 so i think when you take that all together and you actually map out the implications you actually do the math

there are very few people who have done that very very few people and you know i would say that even people listening to the refuel you know it doesn't matter if you're like a newer person or a more experienced person maybe you don't even understand just just yet like the implications of it maybe you're still trying to wrap your head around it and i don't you know that's fine like it's not exactly a simple thing i talk about it as if it's like something that everyone should know not at all there's a lot of building blocks to get to that point where you actually have the conviction and you actually have the belief and knowledge to back all that up but that's what i try to do that's what i try to spread it on on the channel that's what i try to do with my newsletter i try to

get you guys on the page that i am on because i have never seen something so clear in my entire life like i mean i saw it back in 2019. i'm not going to say that it just became a recent thing for me i saw that's why i bought like you know i bought a lot of ether during the bear market because i saw that back then but i still see it today i'm not going to say that you know eighth at 40 my 900 it's all-time high is the only price it is ever going to no way it's going much higher than that i mean and the thing is the only thing that could stop a from going much higher than that is if ethereum adoption stops if ethereum loses its market share if uh you know if people just lose interest in it and we and basically

get uh uh we stopped getting new new users in and the technology just fades away the chance of that happening in my mind is zero percent obviously there's always a chance of that happening but in my mind it's zero percent so that's the only bear case i can come up with for ethereum and for eth and because of that it's why i still buy it you know i buy as much as as i can today just like in 2019 even though the price is much higher than where i bought in 2019 uh because i still have that very very strong conviction and that's what i'm trying to pass on to you guys but anyway going to stop there i've spent a lot of the episode on that today but i felt like you needed a bullish refresher especially over the last 48 hours guys you know there's plenty of stuff

happening in the ethereum ecosystem it's not just the drama get off crypto twitter sometimes too i mean i should take my own advice but it's really i mean you get off crypto twitter go and just read research you know dive deep into into all the stuff going on in the later two space and stuff like that as well just do that that's a much better use of your time than sitting on crypto twitter and watching everyone debate these things because at the end of the day in another you know maybe day or so everyone's going to forget about this and we're going to move on to the next piece of drama like everyone already forgot about the sifu wonderland frog nation drama that was last week guys it's already no one's talking about it anymore the news cycle moves so quickly so much of it is just irrelevant

to to you to to your interest that you should be focusing your energy on other things uh and that's what i tried to do i mean i i as i said i should take my own advice i spend too much time on twitter but i do it because i need to i actually for the refill for everything but um just generally your time is much better spent uh doing research learning you know leveling up yourself rather than watching people argue on the internet that's that's my belief anyway all right on to a thread from rac here today about nfts i really really like this thread he starts it off by saying okay so you hate nfts cool let's talk about it i'm not going to convince you but at least i can offer the perspective of an artist who has been involved in the space since

2017 before any of you heard about it so yeah rsa has been around for quite a while i remember i can't remember what year it was it might have been 2019 or even 2020 where people like in the theme community were getting really hyped that this grammy award-winning artist was kind of like using uni swap and lping on there and things like that and that was that was pretty fun it was like the first signs of mainstream adoption like non kind of i guess um i guess like crypto native adoption that we had so so that was pretty cool back then but uh i mean this thread from rsa i think is the threat you send to all the nft haters to be honest it is that good i suggest going giving it a read but i think what i really loved about this thread was this this tweet here

where he says a lot of people seem to miss that the entire point of nfts is to make content free while making ownership scarce nobody's forcing you to pay for an nft you can still enjoy it for free alongside everyone else uh you like my music you can have it for free i think that encapsulates the whole thing and this is where the divide is people do think that um a lot of the nft haters think that we're just making nft so that we can make digital things scarce so that we can kind of like bring scarcity culture back and get rid of abundance culture it's the complete opposite of what's happening you still have you can have everything for free you can have abundance culture but you can have the other aspect to it as well where there's actual scarce digital things that people can buy limited

edition nft so that people can buy that you know i mean a lot of the uh the nfts that are worth a lot are limited like the ten thousand profile picture nfts they're limited but you can always right click save it if you want but the thing is is that yes you have the picture you have the art but you don't actually own it right you don't own the the kind of like nft associated with it but it's not like you can't actually access that content and that's ric's point here where he basically basically says that you can still listen to his music for free it's all out there but if you want to actually support him if you want to own an nft that he puts out if you want to uh you know kind of like own something limited and scarce you can do that as

well so i really like that tweet but the rest of the thread is great it's really really good as i said send it to your nft haters that you see uh and it's just giving it a read but i just wanted to point out that one and kind of like really highlight that i thought that was a really really great tweet there all right so mahalo from uh polygon here put out a tweet the other day where he said polygon edge allows anyone to spin up their own evm chain in minutes this is just the beginning we have cool plans for the future more consensus modules trustless bridging l2 support integrations like oracles explorers and indexes and then he said multi-chain ethereum is coming so just a refresher for those who don't know polygon edge is basically uh is is the sdk for for kind of um the

i guess like the polygon ecosystem and you can build your own kind of like uh sovereign chain if you want an avm chain as as mahalo says here layer twos all that sort of stuff there and you know i've spoken about how i've been i'm pretty bearish on sovereign chains before so sovereign change just means kind of like l1 chains or like app specific l1 chains but i'm bearish on them as the majority it's actually a niche i'm actually bullish on them as a niche and the niche can expand to essentially there are certain like centralized enterprises and corporations that would like to have their own evm chain that they have complete control over that they actually have like sovereign control over um and what that means is basically that it's not an l2 that outsources its security there they have full control over that

as well they have full control over the consensus set and everything like that so because of that that's why polygon edge was built because they work with corporations they work with enterprises quite closely i mean polygon nightfall they worked with ey on on that sort of stuff there and they understand these needs they understand that these enterprises and corporations they want complete and total control over the whole thing like yes they can interoperate with the ethereum public network and maybe even layer twos and things like that but that doesn't take away from the fact that they don't want to give up any ounce of control doesn't matter what it is and you obviously you can have a fully centralized l2 but with an l2 the one thing you don't get with an l2 is your own consensus set your own validator set your own sovereignty but

that actually isn't needed for pretty much most things as i said i believe this is a niche use case and i believe that polygon age perfectly um perfectly satisfies that but uh uh and i think it's probably the best solution out there right now but uh you know for everything else i still think l2s as altos are good and there's no reason the polygon edge can't be used with l2s as well i'm spinning up evm compatible stuff once that's out like obviously they have the zk teams working on that sort of stuff which i'm sure they'll integrate but for now i believe it's just evm kind of like chains which is totally fine for the niche that it fits into i believe all right uh then a new project called stark swap was announced over the weekend so they're calling themselves a next generation d5 powered

by public zk roll up technology so this is going to be a amm built on stock net so uh this is really cool i mean this is just a i guess say um what how should i say kind of like an another native l2 app going live i don't know if they got if they're a fork of uni-swap or not there does there doesn't seem to be any kind of details on here it just says stock swap will be launching on the stock net planets alpha test net in q1 of 2022 and further details will be shared soon so yeah i'm not sure if this is going to be just the fork of of uniswap um and they've just kind of like renamed it and built it on stock net instead or if this is going to be a kind of like new amm design we're

going to have to see there maybe you can get an answer out of it on their discord channel which you can join here but just great to see another kind of like l2 native pro product be be announced here especially on stock net which you know the stock and ecosystem seems to be really really ramping up lately so i'm very very happy to see that but uh yeah i just wanted to put this project on your radar and possibly another airdrop that you guys can farm i know you guys love your airdrops so definitely go check this out so k'nex put together a really great thread about why arbitrary is a game changer for ethereum so this is 15 tweet thread from them here all about optimistic roll-ups why why they're great how arbitrarine works and how arbitrary you know is different all that sort of stuff there so again just wanted

to put this on your radar for you to go give a go give a read as i said best thing to do in you know in general is just research read learn as much as you can about all these systems about you know layer twos about anything within ethereum that is the highest return on investment you'll ever have to be honest uh within this ecosystem and that's you know that's exactly what i focus most of my energy on and you guys should be doing this as well so definitely go check this out there's links to blog posts and twitter threads and everything it'll keep you busy for a little while here all right finally just a quick shout out to a max here i did an interview with him uh i think i i believe it was over the weekend or friday i can't remember

exactly what day it was but uh it's still fresh we spoke about all things ethereum and layer twos for most of it so i definitely go check this out if you haven't already it was really fun i really appreciated max for having me on interviewing me uh he's got his own channel as well he does does a bunch of content on there and i i believe i was his first interview as well so so that was that was quite cool so yeah i was honored to be on if you haven't watched it yet definitely go check it out it'll be linked in the youtube description but on that note i'm going to end it there for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord

channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone