Bankless - EthCC #2 | Kain Warwick - "The Crypto Fees Boom"

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

🇫🇷 Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience 🇫🇷 With fantastic guests from all corners of the ecosystem, this 8-part series is an exploration of crypto culture and the current state of Ethereum. With Episode 2, Kain Warwick from Synthetix joins us to frame the next bull market. Pockets of DeFi are heating up, the Layer 2 narrative has room to breathe, and electricity (hopefully not COVID) is in the air. ------ 📣Rhino.Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: WAGMI https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:30 Kain Warwick 5:20 EthCC 2022 8:05 Alt Layer 1s 13:00 Layer 2 Vibes 16:00 The Fees Boom 18:27 Kain vs Su Zhu 21:17 Bull Market Goggles 23:14 Setting up the Next Bull ------ Resources: Kain on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kaiynne ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Welcome back, Bankless Nation to the ETH-C-ECC experience. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Vitalik. Talking with Vitalik in real life, it's always a treat. It's always a treat. Coming up next, we got Kane Warwick. And Kane, he's always just so articulate and so clear-headed. And I already tease the part where we talk about his tussle over crypto-Twitter with Suzu.

Obviously, that's part of the show. But Kane gave me this very fantastic presentation of his idea for how bull markets progress with this idea of a scoreboard, where first we had the scoreboard of the ICO mania, like how many millions of dollars can your ICO raise, then the next mania was the Defy Summer Mania, and that metric, that scoreboard was how much TVL can you get deposited in your contracts? And he makes a claim that the next coming bull market is going to be a bull market in fees. How much fees can your protocol earn? And we are currently witnessing perhaps the beginning stages of a fee revolution going in the app layer on Ethereum, you to swap, generating more fees

than the Ethereum protocol itself, which is insane. Synthetics, not too far along. And this definitely fits within the banklets vision of fees are fundamentals. And in order to have a fundamental alternative financial system, it needs to have fees because that's how companies, protocols, tokens operate, is they generate and capture economic value. So I'm super aligned in this thesis that we drop with Kane. And overall, just he's always such a kick to have a conversation with. We tell the story of the last ECC and how I got COVID. And Kane was the last person I saw last year while we were getting our COVID test and mine came back negative. Turns out it was actually, it should have been positive.

and that's a fun story there. But quickly, we're going to speed run the sponsors that make the show possible. One of the big themes of ETHCC Week was the launch of the ZKEVM. Three different teams all launched their test net. And while everyone is trying to claim who was first, we can confidently say

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and now I bring you my in-person conversation with Kane Warwick. What's up, Kane? How's on? Yeah, good, good. Dude, yeah, second year at ECCC. Yeah. You're being back in the hot seat. Yeah, I'm honored for you for taking the risk and coming and talking to me again.

I know, right? I was a little bit worried, but I feel like I've had COVID enough times now that I'm probably out of danger, I think. How many times have you had it? I've had it twice. Yeah. So, yeah. I've had it three times. Yeah.

But I also, I got a double dose of the booster. Okay. Oh, four shots. You've had four shots. I had two shots. And then instead of getting the regular booster dose, I got a full booster dose, long story. It was so much worse than COVID. Yeah.

Way worse than COVID. I've heard the booster is bad. For the context here, Kane was the last person that I saw at last ECC. We were both in the pharmacy getting our rapid tests. And, you know, chatting it up, like recapping ECC 2021. And then I fly back home. start having COVID symptoms and turns out I tested positive for COVID and Kane was the last person I had ever seen. But you told me that you're a negative one. I was negative. Yeah, you're like, I've got a

negative test. Yeah, they let me fly home. Yeah. So, yeah, I was actually on a call with someone and they're like, uh, David from Bangliss just, uh, tweeted that he's got COVID and I was like, no, he doesn't. And they're like, uh, I just saw him tweet it like he does. I'm like, I saw his test. He doesn't have COVID. And then I was like, oh, no, this is not good. No, it turns out. Turns out I had COVID. But I didn't actually get it from you that time. I avoided it, I assume. I've passed on COVID, at least as far as I can tell, to zero people, even though I've gotten it three times. That's impressive. Okay, so you were here at ECC last year. We're also at ECC this year right now. Compare, contrast. How does it feel different? How does it feel the same?

You know, crazily enough, I feel like it's more vibrant this time. Like you'd think macro, you know, bear market, all that stuff. I don't think that people were quite ready July of last year to travel. And so I think there's a lot of lot of people, especially U.S. people that didn't come last year that are here this year. So it feels like you've got a wider range of the community this time. And yeah, I mean, people seem pretty upbeat. Like even at, you know, permissionless, what was two months ago now, I feel like there was a bit of fear in the air. And we hadn't quite like worked out what was going to happen. I feel like the markets kind of shed that fear. And we're like, okay, it's not great, but like, we'll survive. Right. It's kind of funny. I was joking before flying out here. It's like, well, if we had come out

here at $1,100 ether, things would have been depressed. But also, if we had come to ETC at 1500 where we are now, and it hadn't fallen down to 11 first, people also would have been depressed. But now since it went down to 11 and now it's up to 15, now it's like, oh, we're in the green. Exactly. I know, I know. Yeah. Price action has a way of doing that to you. Certainly. Yeah. I've also noticed the variety of projects is much more, there's so many more chains, so many more layer two to talk about. Cosmos has a big appearance here, but they always have a big appearance at ECC. What are some of the themes that you've been picking up on so far? Well, I think we are now at a point where, look, you know, I'm always trying to meme stuff

into existence, right? So I'll shill my memes. But like, I think we're at a point where the L2 narrative has the room to breathe that it needs. I think the Altel One thesis that was playing out so well for everyone for so long really kind of, you know, suffocated, the, you know, roll up centric feature of Ethereum and all of that stuff, it was really hard to get momentum around that. I think, you know, in the same way that positive price action can be beneficial, negative price action can, you know, take the wind out of the sales of some of these things that maybe were not as sustainable as they appeared on the surface, you know, especially when entire ecosystems implode. That doesn't help the Altile one thesis, you know, too much either.

And so I do really feel like people are taking L2's, you know, Arbitrum, optimism. Obviously, there's a ton of like zero knowledge stuff that's, you know, been talked about this. week, they're really taking it much more seriously. And the thing that I've been, you know, kind of hoping for, which is this resurgence in interest in Ethereum, the ecosystem, not L1, but like the scaling ecosystem, all of the L2s, it would happen. And I think we're seeing that, you know, the first kind of glimmers of that happening. Yeah, there's been a lot of adoption, specifically of synthetics in the last couple months. And I definitely want to talk about that. But first, I want to double down on the Alt Layer 1 thesis. And I'll play devil's advocate here.

is it fair to like lump Luna the thing the Algo stable coin Ponzi scheme in with like the other alt layer ones? I feel like if I was like Anatoly or Emin from Avalanche, I'd be like, dude, that's not fair. Like we're not an Algo stable coin Ponzi scheme. Sure. I mean, you know, I guess my response to that would be that, you know, all's fair in love and war, right? If you want to use memes against us, you have to be prepared for the, you know, memes of production to turn against you as well. And like, yes, on one level, that is true. But I think so much of the like memetic power over the last 18 months for Altel ones has been price action.

Sure. Right. So when one of them blows up and you go, oh, wait, maybe these things aren't invincible, especially when, you know, the price action has been negative for a lot of the Altel ones, as it has for everything, right? But like, it doesn't really matter if defy tokens are going down. If the thesis was that like Cosmos or Avalanche is going to surpass Ethereum, and then, you know, everyone who's kind of, you know, betting on that thesis gets wrecked,

it just has a, you know, it's going to have an impact on that and people's, you know, conviction in that theory. To keep going on this train of thought, I've said it a few times that at least one, Alt-Layer 1 will make it through this bear market. And that would probably be pretty bullish for them. Because, like, when we talk about a lot of these Alt-Layer ones were driven by price reflexivity, right? Adoption because numbers going up.

Yeah. You know, things that only are sustainable in the bull market. and now during the bear market, the tide is going out. We're returning back to fundamentals. Things are moving up the market cap stack to the de-risk ecosystem. All of a sudden, we're interested in the layer two thesis because there seems to be a much more rational fundamentals case to argue these things. But also at the same time, if these Alt-Layer ones can make it through the bear market,

would that make you more bullish on the multi-chain thesis? No, no. Absolutely not. And, you know, I think they will all make it through because they're all extremely well capitalized, right? You know, they were able to build significant war chest through that ridiculous run, right? That happened, you know, for the last 18 months for the Altel ones. Like that was the, I would say, probably singular, you know, price meme, right? It was like this Altel One thesis playing out and, you know, taking on Ethereum and Ethereum

being too slow and, you know, too expensive and all of that stuff that caught a lot of the eth maxis, myself included by surprise. You know, we all got a little bit sideswiped by that. But surviving the bare market, I mean, I mean, you know, this is going to be even more controversial. Eos survived the last bear market. No one gives a fuck about them. Right.

You know, so just surviving, I think, is not sufficient. I think it's going to be much, much harder to sustain an ecosystem. The ones that survive with an ecosystem intact, like just surviving as a project is not enough. Keeping the ecosystems that they've got these nascent ecosystems alive and thriving, if they were able to do that through the bear market, then I'm impressed. Then I would say that's a pretty bullish sign for those networks. Okay, so there's a spectrum here of multi-chain, multi-layer one to multi-layer two all on one chain. Where would you say you land in the spectrum? On the outside of the edge of the spectrum, I've like fallen off the other side.

You're 110% into the multi-layer-2. I've fallen off the edge of the spectrum, yeah, definitely, yeah. And, you know, my reasoning behind that is that, you know, Ethereum, while L1, as an execution, layer is not viable anymore, right? And even, you know, the thing that I worry about, one of the things I worry about is people being lulled into a false sense of security that L1 is making a comeback. Like, L1 cannot make a comeback. We need to shut that down. We need... The Ethereum L1 is not your home. Yeah. Sorry, when I say L1. I mean Ethereum, obviously, the L1, exactly. Like the Dow, right? Yeah, so like the L1, you know, thing is like not a thing anymore, right? Like, we need to move on, we need to go

and we need to deploy, regardless of what your scaling solution of choices, whether it's stockware or stock net or arbitram or optimism, we need everyone to really commit to bringing liquidity onto this L2 layer, which will be composed of multiple networks at this point. I think that's the way it's going to play out. It'll be interesting to see whether any of them dominate, but I think that's just a critical thing that we need to kind of see is this kind of scaling of Ethereum as a state layer, right, as opposed to an execution layer. We have to get that right. A bit of the narrative around layer two's is that their execution has been slower than

what would have been desired. Yes. And we're starting to see some signs of life. You know, optimism and arbitralism are generating, albeit small, but growing fee revenue for the layer one, you know, proof of use. Yeah. We're seeing, like, new projects deploy onto a few of these layer twos natively. The synthetics ecosystem is generating.

a boatload of fees. So I'm wondering, how much credence do you give to the criticism that the layer two ecosystem has lagged more than it should have? And where do you see that trajectory going from here? I think you have to measure it on a few different sort of dimensions, right? One is, like, how usable is any of the different L2s as an ecosystem, right? Like for composability, you know, for liquidity, all of the things that, you know, users care about, right? And the reality is that they're all much further behind than I think we would have hoped that they would be. I feel like DeFi Summer lulled us all into this sense that liquidity was super easy to move, you know, and like vampire attacks and all that sort of stuff. But all of that kind of played out on the same network. I think the added

degree of difficulty of migrating liquidity from one network to another, especially off L1 to L2 has been much harder. And so when you look at the state of optimism today, let's say, and you look at the liquidity for like an eth trade on chain on, you know, wherever unyswap or wherever you're trading, it feels like back in early 2020 on L1, right? So we're, you know, a couple years behind where the state of, you know, where L1 is in terms of arbitrage bots and, you know, and liquidity and like all of the things that you want to see. But it is catching up. And I think it will catch up faster than it took to build it the first time on L1. But it's just going to take a bit more time and I think we hoped.

I think synthetics is actually a great, just canary for the whole story of Ethereum scaling, where synthetics and a few other tokens really drove the whole entire ecosystem out of the 2018 to 2020 bear market. And you could see that in some of the fees that the protocol was collecting, some of the volumes of S-U-S-D, and just like the users. It was like the beloved defy app of 2020. And then we hit DeFi summer and like the whole thing ground to a halt because of the fees on layer one. were just like too restrictive. Yeah.

And like that, in my mind, that's kind of when like synthetic stopped growing. It's like when the fees came. Yeah. But the whole plan and like I think you and the synthetics team were really tapped into this layer two specifically on optimism thesis light years ahead of the rest of the ecosystem. So like early, committed to the optimism ecosystems earlier than anyone else that I can remember. Deployed on optimism.

You guys were on their test net. And now optimism, you know, the tokens out there. Synthetics is fully like, I don't know, fully fledged on optimism, but definitely lively. Pretty much. Pretty much. As of like, yet today, you know, SUSD is now fungible across, you know, and transferable across networks. So pretty much it's done. Beautiful. And now like the synthetics fees are like bigger than Bitcoins. On a daily basis, it's usually bigger than Bitcoin. Which is awkward for the Bitcoin max.

That's a different subject. Yeah. So would you say that you feel vindicated by the strategy, the scaling strategy that you like put into motion years ago? Look, I do. I think there are things that I'm happy with and there are things that I'm probably less happy with. I do feel like we were kind of forced into that move by the fact that synthetics being very complex was very expensive. And we had pressure from users super early on. You know, a unisop trade might have been like a dollar 50 or whatever in like the, you know, single digit way days, right? We were like $15. So we were always kind of like an order of magnitude more expensive than like an eth transfer or a unisop transfer or whatever. We just weren't very gas efficient. And I think that just meant that it forced our hand to react sooner.

And then once we saw the Unipig demo, that was like it for us, right? We were like, okay, you know, we were kind of sitting around like, this is the thing. We need to do this. This is what we were waiting for. We thought that scaling was going to happen, you know, through ETH II, right? You know, Vitalik promised me back in Cancun that it was coming in a few months, you know, a long time ago. And so I think everyone was kind of stuck in this mindset of like, let's just wait for ETHU to come and solve these problems, right? And then we just were like, no, no, this is, we need to do this. That said, while it was the right decision, I think the amount of time that it took and, you know, everyone's always too optimistic, no pun intended about these things. And I think we could have done better

both as the synthetics community and even as like the kind of deep Ethereum community of supporting Polygon. I think we're a little bit too ideologically pure about that and we're like, no, it's a side chain, like whatever. And now, you know, look at the investment they're putting into zero knowledge roll-ups. And so there's things that we could have done better. There's things that I'm happy we did, you know, but at the end of the day, I think you just get, you survive and you get to the point where you now have done the thing that you wanted to do, and you build from there. And that's where we are. So one of the interesting stories of the 2021 bull market was that Twitter fight between you and Suu. He was like making fun of you for like selling synthetics,

but I don't think that was totally true. And then you were making. fun of him for whatever reasons. Basically, it was just like crypto Twitter OGs, like going after each other. And then we find out later that Three hours capital is basically borrowed all their money and then leveraged long and then went to zero. After having that fight with Suu, how do you feel now? Look, you know, I try to dance on people's graves because you never know when you're going to be the one who's in the grave, right? So, you know, I really haven't spoken about it publicly too much. I think, you know, I go back to that tweet that's kind of started all of it, right? which was not a sub-tweet of anyone in particular, right?

It was a build-up of frustration that I'd had where I felt like there were a lot of people who could have chosen to support Ethereum. Ethereum did so well for them, and they chose to go down this kind of dark path, at least in my perspective, right? And, you know, I mean, I was on the podcast with SBF, right? And, you know, he has his own view of like, no,

I'm going to go do the thing that's going to be, you know, the solution that I want. want, right? I'm going to go and support the solution that I want to see in the world. Okay, cool. But I think that some of the capital allocators just went down this dark path of, you know, trying to chase gains, as opposed to reinforcing this kind of nascent ecosystem in Ethereum that still needed a lot of help. We were not there yet, right? Like, we're still not there yet. We still need everyone to kind of, you know, come and work together. And that tweet was about that. It was like, this ecosystem has giving you so much and you kind of just turned around and went and supported, you know, other

defy ecosystems, you know, other L-1s, all of these alternative competitors or whatever, purely driven by profit. That's it because you could get a cheaper price in this seed round and you knew that it was going to pump and you just let it happen, right? And I think that that mindset, and I believe in markets, I believe that speculation is a very powerful driver of behavior. And so I'm not saying that people should not be. driven by incentives and that we should, you know, forego markets or something like that, right?

But I think if you throw all of that out and you don't have any kind of core ideological belief about what we're doing and how powerful this technology is and you just lose sight of that, you can go to a bad place. And we've seen that now play out. You know, there's a lot of people that have been revealed to be doing things that, you know, maybe we're not, not ideal, I guess. Certainly. Yeah. Would you chalk it up to just like, market goggles, though? Somewhat, but I think the underlying behavior of like just this kind of constant chasing. And people, you know, I tweeted at one point, like, you know, SBF is way smarter than me, right?

If that guy tells you to go and buy a token, like, you probably should, right? He'll say it's not financial advice, but I'm saying it is financial advice, right? And like, if he says, look, I think this thing is going to work, right? Who am I to say it's not going to, right? And so when I looked at, you know, something like Solana, and like I talked to Anatoly, I'd like talk to people and I was like, this is potentially a genuine competitor, right? But I chose to not participate in those ecosystems because I was concerned that it would blind me. Because I'm human and I'm fallible and we all are.

And if you have a heavy bag of something, confirmation bias is fucking dangerous, right? And it's so easy to be like, oh, that's okay. It doesn't matter if, you know, the network switches off every couple of weeks. Like, you know, and you start to become an appalling. And it just goes down this very dangerous path, right? And so I think that is ultimately what it came down to for me is that I was like, Ethereum is the ecosystem that allowed me to do what I have done. You know, the idea that I would, you know, even in the early days when it was really, really hard to get cut through and, you know, Maker was so dominant and, you know, Haven struggled to kind of get mine share or whatever. and we did, you know, like, flirt with this idea of multi-chain and going to EOS or whatever.

We ultimately looked at it on Emirates and said, this is not going to work and we shut it down before we even got there. But, you know, we learned that lesson pretty early on. And from that point forward, I think myself, the synthetics community has just gone all in on Ethereum. And that's been the strategy we've enacted. Okay, so we're in this bear market. Whether $1,500 feels like a bear market too. I'll let the listener decide. But we got the merge ahead of us, merge soon.

I don't really think we can count on the merge pulling the entire ecosystem out of a bear market. The theme we've been running with a bank list is it's not a bear market. It's a build market. But if we want to get out of the bear, we have to build our way out of it. So as an ecosystem, what do we need to do in the next 18 months to have our next bull market? So I think if you look back historically at like what are the metrics, right? Like what are the things that people measure? In the ICO period, it was capital raising, right?

Like there was a thing called token data. It just tracked every, you know, ICO every day to see who could raise the most money. And that was the game that people were playing, right? And it was like, how much money can you raise it? Like, what ridiculous valuation or whatever? People forget, and like, Eos raised $4 billion. Now, whether you believe they did it or not, when people in the last cycle were like, we've gone crazy, people are raising in a $4 billion valuation, I would say, I'm sorry,

but a $4 billion valuation is not as insane as someone raising $4 billion. Right. Right, right. Like, Telegram raised $2.2 billion. It wasn't a $2.2 billion valuation. That was the capital that came in, right? So, ICOs took the idea of, like, capital formation and just, like, blew it into insanity, right? But we played the game, and there was a, you know, scoreboard and everyone tracked it.

And, you know, I think Haven came, like, 87th or something like that on the scoreboard. That's pretty good. Yeah, it was not too bad. We were top 100, I think, for quite a while. You know, and then we got a much better. scoreboard. Still not a great one, which was Defi Pulse. Sure. Pre-Defi Summer, we're like, wait a second, what is it the thing? What's the heuristic

that people are using to like figure this stuff out? And it was who is putting money into these contracts? That's the only, like who's got skin in the game, right? If I'm putting money into a contract, on some level, that's a signal that I think, you know. Contract good. Exactly. Right. And so if enough people do, then you get some kind of signal that it's valuable, right? And we all thought it out, Curve and Uniswap and Maker and us and you know, Ave and compound and, you know, the compound and Arbe really heavily pointed out, right? It was like fighting to the death, right?

But we had this game and we all played it and we were trying to like work out like, how do you optimize for this thing, right? Like how do you attract as much capital as possible? And I think it pushed us forward. But ultimately that was not sustainable. What we've seen emerge now is crypto fees. And I think in my mind, crypto fees is the next scoreboard. And the fact that there are multiple DFI protocols beating Bitcoin,

is a very powerful meme. Like if we get to a point where the top 10 protocols in terms of like revenue generation, whether they're distributing a token holders or not, but who is paying to use the thing, if all of those things are defyre protocols and Ethereum, that's a very powerful representation of what is actually going on here. And so I do think that that is going to be the game

that we play over the next six months. And it's the closest thing to like fundamentals we've ever had. Certainly. Certainly. I think there's this growing appetite of fixing defy tokens. And I mean, I think the actual recipe for that is relatively simple. Other than fixing governance, which is very hard, we'll excuse that part for another podcast. But just like growing fees and turning on the fee switch. Yep. That's it. Is a bull market. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, like there are protocols out there who have been rightly subsidizing and, you know, creating kind of un- economic incentives, right, for people to use them for years now, right? Multiple protocols, right? And not paying users what they potentially should have and not charging users and consumers of the protocol what they should be paying, right? And that's fine in an early stage, right?

Just like a startup, you know, you offer discounts or free things or referral bonuses or whatever you need to do to bootstrap growth. And we've been doing that in the form of tokens and the form of no fees, low fees, whatever scheme you want to come up with. But ultimately, if we cannot get this ecosystem to a point where people are paying for the services that they consume and that the services are profitable in producing those services based on the fees that they're consuming, then this is all nonsense. It has to be sustainable. And I think if we can get that meme going to the point where we say, okay, we've gone up and down, up and down, and we finally come up again, and we're coming up because

we've got to sustainability where this ecosystem works, people pay, you know, it's a genuine functional system. I think that is the type of thing that would attract the attention of people in the larger world that we've never, you know, we've attracted speculators. I don't think we've attracted people who have fundamental valuation methodologies. I think we can definitely allude to the fact that ether, the asset, has attracted those types of people because of the fees. For sure. And so we can probably extend that same idea. If you go further down the defy and you're like, wait, there's, you know, let's call it 10 protocols, right?

They're all charging fees. The fees are being paid to the people who are producing the service and the users are paying the right amount of money to use the service. That would be an amazing place for us to get to. We're not there yet, but it feels like that goal is inside. Well, Kane, I can promise you that I'm going to steal everything that you just said and turn it into an article. Amazing. I love it. Cool.

Because, yeah, I haven't been producing as many articles as I'm. I would have like, although we didn't get into governance, and I'm writing something on governance right now, because I think the state of governance is something we need to fix in this bear market. Wait, I'm also writing a piece on governance. Okay. Well, you'll probably beat me to us. Yeah, who's going to get there first? We will absolutely get there first. I am not the fastest rider these days, but I'll do my best. Awesome. Cane, thank you for joining me at ECC. Yeah, cheers so much.