Ethereum is Home - The Daily Gwei #334
Home is where the gwei is.
I’m sure everyone is well aware by now of yesterday’s shenanigans involving fake reports about Walmart integrating LTC for payments. As you can imagine, the initial announcements caused a massive spike in the price of LTC (from $175 to $235 in minutes) which was then quickly sold down once it came to light that the news was fake. I had some spare funds on dYdX that I had been using to play around with so I decided to short LTC (with leverage) as I figured it would go back to the price it was before the news came out (and it did exactly that).
The best thing about this is that I did it all on Ethereum using a layer 2 protocol - no need to touch a centralized exchange at all. I simply opened up the website, opened the short using my already-connected wallet, and the order was filled instantly (as it was a market sell) - I didn’t even need to confirm the transaction in my wallet. Seamless experiences like this is what layer 2 on Ethereum enables and I’m sure many of you have already experienced this by using dYdX or some of the other apps live on layer 2’s today.
I feel like the Ethereum ecosystem is barreling down towards a future where you can quite literally do everything you need to using just your Ethereum wallet. This isn’t just limited to finance-related activities either - you’ll be able to use your Ethereum address to sign into different websites, participate in DAOs, join exclusive social clubs (that are token gated), jump into the metaverse or donate to your favorite projects on Gitcoin. The best bit is that the days of having to spend $100’s of dollars to do any of this are quickly being put behind us as the layer 2 rollout continues. On top of this, layer 2’s also give us the added bonus of “instant” transactions at the UI level (though the transactions aren’t actually finalized/settled until its included in a batch at layer 1).
Now, this isn’t to say that other crypto-networks don’t have merit and won’t see adoption but if I can do everything I want to do on Ethereum in a cheap and fast way, then why would I need to spend significant time on other networks? Ethereum is my home - even if I want to go farm some yield on other chains, I will always come back home with my profits and I think many others will as well. This phenomenon just further strengthens my conviction around Ethereum being an economic nexus at the center of the entire crypto space. Of course, there are also purpose-built chains that can feed into Ethereum to enhance it (such as using Arweave for NFT permanence) and I still think that the crypto ecosystem will continue to be multi-chain - though it’ll be a power law distribution.
In saying all of this, there will be plenty of users who onboard via different networks and don’t end up calling Ethereum home - and this is totally fine. Hell, they may just onboard to a layer 2 network and never even realise that they’re using Ethereum - sort of like how we all “use” Linux-based systems every day but it’s all just running in the background.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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