Anthony Sassano is one of the most well-known and outspoken Ethereum educators in crypto. He’s the founder of “The Daily Gwei” newsletter and podcast, and Co-Founder of EthHub alongside Eric Conner.
There’s very few people out there who produce the amount of quality Ethereum content at the rate that Anthony does, and his passion in talking about it has played a huge role in inspiring me to build CryptoStaker.
That’s why when the opportunity to sit down and talk to Anthony presented itself – I took it with both hands.
Enjoy, and as always – if you like our work, please consider following us on Twitter or subscribing to our newsletter to get more interviews with the most interesting people in crypto.
Anthony, before we jump into Ethereum and really start picking your brain, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Anthony: “In one word: passion. I have the kind of personality where if I’m not truly passionate about something I’ll just put in the bare minimum effort but if I am truly passionate then nothing can stop me. When it comes to what I do for a living – educating about Ethereum – the passion has been endless and it has never once felt like a “job” or something that I would dread getting out of bed for.”
What’s your crypto “Hero Journey” that eventually led you to launch The Daily Gwei and become one of the most known Ethereum educators in the world?
Anthony: “I still think the best decision I made since getting into Ethereum in early 2017 was sticking around during the bear market of 2018, 2019 and part of 2020.
I met a lot of interesting people, was able to learn a tonne about the ecosystem, and it was much easier to make a name for myself as I didn’t have to compete for attention as much as people do today.
This gave me the confidence to later launch The Daily Gwei because I had a rather large Twitter following by mid-2020 and I figured that I could be doing more for the Ethereum ecosystem (I also wanted to give back to an ecosystem that had given me so much).”
How does your current work in the crypto space look like? Can you give us a sneak peak into your day-to-day?
Anthony: “My day-to-day is mostly unstructured – some days will be really busy while others can be quite slow. Though I would say that there’s some consistency in each of my days and that’s right after I wake up as I spend a few hours catching up on everything that I missed overnight.
This is actually something quite unique to me as I live in one of the most out of sync time zones (AEST) so I’m basically always sleeping when the U.S and Europe have their working hours.
Funny thing is this is something I needed to navigate around in order to grow my following and compete with my American and European friends for attention on platforms like Twitter – I often found myself scheduling tweets for 5am my time just so they’d go out during “peak time” for Twitter.”
You’re putting in a ton of work into producing The Daily Gwei with such consistency. On top of that you have other projects like EthHub that you’re heavily involved with. What keeps you going? Where is the drive coming from?
Anthony: “I’m involved with many different projects either as an angel investor, advisor or just a casual observer. The projects that I pay most attention to are all of the layer 2’s – they fascinate me and pretty much all of the most interesting research and development is happening in that area.
What keeps me going? I get asked this question all of the time and I can never come up with a good answer for it. I would say just the sheer excitement I get out of knowing that I’m a part of something much bigger than myself counts for a lot and also knowing that I’m directly helping people with my educational work is just so fulfilling.
As for where the drive comes from – probably a few different things. I have a deep passion for Ethereum, I want to help Ethereum improve people’s lives, I want to educate as many people as possible and I get pretty bad fomo if I miss anything!”
What are some of your achievements with The Daily Gwei/EthHub that you’re most proud of?
Anthony: “EthHub has been around since late 2018 and I would say the thing I’m most proud of is having a large impact on so many people during those brutal years of 18/19/20.
Many people will be unaware of this but until the last couple of years the Ethereum.org website had not been updated since 2014 which meant it had a lot of outdated and outright wrong information on it. My co-founder Eric Conner and I created EthHub to fill this knowledge gap by providing a central open-source resource for people to learn about Ethereum. We also maintain a newsletter and podcast to keep people updated on everything happening.
The Daily Gwei newsletter has been around since mid-2020 and I started doing the videos in late 2020 so I would say I’m just most proud of the fact that I’ve been able to keep a very consistent cadence. I think I’ve only missed a few days of newsletters & videos and 90% of the time that was due to traveling.”
What is a little known/cool fact about you that your listeners/readers don’t know about?
Anthony: “Many people may not know that I basically record the video and write the newsletter all within 2 hours each day (usually from 9pm to 11pm) and it’s all just a stream of consciousness. The videos have no script, no editing, no sponsors or ads – just pure Ethereum/crypto updates and education for everyone to enjoy.
The newsletter on the other hand is mostly a commentary on things happening in the Ethereum ecosystem each day and I try to at least make 1 of the editions each week a proper educational piece. I surprise myself with the newsletter as the only time I ever struggle with it is when it’s been a “slow news day” and I can’t find something interesting to write about – I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block which again, is surprising!”
What’s a past memory or experience you’ve had in crypto that sticks out to you?
Anthony: “Oh wow it’s really hard to pick just 1 but I would have to say DeFi summer.
This is because DeFi summer was when a large number of people outside of the Ethereum ecosystem finally began to understand DeFi and saw the real value prop of Ethereum as a network (after writing it off as dead for so long).
I remember talking to some other Ethereans about this at the time (such as David Hoffman from Bankless) and we all felt a great sense of accomplishment in that our work was finally “paying off” and we also felt a deep sense of joy because of this.”
I’ve been writing a lot about the state of ETH staking after The Merge, do you think we’re going to see more mainstream institutions put ETH on the balance sheet and stake it?
Anthony: “Oh absolutely – there is no doubt in my mind that staking will be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, drivers of fresh institutional capital flow into ETH. I mean think about it – these institutions can just easily wrap up ETH staking (a near risk-free yield!) into a product that they then on-sell to their customers and then take a fee from it. On top of this you have this incredible bull case around ETH that is being primarily driven by The Merge which I think will result in a lot of net buying over the next few months.”
What are your thoughts on Rocket Pool so far? Do you think that eventually they’re going to become the industry leaders, or is Lido too far ahead?
Anthony: “I love Rocket Pool and their community is one of my favorites in all of crypto – I’m also super excited that the network finally went live a few months ago after literally years of building.
In saying that, I think Rocket Pool is lacking in the marketing/business development department right now which is 1 major reason why competitors such as Lido have been pulling ahead of them. In an ideal world we would have a bunch of decentralized staking pool providers (maybe 5 or less?) that had near-equal share of the ETH staked in pools.
Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world, but I think we should all be conscious of the fact that we need to encourage people to stake with providers other than Lido at the moment (since they currently have 90%+ dominance over pooled staking).”
What are your thoughts on DVT (Distributed Validator Technology) and companies like ssv.network? Do you think it will play a significant role for Ethereum moving forward?
Anthony: “I think so – especially on the institutional side – and in general it’s just a really great tool to help keep Ethereum staking decentralized (which is actually quite a hard thing to do).”
Besides Ethereum – what other chains / L1 projects, in your opinion, are innovating or building interesting tech?
Anthony: “This is actually quite a hard question for me to answer because I don’t really think there’s much innovation going on outside of Ethereum.
In saying that, platforms such as Tezos are experimenting with “enshrined rollups” which probably won’t come to Ethereum for a few years but are incredibly interesting. I think that what Terra is doing with focusing on a stablecoin ecosystem is fascinating (though I have no opinion on how stable the system actually is).
And funny enough, I actually like that Solana is trying to go down the “scale everything at layer 1” road because it means we can see if our assumptions are right around monolithic layer 1’s being inherently unscalable.”
Who’s the most influential/famous person you’ve met/got to know thanks to crypto?
Anthony: “I know this may be a boring answer but it’s got to be Vitalik for me. Thanks to EthHub I was able to sit on a panel with him and some others all the way back in early 2019 and it was one of the best days of my life. I think from that point on I really felt like I had “made it” in the Ethereum community as I felt like I had the respect of Vitalik and by extension the respect of the rest of the community.”
What’s the highest transaction fee you ever paid?
Anthony: “Oh boy I don’t know the exact amount but it’d have to be in the thousands. I was a very big degen during the DeFi summer of 2020 and sometimes I’d panic withdraw out of a staking contract because someone found a bug in it or something like that – and in that position you didn’t care about how high the fee was!”
Favorite NFT projects?
Anthony: “I have a love/hate relationship with NFTs – there are so many scams but also so many interesting things happening. So I would say that I don’t have a favorite right now but I am paying attention to the ecosystems being built out on Polygon, Arbitrum, Immutable X, StarkNet and others.”
What’s your beard care routine like?
Anthony: “Less is more when it comes to beard care! Just washing it with beard shampoo 3 times a week and only applying beard oil 3-4 times a week.”
Best podcast other than The Daily Gwei / Into The Ether?
Anthony: “I find myself listening to Bankless a lot since they put out so much content. I also really enjoy Uncommon Core and UpOnly.”
Someone you look up to in the crypto space?
Anthony: “I deeply admire the people who I can tell give a shit about what Ethereum stands for. This includes people like core developers (both at layer 1 and layer 2), those trying to actually innovate in areas such as DeFi, and community members who work tirelessly to educate others about our ecosystem.”
How many hours are you on Twitter per day?
Anthony: “Too many!”
Favorite hobby outside of crypto?
Anthony: “I love a good story so I’m always watching a new TV show, movie, anime or reading a new book. I also have a rather large anime figurine collection, I’m a bit of a watch geek and I love everything computers (been building my own since I was 14).”
Enjoy, and as always – if you like our work, please consider following us on Twitter or subscribing to our newsletter to get more interviews with the most interesting people in crypto.
