Ethereum: the Goldman Sachs of blockchains

I have recently started a new initiative: a tokenised, bankless, blockchain-based non-profit called OffChain Luxembourg.

As we don't have a bank account, OffChain Luxembourg uses the Hive / Hive-Engine couple as a bank. Members pay their membership fees in the "Treasury", the Hive account@ocl-trez account. The accounting currency is the HBD

Thanks to Transak, they can pay in € with SEPA, VISA card, Apple Pay or G Pay. Of course they can also pay in crypto. The idea is that no matter the means of payment, the membership fee ends up as HBD in the Hive account@ocl-trez account.

So today we got a new member, Hive account@lord.nicolas , who paid in xDAI on the Gnosis chain. How do you get from there to HBD ? Well, it's doable but there's a trick: whatever I do, I have to go through the bloody Ethereum Mainnet. Therefore, I need to have a wallet with some ETH in it to pay the Tx fees.

Step 1. Move xDai from OCL-TREZ wallet to one of my Gnosis wallets which has ETH on the Mainnet.

Step 2. On the Gnosis chain (low fees) swap xDAI to WETH

Step 3. Use Gnosis bridge to move the WETH to the Ethereum Mainnet.

Step 4. Unwrap the WETH to ETH ... and get shafted by the Mainnet's Tx fees

^{Almost 10€ in fees to unwrap WETH to ETH ...}

This made me see a parallel between Ethereum Mainnet and Goldman Sachs. I remembered the famous 2009 description of the Nb. 1 investment bank as

a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

In the cryptoverse, Ethereum Mainnet is that "giant, blood-sucking vampire squid" ...