Core dev updates, ETFs and DATs buying ETH & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #853 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of daily refuel where recap the latest news in the ecosystem. I'm your host and this is the 19th of January 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So things are ramping back up again in the cryptosphere. The core dev calls are in full swing now. Um and they're there's a lot happening there because Glamsterdam is fast approaching as you guys know. I think you know Glamsterdam should be delivered by mid this year. Uh, and obviously there is a lot of EIP still being considered for Glamsterdam. I mean, if you go to the forecast website, you can see the entire list of them. I've got the website up in front of me here. So, if you go to Glamsterdam upgrade, you can see on the left hand side like just how many there still are.

Um but yeah, they're working through them and Pujo here from the Ethereum uh cat herders basically put together a nice summary of one of the latest core devs calls uh which was facilitated by um an guy here instead of Tim Bico because Tim actually announced that he's going to be stepping into a different role. So he's going to be moving on from being a coordinator facilitator of the all core devs uh calls and doing something else within the Ethereum foundation. So definitely not leaving the Ethereum ecosystem, but kind of evolving his role there, which I think is a good thing because you don't want people being in the same role too long.

You always want to keep refreshing things. You always want to keep things uh nice uh uh nice and uh you know, nice and fresh, get new ideas in, get new kinds of perspectives on things. So I think that's a that's a really good thing there. But I don't think uh Ansgar is the permanent uh person for this at at the moment. I don't think they've found someone who who will permanently be doing this. But it doesn't seem to have slowed anything down. because Glam's Tanam is already on its second devet uh or at least it's going to be um on its second devet. So essentially they were scoping this out at the last allcore devs call basically deciding which EIP they wanted to include as part of DevNet 2 here uh as well as uh kind of reviewing what happened in uh sorry

as well as reviewing other EIPs. As you can see here, there's I mean this tweet's quite long. I'll link it in the YouTube description below, but there's a nice summary table here of essentially what is uh I guess like denied for inclusion, considered for inclusion uh and delayed or pending so far in terms of the EIPs that are going into Glamsterdam here. So, we've only got one CFI in this list, uh which is the increased maximum contract size, which I think is something that developers of the, you know, EVM, Ethereum L1 have been clamoring about for quite a while now. But then we have about seven yeah seven uh EIPs that have been denied for inclusion in Glamsterdam. Now I should explain this and say that this doesn't mean that they're denied for inclusion

forever. It just means that they won't be in Glamsterdam. Uh and there's various different reasons as to why this is the case and the reasons are actually outlined on the right hand side of this table here. So for example uh the pay op code was denied for inclusion and that's because there was no consensus among the clients for this EIP. So you know it's it's it's stuff like that. It's not like it got denied for inclusion because you know one person didn't want it and they vetoed it or something like that. No, it's more about kind of I guess the community, the ecosystem, like all the stakeholders trying to come to consensus on things. But ultimately, you know, there are different waitings to different stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Like a community member like myself uh has a different waiting to a core developer, right? The people actually building this stuff because if none of the core developers as part of the client teams are going to build it, well, even if everyone wants it, it's just not going to happen because no one's building it, right? So there's there's that kind of perspective there. And then obviously there are like many many different stakeholders within the Ethereum ecosystem uh that kind of go into that decision-m process process there. But as I said, this does not mean that it's denied for inclusion forever. It just means it's not going to be in Amsterdam. And there are a few other EIPs here that are either delayed uh delayed being the decision on them will be deferred to a later date. In this case, one of the EIPs has been deferred

to January 19th. Uh and then there's a bunch of other ones that are still pending. you know other things like for example one of them is pending based on a pull request one of them is pending based on the all core dev's uh decision they're going to probably discuss that coordinate amongst themselves see if they actually you know think it's kind of an EIP that's worth going into the network uh and a lot of these are very technical EIPs they're not things that I guess are controversial they're either technical upgrades or kind of I guess uh efficiency upgrades fixes for different things a lot of different things going on here but as I said you can always visit the forecast website to get a complete breakdown of each of the EIPs as part of each upgrade and also what they mean for you. You don't have to be

technical to understand this because in each EIP, if you kind of click the show more button under each EIP here, it'll tell you what the stakeholder impact is for each stakeholder in the ecosystem such as the end users. So that's like me and you app developers. I'm sure some of you out there are devel are app developers, wallet developers, tooling infrastructure, layer 2, so on and so forth. So I I mean I can't praise Forecast enough for this. Like they've gone above and beyond here. Not only do they have like a nice kind of repository of all of the EIPs here, uh they also have explanations of them. Uh and they also have stakeholder impact which we just haven't had in in you know in previous kind of years. Uh so yeah, just again a shout out to to to the people

that run this and and maintain forecast doing an incredible job there. But yeah, that's uh that's really kind of most of the I guess um stuff going on in core devand right now in terms of I guess immediate stuff. Like obviously there's so much happening on the research front of things. Uh I I think like chatter around ZKVM just gets louder and louder. There's a lot of chatter around lean Ethereum uh lately I've noticed. And lean Ethereum is that kind of road map that Justin Drake uh put together back in this is late 2024 now at Bangkok uh for for DevCon there. That was that kind of like fiveyear timeline he had for basically zkying you know Ethereum L1 making it quoteunquote lean. So basically making it really efficient uh

and basically shipping everything uh based on lessons learned over the last 5 years when it comes specifically to the consensus layer uh but also it affects the execution layer as well. Uh, but that stuff's all making progress as well and I probably talk about that a little bit later in the episode two because I have a tweet from Vitalic that I want to cover there. But yeah, that would cover the latest kind of core dev stuff happening uh there. So, moving on from that, um, I mean, this has got to do with core dev stuff, but this is kind of like my own opinion on things. So, Glamsterdam is coming midyear and then as you guys know that, you know, we we try to have upgrades like every 6ish months in Ethereum. Realistically, it's like 6 to9 months. Uh, and essentially the next upgrade will be Hegot, uh,

which is, as I've said before, I don't think it's going to happen this year. I think it's going to happen like early next year. But regardless on timing, uh, the the discussions have already begun around what's going to actually be included in Hegota in terms of EIPs, but also what's going to headline Hegotar because for Amsterdam, we have the headlines already. We have EPBS and block level access lists. I've gone through those plenty of times before, but Hegotar does not have a headliner yet. Uh the only thing that's even kind of considered uh so far to be uh a headliner or even considered for inclusion generally is Fossil. And that's what my tweets about. Fossil or the fork choice in enforced inclusion lists or as it's I guess like more broadly known as a way to improve

censorship resistance on uh the Ethereum network. Now this was originally supposed to go into Glamsterdam but got kind of punted to the next upgrade because we wanted to have EPBS as part of Glamsterdam. Usually the core developers just want to have one headliner per per layer. And I'm not talking about like layer one, layer two. I'm talking about like execution layer and consensus layer. So on with glamsterdam there's EPBS per consensus layer, block level access list for execution layer. Fossil is a consensus layer AIP EIP, right? So EIP if Fossil is the headliner of Hegotar, then there there's kind of people saying that well we won't be able to get faster slot times because there's already a headliner. Because a headliner is both something that I guess a lot of people want and something that's really popular, but also it's something that is

inherently very complex. Like EPBS and block level access list are both complex EIPs. Fossil is also complex in comp and and complexity doesn't have to mean that it's like hard to kind of develop it or hard to code it up. Complexity more so alludes to how much of the protocol it actually touches and how much of the protocol it actually changes cuz Fossil does fundamentally change the protocol. uh and it has you know huge downstream effects for everyone that's part of the protocol specifically note operators right because there are a lot of concerns around the fact that well if uh validators are forced to include certain transactions what happens to these institutional kind of note operators that have to be able to filter out transactions based on laws and regulations that they're subject to my unpopular opinion maybe it's a popular

opinion but I don't know this is my kind of brutal opinion on that is that well then they just don't be validators or don't be not operators on the network like no one's forced to be a validator on the network. No one no one's forced to be a node operator on the network. And to be honest, the less institutional node operators on the network maybe the better like honestly I I think it's actually better for us to have less on the institutional operators than more uh in terms of like network share. And I already think and I've said this before I already think we have too much E stake on the network. I think we have too many uh I I think we can always use more node operators, but I just think in terms of like Estaked, I think it's already too much and it's only going up from here

because a lot of the institutions are getting involved now. Obviously, the staked ET ETFs are still coming uh uh and and and that's going to just like pump those numbers up as well. So, I have nothing kind of against these entities being kind of like forced to shut down their note operators because of the fact that they uh they can't do it. they can't operate on it because of laws and regulations because the way I see it is that Ethereum the protocol should not be uh developed in such a way that it caters to any of these nation state laws and regulations the whole point is decentralization right the whole point is to exist outside of that and if we have to cater to those things then it kind of defeats Ethereum's kind of claim to credible neutrality it claim to decentralization uh and all the I

guess stuff that falls off of that as well so the reason I I I bring this up today is because of my tweet where I You know, I've been a fossil champion for a very long time now. I've been talking about on the refill for years at this point, and I strongly believe that it should be a headline headliner for Hegotar, uh, which is an upgrade after Glamdam. And then I finished a tweet off by saying sensitive resistance, uh, resistance is the entire point of blockchains. Let's harden this on Ethereum. It is the entire point to me, guys. Like, sensitive resistance is one property of decentralization. Cuz as you guys know, I've said before that I think decentralization is an emergent property of all these other kind of properties like sensitive resistance, right? Or the amount of node operators on the network or the amount of ether stake or the

amount of people running full nodes, right? That sort of stuff. But when you actually kind of just break break it down to first principles, break it down to its fundamental kind of building block. What is the point of a blockchain? Like what is the point of a blockchain like Ethereum? Maybe you could argue there are uh certain constructions of blockchains like layer 2s or other maybe like very very centralized layer ones that their entire point is not to be decentralized, not to be censorship resistant. And I I kind of look I kind of vibe with that to an extent. But when it comes to like a layer one blockchain, when it comes to something like Ethereum, right, to me the entire point and the entire value prop is censorship resistance, which is one of the properties of

decentralization. But as I said, at the heart of it, at the very heart of it, censorship resistance is the most important property because that is what we are buying these assets for. At least that's what I store my wealth in ETH for because I know that the only way that anyone could get access to my ETH is to physically take it from me. They act like they can't or to force me to hand it over to them in some violent way. They can't take it from me. I mean, they could hack me, of course, as well, uh, and stuff like that, but I guess what I'm talking about is the government basically arbitrarily freezing my bank account or the bank arbitrarily freezing my bank account or seizing my assets and stuff like that, right? So, like I I can have these assets that exist entirely

outside of that system and also they could be on addresses that no one knows is tied to me. I could have like uh, you know, obviously I've got my public address, sassel, but I have addresses that aren't tied to me as well. I can have these assets everywhere and so can anyone else. Uh and no one can can arbitrarily take them from me. No one can freeze these assets on me, right? So, it's just a much better property rights system uh for specific things like obviously it's for the the the property rights of Ethereum only extend to the things that are natively issued on the Ethereum network because for example a stable coin like USDC or USDT or um any other kind of centralized stable coin uh the Ethereum network does not give you property rights over that.

the the property rights of that is in the legal system because the USDC and USDT tokens are just IUS of cash in a bank account somewhere right so as we know it's completely centralized they have freeze functions all that sorts of stuff so the Ethereum network is not giving you property the ultimate property rights there same with tokenized assets anything like that but when it comes to assets that are issued natively on Ethereum like ETH I mean I would argue ETH is maybe the only one besides maybe maybe some other assets that you could today. Uh then their property rights are enforced by the Ethereum network. And of course like ERC20 tokens have their property rights enforced by the Ethereum network as well. But then these ERC20 tokens are their contracts, right? The ERC20 token

standard is a smart contract. Uh they can have uh back doors in them. They can have uh but uh uh kind of controls around them like freeze functions like as I just said, tether and and circle with USDC and USDT have. So, if we're talking about the ultimate property rights uh over over an asset like for for Ethereum, it's ETH basically. Like it really is just ETH. And that's why I that's a big reason why I store my value uh in ETH here. But yeah, as I said, to me, sensory resistance is the whole point. If you don't have that, then you don't have a blockchain. You have some glorified data database with like a token attached to it. Uh and we've seen many many of those over the years come and go, pump and dumps here and there.

uh make a lot of people really rich unfortunately because uh in my opinion most of them have been scams and grips but that is the way of the permissionless world my friends. All right moving on so I mentioned work on the kind of ZKVM or ZKVMs is ramping up and it re really is like it's kind of gotten the attention of the smartest people I know in the ecosystem uh and they're full steam ahead on making sure that this can be a reality that we can actually deliver. Now Tomas uh the current co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation um basically shared this uh I guess like docu yeah this doc that's on GitHub here of the plan to get the ZKVM on L1. Now this is quite a long

plan. I think I shared something similar to this or maybe even the same thing uh to this the other the other day but this is just another kind of place for it uh that basically outlines Yeah, I I did I did I did share this on the on the last refuel. basically outlines the teams, people working on all the stuff that needs to happen to make ZKVMs a reality. So, you can go check that out uh for yourself. But I think what I wanted to highlight was that Tomas was sharing this and and it's always good when you see like people with with a you know in positions of I guess like influence sharing these sorts of things. Like whenever Vitalik shares something gets a lot more eyeballs than when a regular person shares it, right? So when Samaras shares something like this, people pay

attention because and not even just people within crypto, but people with outside of crypto, the institutions, the Tradfire folk, they look at this and they're like, "Okay, well, here's the the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation sharing this this kind of document here." They may pass this on to their in-house analysts and stuff like that and say, "Hey, what's this all about? Like what is this? Is it going to be good for Ethereum? You know, what's the play here? What's the timeline? Who are all these people? You know, what's the actual goal here?" and those analysts will go and research and and do all that sorts of stuff and then feed that information back and we get better education because of that as well. So, I was just excited to see Tomas share this and again I'll I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you guys to check out. Uh but

it was a really great uh uh kind of outline of what's happening on the ZK EVM uh front there. All right, so some interesting research that the ETH Panda Ops team put out in regards to a bunch of different things actually because there's a bunch of different things that fall off of this. So essentially they started off this thread by saying that uh the blo the second blob parameter only fork landed uh last week and it's a couple of weeks ago now. It bumped the max blobs per block to 21 and they've been going through the data since then. And they said here initial analysis doesn't look good. Have a look at this scary chart but there might be more to this story.

So when I read that I was just like okay what's going on here? But then of course I read through the thread and I was like okay uh I understand what's going on here now. So essentially what they did was they looked at the data of of blobs. They looked at the data of validators and and validators kind of including uh blobs in their blocks and builders including blobs in in in their blocks and stuff like that. Um and I'm sure a lot of you are aware of this but maybe for those who who aren't uh validators uh do this thing called timing games. Um, and they do this through me boost because me boost has this functionality built in where essentially they'll wait as long as possible to kind of propose their block in order to get a more profitable block essentially or to

construct their block to get a more profitable block. And this has all got to do with MEV. Uh, and this is something that's been going on for for quite a while now. Now, the concern has been is that because validators do this and because blobs are a heavier kind of transaction type to process, they're they're either going to drop blobs and just not include blobs because um uh including blobs means that their blobs are less profitable, or they're going to kind of wait um until, you know, still do their timing games, but then still include blobs and essentially make their efficiency go down. And that's what we're actually observing here is that some of them are making uh uh their efficiency go down cuz um the the ones who playing the most aggressive timing games are degrading their um uh their

kind of network uh participation here. And they're doing this on purpose as I said because it's a way to become more profitable. But there's a nice chart here of the entities that are actually doing this. So the worst offender of this was uh p2p.org uh and the least worst was Everstake here as part of Lido. And you can see the full list here. I mean, this isn't the full full list, but this is a pretty pretty big list of of the note operators or at least the validators and and what they're doing here and how many how much time in games uh that they're that they're kind of playing here. Now, why this is a concern is because, as you guys know, the reason why we haven't just jacked blobs up to the theoretical maximum that we can is because if we did that, the network would uh degrade uh a

lot. Like the network participation would degrade a lot. The network reliability and efficiency and effectiveness would degrade a lot. And this is one of the reasons why because we know that validators play timing games. It's not the only reason. Obviously, there are a bunch of other reasons, but like like bandwidth constraints and stuff like that, but this is a big reason here. So, it's good to have this data. It's good to know which entities are the are the ones that are that are offending here. Uh and it's good to call this out publicly as well to maybe kind of put some social press pressure on these entities to stop doing this. Now, of course, there is work on I think like uh addressing this issue whether it be in protocol or out of protocol. uh as part of the wider me road map for Ethereum L1. Um but in

terms of kind of its effect on on the network overall, yeah, it is a negative uh it is a negative effect here. Uh it unfortunately like the more I guess validators do this and the more blobs that we add to the network and the more blob usage there is and if they keep kind of doing this uh network efficiency and effectiveness goes down and it's not good for anyone uh from that kind of point of view there. So you can go read this for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below, but just thought it was worth highlighting for you guys there. All right, so this is probably going to lead me into a bit of a broader discussion around me and fees here. I thought this was an interesting tweet from from Tony here where he said where he asked a question, what does a block

cost? The median cost to buy an Ethereum block moved from the low hundreds of USD in 2024 to a few tens of dollars more recently, largely driven by reduced ME. The chart is based on me boost boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boost payments to uh proposers so to validators that proposed blocks and then someone asked in the comments you know what caused the reduced me and Tony and Tony answered no real hype use cases such as DeFi or memecoin trading which was the last one uh lately now this is something that I've spoken about extensively on the refuel uh in the context of uh fees and fee revenue and how I believe that fee revenue of an L1

just trends down over time u and also in the context of why this was the case in 2024 or even earlier than that in terms of um ME like if you go all the way back to 2020 with DeFi summer that's when ME on Ethereum L1 really kind of took the for the the the forefront that's when fees started really spiking and then into 2021 with NFT mania and then into 2022 as well the fees were really high simply because of me guys now of course those things kind of subsided the mania around them subsided but also we improved uh the user experience ments uh by uh introducing private mess to shield them from shield users from toxic me like sandwich attacks. Uh services like cow swap that use um a network of kind

of solvers to do this. Different like protocols and different apps are taking different approaches here. But the end result is that we have substantially reduced the amount of me happening on the network. Now what does this result in? Well, it results in lower fees because the reason why people are willing to pay fees is because there's money to extract in the form of me. And when there's less of that to extract, there's less fees being paid. Erggo fees go down. Now, this applies to every single chain, guys. This isn't just exclusive to Ethereum L1. It applies to every other L1 and it applies to L2s as well. L2s can be a little bit um I guess like h how could I how can I say this most accurately? L2 can be a bit flexible with this because they can have

centralized sequences where essentially they can just basically uh if you believe that they that they're doing this they can basically have um I wouldn't say zero me but like basically zero me at least from the sequencer there are other form forms of me that can pop up there uh and then some of the L1s can also do this or they can even go the other end where they basically just form cabal of validators and start doing you know even even more toxic me extraction from users in order to make up for the fact that fees have gone down, right? Because fees have gone down across the board on all of the L1's. I keep seeing these posts of um of from these random Twitter accounts basically saying, "Oh, here was the L1 revenue of sorry, here was the revenue of all the L the top L1's." And and they show like

the last year, I think they showed 2025. And I look at that and I'm just like, if you take away like the January and February of 2025, the rest of the year looks really like fees dropped like 80 to 90%. So, and and that's because of the fact that obviously speculation went away, speculia went away, ME went down. But I always just find it funny when I see that because people love to do this thing where they both look back at the history and go, okay, well, you know, this train had this many fees. They're killing it. It's like, well, okay, but let's just like like, you know, don't just look at the whole year. Look at like little pockets.

Look at like a three-month pocket or a six-month pocket and then look at the trend. The trend is what's most important. And if the trend is that for a couple of months you had really high fees and then since then fees revenue has gone down 90%. Then that's not exactly bullish, right? That's not exactly something that you should be pointing to as success. And we've seen that across the board. And then people will also do this thing where they extrapolate like a day or a week worth of revenue and annualize that which is really like bizarre to me. Like like it's actually insane to me that people do this. Like you can't look at one day of fear revenue and annualize that out.

Like one day, let's just say you have $10 million of fear revenue on Ethereum L1 one day. And we did in October when that um the 1010 crash happened. Believe the fe for Ethereum was like 11 or 12 million that day, right? So if you took that just that one day and then kind of annualized that out to to over a whole year, you would get like a massive amount of fear revenue, right? But since that day, fair revenue on Ethereum L1 has been $1 million or less, which is 90% plus down from that day. So, you would be vastly vastly overstating how much fair revenue Ethereum would generate um you know, yearly. So, it's just a really dumb thing to do that.

It's a really dumb thing to annualize things even based on like a week, maybe a month, maybe you could do it. But we've seen so much volatility in fe in in crypto over the years is that I don't think you can have an accurate kind of uh I guess like um uh an accurate look forward at this. I don't think you can accurately predict that hey because Ethereum like I mean you can you can even just look at look at the past. You can say okay because Ethereum had you know couple billion dollars of fair revenue whatever it was in 2021 that means that you know it's incredibly bullish and it's going to keep having that. Well no that didn't happen. Same is same for a lot of these other L1's right. So I think when looking at fear of a new people need to remember that

most of it if not the vast majority of it actually comes from me. And why does ME happen? Well because there's speculative mania on the chain or because the the chain is immature and doesn't have proper MEV safeguards in place and everything's just in the public meool and everyone's getting wrecked right uh by me because ME is most of it is inherently toxic. So when you look at it from that lens, you will begin to understand why I am so against um valuing L1 assets, especially ETH, based on fair revenue, why I think it's the wrong metric. Uh and also why it's just um a really not a good metric in general and really not something that's reliable in general. And and and also you may begin to understand I mean I'm sure a lot of you understand this but I

think there are a lot of people out there who don't begin to understand like why the L1 is really poor or an L1 is really poor at capturing value from fees and and because it can't just arbitrarily increase fees. It can't just charge more rent. I mean it could but like that would just result in people going elsewhere, right? So fees are a race to the bottom. Fair revenue is not a good way to value ETH or other L1 assets on. And I'm glad this is becoming more and more, I guess, accepted as truth, I think, especially because a lot of the crypto natives have kind of, I guess, checked out at this point. It seems to be crypto is much more dominated by like the TRI folks and the institutional folks at this point and they're mostly on LinkedIn, not even crypto Twitter. Um, but I'm I'm enjoying

that kind of shift to be honest. I'm enjoying the the the shift away from just in, you know, just to be blunt, stupidity of the industry. I mean, there's still stupidity out there, but it feels like there's a lot less these days, which is nice. But anyway, uh moving on from that to the big thing I wanted to talk about today, which was Vitalik's tweet, well, one of Vitalik's recent tweets here. So, this tweet is long, so I'm not going to talk about the whole thing, but essentially the TLDDR is that he wants to make the Ethereum protocol eventually look like this rocket booster on the right hand side. Now, I don't know the exact context of this picture. I believe I I I I think like cuz I I remember seeing this picture before that this is uh one of Star um SpaceX's rockets uh over over

the years. And I think this might be their Raptor uh I think that's what it's called or one of their kind of rockets. And this is how they simplified over time. They started with the left one and they simplified it and they simplified it again and they got into this like really simple version which looks a lot nicer, a lot more streamlined. it hasn't just been, you know, uh, I guess made to look nice. You can actually see like how much of the first version was stripped away and made more efficient in this kind of like uh, uh, third version here. Now, the reason Vitalic posted this is because this is what he wants the Ethereum protocol to look like. He wants to simplify the protocol as much as possible. He wants to get rid of as many uh, lines of code in the protocol as

possible to make it easier to reason about, to make it safer, more secure, and obviously overall more efficient. Now, this is obvious this is going back to what I was saying earlier about like lean Ethereum. That's actually a core goal of lean Ethereum is to just basically clean up all of the the mess and make it look like this booster on the right here. Uh but it is a quite a long kind of journey to get there. And Vitalic notes in his tweet, he kind of worries that um with with Ethereum protocol development, you know, we we really want to do big upgrades on the network and we really want to meet kind of every need that that that stakeholders uh kind of bring up, but at the same time, there has to be kind of a I don't know if I'd call it a line or or

kind of like um some some kind of I mean, a line is probably the the right terminology here. There has to be some kind of line that basically we we we stop at and say, "Okay, well, no, that's too complex for the protocol. That's not something that the Ethereum protocol and this is just the L1 protocol. That's not something that we should be they should be be aiming for. It doesn't fit in the wider kind of simplification goal and the also like much wider goal within the next 5 to 10 years of oifying the L1 protocol. So if it doesn't fit into that, maybe we don't do it. Maybe we just leave it up to the L22s to do it if if users want it. Uh but it's not kind of something that we want for for Ethereum core pro the Ethereum core protocol. And honestly, I really vibe

with this. I know that this is controversial um to some extent. I've seen people say that this might might be a too much of an ideological kind of place for Ethereum. Uh there are competitors out there. Ethereum still needs to keep evolving. But there's nothing against Ethereum evolving in what Vitalik has said here. Like he's not saying that Ethereum should stop evolving. His main point is that it needs to be evolving in a way that simplifies the protocol over time that makes sure that the protocol is still uh secure and safe and not getting more complex over time. because with complexity kind of comes uh uh comes risks uh spec specifically security risks. But he also called out the fact that well over the years uh different client teams are going to um uh uh the

various client teams are going to have different people come through right it's not going to be the same people working on the core protocol all the time. So if new people come in and they can't even understand what's going on with the protocol. What ends up happening is that you only have some uh some of the the people that have been around the longest who understand the protocol and then eventually they either leave or in the long long term they they literally die and then who's left to to kind of um you know maintain the protocol? Who's left to maintain the clients? Who's left to fix anything if if stuff goes wrong like a security risk or anything like that. So, and and this is obviously seen across uh all of tech. Uh you know, a lot of big big companies like big corporates are famous for using really

really old school uh kind of operating systems because the people who built those things aren't around anymore and uh they don't want to kind of upgrade anything because it could break everything. So they hire like one guy or two people and they pay them so much money in order to maintain these legacy massive legacy systems that are literally like from the '90s basically. So we don't want to end up in that kind of space with Ethereum. That's that's what Vitalik is saying here. Some of it is unavoidable. There will always be some kind of complexity in the protocol I think. But if we can avoid as much of that complexity as possible, that should be the goal here. So, I think what Vitalik was trying to do here was just more of like a rallying call to everyone to say, "Hey, you know, keep this in

mind. This should be what we were striving for." And I agree with him. I do agree with him. But I do get the concerns from other people out there about, you know, maybe it's being too ideological. We need to make sure that we can keep evolving um and and and so on and so forth. I get that. But I don't know. I I feel like we should definitely be going towards becoming more of a simplified lean I guess for lack of a better term protocol in order to make sure that we're secure because as I've said before Ethereum is trying to last like for hundreds of years. It's not trying to just be here for the next like 5 10 years. It's trying to last for hundreds of years and you can't do that if it's too complex and then in let's say 20 years there's like a massive bug

that brings the whole network down and then bye-bye Ethereum, right? That's like the worst case scenario, but hey, it's a scenario that could happen uh there. So, yeah, that's uh that was Vitalik's tweet there. I'll let you give it a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so. Uh, so last up here, um, I have, uh, something that I noticed the other day that I don't know why I hadn't noticed this before, but if you go to the strategic ETH reserve website, um, and you kind of look at, uh, how much ETH is owned by the strategic Ethereum reserves, so I guess like the treasuries, uh, all the digital asset treasuries, uh, and the ETF, the ETFs, like all the ETFs, uh, the treasuries actually own more than the ETFs. And I

hadn't noticed this before and it's kind of crazy when you think about it because the DATs as they're known didn't launch until last year, right? Until like April, May last year. Whereas the ETH ETFs launched the year before. So they had a whole year ahead start on the DATs. But because of all the aggressive buying from I mean in particular from Tom Lee of Bitine, but also the others like Sharp Link has been doing um buying as well. But because of all that, they've quickly rocketed to having more ETH in them than the the ETFs. Now, I guess like in terms of what I've observed here, I'm not I I don't really attribute it to be bullish, bearish.

It's like kind of neutral here. I don't really have any opinions on that. It was more the fact that it's like it's an enormous amount of ETH here, guys, in these entities right now. It's like 22.7 billion in the treasuries, 20.6 in the ETFs, and this keeps going up. like the DATs keep buying the um the ETFs keep buying. Yeah, the buying has slowed on the ETFs, but that I guess because the price is not doing much. ETFs definitely follow the price and once the price goes up again, I'm sure flows will flow in there. The DATs have been mostly driven by Tom Lee at this point. He's still buying a ridiculous amount of ETH every week or every other week. Uh and also I am just shocked that the market is letting him do that at these prices.

Like it's actually ridiculous that he is at what 3.7% of the of of the total supply uh and we're still at around 3,000. I I don't know what's up with that. But like that's that's ridiculous, guys. Like that is that really is ridiculous there. But hey, he's buying it fair and square. He's not getting any preferential treatment. He's bought higher. He's bought lower than the current price. Uh the market is just really dumb to give it to him at that price. But hey, he might and he he really might get to that 5% goal sooner than uh than than we than we all thought. I mean, I definitely thought that there was a chance that he wasn't going to get there, but because the price would keep going up, but it seems like he is cuz they have a lot of cash left. I think they have like a billion

dollars of cash left or something like that. Something crazy there. But anyway, he's not the only one. Uh, Shar Link is, I believe, still buying not as aggressively. The others, some of them are actually were selling to buy back stock. U, which is funny because I think people were under the wrong impression that DATs were like a buy only thing. No, the the whole point of a DAT is that they're trying to increase ETH per share. And believe it or not, selling ETH to buy back shares actually does do that in certain circumstances. Um, which is funny when you think about it. It's like how can you get more ETH per share if you're selling ETH? Well, it's because they're buying back shares and if the share price goes up then uh and they return to NAV or they trade at a premium, then you increase ETH per

share. And there's other ways of increasing ETH per share like staking the ETH, which is what Tom Le started doing or what Bit Miner started doing. Um, Sharlick has been doing it for a while. So, they're all doing it. You know, they're going to be kind of doing stuff in DeFi as well. So, a lot a lot of stuff happening there. But, yeah, I don't know. I just it's crazy to me that the market has allowed allowed Bit Mine to buy so much ETH at such what I consider to be bargain bin prices. But, I think it's probably mostly because no one's really paying attention to crypto in the outside world right now. Uh, a lot of the attention is on stocks, is on gold, of course, like gold and silver as well and just precious metals generally are on a ridiculous run. Uh, and still

are, which is just crazy to me. But I guess sign of the time, sign of the world. Like we're reacting to the kind of macro world there. Um, but yeah, we'll see how that kind of continues. I said on the tweet here, I wonder what this will look like at the end of the year. I think like both of these kind of entities are going to have more ETH in them than they do today. Uh, but maybe the ETFs flip the DATs. We'll have to see uh that one there. Now, before I end today's episode, I did have a few kind of things that people in the Daily Grade Discord channel wanted me to discuss. One of those things was uh I guess like the recent Clarity Act that was all over Twitter last week. this kind of new pro or I guess like proposed law in order to

make uh DeFi I guess well not to make DeFi I guess legal but like to basically put in laws and regulations around DeFi to make it clear of what you can and can't do you know what um decentralized entities can and can't do and so on and so forth. But as far as I could tell cuz there was a lot of stuff going on. Nothing ended up getting passed. Coinbase ended up pulling out. Uh there was some chatter about the fact that the banks basically wanted it so that you couldn't earn uh yield on uh your stable coins custody with them I think or something like that. Some some stuff that obviously protected the bank's interest there. Um but you know Pep Pepperon Nissen Pepperon uh in the Daily Grac channel I've said his name wrong

but I think he knows who he is. Uh wanted me to to kind of touch on this and I think I guess like what I'll touch on more broadly is a couple of things here. So when it comes to like the banks and and yield on like idle dollars and idol kind of fiat um they make a lot of money from this uh guys uh and they make a lot of money from this because people are lazy. There are a lot of people who will just leave money in a bank account and just a vanilla bank account. It it could be like a just a normal lowinterest account and they'll just leave it there. They won't do anything with it. Now, the banks are legally allowed to do something with that money.

Whether that be go and invest it somewhere else. Uh whether that be just do do the dumb thing of buying not dumb thing, but like do the safest thing of buying bonds and earning the yield from that. They love this cuz I'm sure they make a crap ton of money from all of this and this is just the lazy tax really, right? Um so, of course, they want to protect this. They want to protect this revenue stream. So, I I totally get that. Um, now as I said, like Coinbase pulled out of the the bill, supporting the bill because of this. But at the same time, I did say in the Daily Grade Discord channel that I'm always skeptical of these central centralized entities, whether they be in Tradfy or with in crypto, because at the end of the day, they're they got to look

after themselves. And I do think that as much of a coin as much as an ally Coinbase has been to Ethereum, obviously building base, obviously doing a bunch of other things like holding ETH on the balance sheet and stuff like that, they're always going to prioritize themselves first. Like Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, is always going to do what's best for Coinbase first. He's not going to do what's best for Ethereum first. It's always going to be what's best for Coinbase first. And he is actually legally obligated to do that based on the fact that he's the CEO of a publicly traded company. like he has a fidiciary duty to do this in order to uh make sure or at least kind of make it look like he's doing what he can to increase the share price of of the coin stock. So, when looking at any

centralized company, even if they're private, it's the same kind of thing of they're always going to do what's in their best interest first. that doesn't mean that they're going to do something bad against uh you know Ethereum or against like other kind of uh projects out there, but it does mean that they're they're going to do what's good for them uh first and foremost. And in through that lens, when I saw that they pulled out of the bill, people were saying, "Oh, you know, they're fighting for crypto." And I'm like, "Well, no, I don't think they're fighting for crypto. I think they're fighting for themselves cuz I think there was some stuff in the bill that wasn't good for them either." So when you look at it, when you look at these kind of centralized companies and what they're doing, always look at it from that point of view in in my opinion

at least because of the fact that if you don't, you're going to end up being bamboozled because you're going to think that they're doing things for the good of your bags or the good of what you support when in reality they're just doing things for what's good for them. And maybe you have coin bags, so maybe you're happy about that, but you get what I'm saying here, right? So that's my my general view on on those two uh things there. Now the second thing um that I guess like the people of the dead discord channel wanted me to talk about was this tweet from Vitalik. So uh was this Grey Stroke wanted me to talk about this where Vitalik started this tweet off by saying 2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-s sovereignty and trustlessness. So Vitalik listed out a bunch of things uh

that we are doing within the Ethereum ecosystem to make uh uh make all of this better. So full nodes uh he says you know thanks to ZKVM and block uh uh uh bals it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer which is great. I think it's still pretty easy to run an Ethereum node to be honest but hey making it easier is always better. Um he he he discusses a bunch of different things here. I'm not going to read through them all like making the application UIs uh better and more decentralized and more censorship resistance. So using these UIs on IPFS without relying on trusted servers or running your own front end so on and so forth. I guess like instead of reading out all of this, I'll just comment on the on on what Vitalik said here about

like taking back the our self-s sovereignty here and trustlessness. I think this speaks to the wider trend of the world where essentially the corporations of the world definitely want to funnel everyone into a subscriptionbased model for everything. Uh whether that be for obviously like streaming music or streaming movies, whether that be for for any app that you download on your phone these days. Yeah, it's free to download, but like there's always something to subscribe to. I mean, I downloaded a um this was a few months ago actually. I downloaded a a a meditation app and it was such a basic app. It it really just had a couple of different things, couple of different features. It really didn't even have much going uh for it. It had no kind of real social integrations or anything

like that. It was a very very basic app. And then I I downloaded it and I'm like, "Oh, this is cool." And then as soon as I opened up the the that app and got through the kind of sign up process, they're like, "Hey, do a free trial for seven days and then subscribe for like $100 a year." And I'm like, "What? You want $100 a year for this? Like this should be like a onetime purchase at most of like $5 like for the app." Because I looked at the app and it was so basic. I was like, "An experienced uh um iOS developer or Android developer could build this app in a very short amount of time. It would not take long." But they wanted $100 a year for this and and and a lot of this stuff you can even just get for free off YouTube like a lot

of these um meditation techniques. So I was like okay. So it's it's really everywhere like everyone every kind of business and corporate they they they want that that juicy subscriber revenue right. So the end state of that is basically that you own nothing, right? That you don't own your games, you don't own your music, you don't own any media, you don't own uh you don't own um kind of like um really really anything like you own hardware now because hardware is getting so expensive. But then they're saying, "Okay, well, you can do cloud compute or cloud gaming like AI, obviously the subscription for all of that." And they're like, "Well, you can, you know, you can't afford your own hardware. You can't have your own hardware for AI. Don't run a local AI.

Just use our servers, you know, use our infrastructure, but pay us to do that." Right? So, that's the kind of end state. It's that like you own nothing and you pay to to these kind of, I guess, like feudal lords, if you will. Uh, and and and you're locked in forever. Like, they're not going to let you do a one-off purchase. they're going to make you pay forever basically. So then, you know, Vitala comes along and says, you know, let's let's take back our self-s sovereignty here. Like, let's let's make sure that we can actually still have apps and services and and and different things in our lives that don't require us to subscribe to some some billionaires kind of thing where they just keep getting richer and we own nothing. Uh, and I really vibe with this vision of course because that's like the

broad vision of of crypto generally, but I do fear that it is a niche. I do fear that it's something that is going to remain a niche. I don't think that this is scalable up to most of the planet because I think that a lot of people will always value convenience over o o over um kind of doing stuff like this over like running your own front end even, right? Running your own RPC. I think uh I think people just always value convenience especially when it comes to uh everyday people within like outside of crypto. They value that convenience of just like subscribing to something and and then you've got access to all the features. They don't have to worry about anything. But they just don't realize like how detrimental that actually is and how once you're locked in the prices go up as well. Like I'm

sure all of you have have have um have kind of noticed this and also paying the higher prices like every subscription service is going up like all the time. It's it's pretty much like once a year at least for all of these services. And they do that because they know they can because they know they've got you locked in. Once they've got you hooked, they can raise the price. It's it's it's almost like a drug dealer, right? Where they they kind of give you a free trial, like give you that first hit. They get you hooked and then they keep feeding you stuff and they keep getting getting you hooked and hooked more and more hooked on it. And then they have all these, you know, uh analysis that they do on the on their metrics and all this kind of behavioral analysis. Uh they use

AI for this as well. Um, and they can see uh if you are more likely to subscribe uh sorry, if you're more likely to unsubscribe if they raise the price for you or if they raise the price, if you're likely to to resubscribe and to pay and and a lot of people will just pay, right? So, the subscription model for everything is just completely broken. It's not good. It's not good for humanity, I think. Uh but it is unfortunately going to be the reality, I think, going forward. Um, and as someone who has kind of, it's funny because I I say this, but I've paid for a subscription fee uh uh for World of Warcraft since I started playing it 20 plus years ago. I have literally paid 20 I think it's like $20 a month or something like that. A bit less than

that, $15 US a month for 20 years, right? So, I have I've done that, but I always felt like I was getting value out of that. And the price actually didn't go up. like the prices remain the same, which is kind of incredible. But I felt like I was getting value out of that because I was paying for the uh them to run the servers. Uh because I obviously I was I couldn't run my own server cuz it's an MMO, right? You can't run your own server. You can do private servers, but that's that's a whole thing. It's illegal. It's uh it's very different, right, to run the servers where players are on and and to develop the new content and to keep the the servers running and and all sorts of stuff. It costs money and it it's an ongoing cost.

So, I was I was fine paying that cuz I felt like I got value out of it. But then there's all these other things where it's like this could have been a onetime purchase or this could have been uh you know this could be a lot cheaper than it is in terms of the subscription cost, right? So there there are other kind of things here and obviously like when everything's a subscription that's just not good. It's just not something that we want I think uh to permeate across like everything. We want to be able to have like some self sovereignty. We want to be able to own things. But it just really seems like the corporations don't want us to do that. They want us to pay them subscription fees forever, which I guess good for them, bad for us, right? Um, so there's there's that

aspect, but then there's also like the trustlessness side of things, like censorship resistance. The internet is becoming more censored. There are more and more controls coming to the internet every other day. In Australia recently, the government put forward a um kind of law and regulation that banned under 16s from social media. Now, don't get me wrong, I actually strongly believe that teenagers should not be on social media. It is an absolute cancer. I believe most adults shouldn't be on social media. And I say this as someone who uses Twitter still, especially the only social media that I still use, but yeah, I still use it, right? Um, but it the the law the regulation was not was not put in place for that, right? All the under 16s can get around this. Like teenagers and kids are smart, guys. Like they can get around this stuff. Um, and it also just

is a really shitty implementation of it too because it's like some weird kind of KYC thing that is easy to get around with AI generated faces and and it's also just creating another treasure trove of KYC data that's going to get leaked at some point and hackers are going to exploit it. It's just like it's a world of hurt, right? But it's this trend of essentially tying your identity to your online presence so that the government can keep tabs on you and follow you and be able to essentially tie you to anything that you do online. So, your privacy is going away and has been going away for a long time. Your anonymity is going away. Your [snorts] censorship resistance is is going away because let's just say you're tagged on with your internet uh browsing and you

say something that the government doesn't like. Uh and it's not maybe it's not even violent. Maybe it's just something that the government doesn't like. They could potentially just come find you right straight away. They wouldn't have to wouldn't even have to dig much. They wouldn't have to do anything. like yeah they can always trace your IP and stuff like that but there's more involved right acquires warrants stuff like that um and and also like it's not an exact science but yeah we're just losing all of this we're losing all this privacy and the public internet is just being bombarded by AI as well by bots so if we all just retreat to our private spaces but then even in our private spaces like invite only spaces I should say um our kind of anonymity is gone because we have to even to use the internet we have to have

like our ID attached to it then um it's it's really bad for I guess like um uh trustlessness, self- sovereignty, all that sorts of stuff there. So yeah, I think Ethereum is probably one of our best shots at keeping a lot of what we've had in the past in terms of this, but at the same time, it's going to remain a niche. Like as much as I would love for this stuff to be able to scale up to the world, it is really hard to do, guys. It is not something that um a lot of people are going to want to op going to opt into because people will always value convenience over all of these things especially if they're from western nations which aren't used to being oppressed like other countries around the world and maybe they'll get used to it one day uh because they'll

they'll live through it but that's not a good thing. We don't want that to happen. Uh but yeah, that's my general thought on on that tweet there. Uh I think there was maybe a couple of other things people wanted to wanted me to talk about. Uh yeah, something about like gas fees, overpaying for L1 security. I think I did touch on that earlier in the episode where I said that we already have too much ETH at stake. I think um I don't think like when it comes to the issuance discussion, I've discussed that in the past in terms of like actually overpaying for L1. But um I don't think the issuance is is high enough to justify lowering it. And I don't think it's even going to be a thing that happens because of the fact that there's just too many stakeholders now. Uh but yeah, there's there's that

aspect there, but I've talked about that before. I'm not going to not going to rehash that there. But I think that was that was most of the the kind of stuff here. Someone wanted me to talk about privacy. I guess I just did, right? Um and someone wanted to give someone wanted me to give them a bullish rant. Um not not yet. Not yet. I I feel like there's one brewing, but but probably not today. Um probably in the in the near future. Uh because I know obviously the price going sideways for so long, a lot of people are like, you know, okay, what's there to, you know, maybe like what's there to be bullish about? What's coming up? You know, what's what's actually going to keep get us out of this rut? what's going to get us out of this kind of crablike movement. You can

never be sure. You can never really know. Sometimes it just happens. But yeah, as I said, there is a kind of bullish rant brewing and I'll definitely kind of get on that at some point. But I think for today, that's going to be it. So, thank you everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give it a thumbs up news. Join the Discord channel. And I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.