The EF Mandate, Staked ETH ETF live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #861 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of daily refuel where we cap the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host and this is test 16th of March 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So apologies for not doing an episode last week. I actually forgot to say on the last refill that I did that I wouldn't be doing an episode last week cuz I was traveling to Sydney for a couple of cryptoreated events. Um so yeah, that's why there wasn't an episode uh last week, but of course I'm back today. Lot to get through actually. I mean, there's been a bit of drama, I guess, and that's kind of part of the course when you're in the crypto ecosystem, of course, but it is about the Ethereum Foundation again. Now, the reason why I guess like this drama exists, I I think like I I maybe I've

mentioned this on the refill before, but I think getting at the heart of it is that there are a lot of competitors out there, a lot of competitors to Ethereum out there and they thrive on making out as if like the Ethereum Foundation is doing everything wrong and they're guiding Ethereum on the wrong path and they should do this and should do that and so on and so forth. And on the other side of the same kind of coin, there are a lot of people who want to imprint their own vision of what they think Ethereum should be, what they think the Ethereum Foundation should be. And when they don't get their way, they tend to act like a disgruntled kind of ex employee of the Ethereum Foundation or of someone, you know, some project in the Ethereum ecosystem. Um, or just like a child. It's very immature a lot of the

language and behavior that I'm seeing from people around this. And it really does feel like, yeah, if they don't get their way, they just kind of lash out. They crash out and they have a s about it. They have a cry about it. So, the reason why I'm bringing this up today is because the Ethereum Foundation uh well, the foundation's board released what they're calling the Ethereum Foundation or EF mandate. And they released this uh what was it a couple of days ago now? So, it's still pretty fresh here. And essentially, the mandate is clearly stating what the EF is focusing on going forward. And they say here, these are their own words, the EF will above all else remain focused on an Ethereum that is censorship resistant, open- source, private, and secure. And they have a nice little acronym here called crops

for this. Uh, and then in the service of user self-s sovereignty, resistant to extraction, and with seamless UX. Then they continue and say, "These are conditions that make Ethereum worth building, using, and defending." Now, they have a blog post here and and a tweet thread. You can go give this a read if you haven't yet. It's quite uh uh I guess like lengthy. Not the blog post itself, but the actual mandate, like the PDF is actually quite lengthy. Um like it's what 38 pages uh worth here. I mean, there's a lot of graphics as well. And people were kind of rubbed the wrong way about these graphics, but like hey, I I love stuff like this. You know, it's kind of funny like no matter what Ethereum tends to do, it's like if it's infinite garden stuff or if it's some some other kind of uh graphic

stuff, like there's always someone complaining. I mean, that's just kind of again part of the course in this ecosystem is that no matter what Ethereum does, no matter what the EF does, someone's going to complain. And you know, that's just just kind of the way it is. But if you want to read the whole thing, you can. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But my take is not going to be necessarily on the mandate itself, but more I guess like on the ecosystems reaction to the mandate. So I I will say one thing about the mandate at least um which will that be that of course I agree with this. Um, you know, I've I've been banging this drum for years on the refuel that I strongly believe the only reason for an L1 chain to really exist is to be these things, to be censorship resistant, to

be open source, private, and secure. Like, I don't really understand why you would build an L1 to do anything but those things long term. Like, I know there are some L1s out there that are like the complete opposite of this, right? Like, for example, Hyperlid is the complete opposite of this. and they're not like a general purpose L1. They're kind of like an L1 that focuses on one specific thing. I know they have like their EVM chain, but that's that has very little usage compared to the purpose platform that they have, right? Um, so they're very focused on one thing, but as I've said before, I still think that would be better off being done as an L2, but I feel like they did it as an L1 as kind of this regulatory arbitrage play, but then again, like it's very very centralized. And I think

the only reason why they haven't really been hit with with anything on the regulatory front is because of the current administration in the US just not caring about that stuff. You know, they seem to be fine with corruption and illegal stuff going on. Um, you know, unless it's on the other side of the political spectrum, then they're, you know, they're not fine with it. But I'm not going to get into politics here, but like it's very clear that, you know, we we swung from Gary Gendler's SEC and the Democrats kind of being in power there, having like uh the worst policy when it came to going after crypto actors cuz they went after the good actors and not the bad ones. And then you have the other side now of the spectrum, which is the Republicans not going after anyone unless they're, you know, these people

are like pro-democrat or like heavy pro Democrat or something like that, heavy pro the other side of the the politics here. And I I said this actually um I think I said this to someone at the event I was at last week that I think the only reason SBF hasn't been pardoned yet is because his parents and himself were pro-democrat, right? If he was a proublican going into the election and he, you know, even before the election and he supported Trump and everything like that, he would have gotten a pardon like maybe not day one, but like pretty early on in Trump's presidency. Like I'm pretty pretty confident in that. So you there's a lot of politics going on here with with that sort of stuff. So to bring it back to what I was saying about like about like Hyperl for example, yeah, I just think that what they did

was kind of maybe a regulatory arbitrage play above all else because it was built I guess before the more friendly regulatory environments uh as well. Um but but yeah, I I just think that that construction would be better as an L2. But if you talk like if you speak about like generalized L1's uh and and what an L1 is and what it's actually good at, it's these things. Like if you want to build anything else, it's either an L2 or or a centralized database. It's like I I just don't understand why you would build a generalized L1 to do something that is better done with with something else unless you're you building the generalized L1 to be these things to be maximally censorship resistant to be open source private and secure. Now to me there are actually no chains out there that achieve this except Ethereum.

I don't think Bitcoin achieves this. And I and I think Bitcoin like I know this is not a popular opinion still but I I truly do and I mean I've been saying this for years. truly do think that Bitcoin is going to keep losing relevancy and it's going to be keep becoming irrelevant as time goes on. And I do think that either the quantum threat or the threat of um not being able to secure itself is long-term going to kill Bitcoin. And by kill Bitcoin, I basically mean make it irrelevant. I don't mean like literally kill it because I think it will still continue on in some way or another, but like I just think it's just going to keep losing relevancy over time. So if if you exclude Bitcoin from this conversation, which I think you should because it really doesn't fit into a lot of these

uh a lot of these things. Yes, it's censorship resistant open source, but it's not private and neither to be fair, neither is Ethereum to an extent. I mean, you can use things on Ethereum to make your transactions private in a way like toetach for example, but we all know there's a whole other kind of can of worms there. um and secure that's I mean it it's it's not subjective but like there are differences between the security of Bitcoin and and Ethereum but like I think as time goes on Bitcoin becomes less secure and Ethereum becomes more secure Bitcoin becomes less private Ethereum is going to become more private Ethereum becomes uh more censure resistant where Bitcoin becomes less right so yeah if we if we just like look at that and we can if we want to be generous we can say that Bitcoin

fulfills a lot of these criteria today but like as I said I don't think it's going to in the future. But like I look at every other kind of L1 out there and I mean and I'm I'm talking like maybe like generalized L1's because you could say that for example Monero uh you know fulfills a lot of this stuff and and sure it does but it's not a generalized L1 has a very specific purpose. It's basically an app chain. So when it comes to generalized L1s there really is only Ethereum. So what the EF is doing here is basically saying this is the value prop of Ethereum. This is what is going to drive value to Ethereum long-term, to ETH longterm. This is what Ethereum's product market fit is. So, we're doubling down on that. We're not going

to go off in this direction, this direction. We're not going to be pulled over here and over here uh and do all this sorts of stuff when the EF exists as an organization to fulfill these conditions, to keep building towards these conditions. And as you guys know, there is an entirely updated road map at strawmap.org that is basically encapsulating all of this, right? Like all these different things are in service of those things that the EF is talking about. The increased censorship resistance, stuff like Fossil, right? Open source. I mean, that's just a given across anything that the Ethereum ecosystem does. Like everything is open source already. So, we're doing pretty well on that regard.

Um, you know, private, like there's there's plenty of stuff on here with regards to privacy, right? Um, encrypted meals is something that's being talked about a lot, which I'm actually going to touch on uh on this episode as well. And secure. I mean there are so many things on here wi uh that have got to do with increasing Ethereum security and then user experience as well is on here like it's all on there right so so they're guiding the ecosystem and being the stewards of the ecosystem to deliver on that road map which which basically is a is an umbrella over all of this stuff right so then it comes to what people want the EF to do and what they're just not going to do and why people get kind of upset about this a lot of people seem to want the EF to be an a leader uh when

it comes to onboarding users or when it comes to growing the ecosystem and by that it means like growing the apps and like onboarding users via apps and onboarding more um more more kinds of that that I guess like stakeholder. That's not the EF's job. It's never been the EF's job. It's never been what the EF is good at. And there was a tweet today from someone from from Coinbase, one of their engineers that I felt was just really irritating. And I don't know I don't have it up here right now. Maybe I can find it and and bring it up for for you guys. But it really irritated me seeing this tweet. Uh yeah, it's here. I've got I've got it in front of me on my screen. So, you know, they started the tweet by saying Ethereum is on a trajectory to become the Netscape of

crypto. Like, for starters, this analogy makes no [ __ ] sense. Like, I'm just like, I'm actually angry about this analogy. Like, this makes zero sense. Like, if you actually know the history of Netscape, then you would understand that it's completely different to Ethereum. It's not even in the same ballpark of what Ethereum is. But I guess like regardless of the analogy here, you know, Yuga continues instead, unfortunately, Ethereum is destined for irrelevance due to its inability to focus on what matters. Okay. Okay. Ethereum is more than the EF here. Like even if you think that the EF is doing, you know, something wrong, Ethereum is so much greater than the E than the EF, right? Uh, and then Yuga continues and says, "Just as Netscape wasted time on a rewrite from version 4 to 6 at a time when Microsoft was absolutely killing

them, the insist the EF insists on focusing on cyber funk values at a pivotal time when the institutions are finally coming on chain often to other networks. This is also wrong. Like the institutions are coming on chain to Ethereum in a really big way. Robin Hood just launched their own L2 for God's sake. Larry Frink, the CEO of the largest asset manager in the world, is all in on Ethereum and constantly talks about it. Black Rockck does not have an an ETF for anything except BTC and ETH. They just launched their staked ETH ETF, which I'm going to talk about at the end of the episode. So again, this is just like I don't know, this is really bad engagement bait, maybe. Um, and then you finishes by saying, "An EF determined to win would focus on how to make Ethereum the best chain for finance. That's not

what it's doing today." That's literally what it's doing. The best chain for finance is one that is censorship resistant, private, secure, and has good UX. That's literally what they're doing. So, I don't understand this take. Like, this actually made me upset today reading this. I was like, I I just couldn't like I didn't I actually didn't even want to see this tweet because I didn't want to get upset about this, but I did. Um, so so it's it's it's stuff like this and I I read stuff like this and I'm like, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the EF is and and it's really rich coming from an engineer at Coinbase and maybe they don't work on Bass. I don't know if they work on Bass or something else, but think about this for a second. Bass exists as the largest L2 today, right?

It gets basically free uh uh uh security from Ethereum, right? Uh and why does it get that? Well, it's because of blobs. Okay. Who made blobs a reality? The core developers. Okay. What does the Ethereum Foundation do? It stewards the protocol. Stewards the core protocol. It it you it um has under its wing and in its workforce a lot of the core developers and researchers of Ethereum. So, Coinbase is directly benefiting from the Ethereum Foundation's core principles and what they're working on in regards to those core principles, right? So, it's just rich seeing this this tweet kind of come from them there. Now, on top of that, as well, BAS is uh I mean, Coinbase, but also base within that um

is one of those organizations who should be focused on user onboarding. That is their entire job. like Coinbase's entire job is getting people on board into crypto and then onchain via base, right? So, they are doing what they think that the EF should be doing. But the thing is is that like if you were to ask someone the question, someone at least knowledgeable in the industry, the question, who do you think would be better at onboarding users into this ecosystem? And I mean end users such as like everyday people, the EF or Coinbase, like anyone who's even got half a brain cell should always answer Coinbase, right? So, and and and also the other question could be who do you want onboarding users into this ecosystem? Coinbase and companies like Coinbase or like like Robin Hood for

example or the EF? 10 times out of 10 I I would answer I want the uh companies like Coinbase doing this. I don't want the EF doing this because if the EF was to do this stuff, guys, that would pull away so many of their resources from what they're really good at, which is the Ethereum protocol itself and upholding these values that they've put into their mandate. So when you actually walk through this and you actually understand where all of this, you know, where all the places uh sorry, where all the pieces are on the board, you you kind of understand why the EF does this, right? Why they play to their strengths rather than going down this other path which they're not as strong in which there already exists plenty of other entities there. So why would the EF focus on that? That would be like asking

Coinbase to pivot from all of their other stuff and focus on core development, right? Why would they do that? Why would they focus on Ethereum core development when that's not what they're good at? That's not what they've been doing for many years now. That's not essentially their business model. So the EF isn't a business, right? But you could think of it as a business and say, well, their business model is the core protocol is research and development of the core protocol and upholding Ethereum cyber punk values. If you wanted them to have a different business model, well then you either have to try and change the entire EF, which is not going to happen, or you create your own company or create your own organization to do that. you are free to do that. No one's stopping you from doing that. So, that's my I guess like general view on all of

this. And a lot of that is not news to you guys and I'm preaching to the choir here. I know. But it's something that just gets me frustrated because it just feels like no matter what the EF does, people are going to be upset, right? The EF could literally cure cancer. They could save babies from burning buildings. They could uh, you know, bring animals back to life, right? Come up with something that brought people's beloved pets back to life and someone somewhere would still have an issue with it just because it came from the EF. It just feels very much like the EF is everyone's scapegoat. It's just let's blame the EF. Oh, the EF does this, the EF does that. Let's blame them. Like the other day, the EF announced that they sold 5,000 ETH to to Bit Mine. People complain the EF sold again. So, if the

EF announces that they sell, people complain. If the EF doesn't announce when they sell, people complain. They lit. It's literally an unwinable situation here. So, I am more than happy to just let the EF keep doing what they're doing because I think they're doing a really good job at it for starters, but also it just they can't please everyone. they're never going to please everyone. And anyone who is not pleased with the EF and and doesn't think what they're doing is the right thing, then you can literally do something else. You are not forced to be in the Ethereum ecosystem. You're not forced to be uh with the EF. And there are high-profile people who have left the EF, right? Like Dan Crowd for example, and gone somewhere else because it's very obvious to me, it was obvious to me at the time, but even more obvious

now that Dan Cried wanted to imprint his own philosophies and his own kind of strategies on the Ethereum Foundation. And when he wasn't able to do that, he basically left. And now he's acting like someone who is a disgruntled ex employee because he's always lashing out and no matter what the EF does. That is very immature to me. That's childish to me. It's like, move on, bro. Like, okay, you didn't get what you wanted. Now you're working at at at tempo. Like, move on. Like, not to just call out dumb cry. There are other people out there who have done this. But I just think that it is is extremely childish. I don't think it actually helps the ecosystem. And I think it is um it it is something that actively hurts the ecosystem. But if people want to do that, they can. You know, it's a free free country as they

say, right? People can do what they want. But yeah, that's my general view on all of that there. But as I said, you can go read the EF new mandate for yourself. Make up your own mind. You don't have to agree with me. You know, you don't have to listen to me. I'm just giving my opinions and thoughts like I always do on the refuel. But yeah, this is nothing new for me, guys. Like I've always always beaten this drum around EF. I've always said that I believe the EF should focus on what they're best at. And honestly, in the last 12 to 18 months, they've they've they've got gone even better at that, right? Like they had Tomas come in. He I think he Tomas helped a lot into pull the EF into a a certain direction. And I think they're continuing in that direction just in

their own way. VF was never going to do like a complete 180 and become a completely different organization. They're they're definitely very different to what they were pre-Tamas, but but at their core is what their mandate is here. Like that's the core of the the Ethereum Foundation. And honestly, like you a lot of people I think would get a lot out of talking to people who work at the EF because they are going to be telling you guys the same things that I have said to you guys. I've never worked at the EF, but I talked to a lot of EF members. The the same thing always comes up with them. They want to work on stuff that is meaningful, that gives not only themselves meaning, but gives meaning to the world. They want to work on something that they feel like can positively impact the world. And

honestly, there's not that many of those things left in tech anymore. A lot of the AI stuff that's being worked on does not positively impact the world. I would argue that it negatively impacts the world. Like all of the content creation stuff, I would say negatively impacts the world. I actually don't think anything good is coming out of the AI content creation stuff. Maybe you could say like 5% of it is good. Maybe cuz it's like lowering the barrier to entry to do like some graphic design stuff, but most of it is not that. Most of it is being used for political propaganda. Most of it's being used to create slop just to keep you scrolling on your phone on social media, right? But there's a lot of good that's coming out of AI too, right? coding, but that is a universal thing like Claude, you can use Claude

while working on Ethereum and and a lot of Ethereum developers do this, right? This is not something that is exclusive to you have to go work in AI to do this. No, that applies everywhere, right? Um, but then all the other tech stuff that that you could work on, most of it is honestly a net negative for humanity at this point. There's so much surveillance tech being created right now. I was just reading something, I don't know how true this is, but like I've been following this stuff for a while. I was just reading something that someone has a theory that Palanteer has gotten themselves so integrated with the US government that their end goal is essentially to become too big to fail so that they can't be ripped out and then they can just have like these massive surveillance uh run by private companies

by by private corporations in the US and beyond so they can log everything and and do all this nefarious [ __ ] with it, right? So obviously if you're working on something that empowers people or want to work on something that empowers people and gives more sovereignty to people, you're not working on that, right? you're working on Ethereum or something adjacent to Ethereum, some open source software. Maybe you're working on Linux or something, right? Something that that empowers people. Um, and and yeah, so much other kind of tech stuff that you could work on like social media. I mean, I don't even have to explain why that's a net negative for humanity, right? Even though I do still use Twitter, I don't use any other social media at this point. It's literally just Twitter because I need it for to keep up with with Ethereum stuff.

But even that, like you guys have not have definitely noticed I don't tweet nearly as much anymore. Like I don't remember the last time I tweeted anything. I'd retweet a few things for the refuel, stuff like that. Uh, but again, going back to my original point about people who work at the EF, it's always the same thing from every single one of them. They want to work on something meaningful, guys. Even if it means getting paid less, which they usually are getting paid less than they could elsewhere, but they want to work on something meaningful. And again, like not to say that they shouldn't be paid more, of course they should. I I strongly believe that they should be paid way more than they are. And I'm glad things like the Protocol Guild exist, but like the thing is is that they still stay. They're not like forced

to stay there. They're not in jail, right? They're not like uh uh a gun to their head. Oh, you have to stay at the EF. They could go anywhere else and get more money. But again, it's more about the fact that they want to work on something meaningful. They want to empower people. They want to do something that means something. And that that that that's what keeps me in this ecosystem, too. Even though I've crashed out and burnt out a lot over the years for various different reasons. And these days, I spend less time in the ecosystem. I'm still in the ecosystem. I'm still doing the refuel. I'm still part of Ethereum because I want to see it continue to empower people around the world. continue to give freedom to people around around the world. Ethereum is freedom technology, guys. Like, ETH is freedom money. Like, that's what I'm

here for. If you're not here for that, go somewhere else. Like, don't stay in Ethereum just for just on the off chance that you may be able to make Ethereum more corporate if that's what you want to do. Like, that's just not going to happen. It's not in Ethereum's DNA, right? There's just no way that that can happen. Um, so yeah. Anyway, enough ranting about that. I think that uh I got all that off my chest stuff that I've been bringing on for the last few days. But yeah, you can go give this a read for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So, I guess like maybe this is related to the EF mandate stuff. Uh, but like Barnaby put out a really great tweet here that I thought was pretty I guess like relevant to the discussion

around the EF, but also goes broader than that. So, people always argue about like what is Ethereum? Like what is it Ethereum? Like is it a product? Is it a protocol? Is it a platform? And Barney basically put these three up and said, "Well, the thesis is that Ethereum is a protocol. The antithesis is that Ethereum is a product." Well, but the synthesis is maybe Ethereum as a platform, a protocol for long-term resilience in open adversarial environments, a product for delivering value to its users and upgrading itself in the right order and a platform to offer services which off which other products consume to build permissionlessly. And there's a whole thing called the platform team at the F.

Now, by the way, guys, I actually resonate with this most. I would say that Ethereum is a platform. It's not an app, right? It's not some kind of product that needs to be marketed like a product. It needs to be built like a product. Uh but it's not just a protocol either. It is probably a mixture of a protocol and and a product and amalgamation which is is a platform because its product as Barnaby says here is delivering value to its users and upgrading itself in the right order. Well, the users of Ethereum are a lot of different entities. It's like end users like me and you. It's layer 2, right? big organizations, big institutions, you know, there's there's many different types of users here, but but Ethereum isn't just a product, right? Like it's again, it's also a protocol for this.

So, I think the synthesis here is that Ethereum is a platform. It's a platform for everyone to use, everyone to build on if they want. Uh, and no one can stop you from doing that. It's permissionless. So, I thought that was just a really great little tweet here from Binaby related to what I was just talking about with regards to the EF mandate and things like that. So, yeah. I mean, I just wanted to to bring that up for you guys uh there. All right. Another hot topic of debate that has been raging on for the last few weeks since Vitalic put his tweet out about um L2s and their place in the Ethereum ecosystem is I guess like people kind of taking that tweet the wrong way and thinking that Vitalik saying that L2s are dead. No, L2s are not dead obviously. Um, and I think that

that debate kind of ran its course. But Ethereum, uh, sorry, Etherealize put out a really great post here, which I'll link in the YouTube description below, um, saying, you know, why scaling Ethereum is bullish for L2s, cuz we are scaling the L1 here. We're also scaling Ethereum L1 for L2s as well. But like, we're talking about direct L1 scaling like gas limit increases, ZKVM stuff, right? That's what we're talking about when it comes to direct L1 scale increase. But Etherealizers post here is is is pretty great. And essentially like it's not this is not like a summary of the entire post but like the the heart of it is that L2s are still going to exist for various different reasons and it's but the reasons that I've argued over the years as well. It's not just for scale. It's way beyond scale. And they mentioned Robin Hood as a great

example here about the fact that like Robin Hood is going to scale their kind of crypto endeavor via the L2 for sure, but they also are creating an L2 so that they get the best technology, the best way to do business on on in crypto and also get to be able to kind of pick and play with what they want their L2 chain to be. There's obviously going to be centralized controls in place, but that's what they want, right? And and the L2's the L2 model offers the best way to do that. And I think that it's it's kind of funny because a lot of people will rage against this and say, "Well, this isn't in the spirit of like the cyberpunk values that we talk about talk about. This isn't in the spirit of what Ethereum is trying to be." And yes, that's true, but we're not doing this at

the L1. This is the whole point of doing it at the L2s. It's like a sandbox environment essentially where wherever happens on the L2 does not affect the L1 protocol. That is the whole point of this. It's to separate these these things from each other because when you don't separate them from each other, essentially what you do is you get the worst of all worlds and that's what monolithic chains do. They basically centralize so they get the worst of that and and their performance is worse than L2s. So they get the worst of all worlds. They get less security. They're centralized less performance and they still don't give the the control that a lot of these um these institutions want because they can't control the L1 chain itself because it's trying to be like a general purpose anyone can build in it sort of thing. But then when you have

the the splitting up here of concerns, you have the L1 which remains decentralized secure censorship resistant, completely uh you know open to everyone. And then you have L2s, they can build on top, take advantage of that, right? Maybe not take advantage of the security, but take advantage of the ecosystem and the liquidity, not have to spin up an L1 because that's more expensive. Uh and basically get, you know, get what you want and and and and essentially do that on top of Ethereum as part of the Ethereum ecosystem. So, that's what a lot of this post basically boils down to. But, I still highly recommend reading this post because it covers a lot. Um, as you can see, I'm scrolling through. It's got a lot going on here. So, I'll link that in the YouTube description below. But, as I said, like the L1 L2 debate, it's been

done to death at this point, guys. If you don't like L2s, then just just go away. Like, if you don't like L2s, then then you don't like Ethereum. Like, it's simple as that. Ethereum has the L2s as its strategy for both scaling uh you know um uh just scaling generally but also on boarding new users new institutions into the ecosystem. And if you want to just do everything on L1 and want like a monolithic L1, there are plenty of those out there. There are actually more way more monolithic L1's than there are chains like Ethereum where it's trying to keep the L1 minimized and do things via L2s. I would say that really the the only other chains like Ethereum uh in in that kind of architecture is Bitcoin and Bitcoin's doing it horribly because the lightning network sucks and you can't build

general purpose L2s on Bitcoin um without doing a lot of really weird stuff and it really just makes it centralized in in the end and it makes no sense. It's not like as I was saying before like Ethereum is the best place to do business. Bitcoin is not when it comes to to to L2s. Uh, and then there are a couple other chains out there I think that are that are doing this as well, but they're they're mostly irrelevant chains or pretty much all irrelevant chains. So, yeah, you've got like a long list of other kind of heavily centralized monolithic L1s that will cater to you if that's what you want out of this ecosystem. So, I don't understand why you'd still be in Ethereum if that's what you wanted. And I've always said that it's like there's no shame in it. There's nothing kind of

like evil about it. It's like you want to go work on something else that resonates more with your act your values and what you care about, go do that. Don't try to change Ethereum to suit your worldview cuz it's just not going to happen, right? Uh and and that's again goes back to what I was saying before about disgruntled ex employees of the Ethereum ecosystem. They just are childish. They just really can't get over the fact that Ethereum is not going to bend to their will. Uh and honestly, I'm glad those people aren't in Ethereum because that's not what Ethereum is about. Like if you're trying to control Ethereum, if even if even you're trying to push something that you think is best for Ethereum, but everyone else doesn't think it's best for Ethereum, then by definition, you are not an Ethereum.

You're not someone who cares about Ethereum, you are anti- Ethereum. Like by very definition, because you're anti what Ethereum cares about, what Ethereum is being built to be. So I'm glad those people in the Ethereum ecosystem. Like I'm just going to be honest with that. But anyway, you can read this post. I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So, I I covered this on either the last refill or the refill before with regards to adoption of Max EB. And for just a refresh for you guys, Max EB is the EIP that went live a couple of upgrades ago that basically allows you to consolidate your validator. So, instead of having only 32 per validator per validator, you can have up to 248 ETH per validator. Now, there's a new dashboard here from Buddha on Dune Analytics that basically tracks

this. I showed a couple of other dashboards the last time I covered this, but you can see here what this currently looks like. uh obviously trending in the right direction but like not there yet by a long mile. We we basically want the gray part of this chart to essentially dwarf the orange part. But we're getting there. We're getting there. Um and I think that towards the end of the year, this will look a lot different. I've heard that a number of the bigger staking providers and node operators want to consolidate and consolidate in a big way. So, I'm sure we're going to see this uh happen. But yeah, this is just another dashboard for you guys to keep track of if you want to. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so.

All right. So, there was a bit of I guess drama. This became like, you know what, a bit of drama is understanding this. This became like the main talking point on crypto Twitter over the last few days. And for those of you who haven't heard about this, there was a just to summarize and give the highest level summary I can here. There was a user who did an order on cow swap uh over oh sorry on a via cow swap over the weekend. I think this happened like on the weekend or Friday or something like that. And the order size was $50 million. Now, due to a bunch of unfortunate circumstances, this $50 million turned into, I think, $36,000 and a lot of different uh I guess like

entities within the transaction pipeline of Ethereum took the rest of that money. And there's a breakdown here in this tweet which essentially said that the user got $36,000 out of this order. So, they wanted to swap uh I think they wanted to swap like what was it USDC or or something for uh $50 million worth of Ave or something like that using using C sorry using A's front end which routes through uh cow swap here but instead they got $36,000 worth of Ave and the rest of the money went to so $620,000 went to cow swap for their solver fee $9.9 million went to an MEV bot that back ran that transaction another2.6 $.6 million went to the same meb bot for

back running the um $50 million transaction here. So, a separate transaction. I think a $34.3 million fee went to Titan from the MEB bot. So, Titan is the number one block builder on Ethereum, which includes $1.2 million to Lido as the block proposer and $3.5 million in deck swap fees plus residual residual smaller ARB transactions. So, that's where all the money went. Okay, so why did this happen? Well, this happened because the user accidentally swapped the wrong tokens. I believe they swapped the AV receipt token um or one of the receipt tokens from AV uh or attempted to swap it for um for Ave here. And um by doing that uh yeah so sorry they they attempted to swap the AET USDT. So basically uh this kind of

like receipt token from a for uh for a which there wasn't enough liquidity for uh for sorry for the um receipt token of of a here uh there wasn't enough liquidity for and essentially the trade uh you know ended like this $50 million like there there was just like a ton of slippage if you want to call it that but essentially there wasn't enough liquidity for this trade. So why did this trade still go ahead you may ask like why did um you know this this basically happen? Well, there's still kind of I guess like postmortems coming out about this. The latest one came out today, I believe. But essentially what happened, and I may be getting some facts wrong here, guys, because there's a lot that goes into this stuff, but essentially what happened was that when you're making a trade like this, the AV

front end will warn you and say like doing this trade will result in X amount of slippage. In this case, the AV front end told the user, "Hey, if you do this trade, you're going to lose 99% of this to I guess I don't know if they actually use the word slippage on there, but they basically told the user that you're going to lose 99% of your money if you do this trade." So, the user clicked this, checked this box, and basically said, "I'm okay with this." Okay. Well, first of all, like, why would you do that? But I don't even know if we know who the user is yet who did that. But like, first of all, like that to me is user error. And this this is a debate that I was having in the dedicated discord channel about this. But to me

that's user error. The user should not have done that. Okay. But the user did that. Okay. So so why wasn't there any other safeguards in place becomes the next question. Like why do the protocols even allow this to happen? Like people will argue and say there is no reality where anyone would want to do this trade. Like this trade makes absolutely no sense because you no one wants to lose 99% of their money because the the thing is is that even if you were like incredibly bullish on a token, you wanted to get into it really quickly to make that money back on the token the token would have to go like a,000x, right? Or something stupid like that. So like even meme coins don't do that, right? Um so so when it comes to to that kind of thing when it you know run

through that logic you would make the argument that this order should not have been processed to begin with like a or cow swap should have just blocked this order altogether they should not have allowed this order to go through and that then brings up the debate of okay well then where should they block this order should they block it at the front end or should they block it at the protocol level I think that they should always do it at the front end I I'm very against doing anything at the protocol level in terms of blocks and stuff like that. But then the argument's made that like okay but in what reality would anyone want to do a 99% slippage order on the protocol level and I I sympathize with that like that's that that shouldn't be a thing like no one's going to do that. So then it becomes the

question of okay where's the threshold here and I think that uh cow swap has has introduced something uh called no so a introduced something called a shield which is a feature that will automatically block swaps with a price impact above 25%. I believe that's on the front end. I don't know if that's in the protocol. I I think it's on the front end because to do a protocol change would be would take a lot longer. I think this is actually live today. So that's on the front end. But again, like that that's you know that's 25% like that's that's still pretty big. But like I can understand why a user would maybe want to get out of a trade even with 25% slippage because maybe it's a super volatile meme coin. Those things can go down 30% in like an hour or less, right?

Or in one trade. Those things are very very very volatile, right? So, I can understand why a user would want to do that. Like, that's not as extreme as 99%. But, but if it's at the front end, like I don't have an issue with it to be honest because if you really want to do that trade, you'll find another front end to do it on or you will do it through the contract itself. Like, if you really want to do it, like you could do it because you could ask even if you don't know how to interact with contracts on Ethereum. All you have to do is ask an AI how to do it and they'll walk you through how to do it because they know. I' I've done it myself, right? I'm not an expert on how to read Ether Scan and read smart contracts, but

doing stuff manually is pretty simple and pretty straightforward uh by asking AI cuz I'll just give you a step by step of how to do it. Now, of course, you have to be careful with that too because like AI can be wrong. So, like there's that aspect to it as well. But then again, like the vast majority of trades are never going to want to accept 25% slippage. So, I get that. So, AB has already put this into place. And the question then becomes like why didn't they do this before? Well, they just didn't, right? Like regulations as they say are written in blood, right? Like think about all the regulations for the airline industry. They're all written in blood. Like essentially a plane has to go down for some reason and then we identify the reason why the plane went down and we're like, "Okay, well let's

introduce this regulation or this safety feature or this and that, you know, extra kind of uh a safeguard there so that we can stop this from happening in the future." That's just the way of the world, guys. Like that's that's just the way things work. And unfortunately, this user had to lose that much money for this to happen. Now, I don't know what the end result of this is going to be. Like, are you know, are these various different entities going to return that money to the user and basically say, "Hey, like this wasn't fair. This is ridiculous. Like, here's your money back." Uh, we don't know because I believe Titan actually sent this money to Coinbase. So, Coinbase will know who the operator is of Titania and who the person in charge of it is here. Maybe Coinbase gets involved and says, "Hey guys, like, you know, this is your

money. You [snorts] know, we're not going to maybe they're not going to freeze the money or anything like that. like you made it fair and square, but hey, like this is ridiculous. Like you like if you were a bank, you would return this back to your user uh to the user as like a goodwill thing. So, I don't know. Like I don't know what the solution is there. Like I actually don't have an opinion on whether they should return it or not. Like I think that there's just multiple kind of screw-ups here that happened. The user for clicking that box just dumb. Apparently, they had $50 million on a phone. We don't know the details here. Maybe the phone was only a signing device. Like if it was, then it's different. But if they actually had $50 million on a mobile wallet, then that to me is really dumb

to begin with. So this user doesn't seem to be very smart, but like we don't know the full story. So it's me just assuming things here. Uh and then yeah, cow swap and ar should probably just never have processed this trade to begin with and they should have inbuilt controls for this. Uh but a does now on the front end doesn't have at the protocol level. I don't think it should be done at the protocol level. Uh but then cow swap can also enforce this outside of the protocol by enforcing it as part of their kind of like solver market in their private me. And actually on the meool note as well, it seems like that the reason caused didn't protect the user here was because the transaction actually leaked out of the private mele into the public mele for some reason. I don't that just came out before like a

few hours ago that news. So I'm waiting for more analysis of that before kind of giving my giving more of a take on that. But yeah, that's what people have been I guess like talking about over the last few days and a summary of that. I I've probably gotten some things wrong. You can come into the daily discord channel. There's a lot of discussion there. But on that note, people have been talking about encrypted mempools again. So there's this really great thread here from Julian who works at the uh who works in research at the Ethereum Foundation. And he starts off this thread by saying, "Ethereum needs an encrypted encrypted mempool and it needs it fast. It's not just about stopping sandwiching. Encrypted meals are how Ethereum matures its onchain markets. I just published a post on why Ethereum needs encrypted memples and here are the

core arguments." And you can go through these arguments yourself. Uh I think the number one argument uh that I that he leads with is that private mess are brittle and every 40 seconds a user gets sandwiched on Ethereum but it's more about the users that we are missing. Institutions cannot send their users through or user orders to an opaque and trusted network of unregulated intermediaries. With encrypted memples they don't have to. This is probably the strongest argument I've seen for in favor of encrypted memples because I remember I talked about this a few weeks ago and I was kind of on the fence about it and I was kind of like you know who you know we don't need it that urgently because like there's lots of private meles and people just use private meles anyway but like the strongest argument now for me is that like we've got clear

evidence that things leak from the private mess into the public memples anyway. So if we can make it that even if there are leaks into the public mele it doesn't actually favor anyone and um the public meool becomes like a credibly neutral common good then you would make the argument and people have made the argument that a lot of the order flow would go back to the public mele because it's encrypted and then because of that everyone would be able to get like the same fair treatment and I vibe with that argument and that these are the arguments that have been made in the past and and I wasn't entirely convinced before, but I'm becoming more and more convinced over time. And I do think this is something Ethereum needs. And it seems like we will get an encrypted mele

EIP as part of Hegotar. It definitely seems like that's going to be maybe the EA headliner at this point. It's still pretty far away, but hey, definitely seems like it's going to be be a thing. Um, and yeah, I'm I'm definitely a lot more in favor of that um as I was um as opposed to what I was like maybe a couple months ago because I've learned a lot more about it. I've um studied a lot more. I've seen more arguments about it and and this is really the beauty of the I guess like Ethereum core development core protocol kind of process here is that you know someone puts out an idea we all pick it apart we all give our opinions on it and that causes people to give better and better arguments and defend their kind of EIP so to speak from all these different uh people

coming in with their opinions saying you know this is why it can't work or this is why it can't work and then eventually we get something that looks really good that most people are happy with uh and then the ones who maybe aren't happy with it they you know I mean they can either suggest something better or give more feedback or eventually basically capitulate and say okay well the vast majority of the ecosystem wants it then then that's what it is. I remember there was a core developer working on GU uh for a long time uh that was against EIP559 but then towards the end of that whole kind of process they ended up being favor in in favor of it because they studied it a lot more they understood the arguments and they said that okay well this is a huge net upgrade for Ethereum I'm now for this

and that was actually a pretty big weight weighted voice in the Ethereum ecosystem and his endorsement was essentially the last thing a lot of people needed to be like okay well a lot of people who were against it to be like, "Okay, well, this makes sense now. We're for it." So, in the end, EIP1559 had like 95 plus% of people in favor of it. There was some hold out still. I think most of them were the just the miners and minor adjacent kind of companies, but eventually everyone was on board with it. And that's just what happens with these things. Either eventually everyone gets on board or everyone isn't on board with it and the AIP just never goes through. Okay, in point, EOF, right? That's one that where was very decisive and this is generally what how it happens. If something is very decisive, if

Sorry. Uh, divisive, not decisive. If something is very divisive, you know, it's splitting things 50/50, that EIP is never going in. Like, there's no such thing as a 50/50 split on an EIP that makes it into the network. You need, I would say, 80 90% of people in favor of an EIP for it to make it into the network. It's just not happening on a 50/50 split. Like, it's just it's there's way too many people against it. Um, it's not a democracy. Like, Ethereum core development is not a democracy, guys. It is a it is basically like uh it's not it's it's it's kind of this weird there is a name for it but it's kind of this weird thing that's like an amalgamation of a bunch of different uh I guess governance mechanisms but I think at the heart of it is that 90 80

90% plus of the ecosystem of the stakeholders in the ecosystem need to be in favor of an EIP or else that's just not going into the network. So yeah anyway you can give this thread from Julian a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, last up here. I did mention this earlier. So, Black Rockck's staked ETH ETF is now live. I don't think there are any other staked ETH ETFs live uh in the US uh except maybe some really small ones. Black Rockck is definitely the biggest by far. Uh and they had a pretty good launch here. You can see James from uh Bloomberg said that the majority of the trading of the first day is done and $15.5 million in trading volume for the Black Rockck staked Ethereum ETF. Very, very solid for a day one ETF uh launch. So yeah, I

mean it's out there now, guys. Like I I think you're going to see a lot of inflows into this thing. Um even though the yields are kind of low, I guess these days, but that's low relative for us. I remember when the E staking yield was above 10%. But it was never going to last. Like as more ETH gets staked, the yield goes down for everyone. Uh unless fees can kind of catch up, you know, keep up with it, which it just hasn't because it's just not that it's just not going to happen for reasons I've outlined before. I'm not going to rehash that here. But I still think like 2 3% on on ETH is very appealing especially because like if you're already owning ETH then why wouldn't you stake it? Now of course this brings up the questions around like staking centralization again

like how much stake ETH is too much staked ETH so on and so forth but I've discussed that to death on the refuel. So again I'm not going to rehash that here but monitoring the situation right we're going to see what happens there. I mean ETH stake is going up again. I think if I bring up the staking dashboard here just quickly for you guys to just see Hillby's infamous infamous ETH staking uh dashboard you can see here that you know it's actually not it's actually still down from where it was. I mean we peaked at like 39.2 million uh ETH that was in like January and we're down to 37.8 million. So yeah, we're down quite a quite a bit still here guys. And yeah uh I'm I'm actually glad I'm glad that that is like I don't think we need more E staked to be

honest. Uh, so I'm glad that's um that's kind of uh what what's going on. And you can see actually over the past month, it's all just been net outflows of of ETH stake. Uh the past six months are still net inflows for the top 11 um uh staking entities, but for pretty much everyone over the last uh month. Um it's been outflows, which I'm not having too much of an issue with to be honest. Uh I I think that's okay. U obviously like we don't know where that E's going, you know, is it being sold? Is it just being, you know, held as normal ETH? like are they just over like getting only 2 to 3% on their ETH? Who knows?

But, you know, price is going up right now. So, I don't know. Like, it doesn't you doesn't seem to have affected price over the last well, over the last 3 months, it kind of has. But then you could blame like ETH price going down on a million different things. Like, it's you never really know here, guys. Um, but yeah, that's that's the kind of snapshot here uh of of the ETH staking as it is today. As I said, monitoring the situation. Going to keep tabs on that. But I think for today, that's going to be it for this episode. So, yeah. Thank you everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give the Give the video a thumbs up. Subscribe to the newsletter. Join the Discord channel. And I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.