ETH all time high, Core dev updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #846 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of daily refuel where we cap the latest news in the ecosystem. I'm your host Dan. This is not until the 23rd of August 2025. All right everyone, let's get into it. So a big day for Ethereum today with ETH hitting a new all-time high just and it's kind of debated whether ETH actually hit a new alltime high, but it did. Um, you know, Coin Gecko hasn't updated yet with the number, but they have its old kind of last all-time high at 4878, which uh I think we hit today on a few different exchanges out there. But yeah, I guess like we haven't broken through it yet. At time of recording, ETH's price is 4,700. Maybe it goes up to 5K and beyond by the time I publish the refill today, which is still going to be another like 8 n hours from when I'm

recording it. But yeah, I mean for all intents and purposes, I think we can say that ETH broke or set a new all-time high today. Uh which is kind of amazing, right? Because it's been so long. I was actually talking about this in the Daily Discord channel today. Uh and the last ETH alltime high was in November of 2021. So, it's been around 3.7 3.8 years since then uh for us to set a new all-time high. And it actually took us longer this time than it did last time. If you look at the last kind of uh cycles uh all-time high, it was Jan 2018 was the 1420 or whatever, whatever it was. And then we didn't set a new all-time high until January of 2021. So, it was 3 years back then. So, it's

actually taken longer this time around. And we've all felt it, right? We've all felt it take longer. We've all felt the cycle be very different this time around. I mean, I've been saying that I think the four-year cycle is dead for a very long time now since pretty much the the BTC ETFs were first filed for. Um, and then especially when BTC went to a new all-time high before the haring happened last year in I think it was like March or something or February or something like that. Uh, I've I've just believe that the four typical four-year crypto cycle is no more. There will always be market cycles. I think people maybe get get the wrong idea when I say this. There's always going to be market cycles generally, you know, bull bear cycles, sideways, crab cycles, whatever you want to call them. But I think the

typical 4-year cycle of BTC goes up uh, you know, after a certain period of time, uh, ETH goes up after BTC, all-time high, price discovery, so on and so forth, uh, and then alts, whatever you want to refer to as alts follow that. I really don't think that is going to be the case going forward. And I've said this a lot obviously over the past few months especially uh but but essentially like we're we've kind of matured out of that. I think we're in the kind of macro institutional grade kind of players now especially when it comes to BTC and ETH and ETH really has graduated there. I mean just over the last 3 months since all the ETH treasury companies came online started bidding up ETH massively the ETH ETFs are seeing you know huge uh interest and more interest than the BTC ETFs are in terms

of inflows. we really have seen that shift happen there and I do think that we're at the beginning of the shift still and I put a tweet out where I said you know the most beautiful thing about uh all of this today is ETH is quite literally just getting started there is an enormous set of new buyers wi within the kind of trady space and the in institutional space that are going to funnel tens of trillions of dollars into ETH over the next 10 to 15 years at the same time the largest and most successful businesses in the world are going to move onchain and they're going to move onto Ethereum And I I finish this by saying, you know, Ethereum is still and rem and will be into the future the most decentralized, censorship resistant, secure, credibly neutral, and reliable sediment layer in existence. And ETH is the greatest

programmable store of value asset in the world. And I believe will one day be worth $100,000 plus dollars. And I'm not just saying that to be like a raging bull. I do believe that, guys. And I've said this before, it's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen next year. It's not even going to happen in 5 years. This is like a long-term thing, you know, 10, 15, 20 years thing. And I've been incredibly consistent on that over the years as well. So I I don't think people can criticize me for not being consistent, not believing in something, right? But I think the the broader point here is that if you were to kind of I guess like estimate where the trades in and institutions are in terms of like their adoption of crypto and their understanding of crypto and their involvement within the crypto ecosystem

especially when it comes to Ethereum and ETH. You could make the argument and I I think this you could actually strongly make this argument that they are pretty much in 2013 like in terms of the arc of adoption here because if you think back to 2013 there wasn't much people in crypto. Uh the biggest news at the time was that Silk Road had gotten shut down and then by the end of that cycle MT Gauss collapsed, right? Uh BTC went from I think it was $100 to $1,000 in like a year or something like that. So so just crazy price action there. But if you kind of look at that and and take that perspective and then look at where these Trafi players are, where these institutions are, if you talk to them, I've spoken to some of them. I've spoken to people who've spoken to them. They

they really are just at the beginning of their understanding here. and then contextualize that with the price and the market cap of ETH. ETH is not a uh a small asset, guys. Like ETH is a $500 billion asset at current prices. Over $500 billion asset at current prices. But I don't think that is uh I guess like something that you look at and say, well, ETH can't grow from here or can't grow much from here because it's already worth so much. I think you look at that and you think, okay, well, ETH is at half a trillion dollars without all of this money that exists in the world coming into it yet. you know, it's worth half a trillion dollars without all the, you know, pension fund, retirement account money coming in. All this big money that's managed by these uh trady uh kind of players, these big

institutions, like none of this money or at least very little of this money has gone into ETH ETH and BTC at this point. So, when you contextualize that and you think to yourself, okay, well then there's tens of trillions of dollars left to come in over the next 10 to 15 years cuz this isn't going to happen overnight. Then that's where I get to the price targets that I get to. That's where I start thinking in, okay, well, ETH can be worth tens of trillions of dollars. Uh, and and I'm not going to say it's going to be an easy road to get there. There's obviously going to be ups and downs, but I don't see a reason why it can't be. If enough of the world believes that ETH is a store of value, and we're seeing the I guess that belief get stronger and stronger over time, and

I've always argued this as well, where I said that ETH value will come from being considered a store of value over everything else. That's why I was so uh adamant about pushing back on people valuing ETH based on its fear revenue it generates. I just I I just truly believe that that was the most bearish thing to focus on. Um and then you've seen that with people like Tom Lee and Joseph Luben, the other heads of you know, ETH treasury companies as well as uh the Tradefi heads like Fidelity put out a report all calling ETH a store of value and the sky is really the limit when you have an asset that is considered a store of value because it is a belief system fundamentally. It's not based on like strict I guess like objective fundamentals. It's based on a belief system at the end of the day. And that's

why BTC is worth as much as it is. Even though I would strongly argue that bit Bitcoin has way worse fundamentals than Ethereum. It doesn't even have very strong fundamentals. I think that I put a tweet out the other day where I basically argued that Bitcoin has so much kind of wrong with it and so many uh I guess pain points coming up. The the two major ones are quantum computing which Bitcoin is going to have a really tough time with. uh and as well as the security budget issues which I think is an even bigger issue for Bitcoin because I guess like when you think about it the quantum computing thing in practice or I guess like in theory shouldn't be something that divides the community. If the community came together and said okay well we need to like fork Bitcoin in order to fix uh in order to like

protect it against quantum computing. I think you would find that most people even the most hardcore Bitcoin maxis would agree that that's a good thing to do. But then when you talk about the security budget issue, most Bitcoiners don't even believe this is an issue. So they haven't even gotten to the point where they actually think it's an issue yet. But let's say they do get to that point. Well, then they have to fix it. And really the only workable long-term solution is to add tail issuance. And that means breaking the 21 million cap of BTC. That is not happening. And that is actually my main bare case for for BTC and Bitcoin above all else. I have many other bare cases for it, but but above all else, and that issue does not exist for Ethereum and ETH. So, when I look at it from that perspective and and

you know, compare things here, I really don't think that Tradfi is going to be choosing BTC over ETH for very much longer. They're probably going to buy both, but I feel like they're going to allocate more to ETH for a number of different reasons. Biggest reason being that you can just do more with your ETH. You can obviously stake it and get a yield like that, but you don't even have to stake the ETH, right? You can go and put your ETH to work within DeFi on chain. And yes, you can put your BTC to work as well, but it's as a wrapped centralized version where you have to trust another custodian. And honestly, I actually don't think legally these bigger players are going to be allowed to use these wrapped versions of BTC because WBTC is managed by Justin Sun, a Chinese national who, you know, I guess

like is not the most trustworthy person in the world. So any US companies not going to be able to even I guess like all these US institutions are probably not even going to legally be allowed to hold this. And then you've got CB BTC which is Coinbase's one. They may not be able to hold this either but obviously it's a lot more palatable but that is still really really small and again it's centralized. Whereas with ETH like pure ETH on Ethereum it's the most decentralized asset on Ethereum and it is uh you know very prevalent across the entire Ethereum ecosystem whether that be at L1 or L2s. So, you got to have that as well, right? Where these players are coming in and they can use this ETH to do stuff with to generate yield.

That's why I'm really bullish on the ETH treasury companies because they're going to be able to generate a lot of kind of yield and a lot of more opportunity on their ETH holdings than you would as a Bitcoin treasury company. That's why I think you're seeing more and more ETH treasury companies pop up as well. So all of that coming together just leads to I think like more price appreciation for ETH which then feeds into more I guess like buying pressure on ETH because obviously if ETH in price discovery everyone's FOMOing you know so on and so forth and ETH keeps going up just slowly grinding up over time then more and more people are going to continue to buy it as the story of ETH as a story of value gets stronger and stronger and stronger and then it keeps going up from there you have this really

nice flywheel effect that's happening there but that's I guess like covering ETH the asset then you could talk about Ethereum the network and all of these big kind of institutions and and companies building on Ethereum, whether that be as creating their own L2 or tokenizing things on Ethereum L1 or even on the L2s. It doesn't matter. It's all part of the Ethereum ecosystem. This just acts as a really really strong flywheel, guys. And as I said, we really are at the beginning here. I really do think we're at like a 2013 level uh beginning for these players here, which means, as I said, the next 10 to 15 years is going to be a massive adoption cycle for crypto. And I know that most people in this industry don't have uh you know a time preference that high.

They definitely uh a short-term oriented like week to week, monthtomonth at most sort of thing. So if you do have that year to year, decade to decade kind of outlook and you're happy to just like buy and hold ETH as your store hold of wealth, as your store of value, then I I think that that's the best way to play it here. That's that's my strategy as you guys know. I mean, I've been holding my ETH since 2017. Been stacking more over time, buying more over time, buying more here. I don't care if I think ETH if I actually think ETH is going to $100,000 plus dollars, then buying it at $4,000, $5,000 is a bargain, right? That's how I kind of look at these things. And as I mentioned the other day, there's more than just ETH you can buy, too, right? You can buy uh tokens

on Ethereum, like DeFi tokens, things that are actually part of good protocols. I'm not talking about meme coins. If you want to buy meme coins, go do it. Fine. But they're scams, guys. Like, most of them are scams. Uh pretty much all of it's gambling. So, it's fine to do that if you want to do that. Like, you no one can stop you from doing that. and I wouldn't stop you even if I could. Uh but at the same time, you have to like put it into context. Buying ETH versus buying these things very different. Like if you bought Kanye's scam coin 48 hours ago, you're down like 70%. Whereas if you bought ETH 24 hours ago, you're up like 15%. Right? And obviously that's a very short-term thing. But the problem is is that like these things that get launched by these celebrities, they are scams and rugs and

insider things. They're not serious things. And I I don't think most people treat them as serious long-term investments, but that doesn't matter because you can, as I just mentioned, you can lose 70% of your money in 48 hours on these things. You can lose all of your money in a very short period of time on these things. So, looking at at from that perspective, if you're looking for something to store your wealth in for the long term, that has strong fundamentals backing it, has a strong story behind it, you believe it's going to be, I guess, like keep growing as a store of value, then I really don't think there is anything other than ETH. I mean, yeah, you can probably buy BTC and do relatively well, but I don't know. I'm just like, I know I have a bias here. I know I'm an ETH maxi. I

know I'm, you know, I don't own any BTC, so obviously I have a bias in my investments, too. But I don't own BTC because I've always believed that ETH is the better asset. Like, I don't have the belief that ETH is the better asset just because I own ETH. Like, I I can go and buy BTC right now if I wanted to, but why would I do that? Like, I don't see the point in doing that. I see the point in buying ETH over BTC. And yes, I know over the last few years, ETH has underperformed BTC. But as I've explained many times before, I truly thought, and I think that's been proven out at this point, that was because ETH was missing the macro institutional bid, which it now has. And I don't see that slowing down. So, I really think that, you know, if you were lucky enough to

buy ETH in April, May of this year, you you you really got like a a good kind of deal on it then. That was a phenomenal deal, honestly. Like, it's one of the best deals. It's like I would I would actually say that's as good as buying ETH. Maybe not as good because the upside isn't, you know, as good in terms of like multiples, but in terms of the opportunity, I think it's as good as buying ETH back at $100 in 2019 and 2020. Like I was buying back then and I, you know, at the time I remember thinking it was expensive because ETH obviously had gone up so much from a couple of years prior or something like that, right? Like $10 to to $100. I was like, damn it, I'm buying it at like a 10x. Like, but I kept buying cuz I'm

like, you know, I think this thing's going to 10K. I was calling for 10K back in 2019. obviously not there yet, but I do think we're going to get there relatively uh soon. So, when I look at it from kind of kind of that perspective, uh yeah, I just I I just keep buying ETH. I keep stacking ETH. I'm not worried about BTC. BTC can do its own thing. It's probably going to go up against US dollars because I mean, let's be honest, US dollars in fear generally is just absolutely worthless, right? It's just going to be continue to be more and more worthless over time. People don't actually notice how much inflation has crept up. And you know, when you have tariffs as well going on, you have political instability and you just you have like the Fed now saying that they're probably going to cut rates

again. That that's what happened actually today or yesterday. That's why a lot of the markets pumped. When you have like just the fiat becoming even more funny, it just like doesn't make any sense to sit in Fiat. And then you're like, "Okay, what assets do I buy?" Well, not all assets are created equal. You want to buy things that are going to be good for the long term. You don't want to just be chopping and changing between assets all the time trying to protect your wealth. Why I do think ETH is the best opportunity in the world honestly right now for that. But none of that is investment advice obviously. But you guys know all of this. If you've listened to the refill long enough, you've heard me bang on about this for a very long time. But I figured it was worth reiterating all of

that because of the fact that yes, we are at a new all-time high for ETH today, which is awesome. Hopefully, we get we get into price discovery soon. Go over 5K and beyond from there. I think we will. I don't think there's any reason why we won't. Um, you know, the bears just keep losing and there's really just no reason to be bearish on ETH at this point. You could make the argument that, okay, well, you know, the ETH treasury companies are the main buyer. What happens when they stop buying? But that's the same thing as saying, I'm bearish because, you know, I'm bearish if people stop buying ETH. It's like, what? Okay, so you're bearish if there are more sellers than buyers.

Like, congrats. You know, go back to business school and and lecture because you're apparently a genius. like it does. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense, right? Like it it's it's just a stupid thing to say. There's actually in my mind no at least short to medium-term bare case for ETH at this point. I think the long-term bare case, if you wanted to give one, is that Ethereum loses market share as a network. The story of value uh kind of story around ETH falters. These ETH treasury companies do end up uh uh uh being like a dead weight because maybe they trade at a discount for a while and they have they're forced to sell their ETH or something like that. Yeah, you could make these cases, but they're more longer term. I think when you're talking short to medium term, yeah, I don't know. I I feel like

the people that are bearish are only bearish because they want a good entry on ETH. They missed buying ETH and now they don't want to buy it at alltime high. Well, sucks to be you. I mean, you didn't have to bear post ETH under 2K and you did. And oh, I've got the receipts. I've got so many receipts, guys. I'm not I'm not releasing them yet. I'll release them at some point in the future. Uh just to dunk on people. I mean, I dunk on people sometimes with them. But my god, there are so many that you that you have forgotten about that I've forgotten about. It was really bad, guys. like in terms of the what people were saying. Uh and yeah, I can't wait to collect on that because honestly like if you're going to put those opinions out there, well then you're going to get

called out on them. I'm I'm you know, I'm also having people to call out my opinions that I give and things that I say and on me for it. Go do it. Fine. But I think what what I find funny is that people will will kind of reply to me and be like go like the other day um I I replied to John and I said, "Dude, like he said something about skipping ETH." He's like, "I would only own like BTC, Soul, and Hype. skip ETH. And then I was like, dude, the last time he said something like this was in like April and ETH has just moon since then against USD BTC. Soul ETH has gone down. Hype ETH even went down uh and and and things like that. And then he replied to me and he said, "Oh, here's a picture of an ETH BTC chart of the last few years.

So guy who underperformed everyone is kind of like giving advice on this or talking talking shit." And I looked at that and I'm just like, dude, I replied to him. I said he's got a severe case of ED or Ethereum dysfunction. But in my head, I I I mean, I I wanted to to to say this as well, but I didn't because I figured it wasn't worth the time. But like in my head, I was just like, do these people think I only own ETH? Like, no, I own ETH as a as a separate thing to my overall portfolio. I buy and hold other things. I buy and sell other things and take profits on them. And I use ETH as my long-term store of value. And also at the same time, it's like, dude, you can show me an ETH BTC chart, but then I'll just show you a chart of

something that you were shilling a few months ago, which was Celestia in John's case, and it's and you were saying it was a better buy than ETH, and it's down like 80% since then. And at the same time, you don't even talk about it anymore because you've you've pivoted. You've probably sold your bag and moved on. But with ETH, I've been talking about it since 2017. I've been singing the same tune since then. So, like you can't, it's just like a stupid way to dunk on me cuz it's like, so you're dunking on me for having a long-term investment thesis in ETH, sticking to ETH through the hard times, and then reaping the benefits when they eventually come. That's your dunk? Like, come on, dude. So, yeah, it's just funny when I see those things. But, yeah, as I said, I've got the receipts. You guys

are going to enjoy them once I collect on them, probably next year. I don't know. I don't want to collect on them too soon. I want to I want to wait for like maximum pain. You know, maybe it's it'll be like the the the top signal of to to to end all top signals when I do this, but I want to I I want to kind of like inflict the maximum pain here because, you know, these guys, you talk but like, hey, if you want to talk you're going to get cold on it when the time comes. Anyway, I've ranted for 20 minutes there about this today, but I don't know. Like, I haven't done a refill in over a week. I know I said I'd do one sooner than that, but like I I just didn't. And someone made a funny comment actually saying, "So, what? You

only do refills when the ETH price is up now?" And I'm like, "No, that's not the case." And then I woke up this morning. I was actually going to do a refill today anyway regardless of what the price did. And I woke up this morning and I saw the ETH price like just moon overnight. And I was like, ah, now people are going to think that I only do refills when the price is up, which obviously isn't true because of the fact that I even said on the daily discord channel a few days ago I'd be doing a refill on on Saturdays. But yeah, I don't know. It manages to to kind of happen like that. But but no, there's also the long history of me doing refills during the entire last bare market more often than I do them now.

like I'm literally doing them daily. So, I don't know. I just thought it was a silly comment people making that you only do them when the price is up. It's like do you know who I am? Like do do you know what I do? Um not to like sound egotistical. I was making a um a play on Charles Hodkinson saying do you know who I am on on Twitter that one time. But anyway, I'm going to leave that at that. There's a lot of other things to actually get through today. So, I'm going to move on to some core dev news. So, first up, I just wanted to give a shout out to Andrew here, who has started a new Ethereum newsletter called ETHDev News. Now, you might remember that Andrew was running the uh ETH uh weekend Ethereum newsletter before that was shut down. Uh which was an amazing

resource, and I was very sad to see it go, but with ETv news, you're going to be able to get your weekly dose of Ethereum news, especially things related to like core development and stuff like that, uh from Andrew here. So, highly recommend going and subscribing to this if you're interested in that. I'll link it in the YouTube description below, but I'm going to use it today to go over some of the recent core dev updates because it's just a really great uh resource for me to check in on. So, for Saka, the next Ethereum upgrade is making progress here. We have uh a DevNet 3 that is doing um non-finality testing and then we have a DevNet 5 that's going to be launched in early September once client teams have merged uh to trunk branches. Here, Glamsterdam is still being targeted for June 2026.

Headliners include EPBS and BAL or block level access lists which I'm going to talk about again uh in a sec here. Uh and then non- headliner EIPs can still be proposed for inclusion but the deadline for that is the Faka mainet release which is currently scheduled for October. If I had to say I would say Faka yeah October November seems like the date that it's going to come out. I think I originally said November. It seems like that's the case but at the same time it could come earlier because in November there's Dev Connect. I guess it's towards the end of November, so maybe they do it in like early November, but I doubt they're going to want to do a mainet upgrade in mid to late November because that's when Dev Connect is. So, yeah, maybe late October, early November is probably the the timeline here. Uh,

I'm not as good with timelines as I used to be because I haven't been paying as close attention over the past few months here, but that's that's kind of what I what I what I kind of see there. Uh, so that's the I guess like updates on Fusaka and Glamsterdam. And then he's Andrew's also got a bunch of other upgrade uh sorry updates about uh with regards to layer 1. There is an EF protocol AMA regards to staking. Uh Preston Vanlon was uh did a really great thread on validator exit and entry cues. You probably saw some FUD around that. Uh you can go check that out. It's linked in the newsletter. Layer 2 news research uh and so on and so forth here.

So this is as I said it's really great newsletter, guys. You should definitely subscribe to this and check out everything that's going on here. But Andrew isn't the only one keeping up with core dev stuff. Of course, there's Puja here as well, who recapped the uh all core devs call on August 18th going over things like uh Fusaka with the devets um BO static tests, gas limit testing updates. So, uh getting 60 million gas limit before Fusaka and so on and so forth. So, you can go check out that thread as well. But I guess like if I was to give a high level view of what's happening in Core Devland right now, it really is just like sprinting towards the finish line uh with Fusaka. Most of the work seems to have been moved on to kind of Glamsterdam at this point because I mean

Fake is not like done, but like it's in the testing phase, right? So uh client teams are like balancing that along with what's happening with Glamsterdam. If we want to get Glamsterdam live by June next year, then that needs to be happening. And then obviously there's going to be another fork after that. It's currently called the H fork. There's no name for it yet, but essentially that's going to be coming after uh uh Glam Amsterdam. I don't know if it'll happen in 2026. Maybe it does happen in like November, December next year, but I would probably say that January, February is more likely. I would love to see it in in November, December, but it just depends what goes into that fork because uh there I mean if you go to forkcast.org actually um this is my favorite resource as you guys know. You can see that, you know, in

Amsterdam, there's still a bunch of uh there's uh there's AIPs that are headliners right now, which is BALS and EPBS, but then there's a bunch of other things that are either going in or not going in. Like, I don't know if we're going to get all of these. There's Fossil, uh there's a bunch of other like AIP like delayed execution, reducing block latency. I don't think that's going to make it into Glamsterdam. So, if that doesn't make it into Glamstead, it means it's probably going to go into the fork after it. And as I've said before, reducing block latency, so reducing slot times from 12 seconds to 6 seconds is a pretty big thing. And honestly, I I would even kind of like say that you maybe the only big EIP that is part of the upgrade after Glamsterdam, it might just be reducing

the slot times here because this touches every part of the the consensus layer, guys, and even has effect potentially has effects on the execution layer as well. Um, and the the problem, not the problem, but like the challenge is that you can't get this wrong. Like this is one of the I wouldn't say riskier things, but it's it's one of the more difficult things to get right because there's so many things that it touches. It touches like if you think about it, it determines everything, right? So, I I I do think that it's probably not going into Glammd. I would say it's a very high chance it's not going into Amsterdam. So, if it goes into the fork after, it would probably be the only big EIP part that that is part of that fork.

Yes, there'll be other things, but I think that will be the definitely be the headliner of the fork following of Amsterdam, which means that we may not see it go live in late 2025, sorry, 2026. It may be early 2027, which I I I don't think is a is a big deal. But yeah, just uh giving very rough estimates on on on timelines uh there. But anyway, moving on from that. So, as I said, like block level access list or sorry, I should say yeah, block level access list or bells. Uh I spoken about this before I think on the last refuel. Tony here has been a really big proponent of this. Uh he put together a website uh called blockaclist.xyz that actually showcases why uh bals uh should be included in glamster which it

now is. But also why um I think that uh I think that you know if you read this you'll get excited about. If you scroll down here you can see what the key features are. The the biggest thing is just the parallel execution. And there's a nice little uh graphic here or GIF here I should say that shows what this looks like. So if you look at the transaction execution today it's sequential right you you um execute one transaction after another within uh the execution time of a slot which is 4 seconds. Uh but then um with bals you basically can do this uh in parallel. So you don't have to do it sequentially you can do it in parallel. Now people will ask okay well does this um lead to more scalability for Ethereum L1 because of this. I would say that like the it's not

so much about scalability is as it is about efficiency. So it makes the block or I guess should say the slot more efficient because it's doing things in parallel rather than sequentially here. So essentially what you get is potentially I mean it's you potentially get like more efficient slot which could potentially lead to more uh sorry cheaper fees on L1 but it's not like a onetoone relationship here. It's not like a gas limit increase where you can kind of neatly map things. It's different and and obviously every transaction on Ethereum or transaction type on Ethereum I should say is different has different kind of um gas cost has different loads on the network.

So it really just depends on what transactions are part of each slot essentially uh and how they've been packed and and if they've done in in parallel if they support the parallel transactions versus um doing it sequentially. So yeah it's it's not like a strict thing. It's not like you can map these things very very easily, but at the same time, it is definitely something that we should do because it's just a massive efficiency upgrade for Ethereum. Um, and we are doing it. It is coming in glammd, which is really awesome to see there. But if you want to learn more about that, you can. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so.

All right. All right, so Alex Stokes here put out a really great thread today going over the current status of blob scaling on Ethereum and what the core developers are currently kind of concerning themselves with with regards to blobs. So as you guys know in Forsaka Pier is going live which is a pretty massive upgrade to blobs but we wanted to decouple blob scalability from uh kind of the major hard forks and that's been the I guess like initiative with um BO forks which is blob protocol kind of forks or BO technique related forks here where essentially we could increase blob scalability without having to wait for a major hard fork or a major kind of network upgrade here. Uh which is great.

Um uh but outside of uh that and podas there's also efficiency upgrades that can be done uh as as Alex Stokes says here with refinements to something called cell level messaging and data reconstruction techniques as well as sharding. So sharding is is um definitely not completely dead. It's definitely uh being looked at in in the deep research circles of Ethereum here. But I mean you can go give this thread a read for yourself a link in the YouTube description below cuz it gives a full kind of context around all of this. But as you guys know, scaling blobs is one of the three main um three main kind of pillars of uh Ethereum development over the next few years. Scale L1 L1, scale blobs, and improve UX. And yeah, I mean, if you actually look at blobs today, we

still haven't hit the the kind of limit here in terms of uh if I go to the dashboard here from Hillb, we haven't hit the limit that was was increased in Pectra. So, you can see here we're basically like at average of about 4.2 blobs. Um, and then obviously we increased it from from uh uh sorry from a target of three to a target of six with Petra. So we basically doubled it and we're at about 4.2. So we've increased blob uh usage by about 40% I think you could you should you can say. I don't think we're actually going to reach saturation by the time for saka comes out. Uh but at the same time the reason to scale blobs isn't necessarily for the existing rollups and L2s. It's more for the ones that are coming because as I've discussed before, there

are certain L2s that actually can't use blobs because if they were to try to use blobs, they would use more than 100% of the blob uh the the current currently available blobs. So, they have to use alt da, something like DA for example, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but obviously in the ideal world, we would love to have as many of these L2s using blobs as possible because then you get uni unified settlement. you get nicer things like easy easier interoperability with the other layer 2s. You get potentially like um even nicer things like base rollups, right? For example, base sequencing. So, there's all these different things that go into this. So, and and and as I've mentioned in the past many times, I I do consider blobs to be a loss leader for the network where essentially let blobs be free for

like not not totally free. In in Forsaka, we're also going to be introducing a and there's an EIP going live that basically introduces a minimum fee for blobs. It's not going to be that high, guys. So, don't expect like millions of dollars of fear renew from blobs uh anytime soon. But essentially, like keeping blobs free for as long as possible, I think is a net good thing cuz it means that the L2s stay within the Ethereum ecosystem. They grow ETH. They use Ether's money. They grow the Ethereum ecosystem. They bring other I guess players into Ethereum. And I think that's the best way to go about it here. But we've also got IGENDA as well, which I consider to be net beneficial to Ethereum because of the fact that um ID DA and IGEN cloud and IGEN layer generally uh play off of ETH, right?

They use ETH with reststaking. So, it's still driving demand for ETH. Anything that drives demand for ETH is good in my books, but using an old DA like Celestia for example doesn't drive demand for ETH. So, I don't want L2s using that. I would ra much rather L2s use IDA uh than Celestia there. not just for like Ethereum alignment purposes, but for the fact that it's better for ETH, right? Um, and but at the same time, as far as I know, I DA can actually scale better than Celestia can right now. And Celestia isn't just a DA layer anymore. They're trying to be like a full-blown L1. So, that actually is a a hindrance for them because it means that they're kind of fractured their focus now, whereas I DA is just focused on DA. Um, and and I think, you know, with blobs and that and I DA, it's probably going

to be enough for the foreseeable future here. So, I'm I'm super excited about that. But yeah, I'm happy with Blobs being free for quite a while from here, guys. I'm actually happy with it being free for like 5 years. Like, I really don't think it's a big deal. And I remember arguing with people about this when ETH was at like, you know, in in the 1500, sorry, in the thousands, in 1500, whatever it was. I was debating people constantly about this, saying, "Oh, you know, ETH started suffering once blobs were introduced in March of 2024." And I said to them, like, I I don't think this is the case for a number of different reasons. I'm not going to rehash them here, but but a major reason was because of of the fact that like you can even there are a lot of other things that um that pointed to

ETH uh suffering price-wise against BTC against other assets other than blobs. And people I think made the mistake of thinking that correlation equals causation when it wasn't that at all. It was just like a a a coincidence that these things correlated because if you actually look at blobs in April, right, blobs have been free since April, since Petra went live. So what hap has happened since April? Well, ETH has gone up only. ETH is set at a new alltime high today. So all these people that were blaming blobs being free or blobs not contributing much in terms of like fear revenue to Ethereum. Like they're all wrong. Like it's just a objective fact that they're all strictly wrong about that. Like that was never the case. The case was always that ETH didn't have that macro institutional bid. Now it does. ETH goes up. Hey, it's

simple, right? So I'm collecting that. I'm actually collecting that today because I I remember arguing with people about this constantly and they just they wouldn't listen to me and it was really frustrating for me because I was like, "Guys, like this is so obvious, but hey, I you know, I get it. Price is low. You're looking for any reason to to to explain that. You're looking for anyone to blame." You know, everyone obviously was blaming the EF and other players like that. But I think at this point I've been proven right that it wasn't Blobs that did this. Uh because if it was Blobs that did this, then following the logic, ETH should be worth zero since Blobs have been free since since Petra went live in April. But instead, it's done the exact opposite. ETH went from the bottom in April of what was it

$1,400 to almost $5,000 today. That's a massive increase, guys, in a very short period of time. So yeah, I'm collecting on that uh today. But anyway, enough about that. Moving on from that there to something that Chescen posted here. So there is a new apps page on the ethereum.org or website. So, you know, it's funny. I I I constantly see people asking questions about like where are the apps, what are the apps on Ethereum, where are the new apps, so on and so forth. Well, you don't have to ask that question anymore, guys. You can just go to this website and you can see the apps here. And also on that that question, though, I did want to address that question a little bit. I think what people don't understand is that if you're looking for something to be like a net new totally, I guess like 0ero to

one innovative app on Ethereum, the chances of that happening these days is quite rare. And it's not because it they're not going to exist. It's not because of any kind of like failure of Ethereum or the L2s or whatever. It's just because of the fact that there are only so many 0ero to one ideas in in in the world. And I I think that if you look at DeFi as a 0ero to1 idea because DeFi definitely is a 0ero to1 idea and innovation it already happened like it happened in 2020 in ter with DeFi summer. It happened before that technically but let's say in 2020 with DeFi summer. So if you're looking for something net new in DeFi you're not going to find it because DeFi as itself is a is a 0 to1 but then if you look under the hood it's just using finance

primitives that have existed for thousands of years across human history. There's nothing like new there. We're just using them in different ways. That's the new thing. The actual primitives themselves are not new. You know, the primitive of lending and borrowing, that's not new. Like, you know, payments not new. Uh store of value is not new. So, stuff like that, right? But we're using it in different ways. I'm not trying to diminish the innovations that DeFi has brought. It's brought a ton of innovation, obviously. like I don't have to explain it to you guys, but if you're looking for something that's like going to blow your, you know, socks off in terms of uh of stuff happening within DeFi, as a crypto native that's been here for many years, you're probably not going to find that. Whereas the Trafy people who are just now getting involved are definitely

going to find that because their journey is just starting. But for us who have been here for a while, yeah, you're just not going to find something that like wows you like you did in the past because we're already so used to it, right? But DeFi is just one thing uh within crypto. There's also stuff like I mean looking at the page here you can see parallel which is a a TCG that uses NFTs. You can see Courtyard here which basically allows you to open digital trading card packs as NFTs and collect them and trade them and they're actually physically backed by the actual cards in a vault that uh that Courtyard manages here. And then you have other things like privacy stuff like tornado cache and privacy pools and so on and so forth, right? Uh fileverse which is um the centralized alternative to things

like notion and Google workspace here. So there is a lot of stuff happening but you know again this is stuff that is not like net new to us you know this this decentralized file kind of like sharing like that has been talked about for a long time now it's becoming more and more possible because of the scalability stuff that we're doing but it's just been talked about for a very long time privacy stuff again talked about for a very long time has existed the US government went after tornado cash I mean you can't get really any bigger than that right so when I look at it from that perspective I think people in at least crypton natives really need to adjust themselves here and and think okay Well, maybe I'm not going to be like amazed by the the new apps that are coming to to market, but you can still

look look at them and be like, "Okay, well, that's cool. You know, this app is using these primitives in a different way to this other app, but it's still the same primitives under the hood, but it's being used differently. Oh, look, I can actually do this cheaply now because we've scaled both L1 and L2." So, stuff like that is how I think about these things. But regardless of that, this new app page on the Ethereum.org website is great. If anyone asks you where are the apps, what are the apps, you can just link them this now. So, I'll link this this in the YouTube description below for you to check out. Uh, but yeah, kudos to uh the Ethereum.org team for putting this together there. All right, so another thing that I guess you could argue may be like a 0ero to one innovation, but again, like the

reason why I mean I'll mention what it is AI, right? Like AI is obviously taking the world by storm, but it is not like a crypto innovation. It is a just human innovation generally. It obviously started outside crypto and then people were like, "Wait a second, this AI thing makes a lot of sense within crypto because AI uh uh to for AI to work best, you actually want it to be like based on decentralized technologies. You don't want some mega corporation owning all the data. You don't want them owning all the algorithms. You don't want them owning all the AIs. You don't want it being closed. You want actually open AI stuff, right? You want AI to be as open as possible." And then you think to yourself, well, AIS deal in information, but they also want to deal in value. So, how are they going to do that? They're

not going to use the fiat system. They're not going to use banking systems. They're not going to use centralized systems. So, what are they going to do? Well, obviously, they're going to use decentralized systems. So, Bingi put together a really great tweet here talking about how Ethereum is actually gearing up for AI and to support AI in the best way possible. And you can give this a read. It's a pretty long tweet. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But he was talking about ERC 8004, which was proposed here by David uh at from the Ethereum Foundation, which is an ERC for trustless a agents. And um David describes this ARC as extending the agent to agent protocol with a trust layer that allows participants to discover, choose, and interact with AI agents across organizational boundaries without pre-existing trust. It introduces three lightweight onchain

registries, identity, reputation and validation and leaves application specific logic to off-chain components. So essentially creating a uh I guess framework around these AI agents that will exist and do exist on Ethereum here. And if I was to say what like the next I I guess like in terms of things that are going to wow you going forward. If there was something that would wow you going forward and amaze you and be like a potential 0ero to one or maybe almost 0ero to1 innovation it's probably going to be something around AI. Uh but again AI is just going to be taking advantage of the primitives that that are already there especially the primitives like um with regards to DeFi right all the stuff that's happening within DeFi. you can have like a a I guess like army of these agents using

DeFi and that's the only thing they use to transact value. Uh they can't use centralized systems because it's too risky. Like if you want to be a proper AI agent that that is free and free to do what you want, you can't use centralized systems and you're probably not even going to be able to use centralized systems because you'll get kicked off, right? You'll get banned or you don't maybe you're not even allowed to open an account or something like that, right? Because you can't pass KYC. It it does get weird when you think about AI doing KYC by buying fake KYC or generating it themselves and generating a fake person. I'm sure that's going to happen. But if you want like truly decentralized value transfer and value kind of like uh uh not just transfer, but like doing anything with units of value, then uh Ethereum especially is

the place to do it, I think. So, I'm glad Ethereum is focusing on AI. But you can go give this tweet a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. All right, so just I wanted to shout out this tweet that the Ethereum Foundation put out. So they tweeted from the Ethereum account talking about Tornado Cashache. They put out a simple tweet where they said, "Trorn Cash is a decentralized privacy protocol using zero knowledge proofs to break the onchain link between sender and receiver. It is designed to provide privacy on a public blockchain. Ethereum is for privacy." And the reason why this was like super like based honestly for them to tweet out is as you guys know the context around tornado cash is that it's it's it's come under a lot of scrutiny over the last uh 3 years

actually 8th 2022 I think it was uh yeah it was August 8th 2022 when the US uh Treasury Department uh sanctioned the OFAC contracts and obviously Raman Storm is still fighting his case u there was some results for his case uh on some of the charges a couple of weeks back but he's still fighting and still going to appealing uh some of those charges I believe. So for the Ethereum Foundation to actually tweet this out is awesome because it basically shows they stand with um you know crypto and they stand with the crypto kind of philosophy and ethos here. And then on the other hand like a couple of days ago I think it was or a few days ago Anatoli the co-founder of Salana said that privacy has no product market fit in crypto. So you have like these diametrically opposed

belief systems here and when I look at that I'm just like yeah this is why I'm in Ethereum. This is why Ethereum wins cuz we actually care about the things that actually matter, not things like scam coins, uh, like Kanye launching scam coins and promoting that stuff, which Anatoli has done, by the way. I know people sometimes give me heat for this. It's like, oh, it's a permissionless blockchain. Anyone can launch anything they want. Sure, but at the same time, you don't have to promote it. You know, you don't see Vitalic promoting scams and and kind of like meme coins and and stuff like that and and trying to uh essentially get uh increase that activity. He actually actively tries to say to people like guys like stop scamming each other basically. So yeah, I just thought it was a it was a difference in in

philosophy there. A big difference in philosophy mean but that's why I'm in Ethereum and not in Salana basically. But anyway, moving on from that one there. So um Emily here from the Ethereum Foundation put out a great tweet which I figured was worth covering where she said 10 things we don't talk enough about that you can build on Ethereum. So you can build diplomas that can't be faked. you know the we've talked about this in the past I think on the refill but people have talked about this in the past with regards to diplomas medical records uh stuff like that right you put them on chain as NFTTS obviously you you want to do it in a privacy preserving way uh but then you can have that like proof that's there that that and then you can have like attestations through EAS or something like that that attests to the validity

of those proofs and then the second thing she says here is traceable relief money that actually makes it to people after a disaster this is really cool because tradition ally a lot of the money that goes to disaster relief just gets eaten away by middlemen. So if you can just like send the relief money directly to the people that need it, well then you can cut out a lot of the middlemen. Yes, there's probably still going to be some leakage there, but you can still cut out a lot of the middlemen here. Uh contracts that enforce themselves as her third thing. Yeah, obviously we know smart contracts um are huge here, but this is maybe for uh contracts that go beyond the the um I guess like cryptonative stuff and go into like the real world stuff. Uh medical records, I I mentioned that. Uh

pay that shows up the second you finish a job. So like streaming payments through Sablar. Uh one login you can use everywhere online. So sign in with Ethereum. Books you can co-write with your community through decentralized file sharing stuff like um uh uh DOS which I mentioned before. Uh a savings account that doesn't ask you for your whole damn life story. I mean, yeah, that's just like a a simple Ethereum account, right? You can keep your your funds there and you don't have to KYC or anything for that. Rent that splits automatically between roommates. again, stuff like uh u uh uh protocols like splits uh and tickets to show uh to shows that can't be sculpted. Uh stuff like pop-up, right? That can enable stuff uh enable things like that. So, yeah, lots of things that can be built on Ethereum that aren't talked about

enough. Lots of non- finance things as well, which is really good to see, but I figured it was worth highlighting that uh tweet there. All right, so moving on to something that Spy introduced. So, they introduced something called Pylon, which is a platform for launching based app chains that synchronously compose with Ethereum L2s. It provides first of its kind crosschain contract calling that feels like deploying your app directly onto a popular Ethereum L2. So, you can check this out. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. Um, but again, I guess like this just speaks to the interoperability efforts that are happening within the Ethereum ecosystem, especially across the L2s in order to get these L2s talking to each other, in order to make them less fragmented. Uh, and Spy has really been at the forefront here of of these things, especially when

it comes to like based app chains, which is what they've released uh, here, not today. I think it was a couple of days ago, which you can go check out. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for uh, for you to do so there. Uh, but this thread's actually really good because it describes exactly what's happening and how and and goes into technical detail about it as well, but gives like a highle overview, too, with nice little graphics. So, yeah, go check that out if you haven't yet. I'll link it for you. All right, so here's something interesting. MetaMask has announced that they're launching a new stable coin called MUSD which is a native stable coin uh to to MetaMask here and they're saying that they're going to be essentially deploying this across Ethereum mainet and Lana obviously because Lana is part of consensus and so

is MetaMask. So they're prioritizing their ecosystem here but Lana I would say is one of the most Ethereum aligned L2s because of the fact that they're going to be doing a lot of things like burning fear revenue in ETH. Uh they're going to be uh exploring doing as native uh um native stuff as possible such as like based um potentially being based their ZK roll up. They're doing a lot of great stuff here. So uh yeah, you should definitely learn more about Lana if you haven't yet. I know that's one L2 that I haven't paid enough attention to in the past, but I think this is interesting for a broader point here with regards to stable coins. I don't like the duopoly that USDC and USDT have or Circle and Tether have. And I know why they have it. It's because a centralized stable coin always um I guess like uh always

scales a lot better than a decentralized one. MetaMask USD isn't a decentralized stable coin from from what I know. Uh it's definitely a centralized one, but I'm just glad that there's more more competition in that space. But at the same time, I do wonder like how these, you know, stable coins are going to compete if some of the major banks start doing stable coins. So for example, if JP Morgan does their own stable coin, like are they just going to eat the market? Because they control the banking system and if the centralized stable coins, I mean, they do rely on the banking system. You can imagine a world where they start getting de prioritized by the banks and they and the banks start saying, hm, okay, well, we're not going to push your product or we're not going to like help you with your

product. We're not going to give you favorable terms on your products. we're just going to prioritize ours and we're not going to use USDC and USDT within our products that we're offering to customers. We're going to use JP Morgan USD. And the thing is, they're going to do this because the laws and regulations are currently being changed to allow them to do this uh in terms of creating their own stable coin and they have every economic incentive to do this. It makes no sense for them to support these other stable coins when they could just be doing their own, which they could scale up a lot faster because they have the customer base. Imagine they just convert all of their customers holdings.

And maybe this isn't legal to do right now, but let's imagine in the future it is. And let's just say they say to their customers, hey, you can earn such and such yield if you convert your dollars into JP Morgan dollars, for example. Like, who's not going to do that? like people love yield, especially people with like if they have dollars in a bank account, they're going to want to get yield on it. So, they're going to do that and you're going to quickly see these stable coins um very very quickly grow and I think they're going to be issued on Ethereum Ethereum mainet and they're they're going to get so big that they can probably quickly overtake the the incumbents like Circle and Tether.

Is this a good thing is is a question that people will often ask and I don't know if it's good or bad. I I I I feel like centralized stable coins by default are like not great. Like they're neutral to like I don't know if I don't I think I don't think I should say they're bad because they do provide value to people. But on a long enough time frame, all we're doing with centralized stable coins is recreating the fiat system on chain. We're actually not doing anything that's kind of I guess like changing things and making it fairer and stuff like that because as I said eventually the bigger incumbents are just going to come in and eat those those market shares. So when it comes to growing like a decentralized stable coin, the best way to do that is funny enough to just

pump ETH because then you can back the creation of these stable coins with ETH and that's actually the limiting factor, the bandwidth. So if you for example, I know I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but I I'll come back to the point. For example, if you were to if if ETH's market cap is like worth hundred trillion, right? Let's just say at some point in the future it'll be worth hundred trillion dollars and let's say 10% of all ETH is used to as backing of a uh of a stable coin whether it be like pegged to a basket of assets whether it be pegged to US dollar or some fiat whatever it is that means you can have 10 trillion of those units whether they be as I said like a USD thing or a basket of assets you have 10

trillion but if ETH's only worth 500 billion then then the same percentage is only 50 billion so the order it's just a much smaller by order of magnitude. So that's why we want ETH to be worth a lot as well to be better economic bandwidth to be more valuable economic bandwidth. But then you can open up the whole question to well if ETH is worth $und00 trillion then USD is probably not worth very much anymore. Fiat generally is probably not worth very much anymore. So why are we just using ETH as our money? And well I mean I don't have an argument against that. I'd love to use Ether's money generally, but that gets into a wider discussion around money and purchasing power and and and purchasing power over time and stores of value. And I don't have enough time to go through all of that today, nor am I an expert on

that and and have enough prerequisite knowledge to go through it properly. But that's how I kind of think about these things. But bringing it back to the point, I'm glad that the incumbents are getting more competition. Whether they succeed or not is another thing. You know, whether metam mask succeeds with this is another thing. I do think that the real competition is going to come from Trafi. I do think that you're going to see JP Morgan, potentially even Robin Hood and Stripe and and other big players do their own stable coin and that's going to eat into the market share of the existing ones. If I had to say the biggest loser in this world, it's probably going to be Circle because they have a much less defensible moat than something like Tether because Tether is a global thing. Whereas USDC is mostly US-based and it's also smaller

too and Circle is US-based as well. So, yeah, I would say that like Circle's probably going to be the biggest loser here. Um, but Tether will also take a hit from this too from the fragmentation. But again, there's no way these bigger entities aren't going to try and compete here. they will because it's a ludicrous amount of money you can make from these things. Given that we know how much money Tether makes, we know how much money Circle makes from their stable coin. These incumbents aren't going to sit by and be like, "Oh yeah, we'll just leave this money on the table." No, they're going to want a piece of that pie. So, yeah. Anyway, moving on from that last couple of things here. So, uh, big piece of news actually that I didn't think I covered on the last refuel is that Ronin, which

has been a layer 1 for a while, uh, or I guess you could call a side chain for a while, h, um, is going to be coming home to Ethereum. So, they're going to be trans, uh, ferring or transform transforming their chain into Ethereum layer 2 by next year. This is the second major uh, I think L1 that is doing this. I think salo was the first. Um, and now Bronin's coming home uh to Ethereum here, which is great to see. I mean, you guys know my long-term thesis is that most L1's will either die off or become L2s, but becoming L2 doesn't an L2 doesn't guarantee success either. But I just really don't see the point of launching L1's at this at this point in time. Uh, especially going forward.

Like, if you were to launch an L1 today, I think it's kind of pointless. If you were to launch one in 2 years, it's even more pointless. 5 years, I'd be calling you crazy. We all know why it happens. It's just an easy way to make money. VCs love it. I mean, the other day, the uh one of the co-founders of Story Protocol, which is some L1 for like IP rights, he goes, "After building for like three 2 3 years, I'm going to be exiting today and just staying on as an adviser." It's like, dude, like you just vested, didn't you? You just sold your you know, your your contracts at the company are up. You can just leave now.

Another extraction complete, right? So, it's just like all this And yes, this happens with L2s as well, but like traditionally it's really happened with the L1s because there's been this narrative that there's like a L1 token premium where the token of an L1 is worth a lot versus like an L2 or something like that. And I I think that that is actually going to erode over time. I do think there will be some L2 tokens, don't know which ones, but I do think there will be some L2 tokens that actually end up being um, you know, being worth quite a bit and maybe that kills this narrative around the L1 premium. But yeah, at this point in time, if you're launching an L1, I yeah, I just think you're doing it for the money, for the grift, right? But hey, I guess like um back on the on the topic

here, great to see Ronin coming home as an Ethereum L2. I wish them the best of luck with this. You can give their announcement, pre-thread a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so there. All right, last up, just wanted to give a shout out. Bankas has launched a new newsletter called Ethereum Weekly, which is great to see. Obviously, Bankless has come under a lot of fire over the last what is it couple of years uh for not doing enough to enough focus on Ethereum, but lately they've been really good. They've had a lot of banger Ethereum interviews that they've posted. Uh and now they have a new Ethereum weekly newsletter that you can go subscribe to uh if you haven't yet. So, go check that out. I'll link the YouTube description below. But I think on that note, that's going to be it for today.

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, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all on the next one. Thanks everyone.