ETH is money, Why Layer 2's and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #803 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of Del refuel where C up the latest news etherum acos system I'm your host Anthony Zer and today's the 14th of October 2024 right everyone let's get into it so I am back after a 2mon Hiatus of the refuel I know I originally said two months ago before I went on holiday that I would try to do refuels while I was on holiday and obviously that did not happen so it's been now over two months I think since I did the last refuel and honestly it's been weird but also so good you guys remember in May I did like that 2.5 week cold turkey break of crypto where I basically didn't look at anything crypto for 2 and a half weeks I didn't check T Twitter I didn't check Discord nothing like that but this

time while I was traveling around in Europe for two months I didn't do that it was not a cold turkey break I was still active on Twitter and Discord and and other kind of Social Media stuff uh but I wasn't doing refuels obviously and I had a lot of people ask me you know when's the refuel coming when's the next episode coming because there obviously has been a a lot of fud over the last couple of months uh lobbied at ethereum nothing out of the I guess like ordinary we're always used to dealing with fud but I think a lot of people realized or maybe kind of thought to themselves wow I'd really love to hear you know Anthony's take on this or I'd really love to have Anthony kind of tell me why this is wrong or why this is right and so on and so forth and yeah I guess that

that's the whole point of why I do this right like I try to educate you guys in various different ways I try to make sure that you have the I guess knowledge that you need in order to basically not just fight back against the fud if that's what you're so inclined to do but also realize what is fud what isn't what makes sense what doesn't and so on and so forth but there is a lot to cover there's a lot to cover from the last couple months that I want to cover today don't know how long this episode is going to go for probably a while because I've got a list in front of me it's not that long of a list but like each topic that I'm looking at in front of me I'm thinking to myself wow okay this is like a whole refuel in of itself so we'll see

how long we go for today um but first off you can skip this part there'll be time stamps obviously you can skip this part but I did want to discuss a bit about the last two months the the trip that I was on because a lot of you have asked about this and I said that I would cover it in the video so really just the TD is that for two months my fiance and I traveled around Western Europe really we didn't go to Eastern Europe or anything like that we spent half of the time in Italy but essentially what we did was we started off in London then we went to Amsterdam Berlin Prague Zurich Milan Venice Florence chinka Rome and Kat so that was the whole trip there and people asked me what we enjoyed most I think number one on our list was Zurich

in in Switzerland we did um outside of Zurich as well we did T Thun or tun I can't remember how to pronounce it exactly um and a few other small Pockets around Switzerland but Zurich was like the home base there and we really just enjoyed it um I think that the number one reason we enjoyed it so much maybe was because there wasn't as many tourists there as there was in other places that we had gone to because Zurich is quite expensive so naturally people uh will only go there if they can afford it and yeah I mean if you can afford it definitely go there it is absolutely amazing like just the fact that we were we stayed in a hotel that was about a 10minute walk away from the lake there the main Lake Zurich there and we went on the boat tours like a

bunch of different times because it was just so beautiful we went on during the day we went on when the sun was setting and we had good weather we had weather for basically the whole trip I think it rained like two or three times out of the 60 days that we were traveling so it was amazing um to to basically have that weather especially in Zurich there but Amsterdam was definitely a very close second we had been to Amsterdam before years ago for Dev connect in Amsterdam I went there and my f tagged along but it wasn't really a holiday back then it was kind of conference things and we didn't really get to enjoy it but this time around we enjoyed it much more thoroughly we have a good friend that lives there that was basically our tour guide he got us to ride bikes this time

which is an interesting experience in Amsterdam but yeah I would say Zurich and Amsterdam definitely one and two in terms of uh in terms of what we enjoyed most out of uh the trip here now uh as I said we spent half of the time in Italy and you can see here we went to basically all of the major places in Italy we ended in Katana which is in Sicily uh Katana was was fun it was a different vibe because like obviously it being in the south of Italy for anyone who knows Italy it is very different in terms of I guess like the the vibe like that's the way to put it right in terms of the vibe in compared to other parts of Italy but like everywhere that we went seemed to have its own Vibe uh in in Italy specifically like for example

Milan because it's so close to the rest of um the rest of Western Europe it is definitely a lot more modernized right it's definitely a lot more modern definitely feels like your regular City Venice I mean Venice is its own thing altogether right like it's it's literally a City built on the water and you really feel that when you're there you know Amsterdam obviously has its canals and everything but it's definitely very different to Venice in that Amsterdam is not built on the actual water it is built on land that has water running through it and then obviously some parts of of of um the Netherlands and Amsterdam they reclaimed a bunch of the ocean and built on that uh but it's very different to to Venice in that with Venice it's literally built on on the ocean there and the vibe because of that is very unique uh

Florence had its own Vibe obviously Florence is known for its time during the uh the Renaissance a lot of obviously art and history there chinka was amazing as someone who loves hiking like I absolutely love hiking we did a lot of hikes around chinka for those of you who don't know what it is it's basically five small towns that uh have a train running along the coast from laspia so stayed in laspia and then we went to the different towns you can hike between the towns we did that absolutely loved it and then Rome of course is just Rome I mean like it's just so much to do there's so much history and then as I said Kat in in the south in Sicily was a completely different vibe because it's so far away from the rest of of Western Europe relatively speaking I mean not

that far but in terms of like cultural influences is definitely uh far there but yeah the whole trip uh was was as I said was really really great we really enjoyed it it was a holiday it was not something something for work it was no conferences or anything like that we met up with a bunch of friends while we were over there which made the the trip that much more special and then the funny thing is is that the only thing I think I did that was crypto related was that in Berlin I went to the original building that was uh the building that the ethereum network was launched out of all those years ago so essentially it was just a piece of ethereum history that I wanted to experience for myself um but other than that yeah it was it was just all basically a holiday but um

I think you know that basically covers most of it there if you guys have any other questions you want to ask me feel free to ask me in the Discord about that but I think this is the perfect time to essentially um give a heads up that there'll be more travel coming up for me so obviously Devcon is taking place next month I will be traveling to Bangkok for that uh I think the dates that I'm going to be there is like November 9th to the 18th or something like that because there's going to be like the side events and the main Devcon conference and the B bankless Summit which I'm speaking at so yeah I think there won't be a refill during that period either and then in January I'm going going to Japan with some friends for like 2 weeks I think so

I don't know the dates yet haven't confirmed the dates on that yet but yeah those are the two like over the next few months two times when the refuel will be on Hiatus again but until then we're going to be basically back to our regular schedu scheduled programming here I think except for this Wednesday I'm going to probably just do an episode on Thursday um going forward it will be you know in the following weeks it'll be like the Monday Wednesday Friday Cadence of refuels and I'll try not to miss any as I usually do here um and then yeah I'll continue during the holiday period as well all through December and everything like that because there is just so much happening so much to cover it definitely feels like the market wants to heat up again as well but I'm going to talk about the market stuff a

little bit later and that of course uh obviously whenever that heats up the whole ecosystem heats up but yeah I think that would that that's it on the on the personal side of things I want to move into everything that I missed over the last couple months with regards to ethereum now I have a list in front of me as I said to you guys and I'm going to work through this list in no particular particular order to be honest um because of the fact that like everything's just going to kind of Link together as I talk about it but the first thing I want to to start with here is basically some I guess like big piece of fud that was like a piece of fud for a couple of weeks within the ethereum ecosystem that tends to rear its head head like every now and again for

various different reasons and it this has got to do with the ethereum foundation now for those of you who don't know the ethereum foundation is an organization within the ethereum community was the original Foundation set up to launch ethereum uh do the Ico you know so on and so forth but has since become essentially I guess like this pool of money that funds various different things in the ethereum ecosystem that's probably the best way to describe them and they've had this mandate as an organization since I believe the original presentation was given back in 2019 at Devcon Osaka in October by a the um the current head of the EF she basically gave this this uh presentation that the EF wanted to do what's called or or partake in what's

called a subtraction philosophy and what this means is that the ethereum foundation doesn't want to be this big centralized entity that has overbearing I guess like power on ethereum they want to be just one entity among many that are contributing to the ethereum ecosystem in various different ways and I think that 5 years on almost exactly five probably exactly 5 years on from when a first made that presentation the ethereum foundation has actually achieved that goal like completely I I I actually think that they've achieved that goal go to as much as they can achieve it um and I think that strategy has worked quite well that's my personal opinion on this but then of course you've got the other side of of the fence which is basically saying well by the ethereum foundation doing this and

by taking a back seat essentially what's happened is that ethereum is lacking like a central narrative or ethereum is lacking a central uh kind of north star or ethereum is lacking marketing and PR and strategy and so on and so forth coming from the ethereum foundation but to to this I say that that is not what the EF is that is actually not in the ef's DNA at all at this point in time for the EF to do that sorts of stuff it would actually have to completely change the makeup of the organization in order to focus on that now in saying that what the EF could do is that they could fund these different organizations using the money that they have to do this so for example they could you know give $5 million as a grant uh because they give these grants out to various different

projects within the eum community uh they could give a $5 million Grant out to out to a new organization that is sold Sol focused on marketing and strategy and PR rather than doing it themselves and that would be a much better use of the ef's resources than TR than trying to get the EF to essentially uh change their mandate that they've been I guess like building within or or guess confined within for The Last 5 Years uh because it's just not going to work it's just not in their DNA it's basically trying to change uh the entire I guess like structure of the organization just to focus on something that they haven't been bred or haven't been I guess designed to to focus on so that's my general view on the ethereum foundation uh ethereum foundation's role within the ethereum ecosystem now in

saying that of course you have the fact that the EF could be doing more in various different ways like there is a criticism that the ethereum foundation isn't as transparent as it can be and I agree with that to some extent where essentially the ethereum foundation can be more transparent around what they're using the money for when they're actually going to be selling eth and what for you know what their budget is so on and so forth and they are making St uh making moves there making stries there to be more transparent with that sort of stuff then there are people saying well the ethereum handle on Twitter is owned by the ethereum foundation and it's barely used for anything it has millions of followers and they barely use it for anything so you know why don't we start using that and start using it to promote various

different ethereum projects but then that I like I get the point I get why people want this to happen but at the same time you start opening up questions around okay well who's going to do that right who manages the ethereum foundation account to do that okay is that person subject to guidelines around what they can and can't post okay well it probably they probably are well then we we have to go on from that and and stay on that topic and basically say okay well what are the conflicts of interest that this person has like are they going to promote certain projects over other ones what are they interested in maybe this person doesn't like defi but loves a lot of the stuff happening within social f are they going to be promoting social F more than Defi and then it becomes a game of everyone just

complaining it's like oh why isn't the ethereum account on Twitter promoting my project or promoting my favorite thing or why aren't they talking mem coins and so on and so forth so I think the eum foundation people or the people that are I guess like making the decisions there have already thought a lot about this and comes with the conclusion that it's much better for the ethereum Twitter account to not get involved with this sorts of stuff because it just opens up a Pandora's box of [ __ ] really that I don't think the the ethereum foundation and the ethereum community or the ecosystem would necessarily want to to deal with there then of course you have the people within the ethereum foundation of which there are hundreds of these people within the E ethereum Foundation working on various different things obviously there's the the public

facing people that you all know vitalik a you know Justin Drake Dan crra like Danny Ryan before I mean Danny Ryan actually has um has essentially I guess like semi retired from the ethereum ecosystem or the crypto ecosystem now that was something that happened while I was away I'm sure you guys all saw that but but you know what I'm saying here like the people who are who are known within the community who are very active who have a following uh within the community uh and people know that they work within the ethereum foundation or at the ethereum foundation here but then there are hundreds of other people that work there as well and work within the organization that people have no idea who they are right so the question people were posing on Twitter was like okay well why isn't vitalik being more bullish on defi or the EF hates Defi and

doesn't think e should be valuable and so on and so forth but this is an opinion based on nothing really it's it seems to be a narrative that was pushed and I I don't understand why this why this was a thing I think when it comes to vitalik personally he would rather see more sustainable things built within the crypto ecosystem and I totally agree with that I've been hting that horn myself for many years now I would rather see much more sustainable things being built um and Thrive within the ecosystem rather than just having the same ponies and gambling going on all the time there's nothing wrong with that but when it becomes the main thing that we focus on then what are we even doing here like we're trying to build a better and more inclusive Financial system we're not just trying to build rebuild a casino

and that shouldn't be the main thing that shouldn't be the main focus of what we're building here at least in my view I think that's vitalik's view as well vitalik has most of his net worth in eth so obviously he thinks eth should be valuable otherwise he wouldn't keep most of his net worth in eth because then if eth goes down his net worth goes down and it does really doesn't really make any sense for him to keep it an eth if he thought that if he didn't think eth was valuable he could put his money into anything else and be better off like based on his own beliefs here uh and if the ethereum developers or core developers didn't believe that eth should be valuable or that e economics should be um I guess like strong or should be worked on should be improved

upon they wouldn't have delivered things like proof of stake they wouldn't have delivered the merge they wouldn't have delivered EIP 1559 they wouldn't be thinking about other things that to to to sh up ethereum's um monetary policy and and and E's economics uh and so on and so forth so I think that when people make generalizations about organizations that have hundreds of people within them they really need to take a step back and realize that people have different opinions on things not everyone's going to like what they like and I think that's okay I think there's nothing wrong with that so that's basically a summary of I think a lot of the stuff that was talked about within the community over the last couple months with regards to the ethereum foundation and just to summarize what what I've said basically is that I don't believe

the ethereum foundation should change what it's doing today I don't believe that they should change their mandate I don't believe that they should try and be something that they're not because it's just not in their DNA for them to do that for them to change what they are today they would have to r-rape the entire entire or organization if there is an appetite to do that within the E ethereum Foundation leadership maybe they do end up doing that but I think it's a much better use of their resource for them to fund organizations that are doing the thing people the things that people want to see such as more PR and marketing and strategy around etherium but at the same time ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem like it's it's literally in ethereum's DNA not to have a central coordinate coordin coordination mechanism for it and I

don't think that's going to change it's the same with Bitcoin like I don't understand why people talk about ethereum um as if it's different to Bitcoin in that respect they're they're the same thing there's no Bitcoin there's not even a Bitcoin Foundation I mean I mean there used to be but it was was useless it did nothing so there there's no like Central I guess like organization or Central party or person that dictates what Bitcoin is it's a I guess consensus within the community that they want Bitcoin to be digital gold and then there are lots of people who don't agree with that that have kind of fked off of that because they want Bitcoin they they still wanted Bitcoin to be a payments Network and then beyond that there are people now that want Bitcoin to be more than just like a dumb uh rail for BTC the asset they want to

do nfts on there they want to do smart contracts on there so you have all of this kind of stuff going on in the Bitcoin Community but they've managed to coales around this digital Gold Store value narrative for BTC they managed to find shared values and shared missions together and that's kind of their North Star there the same is true for ethereum ethereum ecosystem doesn't need the EF to dictate these things the ethereum ecosystem has come up with their own things that it values that it finds um a purpose in and that it wants to keep building towards I mean ethereum's North Star this is something that's been talked about a lot on on Twitter recently etherum Northstar is really the rollup Centric road map that is it basically like if you if you want to talk about like the broader Northstar for all of crypto it really is making

onchain as easy to use as possible for as many people and machines as possible like that is the nor star for all of of onchain crypto there are just different different implementations towards doing that ethereum's implementation is the rollup Centric road map it's been like that for four years now we've been executing on it beautifully it's been growing so nicely that I don't understand why people are now saying oh if eum needs a change in strategy or E the ethereum is dying or ethereum is going in the wrong direction how is that even like a take when ethereum is continuing to grow it is the ecosystem where by far most of the innovation in this in the entire crypto ecosystem comes out of and e as an asset is still worth so much it's worth 300 billion guys like e as an asset is not going to

move like your regular 10 million market cap meme coin like it's not it just makes no sense to compare the two it would be like comparing penny stocks to Apple or Nvidia it doesn't make any sense so I don't know why people do this outside of financial incentives of trying to pump their own bags it just doesn't make much sense there but those are my general views on the ethereum uh Foundation uh and their place within the ecosystem and what I think that they should and shouldn't be doing I do think that they can the people within the ethereum foundation can take a more active role within the community balac has tried to to do that recently but balic is doing so many different things we can't expect him to just be the guy that does absolutely everything so as a community need people to step up uh you

know I try to do my own thing there are others in the community that try to do their own thing and that's basically it that's a decentralized ecosystem there is no centralized party coming to tell you what you can and can't do within ethereum that is the beauty of it that is why we are building ethereum the way we're building it is so that anyone can have a voice anyone can have a say anyone can get involved and that is what really keeps me in the ecosystem the fact that I can freely produce and say whatever I want about the about ethereum through the daily guay I can do whatever I want no one can stop me from doing it I can contribute as much as I want I can uh go and take a break for two months um and and go on holiday for two months

without doing a refuel and no one is basically dictating what I can and can't do in this ecosystem which is great I love that I love that that's a thing uh but yeah that's that's the stuff on the EF there and I think flowing off of the EF uh generally is talking about things like the social layer within ethereum the social layer is essentially I guess like some people find it hard to Define but I don't think it's very hard to Define it's basically just the people right it's the people within the ecosystem it's it's what the people are doing what they're saying uh what they care about and what their I guess like um North what the what the people's Northstar is generally as well so I think that ethereum social layer generally is quite strong ethereum social layer works very well when it is

being channeled towards doing things that make ethereum better rather than trying to attack other ecosystems I think that a lot of the maybe I guess like problems over the I wouldn't even call them problems but maybe like perceived narrative issues over the last 12 months has come from ethereum people punching down at I guess like perceived competitors so for example there are a bunch of other l1s out there you know you've got salana Aptos Su say so on and so forth and then I think a mistake that ethereum or some ether not all ethereum but a mistake some of the ethereum within the ethereum social layer have have made is basically punching down at those ecosystems and making fun of them and and what that does is that essentially and the signal that it sends

to people outside of the um the ethereum ecosystem is it basically says to them well look the ethereum are are talking about these ecosystems they must feel threatened by them they must feel like these ecosystems can actually compete with ethereum so let's go pay attention to that and I think that's a big mistake that the ethereum social layer has made over the last 12 months specifically and I hope that that's something that people can learn from and understand that you should never punch down if you want to you should punch up like for example the ethereum ecosystem should be punching up at Bitcoin in my mind ethereum competes with Bitcoin ethereum layer one competes with with Bitcoin eth comp competes with BTC I think that the layer 2os compete with other layer ones the ones that are um the monolithic l1's the ones that are

optimizing for execution but I don't think that we as a community should even be be be punching down to those other l1s either I think we should just like let them do their own thing don't give them free marketing don't give them free airtime don't talk about them as if you're threatened by them like if they're going to succeed they're going to succeed if if they're not going to succeed they're not going to succeed let them do their own thing we should feel confident enough in the ethereum mission in the ethereum vision to just keep promoting what's cool about ethereum what's good about ethereum what we're working on within the ethereum ecosystem there's no need to go out there and fud other ecosystems or talk about them or or or or or send the message out and send the signals out to the world that

we as a as ethereum social layer feel threatened by these ecosystems because I certainly don't like I don't feel threatened At All by these other ecosystems I feel like we still have billions of people to on board onchain and over optimizing on the potentially maybe a couple hundred thousand active onchain human users is ridiculous like why are we focusing on the the absolutely tiny minuscule pie that we have today why are we fighting over that rather than trying to onboard billions more people that should be what we're doing we shouldn't be fighting over the existing user base which is very very small guys it's absolutely tiny and we're we're fighting over scraps by fighting over them we need to be essentially scaling this up as much as we possibly can across like everything

like l1's l2s whatever it is and as an as as the ethereum EOS system we should be producing the best user experience the best onchain user experience possible for these people while still respecting what makes a blockchain valuable to begin with which is obviously decentralization sensorship resistance credible neutrality all that good stuff there so I think that as as the social layer of ethereum uh which encompasses everyone within ethereum as I said it's it's the people of ethereum we should definitely focus on more on what makes ethereum great and awesome and less on competitors let them compete let them try to compete let them try to grow their ecosystem let them do their own thing um they're either going to win or or lose based on their own merits whether you talk about them or not on

Twitter is really not going to um make a difference in terms of whether they're going to win or lose but I do think that punching down to them and making fun of them and constantly talking about them uh gives them a a bit of a leg up at least over the short to medium term so it's essentially handicapping ourselves for what like so you can make fun of them eh doesn't work I don't think and that's why I've avoided doing it for for for a long time now one of the reason reason the other reason is that I just don't think it's productive I just don't think that it's worth calling out things um the truth comes out eventually uh and I'd rather just focus on what makes ethereum great and what you know what makes ethereum awesome generally here so that's the the social layer uh stuff

there now I wanted to move on to I guess like speaking of what makes ethereum awesome the rollup Centric road map the layer 2 road map that's another thing over the last couple months that people have been questioning they've been like oh what if ethereum had made the wrong choice by going with the rollup Centric road map what if we just recentralize efforts um in ter in terms into scaling L1 ethereum and forget about the rollups this to me isn't necessarily fud but it's just like a really like odd thing for people to be thinking considering that the rollup Centric road map is succeeding like I would sympathize with people thinking this if rollups were failing but they're not they're at all-time highs in terms of usage the TV

all and rollups keeps increasing yes we keep getting more layer tws and more rollups that may or may not succeed but like that's the whole point of the rollup Centric ro road map to let the free market do ethereum's scaling for it and then the best Solutions will win out over the long term and we'll have maybe a handful of these solutions that actually end up succeeding so like as I said if if if the rollup Centric R map was actually failing then I would be more part I guess like more partial to these people's arguments but it's not it's doing the exact opposite of failing so I think that the reason that people are saying this and I think there are a lot of people saying this as a way to just fight ethereum but the people saying this seriously I think they're only saying this because of the fact

that we're in the I guess like awkward growing phase of the royal up Centric R map right now where not everything is figured out there are still things that are very very clunky interoperability is a big one that still hasn't been kind of figured out the a lot of solutions still haven't been delivered the scale hasn't hasn't you know the the global scale that we talk about the millions of TPS whatever hasn't been delivered yet and it still looks like there's a long journey ahead of us but that's just a mismatch of timelines then that's got nothing to do with the rollup Centric rap being a success or failure it's got to do with the mismatch timelines if you look out 5 to 10 years and you can't Envision the rollup Centric road map uh fixing all of the current issues it has and basically uh reunifying everything

into one one I guess like or into something that feels like one chain for users when they're using it through a wallet or any other interface here then really you're not thinking big enough because for just hyperfocusing on the short term is not something that I think is productive because it's just going to lead you to thinking that things are going badly when in reality if you just look out one to two years even and you see a lot of these Solutions being developed and being deployed then you'll see that these things are being worked on they all of the issues that exist today aren't going to exist in the future but if you do think that the ethereum's roll up Centric like truly think that ethereum's rollup Centric road map ethereum's layer 2 road map is the wrong one and if you do truly

believe that scaling the L1 is the only way to scale a blockchain there are plenty of other ecosystems out there for you you don't I guess like I don't want to say that you don't belong in ethereum but if you don't actually buy into the ethereum vision then you're wasting your time within ethereum it's like if if I don't like iPhones I'm not going to use an iPhone I'm going to go use an Android phone like why would I say to myself I [ __ ] hate using iPhones but I'm going to use one anyway I don't have to I have a choice here so it's just weird to me that people sometimes act like they're locked into the ethereum ecosystem it's like ah I [ __ ] hate the rollup road map it's it sucks it's so fragmented you know it's it was a mistake but like okay

cool bro like you don't have to stay in ethereum if you don't like it like you can go to somewhere else and I'd love for you to stay in etherum I'd love for you to to understand that the rollup Centric Ro map is a long-term thing and it is it it is already playing out really nicely but if you don't believe in it anymore or never believed in it and you you just want to see the L1 scale go to these other ecosystems they will welcome you and you'll be you'll feel better you'll feel at home there there's no use staying somewhere where you don't feel at home it's just really bad for your mental health generally too so I think that people saying that people saying stuff about the RO Centric rap not being the right path for ethereum have it completely wrong now I

did put out a tweet about this actually um the other day where I basically said that if people understood the history of the rollup Centric Mar map and the history of layer 2os they would probably understand why ethereum chose this path and I want to give a brief history here I don't have any prepared notes for this this is basically all from memory here but I want to give you guys a brief kind of history of why ethereum chose the rollup Centric Ro map so this goes back all the way to at least 2016 I would say where the first discussions or at least uh the first loud discussions around how to scale ethereum were being had because there were a lot of discussions in Bitcoin land about how to scale Bitcoin and obviously the lightning network was bitcoin's Premier solution at the time

which used the technology of State channels now we basically brought this into ethereum as various different projects that were working on state channels but they had their extreme limitations they couldn't be used for anything more than simple payments and even within the simple payments context they required a lot of supporting infrastructure and there were a bunch of security holes associated with them so then ethereum researchers started working on uh things that uh looked a bit better than State channels things that could do more than payments things that could do Native smart contracts at a secondary layer at a layer two and that gave birth to something called plasma now plasma went through many many iterations but uh again it suffered from a few key things that basically made it you know unscalable and and relatively

insecure and then plasma essentially and this was I think in 2017 and 2018 mostly but then plasma uh I guess like uh didn't didn't die straight away there were a few things uh I guess like being delivered at the time there were a few projects working on this most notably was a Meo there was also I believe um I think fuel was working on plasma back in the day there was also um a loom Network I believe as well was working on it these are some really ancient projects now but there were people working on plasma based scaling solutions for ethereum but then we started kind of evolving past that and what became the spiritual successor to plasma was Roll-Ups was optimistic rollups first and then ZK Roll-Ups later the first

company to be formed around this was called plasma group uh which later became optimism which later became op Labs the team behind the op stack behind optimism main net you know Bas uses the op stack everyone knows optimism right so they started off as plasma group they were working on plasma first then they uh I guess pivoted to optimistic rollups and they've been working on that ever since now this is just Layer Two scaling there was also a plan to scale L1 through what was called sharding at the time now this had been on the road map from a very very long time ago I think from like 2015 or 2016 for ethereum L1 to scale via sharding and some remnants of that Ro map still exist within the ethereum protocol today such as the 32

eth um uh Max validator limit because we basically wanted to have a lot of validators on the network we have a million plus validators on the network today in order to uh allow sharding to work but the thing is is that somewhere along the way I can't remember the exact date we basically we being the the ethereum researcher Community not not me but like the ethereum research Community uh essentially looked at charting and was like this is just really really difficult to make work and it is going to take forever to ship it is also going to result in uh very similar issues to just having uh multiple l2s in terms of like interoperability um and it looked like it wasn't going to be secure now there are other chains out there that claim to be able to do Shing I haven't looked into into many of them but

essentially sharding as it existed back then was was abandoned now that that form of sharting later um later became known as execution sharting and then uh there was something that came along later later are called Data sharding or dank sharting or Proto Dan sharting which is actually what was delivered on the network eventually in the forms of blobs so I guess that that is like a very brief overview of the L1 scaling and L2 scaling in terms of like the main things that have been happening on on both of those layers over the course of ethereum's life and how we got to where we are today so essentially we went through a lot of iterations of how to scale various different things while also preserving what makes ethereum

great the reason we don't scale up L1 by throwing more Hardware at it is because we want to make it so that the L1 can be easily verified by consumer Hardware people can run their own full nodes people can become part of the consensus whether that be under proof of work or proof of stake what you know from home basically for for hobbyist for people who want to do this um on their own Hardware rather than doing it in massive data centers that cost so much money to to run and that are very inaccessible to like 99% of the planet that has been ethereum's kind of I guess northstyle when it comes to scaling preserving that while obviously scaling up ethereum here and that's why today we have rollups they are the best of all worlds you can do anything you want essentially rollups are best thought of is just basically

more ethereum block space essenti you have ethereum L1 block space you have ethereum L2 block space it's a same thing you go on bass right for example you go on arbitrum 1 they're both evm chains they feel exactly the same as ethereum L1 except you get cheaper fees and faster transactions but it's the same experience right like you're still using the evm you're using us similar or basically the same apps you're just getting a much cheaper price as well as um faster transactions now of course there are differences in that these l2s are behind multisig they have various different security properties they are not strictly equivalent to L1 ethereum block space but they are still ethereum because the L2 the rollup contracts and and the DA for at least for I one and bass and a few others out there live on

ethereum so they are still part of ethereum they just have different I guess security properties just like a smart contract for a def5 protocol can have a multi on it on ethereum L1 same is true for these these l2s here but hopefully that gives you a little bit of an overview of where ethereum kind of came from in terms of scaling and why we went down the path of the rollup Centric roome map and why we ex we still go down that path and why that path it seems to be the one or at least um at least I think it is the one that is going to succeed long term and it seems to be something that everyone is rolling around as well these days which is great to see uh there are a few holdouts still and there are a few people who have kind

of changed their mind on things I think simply due to price action for some reason but yeah I think that ethereum is still on the correct path with the rollup Centric R map nothing has changed in that regard so hopefully that gives you a bit more context there now next topic to talk about and if I'm talking about um eth the asset and eth's valueable cruel properties and everything like that which has been another big topic within the community over the last couple of months because of the fact that eth has Rel ly underperformed a bunch of other assets and I say that because it's like well I mean eth has still vastly outperformed most of the assets out there that it's worth comparing it to I don't think it makes any sense at all to compare eth a $300 billion asset to a mcoin with a $10

million market cap like do people understand how much of a difference there is there like for example if you have a $10 million market cap asset and you put a million dollars into that asset you are going to send that market cap skyrocketing because if you try to buy a market buy million dollars worth of a $10 million asset there is not going to be enough liquidity there for you to do that so you're going to send the price skyrocketing because people are going to be like wow there's this massive guy trying to buy a massive whale trying to buy so much of this coin that I'm holding I'm not going to sell it here I'm going to like move my price up here and then and and as I said even if you try to Market buy there's not going to be any liquidity there so

you're going to quickly send the price of that asset skyrocketing because it is a you're buying 10% of the entire market cap now if you buy a million dollars worth of E you're not going to do anything to the price that's like nothing like e is $300 billion you are buying 0.00001% I think or something like that of the of the asset or even less than that so you're not going to make a dent in it so it's not even worth comparing those things that's why I say when you look at things as like a comparative market cap that's a better way of doing it now of course ether's underperformed BTC over the last two years I think it's down like 50% from The High 2 years ago which might which you know may seem bad on the surface but it is a vast improve

movement over what ethereum uh what eth did against BTC last cycle where it went down like 90% against BTC from its top to bottom there and also at the same time I don't really think that eth against BTC is influenced so much by crypto specific things I think it is more influenced by uh Global I guess liquidity and Global risk appetite rather than with you know crypto specific things because I think for the most part crypto natives they seem to have like a core ethn BTC bag but then a lot of them like to take a lot of risk so they just end up using a lot of their money to buy all this other stuff like altcoins memecoins celeb coins whatever you want to talk about and at the market caps that eth that Ethan BTC are at at

this point $300 billion $1.2 trillion they need more than retail money to move them in any substantial way they need big money to move them and obviously a driver of that is the ETFs and of course BTC ETFs have had more inflows than the eth ETFs but I have talked about this in the in the past where essentially they they launched different times the BTC ETFs launched in the middle of a massive runup on BTC the eth ETFs launched in the basically the middle of one of the um in in the middle of of of a selloff right of of every everything in July 23rd like July was not a good time for crypto broadly and that's when the ETF went live but if we actually look at Far Side the website that I Ed to track these kind of ETFs and track the inflows

here you can still see that you know money's been trickling in for the E ETFs if you actually go here and look at all the data from July 23rd till till today the the money's been trickling in in terms of like net money it's still been net outflows most days because of the grayscale outflows but money's still been coming in here obviously BTC has been bringing in more if you go here and look at the the amount that's been coming in but uh the amounts going out have also been more so if you actually look at like the net over the last few months BTC and E are very similar in terms of like net flows on the ETFs uh because as I said BTC ETFs have had some pretty big outflow days to offset any of the inflows that it has here but I do

want to make a bit of a meta point about ETFs here that I think I've made before but it's worth repeating the ETFs at so far seem to have not really attracted even the BTC ETFs not really attracted the Boomer money or the tradire money that everyone talked about and I I remember I said this even back when the BTC ETF was launching that it would take a while for that money to come in I I think that most of the money that has actually g into these things has come from Crypton native investors whether they've been retail investors or instit in institutional Crypt native investors and a very little part maybe 10 to 20% of that money has come from potentially net new money from the uh

money in in the Trad ecosystem that has not touched crypto before so if that's the case which I believe it is from everything that I've seen it is it seems to be the case here that that means that there is still plenty of new institutional money in traire money Boomer money whatever you want to call it to come into these things it's just going to take a lot longer than people would have thought I I I believe and on top of that as well the flows themselves even though they may seem big on the day-to-day time frames if you actually contextualize that even for BTC it goes back to what I was saying before in terms of like flows versus market cap you can see here that the net flow recently on the 11th of October for the BTC ETFs was $253 Million

that may seem like a lot of money but it's not when you're looking at a $1.2 trillion asset right and especially because a lot of this stuff is done OTC a lot of this inventory is already bought on the market and then unsold later and then when you look at the way that these products actually do kind of creations and redemptions and when you look at people playing these products to do the basis trade by going long the ETF short the you know the um the non ETF or going short the ETF long the non uh the non ETF there's just too much going on here to look at these raw numbers to say oh look BTC brought in billions of dollars over the last few weeks why is the price of BTC not up more it doesn't work like that it is not a onetoone

mapping like that um especially not when uh these things are traded across so many different Avenues there are so many different people betting on these things speculating on these things there is options markets on this there are Futures markets on this BTC and eth are not like meme coins that uh literally exist in a small liquidity pocket on some chain somewhere that has like a $10 million market cap that maybe you know 100 people have been able to get into like they're just very different beasts here so I think that comparing them is wrong I think that looking at these raw numbers and drawing any kind of conclusions is wrong but I will say that over the long term and long term I'm talking about years here guys I'm not talking about like a month or two months I'm talking about years here long term

as I've said before these ETFs do have an impact but but if you're just going to take even a six-month time period and look at the ETF flows and be like why is price not going up that is not going to be a healthy use of your time that is not going to be something that you're going to get an answer to it doesn't work like that it is not that simple and that's basically most of what I wanted to say around the uh ETF here and the ETF flows generally I think maybe the last thing on the ETF was that people will say well ether's had such disappointing flows to the ETF compared to BTC you know when are we going to see more eth um more eth getting bought up in these ETFs here I repeat what I said before they launched at different times

in terms of like BTC launching when the market was extremely hot eth launching when the market was extremely cold the E ATF launching when the market was extremely cold so let's give it some more time let's see what this looks like in a couple of years from today I did say that I would do like a year recap Once um the ETFs uh once the E ATF had had had gone live so I'm actually going to do one in January we'll do a year recap of the betc atfs and then July of next year we'll do a year recap of the eth atfs because I think you have to see these things through different Market Cycles you can't just look at them in a vacuum you can't just look at them in one kind of like six-month period you have to look at them over the long term

here you have to look at them through different Market cycles and you also have to contextualize this too the um uh trafi investors are still getting used to BTC they like they haven't really thought about eth yet and they will eventually but it's going to take a while I was actually talking to one of the um I think I tweeted about this talking to one of the people who work within this in this industry with in the tradire ecosystem and they say whenever they talk to people about Bitcoin the vast majority if not all of the people they talk to about Bitcoin have already heard of Bitcoin before but when they talk about ethereum most people haven't even heard of ethereum let alone know what ethereum is now you may see that as bearish you be like wow okay ethereum is so big but people haven't even heard of

it yet how is that possible but I see that as extremely bullish that means that these people haven't even been exposed to ethereum before which means they haven't even thought about buying eth yet and they are potential buyers in the future so I think that that alone is extremely bullish for E extremely bullish for ethereum generally but as I said it's going to take a while for all this to play out because the the ETF issuers are still educating these clients about Bitcoin why they should buy it why they should allocate to it and they're also doing eth I'm sure you saw the black rock slide recently that was shared I shared it on Twitter essentially black rock is show showcasing both BTC and eth but they're doing it in different ways uh they they're showcasing BTC as an alternative story value as a digital gold and

they're showcasing eth as a technology platform you know the platform to build decentralized applications on they're not talking about eth as a store of value yet but I do believe that eventually they will it's just right now they don't want to confuse investors they don't want to cannibalize their products they want to just basically make a clear delineation between BTC and eth so that they can sell these products to clients and at the end of the day if if essentially someone says okay well I can't pick between beta C and eth I'm just going to allocate 50% to either of to each of these things that is a win even if eth isn't being sold as a sory of value if eth and BTC still get equal representation within a portfolio then that's a huge win and if even if it's market cap weighted like 7030 that's

still a big win then slowly over time we can keep educating why we believe e is a good story value why you believe ether is a potential potentially better story value than BTC that's going to take a while it's going to take years guys it's not going to happen overnight so hopefully that clears some things up about the ETFs generally and my thinking around them there now uh guess springboarding off of that into I guess like eth being a money or being a story of value here that's another thing that's been discussed over the last few months especially where people are debating it's like okay well if each free revenue is going to remain low for the foreseeable future as ethereum continues to scale up via l2s then why is eth worth what it's worth like if we

do like a na naive PE kind of ratio analysis on eth as an asset eth is stupidly overvalued at 300 ion it should be worth maybe a few billion dollars if that and I would agree with you if you're just valuing eth based on its fear Revenue then eth should not be worth $300 billion but this is why I keep saying that eth isn't valued like that eth is valued first and foremost on its status as a store value as a money its Fair revenue is a bonus in that context and I do believe that if we want eth to be worth trillions of dollars or any if you want any crypto asset to be worth trillions of dollars it has to be a money it has to be a story of value it has to acre monetary premium we have complete and uh undeniable evidence of

that with BTC Bitcoin here revenue is pathetic compared to its market cap it doesn't even do more fear Revenue than ethereum it doesn't even do more fear Revenue than ethereum uh it doesn't even get close to ethereum if you average it out like some days obviously have been bigger days than ethereum but if you average it out it doesn't even get close there and yet BTC is worth $1.2 trillion that's because it is viewed as a store of value it has a monetary premium and I strongly believe that the only way for any other crypto asset to ACR a market cap in the trillions of dollars sustainably and even the hundreds of billions dollars sustainably is to acre a monetary premium is to be a store of value that's why I am such a big proponent of eth being that and I believe when it comes to something being

a store of value or uring a monetary premium the number one thing you have to do is get that asset into as many people's hands as possible it doesn't matter if they buy $100 of the asset or a million dollar of the asset what matters is that they have the asset that's what that that that's all that matters I think in in in in my mind now how do we do that for eth well eth can come at this from two different uh directions and it can come with it from a direction that that BTC can't come from so if we look at BTC how does it do it well it basically tells the story right it tells the story of BTC being an upgrade to Gold being a digital gold uh because of such and such reasons it's it's more portable it's it's secure

because of of math it has a 20 million $21 million app so on and so forth we all know the Bitcoin story right and the more people that buy into that story story the more people buy BTC and then it just becomes this self-reinforcing thing and that's why BTC is worth as much as it's worth and why now it's considered a story value and a digital gold so eth has that as well like you can say the same story for E you can say okay well e monetary policy is this this is it it can become deflationary if the Fe revenue is high enough but even if it's not deflationary it has such a low inflation yes it doesn't have a hard cap but that's because uh of the fact that we want eth to be sustainable into the future we want to be able to pay

validators to secure the network you know so on and so forth there so you can come at it from the same angle you can tell the same or similar story as BTC as to why e is a story of value why it's a money so on and so forth but then you can come at it from another angle where people use eth right people use eth onchain they use it in the onchain ethereum economy people don't really use BTC that much like yes they have wrapped versions of BTC with some small percentage of BTC is used within uh you know within ethereum defi on other chains whatever that's not real BTC it's it's rft BTC it's I but it's still being used there but the vast majority of btc's value doesn't come from that it comes from the fact that it has that story it's a belief system right eth has

that too a vast majority of eth value comes from that belief system but it also has the fact that it's used on chain and that's why I've been a very big proponent of the fact that by scaling ethereum we scale eth and what I mean by this is that by scaling ethereum up via l2s or otherwise we get eth into the hands of more people because now more people can access ethereum more people can afford ethereum because fees are cheap now more people want to use ethereum because of the fact that transactions are fast there's more things to do on here there's more apps because we lowered the fees we made uh we we basically have other environments other than the EVN that new developers can come build on and build novel applications on and so on and so forth so by expanding and scaling ethereum we

scale scale up eth that's something that Bitcoin doesn't have maybe it'll have that in the future I doubt it because it basically defeats a lot of the purpose of its its story of being immutable of being unchanging of being reliable whereas eth has that story of being reliable and secure it changes yes but I think that's a feature not a bug but then you on top of that as I said you've got the entire onchain economy that is powered by eth eth is at the heart of the entire uh you know ethereum economy it is ethereum L1 it is at ethereum l2s it is on other l1s as well it's used there too that those those things on other l1s are I uh the only uh chain that eth is actually uh truly decentralized on is ethereum L1 and

potentially a stage two decentralized rollup which none really exists today so you got to look at it like that as well from a Nuance point of view but that's my general view on like each valuable cruel properties it's use as a money store value and then obviously it's used within the economy whether that be staking the asset whether that be using it as collateral whether that be reaking it whether that be using it as money to purchase things like nfts whether that be using it as gas all of those things contribute to E's value that's why eth wor is worth what it's worth but I do believe that over indexing on E's fee revenue is the wrong way to think about e value it's going to lead people to the wrong conclusions I think that people need to just accept the fact that for E

to be valuable for a to be worth trillions of dollars it needs to be a money it needs to be a store of value and there's no negatives here guys eth AC crewing value is there's no negatives to it it just means that the ethereum ecosystem gets to grow even more like I don't understand people who are like well eth shouldn't be worth you know trillions of dollars eth can work ethereum the network can work just fine even if eth is worth nothing okay like maybe that's technically correct even though there is so much Nuance that falls off of that such as the fact that if eth is worth very little then the ethereum network is very insecure because the ethereum network is secured by eth but outside of that like I don't understand that line of think because the thing is is that the less eth is

worth the less defi can grow on ethereum the less people are interested in ethereum because eth is not um growing as a as a an asset there's Le less wealth effect there less things get funded within the ethereum ecosystem and it's just like a negative spiral so wouldn't you want the positive spiral to be the thing that we optimize for wouldn't you want e to just go up as much as possible so that the ethereum ecosystem can grow at least that's my logic when it comes to these sorts of things and that's what I've been that's the message I've been trying to push uh for so so long now here but yeah that's my general view on ether's money there is a lot of more I guess like stories to be told there there's a lot more finessing to be done around each value prop as money as as a store of value

it's going to be done at both like the tradire layer and within the Crypton native economy layer but at at the end of the day we all know that the best marketing for an asset is for it to go up we can't force eth to go up but we can keep telling the story we can keep improving ethereum we can keep scaling ethereum so we can scale e as well so yeah anyway moving on to the next topic here all right so a related topic to what I was just talking about has got to do with ethereum's fee Revenue now obviously this has been a big topic of discussion for a little while now probably since March when blobs were delivered about how ethereum's Fe Fe Revenue has gone down a lot since then uh and that's bearish for eth or something like that now I do want to

point out a few different things here obviously as I said in March blobs went live uh for the network which took a load off the network I think about 20% load off the network that l2s were using um on normal L1 they were using cold data now they're using blobs so that took a bunch of demand off there and blobs have since been freed pretty much the whole time because of the fact that blobs aren't in price Discovery here but as with everything there's a lot of nuance to this now what else happened in March of this year besides blobs going Live Well the whole Market topped right like BTC topped eth topped everything topped and everything just like crashed from there and has been basically sideways boring for the better part of the you know of all the months that have

followed since March then now of course we know that most of the I guess activity that happens on chain is has got to do with financial activity with defi activity and that is extremely sensitive to price movements if the price is doing nothing just going sideways then gas fees are going to be lower because there's just less movement on chain if the price is being very volatile in either direction whether it's up or down gas fees are going to go up now it's not just like the price of eth it's not just the price of BTC it's just the market in general like if mem coins are going nuts on ethereum then obviously gas pH are going to go up eth could be going sideways the meme coins could be going nuts price is going to go up so when I talk about like Market

activity it's it's everything it's not just eth and BTC here so if we contextualize that and say okay well blobs were delivered reduced fees and then the market topped and the Market's been going sideways that's why fear Revenue has come down for the most part because if you actually see over the last few weeks the Market's been hitting up again and of course L1 Fe Revenue has gone up you can see here in the chart if you actually look at the the green bits of this chart on my screen here you can see that uh since what is it September 16th so about a month now uh fee Revenue has been its high the highest it has been on a on a kind of daily basis since basically what is this June yeah basically June of this year um and I

think June of this year um obviously the market was still a little bit active then um but then you know it's been kind of down only since then but then it started picking back up because the market got active again now if you zoom out a bit to the last 365 days of of fear Revenue you can see here in March of of this year fear revenue on a daily basis was obviously a lot higher but you can see that actually on my screen now you can't see it too well because of the fact that my camera is covering it if I zoom out to I have to sign in to zoom out more than this but um I'm I'm trying to make it so that you guys can see this on my screen here maybe I'll try and move my camera here yeah I can move my

camera up here so you can see here on the left hand side that during the period of October 2023 to like March the you know I mean I guess like to like December when the market was going nuts the fees were going up the whole time fees were trending up but then of course fees went down again because the market cooled off a little bit after the BTC ETF went live but then from basically like February to mid-march the six weeks there the market went nuts again and that's why Fair venue went nuts again and then since then obviously things have have come down um we had a little bit of a spike in June but things have generally been down here but now the Market's hitting up again so fees have gone up again on L1 as you can see on the right hand side of the of the chart

here now of course my prediction is if the market keeps hitting up and we go into another bull market or another bull cycle of part of this Market again then fee revenue is just going to keep trending up again on the L1 and this is because that yes people have moved to the l2s people are using the l2s l2s have onboarded a lot of new users and L1 ethereum probably hasn't onboarded that many new users because it is still expensive to use even at one gay gas prices it's still expensive to use compared to the l2s but that doesn't mean that L1 isn't going to be used it doesn't mean that uh um L1 is just going to be dead forever no not at all L1 is used by various different uh I guess like entities within the ecosystem and there are plenty of people and plenty of

companies and ENT Rises and entities that don't care about gas fees guys they will happily pay $100 of gas fees they don't care not to mention all of the me stuff that's happening as well all of the time on L1 here now um that's just the first part I want to talk what I want to talk about when it comes uh to fee Revenue here the second part which is of course got to do with blobs so this is uh the blobs dashboard from Hill dubby on dun analytics here and you can see as I said blobs if they're above the green line that means that they're in price Discovery they haven't been in price Discovery since they went live basically and you can see here what this looks like but they have been pretty high up and basically stayed pretty high up like uh to towards this green line

here for quite a while now basically and that's because the l2s keep getting more usage the l2s keep scaling up they using more more blobs more l2s are coming online and eventually this is going to saturate here now of course people want to um increase the number of blobs on the network and they want to keep scaling up blobs and that's what we should be doing because when blobs go into price Discovery it it represents the same issue as L1 normal L1 fees going into price Discovery essentially what that means is that L2 fees are going to start going up once blob saturate because the l2s have to pay more for data because the blob fee Market kicks in and then of course the uh fees will be passed on to the users at the l2s and the users will have a worse experience here so we should not

be optimizing for that at all what we should be optimizing for is increasing uh The Blob scalability as much as possible while preserving the I guess like um properties that make ethereum great now there was a proposal put forward by vitalic to increase the max blobs to uh to eight and the target blob rate to four so adding an additional 20% capacity here something like that to the network or to blobs in order to Future proof blobs in Petra so because we're not going to get pias until the end of next year now a lot of concerns were brought up about this with regards to bandwidth requirements especially for home stakers where essentially blobs are quite bandwidth heavy right now but but um those concerns in my mind are not really concerns because there are

multiple ways to I guess fix that there are many different things that are being done at the client level right now and there are other things that can be done within the protocol level to essentially uh make it so that bandwidth requirements um as they exist today will be a lot lower even with uh a higher blob count so if that is really the only concern that we have with increasing the blobs on the network then I think that uh that concern is not a big one because we have ways to rectify that we have ways to work around that and in my opinion we should definitely increase blobs to to four increase the target of blobs to four and the max to eight in Petra because if we don't do that we'll be stuck with three as the Target and six as the max until the next hard Fork

which is going to be happening hopefully the end of next year which will introduce pias which is a huge scalability upgrade it's not just like a little bump like what we're doing here it is a massive upgrade to blobs but as I said that's not being delivered in Petra now it is being pushed out to the next fork and I should mention I don't think I've covered this on the re field before because it happened while I was away pectra ended up being split into two forks so a bunch of ips got moved off of Petra into the fork following Petra because Petra was just getting too big So within Petra we're still going to have things like Max EB but in the fork following Petra things like pias and eof got moved into uh because they just weren't ready in time essentially and I

I still think Petra is going to be delivered early next year q1 of next year maybe late q1 of next year something like March probably makes the most sense here um but and we'll have to see when pias gets delivered after that when the the upgrade um after Petr goes live there but I am strongly in favor of a blob count increase uh for pectra if if and I mean it's not really an if because I think I think it's going to happen but like the prerequisite to that is that the improvements to the clients are in and the other fixes that the core devs are working on also go in as part of Petra in order to make sure that the band rth requirements are are lowered across the board so that we don't lose solo stakers we don't lose home stakers we don't lose the um you know we don't

make it harder to verify the chain and when it comes to bandwidth there's also Max EB now Max EB isn't a upgrade that will directly Target bandwidth requirements uh just a refresher for those of you who may have forgotten Max EB is essentially um making it so that you can stake 248 eth per validator instead of 32 e that may have been changed to 1024 e per validator um instead of a Max of 32 e but but I haven't kept up to date with that because I've been away uh but regardless that is a huge increase in the Mac so instead of people having to run 10 validators on uh 10 separate validator instances or sorry 10 separate validators on on the machine as a solo ster if they've got 320 eth they can just put all of that eth on one

validator and that will in decrease bandwidth usage on their home network here or whatever Network that they're using and then once it's done Network wide uh that will reduce bandwidth across the network too so there are various different things going uh going into the network in order to reduce bandwidth so essentially a blob increase shouldn't negatively impact anything within uh that kind of Realm it shouldn't negatively impact Solo stakers or home stakers even if it's done within Petra now this is a nice segue into a relat topic that I wanted to talk about which is all about solo stakers generally now I think that the one thing for me within ethereum is that solo stakers should be preserved at all costs the ability for the average person to run a full node on consumer Hardware

should be preserved at all costs we shouldn't make that harder to do but the issue is is that we don't really have a you know strictly defined minimum Hardware requirement SL bandwidth requirement for I guess like full nodes and for home stakers because we say consumer hardware and that generally means things like a laptop or a knck or even something like a Raspberry Pi but we haven't really defined bandwidth requirements because band so Hardware is something that you know most people in the world like in First World countries uh especially they have easy access to all types of Hardware it's not like you need to go somewhere else to buy a specific piece of Hardware you can

basically buy an S like a good SSD anywhere anywhere you live in a first world country even in even in outside of first world count you can buy a good SSD you can buy a good computer you can buy a knock someone and so forth but then when it comes to bandwidth it's a completely different discussion because even if you've got all the money in the world if you're in a location where you can't get fiber internet for example Fiber Optic internet you're not getting it right you have to move essentially and obviously that is not something that we can ask of our home stakers and of our solar stakers just move to get better internet no we can't do that so we need to Define what is the minimum bandwidth requirements on the network and basically use that as a Target right now there is no target really it is

basically a Loosely defined thing of well we have these solo stakers who may have really shitty bandwidth so we should do our best to make make sure that they aren't kicked off the network which I totally agree with by the way but there's a limit to that the limit in is the fact that we need to make it we need to have a definition yet we can't just use that Loosely defined thing as a guiding principle so what is that definition well there's been a bunch of discussion so what is that you know what what is what are we targeting here well there's been a bunch of discussions in the community around this in terms of like Hardware we're happy with you know defining it as kind of consumer Hardware AKA a laptop a knck that's fine we're not worried about that but when it comes

to bandwidth I don't think there's been an answer yet but I think that in this day and age like in 2024 there has to be an expectation that you have to have enough I guess like upload speed to be able to run a full Noe and run a solo Staker on your network because most of it is upload bandwidth um on your home network while other other people are on that Network as well and be able to participate in in ethereum now that exact number I've got no idea what that is I think today if you were to Define it based on the people with the uh I guess like um on the low end it's maybe like 10 or 15 megabits per second upload bandwidth but in in my opinion it kind of needs to be higher than that especially as we keep adding more stuff

to the network maybe 20 or 25 and the thing is is that I understand that not everyone has access to that and as I said like you can't just have you can't just get access to that even if you've got the money uh to pay for it you have to basically wait until the infrastructure is rolled out there if it ever comes and then there are other aspects to it as well there's not just the fact that you can get better um even if you can get better uh bandwidth there are certain isps around the world that will block certain connections and you can't get around that they'll get do weird weird things like require you to use their modem or use their router or they won't let you connect so on and so forth right so there's a lot of considerations when it comes uh to that

there and then some people suggested um starlink as an alternative for these people unfortunately it doesn't work there's there's too much um it's too much latency between the connection and uh sorry between the the node and the connection there I believe that the latency is is quite quite a long time and it can be longer depending on where the satellite is positioned overhead uh and a bunch of different factors there so unfortunately starlink is not the answer for being a Staker it it is it is it works for full noes I believe but it is not very reliable for being a Staker it can still work but going forward as we're adding more things to the network it may not end up working very well there so we shouldn't be relying on that either so the conversations will continue within the e system but that's

just something that I figured it was worth putting on your radar that those discussions are happening people are optimizing for that they're trying to find a nice uh I guess like middle ground for everyone to agree on here but it's definitely a conversation that's going to take a little uh while to play out there um but yeah and and as I mentioned before when talking about blobs there are very very many fixes going in to make sure that we can reduce the bandwidth requirements overall of the ethereum network because right now a lot of it is not needed it's a lot of like Tech debt I guess you could say and there's a lot of optimizations to be had and a lot of very smart people are working on that but we also need to define a minimum bandwidth requirement for solo stakers and home stakers

because if we don't do that we'll just keep going in circles here so that's it on that topic next topic is um something related to I guess layer twos and as I said guys like I didn't really have an order to what I wanted to talk about today but this is something I'll let it to layer 2os and this has got to do with with app chains so the concept of an app chain has existed for a long time now uh it's basically this concept of a chain that does one thing you know it's one app that does one thing and does it well and optimizes around that and we've had various different examples of this over the years all the way back to things like peercoin and namecoin so namecoin was an app chain layer one proof of work for um for domain names for I guess like

I guess you could call like an early version of ens um and then there was pcoin which which was the first pro of stake Network it wasn't really an app chain but like it was trying to do one thing and do it well um and then Cosmos the cosmos ecosystem uh basically tried to do app chains as well where essentially there was like a cosmos Hub and then you could have app chains that exist around it and they would have their and they would do their own thing with their own apps and then they would interoperate with the cosmos Hub Cosmos is still around they're still doing things it didn't really go anywhere so there's always been this kind of push and pull case here of like are app chains bearish are app chains bullish what you know are app chains built as rollups going to be different to app

chains as cosmos chains so on and so forth my view on this is that like I don't know really I feel like app chains make sense in the context of people building apps want to have more control over their app they want to have uh more control over the value generated by their app such as the meev value generated they want to be able to upgrade their apps without having to rely on the underlying base layout to upgrade to support that so for example right now now unisoft V4 can't launch on ethereum L1 until a specific EIP is introduced which I believe is going in sorry it actually went in as part of um as part of uh denune so until that went in uh unisoft V4 couldn't launch here so when you look at it from from that

perspective there is a lot of different reasons as to why people want to build app chains and the and and and the reason why this is uh kind of become a discussion over the last week or so recently it was because um Unis swap announced uni chain which isn't an app chain people got confused here uni chain is not an app chain it is actually a general purpose rollup it is not an app rollup uh it's not just unisoft on there they're basically it's called uni chain but you can deploy whatever apps you want on there and it's going to be like a essentially what they're trying to make it be is essentially a D5 playground right but it is a general purpose chain but because people got confused everyone started talking about app chains again so as I said there are a lot of different reasons why app

chains can make sense but like it it's also the question of can they overcome the network effect of a generalized chain so for example let's say as I said uni chain is a generalized chain and let's say there is an app chain for another amm let's say it's Aerodrome or something like that or another another Dex and let's say they have their own separate app chain here but then there's uni chain that is a generalized chain the app chain could be successful but there's it seems like there'd be a limit to how successful it could be because there's liquidity going there for that specific app and maybe it can interoperate with other app chains and it becomes seamless in the end but then when you have this like generalized

chain there are like 10 different apps on there and those 10 different apps are bringing all different types of liquidity there all different types of users so it's this thing of like one you know total adjustable Market versus 10 total adjustable markets but then the line blows even further because what if everything is just inter interoperable what if the app chain and the generalized chain can talk to each other seamlessly that the end user doesn't actually feel that they're on an app chain or a generalized chain it all just feels the same to them this is actually the um one of the things behind what infinex is building essentially they're not building a chain but they're building an interface that sits on top of all these chains where essentially you feel like you're interacting with just one chain and you're not you're interacting with many different chains

whether they be l2s or l1s but they put an interface on top that makes it feel like you're interacting with just one chain or just one kind of Hub here so that that the line gets just very very lry there so the open question Becomes of okay well if that's the case if everything can interoperate with each other then isn't that more bearish for the generalized chain and the app chain because if everything can interoperate with each other then the generalized chains are the ones that are actually going to be consumed by the app chains because the app chains can as I said have that control over their value capture have that control over meev move faster be able to uh tailor their environment but also get the benefit of sharing liquidity of sharing users of being seamless with every other app

chain out there so it's an open question still but if you follow the incentives it seems like app chains could be the thing that or in the in over the next few years could be that thing that actually takes off finally after so many attempts over the years if as long as we have like a seamless user experience I don't think people are going to um uh complain about using them like if it's if it's so seamless that you don't don't have to change change the chain uh in your um wallet that you can just sit there with an interface that sits on top and you interact with all of it and it feels just extremely um simple to use and it's great user experience then I think that people building apps are going to opt to build app chains instead of just deploying their app to a

generalized chain now of course generalized chains are still going to exist you could do both you could that's what I mean that's not what unisoft is doing but that is what unisoft could have done where they could have made uni chain be an app chain and then still had unisoft exist on L1 and the various different l2s and this is funny cuz this is actually a fud Vector that was born out of this where people said well if unisoft is making their own chain now aren't they just going to focus on that and move all of their um liquidity from L1 ethereum to their own L2 well I mean they could do that if they wanted to but it doesn't really seem like it serves a purpose because why not just grow the pie bigger like why not have both and that's what they're going to do because

if you actually look at their strategy so far unop on l2s has continued to grow for years while unisoft and L1 is still the top gas guzzler it's still being used unisoft V2 2 which is really old now is still used by so many people because it's just there's liquidity there there's users there people like using it various different reasons why it's still used of course but it is so there's no fud here to there's I mean there is fud but like the F doesn't make any sense when it comes to these sorts of stuff but as I said lots of open questions around app chains how they're going to work but I do think that if we can have a seamless experience between the app chains they can interoperate they can talk to each other they um people can just use them without having

to worry about changing changing chains worrying about bridging assets across different chains I do think that the app chain um I guess the construction is very appealing to apps that want to internalize all of the value acral that their app has instead of paying it out to me Bots and meev searches instead of paying it out in in gas fees and things like that but again a lot of open questions around uh that there so that's on on app chains now I had another thing here with regards to eth being money where I basically wrote down that I believe the only defensible Mo within crypto is moneyness and being a story of value I I I think that maybe the defensible word is wrong I don't think it's defensible in that I mean it's

defensible but it's like it's not like impenetrable it's like okay well BTC today is worth $1.2 trillion it is obviously the premier store of value within crypto and it's obviously the only one that the majority of people within crypto believe is a store of value a lot of people believe in eth being a store of value but the bitcoiners don't right um the ult L1 people don't like really the people who believe that ether's a story of value are the ones that are in ethereum so in that sense the BTC is is today as it exists today is accepted as that but in the future that can change in the future people can say well I mean BTC isn't a story value anymore like I don't think that BTC is a digital gold I would

rather go buy this other asset as my store of value and then slowly over time the value of BTC gets chipped away because of that and that moat wasn't really def it was defensible for a while but it wasn't impenetrable some other asset comes along and dethrones BTC just like if BTC is to flip gold one day in Market cup you could say that well gold had a defensible um store of value moat for a very long time but it wasn't unbeatable it wasn't impenetrable and eventually BTC overtook it so I guess the main point here is that it is a defensible mode it can be a long-term defensible mode but it is not one that can't be broken whereas things like I guess like scaling and data availability and more the tech side of things that's

not as much of a moe as people think it is maybe things like developer platforms like for example the evm is a pretty big moat for ethereum um developers uh you know the the network effect of the evm the network effect of solidity is a pretty big Moe but it is not that defensible because you can abstract these things away as well like there are various projects working on being able to essentially code in whatever language you want and compile down to the evm or compil down to other um other virtual machines out there so it's not something that you can be like well I we we're the only ones who have this like for example ethereum can't be like well we're the only ones who have the evm it's like well no Tron has the evm binance smart chain has it Phantom had it Avalanche C

chain has it one of the C chains have it or this C chain I should say has it and the same goes for salana like the svm the eclipse is coming to ethereum as an L2 and he's using the svm so that stuff is not something that is defensible it's not like a lockin it's not like really a moat for any particular ecosystem but the money the story of value property of the asset is because it's very very hard to pick that up you can't be like okay well I'm going to take e store value in monetary property properties and the value that it gets from that and just take it from eth and put it on some other asset that's not how it works it takes a long time to do that um and it is something that requires an substantial amount of work for it to

happen and it requires a lot of things to go right it requires a lot of luck it's a lot less objectively defined it's very much subjectively defined so that's the way I think about defensibility in crypto so I think that as I said before there's only positives when it comes to making sure that eth can keep going up in value not just because if you hold eth you make more money but because it is better for ethereum overall Ro if eth is worth more and that is one of the strongest hell beliefs that I have within the ecosystem um almost as strong as my belief that if something isn't decentralized it doesn't deserve to exist over the longer term but that's a story for another uh another day there CU I've repeated myself many times about that uh so yeah I'm just going through my notes Here I think there was

basically yeah one last thing I wanted to talk about here which was AI agents so I put a couple of tweets out about this and it's a little bit controversial where people were like well I'm AI agents just Bots and shouldn't we be like weary of bots using things on chain and shouldn't we not count them as real users and so on and so forth and I'm like look I'm partial to those arguments I do think that Bots result in a lot of spam on chain they're not exactly real you know I guess like defined as real users as we Define today because we Define real users as humans but if you actually look at where most of the activity across all chains comes from it's already Bots like no one's sitting there every day doing hundred of transactions a day or maybe some people

are I should say sorry not no one but like the average person is not going to be sitting there every day doing hundreds thousands of transactions um a day on on these networks they might do a few here and there maybe you do a swap one day that's one transaction maybe you put some money into AR or maybe you go provide liquidity on unisoft or whatever it is that's a couple transactions there maybe you do some payments on chain during the day few more transactions so maybe you do like 20 transactions on a on a good day maybe on a normal day you do like five if that that that's nothing right like if we're talking about scaling this up to like hundreds of thousands and millions of transactions per second doing 20 transactions per day as a human doesn't even put a dent in

that so where do you think all that other transactional activity is coming from well it's already coming from Bots it's coming from Bots doing various different things a lot of it is me Bots um and so it's not a leap to say that AI agents and evolution of the dumb Bots that we have today are going to be the ones that are the main users of the onchain economy because I believe that a true AI agent if their task and their objective task is to make as much money as possible the only way for them to do that in the world today without being stopped is by using decentralized Technologies is by using decentralized money and I think that they're going to prefer the ethereum ecosystem and eth is an asset to do that because eth is the

best onchain money as it exists today ethereum is the most decentralized blockchain as it exists today and if their goal is to make as much money as possible then they're not going to care about the fees so they're going to be like the main users of L1 ethereum and maybe they go and use other chains and go pillage the other lands um of of you know of money on the other other chains there but in terms of like a home base why would they risk having their money anywhere else that you got to remember here these these ai ai agents are not subjective their objective they're not going to be like well I want to keep my money on this chain because like I'm really tribal about this chain like I love this chain no they're going to keep their money where it's Mo where it makes

the most sense to keep it on the most decentralized chain where they can actually still do stuff with it people I guess replied to my tweets with some comments saying well BTC is the most decentralized asset Bitcoin is the Bitcoin is the most decentralized chain they'll just keep their money there it's like okay but like why would they do that when they can't do anything on chain with that money and also to get back to bitcoin from other chains um even ethereum they have to go through like a trusted Bridge so I feel like if they're going to be doing that they'd rather just stay and keep their money on ethereum where they can do stuff with it without having to bridge like they could actually just live on ethereum L1 they don't have to bridge anywhere right but then if there's stage two um

decentralization layer twos and Roll-Ups that they can use they'd rather use those than these other chains out there so I'm trying to think about it like a machine would think about it like an OB an objective way not in a subjective way where people say I'm not going to use that chain because it's uh it's you know it's it belongs to that tribe like no AI agents don't think about that even if they're programmed to think like that they probably program that out of them because thinking like that is is not conductive to profit maximalism right like if you're a profit Maxi whether you're a human or or a robot being a profit Maxi means not being tribal about things not being emotional about things using whatever you need to and doing whatever you need to to stack the most amount of money possible at least that's

the way I think about it there but outside of the money thing as well I just think that machines generally are going to continue to be the the main users of everything on chain humans will be the minority and that's fine that's how it already Works within the tradire ecosystem like most of the trading that happens on the stock market is done by Bots right it's not human sitting there everyday trading high frequency trading is not humans we can't even think at that level we can't think at like the millisecond uh uh you know the 100 millisecond or less level or even less than that high frequency trading is like a few milliseconds so we can't think at that level whereas um these machines can and they do and that's why they dominate in that area uh there but yeah I think that was the last topic I had on my list

to talk about there were some other topics if I bring it up on uh my phone here that some people in the Discord wanted me to talk about if I can quickly bring it up and maybe talk about these ones um yeah there was lucid eyes who asked Lucid eyes I should say who asked um about the recent airdrop meta protocols launching uh tokens paying 5% to binance just to get listed you know bad token across the board Etc and so on and so forth I guess my my general comment on this is that I don't know if it's just got to do with air drops it more so got to do with the fact that the way tokens are launched today is really [ __ ] um and that's to do mostly with regulations you can't do icos legally you can't distribute most of the tokens

to people legally because even aird drops are considered illegal in the US um you can't uh uh basically um sell tokens to anyone but accredited investors which basically means that you're selling to VCS and selling to already rich people so the whole yeah I guess like uh thing of issuing a token is just a complete and total mess today there are some projects trying to fix this I know that Eko which is Kobe's project is trying to do fundraising um as part of like groups and and basically trying to make it so that these groups get the deal flow I don't think that really fixes the tokens as much as it fixes the fundraising side of things when it comes to actually fixing the tokens themselves it's a much bigger thing and I think that as long as the market keeps rewarding these projects

for having like low floats and um tokens that are locked for years then people are going to keep doing it I mean you just need to go look at coin Gecko and look at some of these tokens they have like 5 10% circulating and yet their fully diluted valuation is in the billions so the market is rewarding that the and and the market Cap's like tiny compared to it but the VCS don't care they're up so much on their Investments so they're going to keep investing these things and then the project having a high valuation is good for the project so they're going to keep doing this so yeah tokens are just broken altogether air drop or not it's just broken I don't know what the fix is here guys maybe the market needs to stop rewarding this stuff I know that the market has trying

kind of um tried to I guess offset this with things like mem coins but mem coins are just as bad if people actually are naive enough to think that memecoins aren't infested with insiders then uh like honestly they deserve to lose their money like in what world uh insid is not taking advantage of the mcoin Mania like like the the the you can actually see this playing out just on Twitter the meme coins that do the best or do are the ones that get the most attention and how do you think they get attention well it's the big accounts on Twitter Shilling them and why do you think these big accounts are doing this it's because they're working within their group their friendship groups to set these narratives to set these this stuff up to Shield this stuff Al together so that they funnel people into these things and

then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of oh look this guy called this meme coin it's like no he didn't he just tweeted about it when it was worth basically nothing and if you do that enough times and you've got big enough following then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of because this person tweeted about this coin it went up and then people accredit that person with make um with with getting a good call but the thing is is that their call wasn't good it was just them making the thing pump and that's just the transparent ones there are so many things happening in the background guys there are so many groups involved with this sorts of stuff and they're using every trick in the book to make sure that you are the exit liquidity for them and they can make as much money as possible and it's not just on chain it's

also on Twitter there are so many Bots like I you can't be silly enough to go on Twitter look at the Shilling of these meme coins go through the list of people that have well you used to be able to do this not now of of accounts that have liked the tweets and think that that's organic engagement no there's obviously a group of organic engagement from real people there a bunch of that on um around meme coins but most of it is very boded most of it is very Insider and the cabal me that's not a meme guys it's true there are literally cabs of people making these things go up there's very low liquidity getting suckers in and just taking their money so no I don't believe mcoins are an answer to this at all and also mcoins aren't tied to

anything they're literally just like gambling play things they're not tied to any specific project we've done away with that now they used to try to be but now the Market's like well these things are just like whatever like there's a picture of a dog on it there's a picture of a frog on it there's there's one that's making a parody of like the um S&P 500 called SPX that went up a lot recently like the market is rewarding that now the market loves to reward the stupidest things and the market is the market it can do whatever it wants but that's my general view on on tokens I think is that like nothing's going to change if the market keeps rewarding it like there's no incentive for it to change in that world because even if you're if you even if you think it sucks

which I do it doesn't matter because the people who that who who are getting the benefit from it are being rewarded by the market for it so they're not going to change their ways and the projects aren't going to change their ways either um because then the VCS won't give them money and they won't be able to find their project cuz they can't do an Ico it's a mess it's a complete mess here um so that was from Lucid eyes there there was something from Ben uh Ben Adams who's a who's from the Discord Channel as well who wanted me to go bigger bigger picture on why we are here within the ethereum ecosystem and what we are trying to achieve and why and what the kind of Guiding Light here is I mean I think I've done this a lot lot of times on the refu before so maybe it's not

worth me repeating it here but the trdr is that we're just trying to build a better system for the world and not just a financial system we're trying to build a better coordination system for the world we're trying to upgrade the existing system not necessarily replace it but upgrade it with better mechanisms make it fairer make it more transparent make it more open um and I think that is really the summary of what ethereum is trying to be and obviously being decentralized falls into that but yeah as I've said I've talked about this a lot on the refu before so I don't want to repeat my myself here but still something to think about and I'll probably talk about it in the future anyway because it's something that I obviously care deeply uh about there and there was one final one from yabish I can't believe I said that on the on the

riew that's that's just their name on Discord asking about my uh 2025 predictions and expectations around uh probably I guess like the market generally and what the election means for and politics and stuff like that well I I give I don't know if I give predictions here more so like thoughts what can happen the number one thing that I think is that the election doesn't mean anything I don't think Harris or Trump winning it doesn't matter I honestly don't think it matters for crypto I think what matters for for crypto more than anything is just getting new money in and that can come from various different places I don't think that more new money is going to come in if you know Harris wins over Trump or Trump wins over Harris I honestly don't think that it's going to make a material difference there I do

think that generally um big things like us elections are a overhang on the market markets where the market doesn't like uncertainty so it basically just sits in a holding pattern until that uncertainty passes and then once there is certainty as in who won the election then the market moves on from that and and that's fine as I said it doesn't matter who won it's more about like the uncertainty around who is going to win in terms of like who would be better for crypto guys I've given my opinion on this before and I don't want to delve too too far into the politics here but I I think a good way to think about this is that if you think if you if you believe everything that Trump has said about what he's going to do if he wins for crypto if you believe that he's

actually going to do what he said he's going to do then he would be better than Harris for crypto objectively speaking but the thing is that you have to take him on his word you have to take a politician on their word and when you take a politician on their word you're usually let down it doesn't matter what side of the aisle that politician is on they all lie a lot of the time right so then you can look at I guess like Harris and be like okay well Harris has barely really mentioned crypto she's been part of the administration that's been really hostile to towards crypto so we aren't just looking at what she says or doesn't say we're looking at what she's done and hasn't done but then there's a debate about how much power the vice president actually has a lot of people believe

that the vice president is really just an insurance policy for the president it's like a figurehead essentially it's not someone that has any real material impact on what the administration does so if you buy into that angle then you could make the positive argument that well Harris hasn't been able to do anything because she's got no power which I think is a little bit of cope to be honest um but then then if you take the other angle where you say well no that's [ __ ] like Harris is Vice President she should be able to get into Biden's year get into the ear of other Democrats and change their approach towards crypto then you can basically say well she's done [ __ ] all so she's probably going to do nothing when if she wins nothing good for crypto if she wins more than likely it's going to Contin

the the Democrats are going to continue to be hostile towards crypto so then her winning would be would be bad but again I go back to what I said whereas like on net I don't actually think it matters for the Market maybe it matters for um things within crypto like you know more companies being sued if if Harris wins by the SEC versus if Trump Wass to win so on and so forth so if you want if you think about it from that perspective and you look about it from that perspective then obviously you would think that Trump winning would be better better for crypto but like in my opinion I mean as someone who's not even in the US and isn't a US citizen can't vote in the election has no horse in this race I honestly don't think it matters like who who wins for crypto I think that the

uncertainty once it's passed is the main thing and I think that what matters more than anything is global liquidity really because liquidity is the lifeblood of markets as I've discussed before rates coming down Market gets more bullish because rates are coming down there's more liquidity in it that's what matters over anything else really and that to me is the only macro thing that matters people talk about all these other macro things and I've said before I don't think that they matter I think the only thing that matters in macro is liquidity Cycles because liquidity is the lifeblood of markets you more liquidity you have the more the markets can react to that and the better it is less liquidity you have the more I guess like bearish markets are because people are preserving Capital preserving money and they especially if rates are high they' rather go into risk-free treasuries than

than put money into into risky assets like crypto right which have not performed very well in a uh in a low right sorry in a high rate environment um other than you know small Pockets here and there so that's my general view on on the political side there but in terms of like my pred for 2025 I do think it's going to be a more bullish year generally I do think crypto is gearing up for another another kind of bullish period from here don't know what that looks like does it mean that we're going to have a true bull market where all this new money comes in and we have like a blowoff top and we go into another bare Market not this like little mini bull market we have with this little mini bare Market that we've had maybe I don't know as I've said before I

do believe that the traditional fouryear cycle is mostly broken I don't think it's going to strictly follow that anymore but we're going to have to see I don't have a crystal ball I don't know what the prices are going to be like I still think that eth can go 15K plus by the top of this cycle but that's just a prediction that I've made and I've stated before many many times that I don't think that you should take that prediction as anything other than than a prediction I don't think that you should be like oh well sasel said that E's gone to 15K I'm going to wait till 15K to sell no you have to have your own targets you have to have your own take profit plan and as I said before please take profits guys like don't just like ride the whole thing up and then write

it down again there's no worse feeling than that honestly but that yeah that's my general kind of um uh take there but I think that's going to be uh it for now I think I've gone what like an hour and 40 minutes or something like that not the 3 hours that I kind of [ __ ] posted about in Discord that I was going to do but I think uh that covers most of the stuff that people wanted me to talk about but uh as always you can just ping me on Discord or Twitter and if you want me to talk about something specifically on the refuel I will but going forward from here we're going to go back to our regularly scheduled programming of me covering the latest updates in the ethereum ecosystem and I think this week I'll do that on Thursday maybe Friday

and then next week it'll be that Monday Wednesday Friday Cadence until I go to Devcon next month and then Japan in January but I'll keep you guys up to date on that uh there but yeah I think that's it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next time thanks everyone