The Ether Machine, Blob usage going up and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #844 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Dway Refuel where we cap the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host Dan. This is the 28th of July 2025. All right everyone, let's get into it. So before we jump into the news from the last week, I think the last time I did a refill was last Monday, I just want to shout out that uh the next refill I'll I'll do uh from here will be after Ethereum's 10th birthday. So Ethereum is turning 10 on the 30th of July. So by turning 10, we mean the Ethereum network. It genesis event was July 30th, 2015. Uh what a 10 years it has been. I'm going to be celebrating the event in Sydney. So there's a ETH Sydney event that's being hosted that I'm speaking at. I think I mentioned the other week uh to celebrate the 10th

birthday, but there are events happening all over the world. And I'm sure it's all going to be over crypto Twitter uh on the day. Uh so I don't think anyone's going to uh not know what's going on that day. Uh you know, it was funny. I was talking to some friends before and I I basically said, "Wouldn't it have been nice to have like a new ETH all-time high um you know by the 30th?" Obviously, that's probably not going to happen. Like ETH would have to go to basically 5K from here, which you know, I mean, it's not impossible, right? But it's also like very unlikely, but uh ETH going to 4K is not too unlikely. I mean, it's at 3,900 at time of recording right now. So, yeah, I mean, we'll see ETH at 4K or above 4K then and then alltime high from there. But I'm going to talk

about the ETH price in a little bit and all the bullish things happening with ETH in a little bit because I've got that kind of scheduled up here. And I'm also at the end of the episode going to be giving some reflections on the uh refill, not refill, the drive-thru that I did with David Hoffman last week. I think a lot of people got a lot of value out of it. Uh which was really great. Uh had a lot of good feedback on that. But I did want to give a bit of a uh I guess my kind of digest after doing the podcast with him and kind of my thoughts on that. But that'll be at the end of today's episode. So, kicking us off today, we had some very, very big news out of Sharp Link. Now, I know that obviously Sharp Link has been uh

non-stop in the headlines over the last couple of months, especially because they've been buying a lot of ETH, and that's awesome. Like, I love that they're buying lots of ETH. Uh, and I love that they're staking it, and they're earning ETH rewards, and those rewards are getting rest. It's just great, right? They're buying up all the ETH, basically. But this news is not about them buying ETH. This is about Joseph Chalum here joining Sharlink as co-CEO which is a pretty big deal and I'll explain why. Joseph is ex Black Rockck. He spent 20 years at Black Rockck um helping to lead its digital asset strategy. Now obviously over those 20 years he wasn't leading the digital asset strategy for the entire time given that crypto is not 20 years old. Uh you know bitcoins are not you know not 20 years old yet. Uh and obviously

institutions have only really gotten involved in crypto over the last kind of few years. But Joseph has been at the heart of that uh and he's been doing that with a really great team at Black Rockck which remains there. He was um you know some people said he was the head of digital assets or digital asset strategy. He kind of was but he had other people under him who were like kind of managers and working within that area on different teams. Um but Joseph had a played a pretty big role in getting uh IBIT which is Black Rockck's um uh Bitcoin ETF launched ETH a which is their Ethereum ETF and the build uh tokenized fund here which is built on Ethereum launched as well. So he's been in the thick of it in the meat of it as the leader there. So him joining

Sharlink is a huge deal and you can see in his tweet here where he kind of tweeted out about joining Sharplink he said that uh he believes that Ethereum is becoming the foundation for global finance. So that's why he's basically joining Sharlink, stable coins, tokenized assets, AI agents and all are moving onchain and it's all happening on Ethereum. This is just a massive vote of confidence for Ethereum guys. Like you have someone who's worked in the traditional finance big kind of institutional world for a very long time now. has uh you know been fully kind of crypto peeled for for a while. I I would assume here has worked directly with uh the you know digital assets generally and with crypto generally and has now chosen to join Sharlink in order to I

guess continue I guess like sharp link strategy of buying ETH and building things on top of Ethereum because I think people think that Sharpink is only going to be buying ETH. They're going to be doing so much more than that guys. Like I know um you know this may be just speculation on my part here. Like I'm not saying I have any insider knowledge or anything like that, but like there's no way that sharpling isn't going to be doing more within Ethereum, right? Because Joseph Luben is at the helm of it, right? He he's at the helm of consensus and sharplink and consensus has a lot of Ethereum related products. You know, they have Lana, they have MetaMask have other products out there that they're going to leverage with Sharlink in order to improve the Ethereum network, right? And they're going to put their ETH to work not just

within staking within DeFi as well. So all this is happening and Joseph is going to help them do that as co-CEO here which is just yeah I mean it's just massive guys like I actually can't describe how big this is given the fact that Joseph obviously still has all his connections and his network within Black Rockck and the wider kind of trify space here and he's going to be talking to all of these people about Ethereum. He's not going to be pushing any other network. He's not going to be saying that oh everything you know can uh can win together. No, that's loser talk, right? He's not going to be doing that. He has a fidiciary duty now as coco of Sharlink to increase the value of SBET, which is the the ticker for Sharp Link's um share price or stocks uh here, stock price. Um

and you know, given that he has that duty and given that ESB is pretty much only going to go up, you know, if if ETH does well um and if the company does well with his Ethereum strategy here, then he's just going to be all in on Ethereum. So, he's going to be going to all these people and he's going to be talking about only Ethereum. He's not going to be telling them, hey, you should build on uh Ethereum, but also all these other L1s. No, he's not going to do that. He's going to say, you should build on Ethereum. You know, here's these L2s as well if you want to build or you can build your own L2 on Ethereum, get secured by Ethereum, be part of the Ethereum economy here, and Ethereum is just going to be like top of mind for for everyone. And on top of

that, he's also likely going to be talking about ETH as an asset, not just Ethereum network, and telling these other kind of people that he's talking to and these other entities that he's talking to that they should be buying ETH and that that ETH should be part of their portfolios or should be part of their kind of strategic reserve if they're a bigger entity. So, that's why I said like I can't really put into words just how big of a deal this is. It's not going to kind of uh I guess like uh play out overnight, guys. This is all long-term stuff. And you guys know me. I'm a longterm guy. I think you know many many years into the future. That's why I generally don't really get swayed by short-term stuff. I mean, you know, we had obviously probably the the worst kind of sentiment I would say in

Ethereum ever in the at the beginning of this year, especially as we kind of saw east price tank down to $1,400 in April, right? Um, but obviously that's turned around completely. I mean, it's not a complete 180. it's turned around here. But but even at that time, like even at that time, I I I kind of took a step back and I said that my and I think I said this on the refill at the time, um that my kind of whole thesis is is not, you know, short, midterm, and and maybe even like I guess what some people define as long-term. My whole thesis is decades. Like I've said this since probably day one of of the refuel. Like it's decades long, guys. And this is why because these things take time, right?

It takes time for these bigger entities to get involved, these institutions to get involved. So many of these institutions aren't even involved with uh the ETFs yet. And we're seeing record flows into the ETH ETFs, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit as well. So yeah, just an absolutely massive get for Sharp Link here. Um and and I I I um I know from secondhand sources here have told me that at Black Rockck, Joseph was one of the most well wellrespected leaders in the organization. Apparently, everyone loved him. He was a great leader. So, the fact that he's now leading Sharlink as co-CEO is incredibly bullish for Ethereum, incredibly bullish for ETH. Uh, and I'm uh, you know, happy to welcome him into the Ethereum family here. And what's even funnier is that he has like a Malay profile picture on Twitter. Like, he has an NFT as his

profile picture. Like this guy who worked at Black Rock, one of the most kind of corporate institutionalized finance entities here, joins Twitter, puts out this post, you know, pumping Ethereum and ETH and then also has Mady as his profile picture. And the lady's actually wearing a hat that says um that I believe says e e you know/sbet. So yeah, just great. Awesome. Love it. Uh but yeah, moving on from that, that wasn't the only big piece of news over the last week, guys, with regards to kind of the institutional adoption of Ethereum. We also had the Ether machine launch. Now, I think this launched like after I had recorded the last refill, like a few hours after, but I don't know, this is old news now. It's about a week old news now, but still a very big

deal. So, for those of you who don't know what this is, the Ether Machine is another kind of treasury company that has been spun up and they have over $1.5 billion in committed capital. And they are not just going to be a passive holder of ETH. They're going to be doing a lot more with their ETH. They're going to be staking it. They're going to be using it within DeFi. They're going to be building different kind of things on top of Ethereum to basically increase the value of their ETH holdings, right? And increase the value of the Ethereum network. Now, as for who's behind the Ether machine, there's a few people, but the key person is Andrew Keys, no pun intended there, who was an Ethereum OG, worked very closely with Joe Luben um at Consensus, uh has all the kind of connections in that in that world, as

well as TRDFI institutional connections as well. So, for him to be spearheading this again is incredibly bullish because you know that uh vehicles like the Ether Machine and Sharp Link, they're not just like short-term bets on Ether and Ethereum. They're not just playing a trend. They're long-term bets. They're like potentially multi-deade bets here, multi-deade plays. Um, they're not going anywhere anytime soon. And we're really at just the beginning of of these things here. And it's great to see like I guess people outside of the crypto and Ethereum ecosystems obviously like Tom Lee getting involved here. Um, uh, but you know, they come at it from like an outside view, an outside point of view, whereas you know, Sharp Link, Ether Machine, they definitely come at it from more of an insider view and they probably have more of an intimate

understanding of things. Um, that's not to dismiss what Tom Lee is doing obviously and what other treasury companies are doing obviously, but you know, there's there's differences here. And I should disclose here that I don't own any of the stocks that are associated with these treasury companies. The only thing that I own is um the ETH strategy, so the Strat token there cuz I put some ETH into ETH strategy. That's the onchain treasury um ETH treasury kind of play that I've talked about before. That's the only one that I own. The rest of these I don't own. I don't have any interest in buying these stocks honestly. like I'm happy, you know, obviously with my ETH and I'm happy with uh I guess buying different tokens within the Ethereum ecosystem, which I continue to do. Um and obviously my angel investing as well. Um but yeah,

I'm not just shilling these things because I I bought them. I'm shilling them because they're good for ETH, honestly. Like you guys know I have ETH bags, right? So yeah, Ether Machine is out there. Um you know, you can go give this thread a read. I'll link in the YouTube description below. But guys, like it's just crazy like how many of these things are just being spun up every other week now. I know that I know of more that that that are coming like these there's there's so many more of these things coming. Um obviously there's diminishing returns at a certain point because there's only so much money that can be raised by these vehicles and so much money that can be kind of um put into ETH. But that I think that doesn't detract from the fact that we literally have tens of billions of dollars of

fresh capital going into ETH over probably maybe let's say the next year. Like Sharink alone is raising another $5 billion, right? They're not the only ones doing it. Um Tom Lee's kind of Bitmine uh announced um the other day that they've got $2 billion worth of ETH and they have a target of earning of owning 5% of the total ETH supply. I don't think they're actually going to get to 5%. Because like the more ETH you buy and the more ETH that everyone buys cuz all these entities are kind of in competition with each other. The more they buy, the higher the price goes and the harder it is to get that percentage of the supply because you need more money to get it. Like today, what 5% of the the ETH supply would cost you. So if 10%'s 46 billion, half of that, right,

5% will cost you $23 billion at today's prices. You're not buying $23 billion worth of ETH at $3,900. That's just not happening, right? So if you know the all these companies keep buying it, the price is just going up. So then it becomes just harder and harder and more and more capital intensive to acquire that much of the supply because people would kind of knock back on this and say, well, isn't that concerning that one entity is going to have 5% of the supply? It's like yes, if that might be concerning for various different reasons if it was actually going to be a reality. I just don't see how any entity can acquire 5% of the ETH supply while you know uh buying it today because of the fact that it's a moving target. Like imagine if ETH doubles from here. Now

all of a sudden you need, you know, $46 billion to buy that much ETH, right? Uh and then what if it goes even higher than that? Like if if ETH goes beyond 10K, right? Goes to 12K. That's a tripling. You you now need uh uh uh you know, what is it? 70 $80 billion, right? To to buy the equivalent there. And it keeps going and going and up. And that's just one company, right? There's Shark Link, Ether Machine, uh, Bitmine, um, the Bit Treasury, I think the one that was the Bitcoin miner converted over as well, or Bit Digital, I think it's called, E strategy, as I mentioned before. All these other ones, like there's just so many of them, guys. And that's not including the ETH ETFs. I'm just including the treasury companies here. So, the immense amount of buy pressure is just going to keep pushing

the price up. Obviously, like demand outstrips supply, which it is, and it has been for a couple of months now, and you've seen that play out in the price. This is going to lead to an incredible kind of I guess like repricing of ETH as an asset which I've discussed before. Uh and and it's going to be an incredibly hard time for people like Tom Lee, Joe Luben, and others to acquire, you know, a percentage of the Eid supply. They may acquire, you know, tens of billions of dollars of ETH, but it may not be the percent that they want it to be. So, that's another bullish thing. They're all racing here. They're all like in competition with each other. It's just it's stupid, guys. It's like I'm I'm going off on tangents here cuz I get really excited when I talk about this stuff cuz it's just so bullish and it's

really bullish to see the the thesis that I've had for so long now play out in real time. Like I can't begin to describe how euphoric it makes me. Uh and that's not a top signal because I've been going on about this for a very long time. Um we're not even, you know, at alltime high yet. So it can't be a top signal. Please, let's not top at 4K again. We've touched 4K like what four times and that's where we topped. Like let's not do that again. Like I I don't want you know what? Actually, selfishly, I wouldn't mind that again. And I wouldn't mind going back into the to the the to the uh even 2000 so I can acquire more ETH, but I just don't think that's going to happen. Like I just don't think it's going to happen. There's there's nowhere near enough people selling ETH

compared to what the demand is for ETH to go down anytime soon. Like I'm not going to say it's not going to go down. Like obviously if we pump to like 20K or something like that is an incredibly high market cap. Uh, and if we do that in a short period of time, I would obviously expect the price to come down from there and then we'd have like a, you know, the market finding the fair value again. But yeah, guys, at 3,900, like it's just impossible to think that we're not going up from here. Like I just Yeah. Anyway, enough on that one there. Moving on. So, as I was mentioning just before, these two treasury companies and all the other ones, they're not just buying ETH, right? They're staking it. They're putting it to work within DeFi. They're doing stuff on chain. And I know one of

the treasury companies, I can't remember which one this was, uh, bought a Crypto Punk the other day. I bought an Ape Crypto Punk. So, one of the rarer ones for a lot of money. It was multiple millions of dollars here. So, they're not just buying like ETH. They're getting involved with Ethereum culture. They're buying the um the NFTs. They're also probably going to buy tokens eventually, maybe the the blue chip tokens that actually uh are worth something. Like, for example, Ave. I don't own the AV tokens. I'm not I'm just mentioning a because it's an obvious example here. Um, and there's a few others out there. Uh, one that I do own is is is Athena, which I think is another one they're probably going to look at, actually has a treasury company for it, too, which is funny there. Um, you know, maybe Sky from the Make a Dow

ecosystem. Like, I'm just rattling off names that come to my head, but there are, you know, a fair few actually, I would say, tokens out there that are actually worth owning like because they give you, you know, revenue shares. They're actually part of protocols that have been around for a long time that are long-term sustainable. They're not just like memecoins, for example. And then you have NFTs on the other side of things which are obviously cultural assets but also there are NFTs like Crypto Punks that have been around for a while and have held their value relatively well. I mean in ETH the Crypto Punk floor is what 50 ETH I think it went up to 120 ETH at its peak. So obviously not at all time high but it's held its value relatively well uh against ETH right and then if you go against US dollars it's has a different

kind of different story there as well. But I think we're going to see more of these treasury companies doing this. And that brings me to my I guess like tweet here that I put out which was I I I call this like the Ethereum liquidity flywheel. So essentially what happens and what is happening is that treasury companies buy ETH right then they deploy that ETH onchain and first they're going to stake that ETH because uh you know obviously staking it gives them the yield. So they stake that ETH but they're doing it like via LSTs and then with those LSTs they can deploy that onchain. So they're still deploying Ethon chain, they're just doing it through the LST vehicle. And then the Ethereum ecosystem, you know, by them doing this, the Ethereum ecosystem gets more TVL and becomes more liquid. And as we all know, liquidity begets liquidity.

TVL gets the TVL keeps going up. Uh and and and you know, it's good for the ETH ecosystem. It's good for the Ethereum ecosystem for there to be more money in the system, which leads to more onchain activity because now there's more money in the system. There's more stuff to do. There's more kind of stuff happening. There's more people kind of making money. So they're more inclined to do more stuff with it. It's like a wealth effect that we've seen plenty of times before. And then ultimately this will lead to the ETH price going up and then you repeat and then I said here, you know, you repeat until Ethereum is the backbone of the global financial system. And I mean, I truly believe guys, this is this is the path there. This is the path. This is what we've dreamed of for so long now. And it's not just going to

be the treasury companies. I only use the treasury companies here because they're an obvious kind of big money example. But eventually the ETFs are going to do this because they're going to be staked ETFs, right? They're going to add more uh I don't know how they're going to stake their ether. Are they going to do it through LSTs? Are they going to do it uh through um staking on their own? Who knows at this point? But it's still going to be net beneficial to this liquidity flywheel. There's going to be other things that aren't treasury companies like private companies or private funds and private kind of um um uh hedge funds and and even VCs that have ETH and put that ETH to work which grows the economy, grows the Ethereum economy, grows the onchain economy here, makes people more money, leads to the wealth effect, makes ETH go up more,

right? And you know what? Historically, an ETH bull market, like ETH holders getting rich and using that ETH and spending that ETH on things within the Ethereum ecosystem has been a lot better than other bull markets. I know that may be bias in me saying that, but it's a lot better. It's a lot more fun. It's not just like pure, you know, neilistic stuff like meme coins. I I've been a big critic of meme coins for a while, guys. Like I I felt like it was just pure, you know, nihilistic kind of uh money extraction, speculation for the sake of speculation, whereas DeFi summer was. cuz obviously there was a lot of that stuff in in that but you know from there we got all the DeFi protocols we put DeFi on the map same with NFTTS NFT sum if you want to call it that right is the

same thing here so yeah from from my perspective uh whenever there's like an if ETH kind of wealth effect here it's much healthier for the ecosystem so I'm looking forward to seeing you know more of that play out as part of this liquidity flywheel uh there all right so onto the ETH ETFs so the ETH ETFs had an absolutely massive week last week, guys. And it was the biggest week. Like, let's just put it that way. It was the biggest week in ETF history. Uh, ETH ETF history, I should say, not ETF history. Um, so the ETH ETFs had more inflows. And this isn't just last week. This is just this is for the month of July, but I figured this was a a kind of related tweet here. The ETH ETFs have had more inflows in July of 2025 than the entirety of the last 12 months combined.

Right? Those previous 12 months combined. So basically from when the ETH ETFs launched in July of 2024 to June of 2024 uh sorry 2025 there was $4.2 billion of inflows. Um as of I think like after this tweet as of as of Friday the ETH ETFs in July alone had I think over $5 billion worth of inflows in just July which is crazy when you think about it. The fact that like we didn't have like uh more than that over the past you know previous 12 months. Now we're having that in a single month. As for last week alone, we had $1.85 billion worth of net inflows. BTC only had $71 million worth of net inflows, guys. So, do you see where this is going? You

know, do do you I mean, I see where this is going, right? So, this is what I've always talked about where I said that demand is way more important than supply. And historically, ETH has had a great supply dynamic, right? We had net um deflation for a while there. And even at current kind of issuance rates, it's well below 1% net a year, but we didn't have the demand to match it. We missed out on those macro buyers because they went to BTC. We missed out on the the onchain meta of this cycle, which was meme coins, which I mean in hindsight, I actually don't consider that to be a bad thing because like for various different reasons. I'm actually not going to go through them now because I'll just be repeating myself. But we did miss that.

Obviously, the bid went to things like Salana um and Soul and the Mim coins on there. But now we do have the meta. uh we have the you know the L2 companies creating their own L2s we have the stable coin meta we have the institutional meta and then we also have um the macro buyers right which is very clearly evidenced by the ETH ETFs but also by the treasury companies which are doing very well right now as well there so all of that is culminating in an incredible amount of inflows for the ETH ETFs we'll see how it goes this week I feel like we're going to see another record week this week but it doesn't seem like it's slowing down because now as I mentioned guys like the ETH ETF prices launched uh sorry the ETFs launched when the ETH price is around $3,500 and the uh highest ETH has gotten

to during the period of time that ETH ETFs have been live is around $4,100. We're at $3,900 today. We are basically a sneeze away from ETH being above those prices. So once ETH goes above $4,100, it means that every single ETH ETF buyer is in profit. And it also means that uh the charts of these ETH ETFs because they have different tickers now don't look like crap because they did look like crap, right? It look like a down only chart now looks like it's going into price discovery, which it most likely is because ETH is more than likely going to all-time high very soon.

So, what do you think happens with the inflows there? I can tell you what happens. Just go look at the BTC inflows. Like, that's all you need to do. Just need to look at the BTC ETF inflows to see what's going to happen to the ETF. Spoiler alert, it's tens of billions of dollars worth of new money buying ETH. And that's all I'm going to say on that one. You can figure out where we go to uh from there. Now, uh I did mention that Tom Lee's company uh owns uh $2 billion worth of ETH, which is which is 560,000 ETH, and I had a tweet here just kind of talking about there that there. It's crazy how much ETH he's able to acquire in such a short period of time. People are wondering, you know, how he was able to acquire so much Ether, the price isn't moving,

which is funny because people were saying the same thing when ETH was like $2,600 and Sharp Link announced itself. I'm going to say this again. I've said this so many times in the past, guys. I'm going to say it again. You're you're not going to see the immediate impact of buyers like this because of the fact that almost all of these buys go through OTC desks. Now, OTC desks, as I explained last time, will have a stock of ETH. They'll have some amount of ETH. Maybe they have millions of ETH, right? they're not going to go and acquire more ETH from the market unless they need to. So, as those reserves deplete, they think that the these OTC desks kind of say, well, okay, we need to more ETH. We we're having all these buyers come in.

If this trend continues, we're going to run out of ETH. Then, we won't be able to make our fees. You know, we need to get more ETH. So, they may go to other OTC desks to get this ETH. They may contact Wales who maybe want to sell their ETH or and eventually they do go to the open market to buy the ETH, but that's why it takes time. It's not just going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen immediately. It does take time and the amount of time it takes is random. Like no one can really tell you how much time it's going to take here because we don't know these things are opaque. We don't actually know how much e these OTC desks have, what strategies they're employing, you know, what uh how they're hedging, so on and so forth, right? So if we if we look

at it from that perspective, um the the thing is is that there may be a week or two where price just sits flat. All these buys are coming in, everyone's wondering why isn't price moving, and then price moves. We saw this play out with BTC when Sailor was buying all that BTC. Everyone was like, "How is price not moving?" It's like, well, guys, I mean, you know, either he's buying OTC, which he is, and that's taking time to play out in the market, or maybe there's just a lot of people selling. You know, I I would actually um I wouldn't put it past a lot of ETH people, a lot of ETH holders, sorry, to be selling at this price right now to be selling around the 3600, 3,700 mark. And the reason is because of the fact that, you know, every time ETH has gone to 4K, it's been

rejected in the past. So maybe you're like really bearish on ETH and you're like, well, you know, I don't actually think ETH is going to do much from here. It's already gone up a lot. I think ETH is going to fail to break 4K again, go back to 3K or something like that. Maybe I'll buy back in later. You know, maybe people are doing that. Or maybe people are taking profits because they're up so much on their recent ETH price. Maybe they bought the bottom. There's a lot of big money that I'm sure bought the bottom at $1,400, $1,500, and now, you know, their their investment has more than doubled. So they're like, you know, I'm going to take some trips off the table. So, it's not just like the OTC buying. It's not just like people not selling. People are definitely selling into this, but we have so much demand.

It's just completely offsetting those sales. But again, that will take time to play out in the market. Price is set at the margin. It will take time to play out. And I think we're going to see it play out sooner rather than later. I mean, as I'm recording this, it's playing out. We're at like new local highs. What is it? Uh, if I open the chart here, 3922 as I'm as I'm recording this right now. So, yeah. I don't know. 4K is going to fall, guys. like it's not I don't think it's going to like get rejected at 4K again this time. Not with the amount of uh buy pressure that we have here. All right, so to finish up here, I know I've talked a lot about ETH the asset. I pretty much spent like almost 30 minutes talking about it, but it's uh you know,

I I think this refill is going to be almost an hour long because there's a lot of tech stuff to talk about as well. I put out this tweet just before and I and I really wanted to talk about this because it it's kind of goes to what I was saying before about having like more of a long-term mindset here on ETH and and I'll read out the tweet and then you'll kind of get what I mean here. So I said here most people still don't understand the paradigm shift that is happening with ETH right now. Many of us Ethereum have believed that ETH is a store of value for many years now but the rest of the world is only just now waking up to this and embracing it. And by many years I mean go back to 2018 I think is when the ETH as a story of

value narrative really started taking shape. And then I continued in the tweet and I said the stars could not have aligned better for ETH over the last few months as everything that has happened such as treasury companies you know spinning up especially has put ETH on the path to becoming a serious institutional-grade store of value asset with yield. The best part is that we are at the very beginning of the outside world accepting ETH as a store of value and more broadly learning about the immense value of Ethereum and how it will reshape global finance. And then I ended with my usual saying of ETH is a hundred trillion asset trading at $470 billion. I want to highlight this this um kind of part of the the tweet that I said that the stars are aligning, right?

Could not have aligned better here. So if we actually look at it from like a price perspective, like there's not many kind of assets that kind of come back from what ETH has come back from multiple times. And if we take like recent history, ETH was absolutely murdered this year. It went from $4,000 I think in January, $4,100, $4,000. It's like $1,400 in April, right? Like it got absolutely trashed. Like everyone was calling ETH dead. Everyone was calling Ethereum dead. Everything was dead, right? And we all knew this was but like that was the sentiment. And then since then, you've seen all of the stuff that you've seen over the, you know, since April play out, like, and I don't have to go through it all because you guys know, but you've also seen the ETH price go from $1,400 to four almost 4K, you know,

in 3 months or whatever it is, 3 4 months, whatever it is, right? So, a lot of people look at this, especially like a lot of investors look at this and they look at the market cap of ETH and they think, hm, you know, ETH is worth almost half a trillion dollars. Ethereum is not generating like nearly enough fees to um justify that valuation. So why did ETH bounce from $1,400 to almost 4K? Why did ETH not just keep bleeding out? Because even at $1,400, ETH was worth a lot. It was worth $200 billion, right? And I think a lot of the the people looking at this will come to the conclusion that the reason why ETH is worth half a trillion dollars today is because it's being valued as a as a

store of value. It is not being valued based on fear revenue, which again is the thing that I have talked about for a very long time and I've beaten this horse to to death and then some, right? But but if you look at it from that perspective, the the price being, you know, as as kind of like uh as as what it is, that has just added so much more fuel to these narratives because not only do you now have all these treasury companies, the ETF flows, you know, all this talk about ETH as a store of value, um so on and so forth kind of, you know, permeating into the wider world, but you also have the fact that ETH came back from, I mean, a lot of people considered it to be death, even though it wasn't, but a lot of people considered ETH to be

dead. A lot of people capitulated on ETH. Even some of the most kind of like historically bullish people on ETH capitulated. So ETH has come back from that. Not just against US dollars, but has also gone up against BTC, Salana's gone down against ETH as well, right? So like ETH dominance just generally has gone up. So when you when you look at it from that perspective and you look at the fact that fear revenue hasn't gone up either, like in that time, Fear has pretty much remained flat. The only logical conclusion that you can come to is the fact that people are buying and valuing ETH based on it being a store of value. They're not buying it to get exposure to fear revenue. They're not buying it because they're valuing it on fear. They're buying it because they're valuing it as a store of value as a

asset that is going to be critically important in the future. It's already critically important in my eyes, but it's going to be even more important in the future. and they're trying to stack as much of it as they can at these prices because they have a belief that ETH is going to go much higher than what it is today and they know that they're running out of time to buy because like I think they fully understand that once ETH breaks above 4K that's where things really get going. Um and then alltime high is just like a nice cherry on top there. So that that I think you know objectively proves that ETH is a store of value and and objectively proves to the wider ecosystem that it is and works to act as fuel for the wider wider kind of um I guess like outside of crypto

ecosystems to keep buying ETH because now ETH is valued like they're valuing BTC. Now ETH is a store of value and I am confident in saying that ETH on that barbell that I've talked about before that tech evolving store of value barbell. I'm very confident in saying that ETH is in the store value section now just kind of permanently. I don't think we're going back. I don't think we're going back to evolving and I don't think we're ever going back to just being valued as a tech kind of DCF revenue generating platform. I think Ether is a store of value. I think it's going to stay there. I think it's just going to get stronger over time. And I do still believe in the flipping guys. I do still believe that ETH is going to be worth more than BTC one day. Um and you

know, I don't know when that day is going to come. It's always been a long-term thesis, but I do believe that to be the case. Uh, and we'll see. You know, I never given up hope on the flipping. It's just obviously it's less popular to say this when, you know, like in April than it is today, but I've always believed in it and but it's it's a long-term thing. So saying it on crypto Twitter, people come at me and being like, "Oh, that's never going to happen." It's like, guys, I'm looking 10 years out. Like, I'm not looking tomorrow or next month or even next year. I'm looking 10 years out here. So maybe it doesn't happen anytime soon. But I do believe that it will eventually happen. And you bet your ass if it ever happens, I will be there collecting, you know, I will be collecting my clout.

That's for sure. cuz I've been calling for this since 2017. But anyway, enough on that. Let's move on to the network part of things. So, as you guys know, I think I've got a tweet here. The Ethereum gas limit is now at 45 million. So, we increased the gas limit again. Great. Awesome. Love to see it. But that's not the end of where we're going. 45 million is only one step on the journey. So, Storm here from Paradigm kind of tweeted out an ETH gas limit road map of how he sees things playing. So in uh from 2021 to uh Q3 of I believe uh oh sorry in Q3 of 2021 the gas limit was 30 million. In Q1 of this year it was 36 million. In Q3 of now basically now it's it's 45 million. Um and then he

expects it us to get to 100 million in Q1 of next year and then by Q2 next year get to 300 million. So you can see like how we're stepping things up here. If we get to 300 million by Q2 of next year, which admittedly is pretty aggressive, but we'll see if we can get there. That's a 10x increase of where we were at the start of this year. So that's a 10x increase in 18 months. That is an order of magnitude increase in 18 months. So we're aiming for the for the skies here, guys. And obviously, we're aiming to get to Giga Gas, but I don't know if that's going to happen in 2026. I would wager it's not going to happen until 20 uh 27, probably at the earliest. Um cuz as Tomas mentions here, he even feels that 300 million can only

come with a ZKVM. But you know, maybe we were able to push to that. But even if we only get to 100 million, that's still a pretty big increase. That's over 3x increase from where we were at the start of the year. So um yeah, we'll see kind of what happens there. But figure that was worth kind of highlighting where we're at with the gas limit today. Um and I guess in relation to the gas limit is EPBS. Now this is something that's been talked about a lot over the last week on crypto Twitter. Um because you can see here actually uh I've got the order of the tweets wrong here. Let me have a look. Uh yeah, so uh EPBS has a bit of drama surrounding it right now.

So there is concerns especially from people who work on the kind of me side of things with Ethereum that by doing EPBS we introduce something called the free option problem which is like I mean in terms of understanding what the free option problem is you probably need to read the the post that was put out by the flashbots crew which I'll link in the YouTube description below but Mike Neera here has a really great tweet thread on this as well and why he considers that the free option problem to be a any severe issue with EPBS. But then Poas, who's been a champion of EPBS, um has basically put out a counter tweet thread to this saying that we shouldn't let the free option problem uh I guess like stop EPBS from going

forward. Uh which you should read as well. I'll link that in the YouTube description below. But from my understanding, essentially what the free option problem is is because EPF EPBS extends out the time that block builders have to uh kind of um or I guess like searchers have uh to construct a block. It means that they are incentivized in some cases to actually delay a block. So not publish a block because it's more profitable for them to withhold that in order to get a more profitable block after. So that's my understanding of it. I'm probably butchering the explanation cuz this gets quite technical here. But the main concern is from like a high level is that EPBS could lead to more missed slots on the network which would lead to network degradation because in

the worst case it could lead to tens of percent of of missed slots and uh across the network because of the fact that it's it's more profitable to do this kind of I guess um free option they they call it here. um which means that uh network I guess like stability goes down, network uh user experience goes down and it kind of counteracts the EPBS uh UX improvements. But Pas here as well as some others argue that the the free option problem while it exists and while it is potentially hard to solve for, it's something that maybe only exists in the worst case scenarios. And at the same time, it also requires these builders to be kind of malicious. And if they're being malicious, then um you

know there there's also the option of I guess like searches and uh you know going to other builders or people publicly shaming and socially shaming these kind of entities or these entities not just getting order flow anymore because they're just harming the network. And I guess like in the longer run it actually becomes less profitable for them to do this because by hurting the network they're they're hurting the adoption of the network and they're hurting the potential profit opportunities they get later on. So, there's a lot that goes into this and um I don't know if it's going to be a showstopper for EPBS. There's a lot of discussions around other things right now outside of that cuz there are discussions around like what we actually want to go into um Glamsterdam and nothing has been slated for inclusion yet or or there's lots of things being

considered for inclusion, but nothing has been slated for inclusion yet. So, I I suggest you read these threads because they'll give you a good highlight of um what's going on there. But on that topic of Glamsterdam kind of EIPs here, there's also another EIP called 7928, which is the block level access list EIP or bells. Now, this is one that a lot of people are in favor of. This is done on the execution layer side of things. So, it doesn't actually conflict with EPBS or Fossil, which is on the consensus layer side, or shortening the slot times, which is also on the consensus layer side. But, uh, Tony was recently DMing me and kind of pilledled me on on balss here and basically said that, you know, bals are awesome for for various different reasons and he actually put out a tweet basically breaking this

down. So, essentially uh what bells do is they unlock reliable parallelism parallelism on Ethereum. So um he he tweeted out saying uh bells are enforced blockwide access list recordings uh uh recording every account touched and state differentials storage keys balances nonses and code during execution. So no more guesswork clients know upfront what to load and how best to paralyze these these kind of transactions here. So the primary benefit is that we get that perfect parallelism. Uh so with with explicit explicit mappings dis IO EVM execution plus state route calculations become fully paralyzable. This cuts worst case block validation latency. Faster block validation equals higher throughput for

all Ethereum users. Secondary wins is that we get execution less state transition updates uh such as ZK clients. Pre-execution analysis uh with inclusion lists and warm-ups and sync optimizations and improvements for partial stateless uh uh nodes. Um so there there seems to be a lot of positives here and no negatives. I don't know if there's any kind of negatives besides potentially increasing the bandwidth requirements for nodes if this is introduced, but generally we already know that bandwidth requirements are going to go up across the network for various different reasons anyway. And I don't think that should be a blocker for this being included. So if I was to redo my tier list kind of ranking again, I would put bals up at probably STR at this point. And in my ideal Glamsterdam,

I would love to see EPBS, Fossil, shortened slot times, and bells. We're not going to get all of that in Gammsterdam. Um that that's like my STR kind of list there. Um but we're not getting that in Amsterdam. All of them. So if I had to choose, if I really had to choose, I would say BS and EPBS or shorter slot times. Um Fossil ideally, yes. But the thing is with Fossil is that it can just be put into the next fork. Like I would love to This is the thing I actually brought this up with Tony as well is that my concern with with Fossil is that I don't want it like getting punted to the next upgrade and then not getting included. I don't want it becoming EOF. Obviously, very different things, but I'm talking about the the fact that like I don't want it

getting dropped because there's other things that people want to get into the next fork after Glamsterdam. That's why I wanted to prioritize it for Glamsterdam. But if we can get Bells and uh and um uh EPBS and potentially shorter slot times. I don't know if they were both going to happen at the same time, but if we can get those, that would be huge. That would be definitely very, very huge. Um Fossil can come later. Uh, but I would like to see it in the network obviously there. But you can go give Tony's tweet a read for yourself. He also links to an Ethereum magicians post which talks about this more. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So, uh, speaking of kind of what's been happening in core dev world uh, recently. So, Poz put out a bull

post about Ethereum which I felt found to be kind of uh, I guess like hitting different because core devs don't really bull that often. They tend to post things that are technically correct and technically accurate, but they don't really like bull like I guess, you know, I do for example, right? It's more like in the weeds, talking about things that excites them, but doesn't really excite the average person because they don't understand it. Um but like protest put a tweet here out here where he said two forks ago we didn't have cheap L2 uh transactions but two forks from now we will have perfect paralyzation of execution orders of magnitude more gas limit orders of magnitude more blobs and better censorship resistance. It's a no-brainer that TRFI is trying to tap

into Ethereum. Now I'll break down each of these and why he's saying this. So the the the first point here the perfect paralization of a execution obviously comes from block access list which I was just talking about orders of magnitude more gas limit I talked about kind of storm's gas limit road map before uh if we get to 300 million in two hard forks time which I think we can do before then uh we're going to essentially um get that order of magnitude so 10 10x increase from 30 million to 300 million orders of magnitude more blobs obviously coming with podas in Fusaka and then better sensitive resistance obviously coming with Fossil. So it that's just like all happening within two forks. If Fossil doesn't happen in Glamsterdam, it'll happen in in the uh the H fork that comes after it. So obviously it'll

be three forks instead of two. But still the spirit is there. Like Ethereum is just getting stronger and stronger as as time goes on here, which is incredibly bullish. Now speaking of blobs, Hillbed out that blob occupancy uh is at 75% for the first time since Spectra. So blob usage is continuing to go up and I bet you by Fusaka when Faka goes live in November we're probably going to be at blob saturation again. Uh which is good because it's good timing but we can't actually time these things. But you can see here that over time blob usage has slowly been trending up. Makes sense as you know the ETH price goes up more on chain activity happens. More L2s come online as well over time too. More you know blob usage. Uh and that's just going to push us to the limit here on

blobs which is really really great to uh to kind of see there. So yeah, just wanted to give a quick update on uh blobs there. Uh you can check out this dashboard. I'll link it in the YouTube description. But finally, I'm at what I talked about at the beginning of the episode. My kind of thoughts around the podcast that I did with David Hoffman last week and a bit of a debrief here. I won't spend too long on this, but I figured it was worth kind of I guess talking to something that was brought up in the podcast, but I wanted to expand on more here. So when it comes to myself and David and who we are as people, I think we are fundamentally different and have fundamentally different world views. And that's where a lot of the I guess disagreements that we have stem

from. It's got nothing to do with like Ethereum specifically or crypto specifically. It's more to do with our broad world views. And if I had to summarize our world views, I would say that David is a glass half full kind of guy and I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. And I don't mean that in a negative way or for me or a positive way for David. I mean that in the way of like how we see the world is fundamentally different. And I I'll give you some examples here. So I don't want to speak for David but like this is you know this is my interpretation of you know what David is like and also I guess like what he's self admitted to be being like but David David seems to default kind of to trusting people right he defaults to trusting anyone. and he defaults to

thinking that people are are good, honest, you know, on on the balance. And that's a perfectly reasonable kind of worldview to have. Whereas for me, I'm the complete opposite of that. I don't default to trusting people. You have to earn my trust. And to earn my trust is really difficult actually. Like I am I'm very, you know, I'm I'm very hard to to kind of like earn trust from because of the fact that I especially in this industry, I've obvious honestly like I've seen what quickly trusting people does. It's it's just not a good way to go about it in this industry especially, but just like life generally. So So if we if we kind of break it down into that example there, we can see why David uh listens to the opinions of people that you know are kind of public enemies of of us for for example like the

Blockworks guys or um or other kind of like concerners on on crypto Twitter that that talk really you know have really stupid arguments about Ethereum that we consider to be stupid and say things about Ethereum and say things about ETH that have obviously been proven wrong at this point. But but but with David because he one wants to do the thing where he goes into other tribes and wears different hats and tries to bring them into Ethereum and because he's just default more kind of trusting of people he uh has has the view that you know these people can be trusted because he considers them to be good people. Whereas for me I don't think they can be trusted at all. I think that you know they may not necessarily directly lie about things but they misrepresent things. They constantly flip-flop between different things. They constantly have um

different kind of um views on things depending on what the price action is doing. They don't really tend to have any principles that they believe in. And then when they're proven wrong on things, they they just don't admit that they're wrong. They just gaslight you. So that that's how I kind of view it there. But but David views it very differently to me there. And he he has his own arguments for this. So because of that, because of our fundamentally different world views, we we have diff worldviews generally, we have different views on on on the criticisms of Ethereum, on what Ethereum is doing or what Ethereum needs to optimize for, what is good for Ethereum, what's not good for Ethereum, who we should be bringing into Ethereum, and so on and so forth. And it's funny because we we butt heads a lot, me and David, especially in

in DMs, because we're both trying to bring each other closer to our world view. And I actually don't think that's a healthy thing to do. And I said this to to David. I said like let's try to stop doing that because that's been the source of a lot of contention between us is that he'll say something and then I'll be like dude this is this is wrong you know and I'll imprint you know obviously my worldview on this and I'll be like I'll use all these analogies. He hates when I do this but I use a lot of analogies to illustrate my point. Um and then we just don't really get anywhere. It just turns into like us going in circles and we don't convince each other of anything. So I said to him like I said let's just stop doing that. Let's try to stop doing that and let's like

give our own, you know, views on things and then try to understand more of the other kind of point. Let's not because it's like the opposite of trying to drag someone to your point rather than doing that, you try to understand their view better from how they view it, from their worldview. So try to put on their glasses for example, right? So in doing that, I have like over time just understood more of how David approaches things. I'm not going to say I agree with most of it to be honest. I think that his approach is not the right one a lot of the time but I can still understand it and I think once you have a better understanding of things you can have uh better arguments towards things and I think over time David has actually understood my position as well and understood my worldview and that's led

to us having healthier and better conversations and that's why I actually wanted to bring him on the podcast the other day because I felt like I could actually talk to him again and I felt like we were actually having productive conversations um and yes we're still going to butt heads and we're still going to debate things but on net it's much better and I'm a lot happier with where we are today with our discussions. And the reason why I give David the the the the time is because um David and I have really good history over the years. He's traditionally been an Ethereum and ETH bull. I still think he is an Ethereum and ETH bull. And while I may disagree with his tactics and his strategies with, you know, the I guess like wider ecosystem, I I'm not going to sit here and say that he's not an

Ethereum or ETH bull. I truly believe that he is, but he just has a different way of doing things. And it's a way that I don't necessarily agree with. It's a way that I definitely don't vibe with because my worldview is very different. Um, and honestly, out of everything, I think that it's just really dumb to default trust people in this industry. Like, you can you can default trust people and think people are good like in I guess like the wider world, that's fine and it's probably the right way of going about things. But when it comes to in crypto, when we have all of this evidence of how many people are just like complete extraction, you know, vehicles, how many people are just very like scammers and grifters, like default trusting people in this industry, not the way to go in my opinion. And that's

why I default distrust everyone. I actually default to thinking that pretty much like everyone is a scammer. Like that's how I look at a lot of the people in this industry or pretty much all the people in this industry. You are a scammer to me until you prove otherwise. And again, that is something that David would say is a really dumb way to view things. And I know other people may agree with him on that. But given the history and given the fact that I've actually avoided blowing myself up a lot of the times or getting involved with these things because I have this view, it served me well. So I'm going to continue to do this. Going to continue to think that everyone's a scammer unless you prove otherwise. And it doesn't take much to prove to me that you're not a scammer. But in order to

earn my trust, it takes a lot. And it it's and it takes a lot and it takes it takes a lot of time, too. I'm not just going to trust you because uh you said something nice about Ethereum once. As I described to David on the podcast, I'm not now going to trust the Block Works guys because they're saying nice things about Ethereum. I have absolutely no faith that they're going to be Ethereum bulls for the long term. I think they've just pivoted to being ETH bulls because it's now popular to be an ETH bull. That's it. Like, I don't trust that they're in it for the right reasons at all. But anyway, enough ranting about that. That's going to be it, I think, for today's episode. So, thank you everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give it a thumbs up,

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