Ethereum's 3 goals, Core dev updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #813 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of delway reuel where up the latest news in etherum ecosystem I'm your host andony Z and to the 30th of December 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so I know I have been a wall again it's been more than a couple of weeks now I think since the last episode and we're pretty much at the end of the year now I think this is going to be the final episode of the year for the refuel but as you guys recall I did make a promise of sorts that in the new year when I get back from Japan which will be about mid January I am going to try to get back to a 3-day a week Cadence for the refill there is no particular reason why I'm not doing episodes there's obviously plenty of news and plenty of stuff happening to cover I just haven't

been doing them I don't really have a reason for it but I am aiming to uh once I get back from Japan as you guys know I'm going to Japan soon until mid January uh once I get back I will try my best to do a three-day a week Cadence not so much even for you guys I know you guys love the show and obviously you want more episodes but more so for me like I miss doing this I really do I miss it being part of my routine I miss educating people I mean I'm still doing education through the daily way Discord and on Twitter and things like that I've been pretty active on Twitter lately actually because I just got so annoyed by so much of the fud I was just like you know what I got a little bit of um a

little bit of time here I got a little bit of I guess motivation to do some fud fighting so I'm going to do that but that has obviously taken I guess time away from from doing refuels and U energy away from doing refuels and I think the refuels have a much better effect or a much more positive effect on both my mental health and also all of you guys than ship post posting on crypto Twitter but anyway enough about that uh we got a ton to get through today a bunch to get through today and what better way to start the day or start the episode then with a bullish rant about eth now I know that the eth price has not done anything interesting pretty much most of this year like if you look at the start of the year uh it you know it went up it's up from the

start of the year I think it's up like I can't remember exactly what it's up it's up by right now I don't have a a chart in front of me but it's it's up a fair amount at the from the beginning of the year now obviously Bitcoin is up more uh there's a bunch of other assets that went crazy like meme coins and things like that but you know if you actually look at and and zoom out a bit ether's done remarkably well still since its bottom and it bottom was what 2 and a half years ago now June 2022 which was 880 it's up at 3 and a half Grand or or 3,000 just over 3,400 right now at time of recording which I think is phenomenal like people always uh contextualize this by comparing eth to other crypto assets when really I think the only thing that you can compare eth tube is BTC because

of the fact that they have atively similar market caps but you can't necessarily compare it to things that have a market caps much smaller than that like if you compare E A $400 billion asset to an asset with even a billion dollar market cap that is a tiny tiny percent of e market cap so obviously it's going to move more aggressively both to the upside and to the downside and I've even seen so many people comparing eth to just like $10 million meme coins like guys are you crazy right now like there's obviously eth isn't going to go like 10x to 100 million like 10x for a $10 million coin is to go from 10 million market cap to 100 million market cap right eth is not going to $4 trillion in in in in in like a week for example like it's just not

going to happen the market caps are just so vastly different here so when you look at it from that perspective I think eth has done remarkably well obviously people will say well it's been disappointing compared to other things blah blah blah and it's like I go back to what I always say it's like you don't have to just hold eth there are so many other assets you can you can hold as well as eth and I think I don't know if I've said it on the refi before but I said in the dead way Discord channel that if I was getting started in crypto today and I had maybe still a conservative bias but wanted to be more D gen and wanted to obviously take on more risk I would probably do a 50/50 split between BTC and e as like my my hudle conservative stack and then the

other 50% of um 5050 50 split of 50% of my stack in beta say eth and the other 50% I would put into a mix doesn't matter what percentage mix it is you can come up with your own percentage mix here but a mixed between high quality fundamental based assets and then just pure gambling assets I wouldn't probably exceed like 10 to 15% of my entire stack on the pure gambling stuff that is extremely risky that that is a really high percentage still as well but I'm just trying to think through if if I was getting started today what I would what what I would kind of do there but even that you you know you're not really guaranteed anything there but what you are not so much guaranteed but what you are kind of doing with that 50% in BTC and eth is that BTC and eth are the

safest assets to hold they will appreciate over the long term uh against the dollar so you essentially have your safe hotle Stak you don't have to worry about and then the other 50% you can do whatever with say you do like a 40% into you know fundamental backed assets that are comfortable to hold and then 10% into these like meme coins that maybe you hold for a week and hopefully you make like a a 10x out of it I mean obviously you'd be over the moon if you did that and then you would rebalance that back into BTC and eth or maybe into your other fundamental plays that's how I would kind of play things I wouldn't be 100% eth if I was just getting started I wouldn't be 100% BTC I wouldn't be 100% in any large cap to be honest it doesn't make any sense to do

that if your goal is uh wealth creation if your goal is getting like a 10 to 100x this cycle then you're not going to get that from um from Ethan BTC e going 10x is 34k BTC going 10x is almost a million dollars that's just not going to happen and 100x forget about it that's a pipe dream right maybe in the far distant future but definitely not anytime soon but 100x in a you know a meme coin or even like a high uh fundamentals based defy coin for example or AI coin something like that is very possible and very doable this cycle yes it's very hard to pick these things but it's still doable so that's a bit of talk about I guess like performance- wise but in terms of eth itself uh the tweet that I wanted to to reference today uh for the bullish part of the

rant here is that 22 of the last 24 trading days for the eth ETFs have seen positive inflow so positive net flows into the ETFs and I know I said I think like a while back that focusing on the day-to-day flows is I guess kind of a Fool's errand because it doesn't really tell you much but when you start seeing these things play out over longer time frames you know monthly which is I guess like 24 trading days is is almost a month right monthly uh and then obviously yearly but we haven't even had a one year worth of the eth ETFs yet once we get to that that's when you start seeing Trends forming now if we go to The Far Side website here which is a website I Ed to track the eth ETFs we all know the eth ETFs had a bumpy start right there were a obviously a lot of

outflows due to grayscales eth uh and then there wasn't that many inflows because it launched it pretty much like the worst time to launch uh you know uh 23rd of July which is basically I guess one of the quietest times in the crypto Market we obviously had a crash from March to then um but you know we had those outflows from E that lasted quite a while but then we had a kind of long period of just generally quiet not really many outflows not really many inflows but then things started really picking up in November as you can see here we started having these big inflow days like 50 million 80 million 300 million and that has since continued with outflows in between right up until today and the 24 days that I'm refering is basically all of December and you can see actually more than that 22nd of November to the 26th of oh sorry the

27th of December trading days does not include weekends obviously so we're not counting all the days between those dates but we are counting the trading days here and you can see the only two outflow days one of them was $60 million of net outflows most of that came from grayscales eth which is obviously to be expected and the other one was 75 million of net outflows which was due for due to $103 million coming out of black rocks ETF now that 20 this happened on the 28th of December which I believe was the day that uh things Came Crashing Down a fair bit if I go to my chart here you can kind of see that yeah 20th of December was basically the day that eth went from like 3500 to to to almost 3,000 again after the previous few days where things had been dumping

So that obviously uh lines up with with that kind of stuff there with the price action but the general trend is up we're at $2.7 billion of net inflows into the E ETFs now um and it just it seems like we're going to go up only from here especially in the new year as I personally expect eth to perform very very well going into the new year especially in q1 that's definitely going to lead to reflexivity for the E ETFs here and I I did make a prediction in my tweet where I said the E ETFs will see at least $50 billion worth of net inflows in 2025 I do not think that is far-fetched at all we are already getting like if you annualize out the last 24 days worth of of uh I guess inflows here you pretty much get to that number um and obviously it's not always

going to be like that but this is during a perod of time where things are still relatively quiet this is during a period of time where the eth ETFs are still at around the same price they were when they launched this is not in a period of time where eth goes back to alltime high and goes to 5K and Beyond and you can actually see that from the BTC ETFs that once it actually broke out from its all-time high and actually started going to price Discovery that's when the real monster flow started like look at these consecutive days of hundreds of millions of dollars of monster flows into the BTC ETFs even back in November October you can see this so so it's obvious to say that e the inflows are going to follow the price action and we really have not seen what that's like on ethereum yet

because of the fact that eth is not at all-time highs it hasn't even broken 4K yet but I truly do believe that's going to happen I actually still think that eth could see an all-time high in January I know that might may seem hard to believe right now but it's not that far from here I think once eth breaks 4K it's pretty much Clear Skies 4K has been stiff resistance for years all the way back if you actually look at like I believe it's the weekly chart you'll see that ether's reject Ed 4K from all the way back in 2021 like six times or something so when it finally does break that is a huge signal to the market saying okay well it's finally each time to break through this 4K barrier and go to alltime high and Beyond and then I do believe they're going to see a lot of

reflexivity play out with the eth ETFs uh in 2025 especially given that we're going to have a friendly a more friendly regulatory environment in 2025 which as I've mentioned in a previous episode is going to be very favorable for the ethereum ecosystem and specifically ether as well and this isn't to mention the fact that I do believe we're going to see filings for Stak eth ETFs come the new year I don't know if they'll get approved in 2025 but I do believe we're going to see filings for those things that again will will start the engine like oh my God now I can get yield on my e ETF yeah yeah yeah why not right ether nominated yield too so I do think we're going to see that happen there but anyway enough of the bullish rant there hopefully that's a nice bullish rant to

end out the year for you guys but I really do believe that e is going to have a really great 2020 25 and contrary to popular belief I still think ethereum the ethereum ecosystem and eth had a very good 2024 not amazing obviously because there's been a lot of I guess trials and tribulations through the year but I really do believe it had an amazing 2024 All Things Considered we had the eth ETFs approved we had Denon go live which collapsed down costs on layer 2os we had um tradire getting more involved like Black Rock tokenizing their bidd uh fund on top of ethereum we've had so we had you know reaken go live with Igan layer we've had so many just good things happen it take me forever to to go through all of them and I haven't prepared like a yearly recap episode here but there's just so many good things that have happened the

biggest Devcon ever the biggest uh second biggest hackathon in the world regardless of crypto or not with eighth Global Bangkok there are just an endless amount of good things that have happened in 2024 for ethereum so if that's considered a bad year for ethereum then bring on 2025 because like the bar is the bar seems to be very low if that's a if that's a bad year right so I really do think that we're going to have a really great year going into 2025 here but enough on the price I think the next thing I wanted to get through was yes some I guess ethereum Network ethereum ecosystem related tweets so I put out this tweet the other day and I'd love to get you your guys thoughts on this in the daily way Discord Channel or in the YouTube comments I basically racked my

brain for a while over there so I sat down and I was just racking my brain going through it all and I was thinking what are the top three goals that the ethereum ecosystem should focus on over the next 5 years and I basically nailed it down to these three and I really want people to either agree or disagree with me on this so that I know if I'm heading in the right direction but from my feel over the next 5 years the high level the the three high level goals of the ethereum ecosystem should be to scale ethereum obviously but make it feel like one single chain in ecosystem I know right now it can feel like one chain and ecosystem depending on which wallet you're using using rabby is a breeze I've been using it more and more lately and it's just so nice having it like

automatically switch the chain for me tracking all my assets across all the different Chains It's just an amazing experience but the the thing I think that's missing the key thing that's missing that's still obviously annoying for users um and I know I get annoyed by this at times is the fact that I if I don't have an asset on a particular L2 I have to bridge Assets in now the reason why this is annoying is I guess two big Parts one is that it just adds an extra step like I know bridging is easy it is and it doesn't take very long but it just adds an extra step and also if I don't have access to my funds and I want to try out a new chain say I'm on my phone or something like that and then I have to essentially probably buy some new crypto and then bridge that in in

order to get uh to use that chain I can't exactly use the assets I've got on other chains if I don't have access to them at that point in time obviously not something that is probably going to be like that something a lot of people are going to experience but for me it is annoying and the second thing I don't think I mean this is a really great area this is not tax advice but I think the second thing is that depending on I guess your tax jurisdiction and depending on how your tax office treats this bridging between chains and I don't want to scare anyone one here because as I said this is a gray area as far as nothing is confirmed here but bridging between chains technically could be argued is a capital gain or Capital loss event because when you send eth from

base to arbitrum you are trading base eth for arbitrum eth it's the real eth only exists on ethereum what you have on base eth and arbitrum eth are essentially like I'm they are IUS but the good thing about l2s is that the IOU can be Escape hatched down to L1 so for all intents and purposes it is kind of equivalent to ethon on ethereum L L1 I mean but obviously there's multi associated with the L2 so it's not strictly equivalent but it's it's pretty close right it's much closer than if you were to have ethon another L1 for example you bridge it Bridge it over from ethereum but you know some tax officers around the world may consider this to be a taxable event which is shitty right like that's a that's a really shitty thing it shouldn't be that way but hey maybe it is where you are in the world so we have to basically make

it feel like a single chain equos system from the asset perspective and I know there are a lot of different people working on this one of the initiatives that you are probably all well aware of right now is the AG layer from polygon the I I'm really bullish on the AG layer but as far as I know the unfortunate thing is that it's an opt-in system which means you have to rely on these chains to opt into it it's not something that just automatically happens do I think that chains are going to opt into it yes do I think that some chains are not going to opt into it also yes so we don't know the incentives get a bit skewed you could make the argument that okay well why would would base opt into this um if it would just if um if it would benefit their competitors for

example like why would they want to do that but I think that's I guess zero some thinking or negative sum thinking you'd opt into it because you want to grow the whole pie together and then essentially what you compete on and what you're probably already competing on at this point is your ecosystem you're not really competing on on assets because assets are so easy to bridge across ecosystems here so I I think that yeah you're competing on ecosystem you're competing on apps you're competing on products there so that's the first point the second point is delivering the rest of the current layer one road map with potentially the beam chain Fork being the end and this is springboarding off of what Justin Drake presented at his bankless Summit talk if you haven't watched that yet you should go check it out it's on bank's YouTube channel but

essentially we have a road map in ethereum you guys know the vitalic flowchart road map that's basically a 10-year road map from 2020 to 2030 or at least that's how I look at it we've delivered like roughly half of that road map I think at this point in time so we've got about half left to go which should take another 5 years essentially um maybe it could be shorter than that but I mean I if I'm being honest it's probably going to take 5 years uh with the beam chain Fork being the end so everything in between uh will will still get delivered and then the beam chain Fork could be the end here now this isn't to say that it's the end of L1 upgrades but in my mind it would potentially be the end of the current road map and then we probably just come

up with a new road map probably something that is a lot more conservative something that doesn't doesn't result in many changes on the network over relatively short periods of time so instead of like a hard for every year you'd have one like every 3 years or something like that uh and you would obviously leave room uh open for critical fixes of of certain things uh that need to be fixed in a in a shorter time frame there so that's the second thing that I think we should focus on over the next 5 years which is already being focused on but I felt like it was worth just putting that out there and the third thing is ZK everything ZK I mean from everyone I've spoken to like all the smart people I've spoken to they all come back to the same thing that ZK is going to play a role in literally everything that happens in the ethereum

ecosystem uh and it's not even close really it's going to touch every part of the ethereum ecosystem it already is to an extent and it is complimentary to other Technologies such as trusted execution environments or tees which are getting popular um such as uh being able to do like encrypted mols things like that like ZK obviously privacy uh scaling obviously but it touches everything that's that's my point here so ZK everything you know snarfy the evm get a ZK evm pre-compile in in ethereum stuff like that that's that's the third thing here so I think that those three are the high level things or the high level goals the ethereum system should be focused on but if you have different goals that you think we should be focused on please sound off in the YouTube comments or on the daily way Discord Channel but that's the way I I'm

seeing things right now anyway enough on that onto some C Dev related news so to wrap up the year there is an all core devs update for 20124 uh and a 2025 Outlook that Tim Boo has put together here you can go give this a read I'll link in the YouTube description Bel below but obviously the biggest thing happening in 2025 so far is going to be the Petra upgrade which I believe is probably still going to happen in like March April of 2025 but there's been no dates announced yet but I think we're getting very close to public test Nets being forked to Petra probably going to happen like end of Jan or something like that so yeah I could imagine a March April timeline being uh pretty I guess like on the on the spot right now I mean we've basically been sticking to a March

April timeline for the last two years anyway of getting these things delivered so that's what I think is going to happen there and obviously 2024 was a big year we delivered Denon with blobs and a bunch of other upgrades uh the core Dev have working on Petra all the way through they've also begun starting work on fusaka which is the upgrade that's going to be coming coming after Petra in 2026 here and then after that there's going to be a I believe another upgrade called uh gar Amsterdam or some people are calling it glamsterdam so they're already planning out even further than that so yeah a lot of things happening on the core Dev front I think people tend to miss this stuff in the noise of oh people saying ethereum moves too slow or ethereum isn't focusing on the right things blah blah blah you know we've heard it all before

I I really don't think that's true at all I think ethereum is focusing on the the right things I think we have an amazing ecosystem of L1 developers and researchers as well as L2 developers and researchers and everything that the ethereum ecosystem does especially at L1 with the with the core devs is in service of that road map that I discussed there yes things can change implementation details can change but the high level road map is still intact that's still what we're going for it's still we're still following along with those parallel tracks that metallic outlined because that's what we essentially think is the most important important thing to do for layer 1 ethereum another big thing that was placed importance on over the especially the last 6 months with ethereum L1 is scaling the L1 and now I've talked about this before I'm not talking about scaling the L1 like something like a

salana or an Aptos or a SOI right like a high performance L1 no that's not what ethereum is ethereum is not trying to be a high performance L1 that's the whole point of the rollup Centric road map is that we push the high performance execution environments to L2 and we make ethereum the best decentralized uh settlement layer or world computer or trust machine that has ever existed right that's that's the goal essentially but L1 scaling plays a part in that because um you can't be the best settlement layer if you're too limited because then um you you basically lose out on certain things obviously blobs live on L1 so we need to scale them up to service l2s obviously the normal L1 fee Market also can be scaled with an increase in gas limit which I'm going to talk about in a sec so yeah there's a bunch of different things we can do here

but that's become more of a focus I think and it's probably going to be more of a focus in 2025 as well all right speaking speaking of keeping up with ethereum core development Terren from the prabs team has put together a great little resource here that allows you to essentially look at all these different places to keep up with ethereum core development there are actually many places to keep up with this right now uh as well as many uh podcasts and uh different kind of um GitHub repositories and and tweets and stuff like that but the ones that I wanted to shout out here for those of you who like podcast you've got Christine Kim's infinite jungle podcast which I know a lot of you listen to already that is actually probably the best way to keep up with core developer stuff if you want to go really deep

because she interviews people in like core developers and people around that orbit which is something that I don't do I essentially try to follow along with core development but not as closely as Christine does this is basically her full-time job at Galaxy I believe so definitely go check out her work and follow her on Twitter of course as well then you have the uh ethereum magicians Forum of course and the eth Research Forum you have uh the you have the deadly gay listed here you also have week in ethereum which is a newsletter that's been run for a very long time now very many many years now started by Evan vaness but maintained these days by Andrew um I've forgotten his surname right now he's I know he watches the daily gr so he's going to uh he's going to be mad that I forgot his surname but yeah it's um it's maintained by him

there you can actually go check this out um you click we ethereum news.com you can see it's the same format has always been this is one of the first things that I started uh consuming when I got involved with ethereum all the way back in 2017 because it was really the place to keep up to date with ethereum and it is what inspired my first crypto newsletter which was the block by block newsletter so yeah you can go check that out and as I mentioned Andrew here uh maintains it and you can go follow him on uh on Twitter there uh but there's also um other than that there's also the uh ethereum blog you can follow and a Twitter list as well this is probably going to be most relevant to you guys I think cuz you guys love uh checking out um on Twitter a lot I know I see a lot

of you guys on there there's the ethereum L1 R&D Twitter list here put together by the 2077 Collective you can go check this out this is actually really great this essentially cuts out a lot of the noise and just focuses on ethereum kind of core uh updates and and and core related things so definitely go check this out if you haven't uh yet but yeah thanks to Terence for putting this together it's really great all right moving on so I mentioned that we're watching the gas limit right now on ethereum there's obviously been a lot of talk about this for a while I've covered it a bunch of times has come out with a great little website here got called gas limit. piix I don't think I've covered this before because I believe this came out after the last refu episode but essentially you can go to gas limit. and see uh things like which entities are

signaling for the gas limit to be increased but also what the total for the entire network looks like so you can see that here on the homepage so right now there is 20.8% of the entire network signaling for a gas limit higher than 30 million the target is still 36 million here now this hasn't really moved over the last last few days and I would chalk this up to being the holiday period none of the big staking providers except coin I mean coinbase did it but like the other ones and and I guess big staking operations they probably don't want to change their setups during the holiday period where they're probably running on a skeleton crew so I would assume that we're going to see this ramp up probably by mid January you're going to see this ramping up more until it gets to near

100% And we get the gas limit raised to 36 million there but you can check out gas limit. piix and follow along with this for yourself as well but as I said you can also break this down by entity you can see here that the biggest entity right now I believe is coinbase and unidentified I would assume unidentified is probably a lot of solo on home stakers and then coinbase is the next biggest and then you have okx in there as well but then you can see the list up here of all of the uh all of the node operators that are signaling for a gas limit increase of 30 million or more all right so blobs have been on fire lately and I don't think many people have noticed this and I haven't tweeted about it because I don't want to get anything wrong cuz it seems a bit

funny to me but if you actually go to the ultrasound money website and scroll down here normal L1 gas fees over the last 7 Days the average is 5.7 gay right that's the normal L1 gas that's not the blob um fee Market that's just the normal L1 fee market then you scroll down to the blob gas fee market and the average for the last 7 days has been 17.1 gay so that is actually higher than the um the eth L1 average gas here but as as far as I know they're not equivalent because if you actually look at the amount of um uh fee burn that's happened over the last seven day days with blobs it's $1.1 million whereas for for e at these levels would be more than that over the last 7 days if I actually go down here I can see what this looks like um yeah

it's it's it's like 15 million but I I I don't know if that includes blobs or not so if I take away the blobs it's still like what just under 15 million or something like that so the gas markets aren't equivalent but you can see that even though we have a low gas gas environment on L1 where the gas freeze right now 3.2 gay for blobs it's it's been 17.1 gay which is which is huge right that's that's a huge average for blobs you can see over the last 30 days it's been 11.1 gay but then you go back further than that uh to basically when blobs went live and they were free up until around November and this is when I started covering the fact that blobs were in price Discovery and for the last 30 days the average um gay price for blobs has been 11.1 gay so far from free

and we've burned 3. $ Million worth of eth uh from blobs and that's what my tweet says here you can see the screenshot where blob fees uh when I took this screenshot on December 2 so the period of December 14th to December 21st blobs were a top five uh gas burner coming in at number four here top five eth burner coming in at number four here so for everyone who was futing that blobs wouldn't ACR value to eth and that blobs would always be free and that l2s or rollups would switch off of blobs and go somewhere else that's not the case guys like that's not the case at all blobs are on on fire and we getting a blob increase in Petra obviously doubling going going uh to a target of six and a Max of nine from the target of three in the max of six right now and

then we're going to fill that up again because we're scaling this is ethereum scaling we have these l2s that these rollups that are using ether as da there are other l2s coming online that aren't using ether as da but this is the thing eth da is still going to be used it's still going to be full there is still going to be growth happening there even though these other l2s aren't using ether's da because e SDA has a in my opinion premium attached to it I really do think that rollups uh the full so layer twos which are full rollups so they're using eth da really enjoy the security benefits and guarantees of using ethd da really enjoy the uniformity of using ethdawg so people in this industry really need to stop talking if I'm

being honest because that's what all a lot of these people do and it really annoys me to be honest how much these people can talk when the facts are right in front of you people like to come up with their own realities and you guys know me I don't like to deal in narratives I like to deal in actual reality I don't like to come up with my own reality here um you know to be honest I will sugarcoat things sometimes if it if if it seems like it might be a little bit too bearish for Ean ethereum uh because that's just a bias that I have but I do try to stick to the truth here and I do try to be as truthful with my opinions as possible you know back when I said that blobs wouldn't be free forever that was not a fact at the time that was not reality at the time that

was an opinion I had that was a belief I had and then now that it's come true I can say that it's a fact now like it's an observable fact and the funny thing about this is that we you can verify it for yourself by running your own full node you don't have to trust anyone else on this you don't have to trust me you don't have to trust the ultrasound money website go run your own node and you can verify this for yourself you can uh there there are commands that you can run to check this on on on chain there are basically apis that you can call there so yeah I it's just I don't know you guys know I like the deal in reality really sick of these narratives at this point these concerns as they call them because just time and time again we debunk these things we basically prove

the hate is wrong and we never get the credit we deserve I don't think we are held to a stupidly high standard as opposed to other ecosystems and we really don't get the credit we deserve here I still think that the merge was the greatest achievement potentially in uh software engineering in a very very long time because just the coordination effort was so massive I don't people understand how massive it was all the all the relevant incentives all the the different things all the stakeholders it was such a Monumental achievement and people are now saying oh we should go back to proof of work and they're not saying this as a troll they're actually saying this seriously they're saying Oh e price against Bitcoin hasn't done well since we since the merge um let's go back to proof of work because it was better under proof of work it's like

guys are you insane E's price against BTC did worse under proof of work if you go from the top of 2018 to the bottom of the end of 2019 eth went down 90% against BTC it was proof of work that entire freaking time like the beacon chain hadn't even launched yet so there was no proof of stake at all like I don't understand this Insanity that people say oh we have to go back to prove of work no we're never doing that obviously and the merge was a Monumental achievement so let's keep celebrating those wins let's try to not let the haters get to us it happens sometimes but yeah anyway that's another rant that I'll I'll finish there cuz I'm at 30 minutes here but a bunch of other stuff I want to get through uh for now so uh we have this little graphic here from

Trent vans that I wanted to highlight for you guys on the refuel now this is one of the best graphics that I've seen essentially going through the uh core I guess of ethereum you yeah you could call it the core of ethereum because you can see here there are a bunch of different teams that are all building ethereum core so these teams are the client team such as nethermind and sigma Prime then there are other teams like consensus and Paradigm that are also building core clients but are contributing in other ways as well uh then you have the ethereum foundation which is building a core client but also contributing in other ways so you can see like a nice little graphic here of how everything comes together and how all these teams are really independent of each other you know for example Paradigm is independent of all these

other teams they're not funding as far as I know these other teams they're not receiving funding from these other teams they're not receiving funding from the EF they just decided hey we want to build an ethereum execution client which is WTH and hey we want to add value to ethereum because they develop uh they they produce developer tools like Foundry right so there's a lot of value being added there but you can see that each of these parties is is distinctly different from one another distinctly separate from one another I think that you could potentially argue that the closest uh I guess like the the the way that these parties are closest is by some funding from the EF to these other core Dev teams and really that funding comes in the terms of validators I don't know if you guys remember but there was a an incentive program or essentially

like a milestone program where the ethereum foundation gave eth inv validators so essentially gave validators to the cev teams and said hey the these validators are yours but you know you can run them uh and then over time as you hit Milestones they become fully yours and you can basically uh get the uh the eth and principal if you want or you could keep it stake and and get the rewards and fund yourselves via that so that was the really the closest relationship I would say other than that as I said these teams are distinct they communicate all the time obviously because they're all part of the same the same core here but I just thought this is a really good graphic showcasing how it all comes together you should go check this out I'll link in the YouTube description uh below for to do so all right moving on uh just a little

bit of I guess like uh an update I you could say on the eum foundation here where uh Cyrus basically uh asked if or tweeted out saying if you did a reply or the eum foundation and asked what did you get done this week do you think you would be impressed or displeased with the responses now one of the responses to this tweet came from Josh Stark who is in the leadership team at the ethereum foundation and he asked you know why not check for yourself it's not that hard to keep up with the activities of ethereum foundation teams as most of it happens in the open and he has a long list here of stuff that the ethereum foundation has been doing lately and you can go check this out I'll link in the YouTube description below but it's kind of funny cuz I I can see both points

here first point is that the information is out there for sure and it's available and if you listen to The Daily guay you probably have heard of most of this already because I cover this as it happens as it becomes news but the second thing and morto cirus' point here is that this kind of stuff is not something that you can find in a central location like Josh links to many different Twitter accounts many different URLs here of things that the average everyday person is just not going to be uh looking into not going to be uh paying attention to and the easy fix for this is to get the ethereum Twitter handle to tweet out about these things that's the easiest fix get them to tweet out about it not not just to retweet a proper tweet and get them to do get them to do that all the time I believe that that account should be

tweeting at least once a day at least once a day about related ethereum things as I've said before I would be fine with it tweeting out things related to core development things related to l2s but not like promoting any specific project or anything like that but but doing more I guess marketing from that account doing more awareness from that account I do believe from what I uh what I've uh I learned is that that account is going to be more active in 2025 but obviously like I'm again I'm all about dealing in reality and not narratives until I actually see this happening on Twitter I'm not going to essentially put too much faith in it but from what I know it is going to become a more active account in 2025 which should be exciting there but essentially yeah I see both points here the AF has done a lot a lot it's not like extremely complex to keep up

with this but at the same time it's not very easy either because it's split up into various different parts and I understand that most people don't listen like most people on crypto Twitter especially don't listen to the refuel don't watch the refuel because it is a you know it is a pretty deep thing it's it's not Noob friendly I understand that like people want to have like quick information to like you're not going to sit here and watch a 3 to 60-minute video uh every other day just to keep up with things I totally understand that but yeah that's why the etherium Twitter account can add a lot of value here which as I said I think is on uh the table there but anyway enough on that moving on to the next tweet here so there was a big discussion around client diversity this week so Harry here from uh Cantina said client diversity on

ethereum was a mistake and then I mean I'll I'll kind of link you this tweet and you can go give this a read for yourself if you want to but I replied to this because the the whole tweet really annoyed me because Harry was specifically talking about the evm and changes to the evm and how it's been really slow uh changes to the evm uh don't really do stuff that developers want um and getting even relatively simple things like eof in has taken a long time and keeps getting pushed back that I can sympathize with but he blamed it on client diversity and I don't understand how you could come to that conclusion given that pre- client diversity upgrades were much slower and I know that may seem counterintuitive because you might think well we have

like 10 plus client teams right now wouldn't the upgrades be slower because there's more people to coordinate with no because pre client diversity essentially what you had was I think a bit of apathy right from uh from the GU team parody ended up abandoning ethereum and going to polka dot then you had open ethereum which was the M uh I guess like the fork of parody that was maintained by nosis which then they kind of sunset so it really became gu in the end until we we had this Renaissance of other clients that came online and that we have the beautiful client diversity that we have today so the ethereum ecosystem is shipping faster and we have the biggest upgrade coming with Petra next year than we did when we didn't have client diversity or didn't have proper client diversity so blaming the the I guess like shipping the slow shipping on

client diversity to me is nonsensical and then in the same tweet Harry was advocating for faster changes to ethereum main net but also saying that we would be better off with just doing with one client that's nuts like that's absolutely nuts the chance of a bug in any one client is very high relative right and it approaches 100% over a long enough time period so saying that he he was actually saying he wanted updates potentially every month so you would want a hard Fork on a $400 billion Network that is's is home and and and and securing hundreds of billions of dollars that is have Milli millions of users securing l2s has all these other stakeholders have all these other eth holders that don't even know anything about ethereum but just hold Ethan and uh and basically are confident that the ethereum network is not going to rug

them or or go offline or something catastrophic is going to happen so so you're saying that we're going to upgrade that every month okay sure in a perfect world we would love to do that but then in the same breath you're saying that we should only have one client in that world are you in like that's just Insanity to me that is absolute Insanity to me I I'm all for upgrading every month if we could manage that which was not going to happen but if we could manage that I'm all for doing that with 10 clients not with one client like what it doesn't make any like the chance of a bug happening if you're doing an upgrade every month month goes up astronomically because there are more changes happening every month and some people will say well some changes are simpler than others but that's not the point the point is is

that even the smallest mistake can cause catastroph catastrophe on ethereum especially when it comes to ethereum in a proof of stake regime because of the fact that we have slashing we have inactivity leaks we have correlation penalties we have quadratic inactivity leaks we have things that can happen like the chain finalizing on the wrong chain and one client doesn't mean that a um that they can't go offline still or a portion of the network can't go offline and the network can still stay online for sure it can because there different versions of clients imagine a world where 50% of the clients go offline due to a bug 50% of the Network's still online finality is not happening but hey the the Network's still online that other 50% are probably getting wrecked by correlation inactivity penalties or quadratic inactivity Leakes right just it's insane to me any I don't want to rant too much about this but I just

thought that the whole tweet was was was crazy and people who were agreeing with this were crazy and that's why I felt the need to reply here and and and then I I basically spent the rest of the Tweet saying that we saying what I just said you know we're shipping faster than ever blah blah blah and then comparing ethereum to bitcoin was also weird Bitcoin hardly changes so it I mean I still don't think it's fine for them to have one client but it's much better or much safer for them to have one client than ethereum because they don't change very often at all if ever really um and uh and yeah I basically covered what I said in this tweet with my little rant just then so just wanted to cover that there I I I think that look I don't think that Harry is a bad

actor or dishonest actor or was trying to like uh spread fud or anything like that I just think that they as a as far as I know as like a security uh uh research or security consultant does a lot of audit stuff like that at lowlevel kind of evm stuff I understand the frustration from that perspective and I understand the frustration for from a developer perspective around the evm but but but my frustration came from the fact that don't blame client diversity for it because it makes no sense you what you can blame is the conservativeness of the court of alpas potentially but that is uh that applies whether ethereum had one client or 10 clients and I would actually argue that ethereum is better with 10 clients because it means that what happened if that one team was just uh was uh sorry what happened if that one team was very

conservative then what would happen is other teams would come along and say no the core client teams would come along say we're going to build a new client because we want to be less conservative and and that's actually what happened with and with client diversity so I mean you can see it already nethermind and Aragon are way less conservative than gu for example so when you look at it from that perspective client diversity was a a natural kind of thing that happened in ethereum we also pushed for it but it did naturally emerge to an extent and it is also one of ethereum's greatest achievements and I I think it is the crowning Jewel of ethereum uh right next to the amount of solo and home stakers that we have those two things I think are ethereum superpower it's what separates ethereum from the rest it's the only things that I believe that

other ecosystems will never be able to replicate and also eth as a as a um as a money as an as a decentralized programable money I don't think other ecosystems can replicate that but when it comes to client diversity and the amount of clients that we have true client diversity uh and not fake client diversity like some of these other transic claiming that they have where it's essentially the same uh the the same kind of thing just with like a client that runs faster and then everyone just going to end up running that client so you don't really have true client diversity um and H so solo and home staking no other network even come comes close to ethereum like it's not even they're not even playing the same game they're playing like little league while ethereum is at the top of its game essentially so yeah anyway

enough of rant about that moving on so Inc uh Kraken L2 is now live on Main net so this went live pretty quickly from when they announced it which is great to see here obviously this is direct competition for bass because Kraken saw how good bass was eating or I should say how good coinbase was eating with bass and wanted to join the party here I've covered ink before I've covered what they're trying to do they're basically going after I think like a more Deen kind of crowd from day one they're they're going after like uh the um the nft crowd for sure they're going after like the meme coin stuff they might be doing some AI stuff uh but yeah you can go check out ink for yourself you can go use the network yourself they've got like pretty much all the apps or most of

the popular apps live there right now but more are going to be going live in in the future so you can go check that out for yourself I'll link in the YouTube description below but congrats on the launch I guess to Kraken there I know these guys have been working really hard on getting this out the door getting this on mainnet and they've been working on it through the holiday period it seems like as well cuz they launched this on December 19th so right before Christmas pretty pretty big deal actually an even bigger deal given that like they launched it just as the holiday period was hitting which means that again they're probably on I don't know if they're on a skeleton crew but they'd be having less people in the office so to speak than they otherwise would have because of that and I'm I'm sure it's it's the same right now as we

approach New Year's but yeah that's the uh that's the gist there so you go check out ink for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of l2s unich chain looks like it is going to announce in q1 so they said here public main net will be announced in early 2025 they have their public test net that launched on December 21st here and they say that unich chain main net is going to go live with permissionless fraud proofs from day one that's pretty cool because we know that uh Bas didn't go live with permissionless fraud proofs from day one I don't know about Inc I know I don't know if they're live with permissionless fraud proofs yet but with un Chang live from day one in early 2025 that's exciting to to see here now Ryan Wyatt

here from the op ecosystem his the chief growth OPP officer at optimism said said in a reply that that we're going to see optimism working to light up a bunch of change to stage one starting in q1 and throughout the year Bas sonum uh uni mode Kraken World zor Etc all moving to stage one it's a big focus in 2025 uh with uh with a common shared standard of op stack allowing for inoperability obviously which is a which is a huge deal here so yeah looking forward to seeing that uh go live all right last thing on l2s before I move on to something that I wanted to talk about which I promised I will talk about weeks ago but I haven't done an episode yet so I will get to that in a sec but I quot tweeted this tweet from E purple pill who works at growth

marketing at Eclipse which is the salana L2 or the svm L2 on ethereum here showcasing that the um the eclipse Network did 7,435 TPS the other day so this is on the December 27th year now you guys know that I don't think TPS is a perfect metric but it is a metric and it's great to see that uh eclipse is essentially doing more TPS than salana is because they're taking advantage of the L2 um architecture now of course full disclosure eclipse is totally centralized has a centralized sequencer it is not using eth for da it is using I believe Celestia for da right now um but still it's great to see that uh teams like Eclipse are taking full advantage of the eth L2 architecture bringing Fe down for users while also achieving High TPS numbers here and I quote tweeted this by saying a modular ecosystem of

layer 2s built on ethereum is better than any monolithic layer one been saying that for years at this point but it is completely true I believe so yeah you can uh go check this out for yourself if you want I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last thing I wanted to talk about so I put this tweet out on December 16th this is two weeks ago now where I said I was wrong about maximalists they are needed and should be embraced I'm going to make the case for ethereum maximalism on the next episode of The Daily gay and why I think it's a good thing to have some subset of the community be maximalist so this is the episode of The Daily gay that the next one after where I tweeted this and this is the episode where I'll make the

case so the term maximalism entered the crypto lexicon I believe when vital wrote about Bitcoin maximalist many many years ago where he essentially described these bitcoiners who were incredibly devoted to bitcoin to the point where everything outside of bit coin was labeled a scam was labeled useless uh was essentially derided for not being Bitcoin and so on and so forth right and you know exactly who these types of people are uh and you know and you've seen them all around and you've seen how I guess religious and and and how how how much zry they have about Bitcoin now I I'm here to essentially break what I used to think which was that maximalist are toxic for a community to now thinking that as long as a the maximalist remain a small upset of the

community they are very much needed they are actually critical to a community growing Beyond a small little subset of people because of the fact that they are the biggest supporters they are the biggest early supporters they are the ones who stick through the toughest times and if you actually look at who people would consider to be eth Maxis today and I actually believe there's a difference between Bitcoin Maxis and ethereum Maxis um I don't think that ethereum Max is I I certainly don't I don't think that we think that other things are scams I mean I there's a lot of scams we don't think that everything's a scam we see value in other things we see value in other ecosystems but we just believe in ethereum the most we want etherum to win we obviously have a lot invested in the ethereum ecosystem both with with money

but also ideologically uh and we want to see ethereum win here so if you look at who you would consider to be in eth Maxi today obviously myself right you Eric Conor is another one he's probably more Maxi than I am which is pretty crazy but yeah you you've got um maybe even DC investor for example you could you could say he's someone that's an eth Max um there I mean some people don't think this but I still believe that David Hoffman is an eth maxi too so you have this like list of of um you know high profile ethereum community members that would be considered eth Maxis now all of these people have been around for a long time they've all been through the toughest times within ethereum they've all been through multiple bare markets of ethereum they have kept the faith in ethereum for a very long time they have become ethereum's main marketing arm in

the absence of I guess the EF doing no marketing consensus not really doing anything these days and no one else really doing much marketing around ethereum and they have been there as I said through the toughest times they've also been the ones to speak up the most and have been the ones to fight fud the most and has been the ones to get into conflicts the most of which all of you benefit from by the way right if you have a problem with maximalist if you have a problem with conflict if you have a problem with people standing up for things and and and acting like maximalists for a thing and you're benefiting from that then maybe you should think think long and hard about the fact that if you're benefiting from it then it shouldn't be something that you're criticizing and I'm not in favor of people being toxic I'm not in favor

of people calling other people or being or being like toxic maximalist but I am in favor of fud fighting I am in favor of people calling out where they see it I am in favor of people correcting misinformation and that's exactly what a lot of us eth Maxis have done over the years and we've done that again through thick and thin through the toughest times and on top of all of this a lot of them have already made it guys like they could literally and for many years now quit take their money with them and never look at this ecosystem again and they would be totally fine for the rest of their lives because they've been around for so long a lot of eth Maxis have been here since like the very early days like eth Ico 2016 where they could have bought eth for a dollar or $10 they're still here they're still evangelizing eth they're

still getting into conflicts about it they're still fud fighting I mean I I think like I'm a pretty good example here guys like I actually started the daily guay uh YouTube videos when I had already made it when I was already being set I was like okay well I don't like need to do anything anymore but at the time I didn't think like that and I still don't think like that I thought wow I suddenly have the ability to do whatever I want and turns out what I want to do is just be involved with ethereum and that's what I've done since then and that is true for so many of these people they may not work directly in the ethereum ecosystem in terms of working in a company they may not work uh they may not um I work at the ethereum foundation for example but they

are still working within the ethereum ecosystem they're still doing a lot for the the ethereum ecosystem that again they don't have to do they're not forced to do they're not just trying to pump their bags cuz their bags are already up 3,000 x right so if you look at it from that perspective that to me is incredibly bullish when you have these people who could leave at any time they wanted to still be involved that means that they're here for way more than money they're here because they want to see ethereum win they want to see ethereum succeed they want to make sure that ethereum is treated the way it's supposed to be treated not treated like not treated with misinformation but treated honestly and held to a high standard of course but they're here for that they also all these people act as a way to Rally the community together any

Community needs its leaders it needs someone to Rally around or or someone's to Rally around it needs its generals right that's exactly what these people are they rally the people they get them bullish they make it so that they feel comfortable being bullish during the dark times especially this year I really tried to do that because obviously um this year uh it seemed Bleak on crypto Twitter for ethereum because the narrative was so bad for it but in the mid of all that in the turmoil of all that people were still bullish like the eth Maxes were still bullish I was bullish on the edfs getting approved by May 23rd in the face of literally everyone telling me they weren't going to get approved in the face of all the fud in the face of saying that people saying oh eat going to zero because it's not going to get an ETF I still remained

bullish in the face of all of that and I was right like I was right and then I rallied the community around that and kept people bullish on things like I'm not trying to just to my own horn here but I'm using myself as an example because I don't want to like speak for anyone else here but it wasn't just me there was so many other people out there too many to name that were doing that right um but in saying all of that as I said I don't think toxic Max maximalism isn't that positive I don't think it's good for an ecosystem I do think there is a there is sometimes a place for it in that if you're dealing with an actor who is so dishonest who gas lights all the time who is just literally an all the time then you can be a little bit of an back to them

because they're not going to respond to anything else and being an back to them basically shows the rest of the community that this person should not be taken seriously and there are a couple of people that come to mind right now you could probably imagine who they are but those people should not be taken seriously if they're just going to continually Gaslight and lie then bye like go away you're not welcome here at all we don't want anything to do with you you're not a net positive you're a net negative we don't want you here at all so taking all that together that's the the case that I'm making essentially is that you have these di hard community members that don't have to be here anymore but they are here because they love ethereum they want to see ethereum win they want to see ethereum succeed um

and also I think above all else it's really easy to be a maxi for ethereum because ethereum is credibly neutral the ethereum network doesn't care about this it doesn't know what a maximalist is it doesn't care about our feelings the ethereum network Pro produces a block every 12 seconds or produces a slot I should say every 12 seconds for as long as the network is above a onethird threshold of validator being online it will produce blocks in to Eternity essentially until the end of the world until something else happens to destroy majority of the network it's going to keep reducing those uh blocks those slots uh and it's going to to to keep processing transactions so it doesn't care about any of this but in saying that by promoting ethereum by defending ethereum against these attacks by making sure that ethereum wins we strengthen the ethereum network we strengthen the value of eth which uh strengthens the

value of ethereum's Economic Security which strengthens the value of ethereum as a as a network that is attractive for people to kind of build on that is attractive for people to build on because of the fact that it has longevity attached to it that it there's a high confidence that it's going to be around for a very long time a high confidence that it is credibly neutral it's not going to rug you that you are going to be able to build your decentralized applications on this platform and you're going to be able to scale them to the world as well on a reliable secure resilient Network that all I think comes back down to the social layer which the ethereum maximalist or eth Maxis are a huge part of a huge part of in the fact that they have an outsized voice but they are still a small subset of the community I

would say that if you took putting a percentage terms on it 90% of the ethereum or 95% of the ethereum community are not maximalist but the 51% that are are responsible for 90% of the content 90% of the vocalization of ideals values and virtues and if you are someone who has an issue with that if you're someone who has an issue with their uh these people being competitive being um being somewhat divisive going and fighting for the thing that you care about well maybe you have to rethink that because at the end of the day I am fighting for for ethereum because I want ethereum to win I truly believe in ethereum I want to defend ethereum but at the same time you're all benefiting from that and I don't like I'm not asking for anything in return I don't want you guys to pay me I don't want you guys to um to to give me props or

anything like that I don't care about any of that what I do want you guys to do is I want you to get involved in any way that you can get involved yourselves you don't have to be a maxi but get involved in any way that you can and I'll do my best to promote you because the eum community is strongest when it has the most amount of people in it not the most amount of maximalist not the most amount of um I guess ship posting on CT not the most amount of um of virtue signaling it is the strongest when its Community does things whether that's building an application fighting fud on Twitter writing educational post doing podcasts it doesn't matter buying eth right it doesn't matter doing any of that is helping ethereum you don't have to do what I do right I suggest not

doing what I do uh maybe you can do a podcast but don't do the the crypto Twitter fud fighting because it's uh it requires very thick skin that's for sure and it does get to me at times but hey I'm only human but anyway enough ranting about that I have gone for almost an hour I did not think that was going to happen but hey I haven't done an episode in a while and that is the final episode of the year so I hope you all have a great New Year's Eve I'm going to see you in the new year as I said it probably won't be until I get back from Japan I'm going to put a date on it right now and stick to it the next refu will probably be on the let's say 17th which is a Friday of January and then

from there I will try my best to stick to a 3-day a week Cadence for all of you but on that note that is it for today thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subcribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next time thanks everyone