EthStaker survey, Obol Charon v1 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #790 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of delu fuel where capap latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Dano the 3rd of July 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today we have some kind of fresh e ETF news but not really this is kind of a nothing Burger but I figured I'd mention it anyway so Nate here who you guys know I've been following for quite a while now with regards to the E ETFs uh thinks that the amendments are going to be due on July 8th so the S1 amendments that we've all been waiting for um potential final s1s by July 12th which would theoretically mean a launch week of July 15th so it's seeming like it's a mid July launch at this point but really I think we're all guessing I mean

this has been such an annoying thing like I've mentioned this before but this just been so annoying it's this drag on I guess not the market but just like on mind share around this where I look at this and I wake up you know check the news and see this news and I'm like okay more like non news for the E ETF like it kind of feels like they were approved a lifetime ago at this point and I just want them to start trading at this point I think everyone does and it's just been a little bit frustrating to see how long this process takes obviously tradire moves a lot slower but this I think is more just people not people but like the SEC maybe or I guess just general feet dragging here I don't know it just seems very very slow to me but maybe it's

going to launch uh this month maybe it'll launch next month I don't think it's going to be next month it definitely seems like it's going to be this month but yeah I mean it's been a long time coming guys I just I just can't wait for these things to finally launch so we can actually see what the inflows are going to look like and in particular I am as I've mentioned before most interested in seeing what the eth E outflows are going to look like that is the big question right now that is the only short-term bare case I could make for eth when it comes to like the ETFs because obviously uh people are basically uh making the assumption that okay well because gbtc had 54% of their total AUM outflow once that was converted to an ETF that means the eth E product is going to be the same and that

would equate to I think around $5 billion of worth of outflows from ethe now of course this is a very naive assumption this is not something that is based on anything but like uh you know I guess like one data point so and we only really have that to go off mind you uh but at the same time I've gone through the reasons before why I think that the outflows aren't going to be that much and also grayscale can surprise by making the fee a lot lower than what it is now or they can wave the fee for a period of time I think maybe more likely they wave the fee than lower it like substantially uh I think it was maybe gray stroke in the daily gr Discord Channel made a good point that the gbtc ETF fee is still quite high and they

haven't lowered that um since you know with with since the outflows have been going on um so that would really it would be really kind of silly for them to lower the eth ETF or eth E fee I should say uh to lower than that uh and obviously they're relying on people going into their mini trust you know they have the the gbtc mini trust and they're going to have the E mini trust rather than giving up potentially you know lots of money by lowering the fees here because there is a I guess um absolute fee math you can do here where essentially you say okay well if grayscale lost 50% of its AUM but it's making uh uh it's making 1.5% fees on the remaining 50% well that's still a lot more than if they were to keep all

of the AUM and lower their fees down to 2% right because they're lowering their fees substantially more than 50% and they're giving up fees because of it now it seems like the outflows have mostly stopped so there seems to be a lot of I guess like I don't know if I'd call it dumb money but like money that is very that is insensitive to the fees in gbtc right now uh but I think over time that'll probably still bleed out and a lot of the money will go into the mini trust and other ETFs but we'll have to see how that plays out there and there's no updates with regards to what the fees look like for any of the other issuers right now for the E ETFs definitely not grayscale for for eth just most curious to see what they do there I could see

them waving the fees for a little bit but Ling the fees lower than their gbtc product wouldn't really make much sense to me unless there's some other kind of wider strategy there but yeah it doesn't seem like that that would that would happen uh there but anyway that's it on the ETF front now I wanted to kick off uh discussion around a tweet that I put out uh I think this was yesterday uh where I said it may seem boring boring to us crypto natives but the main narrative that people will be fed when it comes to ethereum is that it's a platform for tokenization with black rock going all in on tokenization people want to get exposure to this and they'll do it with the eth ETFs so I've talked about this before on the refuel but essentially as I said like this is

probably table Stakes for us crypto Naes and super boring I mean we've known about tokens for forever like tokens came to ethereum I believe in 2015 or 2016 then obviously we had an explosion of them via the icos and since then tokens have been the the main game in town right everyone loves loves loves creating tokens people love speculating on them uh and and there are you know potentially millions of these things that have been created over the the years now so obviously nothing special for us but when it comes to outside of crypto and when it comes to what people are listening to what people are monitoring people especially I guess uh every type of investor I can't think of any investor that wouldn't want to get exposure to this they're always looking for I think like something that is

innovative something that is uh you know Tech related like even if you're investing in uh silver or gold for example as precious metals you're going to try and rationalize that investment especially when it comes something like silver by saying okay well you know Silver's used in computer parts or Silver's used in in this part of manufacturing and okay well if if silver gets used here or if this commodity gets used here because of some new innovation in technology that means this commodity is going to be in more demand and the price is going to go up so on and so forth so I think people are always looking for ways to invest in Innovation generally and when you have the world's largest CEO of the world's largest asset um manager go on to these mainstream Publications and say the futur is tokenization we're going to bring the

you know we're going to update the existing Financial system for the digital age and we're going to do it properly instead of all these Band-Aids that we have things are going to be much faster settlement is going to be much faster you know Global Payments Global this uh Global 24/7 stock trading so on and so forth you're going to naturally think to yourself oh well this all sounds pretty exciting like how do I get exposure to this and there's really going to only be two ways to get exp exposure to it directly by BTC ETF or the eth ETF but I don't think you're getting exposure to it with the BTC ETF because BTC and Bitcoin doesn't really do what ethereum does there is some limited stuff going on with ordinals and runes but it's completely different to what ethereum does and the tokenization stuff is definitely going to be built on

ethereum as it has been for the past few years so as an investor you're definitely going in these atfs Especial you're definitely going to be sent marketing materials related to this like I can imagine Black Rock and other issuers sorry other ETF issuers sending out these perspectives where they basically say we have this eth ETF and here's what ethereum is here's what eth is and here's what we believe you know the futurist tokenization here's why um ethereum is at the Forefront of this and this is how eth plays into that soone and so forth so I can see that happening um but it's not going to be an overnight thing I think that's a that's a big thing uh with with with cryptos where there's always a timeline mismatch here where people think that these things uh you know because we know about them today they're going to happen tomorrow

and I've discussed this at length on the refuel so I don't want to rehash my arguments again but there's always a timeline mismatch and especially when it comes to the tradire related stuff there is a huge mismatch here and I think the ETF guys or the people the issuers that have um so the companies that have issued ETFs have been trying to beat this jump for a while now and like even the analysts have basically said the same thing crypto has traditionally operated on a very fast day-to-day kind of news cycle where everything needs to happen now it's like the Tik Tok generation kind of thing right where it's like very very fast stuff happens don't being hit right now no delayed gratification no you know a lot of uh short-term planning versus long-term planning short-term speculation versus long-term speculation but the ETFs aren't like that tradire is not like

that for the most part it is a longterm thing it is a slow burn right it is it is a very kind of I guess passive thing where essentially the ETFs are going to take in tens of billions hundreds of billions potentially trillions of dollars but that's going to take de decades to you know I I wouldn't I wouldn't put a past that taking decades to reach trillions of of AUM like even just one decade I mean 10 years from now across just you know Ethan BTC who knows what other ETFs will be around in 10 years for crypto I'm sure we'll have a lot of them but Ethan BTC alone right it might take a decade for us to reach that uh you know trillions dollar Mark there or maybe maybe shorter than that but my point is is that it's not a Sprint it's

a marathon it is something of a of a huge timeline mismatch between crypto Natives and and the trifire world here and that definitely bleeds into these sorts of things like tokenization like general adoption of things everyone's like oh we've been you know doing building in crypto for the better part of 10 years now in terms of building out products that um that uh that uh smart contracts and uh apps like dii and and you know decentralized exchanges all that sorts of stuff people are asking you know where's the use case it's like well guys like these things have been growing steadily for years now and the biggest product Market fit in crypto is stable coins and I believe that everything flows from stable coins I actually mentioned this in the daily way Discord Channel today where I said that

stable coins are the key to mass adoption and yes okay they're not true crypto they're not like decentralized they're very centralized they're potentially even worse than fat in a bank account in terms of I guess um uh guarantees around security not maybe not so much security but like custody or essentially getting your funds Frozen things like that right like I get those concerns there but they are the the the I guess a gateway drug here where essentially everyone does payments right everyone sends money to to people so that's why stable coins have seen such a huge uptick not to mention the utility they bring by just being a relatively stable asset in a in an ecosystem where everything is is relatively unstable right so that is the front door there

and then from there everything just ble just follows off of that and that I think has been growing steadily over time stable coin dominance has only gone up over time in terms of uh sorry stable coin market cap I should say has only gone up over time which flows onto the rest of the ecosystem uh and I think that people need to kind of zoom out a bit sometimes or a lot of the time in crypto and realize that these things are happening they're just not happening day-to-day it's not like you're going to get you know 100x adoption overnight just I think the mismatch comes from the fact that you could buy a token like a meme coin for example and it can go like 10 100 x in a couple of days whereas adoption actual adoption of the actual Tech takes a lot longer than this you're

not going to get you know uh one day have 100 users and then the next day you're going to 100x your user base and they're going to stay like you might 100x your user base in terms of people farming the you know farming via addresses but in terms of long-term sustainable users here uh you're not going to 100x that overnight that's a years long thing right and I think that that's a good thing because it leads to more sustainable adoption but it is something of a of a mismatch within the crypto natives versus I guess uh The Wider ecosystem here all right so moving on the E St 2024 staking survey report has been published so they've tweeted out some highlights from this report so 32% of the respondents were Genesis stakers 74% do not work in crypto which is very very

interesting to me I didn't think it was that high uh and 62% indicated that they have no plans to exit staking now of course uh this is a solo Staker survey here I believe um uh coupled with I guess like General staking and what this actually looks like you can see here you know du run validator Hardware at home most of the respondents were home stakers but there is a bit of liquid staking in here you know SAS customer something like a coin base or or a binance or something else there but this is very comprehensive I highly recommend giving the whole uh kind of blog post a read here but uh I I read it just before and there are a couple of things I wanted to kind of point out I should have highlighted this before I got on the on the refill because I'm I'm here

like scrolling through trying to find what I wanted to point out uh there was uh there was something very interesting and I don't know where it was maybe it was towards the end of the report here I'm sorry I'm just I'm just bringing it up here bear with me for a sec here yeah the demographic side of things that's what I wanted to to quickly shout out first so it it's it's it's not surprising but 95% of the respondents self-reported as male as I said not surprising considering that if you go to any crypto event you can kind of see the imbalance for yourself in terms of uh in terms of gender imbalance like it's majority males and this is not disimilar to I guess the rest of tech uh generally and finance as well it's like they're very male kind of dominated Fields here

but I honestly didn't think it was that high like like obviously this is self-reporting this is not something that with kyc there's no like you know we don't know for sure if this is this is true or not but I can't think of any reason why uh someone would want to report themselves as male if they weren't like I don't like unless they were trying to purposely muddy the waters here but as far as I know this survey was was definitely pruned for all of that and and checked and and cross referenced um so yeah that's that's quite High I didn't think it was that high high but as I said it makes sense in the in the general trend of things there um and 90% identified as somewhat or strongly technical I guess that makes sense because you do have to be somewhat or strongly technical in order to be a

solo Staker I would say that you don't have to be strongly technical but somewhat definitely I I I don't think that you can't have no technical skills and and become a solo Staker because even if you can follow the guides in order to set up your staking rig which is relatively easy you have to be able to troubleshoot it and troubleshooting comes in many different flavors there's not really a one- siiz fits all guide for troubleshooting and I think that's where the somewhat technical uh comes into it and as I said 74% of respondents do not work in crypto and 88% are staking from North America Europe or Australia I was actually surprised to see Australia mentioned there uh because of the fact that obviously North America and Europe are the two biggest crypto hubs right now or kind of concentration

of of crypto people right now but Australia there's not one that I think of when I think of of crypto hubs but at the same time I think that Australia is definitely batting above the average when it comes to the amount of people in crypto or involved in crypto projects it's just that we don't really get that much representation outside of uh outside of things like this or outside of people making jokes about Australia such as like spiders killing you or um you know kangaroos uh people riding Kangaroos and things like that just just the silly memes that you you're all used to but I thought that was was quite funny there but anyway I want you guys to go read this report for yourself I'll link you in the YouTube description below huge kudos to East ster for putting this together I was one of the

respondents here happy to always uh always help with these things and I tried to get the word out when they did this survey but this is going to be pretty much like the closest thing we have to a comprehensive survey of Solo stakers or of you know e stakers generally um with with our emphasis on solo stakers obviously here um which I think that uh we we definitely need more of because we want to know what solo staking what the solo staking ecos looks like across the uh across the whole ethereum network here and also in the face of some people trying to say that solo staking is not sustainable and we shouldn't optimize for it anymore I definitely think that that is not the case I think solo stakers are the Beating Heart of ethereum I'm very proud to be one and I will continue to be one

until the day I die pretty much I plan to not shut down my validators until then even if I'm not earning any rewards or earning very little rewards I don't care I love being a Staker on the network uh and I'm doing it in various different means you guys know I've got rocket pool mini pools as well uh but yeah anyway go give this report a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right staying on the topic of staking obal has released Shon V1 after 3 years of development testing and mainnet adoption this transitions uh distributed validators from an early technology to one ready to be the standard for all ethereum validators now you guys know about all about obal and DBT generally I've spoken at length about this and you

guys know I was part of of the first mainnet cluster of uh of obal on on the ethereum mainnet here I was using the showon client software you know even though I was basically an alpha Tester the the software was pretty good I mean there was some things I had to troubleshoot but it was pretty good even in Alpha State and now that it is uh basically available in a 1.0 production release fashion anyone can get started with this uh today if you would like I mean oal has been alive on mainnet for a little while now uh but the fact that this is a 1.0 release is obviously a huge milestone so huge kudos to the obal team you know it's funny you guys know I'm most of you should know by this point that I'm an angel investor in obal but I invested in them quite a while ago

they were one of my first Angel Investments actually and I remember talking to them at the time and being like okay I understand what you guys are building but we're so early in the ethereum staking game I don't know what this is going to look like but I really want to want to back you guys and I really want to see you guys bring this to to main it and over the years they've just continued to execute on this they've continued to bring uh to bring Innovative features to the staking ego system and they do truly understand what makes staking unique on ethereum in that uh solo staking you know Squad staking being able to run your own validators and your own full nodes on your own Hardware that is the Beating Heart of of ethereum here so they've been really hard at work at this for quite a while

now and I'm just very very humbled to be able to be a small part of it as an investor but also as someone who um who has uh basically been as part of a main net DV DVT cluster for quite a while now but you can go give the full blog post here a read I'll link in the YouTube description below but just wanted to give a huge Kudos out to uh to oble again for getting this out there all right so as you guys know there has been a lot of discussion over the last few months around ethereum's issuance curve and potentially potentially uh lowering it uh for various different reasons now I'm not going to rehash the debate that it's been raging on for the last few months about this I just wanted to bring it up today because Caspar one of the people

that has been researching this has introduced a website called issu . WTF now on this website you can go and find pretty much everything that you need in order to uh in order to um get familiar with what the research is looking at what the current state of thinking is uh and a bunch of supporting research over the years as well you know in in the form of like research posts blog posts talks podcasts uh papers so on and so forth so this is your One-Stop shop for everything ethereum issuance policy spefic specifically with regards to uh the things that have been spoken about over the last uh few months here so definitely go check this out for yourself this is going to take you a while to get through if you wanted to

get through all of it but if you want to be as up to speed as possible on essentially the the thinking around ethereum's issuance policy this is definitely something you should go check out so I'll link it in the you description below for you to do so all right ZK Sync has announced today uh something called the elastic chain which is an ever expanding network of ZK rollups secured by math and natively Inter interoperable under a uniform intuitive ux AKA this is ZK s's version of a super chain so as you guys know pretty much every L2 ecosystem uh is trying to do a super chain right now uh optimism has it polygon's doing it arbitrum is doing it with their orbit stuff polygon with the cdk and now ZK

sync unveiled today the elastic chain which is their way of doing it uh here now as I've said in in the past I still strongly believe that the L2 ecosystem longterm is going to look like a bunch of these super chains interoperating with each other I think that they're all eventually going to be ZK I don't really think optimistic Roll-Ups are going to survive long term um I think that the the existing optimistic Roll-Ups will become ZK Roll-Ups but I meant the actual like fraud proving architecture it seems like uh well at least I believe that over the long term you know the next few years even a lot of these things are just going to become ZK because ZK just has a distinct advantage over over optimistic rollup or over optimistic rollup technology generally

now you can go give this uh I guess like announcement a read for yourself I'll link it in the yoube description below but I wanted to focus on one thing from this uh from this tweet thread here which was like a chart that got well I guess like a little table that got all of crypto Twitter talking today and not for the right reasons so I hate these tables guys first and foremost these comparison tables between different projects that make the project that is tweeting it or the project that is talking about it look better best and their competitors look worse because usually basically 99% of the time these things are not accurate at all and this is no exception so the reason why I wanted to call this out is because there are a few things wrong here one the

throughput TPS measurement makes absolutely no sense like I don't even know why this is even in here like the AG layer for example is is not something that gives you TPS like it is a is it is a um a layer for assets to live on it unified the layer it's not trying to be a chain that does millions of TPS or whatever you whatever else right it's not that at all and I think the same is true for the optimism super chain here measuring getting TPS it just doesn't really make much sense uh the other things are verifiability I don't know why they've got no here for verif verifiability on on the super chain where essentially you can verify optimism chains right now and you will be able to even easier in the future they've got fraud proofs live but also

you can run the full node today I mean you've seen the ethereum on arm Twitter account tweet about this before um so those are just like two glaring things in terms of shared interoperability I believe the super chain has that even though they have na here native interoperability I believe is not going to be one week I believe it's going to be shorter than that um on the super chain as well so just generally I don't like this table and as I said like I don't like these tables at all because they're usually not accurate uh and it does everyone a disservice here so I don't know what like the I guess the goal of this was besides making the super chain and the AG layer look inferior to the elastic chain but generally not not a huge fan of that but anyway that's just a little thing I

wanted to nitpick there what I do think is cool is the fact that zky is doing a super chain because I think that if you want to survive long term and be one of the biggest l2s you have to do a super chain like there's there's no other way about it because it's a network Effect game if you don't do it right and the chains that otherwise would have built in your ecosystem go buil in ecosystem then that is you losing out on the network effect so for example if you uh if you're a builder and you want to spin up your own roll up but you don't want to build it yourself you want to use the existing Stacks out there well now you have arbitrum orbit stack you have polygon cdk you have the op stack and you have the elastic chain uh stack from

ZK Sync here so out of those four and I believe there'll be others in the future you you make a choice of where you want to basically deploy and that will be that will depend on a bunch of different factors but can you imagine for example if ZK sync didn't have this well then they wouldn't even be in the equation they would be they would lose out to the other three because the project wouldn't even consider them so that's why I think that the bigger l2s out there will go down this path for for the most part here and become part of the super chain or or do their own Super chain um just for the fact that they're trying to gather a network effect now will this work for all of the l2s no it won't and I'm going to bring up L2 beat here just

to give you a list of projects that I think this is actually going to work for it's going to work work for arbitrum I think it's going to work for op stack um and I think you know polygon's gotten a lot of lot of traction here with with chains out there but their main chain right now the polygon POS chain isn't a uh L2 yet it is still a side chain so I think until they do that it's a bit 50/50 right now um ZK sync I don't know what it's going to look like they are a top five L2 with ZK sync error they do have a lot of attention they do have a lot of uh lot of good Marketing in BD chops so probably they can they can do something there but if you look at the other Standalone al2 here like I don't

know if Len is doing a super chain mantle scroll I don't know if starkware is doing one um and then I'm just going down the list here of of independent ones uh Tao is something different they're doing a Bas rollup uh so so they're definitely um filling a different Nisha a mutable is built on polygon technology uh as stars polygon technology right so if you actually go through the list there are only a few independent l2s left that aren't doing their their own Super chain thing um and some of them more successful than others but like are they going to be forced into doing it because of the network Effect game like I I really think so because if we're going to be in a live in a world where everyone wants to spin up their own rollup as like an app chain then you're not going to get

those developers deploying their app on your chain on your L2 or if they do do that they're not going to be paying much attention to it versus their own chain so I think that the natural consequence over time will be that the super chains win out over the over the smaller ones here and there will be some I think Niche chains that kind of get traction that aren't part of a super chain but they may just Join one because it's very similar to how countries have trade agreements with each other right like and have better trade agreements with some countries versus other ones like for example if you want to have a free trade agreement with low tariffs and really easy trade between two countries you could consider that to be akin to uh a chain joining like the op super chain for example whereas if you have more

restrictive trading policies between chains it would be like two super chains trying to communicate with each other right so and and you know I guess like it's more expensive to communicate takes longer uh to to trade sort of things like that as well so there are some loose analogies at play here but that's generally how I see it there but anyway you can go give ZK syns announcement a read for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so staying on the L2 topic here so there's been a lot of I guess talk over the last maybe couple of years about l2s becoming l ones once they become very successful now I understand if you're coming at this uh from I guess like a noob perspective where you may

not understand why an L2 is an L2 and you may just look at it as another chain and be like okay well why wouldn't this thing just become an L1 if they're super successful why keep uh I guess like they call it paying rent to ethereum L1 uh so on and so forth so the answer may be obvious to people that have listened to the refill for years now because what I'm going to say is not going to be news to you guys but there was a tweet that was put up by Yong today who is one of the people building Mega eth which is a a a super trying to be a super scalable evm rollup on ethereum here uh where he was quote tweeting someone saying uh that you know mega mega eth could be launched as an L1 instead of an L2 uh and they'd be better

off doing that and Yong says no well this is wrong many of the Mega E Technologies for scaling l2s don't apply to L1 the only reason we can Implement such a aggressive optimizations is that we can leverage the base layers ethereum and Igan da for security and sensorship resistance if you're looking to build a high performance L1 study salana Aptos or monad the design space for high performance l1's and l2s are just very different so no mega eth is never going to be in L1 it just doesn't make any sense this is what I've been banging on for years guys is that being an L1 is inferior to being an L2 if your goal is scalability if your goal is performance if your goal is uh making sure you have reliability by settling down to to something like a like ethereum like a

global settlement layer very secure L1 and a lot of the Innovations as Yong says here especially around ZK um are are are being done at L2 and are not possible to be done as an L1 like you have to as an L1 the number one thing at least I think it's the number one thing I may be wrong here but the number one thing you have to actually consider is the fact that you have to come to consensus on things so you're limited by that you're limited by the fact you have to come to consensus with a a a ideal ideally globally distributed validator set that is economically secured not to attack sorry Eon economically incentivized not to attack the chain right for and also to stay online and keep the chain up you that's extremely difficult that is not an easy task at

all and you're also paying for that out of uh token rewards too right like as a as a network you're paying out token rewards to do this whereas within L2 you don't have to worry about this at all all you're doing is posting down your data and proof to ethereum L1 or you're posting your data elsewhere and posting your proof down to L1 and suddenly you are an L2 you have your Bridge you're deployed on ethereum Manet people can bridge in and out to your L2 and there you go you you're done you don't have to worry about coming to consensus on things you don't have to worry about spinning up a you know widely distributed validator set you obviously do have to worry about some other things like making sure that anyone can run a sequencer so you get better censorship resistant guarant resistance guarantees

from there but when you don't have to worry about coming to consensus on something when you don't have to worry about the distributed computing problems you can just focus on making the most performance most scalable chain uh that's that's ever been conceived really and that's why I think that L2 specifically rollups are going to be the most scalable chains out there and they I mean they are not there yet of course but they are going to get there definitely so I'm glad that Yong put this out here because that pervasive narrative that l2s once they get big enough going to become l1s is wrong on so many different reasons but especially the technical Reasons I'm not even talking about like the I guess um the incentive reasons of well why would you

give up your entire network effect like yeah okay maybe you've been able to develop your own network effect but the thing is is that a lot of those people came to your chain because you're an L2 not because you're an L1 because they feel more secure on an L2 versus an L1 um I know for a fact I would immediately remove all of my assets from any chain that decided to migrate from becoming an L2 to L1 uh I would not trust that at all uh and you know the fact that they even would do that would uh basically just be a huge betrayal of I guess trust for the ecosystem as well for their Community as well so I just don't see that happening I understand if you're coming at this from A New Perspective and you don't really know what you're talking about it can seem logical that

once an L2 gets big enough it becomes an L1 it's kind of like when when you say oh well if a country gets big enough H it becomes independent like for example all the British col colonies basically saying well screw you royal family we're going to become independent that's not that's not the same thing as this right that's not the same thing as this at all it'd be like you know what it would be like it'd be like a skyscraper in a city saying to the city hey we want to become independent of you uh because we make so much money in this you know in this building uh we we we don't want to be part of your country anymore we don't we don't want to be part of your city anymore um and you know we're just going to do that well okay but how are you

going to do that you can't move the building so you're still in the city and now all of a sudden you have all of the other costs associated with running a building that you have to pay out of your own pocket um you now don't have the the protection the guarantees of the laws of the city uh that you're in and the country that you're in like it just all breaks apart right so that would be the better analogy here not the analogy of a country you know breaks apart from another country and and no you know no longer a sorry a colony breaks apart it's no longer a colony becomes its own country has its own rules and regulations sure go and do that it's historically extremely difficult but also it's not it's not the analogy uh that is I guess um useful here when

comparing l2s and l1's all right moving on from that just to some news from Circle so you guys know that there has been a regulation called M or mic running through the EU um and I think it was put into force a few months ago now a circle announced that they are the first uh Global stable coin issuer to to achieve MAA compliance here for the usdc and euroc or EC stable coins uh so kudos to them congrats on that but I'm going to put on my bare hat for a little bit here and say that I don't like this trend because what this is guys this is regulatory capture so yeah okay usdc has this but will tether have this will usdt have this will I

mean b b USD doesn't exist anymore but will it have had this will other stable coins have this I'm not convinced they will because once you have this once you have regulatory approval once you are uh you have that advantage over your competition why would you want your competition to be able to have that as well so what you do is you start engaging in regulatory capture you start greasing the wheels of the right people right and this is not something that Circle hasn't done in the past I'm not accusing them of doing this or anything like that but they have been in court before arguing that uh you know tether is basically a complete fraud is going to collapse at any moment like I'm I'm paraphrasing here they didn't say these

exact things but they were basically in court fighting tether essentially right and obviously to their own benefit here so as much as I love usdc as a stable coin I love the fact that it exists I love that uh people can use it and people can get value out of it I don't love regulatory capture I don't love uh winners and losers being chosen by government protection or regulatory protection so I really hope that other stable coin issuers can get this Mega compliance I hope that you sdt can obviously because it's the biggest one but others as well I hope that this this regulation doesn't uh hinder these uh I guess like smaller stable coins as well the stable coin startups from being able to compete with the bigger guys because

that is traditionally what it's been in every industry is that uh bigger players capture the regulatory environment and then squeeze out smaller players by doing that by making it essentially illegal for them to compete which is not great but yeah anyway I just wanted to bring that up because I did see people celebrating this but I thought there was a bit of a a bare case to be made on uh that front there all right finishing up today's episode I'm not going to spend too long on this even though I could talk about this for hours I put out another tweet today where I said crypto is a cultural ssocial movement first and a technology movement second this I believe is where the majority of disagreements arise from in this ecosystem I'm in it for the tech but I wouldn't be in it at all if I didn't

Vibe with the cultural social movement I haven't been I guess uh I haven't haven't been hiding this from you guys at all I haven't been quiet about this but if I didn't Vibe with ethereum's culture and and what it's trying to do and what it's trying to be from a social perspective I wouldn't be in ethereum and if I wasn't in ethereum I wouldn't be in crypto because every other ecosystem that I look at I don't Vibe with the culture every other L1 ecosystem in particular I don't Vibe with the culture I definitely do not Vibe with Bitcoin culture at all like hardcore libertarian everything's a scam except Bitcoin like I don't Vibe with that I know there are other pockets of Bitcoin culture but they begin to look a lot like copycats of ethereum culture just with Bitcoin so I kind of see that

as redundant and then you can go down the list of other ecosystems out there I don't want to really call out any in particular but I feel like it's worth calling them out just to illustrate my point so I'll go down on the list salana obvious example I I don't Vibe with that culture at all it's a very very different culture to ethereum a lot of it is uh a lot of it is obviously the DJ and culture but even outside of that the culture culture of moving fast and breaking things the culture of not respecting the fact that uh that the value of this industry is decentralization and we should be able to run you know full nodes at home on consumer Hardware stuff like that like I don't want to FUD Sal or anything like that but that that's what I'm saying like it's a different culture and I

don't Vibe with that um and then you can go down the list right you got cardano definitely don't Vibe with that that culture Avalanche it's essentially a shitty copycat of of ethereum in my eyes because they have an evm chain on there their supernet thing or sorry I should say their subnets thing is uh vastly inferior to ler 2 on ethereum uh so from the te that's technical side I just don't Vibe with and the cultural side the Avalanche people from what I've noticed on Twitter have been incredibly toxic like very very toxic and seem to not really care about anything but like on other ecosystems especially ethereum right and then I mean there's a laundry list of these l1s polka dot polka Dot's a funny one because the most attention polka dot has gotten in the

last like few years has been this week because I'm sure you saw on Twitter that there was a bunch of stuff that came out about how they're burning like $80 million every six months um and essentially spending all this money on advertising and spending all this money on on um Shilling via uh influencers and stuff like that so that was funny but I don't even know what polka dot culture is to be honest I think it might be closer to ethereum culture but at the same time they seem to be too far on the let's wax philosophically about governance side like the last time I checked in they were very down that rabbit hole and I'm like okay that's cool and all but the you know philosophers are thinkers they're not doers like a lot of the time they're just thinking about things which is

valuable but you have to have B if you're building out an ecosystem right so you have to have thinkers and doers here and then you can keep going down the list here I'm not going to I'm not going to call out everything else but yeah generally I don't Vibe with any of the other ecosystems out there don't Vibe with the culture at all don't think I'd fit in that culture but in ethereum I'm home and I think a lot of that uh sorry I think that applies to a lot of you guys uh as well but on that note that I'm going to end that this extra long episode uh today there maybe I need to bring back the daily episodes instead of Monday Wednesday Friday Cadence because I'm going over time but anyway enough of that that is it for today so thank everyone for listening and

watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Friday thanks everyone