Pectra mainnet date, Celo becomes an L2 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #835 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Lego Refuel where recap the latest news in the ecosystem. I'm your host Dan 28th of March 2025. All right everyone, let's get into it. So a bunch of news to get through this week or over the last few days cuz I missed Wednesday's episode got to do with core development updates. So there's been a lot of stuff on the core development side. Uh and the biggest I think piece of news um there's two big pieces of news mainly around Perra. So the first piece is that the hoodie test net successfully forked a petra. As you guys know, the Hleski and Sapoleia test nets did not go as planned with Hleshki pretty much dying, coming back to life.

Still alive today, but eventually going to be sunset. And Sapoleia also having an issue, but nowhere near as bad as what happened with Hleski. Sapoleia is is live and working just fine from what I know. And Hoodie successfully forked with no issues from what I saw. I may be wrong on that. Uh there might have been some issues, but I didn't see any issues there. So it seems like uh it was a successful fork. So it's great to see that. Obviously that means that we can now set a mainet date for Pekra which is what we did. So the latest allcore devs call was quite a big one. But the biggest piece of news from that call was that the Pectra date mainet date has tentatively been scheduled for April 30th. So we're still doing it in April, guys. We're not doing it in May. I think

I mentioned on the last refuel the refill before that I I I could see it happening in May, but core devs want to be aggressive here. They still want it to happen in April. Now given this is the end of April. So obviously not that early to midappril that we initially thought it would be but you know the end of April is only a really realistically a twoe delay from the original estimate. is there was never a date given but it's the original estimate that we uh I mean that I really gave based on the information at the time and then obviously as the test nets didn't go you know according to plan so to speak uh that date was was pushed back because of the fact that we had to make sure that we could do a successful test net fork uh and that everything was okay with the

PRA EIP here. So yeah, April 30th is the tentatively scheduled mainet date for Pectra. Obviously Pectra is the biggest upgrade in Ethereum's history. You guys know everything that's going into it. so far. If you don't, there's plenty of resources out there for you to check out. You guys know that my favorite EIPs from Pectra, uh, the EIP to increase the blob count, uh, and also Max EB. I think Max EB is probably my my favorite because of the fact that I've been championing in it for so long, and the fact that I think it really helps with, um, you know, uh, with a lot of different things across the network. It takes a load off the network, which helps with scalability. It lets solo stakers compound their staking rewards better. It just brings more efficiency to staking overall. So, yeah, I think that's my favorite EIP in in Pekra

there. But I'm glad that we're getting a blob count increase. I'm glad we're getting um account abstraction. I'm glad we're getting a lot of other things uh in there as well. Uh one one other off the top of my head is execution layer trigable exits for staking. So making staking uh pools more trustless there which is really great uh to st to see. But that was not the only thing that was discussed on the latest allcore devs call. Uh you can see here in Tim Bico summary, he's got a proper summary here which I'll link in the YouTube description below. But another big part of it was that uh this discussion around EOF. Now, remember I mentioned on the last refuel or the refill before that when it comes to EOF, like I was seeing a bit of drama about it. I was seeing a

little bit of people still kind of on the on the fence about it saying that, you know, we we really shouldn't be going forward with it. It's too big of a security risk for the network to do it. So on and so forth. But honestly, like I don't have that view at this point. I have done a lot of research into this myself. I'm not a developer, so it is kind of hard to understand this from the developers point of view for myself, but essentially I've done a lot of research. I've asked the right people and I've come to the conclusion that the risk is worth the benefits that EOF comes with. And at the same time, EOF is done, guys. Like, it's fully tested. It works with all the clients. It's ready to go. The only reason why it hasn't happened yet is because it kept getting pushed back

uh due to other EIPs taking priority. But the EOF uh list of IP EIPs, there's there's multiple EIPs in this. It's not not just one, but they've all been tested. It all works. Everything's fine. It's not really that big of a risk. Um and and I think the people who are bringing up the uh the the the the kind of like I guess uh the the reasons around uh the risks I guess you could say around this are people that may not understand it and maybe relying on what other people are saying and then they may be taking one person's opinion and and kind of uh I guess like applying that to everyone else which is a bit confusing because people are saying oh well the core devs are against this and I actually looked into this like in terms of the core devs that have been

vocally against um against eof there's only been a couple or or a few out of the I mean there's hundreds of core devs right core devs and researchers here so from that point of view I don't think that the you know those people should be holding up something and look if something goes wrong with the network we fix it guys like it's simple as that and this is on the execution layer side of things so um it would potentially be easier to fix than a consensus layer uh uh related bug there but hey it depends on the bug obviously there uh and as you guys know I've been talking a lot about podas recently as well. So obviously Pas is still scheduled to go live in Forsaka alongside EOF. That is the priority.

Like if we had to make a choice between PIAS and EOF, I would 100% say that Podas would be chosen um by everyone pretty much like even probably those in favor of EOF, like heavily in favor of it. Would rather get POAS on the network before EOF. But uh from what I've seen and what I can tell, we can get both of these things in Fusaka, which is still tentatively scheduled for the end of Q3 of this year. So, we're not going to have to wait another year after Petra goes live to get this live. So, that's really uh cool to see there. History expiry is another thing I've been talking about. So, premerge history expiry will be going live on Sapoleia on May 1st and Maynet will come one month after Peterra. So, originally I think Maynet was going to be on May 1st, but

this has been pushed back by a month. Not a huge deal here, guys. Not something that you're going to notice as a user. Definitely not. Um uh but yeah, it's definitely something that we need here. So, that's going to be happening on mainet one month after. So on June 1st, we're going to have premerge history uh being kind of expired there or history dropping I should say. What this means is that basically all of the history of the of the chain that happened before the merge. So before September 15th, 2022 will be dropped from the requirements of like a full node for example. So the chain size is going to come down and uh that's going to be great for obviously uh syncing a full node and getting started with validating and all that uh stuff there.

But anyway, you can go read the rest of the recap. It's um Tim Bico has that here for you. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But great to see that we finally got a mainet date for Peterra. Not too long now, guys. Like it's basically a month away right from today until we get it. Uh and I'm sure there's going to be a live stream or something. Hopefully I can be on that cuz it's an exciting time for the network whenever it upgrades there. So, there's been a lot of talk about blobs for a while now on two fronts, right? like and I think I've mentioned this so many times at this point but it's worth refreshing the two fronts that the these discussions are happening on because they're related but also independent of each other. So the first one is the fact that okay we want

to scale blobs up as fast as we can right we want to add more blobs to the network but we also want to make sure that we're not overloading the network. So there's a lot of discussions around this from things like podas to increasing uh the blob count and and potentially blob size to doing blob parameter only forks which basically means uh just doing blob related forks going for like hard forks on the network uh going forward separate to the other forks right in order to get in order to scale up blobs more. Well, Alex Stokes here today basically posted and the reason why I'm bringing this up today is because he posted a specific proposal around this where he he gave a TLDTR that he wants to see or he would like to see uh blob parameter only style automatic blob scaling with two times

the blobs every 2 months after an initial observation period. And I've talked about this before in context of the gas limit where you could just have some like automated thing that happens every two months and if something breaks we revert it. It's not a big deal if something was to to break here. And realistically, if anything was to break, it wouldn't be in like a major way. It would be a small break. Maybe a, you know, maybe 10% of the network is not being not keeping up and is is is basically behind because of the fact that there's too much load on the network. Well, as I said, that is relatively easy to get around. And also, there's discussion around giving the uh there already is actually uh this implemented in some of the clients, giving the um the clients the ability to set how many blobs they want to have uh

and how many blobs they want to process essentially. So you can already control this and obviously as you guys know validators already have control over the gas limit too. So there is a a kind of breath of of stuff going on here. Now you can go check out Alex's post for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But the second thing with regards to blobs which is something that Anders has been posting about recently in the context of uh of research initiatives to um to address this issue. But another another thing that people bring up is the and this is kind of like a two-parter, but essentially it's the inefficiency of the blob fee market where it's too volatile.

It's it's it's not um reactive enough to price discovery and to to demand increases and and and and demand drop offs etc. And also around fear revenue that blobs generate like should there be a minimum fee for example for blobs? Should be Ethereum be charging more for them? people making jokes about Ethereum should put tariffs on the L2s and you know to generate more fee revenue on blobs and so on and so forth. Ander's proposal uh is basically on the first part or trying it tries to address the first part which uh is around the efficiency of the blob fee market cuz right now the blob fee market is not very efficient. It's not great. It's very volatile. It's not what we want it to be where we want it to be at. Well, Anders here has put together an EIP called

EIP7918, which is called blob base fee bounded by execution cost. Uh, and he's proposed this for inclusion in Fusaka. So, maybe this makes it into Forsaka. I don't know. U, but this, I think, is related to something that I brought up last uh episode or the episode before around this as well that Anders was working on, but you can go give this a look for yourself and check it out. I'll link it in the YouTube uh description uh uh for you to do so. Uh but essentially this would uh at least from how Anders describes it address that issue around the blob base fee not uh being reactive enough there. Uh so essentially uh allow them to release as he says here allow the blob auction to reach equilibrium relative to the the price signal here.

So just a better demand and supply curve uh for blobs there. But yeah, those are the two main things with regards to blobs going forward you're going to be hearing a lot about. I think you could even say that like the fee revenue generated by blobs and increasing the I guess fees generated by by by blobs by putting in a min fee or something like that is another separate thing. So that could be like a third thing in with regards to blobs that kind of falls into the second thing. And you guys know my stance on this. My stance is that we shouldn't be too worried about fee revenue capture at this point in time.

we need to worry about growing market share, making sure that we have apps on the chain that can actually take use get usage out of this extra capacity, which is happening. I mean, it's going to happen slower than people would like it to happen, but it is happening. There are more apps going live all the time. There's more people coming on chain. I I think I you know, I discussed last episode or the episode before, I can't remember. Like it's it's too long between episodes, so I lose track of where I've discussed this, but you guys know that I've discussed that I think a lot of people are going to be coming on board or on chain via these intermediaries. They're not going to necessarily come on chain themselves, but they're going to go through the intermediate intermediaries such as centralized exchanges like Coinbase, for

example, because they're making a big push with Bass, of course. And then you have the Tradfi um kind of uh companies getting involved and those institutions getting involved that are going to offer these services and these products and that's what's going to bring I think a lot of people on chain. But then that's probably just like talking about when it comes to DeFi. If you're talking about other use cases, there might be more direct onchain on boarding happening here. So, for example, decentralized social media or onchain social media with something like Farcaster is more of a direct thing. You do access Farcaster via like a third-party app such as Warpcast, for example, but it's still very direct. It's not like you're going to go to your bank and say, "Hey, I want to access Farcaster. Can I do it through my bank account?" Like, no. So, that's

just going to apply to DeFi there. It's like you So, there's there's basically people going to the source and going direct and there's people going through an intermediary. So when it comes to DeFi, I do expect most people to go through intermediaries, but when it comes to the other use cases, it's going to be more direct here. But then you can make the argument around, okay, well, what drives fear revenue? What drives value acral? What drives the most activity? And as you guys know, DeFi drives the most activity, fear revenue, value acral by far. Like nothing even comes close to that. Okay. Well, then what does that look like in a world where everyone's going through these different intermediaries? I think it looks similar to what we have today. To be honest, I think it looks similar in the fact that there's still going to be

lots of money coming on chain. We're going to be able to see it. We're going to be able to see the flows. Stable coins obviously are going to be massive. They already are massive and they're just going to keep getting bigger from here. Um, but they'll be done through these centralized intermediaries for better or worse. Like, I'm not going to argue uh for for better or worse here, guys. You guys know my stance on what I like about uh Ethereum as a network, what I like about public public permissionless blockchains. It gives users the choice. It's not that you're forced into it. is that you have a choice here. But when given the choice, most people will go, and I I've talked about this again in the past, but most people will go with the path of least resistance. They're not going to jump through a million different hoops. No

matter how easy we make it, they're still not going to jump through the hoop of self-custody of doing things on their own. Most people are just not wired to do it that way, or they don't have the time to do it that way, or they don't trust themselves, especially when it comes to money, especially when you've been trained your whole life to trust the banks with your money. Because at the end of the day, if you've grown up in a uh you know, a a relatively developed Western nation such as uh obviously the US or Canada or you know, Western Europe, here in Australia, it's the same thing, right? You were taught from a very young age that you store your money in the bank account, right?

They keep it secure for you. Cash is not secure because obviously cash can be stolen from you. So on and so forth, right? uh and to access any of the digital e ecosystem that exists in the in the traditional finance world, you have to go through a bank or another centralized finance intermediary anyway. So competing with that is very very difficult. Maybe there's a paradigm shift over the next 50 to 100 years where people suddenly wake up and say okay well I want to self-custody because it's really secure. It's actually really hard for me to lose my money but it's very secure even if I'm doing it myself instead of outsourcing it to someone else. Maybe we see a shift there, but I just don't see that shift happening anytime soon, guys. So, coming back to what I was saying with regards to I guess like blob uh blob uh demand and

blob fear revenue and the fact that I think that we should be focusing on capturing the market share. The market share capture that I want to see is across everything, not just the natives, not just people who come on chain, the enthusiasts, but also obviously the institutions and tradi which are mostly interested in Ethereum today and we want to keep it that way. But if they can't do what they want to do on Ethereum in a scalable way where they're, you know, they're not getting eaten alive by by cost because they're coming in to to essentially lower their costs here. Ethereum needs to be that technology for them. Needs to be the best solution for them. And I think it is right now. They obviously care a lot about security and reliability and even decentralization, believe it or not. But in order to scale up those properties, we have to keep

scaling Ethereum. And in order to do that, we have to keep scaling blobs, scale the L1 gas limit. And that's what a lot of this is focused on. The thing that goes directly against that is if we focus too much on value accur because then we start having conversations around okay well we need to charge uh rollups as much as possible for blob usage and they need to be paying heaps for blob usage and then what do you think happens from there? Well the what happens from there is that you have a lot of internal strife within I think the community rollups and L2 start getting annoyed. They may just start using alt da because they're like well this is too expensive for us. We're going to go use alt da and then we end up bleeding market share. So, it's not good to do that. I don't see that as the

right path at this point in time. I don't think the core developers see that as the right path. I don't think anyone who understands economic incentives sees that as the right path right now. But I keep seeing these discussions pop up. And I'm not against having a minimum fee for blobs. I'm not against that at all. But if you do the math on it, even like a a minimum fee, a relatively high minimum fee, I don't know what the dollar amount would be, but I've done the math on it before and I've done it in the past uh a while in the past. It still wouldn't be anything that you know is substantial enough to I don't know move the ETH price up by hundred billion market cap or something like that. It wouldn't do that. You've you guys know my view on ETH asset and where it gets

most of its value from. If you don't agree with that or don't see that then obviously don't buy ETH or hold ETH. That's totally up to you, right? Um but that's that's kind of my view on my thesis on it uh there. But anyway, you can go check out and post for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, moving on. So a lot of talk about blobs and and data availability generally. Well, now you have a new website to go to a new resource to check all uh about data availability sampling and podas. So this is at das.wtf. You can go check this out for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But it basically just has a collection of resources uh for you to go check out in order to learn all about uh Perash and learn about Dash

generally and data availability generally and how it all works within the Ethereum ecosystem uh here. And there's also going to be u more information added to this over time of course uh and if you want to follow along with this you can follow Will. I'll link his um this thread in the YouTube description below for you to go follow follow along there. Uh but yeah, I know there's a lot of confusion around this and what data availability is, what blobs are, what DAS is, what pieras is, you know, pieras is pure data availability sampling essentially, but like what the hell is that, right? Well, that explanation is here on this website. You can go check that out for yourself. Just wanted to shout it out there. I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to go check out. All right, so we have an update

from the PBS Foundation or the Proposer Builder Separation uh Foundation here. So this is their 2025 update and they essentially outlined their three key focuses over I believe this is the coming year or the foreseeable future. So they want to support and maintain public goods infrastructure within the PBS and MEV ecosystem, provide education and secondary research and facil facilitate conversations and ecosystem alignment. And then they detail how they're actually going to do this in this thread which I'll link in the YouTube description uh below for you to check out. You know, it's funny because I believe the work that the PBS Foundation is doing and everyone working on me related stuff and and PBS related stuff and and everything that relates to that is doing such critical work and

they often go unnoticed or often go unappreciated because this stuff is inherently quite complex and definitely is all in the background for the most part. Like yes, users will sometimes be able to know if they're getting kind of fleeced by me in like a sandwich attack or something like that. Most users are oblivious to it. But the thing is is that this has been a discussion for a very long time now with regards to MEV. And it's funny because once I started looking into and learning about MEV in the Ethereum ecosystem, which was quite a while ago now, I started seeing it everywhere in in finance, in economics, just basically everywhere. And and really if you want to generalize the term MEV, it's essentially this a tantamount to sculping. So like for

example, there everyone knows about ticket sculpers, right? where someone will buy a ticket and then sell it for more than they bought it for. Uh they never planned to go to the the the show that the ticket is for, but they know there's a lot of demand for it, so they'll scalp it. That's just me, right? That's the same thing. All they're doing is getting it for a cheaper price and then selling upselling it to you uh for a more expensive price and you're paying that price and then they're pocketing the difference there. Now, it's not like the strict form of MEV that we know within the context of Ethereum and blockchains, but it is a form of of MEV there. And there and it can go it go even beyond that as well because there's a lot of secondary markets for um a lot

of things in the real world outside of crypto that are manipulated too where people will push the price up and get, you know, and and and basically partner up with other people to do the same thing. they'll they'll they'll form cartels around this in order just to push the price up in order to extract as much value as they can from unsuspecting people. So this is a broad issue. This has existed for a very very long time. This has probably existed since the dawn of finance to be honest. And when it comes to it me's existence within traditional finance. The reason why it is a lot easier to deal with there is because it's a permission system, right?

It is a very regulated permission system. But when you talk about public permissionless blockchains, that is the exact opposite of regulated and permissioned. You can't kick someone off the network for doing MEV. So what you have to do is you have to work around that. You have to basically mitigate me in various different ways. And one of those ways was obviously ME boost, something that people could opt into in order to make the ME pipeline healthier on Ethereum. Now, it's not a great solution for reasons I've outlined in the past, such as the fact that ME Boost is sidecar software. it is not part of the core protocol which means that it's very hard for the core developers to reason about that when de designing the rest of the protocol. So the decision was made to basically enshrine a lot of the me boost functionality such as um

you know doing EPBS so propose a builder separation. It's essentially what me uh boost does today but enshrining it in the protocol so that it is easier to reason about and and frankly probably more secure than relying on third party sidecar software that 95% of the network runs anyway. Right. So, so that's that that front there and that's what the PBS Foundation is focused on that and and general me stuff here and they go into more detail about this which I'll link in the YouTube description below. But yeah, as I said, like these people, they go very unappreciated, I think, because they are um working on the what I call the scourge of of blockchains because if you leave me unchecked and you basically let it proliferate on your chain, what ends up happening is that it's it's like

a locus swarm that comes in, drains everything out, and then nothing is left. Nothing is value is left. No one wants to build there because they know they're just going to get fleeced. Users eventually clue into it. Like, no one wants to be on that chain. it basically becomes the chain of extraction essentially and this is what happened in uh you know a while ago in Ethereum before we mitigated a lot of this stuff so now it's a lot fairer you can use services like cowop for example or others uh in order to protect yourself from me but it also happened in Salana as well and their solutions to the problem were really not great like from what I saw there was band-aid solutions such as stake weighted quality of service which is essentially a way to try and make it permissioned in order to

uh become a validator on the network or sorry to get your transactions in on the network. Um, and then there was like, um, I saw some reports of like a cartel forming around me on that chain in order to get, you know, push their transactions through before anyone else. There's just good ways of dealing with it and not good ways of dealing with it. I think Ethereum has taken the the right path here of dealing with it, but it's not an overnight thing. It's been going on for years now. It's probably going to go on for years uh to to to go from here, but I do think that Ethereum is tackling it correctly. Now, another reason why this is a big deal and this is this is the thing I I'll probably finish on here with regards to this topic is that when Tradfire players come

into this ecosystem, when institutional players come into this ecosystem, they know what MEV is. They know what uh payment for order flow is, which is what it's it's kind of referred to um in in the kind of Tradfire uh world there. They know what the, you know, the ins and outs of things like high frequency trading and how people can take advantage of it and so on and so forth. They don't want to be on a network that is getting uh absolutely decimated by me. They don't want to be there. They don't want to be in that environment. They want to know that when they're playing in these environments, there's not some other person on the other end of their transaction uh fleecing them or or or kind of taking them for a ride sort of thing. So, this is very important to them. Very very important

for them, especially if they're going to build their own L2s, for example. They want to take advantage of the latest technologies such as sequencing sequencing technology, uh, trusted execution environments or TEES, ZK proofs, all that sort of stuff. That's all happening within the Ethereum ecosystem. So again, this is what I was saying earlier about how I think that Ethereum currently has the best technology, the best solutions for these players, but we need to make sure that we keep building out those things and also scale up the network in order for the play these players to take advantage of all of this there. Anyway, as I said, last that was the last thing on that topic. You can go check out this thread for yourself. We'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, just another shout out here to Nixo. She's introduced a new

series that she's putting together on the Ethereum Foundation blog called Checkpoint. So, these are going to be non-technical overviews of the last four to five allcore devs calls with with a sentiment check with what's being focused on. So, people have been asking for something like this for a little while now because obviously it can be quite difficult to keep up with all the stuff happening on the all core devs calls. I know that, you know, myself, obviously, I cover what happens on there. So does Christine Kim on her Infinite Jungle podcast, but both myself and Christine and her guests can be quite technical. So obviously there is uh there is a place for someone to come in and break this down for the everyday person, which is exactly what Nixo is going to be doing here with her checkpoint summaries. So you should definitely go check this out. It's

honestly awesome. Uh, honestly, like even if you're technical, you should still check this out because it it does explain things in plain English, really easy to understand, really easy to follow. So, just wanted to give a big shout out to Nixo for initiating this. I think this is going to be a really valuable uh uh um really valuable resource for the community going forward. All right, last up here, just wanted to shout out to Salo that has become a new Ethereum L2. So, as you guys know, they've existed as an L1 for quite a while now. Actually, I remember they launched in either 2019 or 2020 as an L1. I don't blame them for launching as an L1 back then, given the fact that you couldn't launch as an L2 back then.

It was just way too early. Well, now they've essentially hardforked their L1 into an L2. So, now they are now an Ethereum L2. They're technically an Optimium. So, they I believe using offchain DA here. Um, but yeah, this is another example of an L1 becoming an L2. Now you guys know my opinion on this generally is that it doesn't matter what you are an L1 L2 if your product doesn't have product market fit. Becoming an L2 or becoming an L1 isn't going to change that. But Salo actually does have product market fit. They do a lot of stable coin stuff. They're integrated directly with the Opera uh web browser which uh you can download and use. I saw demos of this sorts of stuff and I've I played around with it myself. Uh it's actually uh pretty cool what they've done here and it's even cooler that that

they're now an Ethereum L2 because they can now plug into the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem and bring in their existing users into the Ethereum ecosystem as well. So really really great to see this and it's timely as well because the discussion flared up again around uh I don't I don't remember who started this again but over the last like week or so on crypto Twitter I've seen people talking about this about L2s becoming their own L1's and how about that is like the inevitable outcome that is going to be what happens and I just think it's so dumb and I've outlined in the past why it's so dumb. But the thing is is that more L1's are going to become L2s than vice versa. I really don't even think that any of the major L2s will ever become an L1. Like, I just don't

see the incentive to do that at all. I don't see the path to do that. I I don't see why they would do that. Like, it's just it's bizarre to me, right, that people would think this. Um, and I've given my reasons in the past, but just to recap some of them. Economically, it makes zero sense. It's way more expensive to be an L1 than it is to be an L2. That already should just be reason enough, right? Secondly, if you leave the Ethereum ecosystem, like literally just get, you know, uh completely leave the Ethereum ecosystem, abandon Ethereum, your existing users are probably going to be upset about that. They're going to be pissed off about that. And then you're going to piss off the the ma massive Ethereum community that exists. They're going to keep they're going to flood your chain essentially. They're not going to be

happy with you. And you're basically starting from zero again as an L1. And for what? Again, it's more expensive to run an L1 than an L2. So, it doesn't make any sense there. you give up on the scalability benefits you get as an L2 with not having to worry about consensus. Becoming an L1 is just dumb. There was uh some stuff this week about Hyperlid. You guys remember I I I'm pretty sure I called this out on either the refuel or I definitely called it out in the daily discord channel where I said that Hyperlid is not a decentralized chain. It is not a decentralized exchange. It is completely centralized. And this week they proved that by intervening in one of their markets uh through their validator set which has like four validators. I know they upped it to like 16, but you guys know my opinion on this. Like just

because something has 16 validators or 16 node operators doesn't mean there's 16 distinct individuals or or or companies or whatever that are going to make their own decisions. No, there are cartels that form or they just listen to the team. Uh you know, there's the different kind of pockets of centralization here. And I think Hyperlid proved this week that they're just very centralized. And centralization is a liability because now that Hyperlid has done that, what if uh uh there there's criminal activity on there and then the US uh Department of Justice comes along and says, "Hey, we know that you have control over this chain. We want you to blacklist this."

Well, there goes any I guess any reason to be decentralized at all. Any kind of um not reason, any any uh uh uh um what's the word I'm looking for for here? Any claim to be decentralized at all. Right? So centralization again is a liability and as an L1 you naturally will be a lot more centralized as an L2. Yes, I know most L2s today are not decentralized, but the thing is is that it's much easier to be a decentralized L2 than it is to be a decentralized L1 cuz again you don't have to worry about consensus. You can just outsource all of that to the Ethereum L1. So I'm not going to go through the whole arguments again, guys, but I just saw that pop up this week and I thought it was timely that CO, one of the major L1s, basically became an L2 and is really proud of

this, right? they're they're really glad to be in Ethereum L2. So, uh great to see uh that there. But anyway, enough of me ranting about this stuff today. I think I've gone yep, almost 30 minutes there. So, I've done today's episode. So, yeah, I think that's 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, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all on Monday. Thanks everyone.