Protocol updates, Layer 2 growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #848 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Daily Refuel where I cap the latest news in the mega system. I'm your host Dan. This is unsto. All right everyone, let's get into it. So, I said I was going to do a refuel on Saturday in the Daily Discord channel. Then I said I was going to do it on Sunday and now it's Monday and I'm finally doing it. I almost didn't do it. I was kind of sitting here just before thinking, "Oh god, it's already like 400 p.m. I'm going to like have dinner soon. Do I have enough time to do a refuel?" U because you guys will remember I used to do refills really late like 10 p.m. but like that's when I'm in bed these days. So my whole kind of routine's been changed a lot. Um but yeah, I figured no, I need to do it. I've got a lot to

talk about. There is a lot to talk about honestly. I mean I haven't done one for a couple of weeks now or I don't know how long it's been actually. It's probably been longer than a couple of weeks. 11th of October was the last one. Uh that's yeah that's uh bit over a couple of weeks. Two and a half weeks there. But hey, I'm back now. Um, but yeah, I think like I'll do today's episode and then uh obviously Dev Connect's coming up on the 15th of November. I'll be flying out for that to Argentina there. Uh, I'll probably try to do one more before then. Um, and then when I get back, maybe I'll do one more and then from then I actually plan to take a proper break again. So I want to take a break during the kind of uh I guess like holiday period. So from maybe

after Faka goes live. So, if Saka goes live early December, I would want to take my break from then until like the new year sort of thing. And that break would actually encompass not being on, you know, the Discord channel, which I'm still quite active in, by the way, even though I'm not doing refills. I'm still very active in the Deadly Wear Discord channel. I'm in there pretty much every day. Uh I'm not that active on Twitter anymore, to be honest. I I hardly post tweets and I don't even go on Twitter every day. It's kind of freeing honestly. You guys should try it. But yeah, it's going to be another one of those breaks cuz I think I I need it. I think it's healthy to do those sorts of things and know a lot of people that are actually planning to take a break over

the the kind of Christmas period there. So yeah, I mean I'm I'm looking forward to that, but I'm also looking forward to Dev Connect as well. I think there's going to be a lot of you at Dev Connect from what I've seen uh and it's it's honestly it's going to be a great event. I think like from everything I've seen from the fact that it's going to be in Bonazades where there's obviously a lot of crypto presence already. Uh it just feels like it's going to be a really kind of invigorating conference and I honestly can't wait for it. It's not too, you know, not too far away now. Less than less than 20 days till I fly out at least and I'll get there on the 15th, be jetlagged as hell. So, I'll probably have to get over the jet lag, but then go straight into it uh and

enjoy my time there. But anyway, enough of the logistics related stuff. Let's get into the news over the past 2 to 3 weeks. Now, of course, some of this news will be stale to you guys because uh it's like 2 weeks old or something like that, but it is still worth discussing. And what I wanted to start with is I guess like a bit of news that was drama slashcontroversial slash like f like there was FUD around it. But I kind of missed the FUD cuz I wasn't on Twitter which is actually really great. But then I saw it anyway because people were sharing it with me. But it's all got to do with DNA leaving the Ethereum Foundation and joining Tempo. And for those of you who don't know or don't remember, Tempo is the new layer 1 that Stripe is building in partnership with Paradigm, which is the

uh VC firm, one of the biggest VC firms in the industry. Now, obviously, Dan Krad has been around for a very long time in Ethereum land. He's been very instrumental in Ethereum land for a bunch of different things. I think he's most famous for coming up with or working on dankshing or protodank sharding, which is known as EIP4844 or blobs. He worked on that with Proto Lambda. Um but yeah, he's done a bunch of stuff in the Ethereum ecosystem for I think seven years until until recently he was with uh the Ethereum Foundation for 7 years there now. Of course, him moving to Tempo or just leaving the Ethereum Foundation altogether stirred up a lot of controversy because there's always I guess controversy about Ethereum. There's always fight about

Ethereum. But a lot of people were saying, "Hey, look, you know, the Ethereum is going to lose because the Ethereum ecosystem can't keep talent in the ecosystem." Now, I don't think that's what happened here with Dankra and I don't think generally that's a true statement. But Dan Crab put out his own tweet here explaining, you know, he's that he's going to tempo, what he wants to focus on, so on and so forth. I didn't necessarily like this tweet because it doesn't actually explain much. It just kind of was, I guess, like a generic kind of tweet of like, hey, I'm joining Tempo. I'm thankful for my time at the Ethereum Foundation and what I worked on within the Ethereum ecosystem. Um, and I think, you know, Tempo is going to be friendly uh to Ethereum here, which like I mean, if you're like me, you kind of know that's

[ __ ] Like there's there's it's actually incompatible for L1's to be friends with each other. Like it doesn't make any sense from like an incentive perspective, but also from just like a a kind of I guess like human tribal perspective because as we know each L1 has its own tribe. It really doesn't make sense. Uh, and we even see within the L2s as well. Like the L2s don't get along. The L2s all love Ethereum, right? They all support Ethereum like the Ethereum blockchain L1 but the L2s themselves is there's so much infighting. So I actually don't think that that's possible no matter what you are like no matter kind of what L1 you are and no matter how many times you say we're compliment you to Ethereum. I just don't think that's the case there. But beyond that because Dan Craig didn't really go into details about why he's

moved to Tempo. There's a lot of speculation about why he moved of course. So the obvious I guess like speculation was around, okay, he just moved for the money, right? Because I'm sure Tempo offered him a large salary on top of a very large token bag essentially, right? Because we all know Temper's going to have a token. It it it recently raised at a $5 billion full fully diluted valuation. Who knows if that valuation is going to hold once they do their token or anything like that or if they raise at a, you know, at another higher valuation, but essentially people made the obvious conclusion that okay, well um DNA went there for the bag. And I'm sure that's part of it, but like Dangrad is, I guess, like uh valuable enough as a person and smart enough as a person and and smart enough in this ecosystem to

not only go somewhere for the bag. But then people were confused and they asked, okay, well, if it's not for the just for the bag, then why did he go to Tempo? Why didn't he go to one of these L2s that are like more Ethereum aligned or I guess like in the Ethereum ecosystem? Why did he go to what is for all intents and purposes a competitor? And my answer to that is is essentially speculation because pretty much everything I'm saying is speculation because again he hasn't really given his reasoning behind this at least from what I've seen. But my speculation would be well maybe he actually truly believes that Tempo is complimentary to Ethereum.

And the reason I believe this is because he actually posted another tweet the other day. you might have missed it cuz it was just a random reply that he posted basically saying that he thinks that Tempo is not competing with Ethereum because Tempo is only focusing on payments which I thought was incredibly naive because like Tempo is is is L1 blockchain right it's an EVM L1 chain it's not just going to be focused on payments they're going to want to do everything so they are directly trying to compete with Ethereum and I think to believe they're not is naive but if Dankr actually believes that they're not going to compete with Ethereum and they're just going to be a payments layer um then that you know makes it kind of understandable and it makes sense that he went there with the express intention of being able to help

them build a payment you know a kind of like a good payments layer using the EVM which will then feed value back to Ethereum by onboarding more people. So, if you follow that train of logic, you kind of get to a I guess a reasonable spot, right? But again, as I said, I think it's incredibly naive to think that Tempo is going to only be doing payments. They're going to be doing everything because they're EVM. It's going to be very easy for these other apps like unis swap and arv and others to just deploy on there. Especially like unis swap. I mean, paradigm is very close with the unis swap guys. So, I I think unis swap would probably be deployed there from day one. Like I I don't think that um that's farfetched to say at all. So, so yeah, there's those two kind of major things there, which is

kind of what uh I guess like I'd been kind of speculating on and what I had kind of I guess like been saying in the Daily Way discord channel. Another big thing is that when it comes to people that have been working on something for so long or working in a particular environment for so long, they naturally want a change. Like as I said, Dan has been in the Ethereum Foundation for a long time. like I I'm not sure if he's been he was at the Ethereum Foundation for those whole seven years that he worked within Ethereum, but he's worked within Ethereum for for seven years. Um, you know, as a as as a full-time job, also uh uh being paid under market rates. We all know that the Ethereum Foundation doesn't pay like a lot of money compared to where the money you could make working somewhere else. And

that's a consequence of a bunch of different reasons. Number one reason is that the EF just doesn't have that much money. Yes, they have like a lot of ETH still. uh if you want to kind of uh look at the ETH that they have today, I think it's like $1.5 billion worth or something like that. But then you have to keep in mind that that money has to last a very long time and they can't raise more money. Like no one's giving the Ethereum Foundation more money. They the foundation doesn't have the ability to issue new ETH to itself in order to raise more money, right? Or to issue new ETH to sell to whoever to to to raise more money here. Whereas something like Tempo, as I said, they just raised at a $5 billion valuation. I think they raised $500 million. So the these things

can raise and then they can also issue these token kind of bonuses to these employees. So it's a startup versus like a traditional company kind of or I guess like a mature company perspective here. And yes, the Ethereum Foundation will um pay out like ETH bonuses as well, but it's it's very different, right? Like it's a very different thing. Like imagine if you were able to kind of price those ETH bonuses as if ETH was worth $5 billion as Tempo is worth instead of $500 billion, right? Because if you're pricing them at a $500 billion valuation, then there's 100x upside just gone altogether, right? Whereas and and there's no guarantee that obviously Tempo is ever going to be worth that.

But the logic flows is that if you think it's going to be lucrative and you think this thing is going to actually do very well, then you're happy taking those tokens at a low valuation hoping that they they kind of like price into higher valuation. And that's what happens everywhere. I mean, there's a lot of talk about Nvidia's early engineers having so much Nvidia stock because they got it when it was cheap and they've held it and now it's worth so much and they're all millionaires. I think pretty much everyone at the company is a millionaire from the fact that they all got like stock options and and because the stock's done so well, like over 10x, even if you only got 100 grand of stock options, you know, 5 years ago, pretty sure Nvidia stock has gone uh 10x, if not 5 years or 10 years or something

like that. I don't know the exact kind of ratio there, but you can see how you could very easily make a million dollars if you held on to the stock there. So, it's the same kind of uh I guess like concept here. So, I don't blame anyone for wanting to kind of have a change or go do something else. I'm not blame I don't blame anyone for even going and getting the bag. Like I fully encourage people to do that. But what what has really I guess like irked me and and maybe this is not specifically about Dan Crowd but just about the whole kind of tempo thing but but also beyond tempo and and crypto generally. What irks me the most is the gaslighting, right? And the lying and the dishonesty and the, you know, just the [ __ ] that gets spread. Like

with Tempo in particular, it, you know, we we've seen multiple comments from from from kind of like Paradigm saying that, oh, it's going to be credibly neutral. It's going to be decentralized. We're building this for such and such reason. And then whenever they're questioned at all, they don't reply to those questions. Like I questioned Matt from from Paradigm. I basically uh typed up this whole thing to him a little while ago now asking, you know, how is it going to be credibly neutral? Why is anyone going to build on Stripe's uh L1 or or tempo instead of building their own? Like why would competitors want to help Stripe? Like it doesn't make any sense from that perspective. And also from a technical perspective, how is an L1 better than an L2? I never got any answers. Radio silence, right? And I've asked that to to other people as well.

And I never get any satisfactory answers here. And that's what really irks me the most is that I'm here trying to learn, trying to actually get different perspectives here and then I don't get those perspectives and then I give my own opinion on it and I'm just called an eth Maxi. And that that's that actually is at the heart of what annoys me so much is that whenever I try to be intellectually curious, the people that I'm asking these questions to usually don't like kind of engaging me in these discussions and because I don't let them just say whatever they want. I actually call them out on their [ __ ] If I think it's [ __ ] I keep questioning them. I'm not just going to sit there and take your your word as the truth.

And I think I hate that. And then they'll just label me as an Ethaxi because it's easier to disregard me as an ETH maxi than it is to actually debate my points. And for those of you that are active in the Daily Wear Discord channel, you've seen this happen plenty of times before. Uh I've done this with plenty of people. It's always the same pattern. I engage in the debate. I try to get to the truth. I'm not gaslighting anyone and I'm not I'm not, you know, putting on my ETH Maxi hat and yelling at anyone. I'm actually trying to have a conversation. And then because I keep hitting back at them and because I don't agree with their points, they get frustrated and then they just like I don't know melt down or call me an Ethaxi or whatever it is. So, so that

is kind of at the heart as well of what irks me about this stuff and and especially when it comes to tempo where it's just like yeah it doesn't make any sense to to kind of say that it's going to be credibly neutral decentralized especially because it's not live yet as well. Um but but yeah, so that that's kind of my general take on the whole Dan Cred moving over thing. Um, and I think people calling for the Ethereum Foundation to pay more to these people uh uh to the people working there. I think that that's like looking at it in the wrong way. Not that people shouldn't be paid what they're worth, but guys, like these people aren't prisoners at the EF, right? Like they're really smart people. They could get a job anywhere they want, but people work on things for more than just money. And I think that's

lost on crypto Twitter because a lot of the people on there are just like all about the money. They don't really care about anything else. They don't even care about the industry to be honest. they're just here because they think they can make money from it. And again, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But then when you imprint that kind of view on other people who are actually in this industry to work in it because they actually care about it, you're going to get the wrong conclusion. And you know, this applies to me too. Like I could monetize so many different things about what I do. Like I've passed on so much money in the past, not just from not monetizing the Daily Way, but also from like advisorships with I guess like not the best projects. uh investing in different projects as an angel. Like I've skipped

on a lot of these things, guys. And it's simply because like I I don't like I I want to work on stuff that I want to work on. I want to kind of put my my I guess name behind things that I actually care about and believe in, and I don't want to support things that I don't. Uh but but yeah, to I guess like to crypto Twitter or to like the usual I guess retail person that's only here for the money, they don't see that. And I think if you talk to people at the Ethereum Foundation, of which there are hundreds of them, they will tell you this. they will tell you that they are working on Ethereum because they want to work on something that actually means something. They don't, you know, maybe they they do wish they were paid more. I can't speak

for all of them, but from the ones I've spoken to, they they definitely always talk about wanting to work on something bigger than themselves. And they're not in it for just the money here. And at the same time, if you're in it for just the money, there are pe companies within the Ethereum ecosystem that you can go work for. But these people still stay at the Ethereum Foundation. they they still stay there for for years and years and years and they give up lucrative opportunities. I know, you know, when it comes to, I guess, Dan Krad and a few others like Justin Drake at the EF, they gave up their IGEN layer advisorships, which in hindsight, I think was uh a mistake to let crypto tw the crypto Twitter mob kind of, I guess, like make them give that up and then the Ethereum Foundation to basically pivot and say,

well, you know, no one can really do advisorship because conflicts of interest and all this stuff, which I get, but at the same time, could there be like a reality where Dan Crab was able to keep his IG layer advisor ship and that would have kept him in the Ethereum ecosystem? if you believe he only went to tempo for the bag. I don't know, maybe that's a that's a timeline that could have happened, but we're not in that timeline, right? We're in this timeline. So, there's maybe no you speculating about that, but that's another way to to think about it here. Uh, but Justin Drake gave up his uh I guess advisorship as well, but he's still working on Ethereum. And I would be very surprised if he was to leave Ethereum and go anywhere else within the next 5 years. Maybe after that, he

thinks, well, I'm, you know, I'm done. I'm done with my Ethereum core protocol work. I delivered what I want to deliver. now I'm going to go somewhere else and do something else. I'm sure like that's a possibility. I would hope that he goes somewhere that actually aligns with the values that I think he has rather than something like a tempo or another corporate kind of I guess like chain. Um because yeah, I mean it was surprising too for people to see this. They're like, you know, why is Dan Crad who worked on Ethereum going to what is probably the opposite of Ethereum in terms of like values um and and I guess like um the way it's being built through values of decentralization and and you know going and working at some big corporate and that's why there's the cynical take of he just went

for the bag. So I get that. I understand that. But again, this is all speculation because he hasn't actually dived deep into this himself. Maybe he he'll do an interview with Bankless or someone else and and explain himself further. I hope he does cuz I'd love to get his take on this because I just speculated for the last 10 or so minutes on what his motives are and what he, you know, why he moved and all that. Um, but yeah, you know, based on some of his other comments, I actually think there's just a greater chance that he just wanted to go work somewhere else. The bag was enticing as well. Um, and he really does think that Tempo is is only going to do payments, so it's not competing with Ethereum. So, it's a okay for him to do that. I don't know if that's like the

truth, but that's what I maybe will choose to believe until until he's, you know, until proven otherwise until he actually expands on why he moved there, but that's my take on uh on kind of that situation there. I know it's like old news now. I say old news. It happened like 10 days ago, which I guess feels like a lifetime in crypto, but I figured it was worth uh covering that one there uh for you guys. All right, moving on. So, let's talk about some techreated stuff. Enough of the drama. Let's move on to tech. So, as you guys know, there's been a push to increase the Ethereum L1 gas limit for quite a while now, actually. So, this has been going on, I think. So, if you were to say like when the push actually started, you could argue that it started like maybe midlast year and it really

accelerated this year. Uh, and it's accelerating like every year now. And I think that there is a real big push to like especially into 2026 to really accelerate this um here. So the reason I bring it up today is because the clients uh all the clients that will be available uh for Fusaka. So the essentially when the client releases go out for uh for Faka for the mainet release will be about a month before Fusaka goes live those will have the default of a 60 million gas limit which means that we could be looking at a 60 million gas limit uh in November essentially like if we're within the next I guess like couple of weeks right because the test nets have forked well I think the last test net's forking soon um and then if that goes well there'll be mainet dates tentatively early

December and then once the mainet clients uh are released and and everyone upgrades, we should see the 60 million gas limit to happen. I guess you could say within the next month cuz it does depend on people upgrading their client software, of course. Uh, but you can do it manually, but like people do wait for the for the defaults here, but we'll see 60 million. And currently, it's 45 million. So 60 million would be a 33% gas inc limit increase here, which is awesome because, you know, Ethereum L1 gas fees are actually relatively cheap still. You can see here I've got the block native gas estimator here. Guay is at 0.2 2, right? It's 0.2. So, if we increase by another 33% to 60 million and all else being equal, of course, like let's just assume that demand stays

the same here, then that 2 is going to drop even further. Like, I don't know. I'm not doing going to do the math right now, but that's that's going to drop even further, right? That's going to drop to maybe 0.1 or 0.1.5. Probably not.1, but like maybe 0.15. probably like not a huge difference like I mean it it might be for like the marginal user but I I I don't know how many people that are sensitive to fees are actually using L1 these days they would have moved to the L2s or even I guess like other L1's right um but this is part of the wider trend of increasing the gas limit of Ethereum in order to get it to I guess like you know not just 60 million but like 100 million 150 million 200 million 300 million right that's that's the kind of path that

we're trying to be on right now uh and there's a lot of work being done in that area because it's not just increasing the gas limit, right? It's basically getting the network to the state where you can increase the gas limit safely because we could in theory increase the gas limit as high as we wanted to today, but the network would likely break uh and the network would fall over. We, you know, it would it would basically kill the network. You'd have to walk it back and then Ethereum would lose its 100% uptime um uh kind of achievement there. We don't want that. We also don't want the network to go down. Like that's about the achievement and more about the fact that we don't want the network to go down. We don't want any kind of disruption of the network here. And speaking of disruptions of the network,

the other day um a AWS had a major outage for quite a while. And uh from what I could see, there was actually no drop off of validator participation on the Ethereum network. I think like nothing. uh which was quite surreal actually because that means that I mean like if the data I was looking at was correct that either means that that particular outage didn't affect the I guess like where the Ethereum validators are run which I I doubt. Um but the you know the the the other picture it paints is that a lot of validators or a lot of node operators aren't on AWS which is very bullish because a lot of people like to say that oh if AWS goes down Ethereum goes down which isn't true but it's good that we've got you know I guess definitive proof of this now rather than us saying it and every time

this happens and every time Ethereum doesn't go down it's even better. So yeah, I like looking at it from from that perspective there. But we can look forward to a 60 million gas limit within the next month or so, I think. All right, speaking of making the network more performant in service of not only raising the gas limit, but in service of taking load off of node operators generally, there was a pretty big breakthrough on the P2P side of the consensus layer here. And I think this was done by uh by um uh a team at the Ethereum Foundation in collaboration with with Pryabs. Um I know that there are a bunch of teams working on this. I don't know who all they are. I don't know all the people working on it, but essentially they've been able to uh take

a a big kind of networking load off the network by doing a few tweaks. Now, of course, this is very technical. I'm not going to explain it to you guys on the refuel. There is a thread here which I'll link in the YouTube description below. Um but essentially it means that uh there there's going to be um I guess like load taken off the network which means that we can safely do things like increase the gas limit even further put more load on the network in terms of blobs as well because it's not just the gas limit. It's also blobs cuz with Fusaka we've got Pas coming but Pas is not starting at its like theoretical maximum. starting at a very low blob count, but then we want to kind of do those blob only forks in order to uh uh uh basically uh increase that over time

and increase that uh to to the point where essentially like blobs are extremely scalable and altos don't have to worry about it and then you know we'll have a working pod on the network basically. So it was great to see that there just always these improvements happening guys like it may not be something that's like super exciting. It may not be like a headline thing like a a mainet upgrade like Faka or Pectra, whatever it is, but it's it's always happening and it's always really positive for the network. And these things compound over time. You know, the more improvements we do, the more we can scale uh the more really cool things we can do like uh you know, even ZK related stuff like there's been a lot of progress happening there actually. And that you know what, now that I mentioned the ZK stuff, that's a perfect segue

into what I was going to talk about next, which is essentially a tweet from Justin Drake talking about ZK related stuff. and in particular uh being able to do a ZKVM uh within L1 Ethereum and uh essentially getting the cost of this down to the point where you can prove an L1 E block or slot I guess you could say within that 12-second window cuz slots today is 12 seconds but then we actually want to reduce slot times as well. We want to go as low as 4 seconds. So the goal is to essentially be able to generate a proof, you know, relatively cheaply and and and quick enough so that uh 99.99, you know, 9% of proofs say are done within a 12-second window and then a I guess like

we're going to go to 8 seconds first and then like maybe 6 seconds or 4 second window so that we can have a fully ZKI L1 uh uh kind of on the execution side of things which is part of the whole lean Ethereum road map which I've talked about previously there. So yeah, I mean you can go give Justin's uh tweet a read for yourself. Uh he was basically quote tweeting this team Brevis who uh is another ZK team here where they announced something called Pico Prism which they're calling the state-of-the-art ZKVM for Ethereum real-time proving 99.6% of blocks were proven under 12 seconds. So at a 6.9 second average with 64 RTX 5090 GPUs.

Obviously that's incredibly expensive. People like talk about this and they say, "Well, isn't that just like equivalent to mining, right? Like or proof of work." And it is in a way, but the thing is is that you have to remember that a lot of this stuff is still very early. And it's not like proof of work in that you have to keep throwing hardware at it in order to because of the difficulty adjustment. It's like this arbitrary thing. Um, with this sort of stuff, it actually is going to go the other way because these things are going to get more efficient over time and uh they're going to be cheaper and cheaper over time. So eventually, like if you were to go to like the holy grail, you'd want to be able to uh be be able to generate a proof in under 12 seconds on like one 5090 GPU, right? And

yes, that's still expensive because these GPUs because of the AI boom are not cheap. I don't know how much a 5090 is in the US, but in Australia, it's it's extremely expensive. Um, so if you wanted to be like a prover, uh, you obviously would have to have like some kind of kind of startup capital here or you could use your guess gaming machine if you wanted to to to do it. But it, you know, realistically you want it to be a dedicated machine because you want it to be running 24/7. But yeah, and I mean the barrier to entry is a lot higher than just being a validator on the network because these these roles are going to be split up eventually um into into basically being like a a validator uh sorry I guess like a proposer proposing blocks and a tester voting on blocks and then approver

proving blocks. So you can choose your own adventure sort of thing and you choose which roles you want to do. I I assume that most people are not going to be approver uh it's not going to be worth it for them but then you want diversity of provers as well. You don't just want one prover. kind of like the sequencer thing where it's like you don't just want one sequencer. Um you want like multiple but at the same time you want a fallback as well because with the sequences of the L2s you have the L1 that you can fall back to as a sequencer as well for a lot of them. Um so that's like kind of taken care of there. But like with this sort of stuff, if we need to prove all the blocks, the fallback would be I guess like I mean it depends

on how it's done and like from my understanding the fallback would be onto just a regular kind of I guess like proposal of a block, but then they wouldn't be able to prove the block. So I don't know if that would break things and just basically essentially miss the slot here. So yeah, we'll have to see how that kind of pans out. I'm speculating here now because there's a lot of open design questions around this. Uh but essentially, yeah, the the like most people just aren't going to be provers. But I do think we can have a healthy prover network. I don't think that it's going to be just one person. Like it doesn't even have to be that many people, right? If you have like 10 unique prover operators, that's enough.

I think like I mean because it's it's a one of end trust assumption, right? It's not like they have to come to consensus. They're just proving the block. the consensus is still done by the validators on the network um uh and by the ones who are testing you know the testers I guess I should say here uh whereas uh the proving is more like I guess building a block like so how today we've only got like five builders and yeah it's not great from like a censorship resistance perspective but we're dealing with that with fossil but then when it comes to provers you like from my understanding you don't need a lot of them essentially uh and it doesn't actually like matter that much um especially if like anyone can be a prover which they will be able to be so if like all 10 of those provers for some

reason stop proving blocks and go offline, then someone else can just spin one up quickly and and away you go, right? And there will obviously be economic incentives here for this uh as well, but you can go give Justin's tweet a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, speaking of L1 improvements, uh this isn't an a a kind of improvement directly on the L1 itself in terms of the protocol, but this is a demo of pre-confirmations. So, as you guys know, pre-confirmations, or you may not know, I mean, I've talked about it a bunch on the refill before, but if you're just tuning in for the first time, um pre-confirmations is essentially a way to make it so that instead of having to wait up to 12 seconds for your confirmation, for your um transaction to

be confirmed on the L1, it would be done in like 1 second or less essentially. So, the re the way this is done is essentially you have like a a network of um people that are kind of preconfirming your transaction. So essentially they're saying, "Well, this transaction will end up in a block in 12 seconds or less um depending on when you've done your transaction or maybe more because it depends on the fee that you paid. Um so I'm just going to confirm that for them on on their end. Uh and it's just like a user interface kind of perspective here. They're going to see that it's confirmed and then like I'll throw in their transaction into that slot and and all is well and good here." So that it's like a UX thing, right? It's it's not like I mean it does have some kind of

trade-offs here in that like it's not an actual confirmation of your transaction, right? It's like what they call an optimistic confirmation which essentially says that yeah, it's optimistically confirmed because we're relatively certain that it's going to be confirmed and and included in a block uh or in a slot um within sorry in a block within that within a slot. But you know, right now it's not and obviously like no one is going to be accepting precon confirmed transactions as truth. They're going to wait for the L1 block to be confirmed. Uh, and they're probably going to wait for finality depending on the on the transaction size too, right?

In order to to like fully confirm it here. But really in reality, like even just waiting 12 seconds is not that big of a deal. Like obviously from a user experience perspective and from the front end perspective, we want the users to be able to feel like their transactions are going through very quickly, but if you're waiting for like just like proper confirmation uh of that transaction, 12 seconds is is nothing. And then as I said, we're going to reduce that down to 4 seconds hopefully. So yeah, but pre-confirmations is definitely still needed cuz I guess like the easiest way to explain it is that it makes the L1 feel like the L2s do today because the L2s obviously have um shorter block time, shorter slot time.

They don't have slots, I guess. They just have like shorter block times. It's usually a second or less. So your transaction is essentially confirmed very very quickly. I guess for the end user as well, like 1 second is is fine. Like I think you can think of it like loading a website. If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, you obviously like start getting frustrated and you'll probably click off that website or go and check if something's wrong with that website. Um, I think the same is true for transaction confirmations where essentially if it's taking a few seconds on Ethereum L1, you expect that. Like as a as a regular user, you would expect that. But on an L2, if it's taking longer than a few seconds, you're probably like, "Okay, something's wrong here." Like what's wrong? Right? Um, if it's only if it

takes a second, that's fine. If they say they can do it le in less time that like 200 milliseconds humans don't perceive time that like like that quickly guys that's more for like the bots in the back end being able to be more efficient with their money and being able to be be more efficient with the liquidity here rather than the human. So it is great to get transaction confirmations as kind of short as possible. Like get that down to as close to zero uh as possible. It's never going to be zero obviously but like as close as you can get there. But in terms of like the actual human user 1 second is totally fine. 1 second. Even even 2 seconds isn't that bad. Like I really I I never stand, you know, I never sit there and think, "Oh, it's been 2 seconds. Uh I'm I'm getting

frustrated that that um you know, my uh that it took 2 seconds for my transaction to confirm or for a website to load." Like, I'm actually happy waiting. Um even when you're going and paying like at the F-POS terminal um at at a at a kind of like restaurant or shop or whatever it is, like it's never done like that quickly. like it can take up to a couple of seconds and you're not standing there frustrated about it. You look at the machine, you say that it's confirmed, you're like, "Okay, cool." And away you go. So, I think there needs to be obviously realistic expectations here, but where this does, you know, matter, as I said, is for like the automations in the background, like bots and stuff like that, especially as AI bots keep coming online too. That's another big deal here. But yeah, you can

go watch the demo video here. It's only 18 seconds long of this happening. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So, some big movements on the Max EB side of things. So, as you guys know, Max EB was included as part of the Pectra upgrade, and it essentially allows you to stake up to 248 ETH per validator instead of the 32 ETH per validator. Now, there is a really cool site that you can track this on called petrified.com made by the uh um made by the guys uh wait no, sorry, I don't know who this was actually made by. There was another tool that I was going to talk about that was made by the guys at Pier 2. It's a tool that allows you to consolidate uh things, but the petrified tool I

actually don't know. Uh it's made by Zerox Pulp here. This is their Twitter account. So yeah, kudos to Zerx Pulp for uh you know for making this. But the reason why I bring this up today is because we now have over 10% of all ETH staked as part of accumulating validators. So what that means is that they've converted their validators to the 0x uh02 credentials which means that they can now stake up to 248 per uh per valid ETH per validator. Now as you can see in the chart below not everyone is staking 248 ETH per validator. Uh some are like you can see here that around 212,000 ETH are uh staking 2048. Uh then there is um over half a million ETH at below 2048. um uh well I guess you could

say between between 1920 um ETH and 2048 there's like 200,000 ETH and then you know you can kind of look at this chart and see for yourself what this looks like here. Uh but the reason why this is exciting is because as you guys know I was a huge champion of Max EB. So it's a personal kind of excitement for me but also again this takes load off the network because as you guys know you know we it says here we've got a million validators on the network. That that doesn't mean we have a million node operators on the network. Doesn't mean there's a million stakers right what matters is node operators because one node operator can have many validators.

For example you know the biggest node operators have hundreds of thousands of operators. Like Lido, for example, has what 220,000 validators or something because they've got 22% of the network. I'm actually going to bring up Hillby's ETH2 staking dashboard uh here. So yeah, you can see Lido is at 23.3% of the network. So they would have 230,000 validators, right? Um 8.4 million E staked here. So that's one uh I guess like that's one collective and within that there are different note operators. Maybe lighter isn't the best example here because there is there are different kind of note operators in that, but there's not a million of them.

The best example is probably a centralized exchange. Actually, I said lighter because it's the biggest, but Binance and Coinbase, you know, Binance has 9.1%. So, that means they have around 91,000 validators or you can see here they have 103,000 validators. Sorry, I should say. Um, so from that kind of like uh pool there uh uh you know that's that's just Binance running 100,000 validators. So, you can see what I mean by the fact that like node operators is what matters. So, why is this a good thing? Like why do we want to reduce the number of validators? Well, because like if the if adding more validators to the network does nothing for the network because it's all, you know, it's all part of the same node operators, then uh it it actually has a negative impact on the network because each validator that's added adds an

overhead to the network. It's very very small like each individually validator. It's tiny like as a as a collective network overhead, but once you kind of add this up and you start adding another 100,000 validators, right, that's another 10% load on the network. So essentially, you want to reduce that as much as you can. The ideal scenario is that we have the same number of validators as we do kind of node operators, but that's not going to happen at 248 ETH per validator obviously. But I guess like even having it from here. Even if you're getting to only half a million validators would be a I mean it's not an exact one one, but it would be like a it's not it's not like a 50% reduction in network kind of load here, but it would still be a pretty substantial reduction in network

load, which means we can do really cool things like obviously getting more blobs on the network, like increasing the gas limit, like shortening the slot times, right? because there's less kind of overhead on the network to gossip the blocks around everywhere and to do the testing and and voting and all that sorts of stuff there. So, when you look at it from that perspective, everyone should be cheering for these validators um uh to be uh to be kind of consolidated here, which is which is great to see there's movement on this. And, you know, Peter didn't happen that long ago, guys. It was in April, right? So, it's it's good to see this movement. I remember saying at the time it would be like a long-term thing here. That wouldn't happen overnight, but it will happen cuz it makes sense it will happen because you you as a as a accumulating

validator, you can compound your stake instantly. There's no need to build up 32 E in order to spin up another validator, right? You can just put it on the same validator here. And also, you get you can kind of reduce your network footprint as well. Um that might matter for you as a smaller node operator. Maybe the bigger ones don't care that much, but the smaller ones definitely do. Especially the solo stakers. That's the thing that really excites me is that the solo stakers can do this and and compound their rewards here as well, which is really really great to uh great to see there. But yeah, anyway, just figured I'd give you guys an update on that one there.

All right, so there's a new page uh on the Ethereum Foundation website called uh prototyping.ethereum.foundation, foundation which essentially has a bunch of different kind of links and resources to things that are being tested on uh or I guess like worked on by the protocol prototyping team at the Ethereum Foundation. So what this team does is they build end-to-end implementations of the new ideas for Ethereum's core protocol. So there's obviously a lot of new ideas as you guys know a lot of EIPs that get proposed here and they need to be prototyped. they need to be tested before they're even considered to be made onto the network. And that's exactly what this team wants to do is they want to kind of test this stuff.

They want to prototype this stuff so that when it actually kind of comes up for serious discussion, there is actual data to point to. There is actual work to point to rather than just like how it would work in theory. We've actually got something put into practice here. And the reason why I really like this website is because it's been hard for me to keep track of all this stuff happening because I see, you know, Tony's tweets and and that's all well and good or I see a tweet from someone else here, but then the tweets get lost, right? So, this is a really great website, really great resource to keep track of all of that. Uh, so if that's of interest to you, you should go check it out. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. And it's a really great way of keeping track of all the

really exciting stuff that's coming to the Ethereum pro Ethereum protocol over the next one, two, three, even potentially 5 years. just depends on what they're working on at any given time. Um, but yeah, it's it's great to see this because they even say say it here. They're helping the community to move beyond just the theory and speculation of the different EIPs and also putting it into practice there. All right, last up here, just a bit of news on the uh kind of L2 front. So, I've got a Grow the Pi tweet here. This one's not about L2 in particular, but I I I wanted to use this as kind of a springboard. So, the Grow the Pi team put together an estimation of when we will actually achieve 10,000 TPS um uh on Ethereum L1 if we were to scale uh

the TPS three times per year. So, if we did that from here on out, we would get 10K TPS by summer 2031. Obviously, that's a while away. We want to do that before then. So, essentially, I guess like this is a study in saying, well, we want to be able to get there faster. Like, this is going to take a while. let's maybe do like a five times TPS increase per year instead of a three times TPS increase per year. Uh because then we'll be able to get that in maybe like 2028 or something like that rather than 2031. Um and then of course like this is also scaling data throughput which is used by the layer 2 on Ethereum. Um so it's all well and good to keep scaling uh here. Now, the Grow the Pi team also has on their website, as you guys know, a really great

resource all about um L2s just generally, of course. But on their ecosystem tab, I should have had this loaded up before, but I'm loading it up now. Um on the ecosystem tab here, you can actually see, as I've explained before, like a real-time count of um the Ethereum ecosystem, TPS, uh and then also um the economic activity uh on these chains, stable coin supply, daily TPS, so on and so forth. So, you can see that daily TPS is basically at all-time highs for these layer 2s. And I think the other day we had like a all-time uh high um uh TPS. Uh yeah, it was it was uh where was it here, I think, or something like that, 24th of September.

Uh all-time high TPS. Uh and oh, it wasn't the other day actually. That was a month ago. There was a tweet from the Grow the Pi team that showed that it went to like thousands of TPS. I think it was just like a snapshot in time. Yeah, actually it's here. Alltime high TPS is 3100 TPS. This is across the L2s and I believe L1, but like L1's at like 20 TPS, so it really just doesn't matter, right? Um, it's like 20 TPS or lower. Uh, so it really doesn't really count here. It's more about the L2. So, this page should be bookmarked. Honestly, guys, you should be visiting the visiting this and all the other sections on the Grow the Pie website as much as you can because it really just shows that things keep growing. No matter what people say online, no matter what FUD people try to kind of spread

about L2s especially, this just shows that they're growing. Like there's you can't like you can spread FUD, but then when you're met with the facts, the FUD just like breaks away like instantly. And I know a lot of people like to spread FUD about L2s um because L2s compete with the other L1's out there and they all, you know, sometimes running scared. I think that oh these L2s are doing really well and they're getting better and better over time. What can we FUD them with? Well, you can't fud them with like not being used because they're obviously being used. Um you there some of the FUD still centers around obviously like multi-IGs and how some of them are centralized and so on and so forth and that's fair but like that's changing over time as well like shifting towards stage two uh getting more kind of decentralized overall and

there are other L2s launching as well that are going to be more performance. So yeah I mean Mega ETH launch is coming up soon I think. Uh yeah I mean the the FUD just like it doesn't make any sense. It's never really made much sense, but like there's less and less kind of FUD that you could reason about making sense um coming out these days. It's always the same recycled FUD. Like the last couple weeks, as I said, there was a bunch of FUD on Twitter about uh certain things. And one of the the main things with was the Ethereum Foundation because of uh Dan Crowd leaving. And I was like, okay, we already did this like 6 months ago. This is all stale f like this. This is nothing new. You guys are just literally repeating what was said 6 months ago. And mind you, the Ethereum

Foundation is very very different to what it was like 9 months ago, right? So the FUD is stale and I think that it come it stems from like obviously competitors wanting to deride Ethereum, but also from boredom from a lot of people. And honestly, my my advice to you guys is just like get off crypto Twitter. Like honestly, it's it's so noisy. It's so useless. Um you really don't need to be on there uh for much. I mean, what you can do if you really want to stay updated on things is just create a list of like the people who just post updates on things and avoid all the drama and then never look at your for you tab again and just look at this list that you've got and then you'll get all the updates and it'll be fine. I'm yet to do that. I'm like not even taking my

own advice here, but that's what I want to do because I think that's going to be a healthy way for me to have a a kind of relationship with Twitter. Um, but yeah, it's just it's it's not a great place uh to be as you guys know. And anyway, enough ranting about that. Moving on here to the last thing I want to talk about. So, we always talk about escape hatches of L2s. And we say that, okay, well, because L2s have an escape hatch or what's called a forced inclusion feature, it means that if the L2 was to go offline or is censoring you, you can essentially force your transaction to be included on L1 and still get your money out here. Now I know that there is a tool on the super chain website that allows you to do this for uh optimist optimism chains. So like bass and op

mainet and and chains like that. Um but there's no universal tool for this yet. Now, what uh what was built here by Apov was one that only works with optimism chains so far, but I think they want to expand that out to work with all the L2s, but essentially it's a way to force include your transactions on L1 here if an L2, as I said, goes down or the sequencer goes down or is censoring you. uh which is which is really great because it's all well and good for those features to actually exist but if they're not actually able to be used by everyday people then for all intents and purposes they don't exist right uh and I think that this is one of the key features it's the one that I always bring up of L2s so we should do a lot better of integrating this with wallets

for example so that the wallet can essentially give you the option of force inclusion if you want to take it now obviously in the best case or in the normal case we don't want this option to have to be used. We don't want the L2s to be censoring or to be offline, but that's not the point. The point is is that this option exists for when [ __ ] hits the fan. Um, and and you know, that's when these things really matter, and that's when these things really shine. So, when [ __ ] hits the fan, we want people to be able to relatively easily use these features. And I'm glad that someone uh built this here, but I'm hoping this gets integrated with, you know, wallets, with front ends, uh with with kind of like these new, I guess, like all-in-one solutions like Infinex,

for example. These things should be integrated there because it's not hard to integrate. Uh and it's really valuable, I think, for the end user to be able to do this. And it's what sets Ethereum apart with its L2 infrastructure, or at least one of the major things that sets Ethereum apart here, uh on that front there. But yeah, I think that's it on the news side of things today. I just wanted to take a few minutes here to talk more about I guess uh I call it logistics related things but I guess that's like personal related things here and you guys can can kind of like um you know close off the podcast or shut off the video if you don't want to listen to me rambling on here for for a little bit but I think a lot of you do because you say that you

do in the daily discord channel. So yeah I guess the first thing I wanted to talk about was generally like my feeling towards the industry because it's always evolving. You guys know my stance on the industry for quite a while now has been quite sour. I think and I'm not talking about like Ethereum, but like the wider crypto industry. I really hate the wider crypto industry if I'm being honest. I actually think it's a cesspool. I think it's an embarrassment. I think it's the reason why crypto has such a bad reputation. And obviously like Ethereum is part of that. So Ethereum gets a bad reputation as well. Not to say that Ethereum is perfect, but if I look out at the rest of the ecosystem, there really isn't anything else out there that vibes with me at all. Like I have zero interest in anything else. I think

Bitcoin is a failed experiment. I don't care if it keeps going up. That's not what Bitcoin originally kind of was supposed to be. I think Bitcoin is a failed experiment. Um I think that all the altar ones pretty much are just like useless. I mean there are a couple out there that are doing some things differently and obviously some of them have been able to gather a user base and people are getting value out of it. So more power to them, but so many of them are just griffs. So many of them just pump the token up so that people can exit and then all the founders leave once they're vested. The team leaves and then the thing just dies eventually. So yeah, griffs there. There's a lot of L2s actually these days as well that are griffs unfortunately. Um and I think you know they haven't gotten that much

attention which is which is good but they do exist of course. Um there's obviously like a lot of scams still in the industry, a lot of insider trading which is just ridiculous but I guess it's legal now because crime a lot of other stuff like CZ being pardoned. CZ is not a hero, guys. Like, I I can't believe the amount of glazing that I saw on Twitter when CZ was pardoned. And I know why it's done. It's cuz it's like a political thing to do, right? Where you you're basically trying to be trying not to burn bridges with people because CZ obviously has a lot of power in this industry, but he's not a he's not a a good guy, guys. Like, maybe he's not as bad as someone like SPF, but he's not someone who has like the best interests of everyone at heart. He runs a

centralized exchange and one that is incredibly secretive and one that has uh you know in the past multiple times I think been uh caught doing dodgy and shady things like and and and the thing is is that people will say oh well you know they only went after CZ because the Democrats were going after crypto so the Republicans are just pardoning um CZ to make up for that error. I'm like no no no CZ was one of the people they should have been going after. like they shouldn't have been going after honest people like the Ethereum Foundation or the the the core developers or things like that or consensus or unis swap.

They should have been going after these these people and they did. But that's another thing as I said that's like kind of grossed me out as well is that yes, it's great that you know the Republicans won uh uh the presidency and now we're getting like better crypto legislation. But what was the trade-off for that? The trade-off is what we've got. Um, and I again I don't want to get political about these things cuz I know people have their own views on things but like I'm not American so I don't have a dog in this race. I actually don't care like about American politics at all because it I mean honestly it doesn't really affect me in Australia. Yes, obviously like America is you know the United States I should say is a big place has a huge effect on the world and obviously Australia has like trade relationships

with the US and our prime minister meets the meets the president and so on and so forth. But like on my day-to-day life and day-to-day basis, like I it doesn't affect me. I have no and I can't vote in the elections. I can't do anything. Like why would I? It doesn't make any sense for me to do that. As I said, I'm not American. I'm as far away from American as you can be. My my heritage is Italian. My grandparents moved here from Italy. So I'm nowhere near an American, right? I guess the most American I am is that I speak the same language as you guys. Um you guys being Americans out there that are that are watching. Not to, you know, throw shade at America, but just take away the politics out of this for a sec and just look at, I guess, like, um, you know, Trump and the

people around him as normal people. Don't look at them as Republicans. Don't look at Trump as the president. Just look at them as normal everyday people. And then from that lens, look at what he's been doing to make himself more money, to to enrich himself, the insider trading that he's been doing, all that crap. Like, look at that. Like if you if it wasn't political, if he wasn't like associated with politics, everyone would agree that that is scammy and grifty and just shitty and that encourages even more shitty behavior because it's encouraging even more crime to happen within crypto. He's, as I said, he's pardoning people like CZ, right? Like just take away the politics. And I mean, I'm even the most diehard Trump supporter should be able to see this.

Like I'm sorry, you can support Trump for other things. Like that's fine if you if you believe if you if you kind of care about his policies and his other policies and what they're doing and whatever like those are things you care about. Sure. But when it comes to like fraud and scamming and insider trading, like it's [ __ ] obvious, guys. And don't get me wrong, like if you want to bring the politics back into it, the Democrats do it, too. Like they all do it. They all insider a trade. That's fine. But like I can recognize that again cuz I'm not American. I don't have a dog in this race. But but to bring it back to my point, my point is that like the more of that that's done by these highle people, the president of the [ __ ] United States is doing it, guys.

Like the more it's encouraged, the more it's just normalized. And then we just turn this industry into even more of a scammy mess. So that's why I said like my relationship with the industry is evolving because it's like I don't believe it's always going to be like this, but it wasn't like this for a while. It was it I mean there's always been scams, but it wasn't like the prevailing thing. Um and then and then it was and then there was a lot like there's whenever the market gets hotter there's always obviously a lot of scams and stuff like that and then it wasn't for a while and then we thought well you know we've cleansed all the bigger scams like this was in 2023 like you know SPF is gone terror's gone like all these things are gone like uh 3 hours capital all that stuff they're all gone we've

cleansed it and now the serious people are coming in right we have the BTC ETF coming's going to get an ETF tradfire is here institutions are here we're maturing as an industry indry. Sure, we we're maturing as an industry. And I even put a tweet about this, a tweet out about this the other day. We are maturing as an industry. That's that's true. Um, from like a adoption perspective, but then on the other side, you still got all the scams, right? And you still got like the scams being normalized and you still got the insider trading. You still got the grifting, you still got all that crap. So like on net, it's basically the same. And again, the reason why I I speak up about this is because everyday people are just going to keep like I guess not wanting to be part of this industry. We're not going

to be able to attract the best and brightest people if they hate the industry. There's a lot of people that you talk to outside of crypto, they know nothing about it except the scams because that's the thing that gets the headlines. If you go and um look at the the headlines on mainstream kind of news sites, maybe not the mainstream financial sites cuz they actually go a little bit more in depth, but like just mainstream news sites in general, it's always the scams. And even like the the big popular kind of YouTube channels that aren't crypto YouTube channels, so someone like Coffeezilla, for example, that talks about crypto, they only talk about the scams like and that's what gets the views. So if you were a regular everyday person looking at the industry from the outside, you would only really see the scams. you wouldn't see the good

stuff happening within the industry. And that's why I think we've got such a bad reputation here. And then of course, if you see that the president of the United States is engaging in this behavior and is doing this stuff and doing this insider trading and grifting, then your, you know, your your thoughts on this industry is just going to be worse and worse. So, so you know, my hope is that eventually we get the good crypto legislation in and eventually like I guess the I mean I can't even believe I'm I'm trying to say this, but like maybe they stop doing the scamming and grifting. I I actually don't believe they will. I think that they're going to keep doing it because why not? Like no one's stopping them. Uh and they obviously don't care and white collar crime is never punished really. Um you

know, it's very rare for it to be punished. So like I I say that maybe we get to a point where they stop doing it. Maybe that happens when you know if the Democrats coming back into power if we're talking about like a US- ccentric point of view here. But then we get the other side of it where because politics is so divided in the US the Democrats would probably just come in and start trying to destroy crypto again. So like we can't win. It's just frustrating, right? Like when you look at it from that perspective, you either have the person who's pro crypto but then also like the pro- scamming and the pro grifting and the pro insider trading to go with it. Or you have the Democrats that are like anti-crypto, but they're not using crypto as a scamming grifting vehicle. Yes, they're doing their own

kind of insider trading and other [ __ ] elsewhere, but they're not necessarily doing it within crypto, but they are waging a war on crypto and they are kind of hurting adoption of crypto. So this is just a [ __ ] situation for us. like this. Like what would you take? Maybe I don't know. You could argue that it's better that we have we have Trump than the Democrats because of the fact that oh yeah, okay, he's scamming and grifting or whatever, but like that's worth it because he's advancing through legislation that will uh that will survive even if the Democrats come into power. I can buy that, you know. I can I can buy that that point of view. I can vibe with that. But then you could also make the argument that well what if the Democrats get back into power and there's been enough kind of I guess like

come to Jesus moment if you will for them over the uh the four years that they weren't in power um that they decide well we're not going to be hostile towards crypto anymore. We're actually going to be friendly towards it and then we get like the friendly administration without the scamming. Yeah, I could buy that view as well. I don't put any odds on either view, right? like I don't put like a a percentage odds on on on what chance either view is of of happening here. And you could probably say that um you know the the views are naive or it's just like wishful thinking. But those are the the kind of things there. But that's like that's just the general thing on on the US side of things as well. Guess relating it back to what I was saying about the fact that it's just it's hard

to be in an industry where this stuff's happening and like I keep thinking to myself, it's all right. You know, Ethereum's good. Ethereum people are great. we're working on things when I just see all this stuff happening, right? So, it it does get to me. It really does because I'm someone who wears his heart on his sleeve, you know, to use that expression. Um, things get to me a lot. Uh, and, you know, that's why I like to take breaks from things. That's why I think I like not being on crypto Twitter so much cuz things do get to me. I try not to let them, but they just do, guys. That's just the way I am as a as a as a person here. Um, and I really don't like seeing the the quote unquote bad guys win. Um, and and I'm not talking about like just what's

happening with um with Trump and all that, but also within crypto, all the scamming and grifting going on, all the influencers scamming each other, all the memecoin scamming going on. Like I called that out at the time as well. It was all a [ __ ] grift and a scam, guys. It did nothing good for the industry. And here we are as as it exists today where a lot of the industry is very depressed because there's never been there hasn't been an alt season for a while and they don't really have exposure to ETH and BTC uh because they sold it all especially ETH when ETH crashed and all that. Um and especially as ETH continues to go up they're like oh my god what's going on when when alt season right so yeah from that perspective I think uh that's that's just the way I kind of view things

there. Uh and then one last thing before I wrap up today's episode I just realized I've gone for an hour here. Uh, a few of you in the Daily Grade Discord channel have been saying that like uh because we were talking about the fact that I don't do refuels as often anymore and you were saying that uh you you're happy for me to just do episodes on anything. It doesn't have to be crypto. And I was like, "Oh, well, so I'm going to be like a vlogger now. I'm going to start like my vlogging career." Uh, honestly, guys, my life is not that interesting. Um, I don't think anyone wants to see a video of me working out like like, you know, that's as you guys know, I've I've taken my fitness a lot more seriously over uh this year. Um, and my mornings are basically dedicated

to my fitness routine, but like I don't think anyone's going to want to watch me do that. And then the rest of my day is filled with various different things. I'm actually working on a a big project right now, which is nothing to do with crypto. It's completely outside of crypto. Um, I'm not ready to reveal what it is just yet, but I will eventually once it's finished. Uh, but it's something that I'm super excited about. Something very, very different to crypto. Uh, something that I've been wanting to do for many, many years now. And I finally got started on it. And honestly, it's it's been really really awesome, guys. Like, it's it's awesome. Like, as I said, it's very different.

And and I'm not going to say what it is cuz then I'll I'll kind of give away the surprise there. But I'm also not going to make my videos about that. I'm not going to vlog myself doing that. I'm not going to vlog myself or live stream myself playing video games. I I I do play a lot of video games these days as well. Um not going to live stream myself doing that. I just don't think it's interesting. Like I I understand and I appreciate you guys thinking my life is super interesting and wanting to to get more content from me, but like the the obviously this channel was always been about Ethereum. Obviously, the refill has always been about Ethereum and you guys know my rule is that I just do episodes when I feel like it these days.

And that's that's true for anything. Like I don't think I would do an episode on like my life, right, for example, or what I'm doing in my day-to-day life and not talk about Ethereum as well because Ethereum is part of my day-to-day life. So, I don't think I'll I'll be doing uh any of that. Um like unless you guys really want it. Like unless you guys beg me. It's like, "Oh my god, I need to know what you're doing with your life." I'm like, "Okay, well, all right. I I'll give you a little bit of an insight into it." But uh you know, as I said, I don't think it's going to be that interesting. But yeah, anyway, uh if you do want to talk to me about those things, you can always talk to me about it in the daily discord channel. But as I said, that

project I'm working on, I'm not going to tell you what it is until it's done. uh well not done but like until it's like like 90% done or something like that because uh you know those things with projects that you start and then like there's a lot of them you don't end up finishing and then if you've told people about it you kind of feel embarrassing embarrassed when they ask about it where like oh well how you going with your project and then you say oh yeah I mean it's good and then really in your head you're like a [ __ ] I haven't worked on it in like 3 months and then they ask again like when you see them again you're like yeah look I I fell off the wagon I fell off the wagon working on that thing. Um, yeah. So, I mean, I

hesitated even like announcing it to you guys uh that I was working on something like that. But hey, I am I'm confident that I'm going to uh get to the end of it because I'm, as I said, super excited about I haven't been this excited about something that I've worked on uh in a very long time. Probably since I started really getting serious about like being part of of Ethereum in 2018. That's how I guess reinvigorating this thing has been for me. Uh, and you you'll know what it is eventually. Uh, even if I don't finish it, I'll tell you guys what it was. I'm not going to keep you hanging forever. Um, but yeah, anyway, I think on that note, that's enough about me. It's enough about everything today.

As I said, I'll try to do one more episode before Dev Connect. Uh, and then, uh, yeah, hopefully see a lot of you guys at Dev Connect there. But anyway, thanks 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 next time. Thanks everyone.