TheDAO is back, AI Agents on Ethereum and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #855 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Delway Refuel where we cap the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host Anthony the 2nd of February 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So before we get into the news from today, I did want to give a shout out to each and every one of you that are still watching and listening to the Daily Gray refuel. It honestly means a lot to me to have you with me. And I'm sure there are some listeners out there that have been with me since day one. I have noticed a little bit of a drop off since I started doing the episodes weekly. And also I guess like just generally there has been a drop off within crypto uh across the board uh in terms of participation. I'm sure you've all felt this uh in terms of on the

refuel I think the average listenership is down by about 500. I think it never was like obviously huge or anything like that but you know I'd usually get like around 2,000 I guess on the videos and then on the podcast would be be about the same. So I think I've lost like 250 from from both there. But that but that's okay. You know, there's always people that come and go, and there's always people that maybe become less interested in things over time, don't want to consume the content. And I'm sure some people just got sick of hearing my voice, and that's fine, too. But for those of you who are still here, who have been around for a long time as well, like, I really do appreciate you, and I really appreciate you sticking me sticking uh by me through really everything. I mean, there's been so many

ups and downs over the years. There's been so much stuff happening, not just within the market, but just within just general crypto sentiment uh and general crypto developments. So many things have happened, you know, during the whole course of of the refuel really. I mean, I started this in late 2020 and we've gone through the launch of the beacon chain, right? If we're talking about major things, we've gone through the merge, we've gone through um uh all the craziness of 2021 together. We've we've gone through a lot together, honestly. Uh and I was just thinking about this today and I figured, you know what, it's always good to kind of I guess air out my uh you know, your thoughts when you're thinking about this stuff, especially to to you guys because you guys are my my core audience here. Um, and you know, I have been really kind

of, uh, way less active on Twitter over the last few months. And you guys obviously noticed that um, because I, you know, I haven't been tweeting as much. Uh, and that's generally due to just, I guess, like cutting down my time, you know, my involvement within, I guess, like crypto, but also social media generally over the last I you can say has been happening over the last couple of years. But also, you know, Twitter is still infested with bots. Uh, and the algorithm still sucks. Like, I think it was like a couple weeks ago or three weeks ago, my for you tab got a lot better. It was just showing me crypto people again. And I'm like, holy [ __ ] this is awesome. Like, I'm finally seeing cryptoreated stuff. This is cool.

And then it just went straight back to politics. And then with all the kind of Epstein file stuff coming out, that's literally all I see now. And it's like, okay, it's good to be aware of this stuff, but holy [ __ ] Like, I don't need to be every morning logging on and just like being bombarded with all this stuff every day. It's so depressing. Uh, and it's just not what I want to be exposed to all the time. Like, I want to be exposed to crypto stuff. And I'm just not finding it really easy to be exposed to just that. And of course, obviously, with everything happening within uh the crypto markets, like everyone's depressed again. And I'm going to talk a bit more about that at the end of the episode, but yeah, it's just uh yeah, that's the kind of way of things right

now. But again, just to reiterate the point, like I'm very thankful to all of you guys sticking with it, sticking by me, sticking by Ethereum as well. You know, Ethereum is going through or has been going through uh a growing period over the last I would say 12 to 18 months, but we're in a really good position now. There's a lot of stuff stuff happening and maybe that's the perfect segue into the first thing I wanted to talk about which was uh a tweet from Vitalik where he said in the in these kind of next 5 years the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals deliver on an aggressive road map that ensures Ethereum status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness sustainability and decentralization. Now that's that

road map that has been out for a while now. I think there like from what I'm kind of hearing there is a new road map coming and I don't mean new as in like everything's changing we're kind of uh you know pivoting from what we're currently doing and we're changing everything no I just mean like a a kind of a refresh of the existing road map uh for modern times for for 2026 uh and beyond and it's going to have on there all the same stuff from from my understanding but I think that's coming like I know I I I prodded a few of the um core researchers and developers myself saying you know it's probably a good idea to have a refresher here And I'm sure Vitalik's been thinking the same thing. So I would expect that relatively soon I think from from from

uh you know what I can tell. Um but it's all public anyway guys. Like the the road map would just be them bringing it all together and making it easy to digest but it's all public. Like we all know kind of what's coming. We we all kind of have a high level view here. So it's not going to be anything groundbreaking. But as Vitalik says here you know this is a core goal. Uh this is a core goal over the next few years. And to achieve this, the Ethereum Foundation really needs to kind of lean up. It needs to really focus in and it really needs to make sure that it can deliver this because this is a big lift. I would actually say the next few years in Ethereum core development is probably a bigger lift than the previous 10 years have been. Uh because there's just so

many so much stuff happening. Like the ZK stuff alone is insane. Then you've got lean Ethereum on top of that. You got everything else going on uh uh within that like all the little the I guess the small upgrades. There's just so much happening. So yeah, I'm I'm glad to see kind of Vitalic put this out out here. And the second goal um is to ensure the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as the users ability to access access and use the chain with self- sovereignty, security, and privacy. We all know the Ethereum Foundation doesn't have unlimited runway, guys, and their runway is very much dependent on the ETH price. So, you could say, you know, a few weeks ago, ETH had ETF had a lot more money in in

ETH than they do today, which is true because ETH price has gone down a fair bit. Um, but, you know, to to have a sustainable treasury means not uh I guess like buying more ETH, which the Ethereum Foundation is not going to do because that wouldn't be that would just make them like a trader, right? Um, also not just selling all their ETH, using it in DeFi, which we've seen them do, and staking some of it and stuff like that, right? Uh but but making sure that they're not like spending a lot of money, right? Because I know the Ethereum Foundation has been under fire for spending a lot of money. And the funny thing is is that it's kind of ironic cuz people give the EF [ __ ] for spending, you know, too much money, but then saying they don't spend enough on

core developers and researchers. Well, the EF is more than that. But then I think what Vitalic is saying here is that the EF needs to hone in more on the the core dev side um than all the other stuff that it's been doing, which like a lot of the other stuff it's been doing, the AF has been doing is is really important. And I think that uh they need to keep doing some of that stuff. But there are things that can either like be spun out of the EF or which which has been happening for years mind you or can be funded in other ways. But you know the EF has been this really nice organization within crypto that would fund the things that no one else would fund. You know VCs don't want to fund things that they can't expect a return on. Even if the expectation of a return

or or the chance of them getting a return on their investment is 1%, they would still rather fund that than fund something that they know they're not getting anything from like public goods for example. They know they're not going to make any money from it, at least not directly. So, they just won't fund it. And that's where the EF has stepped in. It's where other organizations have stepped in. It's where other projects have stepped in to fund this stuff. And it's not exclusive to Ethereum and crypto either. It happens in the uh you know traditional computing world as well uh all the time especially within open source you know how many times have you seen stories of the fact that uh these things that people use these things that major companies use this this software is maintained this open source software is maintained by like five guys or you

know a few people basically uh and and that's that you know that's just been the story time and time again which is utterly insane when you think about it because these massive software companies that rely on this software these massive tech companies that rely on this open source software where like even giving these developers $100 million as part of a foundation to sustain themselves forever, right, is nothing to them. Like that's a drop in the bucket. Like Apple's profit is insane each quarter. And what they can't afford to to do this or just a few of them get together like Apple, Microsoft, you know, Google, Nvidia, Amazon, all these tech giants get together and say, "Okay, well, we'll all pitch in like 10 $20 million each," which is like a fart in the win for them and pay these these things. But again, it's this kind of tragedy of the common

stuff where it's like, okay, well, they could do that, but they just don't for various different reasons, which is just again, it's insane. And we've got our own solution within Ethereum to try and tackle this. And that's with the protocol guild, which I'm going to talk about soon. Uh, but but yeah, that's that's just another thing that the EF has been doing in the background, funding these things that people just haven't really taken notice of, which I think is kind of shitty, but I wish more people would take notice of this. Uh but yeah, anyway, Vitalik has a longer tweet here about kind of all this stuff. You can go check this out. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But I figured it was worth mentioning because as I said, yeah, over the next few years, the Ethereum network is going to be undergoing some massive changes,

probably bigger than the last 10 years, I would say, or you know, if not bigger, maybe equivalent like like I personally think the ZK stuff is as big as like the beacon chain for example. And I think the lean Ethereum stuff is as big as the merch. Uh so I think that or if not bigger. So, I think and and and there's a lot more moving parts now, too, because Ethereum has a lot more adoption. You know, it's funny, people don't realize this, but when the beacon chain went live on December 1st, 2020, um, DeFi summer had happened already, but like it was still very, very small. We hadn't even had NFT mania yet. Um, you know, it wasn't 2021 yet, so the real kind of bull market hadn't started yet. And it was still very underground like and people were still learning how to just use Ethereum to begin with

because a lot of people didn't even use anything on chain and they came to Ethereum because of DeFi summer because you know there was money to be made um which is what always happens with these mania. So uh it launched at you know at a very different time and then and then the merge happened during the depths of a bare market a few months before FTX collapsed right September 15, 2022 is when the merge went live and FTX collapsed in November I believe of that year. So, you know, like 3 months basically or two or two months October. Yeah, it's basically around 2 months. Um, so yeah, these these things have kind of happened in in quiet markets as well. Uh, which is which is interesting too, but people don't think about that either. But anyway, you go give Vitalik's tweet a read if you want to.

I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So, we have another all core devs recap from Pujo here. So, I believe this is the latest core dev call. This was from January 27th here. This this recap. So I don't think there's been a core dev call since then. Um yeah, I don't think there has. That was this is almost a week ago now. Things are still proddding along. As you guys know, Glamsterdam is in full focus now. But Hegotar, the fork after Glamsterdam is also being developed or kind of worked on in parallel here. But we had uh kind of DevNet 2 for for bowels go live. I believe here we had more discussions around APBS uh you know gas benchmarking all that sorts of stuff. Uh, you know, Pujo does a really great job of breaking

this all down here, but really it's just like more of the kind of same old uh, you know, b not boring, but like same old kind of like standard core dev procedure here. Nothing really notable to I guess like touch on. There's not been any drama from what I can see. Everyone seems in agreement around having EPBS as the cons consensus layer headliner and bals being the execution layer headliner. So yeah, not much to to kind of report there rather, you know, other than the usual stuff happening here. But, you know, as per usual, if you want to keep an uh an eye on what's happening with these forks, you can go to forecast uh.org here. As you can see, uh Glamsterdam has, you know, has as has a great kind of page here, great full page here. I think all of these things

considered for inclusion right now. Some of these may drop off, but it's it's going to give you a pretty good idea of what's going to be in Glamsterdam. As I said, the headliners already pretty much locked in here. Uh and then also on Hegotar uh this is not uh this has not been populated other than Fossil yet because Fossil obviously is the headliner that has been put forward for the consensus layer for for Hegotar. Uh but there hasn't been any others uh put forward yet. But as we get, you know, uh, closer and closer to, I guess, like Amsterdam test nets going live, stuff like that, we're going to obviously see uh, more stuff happening on the, uh, on on the, um, Hegot side of things instead of the, uh, uh, instead of the Amsterdam side of things here. So, you can give that tweet a read. I'll link it in the

YouTube description below. But speaking of Fossil as well, Soy spoke here put out a uh a an official kind of proposal for Fossil as a headliner for for Hegot here. Now, this is on the Ethereum magicians website and this is just basically just following the formal process of uh of putting forward a headliner. So, this was done 6 days ago. This is going to be the main discussion kind of point here. I don't think there is really any push back on having Fossil. I think everyone kind of wants it. Maybe not everyone, but like most people want it. There is some push back on it but like probably not enough to get it removed from you know Hegot or removed altogether or anything like that. I think the only point of contention that seems to be rearing its head is whether you know Fossil is going

to be the headliner or whether something else is going to be the headliner for for Hegotar. I think the only thing that would be in potential contention here would be encrypted mess. Now I had a good discussion with Jasper and Greystroke in the Daily Gray Discord Ethereum channel today. if you want to check that out about um encrypted me pools. But if you don't want to check it out and you just want the TLDDR, the TLDDR is that Jasper and Greystroke are definitely in favor of it. Um but I guess like I wouldn't say I'm not in favor of it, but for me to actually push for it to be a headliner in Hegotar or to to kind of be a headliner altogether.

I want to see a lot more research on encrypted mess. I want to see them going out and talking to uh like uh players like um high frequency trading firms, market makers, uh anyone providing liquidity and and and anyone doing kind of orderflow um stuff in the background and and kind of ask them would you use the encrypted mele over these private meles that are currently in operation uh and kind of gauge from there because we're still in very early days of the encrypted mele EIP being put forward. Fossil is quite an old EIP now. It's it's not new and it's it's been kind of researched and developed for for quite a while now and it also touches on different things as opposed to encrypted memples. They do kind of have the same goal or one of the same goals of censorship resistance. I mean fossil's

main goal is censorship resistance. Encrypted memples I mean censorship resistance is definitely a goal but I wouldn't say it's like the main goal. I think the main goal of encrypted meals is is kind of eliminating as much me as we can but in um censorship resistance also you know come comes into it too. But for me to be convinced on encrypted memples, yeah, I would like to see more research on on on this here. Um, a lot more research to be honest. So I I just don't see that becoming the the headliner because it's because um it would be like an execution layer headliner. So it would it would fit nicely in Hegota wouldn't replace kind of fossil and you know I previously I mentioned contention between fossil and this I think the contention would be the complexity because fossil is already complex. I think encrypted meals would

be complex. I think on when you have a complex consensus layer change you probably want an easier execution layer change that's why we have uh you know with glamster we have EPBS which is quite complex but then bals which is from my understanding a lot less complex than than than eps is so if we do go ahead with fossil in in um hegotar you would expect the the execution layer uh headliner to be to not be complex so then encrypted meles probably is not going to be a thing then and as I said there's not enough research either for me to believe that it's it's anywhere near ready to go in yet, but you can go read that discussion and be involved with it, you know, if you want to as well. But that's kind of my general thoughts on uh that right now. So, yeah,

enough on the core dev stuff. Moving on. So, I did say I was going to talk a bit about the protocol guild. Uh so, the protocol guild's annual report is live for 2025. Uh and there's a there's a breakdown here of everything that happened within the you know the Ethereum network what the the members of the protocol gear which are all core devs and and researchers did during the the year as well as a funding snap uh uh snapshot. So they raised $7.2 million at time of inflow in 2025. Uh they have $183 million of total inflows all time. 12.4 4 million has been distributed already and the median over the last 12 month distribution is $62,000 per member and distributions grew year-on-year despite fundraising challenges and

volatile markets. And then they've got like top donors here uh like like Puffer, Starket, Optimism, and more. And then they've got the full uh they've got kind of um a bunch of other kind of things here talking about institutional side of things, the storytelling side of things and also link to the full report here if you want to read this as well. This is a very comprehensive report, guys, as you can see. Like, it's pretty long. If I just scroll down, uh, it's it's it's kind of pretty. I mean, it is it is definitely kind of ballooned by the the fact that all the addresses are here of of um distributions, but I think half of it, yeah, half of the page is pretty much um uh the report, which is still pretty comprehensive, I think, for something like this, which is which is really, really cool. So, you guys can go

give that a read. I'll link in the YouTube description below. But this is what I was talking about earlier with regards to kind of funding like public goods. And obviously the um Ethereum researchers and developers aren't public goods, right? Like they're people that have jobs. They get paid salaries to do these jobs. Whether they work at the Ethereum Foundation or somewhere else like Consensus or you know the Prism guys uh work at Arbit the Arbitum Foundation or or part of that offchain labs I should say. Um yeah, they work at offchain labs not the Arbit Foundation. um yeah, regardless of where they work and and you know, they get a salary, they they they aren't public goods per se, but at the same time, they still suffer from the same issue in that they have these skills um you know, and these

skills that very few people have in the world. Uh very few people have the skills to work on uh uh work at the such a low level as these people do, but also work at such a low level within crypto and then within Ethereum. like it takes a lot to be able to kind of get up to the point of a of a senior person or a senior core dev or or a researcher especially it's it's a tall order. Uh and also no matter where you're working you are definitely going to be uh no matter where you're working in terms of like you're working on Ethereum core but no matter who's paying you you're going to definitely be like underpaid compared to if you went somewhere else. So somewhere else being uh a new team that gives you token compensation for example, right? Uh that's that's that's

probably going to work out better for you monetarily because the token will probably make up for the lack of of salary and you're probably going to get a bigger salary anyway because these teams do massive VC raises and can afford it. But then the problem is is that the Ethereum Foundation, they did their raise a long time ago. They've held on to that ETH since then. But as I was saying earlier, they need to make that ETH last a very long time. So they can't be just splurging. And they can't be like, "Okay, well, we're going to pay each of our core developers and researchers that work at the EF, uh, you know, a million dollars or half a million dollars a year." They they can't afford that. And that's unfortunate. I wish they could. And the best way to get them to be able to afford that is

pumping it up to like 10 20k, right? But they can't control the markets. No one can. So, if you look at it through that lens, um, there needs to be a supplemental kind of income here. And that's where the protocol guild came in a few years ago where they're like, you know what, these guys do, you know, really important work. they should share in the upside of the work they're doing because they're working on the Ethereum protocol and logically over time as the Ethereum network um you know becomes more robust gets upgraded gets more used uh the the the price of the assets on Ethereum not just ETH but like other tokens should logically flow up over time uh and these people that are building this should share in that upside. So that's that's why the protocol guild exists. That's what they're trying to do. Um, but it's still

been an uphill battle for them as well, like to get teams on board, to get teams to pledge tokens. And then, of course, as we know, a lot of these tokens, even if even if 1% is pledged to the protocol guild, a lot of these tokens don't end up being worth very much uh because it's vested as well. So, when you look at it through that lens, it's just a very very uphill battle. But then what I find funny is that so many billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars has been completely wasted, completely wasted on enriching a lot of these grifters and scammers within the industry. And even people who say they're building genuine projects like new layer 1's they they're not like they're literally just building [ __ ] that they abandon as soon as they finish finished vesting and then they're never

heard from again. They make their money and they're out. And that's what I find utterly insane is that like VCs and and and just the regular users, they'll they'll throw money at these things, no questions asked. But then as soon as you ask, you know, a team or someone to be like, "Hey, mind donating to the Ethereum core developers and researchers who basically run this whole bloody industry and that a lot of these chains are forked off of that code and use that code like, "Hey, you want to fund a little bit of this?" They don't even [ __ ] reply to the question. They just ignore it. Like could you imagine if all of these chains that use the EVM, which is a lot of them, right? Like there's Tron, there's Avalanche, there's BSC, [ __ ] Binance, right? Like the biggest

exchange in crypto. Just imagine if all of those entities sent money to the Protocol Guild and they could have sent a substantial amount of money as well, guys. I'm not talking like peanuts here. I'm talking the the amount of money these guys have made, right? they could have sent tens hundreds of millions of dollars to the protocol guild and then we would have not I mean I wouldn't say we would have been done but that would have been sustainable for decades for these these core developers and researchers and giving them a lot of money for the work that they did to m you know not only create the EVM early on but maintain it and also keep upgrading it right but that just didn't happen and that's just the worst thing isn't it like that that actually makes me the the the most sad if I if I had to

pinpoint something that makes me saddest within this industry outside of maybe the amount of scams and grifts that go on. But this kind of goes hand inhand with that is that we we don't we don't fund and we don't pay the genuine people enough. We let the scammers and grifters and other you know just shitty people make the most amount of money. And if you you know talk about the the most kind of the people who have made the most money in this industry, you you could argue that the people who have made the most money in the industry over the years have been the bad guys, right? They've they've been the terrible people. They've been the ones who don't deserve it. And then the ones who do deserve it don't get it. Not to like beat the dead horse here because I I know I'm going on about this, but I

think this is, you know, this plays into the wider trend of people being burnt out in crypto, people getting depressed about things, people not believing in things anymore. I mean, I understand. And again, I'm going to talk a bit more about this at the end, but I get it. I get it. But not to be too sour here, not to be too not to put a damper on things too much. I'm very glad the protocol guild exists. I've donated to it as well because I wanted to try and help where I could, but only only one guy. I have not made billions of dollars in crypto. Nowhere near billions of dollars in crypto. Not even a, you know, not even a tiny percentage of that. But, you know, I made some money uh from from crypto, especially obviously from the Ethereum ecosystem. And I gave back uh what I

what I could um uh there. And I think everyone should do that, honestly. Even if you only give like $100 or something, go ahead and donate it to anyone can donate to it. It it means something. It does. Um and if everyone did that, hey, if a million people donated $100 each, that's $100 million, guys. And I'm sure a million people in crypto over the years uh have made $100. So um or have $100 to to spare here. We're not talking about people who live in third world countries and $100 is their monthly wage. You know, most of the people who have speculated on crypto are from western nations, right? They're from the US, they're from Europe, they're from I mean they're from parts of uh you know the eastern uh the more rich kind of eastern parts of the world as well like China for example. Um but yeah, that's

and again this is a coordination issue too, right? like um this is what some this is something that Kevin Owoki from Gitcoin has talked about a lot. Fatal also talked about it a lot. But yeah, anyway, I'm going to kind of digress on that point there. I've gone on about it too much. I got a few other things to get through here, but yeah, you can go give the report a read for yourself. I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So, AI, AI, trustless agents, artificial intelligence. This has been a huge thing for quite a while now, not just in crypto, but obviously outside of crypto as well. chat, GPT, Gemini, Banana, Nano Banana Pro, you know, I'm sure we've all heard of these kind of words. Uh, Claudebot is the latest one, I think, something like that. I've been

monitoring it on Twitter. There's a lot of noise, but the reason I am bringing it up is because ERC 84 or 8004 is now live on mainet. So, um, ERC 8004 is basically, uh, the ERC for trustless agents on Ethereum. You can go to the website to learn all about it if you would like here. 8004.org. Pretty cool website, pretty easy to remember there. So, essentially it's trying to create or it has created a framework for autonomous agents on Ethereum or on EVM chains uh generally.

Now, the reason why I think and and you know, I've been an AI kind of skeptic for a little while and and by skeptic I mean that I don't think it's as revolutionary as people think it is. There are certain industries where it does extremely well. uh you know software programming it does extremely well in that industry but there are so many other industries where it just fails and it doesn't do well and I think that the content creation like the image creation the video creation I think that's all just [ __ ] it's just it's it's it's slop like it's a waste of time and I think that AI is really bad for open uh kind of places on the internet because it just invades those open places as we've all seen on social media but when it comes from to these agents doing things like commerce and doing

things with money and doing financial related things and I think I've talked about this on the refill plenty of times at this point. Uh they need to be able to do that at the same speed at the uh that they operate at, right? And they can't do that with the Tradfi system. So naturally, they need an internet native financial system. Well, what is that? That's Ethereum, right? That's crypto. So the whole idea around 8004 is to build a framework so that people can have these agents and launch these agents and have them doing all this stuff on chain on Ethereum which I think is awesome because as you guys know the financial use cases of crypto and of Ethereum to me is the thing like that is the TAM. The rest of the stuff's a cool little bonus to have but the financial use cases is it for me. uh and that you

know it's a broad umbrella but it is it for me and I think AI especially these kind of um agents fits in nicely to this and slots in nicely and naturally there's no need to force this like there's a lot of stuff over the years that has been forced in crypto people just slap crypto onto it like gaming is one that I've I've been criticizing for a while about it but um when it comes to AI agents I think they slot in naturally I don't think there's any there's any need to force it here because it just works and it just it just it just works uh it works seamlessly um so I'm really happy to see this go live. Um there's not just this going live, there's also going to be a bunch of other stuff happening in the 8004 community. They're running a bunch of hackathons, I

believe. Um and they're doing a bunch of stuff there. But you can learn all about this on on on the website here. Uh but yeah, as as the broader point, as I was saying, like I just think that there's such a natural kind of marriage here between AI and crypto, but we have to build these standards. We have to build these frameworks in order for it to take off. And yes, there's already been some stuff happening uh with AI, especially on base. There's a lot of stuff happening there. But traditionally, a lot of it has been uh you know, just just these kind of AI projects launching tokens and then everyone speculates on the token. Whereas this would be a lot more than that, right? This would actually be setting up autonomous agents to do autonomous financial things and then you know they can even do things on

their own. Uh and there's been experiments of of this in the past, but but what I would like to see is these agents have literally no human interaction at all. they just get let out into the wild. They're immutable on chain. That's another benefit of of blockchains is that they can be immutable and then uh they just go and do their thing. Imagine setting up an agent and saying, "Okay, well, this agent's going to start with like a hundred bucks and I want uh and and program the agent and and tell the agent from the start, say, your goal in life or your goal as an AI kind of agent is to turn this $100 into as much money as you can, and I'd love to see what it does." and maybe it goes broke and then it bricks itself because it doesn't have enough money for gas. But that's when

the human could come in and send it more money to pay for gas, right? So, there's all this really cool stuff that can happen and we can watch it in real time as it's happening. That's what I want to see. Like, that's the cool stuff to me. And yes, it's speculation still, but I' i'd really love to see how it actually manages to do that. Like, how do you turn $100 into a million dollars? Is it going to go speculate on meme coins because that's the obvious thing to do. That's what humans would do. Or is it going to play a longer term game? Is it going to do uh you know is it going to do maybe HFT stuff and then take its profits and put it into uh longerterm things like maybe it it puts um some profits into stable coins and goes into

stable coin farms. Like what strategies would it actually come up with? So and there are different ways to do this. Obviously there'll be some agents that have basically uh you know nothing to them. They just start very bare and there'll be other ones that the human basically programs it and says hey you've got all of these kind of advantages. I'm going to tell you everything that you know you can do and that you know the the the common best practices are to do or will it be one that just starts from zero? I'd love to see the one that starts from zero and learns it all on its own. Like that would be really cool. Like essentially creating a a new life uh like an artificial life basically and saying do what you can to survive and thrive in the Ethereum environment. Uh because it,

you know, it can probably if it wanted to jump to other environments, but if it was smart enough it wouldn't want to do that. it'd be like, "Okay, maybe I'm not going to jump over to another L1 because then I've got bridge risk." Like, imagine an AI thinking about that, right? That'd be really cool. So, I'm sure we're going to see all of that as time goes on. But that's why I'm excited about it uh about 8004 and about AI agents uh within the crypto context here. All right, another big announcement that came out was that the DAO is apparently back. Now, for those of you who don't know what the DAO is, uh it's quite old now. So the DAO was an original idea that came around in 2016 to raise a bunch of money as part of a DAO and then have people governing this money in

order to fund projects within Ethereum. Now, of course, the Dow failed miserably because there was a hack of the contract uh which drained a lot of the funds and then the there was an irregular state change of the Ethereum chain which resulted in a fork where there was Ethereum where they took the money away from the hacker. So, it took the ETH away from the hacker and then there was the Ethereum where they didn't do that which was Ethereum Classic which is still around today somehow. But the reason I'm bringing up the Dow today is because, as I said, it's back uh and it has been relaunched by a bunch of people in the ecosystem and they are going to activate 75,000 ETH to strengthen Ethereum security. So, there's a lot of ETH that wasn't claimed that was stuck in the the Dow contract. So, what

happened after the fork happened is that if you had ETH that was in the Dow, you could claim it back. Uh but a lot of it wasn't. Apparently, 75,000 of it wasn't, which is worth $165 million. It's a lot of money. So good people got together uh specifically securityminded people within the crypto ecosystem and there's a list of them here uh Vitalik obviously uh there but a bunch of people from different teams within crypto uh and they got together to essentially use these funds uh and grow these funds I believe they staked a lot of these funds actually um just recently but to use these to fund security projects within the ecosystem and there is actually a full describe description of this here on this blog post but essentially what they want to do is make Ethereum more secure across the board. Not just the

Ethereum protocol itself, but all of these things. Wallet UX, key management and OPSSE, smart contract security, infrastructure monitoring, incident response standards, L2 bridge security, and of course, core protocol security. So, they have a wide mandate here. But this is awesome. Like this is really cool. This is another thing that suffers from a similar issue to what I was talking about earlier with regards to this kind of tragedy of the comments thing where a lot of this stuff is public goods stuff. A lot of this stuff is an expense. A lot of this stuff is not profit centers for a lot of kind of people. Yes, like smart contract auditing is a profit center for teams, but a lot of this other stuff isn't um you know uh for for example like key management and obssec and wallet UX. Eh,

it can be a profit center but it's not really a lot of the time. A lot of the time the profit center becomes uh bolting stuff on top of this. Like the actual core thing here is not the profit center itself. So it goes underfunded. it's not really given any attention by VCs or other kind of um parties out there. So, the fact that they have, you know, all this money to to kind of fund these things and using it from the Dow, unclaimed unclaimed ETH from the Dow is is quite crazy and uh it's cool to see, right? And for those of you who are wondering why someone would leave that much ETH in in that kind of being unclaimed there for like 10 years now, um it's because at the time it wasn't worth $220 million, which is when this blog post was posted, but now it's worth

a lot less than that because we had this dump. But it's it's still worth like what, $170 million, something like that. Um at the time, $75,000 ETH. I believe ETH was about spiked to $20. Yeah, it spiked to about $20 in 2016. um it was worth $1.5 million at the time. So it was worth very very little. And then ETH went back to like $10 or something like that. So it was worth $750K or I think ETH went to $7 at the end of 2016. It was worth $525K. So obviously like if we were to say there was a bunch of people participating in this 525K. Let's just say there was a,000 people that participated in in this. That's $525. So you can see why people didn't claim this back because they're probably like, "Oh, well it's gone. Whatever. Maybe they

even left and they didn't know about the fork, you know. So, yeah. Well, it definitely wasn't worth that much. And then you may think to yourself, why haven't they claimed it um yet and, you know, it's it's worth it's worth a lot more now. Maybe they lost their keys, right? Back then, everyone was losing keys. Um not not as much as in the Bitcoin early days. People were still losing them. Or maybe they just haven't paid attention to crypto. They're just completely out of it. They have no idea. or maybe it's still worth very little because if you only had $525 in there or $500, let's say $500 and yet ETH has gone up like a hundred times. Um, you know, 50K, maybe you had other ETH that you've made a lot of money on and 50K is not really worth it to you. I don't

know. There's a lot of different reasons here. It might it might sound insane for me to say that 50k isn't worth a lot to people. Some people it's worth nothing to, right? It's not even worth the time to claim it uh because they're already very rich from other ways. But anyway, very cool to see the Dow uh uh kind of coming back here and doing something good with those funds there. All right, so last couple of things here. Fidelity, the world's third largest asset manager, I believe, is launching a stable coin on Ethereum. It's got an unfortunate name. It's called FID, Fi D. Um it's kind of funny. They could have they could have called it Fiddy and then it could have been a meme. Uh but by calling it FID, um people were memeing it as Diddy. uh as in like P Diddy the uh the you know

there's a lot of kind of stuff going on um with him. Uh I don't I don't actually know a lot about it. I was because I don't really follow the celebrity stuff, but apparently he was um convicted of a lot of kind of like um sexual abuse related stuff. Uh I don't know. I don't know the full story there. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know the full story, but people were memeing about that. So besides the unfortunate name of the stable coin, it's still pretty cool to see the trend of the fact that like Trafi isn't slowing down with with with its adoption of Ethereum. it's going full steam ahead. Um, and they're so excited about it. Like I talked to people that are in contact with um the trady world and these TRFI people, they're FOMOing at the bit to get

involved with crypto. They love it. They love everything happening on chain. They love all the the DeFi stuff. They love stable coins especially and I've said this before on on the refuel. Um, and you know, they're falling over themselves to get involved here. So, it's kind of crazy that like the the prices are doing what they're doing, but again, this like prices are usually detached from fundamentals. It was crazy to me at the time that so much was going on with Ethereum in in 2020 and yeah, the ETH price eventually went up or even 2019. Uh but it sat like and did nothing for a while. And same is true of so many things, guys. Like so many things within the world that you know a lot of people get bullish on. They're like why why is this trading at such a low price when

all this stuff's going on? Well, it's just the way the things work. It's way markets work. It's way attention works. Um, but yeah, I just wanted to mention that because again, that's just like more of a a further trend here of stuff uh happening within the the Tradfi world. Now, also there was another kind of big thing that I wanted to put on your radar here, not in Tradfi, in DeFi, uh, that I'm going to disclose, make a pretty big disclosure here. So, there's a new project that announced itself, came out of Stealth, called Polaris. Uh, this is a pure play defi project, guys. This is a project that is going to be using pure ETH. It's going to be decentralized from day one uh I believe or at least very very early on here.

It's not doing like this hybrid DeFi CFI approach or anything like that. It's pure play defi and is the first pure play defi project that I have funded since 2023. Um or at least uh sorry it's the first angel investment that I've made uh since 2020 uh3 in the kind of defy space I should say. Um I believe the last one I made was Athena uh in 2023. Uh now you can check out Polaris's kind of uh announcement here for yourself and check out their Twitter and go follow them and and and everything. The white paper is not out yet, but it will be. Uh but yeah, I am I am going to be angel investing in them. So just just a big disclosure there. But the reason why I'm excited about Polaris is because it's pure play. It's pure play defi.

It's what I love about DeFi. It's it's as I said decentralized. It's using pure ETH. Uh and it's using a few novel mechanisms and bringing them together. So, I'm not going to explain uh you know on the refuel what it is from like a low level or anything like that, but from a high level it brings together uh you can see you can see here it brings together a a stable coin, a yield bearing stable coin called PUSD. Uh and then you've got uh PH which is an ETH derivative with a rising floor price because it trades on a bonding curve. And you have Polar, which is their native token, which is the steward stewardship stewardship token with real yield here. Now, what I like about this is that it's not new to kind of internalize all the revenue that a DeFi protocol makes. Um, but what is

new about this is that it's pure play. It's pure DeFi. It's pure ETH. It's not using any staked ETH tokens. It's just using ETH. And yes, there can be other ones uh uh built on this protocol like other tokens built on this protocol like they say here like uh uh P Gold for example or P anything. Um but they're starting off with like P uh and and they're and they're kind of bringing that to life f first here. Uh but the but the way it basically works is that like you you kind of deposit ETH into this bonding curve uh and that kind of mints this this kind of PUSD here and then all the trading on the bonding curve all that revenue is internalized within the protocol so that that PU USD becomes kind of yield bearing here uh uh from that and it's it's fully onchain

fully immutable fully auditable as they say here no real world assets no offchain dependencies no counterparty risk just pure play uh DeFi but it's not just a stable coin as they say and as I was saying before is a stable coin OS. People can fork it and fork the infrastructure for any stable asset that they want to make. Um, and this has been something that's been I guess like made in different parts within the ecosystem. So like you know maker is obviously the example here liquidity as well. Few other projects over the years have tried to do this stuff but this is bringing it all together uh and putting it on a bonding curve and making it immutable and essentially saying hey here it is just go play with it. Go do stuff with it. Go integrate it. Uh no one can stop you from doing this. So that's why I've

I've kind of um decided to angel invest in these guys almost 3 years since my last DeFi investment. I haven't invested in a lot of DeFi projects cuz I think a lot of them are are the same and the chances of success when you're the same against incumbents is really low. But I think Polaris is doing novel things. Yes, there are components that are the same as other DeFi projects out there, but they're bringing them all together in a unique way, and that's what I'm most bullish on. So you can go check out Polaris for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so here. Now, got a little bit of a rant, I guess, today, uh, at the end of the episode today. This is going to be mostly markets related. So, if you're not interested in that, you can kind of

click off and that's the episode for you today. I know I've been talking a bit about the markets lately. Uh, but that's primarily because the markets have been extremely volatile lately. And I think that it's what's causing a lot of people to lose their heads a little bit. Um, and you know, I was talking in the daily way prices channel today, which I avoid most of the time, but I was just saying in there like, guys, like I come in here and you're all just discussing the same thing day in day out. So, same people in there day in day out discussing the same thing. And sure, I appreciate people being active in the Discord channel, but where it becomes an issue, and everything that I talk about when it when it comes to this stuff is from personal experience, uh, by the way, guys, but when it becomes an issue is

that you talk about the same things every day, right? like you cope about the same things, your investments aren't doing what you want them to do, and you're you're you know, you're basically having like this shared cope with people. And that's fine for like making yourself feel better in the short term. But take it from me, it doesn't do anything longterm for you. It actually just makes you more depressed in the long term. And I think the only cure is to detach your kind of happiness and detach your feelings from the markets. You can't have feelings in in the market like your your your kind of like happiness attached to that because let's say you go to the extreme of things and you're basically your happiness is dependent on what the price of maybe not just ETH but like other assets are doing and let's let's look at how that plays

out dayto-day if you check the price every day. Wake up one day, ETH price is up, you're happy. Wake up the next day, ETH price is down, you're sad, right? Just as like a fundamental kind of thing here as like a basic basic thing here. So, you've got got this continuous yo-yo of ETH price going up and down and your emotions following it. What do you think that does to your emotions, right? Subconsciously, what do you think it does? It it ruins them. It essentially ties your emotional well-being to the random movements of ETH or any asset. And then over time that compounds, right? It compounds. It gets worse and worse and worse. And eventually you don't even realize it's happened where it becomes very subtle where you're like, why am I in such a bad mood today?

Oh, it's because the ETH price is down and all I did when I got up was check the ETH price and then I went in and started coping with other people about the ETH price and it's made me really sad and I'm down on my investment as well. Like that that that also like adds on to things too. Like if you bought ETH at 3K, you're like, "Oh shit." Like I'm down on my investment right now. And hey, I'm the same. I bought some Ether 3K. Sucks, right? I understand how it feels. As I said, all from personal experience here, guys. I've done this before myself a little while ago, but I've done this. And I also think it's pronounced if you entered in like 2021 or later because think about the average crypto participant that entered in 2021 over the last 5 years. You entered in

2021, everything's going up. Everything's awesome and it's co but like you're in crypto and it's awesome. Everyone's having a good time. You're making money. It's making you feel better. So maybe you were depressed about co maybe you were shitty about it. You're like I can't leave my house. I can't do anything, you know, and nothing's happening. The world's ending. But then you got this crypto thing and it all feels awesome. like you got all this, you know, you got this dopamine rush happening because everything's going up. Every everyone's having a good time. You're on CT and it's everyone's having fun, everyone's memeing, there's so much stuff happening. Cool. And then that all comes to an abrupt end at the end of 2021 when the bull market ends, right? Uh and you've experienced all this mania with like NFTTS and and gaming and DeFi stuff and everyone's

convincing you that it's going to change the world and everything's going to be up only forever. And then we enter 2022 and sure co starts subsiding, things start opening back up again, the world, you know, the wheels start turning in the world, but you're not interested in that. You're still in crypto because you're like, uh, you know, it's only it's just going to cool off. We're going to go back up in 2022. It's going to be a good year. Bam. Terror collapses in May, right? You experienced that. Cool. What the biggest collapse in crypto history at the time. You're like, okay, well, we all knew terror was a Ponzi. We all knew terror was a scam. It's okay. Now that we've cleared terror out of things, everything's going to be okay.

And sure enough, things recover a little bit and start going up a little bit from there from memory. People start getting hopeful again. They're like, "Okay, cool. This is this is awesome. This is going to be great." Bam. FTX collapses, right? You're like, "Holy fuck." Okay, cool. All right, guys. We We washed out another scam here. It's great. Like, it's awesome. We'll be all right. 2023 is going to be our year. Sure enough, 2023 hits. Things start looking up. things start looking more positive. Black Rockck files for an BTC ETF. Everyone's like, "Oh yeah, this is awesome. It's going to get approved.

It's going to be awesome. All this new money is going to come in." And sure enough, BTC starts going up and then other things follow. Then everyone's like, "Fuck yeah, we're going to get like BTC going up. E's going to go up. It's all going to go to price discovery. Then alts are going to happen. We're going to get old season. All my bags are going to go up. It's going to be awesome again. It's going to be like 2021. Cool. BTOC ETF gets approved. 2024 kind of uh rolls around here. And all the meantime, right, um the SEC is attacking crypto, by the way, in 2023 and 2024, right? Um yeah, SEC is attacking crypto.

Everything's [ __ ] uh because of that. Like all the other stuff's [ __ ] But then we got that ray of hope at the ETF. Okay, that all happens. And yeah, everything's going up again. Everyone's having a really good time, right, into the ETF uh kind of launching there. Uh, and then the ETF goes live and it was, I believe, a sell the news event at the time and then everyone's depressed again. But then things start looking up. Meme coins are happening. Oh, there's more activity. Oh, meme cocoins are like NFTs last time. Cool. Let's get involved with it. And sure enough, a bunch of people make money off meme coins. And it's and the party's good again. Uh, but then it it doesn't like it collapses.

Meme coins go down a lot and and people are like, "Oh my god, I lost a lot of money." But then we enter 2025 and memecoins start going up again because BTC is going up again and and there's more money in crypto. Like I actually have to bring up a chart for this because I don't remember the exact dates here, but I know for a fact like things were were going were going well um during during this period of time. So if I bring up the the BTC chart here, um yeah, I mean in 2024 up until like March, it went okay, but then not until November of 2024 did BTC start going up again. Um and then it, you know, it went up uh a bunch from there. went into price discovery, went up to like 100k, everyone was having fun. Um, and then

yeah, it was it was going okay. It was going okay into the presidential election. Um, Trump won. Everyone's like, "Okay, cool. SEC is not going to be an enemy to crypto uh kind of anymore there." Um, you know, Trump won and everything. And I should mention 2024 is also when the um uh when the ETH ETF got approved, right? Like against all odds uh which which is really really cool to see as well. So there was there was a lot of hope around that too, right? But then Trump won and um that was cool. But then after that, Trump did his meme coin and that was the top that was the forever top on meme coins, right? And then I think the the kind of vibe shifted from there and everyone was like, "Holy shit." Okay. Um is he just going to grift? Is he just going to

scam? Is he just going to do this [ __ ] Cuz Millennia also launched as well. And then a bunch of other [ __ ] was happening and we're like, "Okay, cool. The hostile SEC is gone, but now we have Trump doing all this [ __ ] and okay, that's not good. Memecoins, BTC starts going down from there. Um, BTC topped January 27th, I think, and went down 30% from there. But then in April, it started going back up again. That April dump was really bad for ETH, too, right? So, imagine, you know, living through through that and living through ETH going like getting absolutely hammered after delivering all these really cool things over the years, just getting [ __ ] slaughtered, right?

Um, and then after that, Tom Lee, you know, comes along. The ETH DATs come along. Okay, everything's good again and we start going up. ETH and BTC start going up. ETH goes up a lot. Goes up to 5K. Everyone's like, "Okay, price discovery imminent." And then everything crashes. We have the 1010 crash in October where it wipes out absolutely everything. Alts get absolutely obliterated and they haven't even done well until then, but they get [ __ ] destroyed. Everyone's losing money. Everyone's, you know, getting destroyed. And then since then we've just had down most of the time until the last few weeks where it's just been really down.

And all the while gold and precious metals went nuts. All the while stocks were going nuts. All the while all these other asset classes were going nuts. So let's go back to what I said at the start. Imagine you entered in 2021 and that's what you've experienced over the last few years. The absolute whiplash in sentiment and emotions that you have experienced in those years would drive anyone crazy. I don't know a single person a single person and some people I knew as the most stoic people that you can imagine but I don't know a single person who has not been negatively affected by this whether they join in 2021 or before they have been negatively impacted by this because it's not normal guys. This is not what humans are made to deal with. This is extremely volatile

emotional damage being done to your psyche constantly because we're always online and throw in all the other stuff. throw in all the social media stuff getting worse and worse over the years. Throw in the the world uh you know getting worse and worse over the years. Like just throw that all in and you can completely understand why especially if you join in 2021 crypto people are miserable. So I get it. I get it. I understand that doesn't change the fact that misery loves company. So that's why you see everyone being miserable together because it makes them feel better. That's not good. It's not good long term. It won't help anyone long term. it's not healthy long term for you personally and for the ecosystem I believe. Now in saying all of that I think if you look back at these times

that have happened within other kind of asset classes if you will you can go back and look what happened after the do bubble right like there are a lot of people who were wrecked after that a lot of people who were sad after that a lot of people lost their jobs and they lived through that and they were like okay well we know this tech is real we know tech is real we know it's going to be big but all the valuations came down massively and the NASDAQ didn't actually recover until 16 years later from 2000 to 2016 and then what happened halfway mark there the GFC in 2008 right so if you got involved in in in in the year 2000 you you you held and then the NASDAQ started going up again after

bubble and then it crashed again in 2008 and then as I said it didn't reach an all-time high again until 2016 now of course since 2016 the NASDAQ's gone nuts tech stocks have gone nuts everything's gone absolutely crazy but during that period of time. It's not been fun those 16 years, right? Um maybe it was fun if you bought the bottom and then rode the the top up. But let's just give it a kind of thing of like those eight years. Maybe it's not wasn't fun at all. It was really [ __ ] It was a really crap time for everyone. So I imagine like if social media was around back then like it is today, you would have seen the same thing happening. Everyone would have been super depressed. Would have been a bad time there. Um but they they probably were like you just didn't see

it because it wasn't on social media, but they probably were depressed and sad and everything. But what came out of it was worldchanging technology that improved a lot of people's lives? Yes, there was some [ __ ] things that came out of it too, like social media has just been terrible, but other things have improved people's lives immensely, right? So, is the same going to be true for crypto going forward? I believe it will be true for Ethereum. I don't know about the rest of crypto. Like, I'm very bearish on the rest of crypto, but if for Ethereum, I do think that as I always have, long term, it's going to change the world. Long term, it's going to be a staple of the world. It's going to replace the existing financial system. And all the Trafy people seem to think this as well, at least the ones

involved with with Ethereum. Yes, they want to protect their own moes, but still they see the writing on the wall. So that's my kind of way of thinking about it. And yes, I have a different stance as well because of the fact that I entered crypto really early. I've done very well with crypto. I'm insulated from a lot of this stuff because I, you know, cashed out a lot over the years. Um, not my ETH, but other things. And don't get me wrong, when ETH swings like it does like this, it still hurts. But I've always said that ETH for me is a multi-deade investment, but it still hurts. Like it doesn't it's not nice to see my net worth uh fluctuate s so violently in such a short period of time. Um but yeah, I I did take a lot of kind of assets outside of crypto because

as I took profits, I I I made sure to protect myself and insulate myself so I wasn't subject to these just really volatile emotions that can that can happen. So that's my advice to you guys. It's not financial advice. It's just like general advice. Don't stare at charts all the time. Don't attach your emotions to whatever the price of your favorite asset is doing. Don't overinvest, right? Don't put all your money into one thing and then that one thing goes down and you're pulling your hair out or if you've got no hair like me, you you're kind of just like trying to pull your hair out and not not finding anything. Um, and just driving yourself crazy. It's not good. It's not good for your health, not good for your mental health. Um, and I hope that, you know, not too many of you are suffering

from that. I know some people are, and I get it. And I get the the the need to kind of cope with other people. I get it, guys. Like, I totally understand. All I'm saying is that it's not healthy long term. It It really isn't. Take it from me. You've seen my journey through this over the years, guys. You saw how badly it got to me at certain points. How badly I got burnt out. It it all it's all from this. And since I've taken a step back, since I've kind of cut down my time, I am feeling a lot better, especially with my my fitness journey, too. Like, that's a very important part. but just like not looking at the price every day or not checking it first thing in the morning, not being exposed to crypto Twitter all the time, like that sort of stuff. It definitely has a

change on on your psyche. And I I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get themselves out of any holes they find themselves in because I've been there. I've been there, guys. I'm with you. Just want you to come out of that hole. All right? Because I know how good it feels when you do get out of it. Anyway, I'm going to end it there for today's episode. So, thank everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. video a thumbs up, subscribe newslet, join the discord channel and I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.