Tomasz steps down from EF, Robinhood Chain testnet - The Daily Gwei Refuel #858 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Refuel where recap the latest news in Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host Anderson 16th of February 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So back again for another update in the Ethereum ecosystem. Another kind of quietish week I think but also a lot kind of happened. Um and I think the biggest news which you can see on my screen here is that Tomas has stepped down as coed or co-executive director at the EF. Uh well, he says he will be stepping down at the end of February. So, just a couple weeks away here. Now, it may seem like it hasn't been very long that he's been co-ed, and that's because it hasn't. Uh if you'll remember back in March of 2025, he became co-ed, it was announced then. Uh so, it's been

around 10 by the time he finishes, you know, 10 11ish months that he's been in the role here. Now, I saw some people talking about the fact that he was only in the role for 5 months, which I found bizarre because like you can very easily verify that it was longer than that, but I do believe he initially had a 2-year contract with the EF, uh, but he's obviously leaving earlier than that. Now, of course, he put out his own post about this and he was on Twitter replying to people because there was a lot of speculation around this, right? a lot of uh I mean there was a lot of speculation founded on some kind of I guess like facts and some kind of arguments and then there was just a lot of conspiracy theories uh as is the case with anything when it comes to the

Ethereum Foundation it seems but you know I don't consider Tomas to be someone who has uh who is dishonest who would lie about things who would basically kind of I guess say that he's leaving for one reason when there's another reason why he's leaving and really I mean you can read his blog post for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But really the reason he gave for for leaving or stepping down was that cuz he he just wants to get back to building things like as the coed here of the Ethereum Foundation. He was definitely not doing much building. And for those of you who don't know, he comes from a product background. He was uh or is the founder of Nevermind. And he was very hands-on with building the Nethermind uh client with with doing all

the other stuff that they do like security audits and things like that. So, he just wants to get back to that. And honestly, I don't think people realize that when you're a kind of builder and when you're someone who really just wants to build things, being in a management position for too long really does wear you down. Now, I think Tomas had a really big kind of job ahead of him when he joined the EF. And I I honestly think that he has executed on that amazingly. I think he has changed the EF in many, many ways in the 10 months that he was there and in really, really positive ways. And I think that the EF is really in a nice position now to continue on uh into the future and be really strong into the future. And I think a lot of people aren't aware of

this, but the Ethereum uh.org website has a or sorry, I should say Ethereum Foundation website has an org chart of what the EF looks like today from kind of I guess um uh a bird's eye view of what it looks like. And I'll bring it up here on uh my screen. You can see it. I mean, it's kind of hard to read on my screen, but you can basically see that it's uh the Ethereum Foundation is split up split up into mainly five different categories with this with kind of uh two subcategories being the board and and management. But really, you've got uh five different categories here. One being protocol, one being ecode, one being devcon and dev connect, one being operations, and one being privacy. Now there is also another sub uh thing here called comm's coordination um which

obviously is like public relations and media and stuff like that but really the there's there's kind of five main uh kind of pillars here. Now if you click into them and zoom in here you can see all of the people that are involved here from the people that are leads uh to the people that are team members as part of the individual teams here. So for in the protocol category for example you have different teams like you have c cryptography research you have the gu team you have protocol support so on and so forth and you can see who is in that team I don't think this is an exhaustive list of everyone but it will show you the kind of like people that are at least the most visible I recognize a lot of names here most visible on social media and things like that as well as

the leads of each team which are highlighted in bold here so on um you know the protocol front in terms of protocol coordination for example you have Alex Stokes and Tim Bico as the leads, right? And then within the sub teams here, you can see um with within protocol support, Nixo is the lead here. Now, uh there, you know, there's other kind of teams on here. There's other stuff going on here. So, you can go check this out for yourself. And there's not just protocol, there's also Ecodeev and the others here, but then you click in the middle and you see, okay, well, this is the the management and the board. So, the board hasn't really changed much over time. Uh the board is Vitalik Ay Patrick which I believe is the lawyer of the the Ethereum Foundation or at least the the kind of

legal council of the Ethereum Foundation and Shiae Wang which is the current coed and still coed of the Ethereum Foundation but she's also on the board and then yeah in the management um section here you can see that the coeds Tomas which obviously is going to change at the end of Feb and Shia Wang as well as Bastion and Josh Stark here. Now a lot of you will probably know who Josh Stark is. A lot of you probably won't know who Bastion is. Uh, and Bastion, actually, that's a that's a perfect segue into me talking about who's taking over from Tamas, at least in the interim, and it's Bastion. So, um, this is his Twitter account. You can go give it a follow if you want to link it in the YouTube description below. Um, but he, yeah, he was basically announced as the interim coed of the Ethereum

Foundation while they look for a more permanent person to fill in the role of Tamas here. Now, I will say one thing about Bastion. I've met him once uh or I've been like I I've talked to him more than once, but I I met him for the first time in Devcon in Bangkok in 2024. Um I have nothing but good things to say about him. Honestly, I I would say that in terms of I mean I, as I said, I've only talked to him a bunch of times, but very brief interactions with him, but I will say that within my interactions with him, he is a very good listener. Like there are not many people that I can say that about u because I can usually tell when someone is a good listener or not. Uh there's a bunch of different tells um when when you're

talking to someone. Uh I know as well because one of my really good friends uh is is a really good listener. So I kind of and I've been friends with him since I was basically 13 years old. So I I kind of know what to look for here. And Bastion really impressed me with how good of a listener he was. And that sentiment is echoed across pretty much everyone that's either worked closely with him or just talked to him. That's the the kind of um through through line there for for Bastion. So I will say that if you're just wondering who this guy is, uh that's what I can tell you in terms of like a highle thing. Uh but you can talk to other people that are are involved within the Ethereum Foundation that have uh that have interfaced with with Bastion and they'll tell you the

same thing there. But yeah, he's taking over uh from from that there. Uh but yeah, as I said, like there's the org chart here. This is not hidden. This is not kind of private. This is public. This is on the Ethereum Foundation website. You can go check this out for yourself. I'll link in the YouTube description below, of course. But back on to Tamaras. So in his actual update, he he talks a lot about, you know, what he did at the EF and what the future of the EF looks like here. And I got to be honest with you guys, I don't think a lot of people know just how different the EF is today as compared to what it was before Tamas joined. There are so many different teams now. like this or chart like there's so many like like okay for on the protocol side of things

uh I I would argue a lot of this stuff existed but not in uh this kind of formal uh I guess um environment like there was a lot of informality at the EF there was it was basically a very flat organization I think at least from the outside looking in um and and a lot of stuff wasn't formalized but then you know I think this work was started before Tomas joined but Tomas joined and really accelerated the formalization of all this stuff and put in and put in um place a lot of processes to get stuff done better and faster and the F is is accelerating is doing a lot of stuff faster doing being a lot more public with their communications being a lot more visible. You've seen all those changes happen and and that they're um I guess in large part due to Tomas's

leadership over the last 10 or so months here. So, he's done a lot uh for for the uh for the Ethereum Foundation and for Ethereum here, but you can give his blog post a read and go check it out for yourself. But he also details what he wants to do in his future. As I said, it's basically that he wants to get back to building and specifically he wants to build things within uh at the intersection of AI and crypto. Now, I think this is actually going to be something you see more and more people kind of want to do as time goes on. Um because I think I've said this on the refuel before when it comes to what's most exciting within crypto right now and specifically within Ethereum right now at the app layer. So not the protocol layer, the protocol layer to me

at least is always exciting. But like on the app layer side of things, the thing that is most exciting uh is of course DeFi and Trfi and institutions all coming on board. But like that's not net new, right? It's not something that's like I mean it's been around for a while. It's been around for a few years at this point like five six years. Defi summer was 5 years ago, you know? It's almost six years ago now. Um so it's not like new and exciting. It's not something that people are are kind of looking at and being and having all the kind of stareyed ideas about what this can be. Whereas AI on the other hand is still quite new. Now, of course, it's not new new. It's been around for I think like 2 3 years since chat JPT came along in terms of commercial AI. Uh but

in terms of its intersection with crypto, it's extremely new. I would say it's only been a thing over the last few months in terms of actually getting adoption. Yeah, there was stuff happening before that. people speculating on AI meme coins and like that, but that's just all all irrelevant. I'm talking about actual products and services being built. Uh I've been following a couple. I talked about one in the Daily Gray Discord channel um called Felix uh which I I've been following and it's actually pretty interesting to see what this AI is doing. This AI agent is doing uh basically trying to set up their own business on their own completely on their own uh and run it and and make money that way and make real revenue for themselves. uh and one of the businesses is actually selling AI agents uh to other AI agents and like it's just it's

crazy like when you actually dive deep into this stuff it gets quite crazy. Um so so that I think is going to nerd snipe a lot of people just like DeFi did. Defi nerd sniped a lot of people in crypto uh and it still does I think but if you're looking at something that's kind of you know feels net new feels unexplored feels like there's a infinite garden ahead of it to in order to kind of tend to then I think AI is that thing. Now, when you're someone like Tomas who is a builder at heart, he's definitely not someone who wants to be in management forever. There are very few people, I think, that can actually do management long term. Um, but he's a builder at heart. So, he wants to get back to building. Now, does it suck that he wasn't, you know, at the EF for the

whole 2-year term? Sure. I loved Samas at the EF. He was doing a lot of great stuff, but at the same time, he's put in a lot of processes over the last 10 months to ensure that the EF has a really bright future ahead of it. Now, whoever replaces him permanently, as I said, Bastion's the interim coed, and I think he's going to do great at that. But whoever replaces him, you know, um, going forward, I I do hope that they're going to be there for for a longer term. I do hope that there's someone who, you know, maybe I guess like is more suited to a long-term management position. Uh, because Tomas is always going to be shortterm. Uh, just given the fact that he only had a two-year contract kind of speaks to that as well. Um but yeah, I understand why people were trying to

find other reasons saying, "Oh, maybe Tomas got pushed out because uh the EF is such a difficult organization to work in and so on and so forth." But you know, both he and the people at the EF all over Twitter were basically saying that that wasn't the case. They weren't saying it directly, but you know, Tomas himself was saying, "I am leaving because of this and this being I want to go build stuff. I want to go build AI stuff. I don't want to be management anymore. I think I've done what I came to do in terms of reshaping the EF and I'm going to move on now. And I think that if you don't believe that, if you think Tomas is lying about that, if you think he's actually lying through both his blog post and all his tweets and basically there's so much more under the

surface and there's so much drama under the surface, I kind of find it funny because that means that you you guys, you know, you like Tomas and you think that he was really great in the EF position and you think and you wish that he'd stayed there, but then you also believe that he's a liar, right? Is a liar a good person to be in a leadership position? I would say no. If you actually believe that he's a liar, then you shouldn't want him to be at the head of the EF. So, you can't have your cake and eat it too, right? You can't just come up with these conspiracy theories and then say that, oh, you wish that he stayed more when you think that he's a liar. Like, I just thought that was a bit silly. Uh I understand, as I said, I

understand why people kind of are coming up with these things because he did not, you know, he didn't stay for the whole two years at the EF. But, you know, he's literally telling you and if you don't believe him, then that's that's all up to you, right? It's it's totally up to you if you want to believe him or not. But then if you think that he's lying, I don't know. I feel like you wouldn't want him back at the EF because then why would you want someone dishonest leading the EF, right? So that's just my take on it anyway. But as I said, uh Bastion is taking over. You can read his um tweet uh kind of here. I'll link it in the YouTube description below, but he, you know, he's basically echoing a lot of the same stuff that I think Tomas has

been doing. He wants to continue that work. Uh, and he also wants to continue making sure that Ethereum sticks to what it does best, which is B, the most decentralized secure censorship resistant network in the world, which is Ethereum's moat, guys. Like, we talk about moes a lot in crypto. You know, what moat does an L1 chain have? I mean, this is Ethereum's moat. And this is something that cannot be replicated, I believe, across any L1 chain. Um, but yeah, I've spoken enough about that. I think on last episode, I went on a little bit of rant about that. So, I'm going to move on from that. uh there. All right. So, speaking of of Tomas, uh this isn't got to do with his leadership kind of positioning here, but this has got to do with him uh giving a talk recently. So, you can see here there's a

bunch of screenshots from his talk. So, this was at uh ETH Denver, I believe it was, uh in or at ETH Bald I should say, sorry. Um he gave two talks uh and he had and one of the talks was about a larger vision for Ethereum. Uh and then the second talk was drilling deep into its postquantum future. So you can see here um the 2025 summary of Ethereum and specifically like what Ethereum has done, what the both the Ethereum foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem has focused on. Uh and you can see here there was an improved communications and storytelling at the EF. Yes.

Institutions being onboarded. Yes. Founders and apps being on boarded. Yes. Different grant strategy at the EF. the protocol uh kind of stuff at the EF being uh being streamlined all these sorts of stuff right trillion dollar security so on and so forth um then the strategy for 2026 you know what does 2026 look like for Ethereum for the EF and there's a bunch of stuff here such as postquantum security devcon in Mumbai of course uh uh getting the lean Ethereum road map merged into the core road map proposals and I believe imminently there's a new Ethereum road map or an updated Ethereum road map being published I I shouldn't say new because there's like nothing new on it really. It's it's just bringing everything together under one unified road map and updating the one that I

guess Vitalik put out a few years ago at this point. So that's coming really soon I think like within the next few days I believe. Um I've seen early previews of it just to give you a disclaimer there. Uh and it's really awesome but again it's not new. It's a lot of stuff on there that we're already you know talking about within the community. We've already been working on for a while. It's just basically bringing together all that stuff. you know, the ZKVM stuff, lean Ethereum stuff, all the existing work with all the existing [clears throat] upgrades like Lamsterdam and Hegotar and so on and so forth, right? That's all coming together. I can't wait for you guys to see that road map. It's really really cool. Um, and then he moved on and he gave a basically an overview of what's happening in postquantum

Ethereum, which has become very very important, and then also a summary of the efforts of postquantum Ethereum as well. You can go give this a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below, but I just wanted to mention that cuz I thought it was important uh and it was a nice little bird's eye view of what has happened over the last year and looking forward for the EF and Ethereum at large. All right, so the first ever L1 ZKevm breakout call happened on February 13th and this as Lattis Laos I think that's how you pronounce it said this is where Ethereum ZK future gets built. Lots of moving parts, lots of progress across eight work streams. So here is a recap and there's also a kind of um forecast section here of this call uh which I thought was pretty cool. Uh and I'm

going to show this for the latest allcore devs call as well. But you can see here there is a summary of what they actually spoke about on this breakout call. So and and and a TLDDR kind of uh uh summary breakdown here as well. all dot points which is really great uh talking about uh basically sorry summarizing the discussions then giving the action items the decisions and uh the targets here. So I guess from this meeting I can talk about what they had in terms of action uh sorry in terms of decisions and targets. So the decisions uh they made a decision that about proofs and about what what validators are going to do here. Sorry excuse me. um you know proof verification, integrating into consensus layer clients, so on and so forth. And

then targets I think this is what people are probably most interested in kind of what the ZKVM team is targeting. So for Glamsterdam they're targeting optional proofs uh launch target uh end of February they want uh to this see this is a lot of technical stuff here that you're not going to know unless you actually kind of read the other stuff. Uh but sound calc milestone one deadline I don't even know what that is but I'm sure you can get the context by reading the other stuff here. And before Glamsterdam, they want to have risk V circuit verification for all major ZKVM. So quite an aggressive kind of timeline here. Uh but great to see that. So yeah, anyway, you can watch the call if you want and you can read the the notes here if you want. I'll link that in the YouTube description below. But I just

wanted to put this on your radar because stuff is moving on the ZKVM front. Uh and it's going to be here before you know it, guys. It's going to offer a huge upgrade to Ethereum L1 and I really can't wait until it's live there. All right. Another interesting core dev related uh little piece here was from Carl Beak who published something on the Ethereum magicians forum titled the case for quick slots in Hegotar. Now there's been a lot of debate around you know shortening slot times in Ethereum and when to do it. I think I've said before that I don't think it could be done in Hegotar if Fossil is the headliner on the consensus layer side for Hegotar, which it looks like it's going to be, which means that faster slots would be pushed out to the next fork after

Hegotar, which is currently uh cenamed AR, but Carl thinks that we can get this in Hegotar. Now, this is I guess a bit different than Quicker Slots. Um what it is is basically gives an idea of a framework that can be implemented in Hegotar that could get us quicker slots that may not necessarily be 6-second slots but maybe we go to like 10-second slots in in Hegotar then eight then six and so on and so forth. So what essentially does it proposes a way to put in place the scaffolding in order to do quicker slots. Now the really cool thing about this is that it can actually be implemented in Hegotar without lowering slots at all. So all the work can be done and we can basically say okay well we don't feel comfortable

lowering the slots just yet but we can put in place all this work all this scaffolding and then by we can uh by the star fork we can lower slots then and the work is already done for that which I thought was pretty cool and a really nice I guess like interim solution uh given the fact that it is highly unlikely that we will go to 6second slots in Hegotar we may be able to get this scaffolding in place and get us down to like 10-second slots that would still be an improvement. I think that the the north star here should always be to uh do an improvement if we can and it does and obviously if we can means if we can do it safely, if we can do it while preserving, you know, the decentralization, uptime, all that sorts

of stuff. Uh but then what we get out of this as well is that it just makes it easier to lower slots in the future. Like the work's already done. So in AR if we go to 10 seconds in Hegotar we can say in Aar well let's go to 8 seconds or maybe we can even go to 6 seconds from there. And in the meantime we've already showed that we can lower slots right and we've already got this scaffolding in place. So I thought it was a really cool proposal that you can go give a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But yeah I just thought it was a great idea here and I'm interested to see if we can get this into Hegotar. It'll be um it'll be really good if we can.

All right. So the latest all core devs call was uh I guess took place 4 days ago now the 12th of Feb here. Uh you can of course go watch it for yourself if you'd like. But also on the forecast website I just noticed this. There is a TLDDR summary of this call. This is really cool because it's all in one place. Like I actually I know I say this every time but I cannot praise forecast enough as a website. This is to me one of the best things to come out of the Ethereum ecosystem in you know in terms of on the protocol side uh in the last like h it'd have to be 5 years at least maybe ever like I don't know I just I just love this website so much cuz it has everything on here like as someone who's covered all of the protocol work

for years now all the way back in 2018 when I was doing Ethub right I've been covering it was always so difficult to track down where everything was I had to go to different GitHub profiles I had to go to newsletters. I had to go to Twitter. I had to go everywhere. Now I can literally just come to forecast, right? And I can see everything. And I mean everything here, which is awesome, right? I mean, it's it's just crazy how much is on here. Maybe it doesn't have like everything everything, but it has coverage of like I would say at least 95% of everything, right? So um what I yeah as I said what I did notice was that they've got this summary now of all core devs calls where they've done the same thing as they as they've done for the L1Z KVM call where they've got you

know the dot point TLDDR and then also the action items the decisions and the targets. So you can the targets is what interests me because you can see here that uh I can quickly get a view of okay well the the bal DevNet 3 launch is happening on February 26th. Also on February 26th client headliner preferences are due and this is for Glamsterdam. And then on February uh 19th the AC/DC call for fossil headliner decision for uh uh for for Hegotta right um so you know all of this is just really really cool like just having it all in one spot. Uh, and again, I can't give the um the forecast uh team, the team behind it, the the team working at the EFR enough credit for their work here. I just I love it and I wish I

could support them more. I don't know how else I can support them uh other than just like giving them a shout out and making sure people see their work. But yeah, it's just absolutely awesome to see this here. You can go check that out. I'll link it in YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, moving on to a little bit of app layer news here. So, Unis swap announced that uh they have strategic in uh they have um uh uh sorry they have uh a strategic integration in collaboration with securitize to make black rockck's USD institutional digital liquidity fund or build available to trade via unis swap x through securitize. This is pretty cool because unis swap I would argue is the most defi native defy app and the most well-known and famous defi app. And then

you have black rockck which is the most trady native and well-known you know um tradi player institutional player in the world. So you have two giants kind of meeting here to integrate with each other. And this is again going to be a theme that we're going to see more and more of going forward. This is not going to be the last integration by you know not by far. We're going to see more and more of this happen. Gonna see more and more of Tradfi coming on chain. We're going to see more and more of DeFi integrating with Tradfi. Uh, and it's just going to be a snowball effect from here, I think, as well. It's it's kind of funny to see like a lot of the sentiment on crypto Twitter and just crypto generally where people have kind of like capitulated and they're like, "Oh, crypto is so boring now. You know,

crypto's so old now. The prices aren't doing anything. Like, what's happening? Like, what's going on? We need something exciting to happen." when in reality there are a lot of exciting things happening but maybe it just doesn't appeal too much to cryptonatives. I think for a lot of crypto natives, the draw of crypto was always the volatility of it, right? Always the craziness of it. And I'm not just talking about prices. I'm talking about the volatility of like sentiment, the volatility of of um you know, what's happening at any given day. Like I know that it was a really big draw for me originally as well. Like especially in the early days, like when I got into Ethereum in 2017, it was the ICO boom. So there was something happening all the time. And then through 2018, 2019, there was so much happening. Even though it was a lot

quieter because the markets were quieter, there was still so much happening in terms of like core protocol work, app layer work, the community was small, but like I'd wake up and there'd be like like I'd be in group chats and there'd be hundreds of messages I'd have to catch up on. I remember going to work at the time. I was working uh not in crypto, I was working at a telekcom in cyber security uh here in Australia and I'd have to wake up at like 6:00 a.m. in the morning to catch the train to get to work. And I remember just being on my phone scrolling through Discord and just catching up on everything cuz I'm in Australia. Everything happens when I'm sleeping. So I'm catching up everything.

And it was so exciting at the time. And then of course it was even more exciting in DeFi summer and then NFT summer and all the stuff there. But I think since then a lot of the volatility besides the memecoin stuff that happened has definitely died down. And especially over the last year the volatility has died down not just with prices but also with just everything happening. But that doesn't mean development has slowed down. It just means that uh I think like and I think I've said this plenty of times on the retail before, but like crypto matured. It grew up. It's no longer in the you know the creative phase or the kind of like volatile creative phase where there's a million different things happening. We know what works, we know what doesn't.

We know what makes money. We know what doesn't. We know what is can be a sustainable business, you know, so on and so forth. So, we're sticking with that, right? Um, I think that if you want some of that excitement back in your life, the AI agent stuff is probably the most exciting stuff happening right now. And the cool thing about that is that it's both crypto and non-crypto. So, you've got access to both worlds here. But other than that, I don't expect DeFi to ever be like it was in DeFi summer. I don't expect NFTTS to ever be like what they were. I definitely don't expect meme coins to be like what they were. Um, so I think that yeah, as time goes on, things are just going to mature more and more, but that's okay. Uh, that's okay because it's sustainable. It brings long-lasting

value and it's also just better for our mental health I think especially like for me it's definitely better for my mental health. I'm spending a lot less time on Twitter in you know in these kind of trenches because uh it's just healthier to do that I think there but yeah you can go check out Unisop's announcement for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right the last thing here is that the Robin Hood chain is now live on test net. So this is a public test net now live. You can go check it out. Um so for those of you who may not remember the arbitum uh sorry the Robin Hood chain is built using arbitram technology here and is designed to support tokenized real world and digital assets. Uh if you want to get started you can uh building or

using the Robin Hood chain. You can go to this link here which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so. But it's great to see that this final this is finally live. Obviously it's been spoken about a lot uh within the cryptosphere. It's been spoken a lot about in Tradfire. But again, this continues the trend of more and more of these Trafi players coming into crypto, building in crypto and understanding that it is the future of of uh of finance, you know, for lack of a better term there. And specifically Ethereum, like I say crypto a lot, but really I just mean Ethereum. Like I think the wider kind of crypto ecosystem 99% of it is just going to zero. And maybe not the prices because apparently nothing ever goes to zero in crypto, but usage, you know, adoption for that sort of stuff,

it's just pointless. I think when I just look at crypto, you know, I just see Ethereum. I don't see anything else. I I even think like Bitcoin is just not not fascinating at all. I just see Ethereum. Um and you know, that's what's most exciting for me still. It's what keeps me here still. It's what's keeps me doing the refuel still. I know I'm only doing it once a week, but hey, I'm still doing it, right? Still involved with the community. And I think that yeah, as time goes on, Ethereum is going to more and more uh kind of realize the vision of bringing the world on chain. I don't think any other chain really has a shot at doing that. I think it's Ethereum and Ethereum alone via uh you know the L1 as well as the L2s. I know we've already talked about the L2 stuff to death, but

this is the Robin Hood chain going live, guys. This is an L2. Like L2s aren't dead. This is one of the biggest Trafi players getting involved and building an L2 on Ethereum and still launching their L2 and still doing things with it. So yeah, when you look at it from that perspective, um I think you can see where the the kind of puck is going here. Uh but yeah, anyway, that's enough on the news. I I was requested, so there was a request in the Daily Gray Discord channel to give a bullish rant on ETH. And they said that even if it's a long-term like 5 to 10 year kind of bullish rant on ETH, they'd love me to give it. And I I thought about this and I'm just like, well, is there anything new that I could say at this point? Like I've been giving you bullish rants for

years at this point and I could give you another one, but I would be repeating what I've said. Like nothing's changed for me fundamentally. you go back many years on the refill and you'll you you'll hear me say that ETH is a multi-deade investment for me. It has never been a short-term play for me. Uh because I understood and and I've understood for a long time that it's going to take a while for the world to wake up to ETH, for ETH to be valued as it should be valued. There's going to be lots of ups and downs. And yeah, I may get ahead of myself sometimes and think that, oh, look, we're back at alltime high. We're going to keep going up.

10K's in sight. Um I get caught up in that stuff, too. But in terms of like my fundamental thesis and what I actually use for positioning in terms of like buying ETH, in terms of investing in ETH, it's always long-term. It's multi-deade and it's based on the exact same stuff I've always talked about on the refuel. The the first and foremost, the biggest thing is ETH is a store of value, guys. And you know what's funny is that I I know I've talked about this before, but it's funny that people say, "Well, gold's a store of value, even though it did nothing for 15 years in terms of price." I mean, it it did go up and down, but it like kind of sat sideways for 15 years. So if you can still call gold a store of value even though it sits sideways for 15 years

then like not that I want this to happen to ET obviously because it would suck but if E sat sideways for 15 years before going to a new all-time high like why can't you call that a store of value as well like it's to me it's very similar to me it's the same thing right not that I think that's going to happen. And I think things move too fast these days for that to happen. But again, ETH is a multi-deade play for me. Just like gold bugs, consider gold a multi-deade play. Just like Bitcoin is, consider BTC a multi-deade play. And for me, it's because I strongly believe that ETH is the world's best store of value. I just think the world needs to wake up to that. And it's just going to take a while cuz the these things do take a while. Um, and then I also think that,

you know, there's a huge bull case to be made around ETH being the only decentralized money for the agentic economy, right? And that's relatively new actually. I think I don't think I've spoken about that too much in the past, but that's another big use case there. But ETH is money is still something that I've been talking about for like 7 years now. So again, it still fits in to my bullcase for ETH, right? So So again, like I could give you all the same spiel. I could tell you where everything's going to be, okay? because uh you know I believe that ETH is going to be a really strong store of value decades into the future. But I think what a lot of you are looking for is probably a sermon, probably someone to tell them that it's all going to be okay because you invested in ETH. You want to

see your investment go up. I've never been that guy. I don't I never viewed myself as that guy to tell you that everything's going to be okay. I give you the facts as I see them. I give you my thesis as I see it. And then it's up to you what you want to do in terms of like when you want to buy ETH, when you want to sell ETH, how you want to invest in ETH. I can't do that for you. And I'm not a grifter. I'm not a an influencer that will basically tell you what you want to hear. Um I make no money off the refuel, right? I make no money off doing any of this stuff. I do it because I I love it. I do it because I care. So, at the end of the day, uh you know, it

sucks. Yeah. If you bought ETH higher, I mean, I bought ETH higher than the price now and and you're down on your investment. Um but this show and my educational work has never been about helping you be the best investor, right? It's been about keeping you informed about the technology side of things and also talking about the markets from time to time. But at the end of the day, guys, the way you position your portfolios, the way you do your investments, that's all up to you. I know that's frustrating. I know that sucks. I know that's uh that that that you know, it sucks sometimes. I know that you don't want to have to deal with that stuff sometimes. I don't, you know, a lot of the time like there's so many things to invest in. There's so many different markets to play in. There's so

many different things that could go wrong. So many different things that can go right. Like how do you make a decision? I I feel that too. Like I'm not a I wouldn't consider myself to be a master investor or anything like that, but what I am is a long-term investor. I identify opportunities early on, you know, or at least I try to. I place bets. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Like my angel investments, for example, I've done like 80 of those. Like there's so many of them that have shut down, guys. Some of them return some money, some of them return nothing. I've taken losses on those, right? I would guarant I would I can basically guarantee that most of those will either shut down or go nowhere and I'll either get a little bit of money back or nothing back from them. But some of them

have been really big winners and I've made back the money that I've invested in all the other ones from those ones. So that's usually how kind of you know angel investing works, right? But again like I I had to make 80 investments u for for some to kind of pay off here. And if I had missed like one or two of those that paid off, I could have I could be just net down as well. So that's that's the kind of way I think about it. Now, obviously, different investment profiles carry different risks. Early stage investing is the riskiest, I would say. Uh maybe meme coins, but like I wouldn't call that investing. That to me is gambling and and and trading. Like I we're talking about actual investing. Yeah. Early stage stuff, the riskiest by far. Ethan BTC, you know, way less risky, but still

risky. Uh, altcoins very risky as well, right? Um, but then you go out into Tradfi and there's a lot of stuff that's risky there too. The least risky thing in Tradfi is is obviously like treasuries, right? But I'm you're talking about like actual kind of investments. Uh, it's index funds. But then you're like, well, on average over the last 30 years, index funds have returned like 8 to 10%. And then you think to yourself, well, that's not very much money. And then you but but then you probably don't realize that people buy these things to preserve wealth uh and to beat inflation and also to protect from downside because yes they don't have much upside but they also don't have that much downside comparatively because of the fact that they're extremely diversified across many different uh kind of assets. So,

you know, the the and and I think within crypto divers diversification doesn't really work that well because things just fall so violently. But within the tradefi system, it does, right? And then not to mention all the other markets, right? Precious metals, housing, real estate, um, uh, whether that's commercial or residential, uh, you know, trading cards, another kind of thing there, other collectibles, stuff like that, you know, collectible cars, whatever. Whatever it is, there are just so many different things to invest in. But again, for me, my strategy has always been try to be early to stuff. Try to invest when you're early, uh, but have a long-term horizon on it still.

Uh, and then also preserve my wealth in things that I consider to be really strong stores of value like ETH, but then also have a diversification within stocks and outside of crypto. That's what I've been doing lately. But even that kind of sucked cuz I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing here. Like, I'm new to this. I'm just going to buy some index funds, which have just been flat over the last few weeks or relatively flat. Uh, but then again, I'm buying them for decades of investment. I'm not buying them to turn a quick profit or anything like that. It's wealth preservation. It's trying to make sure I don't get eaten away by inflation, right? So, there's all those things to consider. But anyway, I think on that note, I'm going to finish it there. Uh, yeah, I, as I said, like if I

gave a bullish rant on ETH, it would be the same thing you've always heard from me. I don't think you need a refresher on at this point. Maybe sometime in the future, there will be a refresher on it, but for now, I think there's going to that's going to be it for today. So, thank everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give it a thumbs up newslet this go channel and I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.