Tornado Cash devs arrested, Base to be decentralized - The Daily Gwei Refuel #646 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we cup the latest news new theme ecosystem I'm your host the internet designer and today's 25th of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for missing yesterday's episode I was at the Meetup uh in Melbourne and I didn't have a chance to record the episode earlier before the meet up and then I got home at like midnight so there was no chance that I was going to be able to record a a kind of a refuel there I think I said I record a roll-up before no review not not the banker scroll up um which I actually will be on again very soon by the way just some Alpha there but uh yeah the meet up last night was great it was hosted by upside down here in Melbourne in cremorne uh and

Stables was the was the uh the the co-sponsor of the event there uh and I've talked about Stables before I think I talked about them on the episode the other day how they have this mobile wallet that you can use for stablecoin payments and upside down is basically a kind of a co-working space for crypto people slash incubator sort of thing going on there but yeah it was a great event met a lot of great people all I had a lot of great conversations on I even had a great conversation with someone from the Solana Foundation funny enough it was it was actually a pretty healthy conversation even though my first introduction to him was when I was on stage on the panel um he asked me a pretty spicy question about ethereum and Solano and I kind of just ran through my answer with it

um I don't know if that was recorded but I'm not going to I'm going to bore you with the details there because I'll rent I know I'll rant for too long uh but yeah I'm I'm really liking these local meetups and I encourage you guys to attend your own local meetups because they're just so much different to what we're exposed to online I know the daily wear Discord channel is really friendly really healthy a really healthy place and we have a lot of fun in there but nothing compares to real life conversations guys like it's just so much different I know that should be obvious but for anyone right because we we all have real life conversations but I think what happens is that we can sometimes get stuck in the bubble of crypto Twitter of discords of just online and of course a lot of that is

reflected a lot of the sentiment is reflective of the price there whereas going to these made Ops like no one really cares about the price like I don't really have price related discussions it's all about the tech the community The Vibes and there was actually a really great panel last night that was all about nfts and the middle and the metaverse but talking about it uh in the context of I guess like Brands outside of crypto not just kind of like in crypto nft stuff and it made of her stuff and I know within crypto if you go on crypto Twitter everyone's just you know on nft on them on the metaverse and to be fair a lot of it has earned that reputation right like uh it wasn't a pretty time for nfts over the last couple years but if you look outside of the bubble and look at the

brands that are actually working with this sort of stuff and working with these digital products and and and and the actual metaverse there's a lot going on guys like let me tell you that much there's a lot going on right now that actually made me really bullish on something that I traditionally have not been very bullish on honestly I mean you guys know I'm not really big into nfts but I um I think that they're you know if you just pay attention to what's on crypto Twitter you're missing the forest for the trees when it comes to nfts and I didn't mean to rhyme that there but yeah anyway enough rambling about that as I said encourage you guys to go to local meetups uh in your own area even if they're small are guaranteed to be a good time uh you know I'm going to

another one next week uh next week of the week I know the week after I believe um and I expect it to be a lot smaller last night there was over 100 people there and last week there was over 100 people as well but I'm expecting the the other one I'm going to in a couple weeks time to be a lot smaller uh but that's okay I think you know small or large as long as the right people are there it's always a good time uh now before I move on to the news uh that I've missed over the last 48 hours just also wanted to mention that someone told me today that apparently there are ads running on my videos now on YouTube now that's not me running the ads that's obviously YouTube running the ads because they just run it on I think channels that reach a certain

size I guess my size is size now for that to be happening but no I'm not involved in the Creator program or anything like that so I don't make any money from from the ads and it's going to be like that forever as you guys know I want daily grade to be completely free it's a public good so I just wanted to highlight that for you guys that may have seen ads popping up on YouTube uh that wasn't me that was that was your YouTube doing it themselves there but anyway moving on to the news so gotta start off with the biggest I think news over the last 48 hours that maybe not enough people are talking about because I mean I saw it all over crypto Twitter for like a few hours and then it's kind of gone quiet but the news is is that uh

two I believe two of the tornado cash devs have been arrested or um going to be arrested so one of them is Roman storm and the other one is a seminov here and you can see there's a block article all about this now not only were they arrested for their involvement with Toyota cache but they have also been added to the list of U.S sanctioned companies and individuals so yeah the US ofac office is not playing any games here they are definitely going after these guys for a number of different reasons I mean they do claim in their prosecution against them or the charges against them that the tornado cash team or the core team knowingly profited from money laundering activities in tornado cash but there's also a bunch of other

Nuance in that and a bunch of obviously questions around first the first amendment in the US and is you know code is his speech so is is them writing the code uh protected under that all these kind of things that are just going to have to be hashed out in court but you can get full details on on the actual news from the Block but then there's also a couple of tweets that I wanted to highlight here uh Peter van volkenberg from Queen Center uh published their thoughts on this so you can say see this is um titled new tornado cash indictments seem to run counter to fincen guidance and Niraj actually highlights what that fincen guidance is uh and Vincent had this guidance that they put out in 2019 that says fincen regulations exempt from the definition of money transmitter those persons providing only the delivery

communication or network access Services used by a money transmitter to support money transmission services so according to this guideline guidance uh Niraj says that uh it's Crystal Clear on exempting the providers of anonymizing software in this case the tornado cash mixer so as I said all of this is going to be hashed out in Court there are a number of different indictments and charges against the tornado cache I guess like core team here I guess the biggest one is knowingly profiting from money laundering uh and allowing it to happen on their on I guess like their platform and they're also arguing that tornado cash was their platform because they had control over the front end or or I I think that's what I read about it um but but the contracts as you guys

know are immutable they didn't have control over the contracts they couldn't stop at the activity on the contracts even if they wanted to um and and that there obviously was a token involved as well so they're saying that because there was a token involved uh that was knowingly profiting from money laundering so there's all these kind of things going on there's actually a lot going on here a lot to unpack and I'm not an expert on the legal side of things so that's why I'm just pointing you to the right information in order to digest it yourself and there was also a tweet thread here from Seth for privacy they unpacks uh all of uh the stuff that happened over the last couple days with regards to this the tldr that he came to was that this is very bad for non-custodial privacy service Services

as custody used to be the lower bound of separating legal and illegal Services of this type now this goes back to what uh Niraj shared when it came to fincen and coin Center's General's response around this um that Peter Van volkenberg shared here uh but yeah essentially it basically from my reading states that even if you're a non-custodial privacy servers you could still be held liable for uh basically whoever's using it right and and if you're knowingly profiting from it that's an even I guess like a different kind of thing altogether but that that plays into it as well so this is going to take a while to play out guys I don't think this is gonna we're gonna get a resolution of this for quite a while now unfortunately the courts and the justice system move slow even though it could rule in the

favor of tornado cash and the tornado cash devs uh they're still going to be a long drawn out process here but thankfully Rahman actually has one of the best criminal defense lawyers probably in the industry if not like uh in the world um and that's not coming from me that's coming from other people that I've seen give him praise here uh so this this guy Brian Klein he's actually represented a bunch of different crypto uh individuals and companies uh the highest profile was block one the issuers of the EOS token who did their EOS Ico uh and they raised like four billion dollars back in I think 2018 or something like that uh and Brian was able to get them off with only having to pay a 24 million dollar fine

to the SEC for conducting an unregistered Securities offering and block one also did not have to admit guilt or or admit anything they just settled for 24 million dollars um and then he also represented uh Virgil Griffith you guys will know uh who um was charged with basically uh teaching North Koreans how to evade sanctions uh and he uh basically got Virgil Griffith the minimum sentencing the minimum sentence that he could have gotten with the charges that were laid against him which was pretty impressive considering that obviously uh the US takes their sanctions uh very seriously the CH and the charges they bring against people for violating those sanctions are very serious so so Brian is no stranger to defending uh these cases and it's great to see that he's

defending Roman here and he you know he says yeah he's it's very he's very disappointed that prosecutors charged uh Rahman because he helped develop software their novel legal theory has dangerous implications for all software developers it really feels like at this point in time guys that crypto is becoming the Battleground not just for Financial regulations but privacy regulations as well and all the precedent that has been set in the U.S legal system for quite a while now around this and if you guys have read um there was a I think like there was a podcast and there was also a blog post called before Bitcoin that goes over the cypherpunk uh kind of fight for privacy of the 90s and and encryption in the 90s and how they won that fight but this is a fight that's been going on for a very long time because encryption and privacy

preserving tools is not something that governments tend to like right because it means that uh criminals can use it uh just like every day people can use it and to the government I mean if you're a criminal or not depends on on a number of different factors but yeah generally they don't like software uh that allows people to to hide their Communications basically they like to have visibility over things and that's what governments do right so uh that kind of feels like what we're going through right now where we're going through a battleground of not just Financial regulations uh and and kind of legislation there with the SEC and then everything's a security retirement but also when it comes to the Privacy stuff with tornado cache and just privacy generally uh on on on on blockchains and and more specifically

ethereum I guess because tornado cash on ethereum was the only uh privacy thing that's been sanctioned so far I think there was some limited stuff in Bitcoin land that happened um but yeah it was sanctioned because I mean it can't be shut down right like I I think that if they were able to shut down tornado cash they would have just shut it down maybe they would have sanctioned it and shut it down but they've only been able to sanction it as you guys know it's still available to use on on the network even though it has been kind of stifled because obviously everyone pulled out their liquidity and and the usage has gone way down and is now illegal to use tornado cash and you face up to 30 years in prison or a a crap ton of money in fines so so yeah I

mean that's what we call the chilling effect right and that seems to have have had an effect uh well it has had a big effect but at the same time yeah this is a Battleground now and you know I'm hoping that we win this I mean the 20s could be as important as the 90s were the 2020s could be important as the the 1990s were for for privacy so we're going to see how that shakes out but I'll link all of the stuff that I just talked about in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right I'll do some ethereum core related news so uh ASN here uh who is I believe an ethereum researcher published a new research post called proof of validator a simple Anonymous credential scheme for ethereum's DHT so you can go give this a read it is quite technical

here but I think it falls into what I was talking about before about privacy and anonymizing transactions and essentially being able to uh create privacy at every layer of the stack of ethereum I've talked about a bunch of other kind of things in the works like the shutterized beacon chain and a lot of the Privacy protocols that are being built and and and things like potentially one day uh making layer 1 ethereum default private but that's an uphill battle uh but they're being layer twos that are being built uh to to be encrypted like the Aztec layer 2. so there's a bunch of stuff going on right now and this is another one of them that this kind of like uh proof of validator thing which is a Anonymous credential scam for ethereum's uh DHT here which is basically got to do with data

availability and and data availability sampling and general like that so it's definitely it's definitely a different type of privacy anonymization it's more in the context of securing the network than it is in protecting people's uh individual privacy but you can go give this a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below but as I said it is a bit technical we just wanted to put it on your radar there all right so the kzg ceremony is now officially closed it ended with 141 416 total contributions by far the largest ceremony ever 132 000 contribution contributors use sign in with ethereum over 9 000 contributors used GitHub and the sha-256 hash of the transcript is now available here this is incredible guys I mean I know the kcg ceremony went

on for probably longer than it was originally intended to but because of that we ended up blowing past my most bullish kind of estimates of a hundred thousand total contributions we uh you know we kind of like went 40 above that which is just crazy to me and I know that there are a variety a variety of different reasons why this happened maybe a lot of the contributions were just one person spamming it maybe there was a lot of airdrop farming even though there's no airdrop associated with this because this is just something that was needed for uh uh for for the ethereum network itself there's yeah there's no airdrop here but I guess even if there is like a 0.0001 chance that there'd be in air drops people would do it but then also at the same time you contributing to the kzg ceremony could be used as a criteria

for an airdrop of another project in the future and it would actually work as a pretty decent criteria I I believe so there's that to it as well but it doesn't matter because this is a form of harnessing that kind of like degeneracy for a regenerative cause which is basically getting the most robust kzg ceremony uh that we could and and it seems like we have right and as I've said before it only requires one honest participant out of the 141 416 or well one honest contribution out of all of those for it to work and as I said before if you contributed and you know that you were honest in your contribution then you can actually trust that the kzg ceremony um you know is set up properly and that's like that's amazing to me and it's amazing and it's enabled all by

cryptography which I don't even understand how it works but uh but yeah I mean that I mean I don't understand the technicals of how it works but I understand the higher level of how it works and yeah just just great to see that but yeah I guess like it's over for now hopefully you guys got your contributions in you definitely had plenty of time to do so and I gave you plenty of heads up on the refuel I'm sure a lot of you did uh but yeah kudos to the team thought for doing all that managing all of that it has been a great success all right so base published their kind of I guess Manifesto around decentralizing their protocol today and Jesse the leader base gave a tldr on bases decentralization plans uh with optimism here so there's three main points here the first one is that base

is making major technical contributions to the op stack across decentralization security and scalability of course we already knew that because if you're part of if you're building on the op stack um and you want to be a contributor to the uh to the optimism ecosystem well then you're going to be contributing to the op stack uh in in these three verticals decentralization security and scalability and of course bass is the biggest op chain besides op mainnet uh right now uh so yeah and they may even end up flipping op Mana which is funny uh and they're also they also want to be part of the super chain so it's in their best interest to to obviously help the op stack out and the second Point here is that bass is committed to the law of chains neutrality framework and have set up the network to ensure there's no

single party uh the the original base team included that could violate the commitment and the third point is that we're funding public goods with a direct contribution of sequencer revenue and will earn an OP token allocation to participate in optimism governance so there was also another kind of point to this as well that I saw someone else talking about where essentially they said that um bass is being built has been built from the ground up specifically with the purpose of being spun out of coinbase eventually where essentially that the original base team and this goes to the second point that was that was stated here but the original base team at coinbase would just be one team of many that are building the base protocol and this is kind of I guess what happened with ethereum itself right where ethereum started off it was basically

just Geth and parody and they were both pretty much part of the same same team as as the clients and then over time we got more and more clients and now we're at a point where and I actually put a tweet out about this about all the independent teams that are building ethereum clients I'm actually going to bring this tweet up quickly uh for you here uh this one here where I was going through the consensus layer client teams and and naming them for for this person here in reply to one of superfuzer's tweets and about how they're basically all independent of each other at independently funded even though they may have received grants in the past from the same entity such as the ethereum foundation uh and I think that's going to be the same kind of thing for Bass and other successful l2s

out there where essentially they'll be you know at least two at the very least two if not more teams contributing to that protocol in order to decentralize out the the building of it and also obviously they want to decentralize things like the sequencer so that that um everyone can have a chance to be the sequencer and make and and sharing the revenue there and they also would like to decentralize out on the whole stack obviously with fraud proofs when they when they get kind of enabled and validators and and things like that as well so yeah I mean as I've been saying since the database was announced I do truly believe that they are going to stick to their decentralization plans because Brian Armstrong is an ideologue he has a strong ideology about crypto if he didn't he wouldn't be fighting the SEC in my mind uh and I think Jesse

also definitely falls into that and he obviously feeds up a lot of the information about bass to Brian and and talks to him about it and it pretty much I I believe bass is is built in Jesse's Vision so far but essentially that I think the whole point is that um it goes from Jesse's vision and then it kind of permeates out and the community makes base what they want it to be uh so yeah you can read the the base tweet itself for a full breakdown of this it'll be linked in the YouTube description below all right moving on so I mentioned the other day that usdc or Circle had announced that usdc was planning to launch on more blockchains here well they announced the full list of blockchains that they're that they're

going to be launching on so this Inc and this is launching on them natively obviously you can already bridge usdc over to a lot of these change chains but this is native usdc issuance kind of what like exactly what like what is like um what's happening on arbitrine one where you can natively issue usdc there so the six new blockchains that they're going to be supporting are the polygon POS chain uh bass polka dot Nia optimism and Cosmos via the noble Network now of course I look at this list and I'm just like you could throw out polka dot Nia and the noble Network because they don't really have much usage there's not much demand there for this stuff and I kind of feel like that Circle should have just prioritized the chains that are actually used and ethereum l2s I mean

they should have prioritized things like Tron and BSC considering that they're you know some of the most used remains as well as l2s and I don't say this because I want to keep things in the ethereum ecosystem I'm saying this because as I've highlighted before about usdc it's lost a lot of market share it is it is you know a distant second now to tether and they need to get that back right and they need to do things to get their back and they need to do things do these things I I believe quickly before the bull market comes back so that they can capture all that mind share there um I've said in the past as well that I I thought that um uh usdc transfers on base should be free and and will be free I still think that's coming to be honest

I think that's a pretty good growth driver for um for Circle to do here and now that coinbase is actually uh it has an extra stake in circle as well and they're working more closely together it just makes more sense for for them to do that as well but yeah those are the chains that they're going to be natively so supporting for Native usdc issuance hopefully hoping to see more of the layer 2 supported in the future rather than these l1s that are pretty much dead and there's not much activity going on there like from a business perspective it really doesn't make much sense to me that Circle will do this but maybe this is an overhang of plans that they've had uh for a while all right so chain link has a great blog post out uh called the LA the role of layer 2 Roll-Ups and chain link in

scaling the ethereum ecosystem so if you wanted to I guess I get the loadout on how chain link plays into a multi-roll-up ethereum ecosystem and how chain link is going to be using their technology such as their oracles but also their new ccip technology this is the blog post to read and obviously there are there are links to to all the different kind of things to to read in order to get more context about all of this stuff so I'll link that in the YouTube description below but I just thought it was it was a great read there because I think that honestly the ethereum community kind of has a blind spot for chain link at times chain link is such an integral part of the ethereum ecosystem not just on the Oracle side of things but on the research side especially with things like ccip which

are pretty exciting if you dive into it it really does seem like a a pretty nice natural kind of cross-chain protocol that they've built that is very different to what we already that we the the existing Solutions right and of course there are calls are the best in the game there's not even a close second in my mind in terms of like Oracle software out there Oracle infrastructure I should say out there and I know that the training gets a kind of a bad rap in the ethereum community because of the link Marines and the link Army that we're all used to seeing and things like that but I think at times you have to separate those kind of people from the actual technology um and that's what I'm and especially technology that's actually used I know that there are kind of um armies of

other protocols out there but the difference is that those protocols aren't actually used right the xrp Army for example xrp and ripple they don't use for anything really so I understand why you know you can look at the Army and say okay well that's a bit silly um you know that doesn't reflect the actual usage of the tech whereas in chain Link's case that's not true the link Marines are obviously very fervent and they're very um passionate about chain link but they definitely uh have a reason to be because the technology actually backs that up and the second point I think is the the token right I mean link as a token hasn't performed very well but at the same time you could say that about pretty much like a lot of tokens out there and I don't think a token being down bad is a reason to hate

on the technology or is a reason to ignore the technology I mean if it was then ethereum would have been ignored for a lot of its uh a lot of the um the years of the last few years because obviously Heath went down 94 in the last bear market right and it didn't perform too well in the last in the last bear Market um against USD and BTC so if we're judging projects based on that then yeah I don't think that's a great way to judge them always I always try to judge the projects based on the technology that they have but not just the tech itself but also if it's actually being used right and has a clear track record of being used and being used for things that are actually uh that actually matter and actually add value to their respective ecosystems all right so I came across this really

great tweet thread from Peter Johnson talking about stable coins now uh this is based on a a a paper actually so this tweet thread is just like the top 10 takeaways of the uh the analysis here that Peter's done called the Relentless rise of stable coins now you can go read the takeaways for yourself but I wanted to highlight a few of them so the first one and the headline one to me was that in 2022 stable coins settled over 11 trillion dollars on chain dwarfing the volumes volumes processed by PayPal which was 1.4 trillion and almost surpassing the payment volume of Visa which is 11.6 trillion and reaching 14 of the volume settled by ACH and over one percent of the volume settled by fed wire so obviously uh not as big as the

biggest payment processors out there but bigger than some of the biggest companies I mean it's bigger than PayPal right in terms of like it's like 10 times bigger than PayPal it's almost bigger than Visa right um I've said it before and I'll say it again stable coins are the number one biggest use case that we have in crypto right now and for will be for the foreseeable future and the US should really bring embracing stable coins because it's all in US dollars right like there is some Euro stable coins here and there and maybe some other currencies but it's heavily heavily us a dollar dominant dominated right and that basically uh increases USD dominance generally and the US should be all about this and I think they are making moves you know slowly but surely with the stablecoin bill and stuff like that uh

but they should really be all about this considering that this is not something of a play thing this is literally uh big as big as um almost as big as visa and bigger than much bigger than PayPal obviously still small fish compared to something like uh like fed wire here but I mean of course it is fedwise huge right um so so there's that that was uh one of the main takeaways and the other one I wanted to talk about was the difference between where the activity is actually happening so as Peter said here most stablecoin activity occurs on the Tron and BSC blockchains as I've talked about before year today 8 the Tron Embassy blockchains collectively account for 77 of weekly active addresses and 75 of transactions but only 41 of volumes so essentially Tron and BSC are being used

for smaller payments obviously that makes sense because um the fees are cheaper on those networks but then Peter continues and says that the ethereum blockchain is used for higher value transactions on average despite accounting for just six percent of active wallets and three percent of transactions the ethereum blockchain is home to 55 of stablecoin supply and settles close to 50 of weekly stablecoin dollar volume so that's ethereum as the settlement layer guys ethereum layer one is the settlement layer for high value transactions and that's exactly why you see this split yacht you know Tron and BSC could just as well be a layer two it's just that Tron and BSC have been around for a while they've managed to to get a network effect and uh people are using them in the various countries that I've I've kind of outlined before uh and

and there's volume then there's liquidity there right and that's that's something that they've got going for them but as I've said it's all the small all use cases it's just like everyday payments because the fees are cheap but when it comes to large kind of payments and large volumes it's on ethereum and that's the thesis right there ethereum is a settlement layer the layer two settled down to it I do hope that Tron and BSC can become layer twos on ethereum because then it just gives their users more security and it retains all their properties that they want to retain and they they get they get a cheaper cost to running the network as well because running a layer 2 is much cheaper than running a layer one so just taking all that into account uh if that happens if Tron and BSC become layer

two's on ethereum then ethereum pretty much dominates all stablecoin volumes which you know is the vision right is it's kind of the vision of ethereum layer one is a sediment layer and layer twos as the um settling down to ethereum there but anyway just wanted to hide this through because I thought it was great you can go check out Peter's thread for yourself and the full report I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right last up here just an update on bitcoin grants round 18 which is ongoing I think it's got about three or four days left and this is an update from Kevin owaki on the amount of uh dollars contributed um per I guess I guess like by around here and also the round summary so the matching pool is 1.25 million dollars there's been 330 000 donated 146 000 donations 20 almost 22

000 unique donors with 11 total rounds you can see here that the web 3 open source software round has dominated and there's a bunch of other rounds here as well but yeah great to see that the community coming out uh and donating here that's uh that's that's a large amount of money that's been donated and obviously the matching pool is going to to match those donations you have what three or as I said three or four days left to donate here and donating is currently being done on the op mainnet and the public goods Network so the fees are really cheap there's no need to spend a lot in fees to donate like you used to in in you know back in the day I remember on ethereum layer one um in the in I guess like maybe the third or fourth Bitcoin Grand surround or

something like that where fee started spy because of D5 summer what ended up happening was that you try and donate like five dollars to like 10 projects but then at some periods of time the fees would be greater than the 50 that you were donating right and it would just it just made it completely uneconomical for um for Bitcoin grants uh rounds to happen there but now they have their own network the public goods Network their own Layer Two and obviously op mainnet as well there to donate on so you can go check all of that out uh I'll link that in the YouTube description below and be sure to donate as I said you have three or four days left there all right I've got a few minutes left here um to talk about the markets again I know I I know I say that I don't want to

talk about this too often but I think that during the bear and crab periods it's Pro I feel like I get more demand to talk about this during the bear and the crab periods because people kind of want to know like when's the bull market going to come back look guys I mean I've talked about this a lot but I don't have an answer for you on that I have a prediction my own prediction based on a bunch of different factors but I don't have a answer for anyone no one does literally no one will give you a definitive answer with 100 certainty if they are trying if they are giving you that they are lying right and that's that goes for uh um calling bull markets and calling and calling for Bear markets uh because I've seen a lot of people give these predictions over the years

and be completely wrong and what the one percent that get it right uh like that's just survivorship bias right but what I really wanted to talk about was the fact that the it's funny kind of watching the the different sentiment and how it changes over time like I believe right now as as I've said like maybe a couple weeks ago we're really at the tail end of the bear crab market where everyone is just so exhausted everything is so quiet on the market front liquidity has been completely drained I know that uh you know the stock market is roaring and there are there are stocks like Nvidia going nuts you know the Nvidia market cap is larger than the entire crypto market cap right and that just shows how much more money is in Trad fire than crypto by the way I I don't think you

guys realize how much money and try to fight compared to crypto it literally dwarfs crypto there is not even a comparison there um but that's actually bullish because it means that and this is why people get bullish about the ETFs right because they're like well that opens crypto up to more Trad fire money and it does but but in terms of like when I say we're at the tail end of the or at least I feel like we're at the tail end of the bear and crab market is because there's only so much kind of I guess like down pressure or like a bearish pressure the market can take until really the only way uh up is up for lack of a bit of a a phrase there and I've talked about this before on how I said that it's like holding a ball underwater eventually your arms are

going to get so tired that you just let go and the ball is not going to stay there because you're not you know you're not holding it anymore it just plops up it's the same is true for markets you know eventually everyone just gets so exhausted of being bearish and crabbish you know even the the traders who are trying to short everything they just get so exhausted and it just doesn't become worth it worth their time anymore to do it because it's just not much Alpha to be had there anymore not just not that much profits to be had there anymore and eventually we see see we see a pop right but it's not a violent pop-up bull markets take time to form it's a it's it has to climb what I call well I mean what's known as I it's not my turn but

what's known as the wall of worry which is basically this climb back to all-time high that has to convince everyone that a bull market is it has started again now I've said before how I think that if we can climb above 3K and stay there bull market back on 100 guaranteed in my mind right I know I said before that anyone guaranteeing you something 100 shouldn't be believed um but like I think me saying 100 I mean like 99.99 right for me it's like unless something catastrophic was to happen once eth got above 3K i i i i i based on you know previous Cycles not just in crypto but in in stocks uh anytime it breaks like a critical level uh it's just gonna continue right it's gonna do

that that ball underwater thing which just plops up from there but to get there to get to like three 3K potentially and then to get to all-time high it's that wall of worry it's that convincing the market hey it is actually a bull market now you can go long you know you can you can basically uh sell if you want to now and take profits but just know that it's probably going to continue going up right so there's that and that takes time to go through it could take all of next year you know I know I've said before that I think that Heath could get back to all-time high by the second half of next year the second half of next year includes December so it could it could not happen until December next year but I think that what the market wants to see is sustained upward price

uh movement and it wants to feel like there's new money coming in because I've said this before as well where the reason why we see these pumps and then they just get completely retraced which is exactly what happened with the SEC Ripple case right and we had a massive pump off of that especially on uh coins other than Ethan BTC and then those coins have sold down uh completely like they've erased their entire pump since then and that's because that pump was was literally just the existing money in the system that was not new money at all and the same is true for the the Bitcoin uh pump off the ETF news right it was just the same money in the system so what we need as I've always said is we need the new money but the new money is not coming near crypto until things get

exciting again until there's something to get excited about and what gets everyone excited sustained upward price uh movement into prices that haven't been seen in a while we haven't seen 3K in a long time guys I mean if I go to the Chart here just quickly on my screen you can't see it on on your screen but I was looking at this this today actually we have not seen 3K eth uh since and this was on the downward tractor trajectory since April of 2022 right that was over a year ago now so we haven't seen 3K we haven't even seen anything close to that we haven't even seen 2500 uh since uh I think what may 2022 right uh the highest we've seen is 2100 I think and we saw that back in

April of 2023 of course so in terms of breaking above these key levels we definitely need to get above a 3K and that's when people start getting like super excited even above 2500 people start getting excited but like above 3K I believe everyone's gonna get super excited and that's what brings in the new money let's look it's the headlines going uh especially obviously btsc plays into this as well but that's what brings it in guys and it's not just the retail investors it's also the people who may be buying stocks and investing in traffic right now because that's where the excitement is things are going up right there is money to be made there and crypto is boring right now so there's no money to be made in crypto but for long-term investors there is because if you buy now uh and you have a

long-term Horizon um you know you have a better chance of making money than someone just trying to to scalp and trade and get chopped up in these markets right now it just depends on the strategy that you want to use here uh but yeah that's how I kind of like generally think about it and as I said I do feel like we're at the tail end um that and and that's just when it comes to price but in terms of taking Innovation my God we're thriving the ethereum ecosystem is absolutely thriving when it comes to Tech and Innovation and getting more people using the chains I mean these meetups I've been to guys like the fact there's over 100 people there and this is Melbourne like Melbourne is not known for being like a super crypto kind of centric I mean Australia generally is not known

for that Sydney actually generally has a lot more crypto projects uh building their uh you know synthetics immutable uh uh Sigma Prime who built the lighthouse client uh they're all there right and there's a bunch of others too that I'm forgetting to name uh but in Melbourne I mean there's a few here and there but not that many but the fact that we had over 100 people and I'm telling you guys those people most of them I would guarantee are not just pure speculators here for the money sort of thing all the discussions that I had were about the tech we're about getting more adoption about the tech people were asking me questions about like wallet ux and how we're gonna make it so simple for anyone to use uh crypto like what and layer twos and like the fees on layer twos and all this sorts of stuff

like it it really does feel like a bull market when it comes to the tech and Innovation stuff and that's exactly the feeling that I got in 2019 to be honest in early 2020 I got that same feeling because in 2019 we had like a lot of device stuff start coming online and and start getting into the early stages of it and obviously 2020 we had D5 summer I'm hoping and I I think we can potentially get a layer 2 summer that mirrors that maybe next year sometime when hopefully uh the market heats up again and new money's coming in because you do need new money for that to happen I think uh but but yeah I mean in my mind there's really nothing to be bearish about right now when it comes to the tech and Innovation and even the price I I really I mean even if it goes

lower from here as I said before eth is between that one and 2K range that could have moved up to like a 1500 and 2K range now it just depends I know that you know there are people calling for lower from here I know that um some chartists that I kind of follow are saying that okay well you know eth could go back to like 1400 and then bounce off of that and that's it that's that's the last it's going to go we need to test that area I mean I'm not a TA guy right I don't know that and and then there are some insane people out there calling for like a four to six hundred dollar eath you guys know who that those people are that's like not happening I mean as I said before don't don't listen to people who who speak in certainties but to me I

mean for each to go back down there it would mean that ethereum as an ecosystem has completely failed as well as everything else in the world the bed like the macro the bed everything's just going down only we have another great depression or something right um that that to get us back down there from here I I just don't think that's that's going to happen and ethereum obviously is the furthest thing from failing right it's driving more than it ever has I mean I would say that ethereum is driving more now than it did in the bull market because there are so many uh kind of like uh new apps coming online new use cases coming online so much Innovation happening the layer twos are just killing the game right uh yeah I I don't know I feel like this is all just setting up for another epic bull

market that we're gonna get hopefully sooner rather than later but on that note it's going to end it on a bullish note for the weekend there so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone