Anthony Sassano on The Past, Present, And Future of Ethereum

Transcript

it's refreshing to hear because frankly I thought that you were just going to on them not to get too political but I do think that this is indicative of some larger Trend that we're seeing now the fuds moved on to oh they're parasitic to ethereum right now new category how much is being paid by AI agents is because it lowers the bandwidth requirements and bandwidth usage of the whole network which means that we can add more blobs where are we headed in terms of the amount of block space expansion for ethereum all right welcome to Bangkok I mean first time here for in Thailand Robie are running around on our grab bikes no helmets just yeah you you got a helmet on today but uh that's the way to get around there's so much traffic yeah and uh these motorbikes just cut right through all

the noise and uh it's like l2s yeah I'm not I haven't braved the motorbikes yet I don't think I will it's just looking at it from when I'm in the car uh and looking at the way they go and they where they drive it's like yeah it's cool cutting through all the traffic but I'm like H I don't know if it's worth yeah yeah I'm stuck on main main Maxi yeah yeah yeah but no bangkok's a very interesting City it's my first time here as well yeah yeah well Anthony it's your first time on the show uh appreciate you coming out this morning first podcast of the day uh I'm sure our our audience is familiar with uh who you are and kind of your background but would love to actually just learn a bit more about your story of how you got into ethereum

personally I I'm not sure that I'm aware of kind of like your journey and then I think that'll be helpful for our community too yeah yeah so my journey was one of of I guess uh it's a bit of a a changing of the kind of Tides as I went through it so I got into ethereum in 2017 really just found it cuz a friend mentioned it to me I was into Bitcoin in 2013 but then there was kind of the bull market and then the bare market and I kind of stopped paying attention to it cuz back then I was just young and silly and didn't have really have much money and I lost it trying to trade Dogecoin back then uh when it first came out so I kind of got burnt out which unfortunately made me miss the ethereum Ico in 2014 um and kind of miss

ethereum until 2017 basically but then my friend mentioned it to me to me cuz he knew that I was into Bitcoin in 2013 and he's like you should check this thing out and I immediately became a lot more interested in ethereum than I ever was in Bitcoin because it wasn't just like the money side of it it was also the tech side and I have a tech background I've been building computers since I was a little kid and I was working in cyber security at the time so yeah I mean I immediately kind of got the vision like I didn't didn't even need to be convinced I read like a couple of blog posts from vitalic and I was like you know what this this sounds awesome and of course like a lot of it was still very early but back then I was looking at it through kind of Starry

dreamy eyed I'm like this if this even works at all this is going to be this is going to be awesome and then you know 2017 there was the bull market as well that that kept me in like because I mean as much as people like to try and deny it number go up feels amazing no matter who you are even if you're in it for the tech like number going up is is good and I think it's just good for the tech anyway like it's it's it anytime the market goes up brings in a lot more attention um but then yeah 2018 2019 bare Market I actually decided to stick around this time I didn't at crypto and that's where I really grew my brand like 2017 I was really just like a casual Observer I wasn't known in the ecosystem I wasn't active on Twitter but then in

2018 and 2019 ethereum needed a kind of I guess like group of core people to really keep the flame alive because it was just such a brutal bare market like eth went from $1,400 to $80 everyone thought eth was dead ether was dead this this thing's going nowhere defi what's that like and then uh in 2020 was when things really got super interesting because uh defi summer happened and then I think that really validated ethereum's kind of core use case of doing you know not just decentralized Finance but decentralized applications on on the chain and then all this money came in and it was a kind of capitulation of narratives for all the haters who were just saying this is never going to work and then it worked and they couldn't say it wasn't going to work anymore it's kind of similar to the L2 stuff um to to

an extent but then yeah obviously we had another bull market rode all of that through um and all the all the meanwhile like I was doing different things as well like during those years up until today I started something called ethhub in 201 early 2019 2018 with Eric Connor uh that was basically an information resource you know podcast stuff like that to fill the Gap because back then there wasn't really anything for ethereum like bankless actually came just after ethhub um and but yeah bankless and ethhub kind of I guess grew during that kind of period tried to to better the narratives around ethereum and spread the word about ethereum uh back then and then the daily gay which is what I mostly focus on now was started in mid 2020 um and that been doing that ever since so that's basically a it used to be a daily kind

of ethereum podcast I kind of slowed down a bit uh cuz things get just so noisy in bull market so I've kind yeah yeah so it's like every maybe like two or three a week if I can do do an episode uh but really the the whole time I've also been growing my my Twitter presence uh and you know For Better or Worse Twitter is like the Town Square of crypto and and of ethereum especially and yeah just trying to I guess like my North Star as people like to talk about with with what I do is to just uh correct the misinformation and educate as much about ethereum as I can because there's just so much bad information out there as you guys are well I I think we have a very similar Mission and we got our start in uh a University Club it was

originally called the university uh Bitcoin Club Y and it's funny because we we met in 2017 we were like that that's kind of where we got our start there and then you know quickly right afterwards 2018 2019 there was kind of that that barar market that hit it was like and there was a movement going on it was like blockchain not Bitcoin actually the club rebranded and went full blockchain and we had this whole Enterprise blockchain cycle where we had Walmart experimenting with blockchain on supply chain IBM it like they started sort of incorporating kind of open their eyes to to blockchain but still cryptocurrency was totally a scam and there was nothing to do with this financial World on chain

and and then you know that has has really started to shift in recent years and so I like as you were kind of going through those Cycles you know did you did you ever lose Faith did you ever lose because those bare markets are tough right was there a point where you were like man I don't know like what you know what was sort of what was sort of that trough and then what kept you going through that and was like no the that North Star if you will right where like the education and the and correcting misinformation was there something that stuck out that continued to persist that you knew was true but kind of the market was telling you was sort of skeptical about that that really kept you going those bare Market yeah I I think that being so close to ethereum development especially during

2018 2019 2020 which were I would say the most formative years for ethereum and has really been the path that ethereum has been on since you know since then we're still on the same path of the rollup Centric road map and and all that stuff there um I would say that just the fact that like I could see that the building was real and real things were happening the community was was there was growing people weren't abandoning ethereum that were just doubling down on it all like that all collectively just made me keep the faith so to speak and also because I actually believe what was being built and I believed in the potential here and I wasn't blind to it uh to to to defi like a lot of people in the crypto ecosystem where they they just didn't use the chain like it sounds insane but they

weren't on ethereum they weren't using it at all and they just heard about defi on Twitter or somewhere else and they're like well that doesn't sound real it doesn't sound like it's going to work but then I'm on there using it I'm like trading on Unis swap right I'm I'm opening up I'm like a make a CDP I'm like this is real like I'm doing it I'm not just delusional being bullish on nothing it's real so I think that when people go and use these things and and realize that it's it's it's real it actually uh provides value and it actually exists that's when it immediately shifts for them because you can't deny reality like there's the narratives that that form but then there's the reality and and as soon as you're exposed to the reality I mean you can try to deny it but it it's

very hard to at that point like with narratives you can always write them off and be like that's just a a story people are telling that's just the eth Maxis being bullish on something that's not real whatever and same happened with the l2s you know that for a while be people were kind of futing them and saying that they weren't real and then they became real and now the fuds moved on to parasitic to ethereum right it always just kind of moves the go post um but for yeah for me it really was that core community that all kind of believed in the mission believed in the thing and things were getting shipped it wasn't just the the app play it was proof of stake was finally happening like I saw all of that and admittedly it was difficult to track this and that's why I

actually started ethhub and the daily gazes because it was so hard to track this stuff and I was like you know what like uh I get that like I'm bullish on it and I can keep track of it but so much of it is very complex very technical uh no one knows what these things mean what these these mean so I started my show with the goal of being able to essentially break down that that information barrier yeah and and a certain point it's like all you got to do is survive like if you survive the bare Market you get you get to Times like today like right now where things are very very different um I mean it it's incredible I mean before we kind of turned on the recording we were talking about like how the Paradigm has has shifted oh yeah today eth has the best

Narrative of the last six months Tech got incredibly better over the last two weeks yes yeah yeah yeah exactly like since the the election is like 6 days now yeah the tech just improved by 30% right feels like it's been like a whole month since the election it's gone crazy yeah that's what bull markets feel like it feels like it just goes on and on and on forever yeah and then it just abruptly ends so we can't possibly keep this pace up right like that's that's what it feels like but then and then it just continues to happen I mean we really have just gotten started it's kind of the feeling and I think because we're in we're doing this every single day you know we're start we're the ones that are kind of like in it as it's happening and it feels like it's taken a

really long time and it's already it's already been going on for so long but I mean we were talking this morning just just this morning people are starting to hit us up that normies you could say right where like they're just starting to take notice yeah and and I think again like that is just starting to happen and so where I mean guys where do we go from here yeah yeah yeah I mean I think that it's the same kind of story every cycle where yeah because we're in it every day and we're paying attention to it it may feel like everyone's in it because it's a little bule and then you just forget that most people don't even hear of crypto until it's at all-time highs and I was actually speaking to one of the ETF issuers recently and I was saying you know what's go how's it going

with the ETF you know how are you going talking to like trfi people about it and they're like honestly most people haven't even heard of ethereum yeah like and that's insane to me hearing I'm like are you kidding me ethereum is obviously not you know as big as Bitcoin it's second it's not first but the thing is is that ethereum has been around for so long it's been talked about in mainstream media and everything but then I I I kind of sat there and I thought about it for a bit I'm like you know what like when you actually look at the mainstream media they only really mention Bitcoin most of the time right Bitcoin is this thing that like Trump for example will only mention Bitcoin in crypto he doesn't say bitco mention ethereum right so it's because it's like it's that thing of you just mention one

or like the broader the broader class um it's it's the same with everything I think but that was insane to me and then when I when I when I sat down and thought about it I was like that's actually incredibly bullish because it means that there's still so many people that need to learn about ethereum and then you know possibly buy eth and invest in eth as well so we may feel like we're so late now because these assets are so big and everything feels like it's going crazy but I mean where so early is not a meme there's still so many people to come in okay so on that point then we on our podcast with Arthur Hayes and mrod a couple days ago mrod basically put out the idea that in order for eth to get to 20,000 or 30,000 the only way in his thesis right which is

that is that it's valued basically as a store value it it it has to have this monetary premium to reach this kind of you know 600 billion trillion dollar Mark eventually uh and basically it can't be it can't be viewed as like this Tech asset like this um kind of like computer right and so bitcoin's obviously got that first kind of like meme like it's like it's got the mtic property of being Bitcoin and so thus you know it's trading over one trillion today could be worth multiple trillions I mean 10 trillion in the future uh do do you see ethereum's path to 20 or $30,000 per eth as a similar narrative and I mean we can kind of get into this

North Star where bitcoin's got this digital gold sana's got trading as fast as NASDAQ the speed of light ethereum's kind of trying to figure it out like is what's the path to ethereum at 30,000 yeah I mean I totally agree with that and it's something that I've been talking about for a very long time now since the last I mean the previous bare market so like 2019 um because it's obvious that Bitcoin is not valued based on its Revenue at all right like it does barely any fees compared to its market cap I think it's like one2 million fees a day and it's Mark cap is 1.5 trillion so if you do like a price to earnings kind of thing on that or do any fundamental analysis on that BTC would not be worth anywhere near that and that's that's obvious to everyone at this point that is a story

value it is a money U the same is true for eth as well like eth has higher fees but not enough to justify a $350 billion market cap right so you you naturally come to the conclusion that these things have monetary premium they're act like a store of value and there are plenty of people who will tell you that they use it as a store of value like I buy e to store my value like I'm not buying eth based on how much Fe Revenue it's doing I've never done that right not to say that fear revenues aren't important then we shouldn't keep increasing those so that when you stake your eth you get you know you get the revenues from that um and it's better and more people want to stake their eth and so on and so forth but yeah for eth to get to 20 30k like

and if you're talking about just from a market cap perspective that's trillions of dollars in market cap it needs to be a store of value in a money it needs to keep increasing that monetary premium and I I really think that that comes down to a the story that you tell about it the story that you tell about ether's an asset and ethereum as a network and I know that ethereum doesn't have like a fancy one liner and I actually think that's a positive thing over the long term because ethereum shouldn't just be boxed in to something like Bitcoin being digital gold is fine but like then there's a ceiling on it your your ceiling is basically gold right um but and and salana being decentralized NASDAQ I mean it's already worth more than NASDAQ like in terms of market cap and also you're boxing yourself into

like one kind of use case really and the thing is is that these narratives are gu social consensus and they change over time as well these North Stars change because even in salana for example they you know they say they want to be decentralized NASDAQ but then there's other people saying that they want it to be something else they want to do something else with it they and and that just happens as the community grows and I think that Bitcoin also evolved over time originally it was peer-to-peer money right and now it's digital gold but there's still a faction within Bitcoin that wants it to be peer to Pure money and they're trying to build like these new Bitcoin l2s that are better than the lightning Network in order to scale Bitcoin payments but the the problem becomes is that well bit Bitcoin has have spent the last 10 years

convincing everyone that BTC is not to be used for payments it is a store of value correct whereas in ethereum eth can be a store of value but we also have stable coins on the network right we that that that can be your like your money and when we say eth is money that's that's a mean within the ecosystem I'm talking about eth as a commodity money not not as a Fiat money people think that Fiat is the only form of money yeah you're not going to use eth to buy your coffee no exactly and and that's that's that's totally fine um and and I think that you know stable coins are great and and everything obviously have their drawbacks they're centralized they're still pegged to US dollars or Euro uh and maybe we get better stable coins in the future that aren't Peg to those sorts of things but

yeah I think people just get it wrong when they think oh ether's money it's not it's not like US dollar it's like yeah it's not it's not it's a commodity money it's a store of value um but yeah I fully agree with that and I and I think that even to um other things that mad and other people have said about like uh Cults forming around these things really like these these coins get a lot of value from the cult energy and and I think you know Bitcoin is a perfect example of that like there's a very strong cult around Bitcoin and that's where they're getting a lot of their value from uh but I think that that a strong cult forming around an asset is very very rare there's not that many assets that have strong cult like strong lasting Cults like talking about

ones that last like 10 plus years like decades it's really I think only Bitcoin and ethereum so far you know maybe salana gets there but it hasn't been around long enough yet all of the mem coins that you see right now besides maybe Dogecoin have not been around long enough so yeah yeah so think about the the GameStop era of 2020 was maybe the only other time or asset that we saw people rally around so I think it is a relatively recent phenomenon that people are forming these these mind hubs around different Financial assets and I think that's a a sign of of the times like it it used to be like you know there we didn't have access to finance like we have access to finance now and and investing and and personal uh like self-

deployed Finance and peer-to-peer Finance was not possible or not really not practical like pre- Bitcoin was the first P2P Network and then things got kind of hyperf financialized and and then we kind of got that era where we had more community-driven finance and the whole IC era Ico era was part of that as well and so like this I think we really can't point to any historical examples of how Cults have formed around money like until like even in recent eras maybe there's some like National currencies that people rallied around we can kind of like draw some examples from the past there but I I really think we're in like this new paradigm where

the people are realizing that they have more of an impact on the financial ecosystem than they've ever had in the past and that is going to have some some long lasting consequences and Domino effects into the future I don't know what the possibilities are are I don't know what results from that I think it I mean we could speculate but but essentially like I mean I I would say that maybe like GameStop Tesla we have some of these other ones in the tra traditional Financial ecosystem but crypto has really taken that as its as a stronghold and ran with it what do you got I mean what do you think are the the the consequences of of more Community more localized finances rather than like one Global Finance but more localized sort of economies mhm it's it's

difficult to tell cuz as you said it is something relatively I guess new because cuz you could say that there's not really like a cult around Fiat currencies maybe the US dollar is like a reserve currency and as like a way for uh you know America to assert its dominance on other nations but you've never really seen like a similar thing like no one's worshiping the US dollar as like a story value or anything there was gold bugs well that I was going to mention gold gold bugs is the closest thing you know there's definitely a gold cult right um but a lot of I think a lot of gold Bugs Got converted into into Bitcoin definitely they did yeah yeah but there's still a lot of gold bugs and gold has been doing well like it's not like it's got down or anything it's

actually yeah it's it's gone crazy and I think Bitcoin is like that as well because it means that the the Target or the ceiling for Bitcoin goes up too right if they're targeting like a$1 15 trillion do gold market cap if that goes up to 20 25 30 trillion then Bitcoin can also kind of go there so and and and I think yeah gold is is definitely much more of a community-driven like people driven thing than than anything else because yeah if you if you're like born in a in a country they forc you to use their F currency to pay for taxes and and services in that country but now with a globally kind of proper Global decentralized Financial EOS system where the cost to issue an asset is basically zero yeah the people are the ones in control now like no one's telling the

people like you need to go uh value this one like you need to pay your taxes in this one or you need to you need to do Commerce in this one no every the community just coalesces around that and I think that's what a strong reason what I believe is like e this this commodity money within the ethereum ecosystem and and Beyond is that people have just naturally chosen eth as that like no one forced eth upon them you know a lot of the core devs actively early on told people that eth was just to be used for gas it wasn't actually to used for anything else and there is an argument to be made that because you have to use it as as a the fee token that it kind of forces people into using it but the thing is is that like people only have

to hold what they need for gas in that world they don't have to hold ether as a money as a store of value but they've chosen to and eth now has the cult energy around it just like BTC has and just like a few other assets have but yeah I don't know what the long-term consequences are here I think that nation states like smaller ones have already kind of made their move where they started to acquire BTC um and they may acquire other Assets in the in the future as well like um what is it Al Salvador doing it a few others so it starts with the smaller ones right um maybe I mean you know Trump said and he and people around him said that they might buy BTC as like a reserve asset but we'll we'll see yeah I and I'm hearing that from Senators like uh the

senator from Wyoming who already has some very friendly crypto uh regulation in their state is has been tweeting that there is like RFK that's very now closely associated with Trump who's been pushing for this Bitcoin Reserve treasury to be added I I I think like not to get too political but I do think that this is indicative of some larger Trend that we're seeing where it is a move away from the globalists and the one world government type of use the currency that we tell you to use think the things we tell and then this transition into more like I mean even Trump transitioned into Less Federal Government more state government more localized government Less Federal National worldwide economies more local driven cult Community Driven Commodities

and and economies and I yeah who who's to say what the consequences of this are but it's it's funny though that you mentioned that like that world yeah is becoming more kind of I guess insular whereas the digital world is just becoming more Global right like it's it's not like you can control the kind of I guess like Bitcoin blockchain or the ethereum blockchain you can't like force people that only in a certain jurisdiction to transact on it because it's it's truly decentralized right so I think that while yeah the the physical world is becoming more kind of insula the digital world is just becoming more Global and more people are coming online all the time getting connected and now that we have a native way to transact value because before it was just information now it's value through through the use of of crypto um it's

going to be funny to see those two things try and like actually work in harmony I don't think there's any Harmony to to be there the software eats the world thing but like with crypto rails now exactly yeah and and I think it gives the not just people but some economies an escape hatch and so you think about some I mean we were walking around this this Thai market the other day and they have usdt pay with usdt on Tron yeah that's that's that's crypto adoption in Asia for you the Tron it's big it's big why are why are they using Tron right fast cheap it was cheap I mean it's it's not so cheap these days but what happened was ethereum L1 was expensive there wasn't l2s um tether there was a lot of tether on Tron cuz like issed it there because the fees were cheaper and then what

happens is that it it builds a network effect and then you know as you said like at the ti market like they tell their friends about it it's like hey you know do this on so it's hard to kind of break that Network effect even if the freeze have gone up but yeah and and binance was a big player too cuz bance was Bal like Asia they got their hands in all sorts of pockets you know we're going to chat with Resnik a little later today and talk about parasitic l2s but I mean like just to kind of break into that a little how parasitic or symbiotic is Tron and this tether activity on Tron is there value acrel to eth as a result of this economic activity or is it too siloed with its own network effects and it

doesn't bring value back to you know you can talk about eth the asset bringing value there or back to ethereum the protocol how do you like using TR tether on Tron as an example here what what would you how how how do you do you think is the right way to think about the the economic activity that is existing on sort of these these rollups or these alternative side chain type of Frameworks how how parasitic or symbiotic is that yeah so I mean when it comes to Tron it's a separate L1 right like it's a separate L1 it has a completely separate ecosystem it uses TRX as its gas token doesn't use eth it's TRX is I mean it's not a money or anything like that but it it's it's the heart of the ecosystem basically so I

think that uh like those l1's definitely parasitic to ethereum because they're actively like not in the ethereum ecosystem they're not trying to help the ethereum ecosystem they're not giving anything back to it whether it be directly by the revenue or socially via like you know talking with people in the etherum ecosystem collaborating with them working with them they're not doing any of that right so I think that every kind of user that's on Tron is a user that ethereum lost or didn't gain uh and I think that's true for pretty much like BSC as well by smart chain even though these things are evm networks by the way they're not doing anything really except you could make the argument that the the most that they're doing is increasing the evm network effect bringing more solidity developers in who can then go and develop on the l2s or on on ethereum

L1 but other than that yeah no I I wouldn't consider those to be symbiotic uh but we're we're still bullish on adoption right for sure I mean I'm talk in the context of a% 100% And so yeah but I mean there's yeah there's no ties there back to etherum at all but it's good to see like the usdt sign on on the crypto adoption side beneficial of course but on the E like for the ethereum ecosystem I wouldn't say that they're like adding value to eum like it's just it's very clear to me but then people will argue the same for l2s saying that well what's the difference between an L2 and and Tron for example and well I mean the obvious difference is they use ether as gas that's that's a big difference but I know for now but I

know people say that they'll extract that abstract that away and then stable coins would be used and and that's fine like I don't think that's that's an issue um they they do pay um I guess like like a fee down to the L1 and I know that's not huge right now but we've already seen blobs are at capacity now they're they they're going into price Discovery all that stuff but then the thing is with the l2s is that the top ones today they're all actively giving back to the ethereum ecosystem like if we just take Bas for example like they were heavily involved in in blobs and getting blobs over the line they were working on them with the ethereum core developers you don't see that from Tron or from BSC or anything like that they don't want to work with within the ethereum ecosystem so so the l2s like as

they exist to I'm not talking about the ones in the future which can have I guess tighter um tighter economic alignment with L1 through based the based architecture but just the l2s as they exist today they're still increasing the network effect of eth as an asset not just as as using as gas fees but also because people are using eth within those economies you can actually go on and see what are the most popular assets on those different l2s and eth is number one across all of them obviously stable coins are also um very popular there but eth is number one across there and I think that the more people that kind of go into these l2s and and the l2s are using the ethereum L1 for their security for their settlement guarantees it just increases the ethereum network effect overall increases ethereum strength overall and

maybe the best kind of I guess way to to think about this is that the l2s are like the states in the United States and ethereum is the the whole us right and it all adds value there and then there are arguments to be made that well there's nothing stopping an L2 from becoming its own L1 directly like it's not like ethereum has an army that can go after the L2 and say hey no you can't leave us you're staying in here but ethereum offers so much to these l2s that it just doesn't make any sense for them to become an L1 um especially because becoming an L1 actually limits their scalability as well because I'm a strong believer that um l1's have a fundamental scaling limit and l2s um have one that's just like way bigger than than the L1 so I I really don't

don't buy into that argument but I can see why people think that they're parasitic because every dollar that's on the L2 isn't on the L1 but then you can make the argument well we did ethereum's road map doesn't um it scales the L1 over the long term but not like salana for example it's not trying to scale the L1 to to a million TPS or whatever uh and then you could say well if ethereum didn't have l2s then all of those L1 users would just go to other l1s because they're priced out of L1 so the the the question in the beginning to me doesn't make much sense because you're implying that ethereum would keep the users if it didn't have l2s which it wouldn't right and so and so you you have this uh this talk later this week about whether or not blobs are good for ethereum and and

more specifically on this topic uh I'm uh a question that I'm kind of like toying with right now is like um is this Advent of alternative data availability providers Celestia Veil Ian da uh which are going to help bring much higher throughput to ethereum l2s and help scale ethereum as a whole but but remove one of the core properties of ethereum's supposed value acrel and fee generation as well as kind of like broader alignment which is using ethereum da using blobs like are these rollups any less aligned to you or any less like important than ones that are using eth da um and like how should we kind of think about these types of L2 designs in this broader conversation of like our

blobs good as well safe is moving the world GDP onchain with the introduction of safet safe is taking this to the next step very soon check out net. safe. Global to learn more about how safe is moving the world's GDP on chain welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for fra and fractal the new L2 out of the frax ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal the modular L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s

become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through through its Evolution the frax ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and this fraxel L2 joins the existing Suite of fra products including fra Swap and frax lend you can see frax faery the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fra main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal

ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity Redstone modular oracles are available on 50 plus chains trusted by over 100 clients and over 6 billion in total value secured visit redstone. Finance to find out more yeah yeah so I I think that like these l2's using old da some of them are doing it because they have to do it so for example like eclipse and mega eth they can't use ethereum da for what they're targeting right now like they're targeting the the mega I guess like Giga gas g gas which is a really cool idea we're getting to

the Giga gas era exactly exact but that's not going to be always true ethereum da uh if you know if I guess like you um buy into the the thesis the research and everything that ethereum da is going to be able to scale to that to that to those I guess like heights in order to allow these l2s to settle there then it probably won't always be like that but but the way I think about I guess da is that well the way a lot of people think about da is that it's the the least valuable part I guess of of an L2 in terms of what they're willing to pay for like people will say well you know these l2s uh that use ethereum da today once ethereum da gets too expensive they're just going to switch off and use Celestial use igen da or

something like like that which could happen but it's not just that simple by the way of of switching off you also do lose um security obviously you lose um guarantees Around Da because these other things are less secure they've they they've been around for way way less time uh and you're basically relying on them now for the da um so because there's two parts to the L2 right there's the proof and the da really there two broad Parts here and you need both of them in order to do things like Escape hatchers right so your al2 is is always going to be less secure than than a full like the way I break it out is like a full roll up is something that uses ethereum for everything an L2 can be something that uses offchain da uh so that that's how I think about it there

but I I still think that they're completely additive to to ethereum I honestly don't think that it's uh it's a negative thing because in my mind the only reason why you'd stop using ethereum da is that it gets too expensive for you but like that's not a bare case that means ethereum da is so in demandre that like it's still generating a lot of fear you it's still generating a lot of activity that maybe temporarily these other kind of chains have to use off chain da but if can scale ethereum da enough and there was actually a a blob simulator tool that Tim Robinson put out he's actually going to be on the panel with me on Wednesday who simulated this if we can scale ethereum da enough you basically uh instead of charging like high fees for for like one blob you you basically have

like an aggregate of fee so you charge cheaper fees for one blob but because you have so many blobs because you have hundreds of blobs it adds up you know you have this aggregate fee Revenue that adds up and I think from that perspective yeah I I just struggled to find a bare case for for these old da layers like I as in the base for eth da because old da exists right right okay yeah because we've been very very vocally bullish on the rise of altd with the Advent of rollup as a service providers really make rollups launching rollups very easy and then also like very excited about alt VMS so I I often times find myself like we started defi slate back in the in like like the 2020 days I'm not sure if if you remember um and you know we found ourselves very

much in the ethereum L1 yield farming very a aligned and I found myself kind of like like like getting more and more like hm maybe we should experiment with different VMS maybe we should experiment with different Das but like hearing you kind of say that okay it's not it's not it's not necessarily uh bullish for ethereum da but it's also not bearish but that these l2s are are simply uh something that can help scale ethereum um you know that that you know I mean it's refreshing to hear because frankly I thought that you were just going to on them you know well no I mean no because like they they they serve their purpose like as I said there are there that want to launch like Mega Ean Eclipse that can't use ethereum da cuz it doesn't have the capacity for them it just doesn't like they just it it

doesn't let them do what they want to do so if if if they didn't exist like would would Mega E and Eclipse even be launching right like would they because they can't launch with ethereum d as it exists today in the future hopefully they can when we scale it up more U but then I also probably have to be their own L1 well yeah but like just kind of their own all da anyway but but but like then Eclipse loses its kind of value prop because it's supposed to be an L2 svm right it's like if you're an L1 then you're just Salo right exactly um and then Mega eth literally can't launch I don't think from what I've heard from what they've said that they their architecture does just not work as an L1 for what they're trying to do so from that perspective it's it's a good thing

that these things exist but I've also like I think people maybe sometimes get the wrong idea about me because I really only talk about ethereum yeah I actually think that the piie is so so small right now that any that we're doing within the ecosystem is good for all of crypto because we're just growing it so so much and I think that event obviously like maybe decades into the future there'll be some ecosystems that have just really entrenched and that you know you have confidence that they're going to be around for a very long time uh and that's where most of the activity is going to happen that's why I believe so much in ethereum in the L2 road map I think that that's the way to scale this all to the world I just have never believe that you could do everything on L1 and even like the the monolithic camp

or the salana camp have capitulated on this recently with network extensions they literally said um that the rec extensions they they're l2s right they're literally the same thing they renamed it but they said that they they for people for for apps that can't be done on L1 salana but originally the thesis was that you could do everything on L1 Sal so I think that over time like people as I said the reality sets in and you can't deny the reality anymore the narratives you can you can spute whatever narrative you want but once the reality sets in then you have to accept it and you have to Pivot and that's actually a good thing mind you like that that the pivots happen like you don't want to be just stuck and and and doubling down on something that's not working but ethereum is so far ahead

when it comes to that stuff and realize this all the way way back in 2020 at least like probably even earlier of these these rollup Centric rap being the way to scale this stuff to the world and I think people are just way too concerned about the short term and like focusing on how what what the pie is today and not realizing that if you actually look at maybe the monthly active onchain users across the entire ecosystem we we probably not even had a million real humans I'm not talking about the the Bots because obviously there's lots of bots but real humans it's very very tiny and there is like 8 billion people in the world right so from we have so many more people to bring on chain and to onboard and getting them on chain is going to take various different kind of efforts I'm

really bullish on infinex which is a project that's being built to create a really nice interface that abstracts away all the complexities for the average person they're trying to be like onchain binance if they can succeed at that that's huge but yeah I think all of this kind of like fud these bear takes this this narrative weaving it's all just too focused on the short term people need to dream bigger and realize that we have so many people to left to on board and now that the AI stuff is happening like I really agent that's B think of Agents being the M users chains and that's just stting so right in your last refuel you were talking about this new uh L2 from nethermind that uh Ultra based is old yeah I think that's what they call surge

surge okay I thought they I thought they described it as being Ultra Bas it is a based rollup right stage two based roll up stage two at launch and everything about it just sounds like the most the most performant that it could possibly be and this is all in theory it hasn't launched right it's all it's all on the road Actually I don't even know if they are going to launch it I think it might just be for like research only well well that the thing is I think that what they're doing with it is that they're going to launch it but it's not meant to be like a regular user L2 it's meant to be like a a science experiment essentially of this is what a stage two base rollup looks like this is how awesome it is here but on but the thing

is with that is because it's stage two there uh if there's a bug in in any part of the stock and you lose your money G that's GG yeah that's like it sounds like some Andre cron T right Tes prod like they need like a medium article saying this is a valueless L2 token do not deposit anything like yes yeah that's the thing and I think it's going to be too expensive for most people anyway because they're they're based and they're using the L1 and stuff that and because it's a ZK um they using ZK Tech as well it's just going to be expensive so I don't think regular users are going to go there anyway but they're launching it as a as an experiment of like here's what it looks like here's what the end game can be and and I agree with you regular

users won't probably won't go there and probably because they don't they don't intend on having a BD team and a marketing team to build out the ecosystem but these AI agents need a place to do Commerce MH you think they're going to do it on the ultra based roll up surge I think AI agents could be the most they're look they're way more Dynamic than any human could be right because you can program in certain rules and they can take actions at as quick as they can possibly be done on chain they don't need to be typing they don't need to have some sort of like uh interaction like back and forth communication with between a human and a computer it's all computer so they can be doing things much quicker ironically they doing things at the speed of light right like a Solano like like

theem at least right at most right so I I I mean these AI agents need a shelling point and and I think coales around the most performing chains whether that's Eclipse Mega eth surge they'll they'll like there's always going to be some latency and there's always going to be Arbitrage uh opportunities that result from such latency yes and so AI agents at as quick as they can move are in position to capture on that very very small thin margin but very quick quickly dissipating opportunity that's available and so I I mean I think we're going to see chains that evolve as AI agents CH like the chain for AI agents and

economic activity on some of these chains is going to be like 80 90% and maybe we'll have rollups that are predominantly human activity and then we'll have other rollups that are predominantly AI driven economic activ well that's the thing about like the like the last six to 12 months we've been arguing that like we have too much block space there's too many rollups we have you know app chains we can't put all these things together like this L2 rollup or this L2 kind of interrupt Dynamic has been the big topic of conversation but we've all been thinking of the lens of like what's here and now which is kind of what you were just getting at right like we realized as a community four or five years ago okay the only way to scale is horizontally scaling or else you have to like beef up

the node requirements on the L1 centralized scale to kind of like this monolithic Vision it's not going to work as as Salon is kind of moving but now we're like in this next stage where like we're getting to AI agents and I think that're we're going to see that we need like more data availability we need more blob space we need more more chains because what what we're doing right now is like block space is like like the demand is relatively relatively low still but like just in any speculative cycle the demand goes absolutely exponential and we saw that in 2020 when ethereum basically couldn't handle it but now it's like the infra is there um so I I'm just curious like how do you how do you kind of like pause it around the the block space Demand versus Supply situation when it comes to l2s and

rollups you know maybe tying in some of the AI agent stuff and like where are we headed in terms of the amount of block space expansion for ethereum yeah yeah I mean it's it's exponential I think the demand's going to be exponential the scaling up needs to be exponential to match it but you can it's always going to be like as scalable as it's I guess like weakest link so to speak so for example you mentioned da like um you know Celestia and igen da AR don't have unlimited da right ethereum da is already at capacity so we're already for ethereum L1 normal transaction the normal fee Market is already at capacity and has been for ages so eventually like if it is exponential like I like I think it is and I'm sure um you guys agree then you know Ian da and celesa will

reach capacity they'll have to keep scaling up like everything will just be at capacity and you'll have to keep scaling it up um because yeah the rollups themselves like they they might have a capacity that uh like their their um gas Target might be lower than the da but eventually it'll be higher than the da available to them and they'll be like well we want to scale more we need more da and then these things will have to scale up and everything just going to keep scaling up and up but yeah I mean traditionally there has been a glut of block block space um but I think yeah now with the the AI agents and and those getting like a lot more sophisticated and and the thing is they're becoming cheaper to run as well they're just going to proliferate like absolute crazy and um the thing is is that they the the

nice thing is that they're all going to be transacting in like native assets too like n crypto native assets because they can't touch Fiat because they can't go through intermediaries too too many inefficiencies it and all they need to be do all they need to do is be seeded with some capital anyone can seeed them with this money right like doesn't have to be their creators it could be anyone say give give them some money and then the AI if it's smart enough will be able to turn that into to more money and do things with it and even if it loses money it just means some other AI took the money from it and then they all just you know so it's basically just replacing humans with with the AI agents uh and I think in that world because as you said like humans are a lot slower

than AI uh and AI can think exponentially faster than us that means the block space has to scale exponentially to match that we're not dealing with humans you know anymore and human Demand with with yeah and and honestly like most of the activity is already been traditionally Bots like a lot of bots and stuff like that and and that's why things get capacity very quickly because of that yeah I am very curious to see some sort of Dune dashboard or something that would show the gas breakdown even going back to ethereum and it in its history like how much gas has been paid by regular human actors how many have been paid how much has been paid by smart contracts Now new category how much is being paid by AI agents I yeah I mean fees. WTF website I don't know if you guys have logged into

that for a while I remember after def5 summer I checked it a couple times it's it's bad yeah yeah yeah it's not fun thank God that we got the l2s huh yeah yeah well yeah exactly um but yeah I I think the AI will end up being like almost all of the activity like 99.99% of the activity like yeah yeah okay so we've got this block space expansion right um we've got tons of rollups now we're getting more and more app chains we just did a podcast with Andre about app chains or not he's in the camp of like come build on my Sonic chain and you can just you can get all your fees distributed but we're like no man you should just build your own L2 yeah we we kind of went at it but the core issue there that he presented that many people

have just always like pushed against the Rope Centric road map and that metallic has written about now more recently is this kind of interoperability is like we've we've kind of unbundled ethereum L1 right like this Ro Centric road map was really just about un unwinding the kind of L1 this like monolithic chain if you will and bringing it out into like this modular design so like what is the what is the community uh organization that is required to rebundle this because what we have right now is we've got Ager super chain elastic chain orbit we've got this shared sequence or espresso asria we've got these Bridges and everyone's competing to like win but we are not coming together as a

community to find like an answer like is there a way that we can put individual motives and incentives aside and embrace a collaboration over a competition uh perspective or like does the EF have to like come top down and be like guys like focus on this intense standard like like how do we get to a a more uh ethereum L1 monolithic ux within our kind of modular design space yeah I mean I think that there already is a lot of work happening on this from the leading L2 teams they are working together to try and agree on standards cuz it is all about standards at the end of the day doesn't matter what one you use just agree on one and and go down that path together and then essentially if you get the few big ones doing that the smaller ones will just

join because if you're a smaller you need to get bigger and the quickest way to get bigger is playing with the big guys and making sure that you're interoperable with them so that's all we need just a few of the big guys to come together like bass arbitrum you know ZK syn stock whatever the the bigger ones are blast um mantle and just agree on a standard and then just stick with that standard that's that's the the smoothest po I I think we're we're starting to see that with standards like uh 7683 um that one has gotten ecosystem wide support um y from Unis swap Unis swap across polygon optimism are all sort of coalescing around that one I I think it's funny if you guys have seen that Meme you know you got 14 standards right so what do we need to do to

standardize all the standards like we we need to make a stand right and now we have 15 but I think that that's generally the right direction like we just need a good one yes yeah there'll still be competing standards um but but yeah and and and I think there are other ways to do interoperability as well like based rollups of course they're not there yet because you need uh you need at least a good pre-confirmation kind of pipeline to deal with the fact that we have 12C kind of slot times on ethereum L1 and you need like subc transaction inclusion or confirmation or like soft confirmations for end users just for the ux perspective but then as I mentioned before there's also interfaces that sit on top of these things that all abstracted away like infinex for example chain abstraction yeah all that sort of stuff

like yes it's maybe not as secure and not as clean I guess you could say but it works for the user like that's all we need to really worry about is what works for the user the interoperability at the I guess um protocol level like at the chain level is more about making sure that everything can access everything else as liquidity right uh and do that in a very secure and and quick way it's not so much for the user because honestly from an end user perspective today I think you've already got like a lot of options to be able to to I guess just interact with multiple change just from one kind of wallet or one kind of interface and you'll have even more in the future and I think the the marginal I guess end user going forward is going to use something like an infinex rather

than a metamask or a coinbase wallet or or a kind of rainbow wallet or something like that like those are more like as much as I love those things they're they're more kind of geared towards the the power users than than the regular users because the regular users the reason why most of them still sit on on centralized exchanges is because they have access to what they want to do on there they can own BTC they can own eth they can own uh LTC xrp whatever all these different chains on one interface they don't have to go anywhere else to buy these they buy them all on binance or coinbase or whatever so in the future when we have um uh something like infinex you basically can do the same thing as you can do on binance ownn all the Assets in the same account using

pass Keys it's uh not technically a crypto wallet but you pass keys are great for the average end user because you still get self- custody there's no kyc or anything and then you just slap all the def projects and every other other projects on top of that and let people interact with with them like that from one interface that's the end your phone as well exactly it's super smooth yes um and uh Apple opening up their uh Enclave chip I I think is huge for stable coins like that now we're going to have top to pay usdc yeah all these like end user abstractions are like I think as you said they're more of like a Band-Aid than like actually the uh the ethereum community aligning on like a standard but like in the interim it seems like those Band-Aids are going to like actually be able to help on board

more and more solve the more end user problems while exactly yeah and everything underneath that gets improved uh it gets applied to these Solutions exactly so we need to do it across all layers but yeah I think as I said like most humans are going to be going through those interfaces they're not going to be like natively on chain using Bridges and going to the they're just going to use what's easiest I'm I'm glad you specified humans because it's almost like teams I think will start to evolve how they're building and start to build for nonhuman users and I mean that's going to be it's it's a new it actually literally is a new paradigm I think AI got a lot of hype very quickly because it um you know the internet tends to be

able to Hype something up very quickly because the information is just disseminated so quickly but the thing is is that people still don't understand that these AI agents uh now have a native value kind of token that they can use like they don't have to use Fiat they're not blocked from anything they can actually do everything on and no one can stop them from doing it yeah and traditional Finance is even going into this direction as well like I think they just opened up Market hours in the US trading hours from was it five days to seven no like just more Market hours I I I wonder how much of that was crypto impacting it I'm I'm sure they'll never admit that it was crypto uh but it could be it could be that but but also I just generally think that because the world

is becoming more interconnected and it's more more digital more 247 just naturally customers demand this they're like you know why do I have to only trade between these hours or access my money between these hours give me 24/7 trading like obviously from the human perspective it doesn't make much sense because we don't operate on 24 24/7 right we have to sleep for 8 hours and then we have like outside of business hours but again going back to the AI stuff there's no concept of that for them there's no business truth terminal is tweeting horny jokes every hour of the day they work 247 posting every day all day long exactly which is why they're way more bullish cult leaders than like I don't know mad or like whoever right like or like Justin son or metallic like

these AIS can just simply outperform you yes because they don't have a brain they don't have a a clock yeah exactly exactly it's the same with but and and this is this is something that I don't think should be surprising to people considering that we've automated a lot of the world already using machines that don't have to sleep don't have to eat you don't have to pay them right they have none of the drawbacks of a of a human worker so to speak or or a human in general uh and that's the same is going to be true with these AI bot they're going to rule they're going to rule the chains there's no way humans can compete this world is wild we just have a few minutes and I know that we could probably go for hours on the AI but I'd like to ask you about the Petra

upgrade for ethereum as just to kind of kind of wrap us up what's the what's the tldr for our community uh are you for it against it what's been the community sentiment and what do you think are the implications yeah so definitely for it I I think hopefully it will get delivered by March of next year so not too far away now maybe push into April just depends on test Nets cuz they're at the test net phase now if everything goes smoothly with the test Nets I I suspect March as a main net date for it uh it's got a few different upgrades in it nothing that I would considered to be like strongly user facing besides maybe some account abstraction stuff like it was hard to follow along because they included account abstraction EIP then they removed it and replaced with another one and then I haven't checked

the latest on it yet but uh I I think there's something in there for account obstruction which affects the end users interface there but the one that I'm most excited for the EIP I'm most excited for is called Max EB which essentially increases the maximum amount of eth you can put on a validator right now it's 32 e per validator both minimum and maximum so if you have 320 e you have to spin up 10 individual validators uh whereas in in the max EB world you can have up to a maximum of 248 eth I believe unless that was changed valid and one validator so the thing is you still have the same uh Economic Security you still have the same node operator it's just that now instead of having to split it up into 10 validators you could do it on like one right and the reason

why this is good is because it lowers the bandwidth requirements and bandwidth usage of the whole network which means that we can add more blobs so it's funny how like you can get from that staking change to an L2 upgrade essentially but that's that's how gen generally it's going to work and you just take load off the network seriously wait wait why does that work sorry because because right now we have like a million plus validators on the network but we we've got like what 10 15,000 node operators because as a one node operator you can operate many different validators so it doesn't add any more security having a million validator the security comes from the node operators so if me as an individual is running 100 validators I'm one person right so that me having one or 100 validators it's the same thing from a

note operator perspective from an economic security perspective it's a bit different but but yeah can I ask you a question is that is that because uh we have to gossip the transactions amongst all of the Val I was going to get to that yeah like that that having more validators means more gossip on the network which means more bandwidth usage which means more overhead on the network which means that we can't scale up blob because blobs a lot of bandwidth to the network so we're essentially swapping that out we're saying okay we're going to take what you guys are using on the validator side um and then we're going to collapse that down and we're going to give it to the blobs but there's also other bandwidth work being done of course but that's a huge thing and and I I I also think that it's good for for

stakers generally like solo stakers as well because now they can compound their steak because in this current world you have to wait until you have 32 e to again to spin up another validator but in the max EV world you essentially get to compound your Awards in not instantly but like whenever you get them you can put them back on your validator and start earning rewards on them no need to wait to get another 32 e which is a lot of money you know so it's it's better for solo stakers uh and and it's better efficiency for staking overall yep Y and anything else in the upgrade to be as I said I think there's that account exraction EIP that was I can't remember if it was included in pectra or pushed out to the next upgrade because there was a bit of discussion around this uh

and a few other things that um as I said aren't directly user facing I believe there's one that allows you to exit a validator from the execution layer which essentially means that you can send a normal ethereum transaction on the normal kind of um where you do normal transactions uh and essentially do uh exit a validator so with withdraw the stake but also shut down that validator right now you can only do it from the consensus layer side which means that the staking protocols that exist today aren't fully trustless because you have to basically go to them and say Hey I want to exit this validator and they have to go to the validator operator and say exit it in the future with this upgrade that's coming uh you won't have to do that you can just send the exit message on the normal user facing side

yeah and then you have a fully trustless staking protocol which is cool yeah awesome and then thank you so much for uh joining us today I hope you have a great week in Bangkok um try to you know it's a marathon it's not a Sprint so yeah yeah exactly yeah thanks for having me on it's been a great discussion I got one more question for you oh yeah yeah for sure could you could you show the camera your tattoo that you got there oh yeah sure yeah all right how many people know where this is from yeah wa yeah first tell us where where this is from yeah so it's from an anime called Hunter x Hunter um yeah it's a very popular anime uh it's uh it's a very like the scene I'm not to spoil it too much for people but like this like this scene I

guess in the anime is like the culmination of the whole story essentially uh and it just it means a lot to me like personally but if I say why it means a lot to me I'm going to spoil it for people and I don't want to spoil it it's an intense look that guy has on his face like definitely definitely looks captivating but my my question was uh around the next tattoo oh yes yes so I said on my my podcast recently that uh for a long time now I've wanted to get like an e tattoo on the other arm like here and I would only do it when eth got the 10K so yeah yeah wow and that's since like I I've been saying e is going to go to 10K since 2019 so it's been a long time but once eth hits 10K uh you know I want to get

the design done maybe before then but I kind of have an idea of what design I want uh but yeah I want to get that here cuz ethereum changed my life in so many ways and it's not just about like eth getting to 10K but I think obviously like eth getting to 10K means that ethereum has succeeded in such a large way and has kept building kept improving kept growing uh and yeah I just wanted to get that but that's the only I think crypto TI we will get I'm not going to get like the teral Luna thing like oh I'm going to regret I think you'll be safe with the exactly yeah let's uh let's run this back with that new tattoo yeah exactly we'll have our next pot at 10K yeah yeah definitely should be too long yeah exactly next week or something

thanks Anthony thank you so much man Che guys