Based rollups, Core dev updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #837 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Delray Refuel where I cap the latest news in the ecosystem. I'm your host Dano as 11th of April 2025. All right everyone, let's get into it. So we before we jump into the news over the last week, I do want to address the elephant in the room which is the sporadicness or the random nature of the refill episodes over I guess the last couple of months, probably longer than that. But yeah, over the last few weeks, it's definitely been worse where it's become like one episode a week, right? So I want to address that. Uh, it's probably going to be a few minutes of me rambling about a few different things here because this is, I guess, a broad topic. It's not just like one thing. But if you want to skip ahead, you don't want to listen to me ramble, you just

want the news, there's timestamps in the YouTube description. You can go click on that and uh and skip this. But yeah, let's let's get into basically what's been happening. So, I think the term I can use to summarize it is that I am really burnt out. And I know I've been burnt out in the past, but this feels like a very different burnout. And I'll explain why. So, I've been in the industry for a long, long time. Uh, I first got into crypto in 2013 with Bitcoin and then again in 2017 with Ethereum. Now, since 2017, I have been in the industry pretty much like I mean, I'm not going to say full-time, but like it's taken up a huge chunk of my life.

Um, and I've enjoyed every second of it. Don't get me wrong. I've loved doing it. I loved I've loved everything about it, but I think 8 years in crypto is equivalent to like 30 40 years in other industries. It's just such an insane industry. It takes such a huge mental toll, physical toll as well, like the fact that a lot of it, pretty much all of it happens online, right? And you tend to, I guess, forget about your physical health when you're locked in, especially during bull markets, all that sorts of stuff there. Um, and it's gotten to the point where, you know, I've been in it for so long and I just I keep trying to be involved and I keep trying to uh, you know, do more regular refuels, keep trying to be being involved with the community at large, keep trying to be, you know, have that

same passion that I've always had for it, but it's just become harder and harder and I think I'm at the point where I'm I literally running on fumes and I don't know what the solution is. I'm going to be totally honest with you guys. I don't think taking another break is going to solve anything. I think the heart of the issue now for me is that I log on to like Twitter or Discord or wherever it is and I see the same talking points every day. It's like Groundhog Day like with within the crypto ecosystem. And it's not just within Ethereum, it's within broader crypto as well. It's the same talking points day in day out. Groundhog Day, especially uh with within Ethereum. And I'm just so like tired of seeing that.

Like I I can't just sit here and enjoy seeing the same stuff. And it's not even positive talking points, right? It's negative talking points every day. It's the same thing. It's the same thing about ETH as an asset. Same thing about Ethereum as a network. And I understand people have questions and concerns, but it goes beyond that. Like people like I answer the questions, right? I answer the concerns. I try to educate as best I can. And then it's just it just goes in circles. And I feel like people want an answer and they don't know what answer they want. They just want an answer that'll I guess like satisfy them. And nothing I seem to ever say or anyone ever seems to say, I guess, like in the broader crypto ecosystem seems to satisfy that. And I I think that's for a few different reasons. Obviously, price

plays a big factor here. And I totally understand people being like really upset with ETH as an asset because it hasn't performed like they thought it was going to perform. They've been outperformed by other assets, so on and so forth. I understand that this bull market had has been very shitty, I guess, as a as a bull market, as a cycle. Um, not just because of the stuff that Trump was doing with the tariffs, but also because of all just like the memecoin stuff that happened that extracted so much money out of crypto. the cycle didn't play out like people thought it was going to play out and it just yeah you know it feel it feels really shitty and I understand that I totally get that but I don't think the solution is doing the same thing every day and expecting different results like

asking the same questions talking about the same things every day uh you know shifting the blame to different people all the time I think is really toxic as well and I've talked about this in the past of course but you can kind of put yourself into my shoes where I actually have to be exposed to this because I need to go on Twitter to get the news for the refuel right I need to keep up with pulse of the ecosystem. I need to go on on Discord in order to communicate with with people on Telegram and keep up with the ecosystem. And if all I'm coming across is the same stuff every day, it doesn't it doesn't lend itself to me being excited about things anymore. It's actually the complete opposite. Like I can't be passionate about seeing the same kind of FUD every day and dealing with the same noise

every day. It just wears me down, right? Um and I think yeah, I've just gotten to the point where I'm just like, you know, why am I putting up with this? You know, I'm I why am I doing this? Like why am I doing this to myself sort of thing. I obviously love Ethereum. Obviously still very bullish on Ethereum and and everything that it's trying to do and uh you know I don't think anything's dying. I think uh crypto in certain areas is thriving. In other areas it's doing you know really poorly. Uh and I do think that there's a lot of uh I guess decent questions, a lot of constructive criticism, but I just I'm so sick of seeing the same things over and over again. So I think that's what's kind of burnt me out in a different form of burnout. It's like not like the previous

forms. It's it feels like a more permanent form, I guess you could say, at this point in time. And and some people have suggested that why don't I just use Farcaster instead of Twitter? It's better. I've tried using Farcaster, but I see like lots of the same things that I see on Twitter. A lot of it's just repost to both platforms. Farcaster is definitely less toxic than Twitter, but it's still the same thing day in day out. And I don't want to sit there and just scroll through my feeds and just see people on Ethereum all the time. Like, that's not fun for me. That's not fun at And I've always said to you guys since the very early days of the refuel that when this stops being fun for me, I'm just going to stop doing it. And you know, the refuel, I guess,

like over time, over the last couple months especially, had become less fun to do because of the fact that I have to sit through all this other crap just to be able to get to the news. Uh, and that's why I guess like the TLDDR and why, well, not TLDDR, I know I ramble a lot, but that's essentially why we're I'm at the position I'm at today where essentially I'm only doing one episode a week of the refuel and really spending a lot less time in crypto if I'm being honest. I mean, I'm not very active on Twitter anymore. I try to be active in the Discord channel where I can. Uh, but generally, I'm doing a lot of other stuff outside of crypto right now. I I I would say that I used to spend like what 80% or more of my time in crypto. I

would say that's like 30% now. And that's simply because I just mentally can't do it. Like I can't sit there and just a and just be exposed to constant negativity. Whether it's because of price action or not, it doesn't matter. I just personally can't do it anymore after being in the industry for so long. Um and I, as I said, I don't think that like uh Ethereum is dying. I don't think crypto is dying. I think it's going to go on to do really great things, but my exposure to the industry definitely needs to on a more permanent basis be at that 30 maybe 40% or something of my time, something like that. It can't go back up to 80%. I just I just can't do it. So, that's that's the reason uh the main reason why the refill's been sporadic. There are times where I'm just

too tired to do one cuz I record these things at night. It's currently like 8:30 p.m. my time. I usually record it later than this actually, but essentially that's another reason there. But I think that this industry generally just to finish on this has a lot of soulsearching to do. I think that the original promises of this industry have all but gone away. I think Ethereum really is the only last kind of beacon of the original promises of this industry. And I really do think that if if Ethereum fails in any way, like obviously I don't think it's going to fail, but there's always a chance that Ethereum fails as an ecosystem. It goes nowhere. No one cares about it and we just end up with like super centralized I guess pseudo blockchains. Not even blockchains. with just super centralized databases masquerading as blockchains. I

feel like the world is a worse off place in that reality. I feel like it's a complete waste of the industry. It's a complete waste of the technology that we have. But if that's the world that we get to, I have zero interest in that world, guys. I've said this time and time again. I'm only here for Ethereum. I have absolutely no interest in anything else in crypto. I'm not even interested in Bitcoin. I don't care about digital gold. Like, I really don't. It is so boring, right? Like, it's so utterly boring to me. What I care about is a decentralized programmable chain like Ethereum, right? Censorship resistant, all the good stuff that we care about, credible neutrality, and a really strong asset like ETH, a store value asset to be part of that economy and secure that network. That's what I care about. It's what I've always

cared about. And if that wasn't here, I wouldn't be in crypto. But again, that's not to say that I can go back up to like my 80% involvement in crypto and feel good about it. Maybe when things like price-wise gets better, I guess maybe that will improve things. But I don't know. I don't think so. I think at this point a lot of people in this industry are burnt out. They're not I guess like they're not admitting to themselves that they're burnt out and they're lashing out. They're blaming other people or they're just like quiet quitting. There's a lot of that going on within crypto. I think just broadly uh and and yeah, I I just think people are very demoralized right now. Not just because of crypto, but also the wider stuff happening in the world. The macro environment sucks right now. Not just

because of the tariff stuff, but just broader like macro broader global global kind of goings on. That sucks for a lot of people. Cost of living just keeps going up. You know, inflation's tamed, but rates are still very high. So, people people are struggling generally and I totally get all of that. I totally understand all of that. And then you throw in uh you know, if you're in crypto, I throw in all of that kind of stuff there and it just doesn't lend itself to a very nice environment to be in. So, for me personally, I've cut back my time on Cryptoola, and what I'm filling that time with is things that don't have any negativity attached to them. I'm playing video games. I'm not playing online video games where 13-year-olds can yell at me. I'm playing single player games, and I'm enjoying the hell out of that. I'm reading books.

I'm spending time with my fiance. We, you know, we do a bunch of different things together. We watch TV shows together. We go for walks. We go out to dinner. That sort of stuff, right? Um, and I'm I'm I'm back riding my bike an hour a day. uh and and getting a lot of um uh uh uh uh uh uh what's the word I'm looking for? A lot of uh good stuff out of that. Basically, a lot of uh a lot of positive health effects definitely out of that. So, I'm back to doing all of that. And that, as I said, there's no negativity attached to that, guys. Like, and it's feel it feels so freeing. It feels so good. But obviously, I still want to be involved in Ethereum. Obviously, I still want to do the refuel. So I guess like my plan from

here is to try and uh completely I guess like uh well not completely but like m much like lessen my exposure to the negative sides of this industry which is admittedly very hard these days uh and try to try and just focus on the positive stuff which I'm going to do. I know I've rambled on a little bit but this is an update that's been a long time coming on why the refill is the way it is. I'm not going to make any promises going forward. But I'm not going to say that I'm going to stick to a 3-day a week cadence because I've said that before and I've broken that promise and I hate breaking promises to you guys. You guys have been so loyal for so long. I know I do this for free and you and and like uh and you don't pay me for

for this or anything like that and I don't have to do it because you you know you're not paying. People tell me this all the time. It's like why you feel bad for not doing an episode? We're not paying you to do it. We're just happy when you do an episode. I'm like well yeah but at the same time I still feel an obligation. Like I still feel like you guys love the updates that I give you on all the Ethereum tech. love all the stuff that I cover uh and love listening to me talk about and educate you guys about this stuff. Uh but at the end of the day, first and foremost, I have to take care of my own mental and physical health. And yeah, it as I said like if it's not fun for me, it's not enjoyable for me, if it's not uh if it's

not stoking like the passionate fire within me, then it becomes much harder to do this stuff. And I think that just lessening my exposure to the industry will reignite that flame and and and keep me engaged in it. But going forward with the refills, they're just going to be sporadic and random as they have been. I'm not going to say it's going to be once a week or three times a week or daily. It's okay. I can promise you it's probably like it's probably never going back to daily. Like I don't think I'm going to be able to maintain that. Um definitely um not going forward because I I do plan to have kids at some point in the in the near future hopefully. Um and yeah, in that environment I don't think I' I'd ever be able to do daily refills, but I'm going to try and do

them when I can. I'm going to try and do them as often as I can. But yeah, uh, episodes will come out when they come out. But thanks for listening to me rambling there. I know I took up about 10 minutes of the refuel doing that. But enough on that. Let's dive into the news over the last week. And there are actually exciting things happening in the world of Ethereum in uh, you know, in spite of everything that I just said. And that first thing is that we had the latest allcore dev core. I believe this was this happened yesterday. And this was all about Fusaka. So as you guys know, Pectra, the next mainet upgrade for Ethereum is going live on May 7th.

that is already done pretty much and finished. It's been on test nets, all that good stuff there. There's not really any work left to be done on that. And Fusaka, the spec has been worked on for a little while now. We know what we want it to be. We essentially just want to ship Pas and maybe EF with Fusaka here. And that's what was discussed on on the call. As well as a lot of other EIPs that were proposed for inclusion, but are basically getting moved to Glamsterdam, which is the upgrade after Fusaka, because we want to leave Fusaka quite lean so we can deliver PIDAS and and potentially EF here. But if you want to see a list of all of the EIPs that have been proposed for inclusion and then considered for inclusion and then uh uh and then denied for inclusion or I

guess what does Nixo call it here? Uh yeah, declined for inclusion I should say. Then you can go check out Nixo's tweet and check out Tim Bico's post on Ethereum magician magicians here. But essentially for what's going into Faka is I think four different EIPs or five different EIPs here. One of them doesn't require a hard fork. It's got to do with the history expiry, I believe, which I've talked about before, but the rest of the EIPs on this list that Nixo shared are not go going in to um into Faka if they're not part of these five here. And and the four is essentially got to do with um uh uh this EIP 7823, which is setting an upper bounds for mod

XP, which is an op code, I believe. 78.25, which is a transaction gas limit cap. uh 7907 I mean these are all technical stuff technical stuff right not userf facing there is EIP 7762 which is a very um interesting AIP that people have been asking for coupled with 7918 which is essentially a minimum base fee per blob gas so essentially making the blob fee market better for ETH and Ethereum value acral there and then of course uh podas with that as well so yeah that's the latest on the all core devs front things are still moving really really well there and on top of that as well I've been seeing and hearing from both in private and public a lot of Ethereum developers and researchers or core developers and researchers saying that they've never

been more excited about the Ethereum road map in terms of not just the stuff that's getting done and getting shipped on it but also the the speed at which it's getting shipped and also the fact that the focus is on the right things at least what they believe are the right things. There are debates about this, but they are super excited about the future going forward with regards to core development because of all the changes that have happened not that not just at the Ethereum Foundation, but at various different places within the ecosystem, which is which is quite awesome to hear and see there. But anyway, you can go check out uh this for yourself. All the links, as you guys are well aware of by now, are in the YouTube description uh for you to check out.

All right, so speaking of core development, research and development, we had the beam call number three, which is all about P2P networking happen. So, uh, Will here has a summary of what this call was about. You can go check this out. I'll link it for you guys. Uh, but essentially, you guys know all about the beam chain, what it what it's aiming to do. It's it's a hu it's a pretty huge undertaking honestly for the Ethereum ecosystem, but it is getting done in a really uh relatively quick fashion at this point in time. I think you know there was that original kind of road map from Justin Drake that said this would take 5 years. Honestly though I don't think this is going to take 5 years and that's 5 years from let's say DevCon last year. So let's say November 2024. I reckon we can get this shipped inside of

3 years guys. And we may even be able to get that shipped faster. Given the amount of people that are working on this right now and the amount of excitement there is around this and the amount of I guess like strong drive there is to get this shipped. I'm going to go out and limit saying we can say we can ship this within 3 years. We may even be able to ship it faster than that. I don't think it's going to take 5 years here. And again, this stuff is not necessarily userfacing. It's like direct user facing, but it is very important. I think the most exciting thing people are looking forward to is native rollups or ZKVMs uh and natively integrated into the protocol. I believe that could even happen before the beam chain. So, I don't think we'd have to wait that long

for that either. But yeah, if you want to check out the latest updates on what's happening on the beam chain, you can go check out this thread uh uh for yourself. off. It's got all the details there. All right, speaking of other core dev related uh news, you can see here Ben Adams from the Nethermind uh who contributes to Nethermind here put together a screenshot showing off a PR which is a pull request on GitHub 8462 which just outbuilt all builders. So um oh so this sorry this is never mind with this PR uh it just outbuilt all builders with their private order order flow doing local building with just the public meool where were some better me boost blocks after slot time but beat

all the builders before slot time so as you guys know well maybe you do know maybe you don't know the way MEV boost works uh and the way I guess like me generally works is it's it's basically an open competition for who can get uh build the most profitable block and get that proposed on the network. Now, of course, because of the fact that local block building has traditionally not been, you know, competitive with outsourced block building, 95% of Ethereum blocks today are outsourced. There's private order flow as well that happens when you send your orders to RPCs such as MetaMask's default RPC, which I believe is a private orderflow RPC now, as well as other things like Cow Swap, for example. But uh Ben is saying here that never mind with this pull request uh which is um number 8462

apparently just outbuilt all uh all builders all the external builders locally which is really really cool. So I don't know the exact details here. I think Ben is just um is just teasing this here. This as far as I know is not merged as part of Nethermind itself yet. But it's really cool to see this because there's a lot of debate around local block building versus versus external block building and preserving local block building. I I think longer term local block building is not going to go away completely. It's going to it's going to remain quite niche though because of the fact that the way the Ethereum road map is being designed with things like Fossil is we're basically accepting that most people or most validators I should say are going to

outsource their block production or most node operators are going to outsource their block production. But really the when it comes to block production what you really want to care about the most is censorship resistance. And with Fossil you still get that even if blocks are outsourced. And I've talked about this before on the refill. I'm not going to rehash the points again, but if you got that, if you have Fossil in, which is an EIP that will probably go in, maybe it goes in in Fusaka, I don't know, but most likely in Glamsterdam, then essentially external block building doesn't really become that much of an issue anymore. MEV as a broader topic is still obviously something that needs to be dealt with in various different ways, but external block building itself doesn't become the issue that it is is today with regards to censorship. But

anyway, if you want more details on this, you can check out Ben's tweet. You can even reply to Ben uh Ben's tweet here or talk to him in the Delhi way discord channel. He's quite active there uh and he's really good at answering all the technical questions that you have. He's helped me a lot over the years and help and helping me understand different things. So you defin definitely do that if you have more uh questions here. So uh ETH Global was in Taipei recently uh and they have their 2025 finalists are now in for ETH Global Taipei here. So essentially there are eight projects that were part of uh the finals here. you can check them all out for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. Um, but these global events usually focus on projects that aren't uh necessarily like part of

one category. There's a lot of debate in the ecosystem right now around the fact that well, the only real thing that has taken off in a really kind of big way that actually provides tangible value in terms of like fear revenue and economic activity on the network is DeFi. Well, that's because, and I've said this before, but that's because DeFi is like the biggest thing. Defi is the thing. Not to say that other things won't and can't be built and won't be valuable, but DeFi is still the biggest thing. But that actually leads itself to a problem that VCs really only want to fund DeFi things, right? Because that is is I guess like a less risky bet for them because they can clear see a more clearer path to, you know, tokenization and then to that token having value, right? and a clearer path to product

market fit. Whereas things that aren't DeFi have a much harder time raising funds, a much harder time getting users users interested in it because it's not inherently speculative or financial. And as we know, like most of this industry is speculative and financial. So if you're trying to incentivize people to come use it, it's very difficult to do so. Uh and then a lot of these products really uh are just generally quite niche as well. like they don't appeal to a mass market crowd. Because when you're thinking about finance, finance, it's not about what it appeals to. It's about like who actually gets value out of it.

Everyone gets value out of finance. Whether that be payments, whether that be borrowing and lending, whether that be uh uh peer-to-peer payments to to uh to each other essentially, whether that be buying products or selling products, whatever it is, right? Finance outside of crypto obviously is part of our lives and we all are exposed to it from a very young age, honestly. like from the youngest age where we can basically stand on two feet and our parents give us a little bit of money to maybe like buy our own chocolate bar at the at the corner store or at at the grocery store or something like that just to give us a sense of what it means to actually transact. But it goes beyond just like fiat currency, right? And just like money, we transact in different ways even as children. Like think about children trading toys with each other.

That is a form of a financial transaction taking place. The children aren't thinking of it like that. uh they're not thinking in dollar terms or anything like that, right? But it is still a transaction taking place there. It's like a bering kind of uh system taking place there. So from the youngest of age until the day we die, finance is part of our lives. It's basically everything that the entire world is built on. So you're never going to have something of a that's bigger than finance. It's just inherently not going to happen whether it's in crypto or or elsewhere. But again, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't build non-financial products. And that's what ETH Global tries to do, I think, is they try to make sure that non-financial products can still get built and still get funding and incentives to build in order to get some of these ideas uh off off

the line here. And a lot of these things are actually complimentary to DeFi as well, such as ENS for example. It's inherently non-financial, non-speculative, but it is very complimentary to DeFi and very complimentary to the DeFi happening on Ethereum. It's complimentary to everything, but you know, in particular with DeFi, think about payments. For example, instead of saying pay me at 0x blah blah blah, you say pay me at sassle.eth. So much easier. I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory. So, there's all of that that that kind of happens there. But it always kind of irks me when people say, well, you know, can we build something that's not DeFi and get mass market appeal on, you know, that that's non DeFi? It's like, yeah, maybe we can, but it's a lot harder than building DeFi because your addressable market is

already way less. Like as I said, DeFi's addressable market or finance's addressable market is every single person on the planet, right? So let's just say you build a decentralized messaging app for example like a fully decentralized messaging app that's fully encrypted. Now you would think that the the address addressable market for that is everyone on the planet, right? You would think that everyone would care about having a decentralized fully private messaging app. That's just not the case, guys. Not the case at all. Maybe in the best case scenario, you get few hundred million people. That's awesome still.

That's absolutely great. Like that's a hit app by any measure. But that doesn't hold a candle to DeFi still. A few hundred million versus 8.5 billion. You kind of see where I'm going with this, right? Like there there are things that will will have mass market appeal but will never even come close to DeFi. But then there will be things that don't have mass market appeal that are very very niche that not many people will look at at all. And those are things like potentially video games like decentralized or onchain games. A lot of games even that aren't on on on chain or I guess like within crypto crypto games just normal games, they don't have that many players either. There's a lot like a long list of games that just don't have many players. Maybe they have an initial surge and then then it kind of

dies off there depending on the game you're looking at as well. Like single player games for example that can be replayed but essentially like most people don't won't replay a single player game. They'll play it once they might not even finish it but they'll play it you know they'll buy it whatever that's done right. uh whereas online games obviously are built to be played more than once and people do play them but even those things even the most popular online games in the world don't come anywhere close to the total market and user base of finance generally there so I just wanted to kind of get that little bit of a rant off my chest because I'm just really tired again this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the same kind of groundhog day happening day in day out I'm really tired of people saying that oh we need

to build more non-defi stuff it's like yes sure that would be But DeFi is the thing that we should be mainly focused on. Finance is the thing that we we should be mainly focused on. And that is a big umbrella. And uh there is never going to be anything bigger than that. There is nothing else bigger than that on on the planet. I mean you could argue that there are there are certain things that uh everyone has to deal with as well. everyone has has to interact with like the healthare system for example and there are things being built with blockchains that with regards to healthare but that's a whole different thing altogether like healthcare is completely different to finance like you can't even think about it in the same vein and it's different based on uh you know different kind of like countries how they handle it versus

you know how much input the government has versus private healthcare so on and so forth there's just too much going on there so it's not really something that you that you can kind of compare and then obviously people will say well everyone has to eat and drink I'm like yeah but but how do How do you get your food right? How do you how do you get your your drinks? You pay for them. And what what what is that? That's finance. So, I don't know. Like, I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here. Maybe I'm saying stuff that's obvious to you guys, but that's just a little rant there. But anyway, if you want to go check out the the projects for yourself, I'll link this in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so. But there was a lot of heavy focus on on DeFi with these

projects, which as I just guess ranted about is only natural. But if you go to the ETH global website, you can actually go and look at past projects as well and see the non-FDI projects that have been worked on or at least things that maybe they have DeFi integrated within them, but they're not D5 first and and foremost here. So yeah, yeah, definitely go check that out uh for yourself there. All right, some exciting news from Spy. So they have their first live public demo of the first based L3 app chain. So they say here this is a landmark moment for Spy as we demonstrate the future of Ethereum roll rollups synchronous composability. So obviously everyone at this point is probably heard of base rollups and what they can bring to the table with regards

to efficiency interoperability uh value acrruel for Esset uh and so on and so forth for Ethereum here. Now Spy is one of the teams at the forefront of building based rollups and what they have today is not I guess like an L2based rollup. It is an L3based app chain and what that means is that there is an L3 sitting on top of an L2 that is synchronously reading data from that L2 at the L3. So in a based way so essentially there's no bridging here. It's essentially just reading the data uh directly or synchronously I should say sorry from the L2 and then doing things at the L3. How it would work in a based L2 chain is that the L2 would be reading data from the L1 uh and then multiple L2s could be reading the same

data interoperating with each other and then they would be uh having based sequencing happen at the at the L1 here. So there is a live demo at at this link here. I'm actually going to link this in the YouTube description. It's called Yeet Dex. So you can connect your wallet here. Maybe I'll connect my wallet quickly on sassel um and switch to to the network here on it. Uh, let me have a look here. Yep. And you can't see what's happening because Metamas doesn't pop up on my on my screen here, but you can see I need to get some tokens. All right, give me some tokens. I'm doing this live, right? Live demo here and approve my USDC uh and wrapped ETH. And I'm just adding them here to MetaMask approving everything. Uh, there's a few pop-ups here. Obviously, a lot a lot of

this stuff with approvals is going away with regards to um the the IP that's coming in Petra, the account abraction EIP. But hey, I'm all set up with my tokens now. So I can buy some ETH. So or wrapped ETH I should say. So let's buy some ETH. Just clicked on that. Confirming the transaction in MetaMask and done, right? It's all done here. So uh I mean you can't obviously see what's happening in terms of uh like what's happening in the background here. But as uh is explained in Spire's tweet here, this is an L3 app chain reading L2 and then processing the transaction there.

And they've got more information about this. I'll link it for you guys to check out. But that was really cool and you saw how fast it was as well. Uh I would do the demo again by selling ETH but I can't bring myself to sell ETH so I'm not going to do that. There's also like a leaderboard here in terms of people who are kind of playing around with this and trying to get the best P&L. Uh and then there is like a history tab as well. So yeah, while this is a demo, this is real technology and this is working and this is stuff that's going to be coming to mainet. Uh and this is the I guess like uh stuff people have been asking about for a while like based rollups generally. So you should definitely go check this out. I'll link it for you guys to do so there. But

staying on the topic of base rollups, we have Rise's test net now live. So for those of you who don't know, Rise is basically a competitor to Mega E. They're trying to build a super fast, super scalable L2 on top of Ethereum here. I believe Rise is using Celestia for data availability, whereas Mega ETH is using DA. And I should disclose that I'm an investor in both Spy and Rise here. Um uh but yeah, I just wanted to get that disclosure out of the way there. So Ris's test net is now live. They claim to be faster than Mega E in terms of round trip latency. You can see here the table of uh they they claim 11 milliseconds round trip latency here whereas Mega E they they say in this table is 112 milliseconds and then they got a bunch of other comparisons here as

well. I will say that when it comes to speed, like I think I've explained this before, for regular users doing regular kind of transactions, like DeFi transactions for example, I really don't think they're going to notice the difference between 11 milliseconds and 100 milliseconds. And also the supporting infrastructure like the RPCs and the infrastructure, the API infrastructure and stuff that's feeding in this information is definitely not going to be doing it this fast. So I think where this really shines is with games. And I've said this before with onchain games and things that require like very low latency. That's where these things shine. And I think that's where these things may may see a lot of uptick is things like you know onchain games and maybe stuff like uh central limit order book dexes for example which

require just very very fast updates here. So there is obviously a lot of value to being as fast as possible, but also you have to kind of see where the actual use case is and where the actual value is for the user. That's where essentially I think it is uh there. But yeah, anyway, you can go uh check out this this thread from Rise to get more information about this. There's a lot of kind of different comparisons here and there's also a website that you can go to to play around with it yourself at portal.chain.com. You can get tokens to play with and then you can go explore apps. There's actually a bunch of different apps live. There's a there's an on there's a game live called for the kingdom which I was playing around with a little bit before. There's a deck live called um gas pump and a few other

things here but still early days obviously for for rise here. But the reason why I said that it had to do with with base rollups is because Rise's ultimate goal is to actually be a base roll up on top of Ethereum even though they are using uh Celestia for DA. I believe they're using Celestia for DA because Ethereum DA just isn't enough for them right now. But they are planning to be a based roll up on Ethereum here, which I do think I mean maybe maybe it's not a think, maybe it's more of a hope, but I I do hope that like most of the rollups go down that path of being a based rollup. It's just better for everyone. Better interoperability, better efficiency, better better security. But we have to keep building out the technology. We have to keep building out things like with Spire. Have to keep getting things

on on test nets obviously, but also on on mainet here. And that's going to keep coming, especially over the next uh I guess like 12 to 18 months. Well, 12 to 18 months from the beginning of the year. So, I guess like 12 to 14 months from now over over that time. And then the Ethereum L1 is going to keep getting better. That's going to keep scaling. Really, guys, I know I started the episode off being a little bit negative. Maybe a lot negative depending on on how you view things. Glass half full glass half full glass um a half empty sort of way of viewing things. But like at the end of the day, there's still so much happening in the Ethereum ecosystem.

There's so much development happening. There's so many things getting built. There's so much exciting stuff happening that it's impossible for me to be bearish. It's just personally there's a lot going on that I, you know, in terms of my involvement in the industry, in terms of like, I guess some soularching here and there, how much I want to be involved, stuff like that, which I explained at the start of the episode. But don't let that dissuade you from being involved. There's still plenty of to do. There's still plenty of opportunities in crypto, and you should definitely stay involved. Don't go anywhere because things are honestly still just getting started. I really do think that we're still in the golden era here. I do think we're going to see a lot of adoption going forward, especially with things like tokenized assets. That's going to be huge. Um, but

yeah, you can go check out Risers's TestNet for yourself and play around with what they have to offer there. Now, last thing is just uh a I guess this is not a podcast that's on like YouTube or anything like that. It's only on a Twitter space right now, but Franchesco here did a state of decentralization in Ethereum podcast with Justin Drake and I believe there was one other person on the show here. Yeah, Simon here from Consensus that you can go check out for yourself. Now, I haven't watched this myself yet. I've been meaning to, but I wanted to shout it out still because everyone who has watched this or listened to it has given me the feedback that this is one of the best things they've listened to with regards to Ethereum and with regards to obviously the state of decentralization in Ethereum, but also the wider road map

going forward and how things are going to evolve going forward and how Justin sees them. So, if you need an injection of bullish energy, Justin Drake's always there to give it to you. probably even more so than me these days. He's just I I I think he's a bigger bull than me, honestly. And I consider myself to be obvious obviously a pretty big bull. Um but yeah, you can go check that out uh for yourself if you haven't yet. You probably missed it because it wasn't really advertised that much, but it was a really a really great podcast from what I've heard. I can't wait to dive in and listen to it there. But I think on that note, that's going to be it for today's episode. 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

the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all when I see you. Thanks everyone.