Bullish ETH, Robinhood launching L2 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #840 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of daily refuel where recap the latest news in the ecosystem. I'm your host Dan this design the 4th of July 2025. All right everyone let's get into it. So I'm back. It has been a while guys. I didn't realize actually how long it had been since I last did a refuel and it's coming up on 2 months I think. I think the last one was like on the 10th or something like that. Uh 10th of of May actually. Uh and a lot has happened during that time. Uh so I think for today's episode I'm not going to go through everything that's happened. And I haven't got like a million tabs open here to cover, but I think it is worth going through like the broader themes happening across the crypto ecosystem and across the Ethereum ecosystem uh right now. Uh and what that means

obviously for Ethereum as as a network, ETH as an asset, all that good stuff there cuz there has been uh a lot that has happened um specifically outside of I guess like the tech related stuff. It feels like on the tech side, on the Ethereum side, we're in a really great position right now and it feels like the kind of engine is chugging along just fine. We had all those changes changes at the Ethereum Foundation that I spoke about a little while ago. There's since been more changes as well. They've published new org charts. They've uh created new internal teams to focus on different things with new leadership. So yeah, the tech side's really really uh bullish right now and in a really really great place. Um and I think obviously for for a while there the main criticism of Ethereum wasn't really about the tech

so to speak. There were certain criticisms about the L2 road map, you know, not scaling the L1 enough, so on and so forth. But most of the criticisms kind of focused on ETH as an asset, right? Like why is ETH underperforming? You know, why why does ETH um not, you know, have an easy to understand narrative? Why is ETH kind of getting slaughtered in the market going back to, you know, 1300 or 1400 whatever it did a few months ago? Uh why is it bleeding against other assets? You know, we all know this, right? We all know these questions that everyone was kind of asking for a while there. Um, and no one's really asking that anymore. It certainly seems like a switch has been flipped and everyone seems to be bullish on ETH now. Even the people who were like really bearish on ETH have suddenly

become bullish on it. And there there are reasons for this to to be fair. But at the same time, I kind of I can't help but laugh after seeing these people say that they believed ETH was extremely overvalued when ETH was like $1,800. But now at $2,600, ETH apparently uh you know has all this upside and it's really bullish um uh you know going forward. So yeah, this is why I think I've I've told you guys many times in the past that it doesn't really make sense to listen to these talking heads on crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter is irrelevant. I think in the grand scheme of things at this point, I think that for assets like ETH and obviously BTC, the most relevant uh I guess like part is the macro kind of part, the trady part, getting them on board uh and graduating out of this I

guess uh cryptonative hole. Like I actually believe the cryptonative kind of part of investing is actually really bad place to be because cryptonatives historically haven't really invested based on fundamentals. They've only invested based on narratives, right? and they've invested based on narratives that are usually concocted by people like VCs who get in really early to things. They have their own podcast. They have their own media channels and they spread all of these various narratives to their audience. And then of course when things are relatively bullish, these narratives can work and then you know token price goes up, it's it reinforces on itself. But then on on the flip side, it's really really bad.

And and I think that's why you've seen such a disconnect between BTC as an asset and the rest of the market. We never really had an alt season as they're known as, right? We never really had that that kind of everything going up together. We did have the memecoin mania which has since died off. I think you know the Trump memecoin launch was the top of that. Uh it's been six months since then. Uh and it seems to have died off. All that activity well most of that activity has gone away. It's still there. And I think I argued at the time that it's always going to be there. It's like the casino part of crypto. But you don't want the entire economy, the entire oddchain economy to just be a casino, right? You want more than that.

And that's where obviously, you know, DeFi comes in and trify integrations come in. And I remember saying at the time that we, you know, it shouldn't matter too much about capturing meme coins. Like, who cares that Ethereum didn't capture meme coins? The real value is capturing things like stable coins, capturing Trady integrations, capturing um macro asset investors, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit, but I figured I would kind of give the the context around all of this. And that that's kind of where we're at uh today. Now in the context of ETH as an asset and kind of getting more bullish on ETH as an asset. There was this report published in June uh called uh the bullcase for ETH. Now this is a report from Etherealize with a bunch of different people who contributed myself included. You can see their names here

where essentially it breaks down why you should be bullish on ETH. And it's not just talking about ETH as an asset. It's also talking about how the Ethereum network feeds into this. And they basically are like a ying and yang here. But it's also positioning ETH as digital oil. Obviously, you know, we know at this point that Bitcoin uh has essentially meme'd itself into being digital gold, but these things are just stories and narratives that people tell each other. These are not kind of pre-ordained things. BTC was not digital gold just because, right, it became digital gold. It became like a common truth that it that it is digital gold because it was me'd into that reality.

Now, obviously, you know, Ether as an asset is a lot more uh broad than BTC as an asset. And Ethereum as a network obviously is a lot more broad than Bitcoin as a network. So, it's traditionally been very hard to pin down a single narrative. And I still think we're never going to get like a single unifying narrative here. People have their own different views on things and that's totally fine. But when we were discussing this, you know, people at Etherealize, myself, other people listed on this report report, we were discussing this for for quite a while. We're like, you know, digital oil makes sense for ETH. ETH is a asset that powers the digital economy, powers the digital economy, not just on Ethereum, but on not Ethereum, not just Ethereum L1, but the L2s and even other L1's and and basically everywhere, right?

Eventually, when it gets plugged into um the rest of the the financial ecosystem, it's just going to be everywhere here. So, um you know, and and and oil traditionally has been an asset that has been stockpiled by nation stage strategically because you need oil for energy. Yes, it may not be a narrative that I guess people people kind of criticized it and said, well, oil is more of like an old school thing. It's not like a forward-looking thing. These days, we have different ways of generating energy. Uh, and we and we're progressively moving more and more towards those ways. You know, solar energy, nuclear power, hydro, electric stuff. Like, I get that. But the thing is is that a meme doesn't have to be perfect. You know, digital gold is not a perfect meme if you kind of look at it from that lens. Gold is very old as

well, right? Like the whole point of BTC being digital gold is that is an upgrade over gold. Like gold is obviously doing very well in the market, but it is kind of a very old asset. It's it's it's an asset that doesn't do much. It doesn't change, right? It is fundamental to uh uh fundamentally entwined with the laws of the universe, right? It is it is part of nature essentially. So it's not going to change, right? Uh unless you believe in alchemy, which you know is a whole another conversation there. So the same is true I think for something you know like a digital oil, right? Yes. oil is old, stagnant, been around for for for ages and the world is progressively moving off, you know, oil literally, but the I guess like the comparison still stands where it powers the economy. So with with with digital oil, we're

powering the digital economy and going forward, more of the economy is going to become onchain, you know, more of the economy is going to be onchain native and more and more stuff's going to happen. We're seeing plenty of of these sing signals over the over the last few months especially, but over the course of the last few years as well. So, we basically came to the conclusion that in the absence of a better meme, digital oil is a good meme. And I don't think there's actually anything better than digital oil. If you're looking for a meme that is very simple to understand. So, that's why we kind of landed on that. Now, as I said, everyone's going to have different opinions on this.

They're going to have their own way of selling ETH, and that's totally fine. But in terms of selling this, because this report is not for cryptonatives really, it's for traditional investors. It's for macro investors. This from what I know has actually resonated a lot with those investors for the first time on ETH. You know, those investors traditionally have looked for narratives and looked for ways to sell ETH and looked for ways to reason about ETH and they just didn't have anything to go off. Well, now they do. And this report is available at edigital oil.com. You can go read it for yourself if you haven't yet. I've been posting about it frequently. So, if you've seen me posting about it, you've probably read it by at this point. But, yeah, it's a really great report. I'm not just saying that because I was part of the

conversations that that that kind of uh I guess I created this report, but I think it really does cover everything uh that that has to do with Ethereum as a network and ETH as an asset and why ETH is extremely undervalued. Like I really do think that ETH right now and even more so obviously a few months ago, but right now is still incredibly underpriced relative to other assets. And I know people have their own arguments against this. People will say well you know ETH as an asset has been uh has been extremely overvalued because if we compare it to the other assets and we compare their revenues then ETH is not generating enough revenue to justify its valuation. But what these people miss as I have been preaching for many years is that ETH is not something that gets its value from revenues. ETH is a a

commodity store of value. ETH is a you know digital oil falls into that right commodity store of value here. It is not something that should be valued based on the revenues of the Ethereum network. And uh I don't think that most things in crypto have traditionally been valued like that. And the perfect example that I usually use is that bit the Bitcoin network generates very little fear of revenue, much less than Ethereum L1. Yet BTC is currently worth much more than ETH. I think ETH is worth 15% of BTC. And on the flip side, you have Tron, which generates the around the same fee revenue, if not more, than Ethereum does, but TRX is worth 10% of ETH. So even if you use the argument that uh you know revenues leads to value acrruel it

doesn't even match reality. It's it's not like that. What what matches reality when it comes to these L1 assets is if people consider them to be a money and a store of value which obviously people do consider that with BTC and more and more so with ETH here and with ETH you also get the yield if you stake it too. So it's a store of value with yield and you don't even have to stake it to benefit from from uh you know stuff like the fee burning right AIP559. And all this isn't to say that I don't think Ethereum L1 should generate should shouldn't generate revenues. I certainly think it should, but I just don't think it the revenues that it generates should be used as a primary uh I guess like measure of ET's value and I've been very consistent with this for many years now.

And I think more and more traditional finance investors are definitely resonating with this and then we are going to see that and see that story told and I think that's why a lot of people are getting bullish now is that they see these trady investors, they see these macro investors actually not talking about revenue. They're talking about the fact that ETH is a store of value. ETH is the home of things like tokenized assets, right? The Ethereum network uh is is going to get a lot of Chadfire adoption because of the layer 2 model, which I'll talk about in a little bit here. So, we're seeing all that resonate finally, which is really great to see. So, I do think that going forward, ETH is going to be breaking away from the rest of crypto assets.

It's not going to be traded like others. I think it's going to fall into the bucket of BTC. And I've talked about this barbell before, right? this this tech barbell um sorry this tech um store of value barbell where essentially you have um tech on the left side store of value on the right side in the middle you have kind of assets fighting to kind of graduate to store of value. So I I I I think until recently ETH has been kind of stuck in the middle um and and maybe like a few months ago it got pulled towards the left again towards the tech side of again but I think at this point ETH is kind of halfway between the middle and the store of value now. So, we still got to do a lot of work to get ETH to where BTC is, I think. But we're

we're going there. And that's where we want to be. We don't want to be with the tech things cuz tech always gets rotated out. Then you get valued on things like revenues. And I I truly believe L1 revenues for the most part, maybe they're not going to zero, but they're not going to be very high like because they get abstracted away in various different means. The L1 has a very poor way to capture revenues. Um, and I I think that's just going to be increasingly true as as time goes on there. So, that's all about I guess like ETH the asset. why it it you know why now and if not now even like over the last couple years it's been the right time to be really really bullish on ETH.

Um and you know there's there's many reasons for that as I've outlined. But another big reason and I know like some people in the daily discord channel want said that I they want me to talk about the tech you know Ethereum tech more on today's episode than the asset. But I thought it was worth covering the asset first because so much has actually happened for the asset. And as I said at the top the tech is actually progressing along really nicely. There's not really any dramas there. There's not really any kind of like new narratives there, but I'm going to talk about the tech in a little bit, but staying on the asset side for now. We recently had something really really big happen and this was only a few days ago. So, as you guys know, there's been these ETH treasuries that have been set up in I guess like

they're basically copying what Sailor did with Micro Strategy where essentially they there's a stock uh that's that's listed on the New York Stock Exchange or sorry, I should say a company that's listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They obviously have uh you know, a freely traded stock there. Um and essentially what happens is that these companies get converted into um basically ETH treasuries. So essentially they they say well we're going to sell shares in in the company um we're going to issue new shares and sell it and sell I think sell debt as well. Uh and essentially we're going to buy ETH with it or buy BTC with it. And then uh if we buy ETH with it and we stake it and the ETH value is worth more than the shares then the ETH per share value goes up.

And essentially by buying the shares, you're actually benefiting from the purchases of ETH. I probably butcher that explanation. There are better explanations out there, but that's basically the gist of it. And you know, it's been criticized as being a Ponzi. But I think where people get lost is that there is an underlying here where essentially you're not just buying thin air, you're buying a claim on ETH, right? So if the ETH value goes down, then you would expect the stock value to go down as well. But if the ETH price goes up uh then you expect the stock price to go up to follow that because there is a net asset value there, right? There is a NAV there as well as a premium or potentially a discount.

Premiums are are much more likely than discounts. U but there's but there's not really like a death spiral or risk or anything like that unless I guess the uh custodian of that ETH somehow loses access to that ETH then sure, you know, the stock's probably going to go to zero. But as long as there is something backing that up, then it is fine. And it's not like something like terror where you had the US uh stable coin not actually backed by any collateral. It was just backed by belief. You're not buying any beliefs here. You're buying uh you know uh essentially an exposure to the collateral which in this case is ETH. Uh and the reason why I bring this up today is as you guys know there's been a few high-profile launches of this. The the biggest one until recently was um Joseph Luburn uh launching uh I

guess his ETH ETH Treasury uh play. I think they currently own over 200,000 ETH that they've bought at an average price of around $2,500 here and that's Sharp Link Gaming. But another one that happened recently that I think is even bigger than that was one that is being spearheaded by Tom Lee. Now, if you don't know who Tom Lee is, he's a longtime kind of I guess like uh crypto bull. traditionally been very bullish on BTC, but the other day he announced that he's creating an ETH treasury uh kind of play here where essentially he's raising initially raising $250 million to buy ETH with um and essentially they're going to copy what Micro Strategy has been doing. So, and and copy what Sport Link Gaming is doing. Sorry, uh Sharp

Link Gaming is doing uh and copy you know that that whole strategy there. But the reason why I think this is much more bullish than than you know someone like Joseph Luben doing it even though you know Joe Luben doing it is amazing is that Tom Lee is part of a different investor class. He is on things like CNBC pretty much like not every day but like most times he's on there um and he's talking to an audience that is not cryptonative that is not on crypto Twitter that is totally different. There's an investors that listen to people like Tom. So, for him to get on there now and start being bullish on ETH and Ethereum and start shilling, you know, these awesome price targets like $100,000 ETH and and beyond, people are going to listen to this. And Ryan Sean

Adams here on on Twitter put out a really great tweet about why you should care about this. So, historically, for those of you who don't know, Tom Lee was uh the guy in 2017 on CNBC calling for a $55,000 Bitcoin when it was trading at 2K. And at the time, of course, people thought he was insane. Wall Street people thought he was insane. Uh but then he was right. So at this point he has all that credibility built up. So what do you think's going to happen when he gets on CNBC and he says that ETH is the next Bitcoin, right? ETH is a better Bitcoin. ETH is going to be the home of stable coins and tokenized assets. So we should buy ETH to get exposure to that.

What do you think is going to happen? People are going to listen this time. They're not going to call him crazy. They're going to listen. they're going to listen to his outlandish price targets because hey, he was right about Bitcoin. Now, of course, you can criticize uh and say, well, just because he was right one time doesn't mean he's going to be right another time. That's not the point here. The point is that ETH is getting exposed to a different class of investor by someone who has credibility within that those investor circles with someone who people are very familiar with uh that watch CNBC, the trady world. And this is going to start a snowball effect here. And I've talked to a lot of people about this and the consensus is is that this is one of the most if not the most bullish thing to

happen for ETH in a very long time because of the fact that what Ether struggled with is getting those Tradfire investors on board, those macro investors on board. Both because of narrative, but also because we didn't really have a champion in that arena and now we do. And people are going to follow these. People are going to start their own ETH strategies. There's other people that have already done this. There's going to be many more. And there's actually a really great site that's tracking this tracking this at strategic eathreserve.xyz put together by fabda.eth and this tracks all of the ETH that's part of the different uh treasuries here. So currently there is over $3 billion worth of ETH in these treasuries or 1.2 million ETH. Now these are not all treasuries that are doing the kind of like uh Joseph Luben play or the Tom Lee

play. This also includes players like the Ethereum Foundation uh like Coinbase for example owning uh ETH on their balance sheet. uh Golem Foundation here, Nosis Dow, so on and so forth. They're all listed here, but you can see Sharpling Gaming is here, right? And I think this is this needs to be updated, but they do own over 200,000 ETH right now. You have other companies uh that are doing this, like Bit Digital, uh which is a relatively new one. You have uh BTCS Inc., which is doing it. You have Tom Lee's one, which I'm sure is going to pop up here now. You have uh Ink Chains Group, another one here. So, these are listed under under public companies, but not all of these are uh sorry, these sorry, I should say these are listed under treasuries. Um, but you know, you have to kind of like dig

deeper and see if they're actually just an ETH treasury company or they've just got ETH on their balance sheet. Either way, it doesn't matter. It's fine. But it's really great to see this is being populated more and more uh by by different players here. What I really want to see is the Ethereum Foundation dethroned. They have 250,000 ETH, but we know over a long enough time frame they're going to be decreasing their ETH because they their ETH exposure because they need to pay for development and that's how they fund themselves. Um there's um and there's also uh I guess like a few others here like the US government that owns about 60,000 ETH. They didn't buy it. That's just from seized ETH. So what we want to see is we want to see these players dethroned. We want to see Sharp Link Gaming overtake the Ethereum Foundation for example. And

I think they're going to like they're not very far away here. And they're going to keep keep increasing their ETH exposure. And I I do think all this is going to culminate in really positive ETH price action, guys. I know ETH is still, you know, seemingly stuck at like the 2500 level, but I don't think that's going to last very long. I think you have all of these people, you know, buying large amounts of ETH, and yes, they're most likely buying at OTC, but but I think the common thing that I see from people, which which kind of um I guess like confuses me, is they say, well, you know, they're buying OTC, so it does nothing for price. That's not how it works. Like, where do people think that the OTC brokers get their inventory from? There there are two ways for them to get the inventory really.

There's a third way, which I'll explain, but there's there's two main ways. They either buy it from other OTC brokers or they buy it on the open market. Now eventually like or the OTC brokers are going to run out of ETH. So they're going to have to go to the open market to buy eventually, right? So that's why you see these things playing out slowly over time because the inventory needs to be depleted and then you'll see the price set at the margin which is on the public market here. And that's why you typically see violent moves within crypto is because of because of this. Not just because of this and people love shorting in crypto. So people getting blown out on shorts is also very popular which I think you know there is a good chance of this happening on ETH again because the ETH shorts have just piled

up again. So like I really do think that if ETH ends up going 3K and beyond it's going to blow out so many shorts. We're going to see another violent kind of uh price movement here uh because of that. Um so yeah, those are basically the the the two main ways there. But there's a third way that I spoke about which is essentially getting ETH from staking. Now, I don't know how many of these OTC brokers are actually staking their ETH. I don't think many of them would because they need that ETH to be liquid, right? And yes, they could have LSTs, but it's different. If someone wants just ETH exposure, not the LST exposure, then they need to to give them ETH. And yes, they can go to the open market and redeem this for for ETH or go but but still the if they've got like lots of

this, it's there's going to be price impacts there. It's going to impact their broader strategy. So, they're going to have like a vanilla ETH reserve. Um, so I don't think many of them are going to be staking it. And even if they do, that's like a drip feed of ETH. You know, if you have someone coming to you and saying, "I want to buy 100,000 ETH." You're not going to get 100,000 ETH from staking rewards anytime soon, even if you're staking a large amount of ETH, right? So, essentially, yeah, you ultimately have to go to other brokers to get it or you have to go to the open market. Now, of course, within brokers themselves, if there is a huge demand for this asset, and then um you know, the price, they're not going to give like a a good discount. they're not going to give like a a huge discount

because they know there's huge demand for the asset. So, they're like, "Well, you know, maybe I'll just hold on to this inventory because I could get a better price maybe tomorrow or in a couple days. So, this is where essentially it'll play out in the open market eventually. So, I wouldn't fret too much about ETH being quote unquote stuck at its current price. I do think that sooner rather than later, we're going to see a pretty violent move on ETH there uh for a number of different reasons. Uh, and also I mean like speaking of I guess um ETH accumulation, the ETFs, the ETH ETFs have been picking up a lot. In June alone, there was $1.1 billion of fresh capital that went into the ETH ETFs and this has just been accelerating and it's getting better and better. And now that we have these, I

guess trady people like Tom Lee talking about it. We have a clearer story around ETH, a clearer narrative around ETH. I think that we can go to Tradfy with this is just going to accelerate from here. That's a theme I've I've been seeing uh and that's that's a theme that I've been pushing as well is that things are just going to keep accelerating from here and it's really is a snowball effect. And you see what happened when Sailor started doing this for BTC. It stop it started very slowly at first but now it's seemingly there's a new BTC strategy kind of company uh coming out and and trying to acquire BTC. I really do think the same thing is going to happen for ETH and I think it's going to happen in an even bigger way because with ETH you can stake it that and and

you can put it in DeFi. You can do onchain native things here. Uh, and that's a bigger deal, I think, than uh than BTC. So, yeah, that's all going to happen. I'm very confident in that. I spent, you know, almost 25 minutes ranting about Ethia. So, it's probably a good idea to shift a bit into the tech related stuff. So before I talk about core dev related updates, I did want to talk about probably one of the biggest things that's happened in the Ethereum ecosystem for quite a while now. And that's Robin Hood announcing that they're going to be doing tokenized stocks and they're going to be doing stock trading on top of Arbitum 1. So they're starting with Arbitum 1 and then they're actually going to be launching their own chain using arbitrum's technology. Now unless you live under a

rock, you know who Robin Hood is. You know what Robin Hood is. It is one of the biggest platforms for trading stocks uh in the tra traditional finance world. Um and it has been for quite a while now and it's only been getting bigger. And if you haven't watched the presentation yet from um ACC, you definitely should. But the CEO of Robin Hood gets it. like he really gets it and he has a really good understanding of the underlying technology which I thought was quite surprising for a CEO to have because usually the executives will have a you know they'll have an understanding of it but not to the depth that I saw that the Robin Hood CEO had an understanding of which I thought was was super impressive here. Now what's even cooler about this announcement is the fact that I I don't

know if you read about this but this was something that was tweeted out and this is something that that was talked about a few months ago. So there was actually competition between Salana and Arbitum for this Robin Hood deal. Now a couple months ago or two to three months ago from what has been said and what I've seen on on crypto Twitter, Salana had won that deal. They had won it and they were and Robin Hood was getting ready to set up everything on top of Salana. But then Arbitum came along uh and did the the hard work, did the the real hard work, did the business development and essentially got them to switch off of Salana to the L2 model to building on arbitrum uh one and to also launching their own L2. Now, as you guys know for many years now, I have talked about this

at length that I believe that the modular road map is better than the monolithic one precisely because these companies are going to want to launch their own chains. Now, they don't want going to want to launch their own L1s because there's just too much overhead of that. You have to worry about getting a node operator set. You have to worry about securing it. You have to issue an asset to secure it, right? All this murky stuff. Whereas, you can launch an L2 and just outsource all of that to Ethereum L1 and only worry about your execution, only worry about getting your be, you know, your product in front of users, getting make uh having the best product in front of users. And that's exactly what Robin Hood is doing here.

And they understand this. And that's why I I believe a major reason why they would have given up on their plans on Salana because they probably thought well launching on L1 Salana we basically have very little control over things. Um you know it's going to it's going to be more cumbersome. We have to like share all this space with other things on the L1. Uh it's just not efficient for us to do it this way. So we're going to launch an L2 instead. So, I think that Robin Hood doing this signals the start and maybe not the start, but signals like a very big trend shift now where we're going to be seeing more and more companies doing this. And I still think that we're going to see Black Rockck and others team up to launch a new tokenized stock exchange like the New York Stock

Exchange on as an L2 on top of Ethereum. I I still have confidence in that. It may not happen anytime soon. Maybe it only happens like, you know, next year or the year after or something like that. But I still have confidence that that's going to happen there because the L2 model wins in every single battle against L1's. I strongly believe that and I have believed that for so many years. Like I would say that this is one of the first things I talked about on the refuel and I was still talking about it when I was doing into the ether with Eric Connor. Uh and and I was talking about it in my daily newsletter. So I'm doing a victory lap here. I'm I'm really doing a victory lap here because I I believed on this for a very long time now. And that to see it come to

fruition, I don't know. It's incredibly bullish, guys. It really really is. So, that was a huge deal obviously within the within the Ethereum ecosystem. And I do think we're going to see a snowball effect here of other companies building their own L2s. We've already seen, you know, plenty of them do it already. Like obviously Coinbase has base. We've seen Sony do it. We've seen um, you know, Black Rockck not launched their own L2, but do their tokenized stuff on ETH1, which is another big narrative, by the way, guys. Like tokenization generally is something that really resonates with Tradfi. But the number one thing that resonates with them is stable coins. and stable coins. Where do most of them live? Ethereum. So that that's actually to one of Tom Lee's kind of most um bullish thesises on ETH is that he thinks that stable coins are going to be

living on Ethereum. Stable coins are a huge market. They're only going to get bigger from here. So how do we get exposure to that? Well, you could buy Circle, but that's, you know, Circle's a stock, right? Circle's already valued pretty highly um for what it is. You could buy Coinbase because they have a stake in Circle. Or you could buy ETH. and ETH just gives you uh you know um exposure to not only stable coins but all the tokenization stuff happening the new onchain economy uh ETH uses a store of value you can stake it you can get a yield so on and so forth there so very very bullish things happening in the in in in the tech space uh especially in the L2 space here and I think it's really kind of put proved out the L2 model uh at this point so I'm super

excited to see Robin Hood eventually launch their own L2 and see what they're doing with that yeah it's probably going to be like relatively central ized and and permission to some extent. Maybe not permissioned, but like there'll be some parts of it that will be uh they'll be quite centralized and so on and so forth, but we always knew that was going to happen and I've said that was going to happen in the past. That's not a knock, I don't think. That's just things that's just how these businesses are going to build on top of these things. And who knows, maybe some of them do actually decentralize these things over time. That would be really cool to see as uh as well there. But anyway, on to the next topic. So, we we've got a lot of core development updates happening.

As you guys know, Pectra went live, was very successful. Core devs quickly moved on to Forsaka, but also Glamsterdam. So, I think Faka is pretty much like it's not done, but like it's basically at the point where the core devs are all pretty happy with how it's it's come together. We know what's going into it. You know, Podas and a few other things there. Um, and hopefully we can still launch this thing before the end of the year onto mainet. So Faku has kind of become like the boring upgrade. The really exciting upgrade has become Glamsterdam. Now I know it's traditionally been hard to track these things and you've probably relied on the refuel in the past to track core development updates which is great but Nixo and her team have recently launched a new website where you can actually track Ethereum forks.

So it is called forkcast.org. So if you go to the website here you can actually see uh the Fusaka upgrade listed here and the Glamsterdam upgrade. So if you click into the Faka upgrade, you can see basically where we are today in the timeline uh when it's slated for inclusion uh on mainet and also what's what's actually scheduled for inclusion in the Fusaka upgrade. So the headliner is Perash obviously right we know this we've known this for quite a while everyone knows about Pas at this point but there are other EIPs uh as well here a long list of them actually that you can scroll down and see everything. Now, the really cool thing about this website is not that it just lists EIPs. It actually um has a section called stakeholder impact. So, it goes through

every stakeholder within the Ethereum ecosystem and how this actually benefits them. And I've talked about this before about how there are certain things that benefit end users. There are certain things that benefit app developers, you know, layer 2, infrastructure providers, so on and so forth. So, this actually goes through each of them and gives an explanation of it, which is amazing. Like this is actually one of my favorite websites uh in in the in the last kind of like few years that I've seen come come out like this the strategic ETH reserve one the Ethereum dashboards one uh you know a few others out there that I'm forgetting to mention here they're they're all just amazing resources that I've been relying on but I think this is going to become probably my number one resource that I'm going to be relying on going forward for core development

updates specifically because of the fact that it just has such a really nice list of of things here. So you can go check this out for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But yeah, as I said, Glamsterdam has become this kind of big update. Like this this is becoming very big here. The main things that are being debated for Glamsterdam, I think at least two of the main things are EPBS and reducing slot times. As you guys know, these two things have been in the works for quite a while now, but there's been more of a priority put on reducing slot times from 12 seconds to potentially 6 seconds in Glamdam. So basically cutting the slot times in half. Now what is the impact of this?

Well, you can of course read the impact of of this on on the website here. But really the biggest thing is that improve it improves overall uh user experience uh because of the fact that you get faster transaction confirmation. Instead of having to wait up to 12 seconds, you only have to wait up to 6 seconds on L1 Ethereum here. And there are plans to lower that even more. I think the long long-term goal is to get that as low as possible. there is kind of a fundamental limit if we want to respect the fact that we have uh home stakers and home validators and and and and keep those um keep those parties involved. I think we could probably get it as low as 1 to 2 seconds. That's at least what I've seen, but not for a very long time. 6 seconds potentially in Amsterdam, but then like

1 to 2 seconds, you know, a longer term. Maybe we do a thing where we go from six to five to four to three to two to one, right? Instead of going from like six to one, so that we can do a gradual thing here, but that's all coming. So there's that. There's EPBS, which as you guys know is um essentially enshrining a part of me what MEV boost offers today. Uh which essentially makes it easier for core devs to reason about these things. And there's also Fossil which is the censorship resistant EIP that I've talked about a lot in the past and a bunch of other ones here which you can go check out for yourself there. But as I said, this website is just so cool because it tracks everything. You don't need me to update you on on this sort of stuff uh anymore. you can just go to

this website which I'll be referencing a lot going forward as well. Um but yeah, I'm just very very glad this exists. So huge kudos to Nixo and her team for this solely needed for quite a while now. Very very happy that it's out and I think that this is going to be something that I point to a lot going forward for anyone who asks uh questions about Ethereum updates and this is going to be really great uh to to to just track everything and as it as it happens um as things go forward. I do think that uh you know the the upgrade after Glamsterdam maybe uh I don't know what's going to be included in that but like maybe we should have a box here that says future upgrade and then just have it in like the the TBD phase kind of thing so that people know that there's

more stuff happening after Glamsterdam like for the I guess casual observer of these things. So maybe if if Nixo or her team are watching this maybe that's something that you could add there. Uh and then uh I I do want to see obviously uh uh pages for every upgrade from like Genesis for Ethereum. Here you can see here the Petra upgrade. There is a page coming soon. I know this is a lot of work here guys. Um and I I I I know that um obviously it's going to take a while to do this, but I do think they're going to populate this out with with historic upgrades as well, but the priority should definitely be put on future upgrades because historic upgrades, it's going to be cool to see, you know, everything that was included in that, how that impacted users, so on and so

forth. But the really cool thing is going obviously and the thing people care about most is future upgrades. So I'm glad that um that exists there. So yeah, that's the latest on uh core dev stuff. There's actually been a lot that hap that's happened, but I haven't covered it obviously because I haven't done a refuel, but yeah, if you need your fix, then then this is it uh uh here. So definitely go check that out. I'll link it in uh the YouTube description uh below for you to do so. And speaking of I guess like core uh core dev related stuff, tech related upgrades, there are a couple of other things that have been happening um outside of this as well. Most importantly has been the interoperability between the L2s. I think this is making progress. Um Josh Rudolph from the EF is headlining this

is leading this. You can go follow him on Twitter for progress on this. it I think at this stage is at the point where like people are just agreeing on standards essentially and getting like all of these different um teams like infrastructure providers, app developers, so on and so forth to buy into these standards and to use them in order to enable that interropability there. But I think it's also become less of a critical thing than it has in the past because you know if you actually look at the L2 landscape today and I'll bring up L2B here to show you guys what this looks like right now. So if you look at the L2 landscape today, arbitrum 1 and bass pretty much lead the rest of the L2 ecosystem here. There is other L2s and there are other L2s that are getting usage here. Um but as it

currently stands, arbitrum one and bass account for I think like 70% of the total TVL of the L2s. Um so if you're on arbitum or bass, you're probably not kind of changing which L2 you're on too often because those L2s are probably servicing your needs just fine, right? in terms of being able to do things like DeFi trades, maybe minting NFTts, uh maybe doing uh kind of like lending and borrowing, so on and so forth. And you can do them in a relatively secure way as well because they're both stage one. Now, obviously, we want to see these at stage two, but they're both stage one right now. And Arbitum in particular is very close to stage two, uh which is which is really cool to see there. There are other L2s that have been growing.

That's totally fine. But yeah, I mean uni chain is pretty cool, but like hey for the average user like arbitum and base probably servicing their needs for trades, right? So no one is I guess like clamoring at the at the doors to be like let me into uni chain, right? And and I I I think that's fine. I think that's just the way things are playing out. Same with a lot of these other chains here. But I think I said this before where I I I've said that most of the L2s are just going to fail. They're not going to succeed, guys. like most of them uh don't don't really have any kind of like differentiation here. They don't really offer something to people that is going to get them to clamor to to get on board to these things, right? People are are happy with the fees on arbitrum and

base. They're happy with the transaction speeds there. We're pretty much at that that really nice uh position there. That's not to say that there won't be other successful L2s. I'm particularly bullish on the really high performance L2s that are coming out like Rise and Mega ETH and so on and so forth because I think they're going to offer something uniquely different. But if you're just another EVM chain that's not doing anything different, then I I don't really think you're going to get that much adoption. It's just not something that users are really caring about at this point, like they've pretty much serviced uh for all their needs on the on these networks here. And that's totally fine. But I think back on my point about interropability, it's just not something that I think is that urgent. Like I I do want to see it happening, but it's not like it's

critical. It's not like if it Ethereum doesn't get this, you know, today it's going to die. And I obviously there's been more of an emphasis put on L1 as well. And L1 has been relatively cheap for quite a while now too. Um and then you can see here on the on the gas limit tracking website as well that core devs have recently signaled that a 45 million gas limit is safe. So more and more validators are signaling for that. We're going to go to 45 million soon, then we'll go to 60 million. And we're going to keep increasing L1 scale until eventually we get to a point where we do in, you know, we we do the the ZKVM stuff on L1. We get to like 10,000 TPS. So costs are going to keep coming down uh and and transactions are going to keep getting faster, reducing slot

times, doing things like on L1, doing things like pre-confirmations that really the way to get an ecosystem or to build an ecosystem will always be to be differentiated from the others out there. So for example, Robin Hood chain, it's going to be differentiated because it's going to be all about, you know, trading trad assets, trading stocks and bonds and and equities and tokenized kind of assets, right? It's not going to be copying what's already been done. So as I said, we're going to get more of those. We're going to get those ones that differentiate. There's going to be a long list of these L2s. There already is that are just not going to go anywhere. And you know, there is what over a hundred of these things that are just going to die off, guys. Like they're just not going to go anywhere.

And that's just that's just the way it is. There's no world in which hundreds of and thousands of L2s are going to get like lots of activity on them. And maybe there's going to be some niche ones that maybe don't have too much activity but are very important. I'm sure there will be. But yeah, that's my my general view on on that stuff uh uh there right uh right now. But I think that's it for the L1 L2 stuff. There was a couple other things I wanted to highlight here before ending today's episode. So, uh, Tim Robinson, who is a Daily Aguay, um, regular in the Daily Discord channel. I have known him for quite a while, actually. He's a fellow Aussie here. Um, uh, but essentially he built out a new kind of totally cryptonative open-source pro uh, payment system. So, uh, point of

sale system, I should say, here. So, you can go watch, um, this video for yourself. He's got a video here in his second tweet. I'll link in the YouTube description below. But essentially he created something called called Free Pay which is the world's first open-source feef free payment terminal. So he said here the aim was to give the same UX as using your card without any middleman. Here's a demo of it in action. I'll just fast forward to the demo. You can see the the devices here where essentially he's got the the payment terminal there. He puts in a uh amount to charge. Then he puts his smartphone up here with the MetaMask wallet. Uh essentially confirms the transaction and then the payment goes through. And this was all done on the base network. So his demo lasts for about a minute minute. The the payment

takes I think 20 seconds or something like that and it's only because he has to approve the transaction on his wallet but you can there's probably a way to do this where essentially it just gets like auto approved and tap and it's much faster. This is obviously just a proof of concept here. But this went quite viral actually. Um people really resonated with this. But the cool thing about this is that it's all open source. Tim doesn't want to make money from this. He doesn't want to commercialize this. He just wants it to be open source. Anyone can use it. Uh, and it's it from what I know, it's relatively easy to set up. He's also got a Discord channel here that people can can follow and a Twitter account now that people can follow here. Um, but yeah, just figured that was worth highlighting for

you guys. You can check it out. I'll link it in uh the YouTube description below uh for you to do so there. All right, last thing to highlight here, and this was Greystroke telling me in the Daily Discord channel to to highlight this. Well, thank you for for the reminder here. So Raman Storm, the Tonto Cash developer, is still fighting his case in the US, um, which is costing him a lot of money. Now, the Ethereum Foundation announced last month that they're going to be donating $500,000 to Raman Stor's uh, uh, legal defense here, and they will match a further $750,000 in don donations from the community.

Last time I checked, Raman needed $2 million, uh, which is ridiculous, the fact that you need so much money to defend yourself here. But yeah, that's how much he needed, and I I don't think he's hit his goal yet. So, if you want to donate, you can um you can essentially go follow the links in this tweet, I think, from the Ethereum Foundation here. Yeah, they've got the link to the um to to the donation address here that you can check out or link in the YouTube description below. But yeah, I figured it was worth highlighting this as well because this matters for for everyone in the Ethereum community, guys, and and crypto at large. like Raman is defending I don't know the exact charges off the top of my head but but essentially what what Raman um Raman's defense is trying to to prove

here is that open source developers shouldn't be held liable for the actions of the people who use their their software. So essentially there you shouldn't be criminally liable for people using your code in criminal ways. And this is really important because you can write code, right? Like you can write code that does anything. And that code can be used for good or bad things. Just like you can write a uh manifesto and that manifesto could be used for good or bad things. But should we be prosecuting people for writing those things? Should we? No, we we shouldn't, right? Like there's a there's free speech, especially in the US, right?

There's protected speech there. You can say anything you want and you're not prosecuted for that. Um and the same is true of code. You should be able to write whatever code you want. uh and and and as long as you're like even if it's bad code, even if you write malware, but if if you're using that malware for nefarious purposes, then sure, you're now committing an illegal act. But if you are just writing the code and someone uses that code for nefarious purposes, you should not be held liable for that. So that is what in essence what Raman here is fighting against. So that is why it's very important um to to to um to donate to this to get his um legal defense fund up there so that he can defend himself against this and why it's important broadly for the crypto and Ethereum ecosystem at large and even

like outside of that is the privacy aspect as well because we want to make sure that privacy is protected that you shouldn't be uh held criminally criminally liable for developing privacy tools for developing mixers because privacy is not something that only criminals uh use right everyone cares about their privacy so So, we should be defending that uh as well here. So, yeah, I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you guys uh to check out there. Now, finally, before I wrap up today's episode, probably addressing the elephant in the room. Probably all wondering when the next refuel episode is going to be now that I've done one after 2 months here. I didn't plan on it being a two-month period between, you know, the last refuel and today's episode, guys. But honestly, I I'm still sticking to what I said last time where I said I'll do

episodes when I feel like it. And I really felt like doing one today. I don't know why. Uh, I just woke up and I was just really bullish. I was like, "Holy crap." Like, there's so much that's happened, so much to be excited about right now. I need to do a refuel and I I honestly was to the point where um, as you guys know, I've been paying a lot more attention to my fitness lately, and there's a fitness channel in the Daily We Discord channel if you want to discuss that with me. But I woke up, you know, I went on my bike ride, but the whole time I was on my my bike ride this morning, I was like, damn, I want to get home so I can just, you know, shower, eat lunch, and then do my refuel. And the whole time I was just like FOMOing

over it. I'm like, ah, need to hurry up. I need to to shower quickly. I need to eat lunch. And now I need to do my refuel. Um and and and you know, I was as soon as I started recording, it just felt natural again. It felt really really good uh that I was doing it again. But you know, then the open question becomes when's the next one? I'm not going to make promises, guys, like I anymore. And you guys know that. I'm going to try and obviously do them when I can, but it's it's just going to be when I feel like it. And I think with the I guess like uh you know crypto uh space becoming more bullish on Ethereum overall, maybe I'll be less burnt out from all the negative sentiment and maybe it'll be easier for me to do it

going forward. I do obviously need to stop letting that stuff affecting me uh uh so much. But it does like it really annoys me. You guys know this. I I I don't like it when FUD gets spread, misinformation gets spread. I especially hate it when people spread like uh you know bad narratives and then all of a sudden oh we're bullish on ETH now. like that's just yeah that's just crazy. Like I just I don't don't appreciate that. I don't like that. But hey, I think uh you know enjoyed I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I'm not sure when the next one will be, but hopefully it's uh sooner rather than later there. But on that note, that's going to be it for today. So thank everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give that thumbs up, subscribe

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