Bullish on Ethereum, Based rollup chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #802 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of delway refuel where latest news and eum ecosystem I'm your host here to the 9th of August 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so it is the final episode for a little while of the refill as you guys know uh starting tomorrow I am beginning my holiday through Europe for 2 and 1 half months and I think for the first couple of weeks I'm going to do another proper break probably not like full cold turkey like I did back in May but I don't think there'll be a refuel for the first couple of weeks and as you guys know I will try to do a refuel once a week while I'm away but it's going to be difficult because we're going to be moving around a lot uh and it's just going to depend on a bunch of different

factors there but yeah I think um because of that I'm going to end today's episode off with a bullish rant because I know things have been a little bit I don't know I wouldn't call them like dire or anything like that but a little bit depressing lately if all you do is Doom scroll Twitter so I want to I want to counteract that a bit especially as I'm about to leave for a little while and you probably won't have my bullish energy for a little while there but yeah just uh wanted to remind you guys that this will be the last episode for a little a while and I'll try to do an episode when I can um but I'll also be less active in the Discord Channel as well given that I'll be on holiday and uh and on Twitter too like I'm going to

try and take like a break but just not a full cold turkey break but like a you know a break from things because things are crazy things don't change that often so I don't feel like I'm going to really miss anything uh but yeah anyway enough about that let's move on to the first bit of stuff I wanted to talk about today which is just briefly touching on this I'm not going to spend too long on this but this was the ETF flows for this week so we actually had some positive ETF flows this week which was really great to see like actual uh positive net flow and then you can see here from basically the 1st of August uh the 5th of August and the 6th of August were all positive flows which means that there were more Flows In than there was as

outflows from grayscale's E product now grayscale's e product outflows are actually slowing and they've slowed quite considerably actually I mean just today or I believe yesterday it was only $20 million of outflows for grayscale ether and you remember that that started at $500 million the on on day one so that was that's been a pretty substantial drop there now of course this doesn't mean that this trend is going to continue and it's just going to go down to zero but I do believe that we're through the quote unquote worst of it right especially because price came down and I don't know people probably just don't want to sell at this price right so we we we'll see how it goes there because obviously it's just seems insane that people would stick with e given that the fee is so high at 2.5% so much higher than the other ones you know

10 times higher than the other ones out there um or more so yeah we'll have to see how that kind of uh plays out in the coming weeks and months and see if that uh outflow Exel re accelerates because it did for BTC if you remember if you go to actually farside's website here you can go to BTC and then look at all the data from the BTC ETFs if you click uh click here yeah so this basically shows you data from day one to today and you can see basically for the first few weeks it was the same situation as it was for eth where there was like massive outflows it was actually even bigger for BTC than eth because uh the market was obviously much hotter through January February and March and they remained quite big for a substantial period of time like look look at this like gbtc

outflows were massive for quite quite a substantial period of time but there were quiet periods right there were periods where there weren't much outflows at all but then there were big outflows and I think a lot of it probably tracks price because price was pretty good in Jan Feb and and March obviously um and into even into April a little bit but then you can see that they've kind of come off pretty substantially since then they haven't really been much outflow since May because that's basically when the Market's been kind of trending down since then you know May June uh and July and June it kind of I guess re accelerated a little bit but it's nothing like it originally was and it's kind of funny because the last week it actually accelerated a lot for BTC whereas eth was getting inflows so not entirely sure what can be drawn from

that given that such a unique situation in the ETF world is that you had this massive product in gbtc and E convert and then you have these outflows to worry about but what we really care about is obviously the flow number and what we really care about is the long-term flow number and for those of you who don't know I don't know if I've mentioned this before but most ETFs actually see Zero daily inflows it's it's this kind of thing within crypto where people obsess on the day-to-day stuff and they don't realize that outside of crypto the day-to-day stuff is completely ignored like no one cares about the day-to-day stuff besides obviously the media because they get clicks from it you know the long-term investors and and and even just regular people who are doing long-term investing they're not sitting here looking at day-to-day flows they don't care about

that sort of stuff right uh and as I said most ETFs uh day-to-day get basically zero inflows you can even see that eth this week got some random inflows from Black Rock like you can see on the 2nd of August there was Zero inflows but then on the fifth and sixth combined it was like over $150 million on the 7th of August there was zero and today or yesterday there was 11.7 Million inlow so as I've been saying for weeks now day-to-day is is basically noise and it's better to look weak to week so I think going forward I'm probably not going to be checking in on this very often unless we have like a huge outlayer day or something like that all we know is that the ETF all we need to know is that the E etf's alive they're bringing in new money it will

play out in the price eventually it's not going to play out overnight um but I'll talk more about that at the end of the episode but that's my current uh stance on things there all right moving on so rocket uh scan or sorry I should say rocket pool R to tokenomics is now live so the vote for this is live at rip. roer pool.net and I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out but this is a pretty massive rework of the um I guess like RPL toomics here so essentially you can see what it's like now in this table and then you can look at with rework so this is a pretty good way of I guess like illustrating what it's going to be like with the rework if it is approved obviously by Rocker pool governance which was spun up recently for those who

don't know um but this is a much needed change I think like if you have spun up a mini pool before as part of rocker pool you know that unfortunately due to the fact that the uh RPL token has pretty much like pretty severely underperformed eth the ratio uh of your RPL to your eth when you've created a mini pool falls off completely and in order to keep earning rocker pool rewards you need to rec collateralized with a bunch of RPL and it becomes I wouldn't call it death spiral but but it becomes the thing where you're basically chasing the RPL essentially where you're basically like okay well IP is going down I'll buy more so that I can recaller eyesee oh it's gone down again or I'll buy more so I can Rec collateralize so you're basically buying more of an asset that you may not

necessarily want and then you're losing on that asset uh because of the fact that um it's going down even more and you have to buy even more to recaller your position so obviously not the greatest uh kind of tokenomics out there right probably not not not not very good toomics but this is old toomics that's been around for quite a while now but with this latest um I guess change they're substantially uh uh trading that so you can see here even just like as an existing rocker pool note operator right now as you as I said you need RPL to create a a validator but with the rework you do not need rpr to create MEAP pool validators uh and the commission is 5% of the borrowed eth if I choose to stake RPL I receive additional eth rewards um proportional to my share of staked RPL

there the whole details are in this table which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you guys to check out but I'm really glad to see this as you guys know I'm a rocket pool note operator I actually worked it out recently for me to get back above collateral like the collateral ratio I need to be at I think I have to buy like another $60 or $7,000 worth of RPL and I'm like I'm not going to do that like I just I I don't like the fact that I have to do that I and and I kind of feel forced into doing that but at the same time I don't plan to spin down my mini pools and I'm not really crying over losing out on rpr rewards but yeah it it sucks that like it's gotten to that point because of the fact that the ratio

has just gotten gotten murdered for one reason or another basically um uh but that's essentially what happens when you have such a a system where there's a token you know that's outside of e that's tied to the eth ratio and then the system is built on top of that so yeah we'll see how this this rework goes but as I said it's still going through the governance process so it's not live just yet but just wanted to put it on your radar there all right optimism has a great little tweet thread out from I think this was a couple of days ago where they said they well they titled it with unifying the super chain they say say say here with Big Dreams of scaling ethereum optimism has grown into a huge ecosystem of ethereum align chain chains all working together to build something bigger than any of them alone so what

does this mean for the super chain now I want to uh say you can go read this um This Thread all Link in the YouTube description below but what I really wanted to talk about with regards to uh optimism specifically was this narrative that they seem to be pushing lately that I think people are confused about so optimism is pushing that they're not a layer two and technically that's correct because optimism itself is not a layer two right it is a I guess for lack of a better term a movement right or I guess like a developer stack with OP stack the layer twos are what's built using that developer stack or or what's built within the optimism ecosystem but optimism itself is is not a layer two the optimism project op main net is a layer two Bas is a layer two Zora is a

layer two anything building on the op stack is a layer two but optimism itself isn't now as I said this is technically correct but also confusing for people because people just think optimism Layer Two right so I just wanted to clarify that uh that for for you guys there but they are definitely all about this super chain thing that they've been building for a couple of years now or essentially they want all of the op stack chains to unify under this super chain umbrella where the optimism I guess system benefits from it the opto also benefits from it um but also all of the outlayer 2os that join the super chain benefit from it with things like shared liquidity interoperability with each other um you know shared governance stuff like that right so there's um there's a lot more explanation about what this is in this uh in this thread

which I'll link in the YouTube description below but I really did want to essentially bring uh basically clarify that narrative that uh people have been talking about and and I've seen some people fud ethereum with this saying oh look optimism is now claiming not to be an L2 they're leaving it's not that at all it's just that they're trying I guess like to use the technically correct language which obviously doesn't translate to the masses because a lot of people don't understand how this works but that's essentially what it is so optimism as a I guess movement as a Tex stack as a thing is not technically a layer to but op main it is basses etc etc right so anyway you can go give this thread a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so speaking of layer twos

uh I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about not specifically Tao cuz I have a tweet here referencing Tao but specifically around based rollups and things like pre-confirmation and and what the future of all this looks like right now so from where I'm sitting based rollups pre- confirmations stuff like that is all in pretty early development still but he's making really great strides and as you can see from this tweet which was put out by uh younga from who's doing a research at Tao basically they've been able to do 20 millisecond pre-confirmation times on Tao's Helder test net which is faster than centralized sequences um and even the ones in arbitrum uh which is 2 to 300 milliseconds right now so some really crazy speeds on the pre-confirmation times here faster than

the speed of uh of essentially like um maybe not the speed of light but like when I think about I guess propagating this stuff across the globe you're limited by the speed of light at in the best case because the speed of light because fiber optics Works off of light so or Works off lasers technically uh so which is light but but but so essentially your Limited by that and that's why there is basically a a limit to how fast you can propagate blocks through the network and I believe salana pretty much like hits that limit I think it's like 400 m seconds or something like that but with pre- confirmations you can get this down to essentially how long it takes you to just process it on your local machine which is very very cool right so this is 20 millisecond pre-confirmation time here but as I said

I wanted to to kind of like open the discussion uh I guess like to the general thing around pre- confirmations and Bas rollups now when it comes to the tech I believe the tech is very sound the tech there's nothing wrong with it the tech is going to work the tech does work but the uphill battle for base rollups and the uphill battle for I guess like PR confirmations and converting things into Bas rollups is the fact that the incentives are a little bit lopsided so for example today base arbitrum 1 op main that whatever they have these sequences that they earn Revenue off of they don't do me but they earn Revenue off of uh basically sequencing their transactions executing the transactions right off those um execution fees that we all pay there even though they're low you know they still make the money off of that now in

a I guess like base rollup world you're essentially giving up a lot of that to uh one right and you you in in in certain constructions because there's an open discussion right now and there's open Research into just how much revenue you give up on the execution fee side but also on the me side because obviously we know ethereum L1 validators are all not most of them 95% of them are opted into meev boost which means that they're taking me um which you know which means that uh there different to how it works today with l2s with their sequences but eventually sequence the l2s will want to capture that me right internalize their me here so there is a big discussion around this right now and around the incentives with it because you can imagine well let's just say um

you go you know the community goes to arbitrum or goes to offchain labs and says to them hey why don't you make arbitrum one a based rollup and then offchain Labs comes back and says why would we do that we we're going to lose Revenue if we do that so I think that it's half right because you can still retain a lot of Revenue while being a base rollup but I understand why there's hes hesitancy to do it because these rollups and these layer tws definitely want to make their revenue pass that onto token holders make their tokens more valuable so there is a little bit of tension here but as I said still early days with all of this um and the reason why we want pre- confirmations is because with based Roll-Ups as I've mentioned before if you don't have pre- confirmations you basically have to wait

a full ethereum slot which is 12 seconds um or up to a full ethereum slot of 12 seconds uh you could get lucky and get at in at the end of the block and have your transaction included within a second but that's a very poor experience compared to the layer twos today where essentially you can have a transaction included in one second or less right but obviously you get better guarantees because you're doing it directly on L1 um but that's why we need pre-confirmation in order to give the user the confirmation within 20 milliseconds or whatever it is but then uh it gets included in a block uh at that 12C Mark right that slot time there in the best case scenario of course um but yeah anyway just wanted to talk a little bit about that cuz I I thought it was relevant um given a lot of the

discussions that I've seen recently in the ecosystem all right moving on just to the last thing I wanted to talk about on the update side before I go into my little bit of a bullish rant here so techmo here said or shared this picture of a coffee shop where he said this is a coffee shop in uh Montgomery Alabama that I opened up several years ago with my wife and our friends it sits in between the church that Dr kin used to Pasta used to pasta and the bus stop where Rose Parks uh got on the bus today we officially started accepting usdc on base with a the percentage of sales going directly and instantly to our coffe coffee growing partner in Costa Rica what a great location for Freedom technology to thrive now you guys will probably remember if you've been around for a while that payments was like the

thing with crypto like I remember back in even like the 2013 Bitcoin days it was all about paying for coffee with BTC you know being able to to essentially pay each other with BTC being able to to use BTC as money but then over the years that obviously went away and BTC just became like a pure story of value no one really uses it as money lightning network is a complete failure but then there was a a bit of a Renaissance within the ethereum community of stable coins right because stable coins didn't didn't start on ethereum but ethereum really made stable coins huge absolutely massive you know tether and usdc and so on and so forth and and they were used as payments but then what ended up happening was that ethereum obviously was too expensive so people didn't really use them for day-to-day payments

um but then a lot of people went to Tron uh especially with tether and Tron started getting popular with with payments as well and a lot of people were using Tron because it had integration into binance and they were using in different parts of the world they're getting a lot of value out of it um but now today we have the I guess like maybe not the perfect payment solution but like something really really good on the payment side here not just for stable coins but also for eth right because some people will I mean a lot of people will actually knock stable coins and say well the two biggest stable coins are both completely centralized all we're really doing is recreating what we already have in the traditional Finance system it doesn't matter that it runs on a blockchain it's still it's still centralized and I would

would agree with that to an extent I think that stable coin issuers while they do retain the power to like unilaterally freeze assets um they tend to not exercise that power as often as like a bank does for example um but that's debatable because it depends which bank you're talking about it depends what part of the world you're in yada yada y right but regardless of all of that what we have today with not just bass but other layer twos but I guess like just focusing on Bas here is have an extremely cheap layer to do payments on with really quick uh confirmation times a second or less with Integrations uh with the biggest exchanges like coinbase and being able to essentially uh not just accept payments but then redirect the percentage of the sales instantly to a

coffee growing partner in Costa Rica in this example and the reason why they can do that is because all the coffee partner needs to do is have an ethereum wallet have an ethereum wallet that gives them a base wallet right and then automatically they get those funds across the globe there's no need to go through any centralized intermediaries there's no need to go through the banking system there's no need to go through all these paper work to do all this you know slow stuff it's just automatic automatic automatic and that's the whole value prop I think of or a big part of the value prop of these things it's not that okay yeah usdc is centralized fine but it's the fact that you can do this without having to go through a centralized intermedia and that was the original Vision I think of crypto to begin with with with with the

um the start of Bitcoin here and ethereum really is realizing it with the layer twos and as I said it's not just bass you can do the same thing on arbitrum 1 but obviously bass is leing heavily into payments because of the fact that usdc is is closely tied to coinbase coinbase is offering free transactions free withdrawals and stuff like that uh because obviously it helps them grow their coinbase um market share too and their coinbase coinbase user base but the fact that this exists today uh and exists and and that's and it won't go away like it's not like we're going to be like oh we're pivoting base to a store of value chain now and you're not supposed to use it as payments no that's not what's going to happen here Bas is going to be a payment payments chain as well as a chain for lots of

other things as well I mean I think the two things that Bas really does well his payments um and also a lot of the stuff around like social with farcaster a lot of nft stuff arbitrum seems to do a lot of stuff within Defi and um gaming and then the other l2s have their own special DCR but yeah it's not like we're going back now so we really do finally have this I wouldn't call it holy grail but like this original vision of what we wanted to see within crypto with regards to payments specifically which is really great to see and and obviously because B also has a defi ecosystem um you don't have to do just payments you can do defi on their say you receive usdc you can instantly trade that for eth on Unis swop or whatever favorite decks you want to use instantly and then you can go

loan that out and borrow against it and I don't and and and kind of like pay off another debt that you have or buy more ether de like I wouldn't recommend leverage of course but you know what I'm talking about like it's all composable it's all very uh very easy to do uh at this point in time uh so yeah I just wanted to highight that for you guys you can go check out the tweet for yourself there's a nice little picture here I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so but I've got a few minutes left of today's episode and I did promise promise a bullish rant here because well I'm sure you guys have seen out there it seems to be the end of the world for ethereum everyone seems to be really bearish on ethereum they seem to

think that ethereum is dying or go or going to die they can't find anything to be bullish about when it comes to ethereum and really it's only got to do with the price action and I don't think the price action is even that bad bad against USD um people are just looking at the ratios like they're looking at um uh e price action against BTC they're looking at its price action against soul and they're like oh salana is killing us salana is winning ethereum's losing it's like okay guys like you're looking at like the price action and then get coming to a conclusion from that alone like let's let's take a step back here and actually think about what you're saying here and think about the fundamentals of of ethereum not just like the day-to-day price movements because I understand why people feel like this but the problem becomes is

that you feel like this you go on Twitter and you see everyone else just like [ __ ] posting about it and you're like oh my God is it the end of the world is my going to go to zero did I pick the wrong horse is ethereum dying and you forget the fact that well you can actually verify all of this for yourself by just going to the various websites out there to track what's happening in the ethereum ecosystem or you could just listen to the refuel maybe for not for the next few weeks as I'm on holiday but you know generally you can just listen to the refu and get all the relevant information uh that you that you need from from the ethereum ecosystem but yeah let's let's let's take a step back here because I know a lot of you in the Discord Channel were

just going nuts about this which is just insane to me because I've been banging this drum for years on the refuel where I tell you guys to stop stop looking at the day-to-day stuff because it's going to drive you crazy but hey I can't stop people from doing um doing that I can just give you the advice I'm not going to give investment advice but I'm going to give you advice of you're going to drive yourself Crazy by sitting on crypto Twitter all day but anyway let's take a step back and let me let me give you a different perspective here that can make you bullish all right so besides the price I look at the price the price is noise let's not look at the price let's look at the fundamentals let's look what's happening in the ethereum ecosystem okay so the layer twos are at alltime high activities

that's not debatable we have the metrics for that they're at all-time high user base alltime High um gas usage and TPS basically and activity across them uh there's a lot of stuff happening not just on the stable coin side as I mentioned with bass but also on the defi side a lot of Integrations Happening Here the layer twos are just absolutely killing it right now and yes I know there's a lot of layer twos but you don't even look at that you look at the top l2s and really Bas and arbitrum 1 account for most of the activity on l2s so everyone bringing up this fact that oh there's so many L2 2's everything's fragmented it's like well that's just stupid that's like saying there's hundreds of l1s and everything's fragmented that means the it's bearish for for um for ethereum because like because all the l1s are like dead

essentially it's just this weird logic that people use um so so so the l2s are doing absolutely amazing I don't even have to go into it because you can go verify this for yourself you can go to L2 beat you can go to grow the pie you can go to roll up. WTF you can verify this for yourself there's no need to trust what I'm saying here right that's the L2 side of things and then people will fud like the ethereum main net and say oh the ethereum's fear Revenue dropped so much since we integrated blobs it's like okay so let me let me let me take a step back here for a second so when ethereum fees were high and we were all like all the ethereum Bulls were on Twitter basically celebrating the burn the high burn celebrating High fees saying that this

is awesome for for eth it's awesome for eth Value acrel every single time we were met with people saying this is this is bearish you know what the hell people aren't going to be paying these fees forever if is dying because because no one wants to use this and and at the time I was like well I mean obviously people are using it because they're spending so much on fees but regardless it was just a weird kind of thing that people were saying and it made no sense and then then we lower the fees right not just for l2s but mainnet fees went down as well and all of a sudden the narrative becomes oh what happened to all ethereum's revenue oh that's bearish for ethereum it's like okay well [ __ ] hell like okay so it's bearish when there's High fees it's bearish when

there's low fees and I understand the distinction between the fact that if you want High aggregate fees and you want low individual fees I'm not saying I don't understand that distinction but the the problem is is that people weren't focused on that they were just focused on the fees altogether it wasn't just the individual Fe it was like saying that ethereum generating any Fair Revenue was bearish and it's like well well no but okay um and then as soon as ethereum is fair Revenue drops off a bunch because we obviously integrated blobs and I guess like the Market's been relatively quiet as well uh people are are being bearish on that too but if you actually look at what we did what we did was we're using blobs as what what is traditionally known as a loss leader essentially you could say the ethereum network is taking a loss on blobs

because blobs right now are free to post essentially l2's people say that they're free riding because it's so cheap to post blobs to L1 ethereum and they're basically getting a free lunch y but that's not permanent that's temporary this was known ahead of time that this would happen because until blobs are at the Target and until they start out B uh until the l2s start out bidding each other to get their blobs included the fees aren't going to go up but the the whole thing is that like they will get to that point and they will up at each other and then eum Fair Revenue will come back but for now we're using blobs as a loss leader for the l2s so that we can grow the ethereum ecosystem so that we can scale ethereum but somehow people have managed to spin that as bearish

which is just insane to me and I think that they've managed to do it because of the price action of eth which in my mind has nothing to do with that honestly I think the price action of eth has to do really over the last few weeks especially or maybe the last few months especially has to do with major kind of factors outside of um of the control of of of really anyone within the etherum system right recently you had jump offloading lots and lots of eth which actually murdered eth during this latest dump but then before that you had obviously some eth e outflows going on and then you had other players playing around the ETF narrative which was just absolutely messy then you had the normal sual all that sorts of stuff right but then people will also compare price action to ratios as I mentioned before

and it's like okay guys well let's compare let's not compare eth to BTC and soul right BTC uh sorry eth against BTC will always bleed during a um you know non retail bull market cuz we haven't been in a retail bull market before it's a Crypton native thing here and it's been bleding against BTC that's that's normal like that's not out of the ordinary and then people will look at so it's like okay well Soul going up means that salana is killing ethereum means ethereum's dying it's like wait a second here so you the soul is seems to be like this Cycle's favorite asset everyone like seems to be bullish on it there's like momentum behind it and that's totally fine like I I understand that because they did manage to grow their ecosystem quite quite well and they grew their community and all that that's

totally fine um but then like what people are doing they're looking at that that but then look at everything else like go look at eth against pretty much everything else over the long term like maybe long term is like one plus year out like it it's outperformed everything else in a really really big fashion and what people do is instead of looking at that they just look at the one outlier and then they start kind of coping about it like I should have bought this I should have done that well guess what guys you didn't do it so there's no point being like Oh I should have done this or I should have done that you didn't do it at the time and you had your own reasons for not doing it at the time but the problem with this is what happens is that people look at

this and then they start uh connecting this to the fundamentals and then they start saying things like ethereum is dying and it's like well what do you [ __ ] mean ethereum is dying like you can actually go look at it yourself and see that it's not if you're only saying this because the price is doing whatever it's doing uh you know over the over over like the shorter medium- term then you really don't understand how these things work I think you really don't understand the fact that like ethereum is a long-term in thing it's a long-term investment in eth and ethereum is a long-term play on building the world's best I mean in in simple terms like settlement layout right and that's not and and world's most decentralized most secure stable settlement layout that hasn't changed the road map hasn't changed the road map is not wrong we

didn't make a mistake going with rollups we didn't make a mistake with making sure that L1 was able to be verified and validated by low powerered Hardware I don't believe that's a mistake and I don't think calling it a mistake just because the fact that um the price went down is is the right way to go about it at all so there's just been a lot of that there but if you actually look at the fundamentals you look at the L2 activity you look at the uh even their L1 activity is still relatively High you look at the fact that we're using blobs as a loss leader you look at all the development happening on the ethereum core side especially on on L1 not just on the L2 side there's so much development happening Petra is going to be the biggest upgrade in ethereum's history right um and then you look at

the fact that we just got the E ETF approved even though everyone thought it was going to get denied you just look at all the winds that ethereum keeps racking up over time and in a really big way you have like black rock using ethereum mainnet for their tokenization fund you have I saw recently Franklin Templeton using arbitrum right which is settl into ethereum you actually just zoom out a little bit and look at all the fundamentals there is literally nothing to be bearish about at all the foundations of ethereum are so so strong ethereum still is the home of defi look at the tvl of ethereum compared to any other chain out there but to any other L1 or L2 out there ethereum still has I believe 10 times the tvl of salana and that's because ethereum is home of the big money they want to be on there they

want to be on there because they know that the def5 protocol on there are true and tested they know that um that ethereum is reliable they know that ethereum doesn't go offline they know that ethereum is secure and decentralized so they keep their funds there and they're comfortable keeping their funds there right whereas salana has not proven itself as that it's gone down multiple times I'm not trying to FUD salana here but like obviously a lot of this conversation revolves around that um but like they've gone down multiple times so obviously people with with big Mone money are looking at that and being like well I don't want to risk my funds there maybe when they've been off um you know online for a while then uh I'll I'll I'll move there and then they' also still got the like the beta tag so they call themselves main net

beta that also scares people off too because they're like well it's in beta like I'm not going to store all my money here right I'm not going to want to take risky stuff there and also a lot of the activity on on salana has uh is got to do with like meme coins and stuff like that they don't really have a strong uh defi ecosystem like ethereum has it's much less of a defi ecosystem over there and as I said I'm not trying to FUD things here guys like I'm just trying to to give it to you straight I'm just trying to give it to you how I see it here and honestly I actually think it's a good thing that salana uh is is legitimate competition for the ethereum ecosystem because it pushes ethereum forward it pushes ethereum to keep shipping to keep doing things and make

sure we don't rest on our Laurels I love that because traditionally all the other l1s that have tried to compete with ethereum have been absolute dog [ __ ] right they''re just not being good competitors so we finally have like a decent competitor to ethereum here even though I disagree with fundamentally disagree with their architecture we still have a a a a competitor here for ethereum that we can want you know we can learn from definitely and we can also use as a source of um as a source of energy in order to make the ethereum ecosystem better here and at the end of the day it needs to be all about the user right everything we're doing is for users to be able to get people to use these things but as I've said before in my mind in my opinion the only value of

a blockchain the long-term sustainable value of a blockchain is for it to be decentralized in sensorship resistance if you don't have that if you don't have that then you don't have a blockchain and you may as well just have a centralized database and you may as well forgo all of the you know tury stuff that you have to do to have a blockchain to run a blockchain and just do that and obviously there's multiple reasons why teams don't do this a lot of them is regulatory but also they want to S out people into thinking that they're decentralized um you know there's lots of l1s out there that are definitely not decentralized right uh but they want to you know isue a token so they can make money and all all that sort of stuff there but really at the end of the day as I said like fundamentally you need to

be decentralized well the blockchain needs to be decentralized and it needs to be sensorship resistant if it's not that then it's not a blockchain it doesn't really need to exist at all to be honest that's not serving any long-term value to anyone um and I you know I think even if it gets a bit of traction and then just falls off all you did was essentially create a breeding ground for people to come Farm the [ __ ] out of whatever you're offering and then take it back to the the Homeland which is usually uh ethereum right usually ethereum for a lot of people that's what happened last cycle it's what happens pretty much like every cycle maybe it's more so happening on Salan people going there like oh I'm going to do the meme coin stuff and then I'll buy soul with it and then I'll ride so up so on and so

forth but that's essentially what you get if you if you kind of do the those things there but anyway I think I've gone overtime here a little bit enough of my bullish rant but hopefully that keeps you guys on the ball here gets you rem motivated and as I've always said guys don't focus on the day-to-day stuff please especially the price like it's just completely and utterly useless all it does is serve to FUD you out of your bags all it does is serve to make you really bearish over the short term for absolutely no reason all it does is serve to make you question reality which is ridiculous because we have reality right in front of us we can verify all these things that's another magic point blockchains especially ethereum L1 where you can verify this all for yourself and the l2s are actually pretty light as

well there's no need to go on Twitter and form your opinion on ethereum based on what people on Twitter are saying because as we all know they have fried dopamine receptors and their opinion changes day-to-day like I it was funny yesterday or the day before maybe the past couple of days it was like Max fud of ethereum on Twitter and then eth pumped like 10% today and everyone's like oh my God [ __ ] yeah eat's Coming Back Revenge pump blah blah blah and it's like what the [ __ ] is wrong with you guys like why are you like this like come on on like aren your isn't your brain like hurting from being this kind of sporadic about your I guess like um thesis on this ecosystem or I guess like your feeling on this ecosystem it's just ridiculous so yeah if I have any piece

of advice for you guys it's the same advice that I always give it's like please just zoom out focus on the longer term everything's fine there's nothing wrong with ethereum um and and vitalic having a girlfriend whether that's true or not because people have been posting this on Twitter is not bearish for ethereum like it's just ridiculous like I I I I feel like people just say these things things when the price is going down to justify being bearish and then like the price goes back up and people are like oh my God price is going up butal like having having a girlfriend is like um giving eth energy it's just stupid [ __ ] that doesn't make any sense but if you're sitting on crypto Twitter that's what you're exposed to so I figured that you guys um would would benefit from a bullish rant as I finish

up today's episode because as I said at the beginning of the episode I'm probably not going to be around for another couple of weeks probably two to three weeks at this stage in terms of getting the refuels out um and I'll be very sporadically involved with Discord Twitter because I'm going to try try and take another break here but anyway until then uh yeah be bullish be uh you know stay with your conviction on things because I think that the future is definitely still very bright for ethereum so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all when I catch you thanks everyone