Core protocol chat, ETHval website and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #851 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of daily refuel where recap the latest news in Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host Dan the sun at the 5th of January 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So yes, it's 2026. So happy new year, merry Christmas, all that to all of you. Hope you had a good break. I know I did. Obviously the last refuel was quite a while ago now. I didn't realize it had been over a month since I did the last refuel, but as you guys know, I'm going to be doing it weekly again. So every Monday you can look forward to a new refuel episode. uh going forward uh until such time that I change it at some point in the future.

I'm sure it won't be weekly forever. Uh but for now, it will be and I definitely aim to to keep up that cadence there. As for what I've been up to over the last month, I mean, as you guys know, I announced I think it was the last episode or the episode before that I am writing a fiction novel. Uh I managed to do quite a bit on that even though it was quite a busy period for me obviously during you know Christmas, New Year's holiday period, doing a lot more stuff outside of the house. don't didn't have much time to write, but I actually ended up, I think, writing double what I had last time. Um, so double the amount of words that I had written when I told you guys about that last time. And uh, you know, in about a month and a bit, which

I'm I'm pretty proud of. Uh, I would say that I was going for 100,000 words and I thought it was halfway through, but I'm not. Uh, after kind of writing for a bit longer, I expanded the scope and I think the the book's going to be about 150,000 words. So, I'm like maybe just over halfway there at this point um in terms of like raw raw word count. Yeah, I think I'm I'm I'm beyond that uh in terms of raw word count. But then obviously like there's the whole process of going through reviewing editing, you know, that's a year many year long process there. So, uh it's not going to be ready for a while, but that's what I've been I've been working on there. Uh mainly, I guess like that's what I was using my kind of spare time on. Of course, keeping up with my fitness and

everything like that. And I did take a break from Twitter and and Discord. Uh I mean I I kind of was still on Twitter a little bit. Like I checked it maybe once a day for like 10 minutes just to kind of try and stay on top of things. Uh Discord I didn't really check at all. Um I kind of remained off of that. But it seemed like not much happened I guess over the the holiday period, right? I mean I think the most news that has happened in terms of like even outside of crypto has been the last few days, right? Like to to to start the new year off there. Um, but I have plenty of stuff to cover today. Of course, as you can see, this stuff might be old news to you. I'm going to cover a little bit of Foragaka stuff, which is over a month or

a month ago now, which is funny. We actually have a uh blob parameter only fork going live soon. A BO fork, which I think people have forgotten about, but that's coming as well there. Obviously, like prices are looking a little bit better lately as well. So, a lot of lot of stuff still happening there. And if you guys caught me on the bank list rollup a couple of days ago, you would have heard my thoughts on a lot of that stuff there as well. It was funny. David messaged me like last minute. He's like, "So Ryan's in a snowstorm and we need someone to fill in on the rollup." And I was just like, "You know what? I'll do it." Like I know I'm I was trying to trying to take a break, but I was like, "No, I can't leave these guys high and

dry. I need to help them out." Cuz I know that they've never missed a rollup episode, I believe. Uh which is pretty impressive, right? I never missed one since they started doing it, which uh I know how hard it is to stick to a schedule, right? And stick to consistency. So kudos to them for that. And I'm always happy to fill in anyway. I love being there on that show. I love talking to David and Ryan. They're good guys. Um, but yeah, that's what I've been up to. I hope, as I said, I hope you guys had a good break. But, uh, let's continue to, I guess, like uh, uh, scale this year with 2026. I think that's a big theme for Ethereum. If we're talking like broader picture themes, uh, scaling up the network, making sure that we deliver Glamsterdam, which is obviously happening sometime

this year, I think like mid mid this year is like a good bet on that. Uh, and then all the work on the ZK stuff as well. So those are the kind of like three main themes I think for 2026 on like the protocol side of things. Obviously there's a lot of other stuff happening at the app layer kind of side of things and on the adoption front which I'm going to talk about uh going forward as well. But in terms of what I'm talking about today I think I went over the tabs just before it's going to be pretty core protocol heavy because there was actually quite a bit of stuff that happened with regards to the core protocol. Uh, and of course, you know, we had Fusaka go live and then I don't think I No, I wouldn't have covered it because the refill was before Faka.

There was a hiccup with uh with Fusaka with the Prism client, which I'll I guess I'll I'll cover as well. Uh, but yeah, on that note, let's dive into a tweet from Vitalic here. So, as you guys know, the headliner for Fusaka was Pas. That was the biggest EIP that went into the upgrade. Uh, and it allows us to essentially realize the vision of sharding on Ethereum. Now, we're not sharding execution. we're shing only data uh which has been uh kind of on the road map for many years now right like that's um that was part of the the blob road map and the data data availability road map of Ethereum for as early as 2020 I think like it have to be 2020 um I think it's 5 years now uh in terms of like uh uh data sharding but sharding

itself has actually been on the Ethereum road map since pretty much day one as Vitalik calls out in his tweet here and I remember reading about it when I first got into Ethereum in 2017 and I thought you know, this is a really cool way to scale the network. But then over the years, execution sharding just became, I guess, way too complex uh and way too difficult to do in, you know, in uh in in line with the other Ethereum goals of obviously staying decentralized and secure. So that was tabled in favor of of data sharding which we have the first implementation of now with Pas where essentially the entire network is not holding all of the data at the same time and you still have the same or I guess like almost the same data availability guarantees that you get if the whole network is holding the data at the same

time. So huge upgrade guys and obviously like with blobs we're going to keep scaling them up with BO forks. Uh, and then I I think when it comes to Podas, we're also going to be doing uh upgrades to that as well and and you know, slowly ramping that up too. So, we're really at day one here of that there. Uh, but yeah, that went live with Faka. Faka went uh I guess smoothly for the most part. As I mentioned before, there was that bug with the Prism uh client that caused a I guess like a pretty hefty chunk of the network to go offline. It didn't stop us from finalizing which was which was cool but it did I think there was like 23% of the network that went offline from from memory here which uh which showed that Prism is actually uh you know a majority now like in terms of

um in terms of its uh its kind of use here. So uh sorry it's a minority compared to what it was. So yeah no I was misremembering there. So Prism used to be like I just to give some context about why I was um why I was getting jumbled up there. Prism used to be the majority client uh on the consensus layer side and it had a huge majority and then there was a huge client diversity push to get people off Prism and onto the other clients and it seems like most people went to Lighthouse and now Lighthouse has a big majority whereas Prism has uh has a smaller share of the network and I think post the bug that Prism had people went to Lighthouse as well. So essentially if Lighthouse had had this bug, we would have lost finalization. The network would have

still been online because we have a pretty good tolerance for for livveness where it requires 66ish% or 2/3 of the network to go offline for the entire network to to kind of go offline. And what I mean by go offline is that we would just halt block production. Whereas if like you know 20 30% goes offline, uh if it's 30%, we will uh we will still not lose finality. Um but like at 33% so one third of the network going offline we'll lose finality but that's not a huge deal either uh because the finality can come back and then we'll just you know start finalizing the chain from when when it comes back and then everything's fine again. Uh and the chain is self-healing as you guys know.

I've talked about that a lot in the past as well. But yeah, there was that bug with with Prism. Uh I I don't remember exactly what the bug is now. I I remember kind of reading about at the time. This is this is like a month ago now. So definitely not fresh in my memory. Uh that's for sure. But that got that got fixed with a hot fix and then it got patched. Uh and you know everything's okay now. It didn't last very long in terms of the impact on the network. But yeah, I think it did open people's eyes to the fact that client diversity isn't where we need it to be at this point. Uh we definitely want client diversity to be a lot better especially on the consensus layer side of things because as I said if Lighthouse had gone offline then we

would have lost finalization. It would have been worse. still wouldn't have been like you know d you know catastrophe like nuclear catastrophe for Ethereum where it went offline uh and that's why we have client diversity to begin with uh but yeah still wasn't great but like it's expected as well I mean usually we have these things I think with upgrades whereas some small part of the network will will falter for whatever reason uh and that's why we built client diversity to have resilience because we know that we can't do upgrades without something somewhere potentially breaking right like uh for some reason there's so many different reasons things can just go go wrong or break and we want to have resiliency against that so that it doesn't mean that the network goes offline or it doesn't cause you know catastrophic

losses of funds and stuff like that. So yeah, but anyway that's uh that that's the foraka side there. As I said like next up is Glamsterdam this year. Um I think like it's going to be an even bigger upgrade like Forsaka was the biggest upgrade so far I believe in terms of EIPs and I think Glamsterdam's going to be a lot bigger than that which is which is kind of crazy. I mean, I think if the the thing is is that nothing's kind of like set in stone yet. I think really it's just the headliners that seem to be set in stone, which is BLS and EPBS. But in terms of the other EIPs, they're all considered for inclusion at this point, uh, not slated for inclusion. Um, but, you know, if all the considered for inclusion EIPs get slated, which I think is like 13 or 14,

yeah, it'll become the the biggest Ethereum upgrade ever. Uh, and it may end up being like Q3 that it goes live or late Q3 instead of mid mid uh this year, which would mean that we wouldn't get a second fork this year. And that's my base case at this point. I remember I I spoke about this on the last refuelure and I think the one before that where I said that my base case for this year is that we only get Glamsterdam. I just I don't know. I I I don't see like how we can do such a big upgrade with Glamsterdam and then do HAR as well or I guess like it's called Hegata now or Hecatar. Uh I think it was Hegota. Uh that's that's the one that they landed on the name there. Uh because in Hegota it's going to I mean there's not I mean

it's still pretty far away. So there's nothing really set in stone there either. Uh but at the same time there is people kind of saying that okay well we want fossil in that. Yeah. Okay fossil is fine. Fossil's relatively easy because we've already kind of speced it out, tested it, done a lot of the building on it. But then there's the shortening slot times. So, if we were to do shortening slot times in in Hegota, then it's going to push out in 20 into 2027. I just don't see it happening this year because shortening slot times is one of the most complex things to do on the network. It may seem simple to be like, "Okay, well, we're going to go from 12-second slots to 6second slots, but then you got to think about how many things that touches. That touches everything on the network, right? Uh

everything on the content layer side. Everything has to be adjusted. Um, you know, the issuance has to be adjusted as well. the curve uh from from from what I what I know um just basically everything and it all has to be tested. You have to make sure there's no edge cases. There's just a lot going on there. So yeah, if if we are going to aim for shortened slot times in Hegota, I just don't see how we get both this year. So my base case, we get Glamster this year. Like I have zero doubt about that. I don't think that's going to get pushed out to 2027 or anything like that. Uh but you know if we do include all those EIPs which who knows if we will but if we do then yeah I can I would say Q3 instead of like maybe like late Q3 instead of

mid 2026 but I'll be pleasantly surprised and I'll update you guys on my timeline estimates when I when we have more and more information. Uh but yeah we we'll see. I think the next month or so we'll know we'll get a bit a clearer picture because people are back to work uh back to the regular kind of swing of things after the holiday period. Uh but we will see there. All right. So, uh, yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, we have these BO forks or these blob parameter only forks that we're doing now where essentially there's two of them that were scheduled, uh, with Faka. One of them already went live. Uh, so it went live on December 10th here or December 9th, I believe.

December 10th for me. Uh, and that basically scaled up the blob target from 6 to 10. Now, the next uh, BO fork is soon. I think like January something, January 7th, I believe. Um, if it's not the seventh, it's like, you know, around that. But that's going to scale the blob target up from 10 to 14. And I think like last time I checked on Hillby's dashboard on Dune Analytics, we're nowhere near I think 10 yet. I I I think like we're still at around six in terms of blob usage, but I'm just checking now on my other screen here cuz I want to see cuz I haven't checked. Yeah. No, it's come down a bit. Obviously like over the holiday period things quietened down a bit as well but like the average over the last um I guess like what is it like week I guess you could say or 3

days it's like 4.2 so 4.2 blobs and you know before Faka sorry before the um the BO fork went live we had um uh we had uh six and then obviously like we had Pis go live um and then we've gone to 10 and then we're going to go to 14. This is going to be enough blobs for a while, I think, guys. Which is good because we I think like with blobs, we're done for a little bit. Uh I don't think like it's in scope to touch blobs or to kind of like focus on blobs too much until maybe next year at this point until like the H star fork and beyond because we have other things that we need to focus on.

But blobs are in a really good spot right now. And the nice thing about the BPO forks is that if we do get to the point where okay, well, you know, we're coming up on that 14 blobs per block. We need to scale blobs again. we could just do another BO fork in Amsterdam, right? Like that. And it's very easy to do these things. They're very simple changes. They don't require extensive extensive testing or development or anything like that. It's already built in. At least from my understanding, it's already built into the network. So, uh we can just schedule another one as part of Glamsterdam and then or as part of any fork really and then do that. Uh which which is great. You know, that's that's a really great solution to these things. But in terms of like upgrading PIDAS, upgrading like blobs themselves,

changing things about them, like I don't think that's going to be happening in Glamsterdam, but I haven't checked lately. So maybe it maybe it will be, but yeah, I mean I I haven't seen it talked about much. I think it's the core developers and re researchers have moved on from that for now because that has been such a big focus for a while and we're in a really good spot now. So I don't think that's going to be a huge focus going forward. All right. So speaking of client diversity earlier uh flashbots here or data always from flashbots uh put together a little research post here taking um you know basically titled a consensus layer client diversity snapshot. So what they've done here is that they've basically um uh kind of gone over the network and gone over the network that's using sorry the um the

validators on the network that are using or the node operators I should say that are using the flashbots relay and then trying to determine what percentage of the clients they have as a as a share across the network. Now this isn't going to show the whole network. This isn't going to be comprehensive. This isn't going to be like 100% accurate. But this post is a really great way of showing how client diversity has changed over the last uh year or at least in in 2025. And what I wanted to just focus on was this here. So you can see on January 1st to the 7th there was uh in terms of like client diversity and this is just the consensus layer. Uh Lighthouse was 26%, Prism was 28%, Tekku was 10%. Uh and then you had a bunch of others uh like Loadar, Nimbus smaller than that. And

then you had these uh uh these uh uh uh pieces of software like Vouch and Vero that run multi- consensus layer clients uh that account for uh you know I mean vouch is 13%, Vero is 8% and there's 12% unknown there. Now I guess the raw numbers isn't really what I wanted to focus on here. It's more the change in raw numbers over the year. So you can see here that by the end of 2025 Lighthouse had gone from 26% to 39% of the network. And this is what I was talking about earlier. And Prism had gone from 28% to 15%. Teu went from 10% to 8%. Uh and then uh the rest of them didn't really change that much. So it seems that a lot of Prism users went to

Lighthouse, right? Like pretty much most of them went to Lighthouse, which and this this would have happened before the bug, I think. Uh uh or at least I mean they always did take this after the bug happened. They take this snapshot after the kind of bug happened. So I'm not sure how many people like changed straight away, but still like that trend would have been like throughout the whole year. And that's a pretty substantial shift there. And we This is not good. This is not healthy. We don't want one client to be at 39%. It was healthy before like 26 28 that was good. They're around the same. And then we had 10% Tekku and a bunch of others. But yeah, it's it's not great that it's like this right now. Uh but on top of that as well, I mean many of you maybe aren't

aware of this software because many of you are solo and home stakers. You probably don't have to worry about this as much as like big node operators do, but there is this software uh called Vouch or Vero that essentially what it does is allows you to run all these different clients as like automatic kind of failovers and backups here. So essentially if one of the clients that you're running or the main client that you're running, I guess uh uh it kind of goes offline, you you're not going to go offline with it. Uh and also I think uh it does even more complex stuff than that. Uh I don't know which voucher Ver does this. They may both do it, but essentially what it does as well, I believe, is that it runs it can run multiple clients at the same time and then check things against each other to

make sure it's following the right head of the chain. So, I I actually think that all large node operators should be running this software. I get why they're probably hesitant to do it because they want to make sure that the software itself is legit, that it's it, you know, it's been around for a while so they can trust it, uh that it's secure, that it's not going to like break their setups or anything like that. But at the same time, if they're all just using like a a majority client, then that's just as risky, I think, uh if not riskier. So, yeah. Anyway, you can go check out this um this post from data always here. It's really great. Uh I think it's a really great way of getting uh I guess like a snapshot even if it's not totally accurate, but it's a really great way of

getting a snapshot of consensus layer client diversity there. All right. So one thing that I have discussed over the years on the refuel and that has been discussed in the Ethereum ecosystem actually for quite a while is uh stateless Ethereum. So you may have I guess like heard of terms like the verge uh and the stateless Ethereum road map or light client stuff like that or state expiry like all these terms that have been thrown around over the years. Now I don't think I've talked about it a lot recently maybe over the last 12 months is because it kind of fell out of focus. I think the Verge in terms of like going to vertical trees probably as far as I know not going to happen now. Um and then in terms of stateless Ethereum it definitely still is a roadmap item but it kind of took a

backseat on on things but at the same time it's now I guess like coming back in a really big way because of the renewed focus on uh scaling the L1 as well and and the renewed kind of interest in scaling the L1 there. Uh, and of course, stateless Ethereum is all about making sure that the chain doesn't get too heavy. And what we mean by that, it doesn't get too big and it makes it really hard to run the chain, really hard to sync the chain. So, we want to do a we want to basically get to Ethereum to a point where we can uh either kind of like expire a state after a certain period of time or make it so that you can run a full kind of validating client without having to have the state. So, go stateless sort of thing. Now they have three major points

here about why state growth hurts. And this is by they I mean the stateless Ethereum uh uh kind of Twitter account here. So nodes store more data and database work gets less efficient. Infrastructure gets more expensive to hold and serve states and syncing and staying near the head gets harder. So as I just mentioned just makes the chain heavier inefficient uh things like that you know centralization uh risks all that sorts of stuff there. So essentially in a stateless world world the full state would only be stored by um block builders who are already running kind of like more powerful hardware and they're already uh kind of getting paid you know a handsome sum of money to be block builders. Um, and then large RPC providers. I mean, that's their bread and butter to serve these uh these kind of requests. Uh, and

specialists like me searchers, which go hand inhand with block builders, explorers, indexes, they already do all of this stuff. Um, and and and and so and so when when you kind of like talk about who needs to hold the the the full state here, uh, it's it's kind of these entities. Uh, you know, and a lot of people, a lot of individuals probably don't want to and they probably prune things. Uh but that's obviously like bad for guarantees around this state as well. Uh so there's a whole kind of project around this. Uh there's a whole kind of track around this. It's still going. I mean this uh Twitter thread here is a good update on what what's kind of going on here. I'll link it in the um YouTube description below. But yeah, I just wanted to kind of put that back on your radar. It's definitely

something that's come back into light recently and definitely something that uh people are getting excited about again. Uh but yeah, I'll keep you guys updated on how that uh that that kind of tracks there. All right. So, the protocol guild is launching something called sponsor a core dev, which is a new funding program connecting sponsors directly to core contributors. So, essentially, as you guys know, the protocol guild is this kind of initiative uh just like this broad initiative to pay core developers and researchers uh what they're worth essentially. So they all get like a base salary from either the Ethereum Foundation if they work there or from outside organizations like for example Prism is developed by Offchain Labs which was acquired by Arbitum. So now

they're paid by Arbitum. Uh there are consensus you know funds clients. Lighthouse is um by Sigma prime prime. They're kind of self-funded. So there's all these kind of different ways core devs get paid but they're definitely not paid enough. And that's what where the protocol guild comes in and says, "Okay, well, we're going to get like voluntary donations to the protocol guild in ETH, you know, stable coins, other tokens, and then we're going to pay them out to core developers and contributors." So, another program that they've launched, and this was a couple of weeks ago now, is this kind of sponsor a core dev program. So, essentially, what you can do is reach out to hello@protocolgild.org and uh if you want to be a sponsor, if you want to kind of uh contribute here and contribute some some money, uh you can. you can kind of reach out to be

part of the uh co uh the sponsor cohort for early 2026. So again, just wanted to put that on your radar to make sure that you didn't miss that. Uh I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out. All right, one thing that has been talked about for this is this has got to be a very long time now. I would say since DeFi summer at least, so five years now, is what's called encrypted mempools or kind of shutterizing the memp pool. Now what this involves is basically making it so that the mempool the at least the public mempool uh is encrypted which should lead to less me or eliminating me uh at the kind of I guess protocol level. Now there are ways to do this out of protocol like private

meles uh like things like cow swap you know those sorts of things and they've been very successful and very good but they're kind of centralized. I mean like they're not I mean they are centralized like some of them are centralized. Some of them rely on economic kind of incentives to uh I guess I wouldn't call it decentralization but to kind of I guess lessen the impact of the centralization but they're not ideal solutions. Um now the ideal solution is what Shadow Network here is proposing which is a a encrypted mele at the protocol level. I love this. I love the whole kind of concept of this. I love the idea around this. I'm all for doing this. Uh but I guess like there's another side to this as well where essentially most of the transactions

that go uh through the network right now are done through these private mess. They're not actually done on the on the public me side of things. So I think like this should be done but I do wonder what impact it's going to have like does everyone just stay and go through the private mess or do they uh you know default to the public meool because people may not know this but uh a lot of the wallets will actually route transactions through a private meool. So Metamas by default I believe goes through their private me. It it doesn't go to the public meool uh for their swap feature. So if you were to use metamas swaps and I mean like that's the thing like why are you using swaps to begin with? I mean the fees on that are really high uh and there are way many you know

there are way better ways to do onchain swaps but I guess like it gets the the noobs. Uh but essentially yeah what happens is that like if you use metamas swaps it'll go through a private meool already and they that's how they make money uh they make money off of those trades. It's essentially the same as like payment for order flow in the trady system if people are familiar with that where essentially you get access to or you get like forward access to incoming trades and you can kind of um I kind of bit bid that up and me that and extract from that and and and I mean net I could you could say it hurts users uh especially things like sandwich attacks and stuff like that obviously uh but the private mess have also helped a lot as well to help to minimize me uh because

public mele me is disastrous private me is not as bad but like still not ideal. So that's where like the encrypted meool comes in the encrypted public meool comes in where essentially you could have like full protection against me and not have to trust these out of protocol solutions or trust third parties. So, I'm very much in favor of that. But at the same time, it gets frustrating when you think about the fact that like how many people will actually be using this because a lot of people, as I said, like the noobs, which is the majority of people, uh, not the power users like us, they won't be using the public meool because they'll be using these wallets that route their trades through these private mess. So like it's good for us power users, good for people who

actually care about uh you know this sort of stuff, but it unfortunately probably won't have an impact on on those users. Um so I'm curious to see if maybe maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but that's that's the kind of uh uh uh view that I have there. But the reason why I'm bringing it up today is because Shadow Network here uh basically put together a new proposal to uh um have this encrypted meool done at the protocol level layer. And you can see there's a a ETH research post here and there's actually an EIP attached to it as well which uh you you can uh read.

I'll link it in the YouTube description below proposing this. Uh I doubt this would go into Glamsterdam. Uh you know pro if it if it goes in it would go into like uh the fork after it but it's still super early days. It might not even go in for a couple of years still. Who knows? But anyway, I figured it was worth kind of giving some context around it and you can go check it out for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. All right. So, Etherealize has launched a new resource for enterprises navigating the transition onchain with chain link. So, you can see uh and go to this. I'll link this in the YouTube description below. But if you want to get an insight into how not just Etherealiz but like chain link and others are approaching the enterprise

world, this is a great little piece to read because the enterprise world, while very sophisticated when it comes to Tradfi, they're very new to onchain. And that may seem insane to us considering that onchain has been around for a while, but I think I've said it before and I I would say these enterprises are at the 2017 level of understanding Ethereum and understanding onchain uh things. So what this uh kind of report plan uh basically does is explain all of the major themes and all the major kind of components to uh Ethereum and blockchains more more broadly and what they these things kind of offer over tradi. So just a really great report that I wanted to put on your radar. you can go give give a read and a huge kudos to Etherealize and Traink for putting this out. Um, and you can see yeah like

this this goes over like the very foundations of of Ethereum like what is a blockchain, what is a ledger, what is a token, what is an address, right? So, this is definitely not for like us people who already know what what all this is, but maybe you want to read it because you're you're kind of wondering, okay, well, how is this explained to enterprises? How would I explain this to everyday people? Um, and this is this is kind of a report that does that. So, really great piece of uh of work here. I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to check out. All right. So, I don't think I've covered this yet uh because it either came out just as I did the last refuel or um I might have might have covered on the on the last refuel. I actually don't know. Maybe I should look it up because

I don't know if I covered it, but it has gone through a lot of upgrades. Um, you know, since I first saw it because I think it uh yeah, it first came out on November 27th and that was the last time I did the refuel. But uh I'm I'm just looking at the video here on my other screen. Um yeah, I don't think I I covered it. Uh no, no, I didn't. So, this is a website from Simon Kim here, who is the CEO of Hashed, uh which is a um I guess like a a VC firm, I believe. Uh but this is ethval.com. So essentially what it is, it's a website to try and value ETH based on a bunch of different metrics. Now as you guys know there is constant debate about how to value ETH. Is it should it be valued on

revenues? Is it a store of value? Should it be valued on TVL or what about um you know it staking security? What about its L2 ecosystem? So on and so forth. So what Simon has done here is he's put together all these metrics. You can see here and the the models and kind of like uh uh fair value based on a bunch of different kind of calculations here of things like you know TVL multiple, staking scarcity, DCF, uh price to sales ratio, liquidity premium, so on and so forth. Uh and then kind of he works out based on all of this a fair value for ETH. So currently the fair value for ETH according to this model is $5,100. Now, I would argue that like I I I like this, but I would also argue that like you

can't really spit out a fair value based on all these metrics because when it comes to things being like a store of value, the number one thing with a store of value is a belief system. There's not really anything you can point to that's tangible. Like all of these things are tangible. They're measurable. Like TV multiple, you can just kind of go look at the TV. I mean, the the equations here, right? The TVL multiple is TVL multiply by multiple divided by supply or the staking scarcity is uh price times the square root of supply divided by supply minus uh minus the staked ETH right so you've got like all these equations here but when it comes to like valuing something as a store of value there is no equation for that the

closest you could have to an equation for a store of value is network effect uh so like metaf's law for example here but but even that um uh like even even that is like too I mean there's too many moving parts to try and kind of um calculate that there because like if I was to use maybe a crude analogy here you could say that it'd be trying to value a religion. So like what would if if if a religion had a coin. So for example, if like Christianity had a coin or you know um Islam had a coin or whatever religion it is like I'm just trying to kind of talk about the the biggest religions uh like okay what would that coin be valued right like okay it was not it's valued purely on

the belief that it's worth something. Let's let's let's let's do an experiment here and because this is like this is a fun experiment to do and this is maybe a a good way to explain a story of value. Let's say someone came along and said, "Okay, well, our religion is this coin." And this isn't too dissimilar from what basically Bitcoin is, right? So, let's say they say, "Okay, our religion is this coin. This coin has God in it." Like, this coin is God. Basically, we believe in this coin. The, you know, the coin essentially saves us from our sins, whatever, whatever it is, right? Whatever whatever spin they want to put on it, right? That that's what it is.

Now, let's say that religion grows and grows and grows and grows and and a billion people end up following that religion. So, what is that coin worth? Like, well, I mean, there's no real kind of way to value that, right? Like, there's no real way to say, okay, here's the equation that I'm using to value this. This is what it should be worth. And then you're doing that in fiat terms as well. You're like, okay, well, it's going to be worth this much US dollars or it's going to be worth this much Australian dollars or this much of euro or this much of yen or whatever it is, right? Um, so that's why it gets very complex when valuing something as a story of value and that's why there's so many debates about these things. Um, but yeah, Metaf S is probably the closest thing because it's based on network

effect because a store of value is based on network effect. The more people that believe that something is a store of value, the more people that buy ETH because they believe it's a story of value and they hold ETH because of that belief, the more valuable ETH is going to be because that that translated to more demand, right? Less supply on the on the on the market because more people are buying it. There's more demand coming in. Naturally, the price should appreciate. So, that's the closest you can get there. But all these other things of course are things that are objectively kind of measurable because you've got numbers that you can put to these. Whereas store value is not not measurable as the example I just uh just used there. It' actually be kind of funny to know how much like it would it would be worth. Like imagine if the

maybe maybe like it's a bit different, but like this is the closest way I could think to do it, but imagine if the like the Pope did did this, right? They're like, "Okay, well, I'm going to issue a coin because God told me that this is his coin, right? Uh this is never going to happen obviously, but like let's just say it did. Uh and what would that be worth? Uh who knows, right? Like and obviously straight away it's not going to like maybe it was worth a ton and then it goes down or something. Maybe it's not worth much, but like what would it be worth in like 10 years? Like if 10 years worth of like the pope saying this is God's coin, this is what you you know what you should buy. This is what uh by buying this and by holding this coin you

are closer to God. All all that sorts of stuff, right? Like I think eventually it'd be worth quite a bit, right? because uh of that belief system because that's all it is. And I know people who may not be religious, you know, may not vibe with this. I mean, I'm not religious at all. I think you guys know that about me, but I I understand why people follow religions. I understand why people like religion. I understand why religions exist. I also understand why store values exist and I understand why people value things based on collective beliefs. And it's not just ETH or gold or BTC. There are so many things that are used as stores of value, but there's also so many things that have that have like a I guess you could call it store of value premium on it. Uh like for um I I follow the um the

Pokémon trading card market uh quite quite closely. And like objectively, a lot of the stuff on there is is not valued based on quote unquote fundamentals. And when it comes to trading cards, uh the fundamentals are basically like, okay, well, how many of this card exists? And that's like a guess. You don't actually know. Uh, and you know, how scarce is this card because like is it is it really old and has a lot has a lot of it been lost? You know, what condition is it in? Those sorts of things. Like what Pokémon is it? Like certain Pokémon are more popular than others. Like Charizard is very popular compared to like Echans or something like that, right? Um, so so when you kind of take all that together, there are fundamentals there, but then I look at the value of these things and I'm like, okay, well, it's not being

valued based on the fundamentals here. like there's a huge kind of premium on this and it's kind of a store of value premium uh but it's also like a speculative premium of course and then there's also like the the other side of it which is aian beauty contest premium and for those of you who don't know what the kinesisian beauty contest is essentially what it does is it describes the fact that when more humans find something like when when lots of humans find something valuable or appealing uh more it's more likely that other humans will also find that appealing. So, for example, if there is a a card, like a trading card, and you might might see it like and be like, "Okay, well, I don't like this card. This card actually doesn't the art's not great." Like, uh, I don't like the the set that it was in.

It's not even that old. It's relatively new, so there's probably lot many of it. But then someone starts posting about it and this actually happened recently with I don't know if you guys saw there's this guy called Kabuto Kabuto King on on Twitter and he was collecting all these Kabuto from the the Fossil um set which is a very old set now but this is a very common card like there's there's probably millions of this card lying around. I I myself have lots of this card, right? But he's collecting them all and he kind of created a meme around this and he started putting attention on this and of course the price of that card went up but like it's a ve it's a card that just is not very appealing. Like it's not a a hollow card. uh no one really cares about it. No one really

talks about it ever. Like if they talk about the the the the the early sets, it's never about this card. But because all of a sudden a lot of people started talking about it, there's a lot of attention on it. A lot of people started um kind of I guess like uh being, you know, uh I guess liking this card and and and saying that they like this card. Other people start saying that, too. They're like, "Oh, okay. Well, yeah, that card's pretty cool. It's got a cool story behind it now. You know, I like that card as well." So that's that's what I mean by like there's also that Kinesisian beauty contest kind of I guess premium on it too. So yeah, that's why you you can't value things just based strictly on fundamentals. With every asset in existence, there is always speculative premium, there is

always a um store of value premium and there is always a uh kinesisium beauty contest premium, at least in my opinion. Uh and that's why people have debates about what things are valued uh you know how things should be valued and that's why there's so many so much debate about ETH because a lot of people don't think ETH is a store of value because they say well it's got no cap on its supply right it's monetary policy has changed in the past doesn't use proof of work all this sorts of stuff they they're just arbitrary rules guys there's actually no rule that says that a store value has to be capped in supply like that that doesn't exist that's just something that Goldbugs came up with because they're like well you know uh there's only a finite amount of gold on Earth that can be mined. Uh then okay, well gold has a

fixed supply. It's like well yeah, but if you take that to its logical conclusion, you could argue that about really anything. You could say that there's only a finite number of of I guess like trees on the planet or or kind of like matter on the planet and and then that should be worth x amount of dollars because of that. So like these things are just made up rules. Like there's they're made up rules by humans and it's also a madeup rule that gold should be worth the most, right? Why isn't silver worth more than gold when it's used more in industry than gold is? And it's used for basically like electronic components and computers which are are huge markets in of themselves. I know that silver had a run recently of course in price but that you know gold did as well but obviously gold

has a massive store of value premium on it a massive speculative premium on it. So and gold is also like in my opinion gold looks better than silver. Like I like the look of gold better than silver. Some people don't, you know, that's fine. But I think the majority probably would like the look of gold over silver because I mean there's a lot of gold jewelry out there. There's a lot of silver jewelry, but uh you know, gold is is is kind of that that thing especially in like media like movies, TV shows, stuff like that. Gold is that symbol of wealth. It's like if you want to show off that you're wealthy, especially maybe not in modern times, but especially in kind of like uh medieval times and and and middle history, uh you would you would kind of have gold things, you know, gold

statues. cuz you have gold everywhere and then that would show that you're wealthy to to people and that's how you showed off your wealth. There's other ways to show off your wealth of course, but yeah. Anyway, I'm I'm going on on a bit of a tangent here, but I thought it was worth kind of going over how I view stores of value, how how I look at these things, but this website itself, evil.com, is still really great and I still like it for the sole reason that we have a central place to kind of keep track of everything now. Like there's so much information on here, guys. You can scroll down, as you can see, there's so much information. He's also gotten the community involved. So, you can connect your Twitter account and you can rate uh different uh metrics here on how how important you think they are. And it's

funny cuz I went here and you can see here that uh a lot of people downvoted the price to sales ratio and um the staking DCF as being uh you know, as being something that's important for ETH. Uh and they left comments about why this is the case, which is which is pretty great to see because that means that there's more and more people saying, well, this isn't how you should value ETH. you should value it like this. Again though, it's a collective belief system. People can say whatever they want. You know, at the end of the day, the market is the ultimate arbiter here. But yeah, this is a great website you should check out yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. Um but but yeah, again, on the on the store value front, guys, like there's always going to be debates around this. I mean,

look how many people made fun of gold. Like for Bitcoin has made fun of gold for ages, like for many, many years because Bitcoin was outperforming gold last year. Gold outperformed Bitcoin, guys, which is crazy to say that gold outperformed Bitcoin for the first time, I think, in history, maybe, or maybe not in history, but for a very long time, at least a decade. Uh, and then, yeah, it outperformed uh Bitcoin last year. Gold had had a really big run last year. Who knows what's going to happen this year. Maybe maybe it's the other way around this year, but yeah, I mean like uh a lot of Bitcoiners don't believe that gold is a store of value or is that is a good store of value. They believe Bitcoin is a lot better. I mean, I would say I believe ETH is a better store of

value than Bitcoin and gold uh for a number of different reasons. Uh but but the obviously like the market doesn't believe that yet. If it did, Ether would be worth more than gold, which it's not. It and and it's not worth more than Bitcoin either. It's not even close to gold. And I mean, it's not even close to Bitcoin yet. Like so that's what I'm saying where it's a collective belief kind of network effect system where the more and more people that buy into ETH as a store of value the more and more that will translate to price number go up and then eventually I mean ETH will flip Bitcoin first before it flips gold obviously uh but then maybe one day it's more worth more than gold. We'll see.

But I mean that's that's far away I think. I think uh when you're talking about being worth what's gold worth now like $40 trillion probably more than that. I haven't even checked gold's market cap in a while. Um that's that's a massive amount from here. I mean $40 trillion from here for ETH I think is 100x. Uh I think it's more than 100x because ETH is worth Yeah, ETH is worth almost 400 billion. That's 100x guys. Like 100 that would mean ETH is worth $310,000 per coin. Yeah, it's not happening anytime soon. Possible one day, but not anytime soon, unfortunately.

All right, moving on. So, as you guys know, a lot of stuff happening on the ZK EVM front. Uh, and this has been in development for quite a while now. I've talked about this at length on the refuel. I'm not going to go over it in depth here. I just wanted to highlight a tweet that Vitalik put out about this. He essentially said that we have solved the blockchain scaling trilmma uh with ZKevm uh uh because of the fact that uh not with just ZKVM but because we've done PIDAS as well, which is data sharding. Uh so essentially uh for those of you who don't know what the scaling trillemma is that there was this trillemma that Vital came up with is basically this triangle and in each side of the triangle you had um scale security and decentralization and you

could only pick two. You could have decentralization with security or you or you could have um decentralization uh with scale but less security. I think that was the trilmma. It's something like that right where you can only pick two out of out of the three. You can never have all three. But according to Vitalik here, we have all three with Podas and ZK EVVMs where essentially we get scalability, we get security and we still uh retain that decentralization there. So having all three is I mean the holy grail and has been the holy grail for quite a while. And as Vitalic posted here, this has been a 10-year journey uh from the first his first original post on daily availability uh um uh sampling here. Uh and then uh also ZKVM started in 2020, which is about 5 years ago.

Now, as you guys know, in terms of getting all this delivered on the network and realizing the full vision, it's probably going to take till 2030, but that's only 4 years away now. So, we're very close. We're actually through the the the bulk of it at this point. We're just kind of doing doing the the last bit of research, I think, and then then the deliverables cuz things are getting better all the time. I mean, I talked about this last time on the refuel where ZKVMs or proving ZK is getting so cheap and so quick and it's just I mean, I think uh the ZK sync team uh did it in with 250s, which is just insane, right? Like that's that's not that much hardware at all. So, all of this stuff is happening uh in a in a really quick way. And I I do believe

that by the time 2030 rolls around, guys, like everyone will be like, "Oh, well, we we did it. You know, it's done. That didn't feel like a very long time at all." Cuz it always seems like a long time when you're like looking forward, but then when you look back, you're like, "Oh, wow. That actually wasn't that long at all." That's how I feel. Like it's funny, like when I first heard about all this stuff in like 2020, I was like, "Wow, okay, this is like a 10-year plan." Like that's a while. Like that's a that's quite a while. Like I wonder what's going to happen between now and then. Now we're in 2026 and I'm like, well, we're way we're more than halfway through it right now. Okay, that's cool.

Like, where did that go? It's kind of scary as well cuz it's ex it's existential. You're like, oh crap, where did the five six years of my life just go? Like, well, I'm sure we all feel like that, especially as adults. I know kids feel it differently, but as adults, we we definitely like where does the time go, right? Um, but yeah, it's still also a positive thing because it means that this stuff is closer to being realized and closer to being reality because once this stuff is actually fully realized, we will have a fully scalable layer 1 and a fully scalable layer 2 ecosystem working in tandem to scale Ethereum to the world, which is the holy grail, which is what we've been building for so long now and what I've been talking about for so long now. So, it's great to see that we're getting

close there. But, you can go give Vitalix tweet a read for yourself or link in the YouTube description below. And there's also also this resource here that I found that was uh that was posted uh and this is all about kind of getting the Ethereum network ready for ZKevm. So there's a lot of work here guys. You can see all the work that's going on. You can see people that are assigned to this work that are working on it, the working groups, the milestones, all that sorts of stuff. So if you actually want to be on the bleeding edge of what's happening on this in ZKVM land, this is a really good document to to keep on top of. uh because I don't know if it's going to be an a living and breathing document or and and and kind of changing, but it's a

good way to kind of see who's involved with this stuff, see what's going on, see how much work it's actually going to take to get there. But the fact of the matter is that that work is all being done already. Like this isn't something that's pie in the sky, dreamy, oh yeah, we'll do it one day. No, this is all being worked on already, guys. Like this is all all, you know, full steam ahead sort of thing. This is going to happen. Like there's no I don't think there's any question mark over this anymore. It's there used to be, of course. But now there's like, okay, well, we know how to do it. It's, you know, it's getting to the point where it's cheap. It's e it's relatively kind of straightforward to do. Let's do it. Let's build it. And yeah, it's going to take a while, but hey, so did the

getting the beacon chain out. So did the merge. So let's get it done. And that's what this kind of document covers here. So you can check that out. Link in the YouTube description for you to do so. Last thing I wanted to cover here was just I don't know if this is actually on the main forecast website. I think it was linked in the daily discord channel. Doesn't seem to be on the main website. So maybe I'm leaking a bit of alpha here, but this is this is a planning sandbox for all core devs. So what you can do on here is essentially see what the kind of current rough planning looks like for upcoming uh hard forks. So you can see here that with uh Glamsterdam and it also shows historic hard forks as well, but with Amsterdam the uh uh selection date and the and proposed

deadline for considered for inclusion was December 9th. I I don't think that's actually accurate. I think these dates are off here, but you can see how it flows, right? You can see, okay, this is the considered for inclusion deadline. Then you have um the dev nets. Uh this is when we're going to be doing the dev nets. Then this is when we're going to be doing the test net. And this is go live date. I actually think you can add a month to all of these dates pretty much. Uh maybe even more than a month here. Uh and then hear definitely you add uh even even more than that there. Uh but yeah, I just thought this was a really cool tool that I think core devs are going to be using going forward.

It's not public yet as I said. Um but yeah, I mean and the dates are definitely wrong. So don't don't look at the dates as any kind of signal right now. Uh at least the the forward-looking dates, historical dates, sure, but uh like that was all well and good, right? We we did the full stuff. It's all done. But this is for the next two forks, Glamsterdam and Hegotar here. Uh but yeah, you can go check that out. Link in the YouTube description below for you to do. So that's going to be it for the news for today. One last thing I want to talk about, and maybe it's worth talking about this because things are looking a little bit more positive lately. It's the the market side of things. Now, I spoke a little bit about this with David on the rollup. If you haven't seen that

episode yet, you can go check that one out. Um, but in terms of like the market stuff, I actually think we're through all of the the bad stuff. I think what happened with the markets at the end of 2025 was that 1010, you know, the 10th of October crash that that really did destroy a lot of people. And we haven't really seen any bodies come to the surface yet. But like I know from pretty reliable sources that there were a bunch of people who got really really blown up and they had to sell a lot of assets off in order to cover their debts because they always have debts when they blow up. Uh that's the I mean that's a leverage blow up there. And there was just a massive deleveraging event and a lot of alts got slaughtered and a lot of alts got to the point where people are

like okay well they look attractive now and over the last few days we've seen I mean it's a new year so it's not like total signal but over the last few days we've seen a bit more positive price action. Now, am I saying we're going to go into a raging bull market again? No, not at all. Uh, am I saying that 2026 looks, you know, do I think 2026 is going to be a more positive year for crypto prices? I do think so. I definitely think so. Uh, I don't know what it's going to look like. I don't know if we're just going to, you know, go sideways instead of just going down. Uh, because that would still be relatively positive. I don't think it's going to be a sideways year to be honest. I I just don't see that happening. But then you also have to

account for like macro factors too. Obviously, the stuff that happened with Venezuela is getting a lot of people kind of riled up. Obviously, we don't know what the US is going to do going forward. Are markets going to care about that? Who knows, right? Uh is the AI bubble going to burst? Who knows? Uh you know, is is that going to take down crypto or will crypto go up? Because people will be like, well, I'm going to sell out of AI and go into crypto now or people finally going to rotate out of gold into crypto. We don't know. There's so many unknowns, but there's so many things to be bullish about as well, I think, when it comes to crypto. I mean, it's funny when I say it out loud, but the thing that I'm most bullish about when it comes to prices is just the fact

that crypto has done nothing for a while while every other asset class has gone up a lot. And naturally, to me, that means that crypto is more likely to go up because if people are done with the other asset classes and they're like, "Okay, well, you know, all these stocks that I've got, they've just gone up so much and I'm feeling like this is really bubbly right now and all these precious metals that I own, you know, it's it's bubbly. Like silver did like a massive run. I want to take profits, but I don't want to sit in cash, right? Because maybe you expect rates to go down. And you're like, I don't want to sit in cash. Well, what hasn't gone up? Well, crypto's looking kind of, you know, kind of um attractive. ETH and BTC are below their all-time highs and they've kind of

gone sideways for a bit and they haven't done any parabolic moves or anything like that. Seems like the pain from the large crash that happened is gone away. Maybe I'll allocate to crypto. So, that's kind of like my my base case in terms of like my base bullishness is is just that really. I mean there's other reasons as well but like that's like the the big reason for me a big factor for me. Uh but I do think you know if if rates keep going down in the US that's a big spur on as well for crypto because crypto does very well in a low rate environment in a high kind of money printer environment. Yeah, crypto does does quite well there. But that's all I really have on the market front of things. We'll have to keep seeing how how things play out over the the coming

couple of months. Uh but I'm sure I'll touch on it again in the future there. But on that note, that's going to be it for today. 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, subscribe to newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.