Devcon7 recap, Beam Chain discussion and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #808 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of theway refu where up the latest news in the etherum ecosystem I'm your host Dan s and to the 19th of November 2024 I everyone let's get into it so I'm back after Devcon 7 and what a week it was in Bangkok there over 12,000 people attended the conference with 27 uh 2,750 people participating in the hackathon and wow it was amazing guys like as I said on Twitter you probably saw my tweets there was uh so many people the venue was so amazing the organization was so good the talks were killer The Vibes were off the charts and I got to meet so many of you regular daily way listeners um and got to speak to you and meet you in person and it was

just really really great uh to see you all and to get your feedback on things and to have you know real discussions in real life about ethereum and as I said The Vibes were high I know if you go on crypto Twitter The Vibes are always crappy but in real life The Vibes were were amazing I mean I know the price went up a little bit um from I guess like before Devcon to when Devcon started but no one was really talking about the price it was all about the tech it was all about what was coming for ethereum what ethereum has achieved so on and so forth it was just so bullish honestly like it's kind of striking how different the vibe and the sentiment was in real life as opposed to online on crypto Twitter and you know some people would say well of course

it's going to be like that it's an ethereum conference I'm like yes it's an ethereum conference but it's also a developer conference right this is not a conference that is meant to be attended by people that really I mean I guess like aren't interested in developing on ethereum or aren't interested in being part of the ethereum community it's not a trade show there wasn't any sponsor booths there wasn't anything like that it's a it's a conference run by the ethereum foundation and that means it was fully ethereum there wasn't like l1's uh kind of sponsoring you know other L1 sponsoring booths things like that there was none of that stuff going on so yeah 12,000 people traveling to Bangkok which is not close to people in Europe and the US right it was relatively close for me in Australia still a 9-h hour flight but hey that's

close for for me in Australia uh but people from the Europe from Europe and the US traveled all the way there because they know that Devcon is the best event in crypto I honestly I honestly think it is especially this one like I've spoken to so many people and they all said that it's the best crypto event they have ever attended not just ethereum conference but crypto event and the hackathon was the second biggest hackathon that's ever taken place in the world and not just within crypto but within any industry which is absolutely massive so yeah as you can tell I had an amazing time there extremely bullish on what's happening in ethereum there was so many talks guys and they're all up on YouTube you should definitely go check them out and check out which ones that that interest you but there was so many

and you know a lot of it will probably be stuff that I've already covered on the refuel but the people directly working on this stuff were the ones giving the talk so you really got to kind of Deep dive into exactly what's being worked on and what's coming and there was a lot of talking about things like interoperability between l2s that was definitely a main theme l2s generally there was a lot of talk about apps uh other than infrastructure obviously infrastructure is still a heavy thing within the etherum EOS system but there was a lot of discussion around apps and what these new kind of l2s enable on the app layer uh there was also a lot of talk about the core protocol and scaling up uh L1 as well as the l2s or scaling up L1 for the l2s so there was a lot definitely going uh

going on here but as I said like it was amazing for me personally because I got to meet so many people in in real life so many daily gay listeners and even people who didn't listen to daily way just knew me from Twitter it was just great meeting everyone because the Vibes were always high I don't think I came across anyone that was like bearish or negative at all which was amazing and it just really added to the fact that as I said the venue was great talks were good uh the whole thing was run really really well I think the only I guess like negative I could say is that the the weather because I'm not used to humidity it was humid like every single day like over 30° C and humid every day and made basically walking anywhere I mean not impossible but like if you walked

anywhere you would just sweat the whole time and it would be gross uh but then getting around Bangkok for those of you that attended but also people who have been there before you know it is not an easy thing to do because there is always traffic and you could get on one of the bikes I guess to avoid the traffic but then you take the risk of you know you prably much um a lot of the time didn't get a helmet and the people um on the bikes like the the grab Riders on the bikes uh drive like maniacs so it's not doesn't feel really safe but that was really the most efficient way to get around because you could walk places you just sweat you could go in a car you'd probably get there like you know double the time it would take you um in in

normally because there was so much traffic but I guess that's not not really a negative I would say it's more of just something that I guess put a damper on things for people but was really nice about uh the Devcon days like the the the four Devcon days was that a lot of the side events didn't take place with on those days because the ethereum foundation requested that the side events be done at the at you know before the event and after the event has not to split things up especially in a city like Bangkok where you could probably maybe attend like two things in a day because of the traffic so it wouldn't really be worth going to multiple events so the main venue was always packed it was so busy it seemed like got busier as time went on like more people came as time went on which

was which was great there but yeah anyway enough of me rambling about Devcon there are a few uh updates to get through over the last I guess like almost two weeks now a bunch of updates that came out of Devcon as well that I'm going to cover just before I do that I want I do want to shout out this thread that eth Global put together of the finalists uh from eth Global Bangkok so from that hackathon there there were 10 projects that stuck out um to the judges from the 713 projects that were built you should definitely go check these these out because there's obviously like this narrative within crypto and it's not just within ethereum but it's also within like broader crypto that there aren't many apps right like where are all the apps and I understand this because a lot of it has just been

dominated by Def and a lot of defi is growing but it's like not growing very quickly I guess you could say it's growing like slow and steady it's still growing but it's like a slow and steady thing and really the only I guess like app level kind of stuff going on right now is meme coins across the whole ecosystem obviously a lot of that is happening on salana but that really is the main thing right now outside of just regular dii growing nice and steadily so I always go and I look at eth Global and I look at their website and look at their hackathons to see what's coming down the pipeline on the APPL and what people are building here especially now that we have I mean I would say at this point we have no excuse not to build um you know better apps considering that we

have the scale there the ux impr is improving all the time we're going to have inability between the different l2s soon and things just keep getting easier and easier so so really I definitely want to see the the Focus Shift back to apps and apps that are broader than what we already have uh because honestly if all crypto amounts to is being a casino then we failed honestly like that was one actual kind of theme that I talked to a lot of people about at Devcon because obviously mem coins are so hot right now nothing wrong with them at all and I understand that at the end of the day these are permissionless networks people are going to do what they want to do but I'm in this industry for way more than that I think that mem coins casinos are part of an economy but should not be

the whole economy could you imagine in real life if the entire economy was just gambling right like there was basically nothing else going on except gambling they that would be destructive as hell because as we all know um most people lose when they gamble like almost everyone loses when they gamble especially over the longer time frames when they essentially forget how much they've lost and then they win they're like oh my God I won and then they don't realize that they're like still net down so they just keep going so it would be incredibly destructive if that was the only thing but it is still a necessary and I guess like um necessary part of the wider economy just like it should be a necessary part of the crypto economy and the onchain economy but it should not be the only thing that we focus on

it should not be the only thing that we hope for out of this industry because the tech can enable so much more than that it really is sad if that's all we amount to and I'm not saying that that will be the case I I definitely don't think it will I wouldn't still be in this industry if all I thought that we'd be doing is amounting to a casino um but obviously given that I think that uh what what a lot of the participants are want are in crypto for like speculation what a lot of the um infrastructure actually enables today and what a lot of the focus is on because number go up right now especially in the bull market is that that remains dominant but I do think as we kind of I guess continue to scale up into the future as more and

more different types of Builders come in as more and more of these newer non I guess financial apps not speculative apps are enabled those things will definitely become uh I guess like uh more and more successful and grow more and more and we'll have a broader more Diversified economy because at the end of the day we know from real life that if a country has like most of their economy in one sector then they're incredibly I guess um incredibly fragile as an economy because it means that if that sector goes uh into a recession or if that sector falls out of favor or if that demand goes down essentially it can pull the entire economy of that country with it and it's funny in Australia we actually have this issue where our economy is pretty heavily mining we mine stuff out of the ground and sell to

other countries and and the internal economy is is just it's selling to each other basically selling houses to each other restaurants stuff like that Sur is's a strong economy but it's because of that mining sector primarily imagine if um people stopped buying that imagine if people stop buying those materials or got it from somewhere else it would negatively impact the Australian economy just as an example here because I'm familiar with it the same is true for a blockchain if all you've got going on there if all we've got going across any blockchain is speculation and meme coins then when that stuff inevitably washes out and that stops being like the main I guess like value driver of your economy then it can be brutal the other way around as well so I want to have a more Diversified onchain economy I don't just want it to be speculation and meme coins

I want it to be Way Beyond that you know payments right loans like under collateralized loans stuff like that the real world stuff that we're already doing with the central system centralized system but on the onchain economy on in in the onchain system so that's my hope but you should definitely go check out the eth global projects they highlight a bunch of these different things and not just within the finance industry but also within everything else that can happen uh on on chains here so I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to go check out um next up here is an announcement that myself bankless uh and the grow the pie team made at the bankler summit so we have created a new website called ethis money.xyz it currently only works on desktop does not work on mobile right now but Mobile support is coming very

soon and it is still an early version of this website but the purpose of this website is to showcase exactly why eat these money you know we say it all the time we say we meme it on Twitter but we don't really show it and we don't really explain it and that's exactly what this website is trying to do so as I said you can go check this out on desktop but you can see it in front of me here so essentially as you scroll down you'll see things like where is eth actually sitting in the ethereum economy you know we I always say that I I like that L2 scale ethereum block space because that means we can scale eth as an asset and that's exactly what happened what's happening here as you can see there's been a lot of eth exported into these

l2s over time and the trend is is generally up here and you can see the um the the L2 is listed on the right hand side and what they're all doing there and then you can kind of uh get an overview of uh where e is held like where is it held as a store of value who is it held by there's a list of entities here this is all going to keep getting updated there's going to be more entities added here and then we have a really nice graphic here showing ethereum's monetary policy now we had this we being me and Eric Connor had this on ethhub back in the day a similar thing but there isn't really something like this that has existed before essentially we uh we put this together me uh myself Gro the pie um the bank bankers and a few other people uh put

this together here and as you can see it's monetary policy is algorithmic it its issuance rate is algorithmic because it takes into account the fact that it changes based on how much eth is staked but it also changes based on how much eth is burned and as you can see like since the merge I've essentially been stradling this this line here this basically like zero line like sometimes we have Uber deflationary periods then we have slightly inflationary but generally the trend is that it's basically at zero so it's a really nice way of highlighting uh what what that kind of looks like here and why um eth is such a strong uh story of value and then you can scroll down there's a bunch of other information here and then you'll be able to get involved with the community soon enough you can register your interest here for the for the

Discord Channel um but yeah we're basically trying to grow in eth's money Army trying to grow in eth's money kind of um support system around it and get people rallied around this so you should definitely go check this out if you haven't yet register your interest I'm excited to to have this out there finally but as I said this is just the first version of it it's going to be updated a lot there's going to be a lot more stuff happening on here and going to be a Community First initiative is not just going to be myself bankless and grow the pie running this it is going to be a community initiative a community funded initiative as well we have interesting uh ways of of of funding the development of this website uh but yeah I just wanted to give a huge shout out to um um bankless in particular Ryan who

who um put a lot of work into this and also the grow the P team for get this done honestly like um I I think I was this was kind of my like so to give some context you I had an idea for a website like this a while ago and I passed this along to Ryan and then he really liked the idea and just ran with it so full credit is got goes to to him and grow the P team for doing the the majority of the work on this um I you know I just generally gave feedback on it and came up with one of the initial ideas for this uh but they've really poured their heart and soul into this and and made it like I think one of the best websites you can find out there if not the best website that we have right now to track

e why eth's money you know what eth looks like across the ethereum economy and it's just going to get better over time so you can go check that out I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so we need to talk a little bit about the eth ETFs and this is something positive I I know usually people talk about the eth ETFs that's being negative because everyone's like oh you know it's still net outflows I didn't have as much as de demand as the BTC ETFs no one's buying the E ETF blah blah blah blah blah so on and so forth well as of I guess like the last couple of weeks the eth ETFs are now net positive overall you can see here that it's green so this means that we've basically fully erased all of the outflows that

came from E and we're on the up and up here and as you can see I think last week was the best week that the E ETFs ever had um from the 6th of November to the 13th of November so this is a little little while ago actually not last week I forgot that today is the 19th but that was like the best week I believe that the eth ETFs have ever had um and and that's showing that there is real demand there for the eth ETFs there are people wanting to buy them there are institutions wanting to buy them and obviously we hope that this trend continues but it is a a positive trend here especially I mean if you look at the the data since launch it it hasn't been pretty right like I'm not going to sugarcoat this and say that it's been

been pretty there's been a lot of outflows from E right as you can see here and then there's just been like I mean kind of a I guess pingpong between outflows and inflows as you can see from the numbers but really from the 6th of November to the the 13th things changed and over the last I guess couple of days there been some some I guess mediumsized outflows not really large outflows but I guess that's just following price action there seems to be some consolidation across the board right now within crypto um especially on eth because eth went from 2400 to 3,400 that was that was like A1 billion market cap increase by the way guys and now it's at like 3120 I think so from that perspective that that's pretty normal there but yeah the trend is is looking really good on the E

ETFs and I think that we're going to see at one point billions of dollars of um billions of dollars going into the eth ETFs each day and that might be towards the end of of the cycle but I do think the the demand is going to keep ramping up from here on that all right so as you guys know Trump is currently selecting a bunch of different people for his cabinet and already made a variety of selections and the question on everyone's mind is who is he going to put in power as the SEC chair potentially the the cftc chair and anyone got to do I guess like with the financial system and anyone that touches crypto now there was I guess like something a couple of weeks ago that apparently Charles hoskinson was going to advise Trump on on crypto related

maners I don't know if that was true it seemed like it was fake news at the time but there was another announcement today that came from a much better source which is the Wall Street Journal here that says that Trump is expected to discuss appointments with Brian Armstrong and as you guys know Brian is the CEO of coinbase and I quote tweeted this by saying Brian is one of the best people we could possibly ask ask for to be advising Trump on crypto letter topics I honestly couldn't think of anyone better he has been around since 2012 he has founded and grown the biggest crypto related company in the US it is a public company here is across everything basically that's happening within the crypto ecosystem because not only is coinbase a centralized exchange and has a lot of interactions with different parts of the ecosystem because

of that but they're also building their own L2 on ethereum they're making a huge push into onchain so Brian really has a great bird's eye view of everything and on top of that which I believe is even more important Brian believes in crypto values he is not just some grifter not just some mercenary that came along and just came into this to make money no he's been around since the early days because he really bought into the the original vision of Bitcoin and then later ethereum and open blockchains generally so I really hope that he gets the chance to advise Trump properly on what he should do with regards to crypto and I really hope that Trump listens to him because if he does if Trump does listen to him and Brian does what I I assume that he's going to do which is which is give good feedback here and

give um good good advice here we could be in store for a very very nice and healthy crypto ecosystem for the next couple of years at least until the midterms uh and potentially four years in this admin if you know I mean I'm making assumptions here if the Democrats do well at the midterms in two years or if they if they win the next election that's the kind of timelines we're working with right now but this has long- lasting implications especially if we see new laws passed and new regulations passed and stuff like that that make it easier to build within crypto because as you guys know traditionally it's been very hard a lot of people didn't want to touch crypto but that all 18 aded once Trump won the election but we also need to make sure that Trump isn't just saying things and

that people around him aren't just saying things when it comes to crypto but they're actually doing things and they're doing things that are actionable and provide value to the crypto ecosystem this is what I want to see I want to see people that I trust within crypto like Brian advising the Trump admin on what to do within crypto I don't want to see people I don't trust like Charles hoskinson and and others who I consider to be not really in crypto for the right reasons I guess you could say uh to be advising um uh to be advising the Trump admin I I think that Brian is going to do a really great job here and I can't wait to see what comes out of this all right so let's move on to some ethereum core Dev updates so first off I wanted to talk about blobs so as you

guys know by now if you've been paying attention at all blobs have been at their target since the start of November so almost I guess 3 weeks now and they have generated around $2 million of fees for ethereum since then which doesn't sound like a lot but it's more than free remember when blobs are free and everyone was fighting it saying that blobs are free you know they're providing no you back to eth well that is not the case anymore blobs are not free anymore and we're still like on day one of blobs cuz we've only got three of them we got the target of three the max of six but effectively it's three and they're still generating fees for ethereum that's showing that obviously their demand for rollups is going up demand for Etha is going up uh and it's been great to see that this is happening

here and I said in this tweet as well ethereum will keep scaling up blobs and the demand will keep hitting them up aggressively the trend is up and you can actually play around with that um blob simulator that Tim Robinson made that that I showed you guys on one of the refuels to see how this plays out because we're not just going to be on three blobs forever we're going to scale this up aggressively like hopefully getting to I think the the the the Target right now but like it's a soft target I guess and it can be changed like 128 blobs so orders of magnitude bigger than where we are today like if we got to 128 blobs it would be 42x increase from what it is today now what you can do is you can actually like make a naive I guess um I guess a naive what

what's what's the thing I'm looking for here what's the word I'm looking for here naive assumption around what the fees would look like if we had that many blobs you could basically 40x the 2 m fees you could say $80 million of fees would come from would come from blobs instead of $2 million here while L2 fees remained low because the blob fees are still quite low I think the average right now is like four or five gay so it's still uh it's still quite low it's not like 50 gay or something like that and but but Tim Robinson's blob simulator to allows you to kind of simulate different outcomes here so you can obviously have assumptions here around demand but then model it out if that was to actually uh come true now speaking of blobs as well Tony here put out a great eth research post today

where he said with ongoing discussions about increasing the blob count while lowering the execution layer payload size in Petra I've summarized four potentially interesting changes to the blob fee Market my stance is clear we should scale up the blob count in Petra while reducing the maximum payload size this way we lower the worst case limits while giving users what they demand more space so you should definitely could give this I guess blog uh This research post to read I'll link it in the YouTube description below but essentially what um I guess Tony's advocating for and I guess like what the suggested updates are uh that raising the Min blob fee uh to allow for faster price Discovery this is something I've talked about on the review before automating the blob gas update uh fraction which uh um makes it future proof normalizing the excess G uh

the excess gas prevents an edge case where the blob base fee drops after a fork that increases the target though nothing bad can happen if we don't do it and making the base fee scaling uh symmetric ensures that mechanism stays as is so it scales plus uh 12.5 at the extremes of zero and six blobs so essentially he's just proposing to summarize all of these changes into the existing EIP 7762 which is the one that raises the Min blob fee for allow allowing for faster price Discovery here but I guess for me personally you you can go read this for yourself I'll link in the YouTube description below but for me what I want to see and I think what the guiding principle should be here is scale up blobs aggressively as much as we can without increasing the bandwith requirements too much because as I've

discussed before if we increase the bandwidth requirements too much we risk kicking off certain players on the network such as solo stakers and we don't want to do that for obvious reasons so we need to keep scaling up blobs and it's a delicate balance here but we need to keep scaling up blobs because they can't remain at ceiling forever because then the Bas Fe just keeps going up for the blobs which means that the phas on l2s will go up eventually and that just leads to a bad user experience there and as um Tony said here this needs to happen in Petra I know we're really late in the game here and Petra is probably going to go live in like March or April of next J so we're very late to get I guess changes into Petra but there needs to at least be a blob count increase in Petra I

think going from 3 to six so six Target and a nine Max is what's kind of being floated here as well there is there is the initial one that's being floated which is 46 so uh don't change the max but change the target to four I would like to see a Target of six and a Max of nine uh ideally because of the fact that if we only do four then we're stuck with four for like potentially a year and it's it's not good enough and I know Pi Dash should hopefully come in the next upgrade after that but I don't think it's going to to be enough it is definitely very conservative I think we can be more aggressive here but we also want to make sure that we have the data to back this up and I think there's a lot of work being done on that and we

want to make sure that we don't overload the network of course but as I said you can read this post for more information about that but that's my general stance on blobs there all right so Justin Drake gave a talk about something called The Beam chain at Devcon and I'm sure you guys all saw the I guess differences of opinion on the beam chain on on crypto Twitter now I think Justin's biggest mistake was including a timeline slide in his presentation for those of you who watched it the timeline basically was a bit funny it was basically like a 5year timeline and then essentially what happened was that everyone took that and like oh my God it's going to take ethereum 5 years to ship it anything when in reality what he was talking about was a consensus layer related

thing so it's not really a user facing layer thing at all and the consensus layer is the proof of stake layer for those of you who don't know but people were acting like because we would if if we were to do this beam chain thing it would mean that everything else that happens on ethereum would get paused like all the other development that happens at ethereum core protocol would get paused is and that is completely wrong and obviously you guys listening to this know that's completely wrong because you're not silly enough to believe that stuff but Justin then did a follow-up talk at the bankless summit about this so he he didn't talk about the beam train specifically but he basically created this little I guess like timeline here where he shows where we're at today and what we're going to be like in 5 years and then where

everything fits in there so you can see the beam Fork basically comes at the end of the 5 years here but there's so much other stuff happening at L1 in between then and now at every hard Fork essentially so this is like a I guess a a summarized 5year road map for ethereum for ethereum L1 this isn't including the l2s by the way this is just the L1 and what we're bringing here and what we're doing here and how this will actually uh improve ethereum and he talked about this I I highly recommend going and giving his talk um a watch it's actually live on bank's YouTube channel right now should definitely go watch that but I think you should watch that before you watch the beam chain talk like the beam chain talk should have come after this talk I think because it gives better

context around the beam chain and it explains the timeline a lot better now in saying that I do want to cover the beam chain thing the beam chain proposal and um uh the thing is is that it is just a proposal I think people took this as something that is I guess like set in stone something that's 100% going to happen it is still just a proposal but it is not a new proposal what it is is it's basically taking all the existing major consensus layer road map items rolling them up into one fork called The Beam chain uh and essentially doing them all as I guess another separate uh uh project to what we're already doing at L1 and the point of this the reason why you do it like this is because Justin believes it would be a cleaner way to do it he believes that there are a lot of

things on there that couldn't actually be done with a without a beam chain likeed uh like initiative and also it works as a way to bring new core developers into ethereum now this is something that wasn't discussed I think by uh Justin himself he did highlight some core new core Dev teams but I think this is missed by a lot of people as it exists today we have over 10 core Dev teams but they've been around for a while right gu has been around since day one nether mine's been around for a long time you know B's been around for a while the cons layer clients have been around for almost 5 years now pretty much probably longer than that and for new entrance new core developers new client teams they will find it relatively hard to break into the existing consensus layer and execution

layer uh I guess like development pipelines they can still do it but you know they probably they might get disheartened by the fact that it's quite difficult now it's not as easy as it once was so maybe they want to work on something new and I think this is part of Justin's proposal was like okay well the existing client teams already have a lot on their plate when it comes to L1 as you can see from this timeline so let's Recruit new teams let's Recruit new people to build out this beam chain thing so that we can get it done faster we get these upgrades done faster while in parallel still doing all the stuff we want to do on ethereum L1 on ethereum Main net and from that frame of reference I actually consider this a really good proposal I I I know that I

talked to a lot of people at the um at the bank not the bank of summer I mean at the bank of Summer too but I talked to a lot of people at Devcon about this and I basically said that oh maybe maybe the beam change just becomes a test net and and then we uh test things there and then just like put those upgrades into ethereum main net as they're ready but I I'm I'm more I guess like leaning towards the fact that I really like the the beam chain project I really like the beam chain initiative because as I said it can be done in parallel to everything else there's no need to interrupt the current flow of the ethereum L1 I guess like development process in order to put like beam chain related things in there because that means that more Focus can

be put on a L1 execution layer like user facing stuff and all the consensus layer stuff all the non-user layer facing stuff can well most of it can essentially be put into this beam chain which just gets forked into the chain in maybe it gets deled faster than 5 years maybe it's like 3 years or four years and during that whole period of time as I said all these other things get developed alongside it so I'm I'm coming around to that I think that that is a a sound strategy honestly from a number of different vectors here but if you want to get involved with this you can like the beam chain you just have have to email beam. chain ethereum.org and Justin did announce that a lot of people already reached out and he has like I think five new teams that want to build

a beam chain client that's like that's insane there's already five teams that want to build a beam chain client what the hell so there's a lot of interest in this obviously but I think that as I said Justin should not have shown the timeline on his original beam chain talk and maybe he should have given this talk first before his beam chain talk but I think he got overly excited about the beam chain and I think he underestimated how far something like that would go outside of Devcon because as I said Devcon is a developer conference but of course you start posting this stuff on Twitter and the majority of Twitter are not developers they're just regular people and they see this 5year timeline they don't understand what the consensus layer is and they start thinking oh my God is it going to be 5 years before eum

does anything again so obviously like an easy fud Vector it doesn't make any sense but it's there so I think that this talk as I said is recommended uh watching before the beam chain talk if you have if you haven't even watched the beam chain talk yet so that's on Bank Clos the beam chain talk is on the ethereum foundation YouTube channel or on the devcom website you can go check those out there but highly recommend giving them a watch all right speaking of core development there was an announcement that Tim boo posted about on Twitter here where he said the EF is running its first ever formal internship program next year we'll have both software and engineering and research inter internships across a range of teams applications are open now and Clos on December 9th 2024 so if you have what it

takes or so if you think you have what it takes to be part of the EF engineering and research teams you should definitely apply to this I remember they did this a while ago but I don't think it was a formal internship it was more of a loose one it was kind of the first time they had done it I believe but this is more of a formal one where essentially if you're interested in any of these kind of things that are listed here on um on this blog post such as working within gu working within the robust incentives group working onc exraction Etc uh you should apply to this so I'll link this in the description below for you to go check out but I think this is an awesome opportunity to work within the ethereum core Dev and research uh pipeline here all right another thing that I I

guess like forgot to mention before about devcom but I'm glad that I have this tweet to highlight it there was a keynote or I guess like an opening talk at the opening ceremony of Devcon given by Josh Stark as well as a and uh I sorry I should say uh who is the um executive director of the EF and vitalic of course but Josh's one Josh's talk really stood out to me because I would say it's probably the best opening talk or just like talk generally that I've seen on the current state of ethereum as well as giving some context around where we've come from and what ethereum is building for now he summarized his talk in a Twitter thread here but I highly recommend going and watching this one it's on it's again on the ethereum foundation YouTube channel or on the

devcom website but one thing he really uh one one quote that he said during his talk really stuck out to me and you should watch the talk because it contextualizes this really well but what he said was ethereum hits hard problems first because it has gone the furthest this is something that I've been talking to you guys about for a very long time now and I remember I said I said recently that there was a tweet that I saw people that that someone tweeted out that said ethereum sorry other chains are just living in ethereum's past this is because ethereum is the furthest ahead when it comes to basically anything related to blockchain technology it is the furthest ahead in every single kind of search Direction you can go down it's the furthest ahead in accepting the fact that the modular design is the long-term sustainable

design it's the furthest ahead when it comes to things like me and it has the longest term road map and is executing on that it has been executing on that for going on almost 5 years now right so that quote from Josh just really stuck with me the reason why ethereum is always you know attacked for certain things is because it is the one facing the hard problems first because it has gone the furthest like that just perfectly encapsulates what ethereum is and why ethereum I think gets so much uh I guess like heat in the in the wider sphere is because these other chains just haven't hit those issues yet they haven't run into those problems yet and they will like I think people are kidding themselves if they think that these other chains won't run into those problems they will it's just that a

theum is still the biggest ecosystem within crypto uh and he's run into those problems first and he's dealing with those problems and trying to deal with them in a decentralized way other ecosystems may just opt to deal with them in a centralized way and actually have there is evidence of them doing this already ready because it's easier but ethereum doesn't want to take the easy path we want to take the right path and unfortunately or fortunately whichever way you look at it the right path is the hard path but we do hard things ethereum goes hard Josh put a post about this um ethereum really is I guess like the the one ecosystem as I've said before to you guys the I mean the only ecosystem I think that keeps me in crypto if it wasn't for ethereum I don't think I'd be in crypto nothing else is

doing what ethereum is doing and I think Josh's talk his opening kind of ceremony talk perfectly Illustrated that as well as that quote that I just mentioned there so you should definitely go check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so all right speaking of talks you should check out uh this is the the Justin Drake one that I mentioned just before it's live on bankless I'll actually have this Linked In the YouTube description below for you to check out I'm going to put this over here so that I remember to link it for you uh just so it's easy for you to go uh watch there um there's uh two other talks that I recommend you go watch of course they they're mine one of them was a debate so there was a debate had are blobs good for ethereum between

myself Ansgar Tim Robinson and zerox bread guy ansar works at ethereum Foundation Tim Robinson made the blob simulator and also works at a VC fund and zerox bread guy now works at Mega eth but has been a bit of an independent um voice within the community talking about blobs and it was a really great debate it went for about 45 minutes and then we had 15 minutes of Q&A so you can go watch that I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out and then finally here my my talk from the bankler Summit is live I got a lot of good feedback on this talk people seem to enjoy it it was a bit funny for me like just standing on stage I didn't know people were going to take this but essentially in my talk what I did was take people on a journey through

ethereum's history I looked at what ethereum is like in the present and what I think ethereum is going to be like in the future so you can go give that a watch I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do s now just before I finish up for today I did want to give a massive shout out to bankless for their bankless Summit it was one of the best events that I have ever attended it was the perfect end to Devcon honestly like I I went home on the Sunday the um the uh the the bankler summit happened on a Saturday it really was the icing on the cake like I already had an amazing devcom by that point and then I got went to the bankler summit and the quality of the talks were incredible for those of you who don't

know the bankler summit was basically like a Ted style kind of or Ted Talk style Summit where essentially there was a bunch of speakers not just me giving uh presentations and speaking on various different topics and every single one except except one I think like I know the one that I didn't like the most but I'm not going to I'm not going to say which one I didn't really um resonate with but like you know there there were just extremely high quality talks the people talking about these things really cared about the subject matter it was really um entertaining as well as being educational and The Vibes again were very high there was um you know there was people everywhere we were talking about all these different things talking about the talks talking about different things within the ethereum ecosystem and it was just really great so a massive

cror to bankas for putting this on I can't wait for the next one honestly this was so great and I I thank them for giving me the opportunity to essentially give my presentation here because I don't actually get to do a lot of public speaking almost like all of every all the the I guess quote unquote public speaking that I do is behind the camera like the refill right or on going on Bank list doing podcasts with them or other podcasts it's like 99% in front of a camera where there may be like 5,000 people that listen to the refuel but it's not 5,000 people looking at me in a crowd so it's a different experience right and on the refuel OB obiously I'm I'm you know I'm at home recording I'm much more comfortable in this space so it got me out of my comfort zone and

allowed me to flex some of my public speaking skills a bit more and people said that I was fine I mean I was a bit nervous going into it being like H I don't know how I'm going to go but it was like a I guess a live daily gay anyway for people but yeah if you want to watch that you can go check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you uh to do so there now actually before I finish off today's episode I did want to discuss a little bit more about Vibes Vibes generally not just Vibes at devc or vibes online but Vibes generally what really like amazes me is that like I spend most of my time online in this industry I only go to one major ethereum conference a year this year was Devcon uh I've been to some

smaller events but that was the major one I go to and going forward I'm probably not going to go to any conferences except Dev connect and Devcon to be honest because I know they're going to be ethereum focused the other ones they're just trade shows at this point there too many sponsors it doesn't really feel like an ethereum conference anymore it feels like a crypto conference and I'm not interested in those personally it's just not what where I want to be yeah okay maybe I'll see people there that uh I see at Devcon and stuff but like I'd rather just see people at that one place um you know in in a place where I know is going to be high quality rather than traveling halfway across the world or the other side of the world just to go to a conference that I know is not going to

be the greatest right but but in saying that the as I said The Vibes at devcom were incredible The Vibes online are not now when you have such a stark disconnect and Stark difference between like the online world world and reality you start to question certain things and I've been questioning this for a while and I've been saying for a while in the deadly way Discord and to people in real life and even to my friends that aren't in crypto but just generally that like humans aren't made for the online World we're not made for social media social media it has its purpose and S and serves a role but sitting online all the time interacting with only interacting people only through like text interacting on on on on on Discord on

telegram on Twitter all that like it's a completely different experience to real life you know personto person communication and as a as humans we do not evolve to do online communication right we evolved to communicate with each other face to face that's why we have different facial expressions and facial cues and that's why we have um different things that our body does to like I guess um uh I guess signal to people whether we're interested in what they're talking about or not and you know all these different social things in real life right and that's why in real life you're a lot more I guess like reserved because you know that there are consequences for saying stupid stuff like for example if even like half of the stuff that get said on crypto Twitter was said directly to the person in real life there is a high risk that

that person would get punched in the face right so there is a stark difference between these two worlds now I'm not saying that I don't think the online world and social media serves its purpose it does but the fact that there's such a stark difference between I guess um uh crypto Twitter and I guess Devcon really really stuck out to me because it was funny I'd be at Devcon all day I wouldn't really be checking my phone cuz I'd be so busy talking to people and I'd be so happy like the whole time The Vibes were so high it was amazing I wasn't checking anything online I wasn't checking any prices or anything right and it was great I was I I felt like I was getting intellectually stimulated from all the discussions I was having the the my mood was good and I didn't feel like my brain was turning

to Mush then I get back to my hotel room and decide oh I'll just go on you know I'll go on Twitter for a bit I'll check I'll I'll check some Discord channels for a bit and then all that happen happiness and all those Good Vibes just turn into bad vibes the the the first tweets that I see is someone futing e or fting ethereum saying E A shitcoin so on and so forth people coping over everything and I just see that I'm like how is there such a difference here like how is there such a stark difference and I really think it's because when you're online and when all you're doing is Doom scrolling it just feeds on itself right like it's like the opposite of the Good Vibes that I had at devcom where that the Good Vibes are feeding on itself and

uh talking person to person is much healthier and your brain registers that as being much healthier than talking online to people it's just look like a much different experience there and as I said this is not something that is exclusive to crypto this exists I think across all of um all of the online world and I think that there is no good conversations that can happen online especially on social media I don't think you can have good debates I don't think you can have good intellectually honest discussions I think that when it comes to social media the currency is engagement and you don't get engagement by being intellectually honest or by being bring being someone who brings Good Vibes you get the most engagement by being controversial by being dramatic because that's what people really resonate with not resonate with but

really respond to I should say because they either want to correct you for futing something or they want to make fun of you because you're being an idiot so on and so forth so that really is the the best way to get engagement now if you do that in real life right it's a completely different thing because one you don't have a huge audience like you do online for example if you're speaking one to one to someone in in real life right and let's say you're at the conference let's say I'm at Devcon and I'm speaking to someone one-onone yes there's thousands of people around me but I'm speaking oneon-one to this person now let's say I wanted to make fun of that person I could make fun of them to their face right they'll punch me in the face probably for doing that or I could yell and make sure as many

people around me could hear me making fun of this person to their face and those people around me would not really respond to that they'd think I'm crazy or like what's going on with that guy that's weird or what's this Guy saying and they probably tell me to shut up basically but online on social media that's exactly what's happening when I'm replying to someone or when someone replies to someone not even just with an insult but just generally there are thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people that see that and can read that there's no need for anyone to yell you don't have to like get a megaphone you don't have to get into people's ears uh you know uh through like a podcast or anything like that it's there that people can see that so as I said like imagine doing that in

real life versus online online it's accepted on social media it's accepted it's just like the norm but in real life you as I say potentially going to get punched in the face for doing that you're going to get told to shut up everyone around you're going is going to think you're weird but online it's totally normal that's just one example of how the Two Worlds differ so much and again why I tell a lot of you guys especially those of you who are very susceptible to this because you're just sitting there all day Doom scrolling to take breaks from this stuff or to like not consume too much of it because it is not healthy it's not reflective of reality and it's just going to make you feel worse you spiral essentially and for anyone who hasn't been to ethereum conferences before especially stuff like

Devcon and devc connect go to these things they will give you a completely different perspective on this industry completely different perspective on on what's happening in the industry because as I said there were no bad vibes at Defcon there were no bad vibes and any of the side events I went to there were no bad vibes anywhere it was actually amazing it was refreshing and it really reenergized me being amongst all of that and realizing I mean I already knew this but like your brain plays tricks on you when you're exposed to something so much it tends to believe something even if it's not true but I already knew this like I knew that obviously ethereum isn't dead as an ecosystem I know that etherum is striving as an ecosystem I know that etherum is doing so much across so many different things but actually being there in the flesh

talking to real people in real life seeing it all happening being amongst the Good Vibes re-energizing myself with it all really just reaffirmed my uh belief and bullishness around ethereum and really brought to the Forefront that me I personally needed to be taking more breaks from social media because it is not healthy it is not something that actually does anything good for me personally and I'll be a better I guess like educator of AUM I think and a better bull for ethereum if I was to actually limit my social media time generally now it's hard to do obviously for someone like me who needs to be on top of things in order to do my show uh but yeah I just for you guys I just wanted to to give that kind of piece of advice as well it's it's not healthy guys it's it's not reality reality is

reality The Narrative is the narrative as I always always say and I really do think that almost everything you see on social media is complete narrative it doesn't match up with the reality uh not just within crypto but outside of it as well so it's probably best to keep that in mind uh and try to remind yourself of that but really the best thing you can do is just to limit your time on social media that is I think the best thing you can do and every single person that I've ever spoken to that has done that has not said that they regret doing it no one says that they felt worse being off social media now that tells you everything you need to know about how bad it is for your mental health for you to just be constantly Doom scrolling and I'm talking every single person like

whether they're in crypto or outside of crypto every time that they've taken breaks from it they their mind's clear they feel a lot happier their moods up so that's all the evidence that you need I think but anyway I think 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 Disco Channel and I'll catch you all next time thanks everyone