Devconnect recap, All things ZK and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #850 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Delway Refuel where recap the latest news in the ecosystem. I'm your host and this is S 26th of November 2025. Right everyone, let's get into it. So I'm back from Dev Connect. Uh that was a long week actually. I always kind of hate going to that time zone. So like the American kind of time zone uh because of the fact that the jet lag is brutal. Uh you know the flight there isn't that long. I think it took me 16 hours to get to Borneeris. But the time zone difference is like I think it was 17 hours or something like that, which is insane. And by the time I had gotten over the jet lag, I came home. So I basically spent a week there and then I came home. I got home Monday morning here. And now it's Wednesday. Uh and I'm

still jetlagged. So I'm hoping I can get this kind of refill done before I I collapse cuz typically I'm recording this in the afternoon and typically in the afternoon I'm kind of like fading from from the jet lag there. Uh but Dev Connect was extremely fun. Uh, I think it was really energizing for me personally and for a lot of other people out there to see, I guess, like the new EF in action. I've been talking about this obviously for a while and we've seen kind of the new EF in action online uh since uh the beginning of the year, but to see it in person and to see the EF be much more visible, I guess, uh, was really refreshing. Uh, and for me personally, it was great to meet uh, you know, new faces that had been listening to the Delhi or had been part of the

Delhi community for quite a while now, but also see old faces as well because, uh, as you guys probably aware, I mean, I've mentioned this before, I only go to one conference a year now, and that's DevCon or Dev Connect. Um, and DevCon actually, I had this tweet here, which I'll just talk to now. DevCon 8 is going to be in Mumbai next year in India, which is pretty cool because I've never been to India myself. Uh, and this gives me an excuse to go there. And that's what I love about these conferences. It gives me an excuse to go to places that I haven't been to before. And I know there was a bit of drama, as there always is, about what location the EF picked for DevCon 8 here. Uh, and people saying, you know, why can't there be a Devcon in the US? Look, I mean, I've

been through this before. The number one reason, and this isn't just like, I guess like an excuse, but the number one reason is because it's really hard for people outside of the US to get visas to come into the US. And I think that anyone who uh uh I guess like lives in the US obviously doesn't feel this cuz you don't need a visa to go into the US. But and and if you you're a US citizen, getting a visa to go to other countries is relatively easy. But if you're a citizen of a majority of other countries, getting a visa to get into the US is really really hard. So the EF has always prioritized hosting DevCons in both kind of like I guess exotic locations, but also locations where it's easy to get a visa. And for me personally, I would much rather them

keep doing that because I have no interest in having like a DevCon or a Dev Connect being in like a kind of westernized nation, right? Like I just like for me it's kind of this thing of I live in Australia. Um you know I'm already in kind of a western country. Everyone speaks English. Like if I go to America I mean it doesn't feel that different. I'm just like okay well everyone speaks English right? Like um you know it's very westernized. So it's very similar to what it is like in Australia. Um, same with, you know, not everywhere in Europe, Europe, but like a lot of parts in Europe. So, like the UK for example. So, yeah, I just I I personally would love to see them continue to do DevCon and Dev Connects in these different locations. And there is already plenty of conferences in the

US, guys. Like, I know, you know, obviously DevCon is the biggest Ethereum conference, but I mean, uh, there there's already like ETH Denver, which I guess is more like crypto Denver these days. It's not just focused on Ethereum, but it's called ETH Denver. It's there's still a lot of Ethereum kind of presence there. A lot of people go to that one. Uh there's ETH Global that's going to be held in New York this year. Apparently, they're expecting 8,000 attendees, which is huge, right? Like that's bigger than most of the other conferences out there. I know Etherealize is doing a lot of great work in New York as well. And there's just so much kind of Ethereum presence in the US already, especially with the the new AF. They're actually spinning up things there. So, I don't think we need a Devcon or Dev Connect there. Maybe there will be one there

eventually, but I think it's much kind of I I guess uh much more kind of plus EV as they say to have these conferences outside of the US. At least that's my my personal view here. Uh maybe that's a biased view because I am already like I live in a westernized kind of nation and I would rather be able to go to like places that I maybe otherwise wouldn't travel to that are very different to where I live. Uh because that's what I enjoy when traveling. Honestly, for me, the my favorite places that I've ever traveled to in the world are places that feel nothing like home. And I guess that's a big reason why I like uh Japan. Uh you know, Japan to me is a massive culture shock. The first time I went there in 2019, it was a huge culture shock. And that was for DevCon or Saka.

Um but it was a culture shock because like barely anyone spoke English. There's so many different kind of cultural differences um with Japan as opposed to to Australia for example or any other kind of like westernized nation. Um and also they uh I guess I I guess like because of their policies around immigration, they don't really have much immigration going on. their culture has become has maintained kind of like a monoculture rather than a diverse culture. And nothing wrong with diverse cultures, but for me it was just really I guess like cool to see such a different culture and and and kind of get get a shock like that and and the same is true for other places that I've been kind of around the world. Um but I think Japan was like definitely the one that struck me the most. Uh and I'm sure

India is going to be as well. like India even though Mumbai is probably the I guess like the I guess most popular city in India and maybe the the closest you could say to like the most western part I guess like in terms of uh uh in terms of like the culture there. Um, from what I've heard from other people, it's still very different, right? It's still very unique and I am personally looking forward to going there and seeing kind of what it's all about. But yeah, as per usual, there's always drama around everything. Like some people just love to complain and I think, you know, if you complain on Twitter, you seem to get the most attention. So, I don't know. I would ignore those. As I usually say, ignore those people. You don't need to kind of give them attention uh there.

But I figured it was worth giving my take on what I kind of see with regards to these conferences here. But yeah, anyway, as I said, lots of fun at Dev Connect. Was really energizing. The favorite part for me was, I guess, just seeing all of um the kind of Ethereum core protocol related talks, not just at Dev Connect, but at like the Bankless Summit, for example. Seeing the fact that we're on this kind of really nice path right now towards L1 scaling, which I'm going to talk about in today's episode as well. Uh, and we've never been in a better position. I think I think the EF is firing on all cylinders.

I think that in terms of the speed at which we're upgrading the network and scaling the L1, uh it's just getting faster and faster. Uh and there are a lot of kind of uh sorry there's a lot of focus on real world kind of Ethereum now and real world assets and obviously stable coins and bringing that on on board but also DeFi continues to grow. It's just for me like the main theme was that everything's growing on Ethereum in a really nice way. Uh and Ethereum is best, you know, is is the most well positioned it's ever been in order to keep scaling up the network. work. I mean, we have Waka going live in less than 10 days, less than 9 days now or something like that on December 3rd. Uh, which brings with it obviously a massive scalability increase to uh to to blobs

with PDAS. Um, and also the gas limit going to 60 million, which it is right now. I think it's at 55 million right now, which I'm going to talk about uh in a little bit here. Uh, but yeah, obviously Forsaka brings with it a bunch of other upgrades as well, which you can go to forkcast.org to to view all of that. But Pas is the biggest one. um which again I'm going to talk about in a bit with regards to to Blobs here. Uh but yeah, that's that's two major upgrades this year, guys. Two major network upgrades that we've that we've kind of um put forward this year, Petra and and Faka. Now, next year, obviously, we have Glamsterdam. I think that's going to be the only one that goes live next year. I highly doubt we're going to get two forks next year because

Glamsterdam alone is a pretty big fork. Uh and I think that if I was to say when that would go live, late Q2 into Q3 is my kind of estimate here. But it's too early to tell still. That's just like a very rough estimate. So, if it does go live in Q3 there, I mean, even late Q2, there's just no chance that we're going to get the next fork, which is the H star fork, uh, happening next year, which is okay because we actually have other things happening, which I'm going to talk about in a bit. I don't want to spoil too much of it at at the start here. Uh, so yeah, I think it's I think it's okay there. Now, before I get into the uh I guess like news from the last couple of weeks here, I did want to announce something

with regards to the Daily Guay. So, I announced this in the Discord channel a couple of days ago. So, for those of you who are in there, you got the alpha first. But today, I announced on Twitter that the daily guay refuel is going to be uh going back to a regular cadence starting in 2026. So, um today will actually be I think this episode will be the last episode of the year. So, I will not be doing another episode until 2026. I'm going to take a break during the the Christmas holiday period there. Uh because I definitely need one and I I I think it's always healthy obviously to to take breaks here. But starting on January 5th in 2026, which is a Monday, I'm going to be doing weekly episodes of the refuel. So that's the the cadence that I'll be doing. Every Monday, uh

probably morning, I guess, like EST time or EDT time, uh there's going to be a new episode. Now, I chose Monday because obviously it's the start of the week, but also I didn't want to, I guess, release an episode on the same day as the weekly rollup that Banklist does, which happens on a on a Friday. So I think, you know, you got Friday for the roll up, you got Monday for for um the refuel. And I do believe there's a lot of overlap between the two shows. So I didn't, as I said, want to cannibalize uh the roll up or at least kind of like share the the spotlight with with the with the roll up there. I think it's great to have one on a Friday and a Monday. And of course there's lots of other podcasts, but I don't think you know, most of them are as Ethereum

focused as Bankless and the Daily Gray is. But yeah, I mean the reason I'm doing this uh as you guys have, you know, I guess like the people who have listened to me this year, I was like super burnt out. I stopped doing daily episodes. I went to like every other day and then it just became whenever I whenever I kind of felt like it. But since getting my I guess like health in check, since getting a lot of other things in my life in check, I feel a million times better than I did at the start of the year. It's honestly been a pretty transformative year for me personally. For those of you who followed along with my fitness journey, uh you'll know and I spoke about that on the last refuel. Uh, but there's also other things that I've I've kind of I

guess like changed in my life in order to give me I guess the structure I needed and to kind of fix a lot of the problems that I was suffering from with regards to I guess like my my mental health especially and burnout that I was constantly experiencing here. And just a teaser, I'm going to say I'm going to go through this at the end of the episode, but I'm actually going to reveal what my secret project is. A lot of you have tried to guess what it is. None of you have gotten close, but I've actually revealed um it during Dev Connect to people who asked, so I figured, well, it was going to come out sooner or later, so I may as well reveal it myself. That'll be at the end of the episode, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But yeah, all of that has kind of

culminated in me feeling like that now it's time to get back to a regular schedule for the refuel. And I I'm confident that I can maintain a weekly schedule. That's that's pretty pretty straightforward for me. The episodes will uh obviously be longer. They won't just be 30-minute episodes. I'm thinking an hour minimum cuz I'll be covering a week's worth of news. uh and everything that's happening during that week. So yeah, an hour minimum and if I go longer, I go longer. I'm not sticking to any kind of strict schedule with regards to time. Uh and also there may be day like weeks where I do more than one episode. Maybe there's something that I feel like I need to talk about or maybe I just feel like doing more than one. So really one a week is kind of like the regular cadence and the minimum that I'm

aiming for, but there may be more than that. Uh, and yeah, I mean like I, as I've said before, it's it's likely never going to be daily again, but I I think if I can if I can stick to one a week, that's uh that's better than what I'm doing now, which seems to be one like every 3 weeks or something like that. Um, and as I said, I'm not forcing myself to do this. I'm just in a really good position where I think that I can do this going forward. I've I guess like changed my relationship with crypto over the last year so that I'm in a much better position to essentially focus on what matters, ignore a lot of the noise. Uh, and I think 2026 is just going to be a massive year for Ethereum. So, I really want to be part of that. I really

want to be covering that and I really want to keep the education up because I think that when the daily way isn't a isn't frequent, education levels go down. there just isn't really anyone else doing what I do, especially doing it for free. And I kind of feel a duty to to keep my my, you know, to keep a regular cadence up so that people aren't being fudded uh by, I guess, like randoms on on crypto Twitter or aren't kind of like losing faith in Ethereum because they're believing all the crap that's being spread about it. So, I want to be that counterbalance. That's always been one of the major points of the show. So, I'm super excited to yeah to announce that today to all of you that I'll be going back to a regular cadence starting on the 5th of January. But as I

said, today's episode of the refill will be the last one of the year, but I'll finish off the episode later and talk a little bit about that there. Now, that's all the logistics out of the way. Let's get into the update. So, as I mentioned earlier, the Ethereum uh L1 gas limit is going to 60 million today. Basically, so I said shared this screenshot on Twitter earlier. It was creeping up. Uh this was from the Etherscan block explorer page or the sorry, the the block page where it shows you the blocks and the gas limit. It was at 50 millionish. And I actually saw this creeping up last night. So, as you guys know, we started at 45 million. People have been changing their their gas limits or updating to the Fusaka clients, which have a 60 million gas limit uh limit here. And you

can see just today on gas limit.pix, we reached over 50% uh basically. So, that means the gas limit is going to 60 million. It slowly goes up until we reach 60 million, but we're getting there pretty much today cuz at last I checked on EtherCan, it was 55 million. That was an hour ago. So, we'll be at 60 million in the next few hours. And that will represent a 100% total increase in the gas limit this year guys. So from 30 million to 60 million. This year we went we went 30 36 36 to 45 and now 45 to 60 million which is also the biggest increase that we've seen because the other two increases were 6 million and 9 million respectively. Now I've done a 15 million increase. So so definitely a bigger one there. Now, of course, as some of you know, the target for next

year and every year going forward, at least for the next 3 years, I would say the target is to increase by three times per year. So, go from 60 million to 180 million next year. And I think from what I've seen, the target is actually in Q1 to get this to 120 million. So, to double it again in Q1. Uh, and then if we can get to to 180 million, that will be a a 3x from 60 million. So, that's kind of the goal here. And then the year after that, we want to do a 3x again, which would get us to 540 million. Uh, and then after that, I think we may not do a 3x the following year because uh, as we get closer to Gigas, uh, we do need ZK VMs. Uh, and that's being worked on as well, which I'm going to talk

about. But hey guys, we're scaling. We're scaling the L1. It's 60 million before Faka goes live. And then with Fusaka going live, we're going to have uh, the, you know, Pas come along with blob increases. So we're scaling across both layer 1 and uh layer 2 here. And I think that you know given that we keep scaling L1 fees have stayed relatively low here which is really great to see. You know guay right now um according to the extension I have here the block native extension is 0.15 the the base fee. So it's quite low guys like uh and it's great because like the more we increase the gas limit uh the the lower that is likely to go and then you know we we expect demand to kind of like pick back up again. But it's kind of this balancing act of you know we um we

increase the gas limit demand comes in maybe pushes the the the the base fee up again and then uh we kind of increase the gas limit you know we reach capacity push base fee up again so on and so forth. That's the whole point of scaling right is to give more capacity for more transactions across the network. So yeah we're going to 60 million uh within I mean by the time you watch this episode we'll already be at 60 million because I'm recording this like 8 hours before I publish it or something like that. So yeah, we'll already be at 60 uh million uh there. But speaking of scaling as well, as I mentioned uh in Podas, we're going to have uh sorry, in Fusaka, we're going to have Podas, which is going to allow us to increase blobs even more than what they currently are. So current

blob target is six blobs per block with a max of nine. Now, we're basically at that target. As you can see from this chart from Hillby's blob blob dashboard, you can see the average is 5.7 and the blob's average over the last 3 days is 5.5. So, we're almost at capacity at six here. And I would say we're pretty much at capacity now. Um, and some of you may not be aware of this, but uh the blob increase is not going live with Fusaka straight away. So, what hap what's happening in Fusaka is we're introducing uh something called blob parameter only forks or BO forks. And I've discussed this on the refill before, but essentially what this is is that there's going to be uh in in kind of like the Faka uh client release, um there is uh the EIP, the blob parameter only for

there's a Unix time stamp in there that says, okay, once we reach this time on the network, we're going to increase the blob throughput. Now, the first two of these are happening very quickly after Fusaka. So, the first one is happening on December 9th, which will increase the blob target from 6 to 10. So almost a doubling there and uh that will happen a week after Fusaka goes live and then a month after that on January 7th we will once again increase the blob target from 10 to 14 and then after that I don't think any BO porks have been have been scheduled yet but I'm assuming that if everything goes well if the network is is stable and we're not seeing you know huge participation drop offs or anything like that in terms of um validators on the network then we're going to keep

increasing the blobs here. Now, in terms of like the theoretical limit of PIAS, I've seen different numbers thrown around. Um, and it's it's um good to keep in mind this is just like the first version of PIAS, which is called one-dimensional uh uh PIDAS. So, there's going to be other ones that are coming. Not sure on timelines there, but yeah, from what I've seen and what I've read, the theoretical blob target limit uh can be up to 72 blobs per block, which is a pretty substantial uh increase from here. But again, I I with these BPO forks, the whole reason to do them like this and the whole reason not to go straight to 72 blobs per per block is because of the fact that uh you know, if we were to go to 72 straight away, it's likely that a lot of the network would

fall off because they just don't have the capacity to uh to essentially uh you know, run the network with that many blobs on it. Uh and that's not to say that like they would fall over immediately because I doubt that we would fill up that blob space immediately but you yeah obviously as like the demand increases as more blobs is posted then yeah we would start to see uh kind of participation rates fall off there and that also goes into the whole discussion around what should be the minimum hardware requirements and the minimum bandwidth requirements for uh node operators on the network and then there's discussions that fall off of that about splitting up roles uh and and that's part of obviously the the wider lean Ethereum road map but also u um spinning up uh splitting off roles with regards to what a super node could

look like on the network where it won't I guess like uh compromise on Ethereum's decentralization but there'll be certain actors on the network that run more beefy hardware uh like provers for example I'm going to talk about the ZK proving stuff um soon as well but yeah so basically splitting this out so that we can still keep those lower powered um devices on the network but more so I guess like those I guess bandwidth constrained node operators on the network because and this is a discussion actually in in dev connect that I had with a lot of people and I've talked about it a lot in the refuel before but you can't buy more bandwidth if it's not available to you in certain places around the world right but you can buy pretty much like any hardware you want pretty much anywhere in the world um and

so so when you look at it from that lens if you say require 100 megabits per second upload bandwidth for a for a um a full node I guess like a full validator that processes everything well there's a lot of places around the world that doesn't have that uh you know I only recently got upgraded to that but I can't go higher than that if I want to upgrade more than that. Uh and and up. So so my internet connection at home is HFC. So it's hybrid fibered hybrid fiber coaxial which basically means I have fiber to the street and then coaxial into my home which li severely limits my upload bandwidth. So I have 2 GBs down but only 100 megabits up. So if I wanted to go to full fiber, I actually looked this up. It would cost me $20,000 uh to do so. That's Australian dollars. And it

would also take a long period of time, undetermined period of time. I've heard estimates of 6 to9 months uh from when you actually agree to it. But yeah, that's that's a huge kind of outlay for, you know, I'm not going to earn that back in rewards uh anytime soon, right? Like in terms of additional rewards on things uh and it would really just be kind of me doing it out of an altruistic endeavor. Now, I may end up doing it because I really want full fiber, but at the same time, like it's it's it's a big cost, right? And that's that's like me who can afford it. Like there's plenty of people out there who cannot afford that. That's a ridiculous amount of money and also they don't even they may not even have that option. So they literally doesn't matter how much money they have, they may not be able to get

better internet. So they'd have to move in order to get better internet which obviously is not an option for the vast majority of people. Whereas when it comes to hardware, I can buy the highestend hardware available in the world. Like I have no issue uh buying hardware. But bandwidth is a completely different story. So the main conversation is always always around bandwidth. And I think when it comes to hardware requirements, the general consensus from what I've seen is that we are okay with kicking off Raspberry Pies from the network at this point in time because it's 2025. You know, everyone has like a knuck or you can get a knuck uh which is very cheap a very cheap uh kind of piece of hardware to get and you can run a validator or many validators on there and run full nodes on there no issues. Uh, and it's it, you know, it's

fun to have like a Raspberry Pi as a full node on the network or a Rock 5B, which I still have. Uh, but my Rock 5B, its efficiency has been going down. It's at like 94% now because of the fact that we increased the blob since Spectra. Uh, there's more load on the network with the gas limit going up. So, my little device is not doing great, right? Like, you definitely I mean 94% it's going to go lower than that with with Faka going live once these BO forks happen. So, I'm expecting to have to like obviously sunset that as a as a kind of like um note operator there uh for I guess like the time being because as I guess some of you know, the long-term goal here is to split out all of these roles um when you're a node operator. to split out the

attestation kind of role of a validator into its own thing. So that if you're just attesting to to blocks or to slots uh essentially what what happens is that you can run that on very low powered devices and then on the other end of the spectrum you have super high powered devices that are provers on the network. So they they verify the ZK proofs uh and that is is is kind of like the heaviness of of the network here. Doing it like that means we don't lose this decentralization and we keep solo stakers, we keep home validators, home full node operators on the network and we keep them on the network with low powered devices as well which is which is obviously uh really cool there. So a lot of moving parts here to all of this.

Obviously when it comes to scaling Ethereum it is a multi-dimensional thing. It's not just brute forcing it by throwing lots of hardware at it. And that's why it's so interesting and that's why I guess like I love Ethereum is because of the fact that we're not giving up what makes Ethereum great in order to scale the network. Uh but yeah, there are some kind of conversations around that and around, you know, keeping, you know, are we going to keep Raspberry Pies on the network? Are we going to keep these other low power devices on the network? I'm personally okay with kicking these devices off because honestly if you do have enough to be a node operator on the network enough enough ETH uh uh then like I guess like a full kind of node operator maybe not something that's like uh I guess squad staking or rocket mini

poolool but if you yeah you yeah if you are a full kind of homestaker you have 32 ETH you probably have the money in order to buy some better hardware or you've got better hardware lying around that you can repurpose uh but bandwidth whole another story that's something else that's being worked on in mult in very different ways and there's many stuff you know many different things happening across the full stack there from client optimizations uh to I guess like splitting out the roles of validators and of node operators uh in order to uh further scale the network while not sacrificing uh decentralization there. So on that note as well with regards to scale uh there is an EIP that I didn't highlight um yet. I don't think I've highlighted this ever on the refill before but I should have because I recently became a

co-author of this EIP. So this is EIP 2780. Now this is an old EIP. If as you can tell by the number, uh it's actually quite old here. U it was first proposed in or sorry created in 2020. So yeah, very old like I think this is um November 2020 here I think if I'm reading the date correctly or it's uh se or it's July 2020. Either way, it's quite old, you know, 5 years old here. Um, so if you if you look at it from that perspective, uh, it's a wonder that it's taken this long to go into the network, but I think it's because of the that kind of rep prioritization that I'm talking about because this is an EIP that scales the L1 technically. So, what this EIP does is that it's going to lower the base cost of a bunch of

different transfers on the network uh, for both ETH and and tokens from from kind of like my understanding here. But what gets me excited about this EIP is that it's lowering the base uh ETH transfer cost from uh 21,000 gas down to 6,000 gas. So for those of you who don't know how this works, when we talk about like the gas limit on Ethereum L1, we're talking about like how much kind of gas, which is the res the the resource that we use to meter Ethereum blocks, how much kind of uh gas can be used or utilized in a block. So you know, at the beginning of the year it was 30 million gas. Now it's 60 million gas. So we can fit like double the amount of gas into a block, but every transaction type or like kind of op code on the network has

different gas costs associated with it. So for a basic ETH transfer, it's currently set to 21,000 gas. So if you were to divide that 60 kind of um that that 60 million by 21,000 gas uh and and let's say the only transactions happening on the network were ETH transfers, then you could say that Ethereum could do like hundreds of TPS, right? If you do the um the kind of division there. But as we know, the Ethereum network is used for much more than basic ETH transfers, uh token transfers, DeFi operations, all that sorts of stuff, which are generally heavier as well. Like DeFi transactions can take, you know, sometimes they can do like uh uh millions of of gas uh if you if you if you're doing a lot, if you're doing like what's called a complex transaction. But if we're talking about just like basic ETH

transfers here, um lowering this uh is is a good thing for a number of different reasons. I think the number one reason um and I think this is why I became a co-author on this EIP because I should mention that like Ben Adams, a Daily Guay regular who's also the champion of this EIP is the one that added me as a co-author here. And it's because he said that I informed a lot of his thinking around this EIP and why he wanted to be a champion for it. And that was because I've been saying on the refill for a while that ETH as an asset should be a first class citizen on on the Ethereum network and the cost for transferring ETH was too high. I believed this for a long time now.

21,000 gas may not seem like much, but it's too high for a basic ETH transfer. Like ETH is the only decentralized asset on Ethereum and will always be that and obviously is the best asset on Ethereum. So, we should make it uh the best asset on Ethereum by lowering the cost to transfer it. So, lowering this cost from 21,000 to 6,000 is a 71.4% cost reduction. So, that's a pretty substantial cost reduction here, guys. But, it's not just ETH that's being reduced here. Now, um, Ben actually explained this in the Daily Grade Discord channel. So, he said the beauty of it is that this doesn't specifically target ETH, but it just reduces the base cost of all transactions. Um, but since the base cost is 100% of an ETH transfer, it in effect improves ETH much

more than any other ERC20. So, essentially what happens is that ARC20 transfers are also going to get cheaper. But because as as as kind of like I said here because uh sorry as Ben said here uh because 100% of the cost of an ETH transfer is that B base transfer cost or that base cost then ETH is going to benefit the most here. So um he he he put two more points here about the justification for this. He said it improves the moneyiness of ETH versus other tokens. And that's another thing I've spoken about on the refuel. Uh the goal being that people think of ETH for payments for low ticket items rather than just high ticket items like NFTTS.

And if you are transferring ETH, half of the transaction is already being done via charging for gas and the other half to an externally owned account doesn't invoke the EVM or load contract. So it's much lighter. Um, so if you do create an account, there is currently an anomaly where if you do it via a call, you get charged 26,000 gas. If you do it by transaction, you don't get charged anything. So this corrects that anomaly, bringing down the base cost and charges if uh I if you create. So essentially like kind of playing I guess like this used to be called gas golfing which is essentially uh kind trying to optimize your gas usage here and that was in the context of using the network but this is kind of like gas golfing for changing the the actual cost in protocol. Now as far as I know this EIP is going to be

going into Glamsterdam. Uh it doesn't seem to be controversial at all. It is a scalability increase um while also not over overloading the network cuz it's basically as I said like doing this kind of gas golfing thing here. Um, so essentially shuffling around things uh here, which which is great to see. But yeah, I mean this is the first EIP that I'm I I guess a co-author on. And if it does make it into Glamsterdam, which I think it will, it technically makes me a core developer. So huge shout out to Ben Adams for doing this here. I actually originally kind of hesitated. I'm just like to him like, oh, if you feel like you should add me to it, then then that's cool. But then he kind of justified it to He's like, you know, you you a lot of the kind of like thinking,

a lot of the reason he went and became a champion for this old EIP now is because a lot of the stuff I said on the refuel. So that's cool that core devs are being influenced by by kind of what I say on here. And and just for context, Ben works on Nethermind. Uh and as I said, he's a very active member of the Daily Discord community. He's always there. He's great to chat to. I saw him in Dev Connect. It was it's always great catching up with him there. Uh but yeah, so by come Amsterdam, uh I'll be I'll be a core developer, which is which is great because it's funny. Um you know, I used to do ETHUB with Eric uh Connor, you guys will remember. And Eric became a co-author of EIP1559, the gas burning EIP. So technically, he's a core developer. So I always felt a little bit

left out on that. I was like, "Oh, okay. He's a core developer. Maybe I can become a core developer one day." I never really tried to because obviously like I'm not. Um, but technically getting an EIP into the network and having your name as being kind of a co-author there makes you a a core developer on on some kind of level. So, I'm I'm pretty happy about that. That's pretty cool. Uh, so so yeah, but regardless of of that, like regardless of of my personal involvement in this, just having this go in is a huge unlock, guys. Like making ETH transfers super cheap on the network is great. And obviously like by the time that we even get like this EIP into the network as glam as part of Glamsterdam, we should actually be at 120 million gas limit by that point. So we we've scaled even more

by that point, right? So yeah, anyway, you can go check out this EIP for yourself if you want more information about this. I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so there. All right. All right. So, as I mentioned earlier, the main theme I would say of Dev Connect or at least one of the main themes was L1 scaling and in particular scaling via ZK. Now, obviously ZK is much more than just the L1. It applies to L2s. It applies to privacy, right? It's much more than just L1 scaling here. But the reason why it's such a big deal is because the amount of progress being made on ZK is staggering, guys.

Like, it's absolutely crazy. And just to give you some context here, so Justin Drake tweeted this out uh what was it like 5 days ago where he said two 5090s, so Nvidia GPUs 5090s now prove every L1 EVM block. Okay, so let me contextualize why this is insane. And this is being done by the ZKYNC air bender team, by the way. So just awesome to see like an L2 team uh kind of um uh uh doing this here. And they've been around for a while. I love ZKYNC. um should disclose I'm an investor in them as well. Uh but I want to kind of contextualize why this is insane. So kind of like I guess go back a year. We were at I think 64 or

128 GPU clusters. So you would need 64 I think at the time was like 4090s or 128 490s to prove every L1 EVM block, right? That's ridicul a ridiculous amount of GPUs. No home consumer, no regular person has that many GPUs. If you do have that many, you're obviously setting up like an operation. Uh whether I guess it was mining back in the day when Ethereum was proof of work or obviously as as a provier or you're just a team trying to test out your kind of your kind of I guess like software by doing this. Now, fast forward to today. You have just two 5090s, which is very accessible to consumers. Yes, they're expensive GPUs, right? But they're still very accessible to consumers to prove

every L1 EVM block. And I I think even 3 months ago it was much more than that. It was like 24 GPUs or something crazy like that. So yeah, fast forward to now we we're at two, guys. Two. That's insane. That's actually insane. Like I I actually can't describe how insane that is. is like I've given you the context but like going from a year ago 128 down to two today and then thinking okay what this what what is this going to look like in 3 months 6 months 12 months like are we going to get to the point where we can do this on lower powered GPUs so not 5090s maybe like a 5070 or 5060 at only one that makes it purely consumer and the reason why this is needed and

the reason why we've wanted to bring down proving costs and proving in time. Not only so that we can prove every L1 EVM block, cuz as you guys know, an L1 EVM uh slot is 12 seconds. So, you need to be able to do it in 12 seconds or less, which is what's happening here. But also, we want to reduce slot time. So, we need to get that down to like 8 seconds or less and eventually like 6 and 4 seconds or less, which I think will happen. But but getting the cost down to the point where a regular home kind of uh I guess like uh consumer or home kind of like verifier can do this on their own hardware is really important to decentralization and livveness of proving because proving is a one of trust assumption essentially it's the same as like an L2 with a

sequencer right you only need one honest party to publish these things and you're good but with that comes the caveat of livveness and decentralization and obviously censorship resistance being weaker. So if you only had like one prover for example, just just one prover on the entire network submitting the proofs, then that's not very decentralized. Even though it's a one of end trust assumption, they can't really do anything malicious. Uh it's still not very decentralized and it also sucks for livveness cuz what happens when this prover goes offline? Well, then they're not proving any blocks. The stuff starts breaking, right? So we want to bring that cost down as much as possible so that we can have tens, hundreds, thousands potentially of provers across the network so that the livveness becomes just as strong as it is today with the node operator set that we have

now. Of course with that comes better censorship resistance as well because there probably is some way to kind of censor not just by not doing the I guess like the proof but also potentially by censoring inner proof. I'm not an expert on this, so there may not be a way to do this, but I think there is. Maybe if you kind of like partner up with a builder or something like there there are definite risks here, but I think livveness is the is the biggest one, of course. So, even if you had only like tens of people doing this, that's probably good enough. But to get to that point, you would definitely want um tens of people uh doing this on consumer grade hardware, right? Instead of really highowered hardware. So, we're we've gotten to that point. Like I I would say as I said like two 5090 GPUs is already

at that point. We're going to get to one. Then we're going to get to weaker GPUs than that. 5090 is obviously the highest end right now. Um and then we're going to get even even weaker than that. And it's actually good as well from I guess the lens of the fact that as you guys know currently hardware is like extremely expensive especially like RAM for example u because of AI. So, we're competing with AI here, but at the same time, we're only competing with AI in so far as we uh you know, as kind of it's relatively expensive today, but with the progress that we're making here, it's going to become just so much more cheaper, right? Uh so, yeah, it's just just crazy. And you can actually keep track of all of this on eroofs.org. So you can go to this website which has all

of the I guess like metrics around this all of the provers cuz it's not just like the ZK sync air bender air bender team there are actually plenty of other teams working on this and you can actually go to the teams page and see there's there's tons of teams right there's like zk cloud the zisk matalab matalabs which is the zkync one axiom brevis zilkworm succinct so on and so forth but you can see here that like the average proving time for most of them is still above 12 seconds but that's going to come ZK Cloud seems to be the current leader with average proving time of 9.6 seconds and a cost per proof of 0.08.

That's quite cheap, but obviously if you consider that we have like a lot of blocks per day, I actually don't know how many blocks we uh sorry, I should say slots per day we have. It's like in the thousands somewhere. But if I was to do like a a quick kind of um quick math on this, we have five slots per minute. And then we have I'm just doing the the the the math here on this because it's um I want to work this out. That's why I can give you a good accurate here, a good good estimate here. So, I think if I'm if I've done my math correctly, we have 7200 slots per day. So, if we times that by 0.08, it would cost $576 per day uh to prove all of the blocks. So, obviously, like if you're a prover, that's that's still

very expensive. And that's why I said before, it's not just the proving times, it's also getting the cost down per proof. And there's various different ways to do this. It's all very complex, you know, cryptography stuff that I don't understand. if you were to like dive deeper into it. But from a high level, I understand that obviously cost is is is a big thing here. And you can actually see that like ZK Cloud's actually one of the more expensive ones. Mata Labs has got this cost down to uh you know, basically a half a cent. Um and that brings it down to only $30 a day. Uh but the average proving time is still 13.7 seconds. So it's not 12 seconds yet. And also the average proving time. So this is this is actually the main issue with this sort of stuff is that the average proving

time is fine, but like you need every single L1 EVM block to be um proved within 12 seconds or less. Uh, and I guess like you're never going to get 100% coverage, but you want like 99.9% coverage because of the fact that if it's at like say say you're able to prove only 90% of them in 12 seconds or less, that means that you're going to miss 10% of blocks per day or 10% of slots per day. So, you need that to be uh 99% under 12 seconds. And then if you miss a couple, it's not a big deal. Obviously, like one missing 1% per day, I mean, that's that's still a pretty big deal. So, but like it's not as big a deal as 10%. And then we can get that down even further here. But if you want to keep track of all of that, you can on

this website, which I'll add a link in the YouTube description uh for you to check out below. But as I said, guys, like most of this, I guess like most of these improvements have happened really in the last kind of I would say 6 months honestly. Like you can see on the chart here, the the latency has just dropped off a cliff. Like this was in October. At the end of October, the um I guess average proving time was like 5 minutes. Now today, it's 13.3 seconds. Like what? That's like a month, right? Like that's that's a month. Like just think what this is going to be like in another month or another 3 months or another 6 months. We're going to get those costs down to negligible. We're going to get those times down to 12 seconds or less

for 99.9% of of blocks here of Sautia. And this will be like a long time before we actually get this on the network, right? Live on the network because there is actually multiple ways of doing this. Um Justin Drake showed a demo at the ETH proof day, ETH proof proof stay of doing this on mainet basically submitting a proof without relying on execution layer clients. So just to the consensus layer clients, but to actually become part of the core protocol and to do like the inrine ZKVM and things like that, that's a longer term thing. So by the point by that point when we get to that point this stuff is going to be so incredibly cheap so incredibly fast to prove and doing it on like the cheapest maybe some of the cheapest consumer hardware that you can get that Ethereum is going to

scale so massively we won't even know what hit Ethereum and that that's actually another thing that I haven't even discussed yet like what this is actually like what does this do in practice for the network guys like I was talking earlier about a 60 million gas limit and then 3xing that to 180 million that's fine like that's cool and then rexing 3xing that again to 540 million. Sure, huge improvements there. Like massive improvements, right? Like if we if we say we started at 30 million and then in like 2 years we're at we're at 540 million, that's an almost 20x increase there. But like where we're going, we're going much further than that. Justin Drake reckons we can get to a gigas per second. Okay, that's not a gigas. That's not like I guess like a 1 billion gas limit on uh for a 12-cond

slot. That's that's per second. So if I'm doing if I'm understanding this correctly and if Justin Drake gets what he wants, he's always very aggressive about this, one gigas per second would translate to a 12 billion gas limit. So if we do 12 billion divided by where we started at 30 million, right, we get a uh 400x increase uh and we can probably push it further than that. So that's a 400x increase in scale. So just I mean obviously it's not going to be exactly 400x there's going to be differences here but just like think about what that does for capacity of the network right now the Ethereum network does what like layer one I should say it does you know

I guess like 15 20 TPS on a good day right that's that's nothing you know where we're going we're going 10,000 plus TPS on L1 and then couple that with blob scaling and with Pas and and improvements to Pas and beyond air. We're going to millions of TPS on the L2s, right? And and not just the blob L2s, but also like the offchain DA L2s. So, I do think, you know, with the advancements happening in ZK and the way the Ethereum protocol is being architected, there is a real chance we can get to 100,000 TPS on L1, which is just disgusting when you think about it.

and discussing in a good way where we're today we're at like 20 and in let's say 5 years or less like I'm just saying 5 years because it's probably going to take a while for this to roll out but let's just say 5 years or less maybe like 3 years uh or uh 3 to 5 years let's just let's just give that estimate it's always hard to estimate these things but let's say 3 to 5 years maybe even less than that given the progress that's happening right now but let's just say that for now we could be at 10,000 20,000 30,000 TPS when today we're at 20 at 10,000 TPS PS, guys, that is a 500x increase, right, to what we are today if we if we're saying we do 20 TPS today.

And the real cherry on top here is that we would would we would do this without sacrificing Ethereum's decentralization at all. We're not doing what the other chains are doing. And this is something that was thought to be impossible. This is the trillemma that has been spoken about for a long time that Vitalik wrote about all those years ago. And Ethereum may just be able to break that trillemma. And that's just L1. We still have the L2s. They still the L2s still serve a purpose and a and a great important purpose. Not just for scaling, but also for customizability for different organizations to come in and say, "I want to make my own chain. Do what is an L2 on Ethereum. Ethereum gives me what I need." And away we go.

Right. Privacy as well. Big thing. Obviously, Aztec is getting a lot of attention recently because they're doing a a token sale. But their tech is real. Should disclose. I'm an investor in Aztec from like four years ago uh in one of their funding rounds there. But their tech is real. It works. They And honestly, I'm impressed by how much they prioritizing decentralization as well because their network only launched when they went to 500 sequences, which is really really cool. Like that's that's insane when you think about it. But just all of this from like a high level, taking all of this together, we're we really are in the scalability era of Ethereum. And I I think I I talked about this last year a lot on the refill where I said that 2025 and onwards is going to be the scalability era for Ethereum, the

real one. Cuz we had the L2s go live before then, but I would say most of them were like proof of concepts. We still need a lot of them to move towards stage two, but we're kind of getting to the point now if you go to L2B. Um, you're seeing like which ones are obviously going to be dominant into the future. Like arbitr definitely base definitely uh OP mainet is still there. I I think OP main is going to keep losing market share to be honest because uh you know I guess like Bass has taken that in terms of like the OP ecosystem, but you also you also have new newer L2s like LAR which is just killing it right now. The fact that they're using blobs as a per deck is crazy to me. Like they're killing it. They're doing like from from what I can tell they're

they're doing like um uh they're doing better than than the other per deckes out there like Hyperlid and and others out there. And this is an as an L2 cuz as you guys know, Hyperlid is an L1. So, it's great to see to see that. And then there's there's other L2s that are still growing like Starket, Lana, ZKYNC, and so on and so forth which you can check out. But yeah, we've really gotten to the point now where I think we're seeing which ones work, which ones don't, where we're kind of um uh uh I guess like um uh getting some some key players, which is which is great. So yeah, from from kind of like last year into this year and and I guess like for the next 5 years, it really is the great scalability era of of Ethereum. And I really do think this is going to reflect

in uh Ethereum market share. Uh which I mean Ethereum already dominates market share. It's got like 10 times the TVL of the next L1, which I believe is Salana. Uh, and then it has like way more stable coins than any other chain, which is obviously important. Real world assets. It has more, I guess, like organizations companies enterprises building on Ethereum than any other chain out there. And it's going to continue, of course, but then we've got like the scaling that's happening. But then as I I do really think this is going to reflect in the price. Um, I know that this year has been like a pretty I guess like it's a pretty big yo-yo for ETH this year, right? If you see what ETH started the year at, I'm going to bring up a chart uh on on my other screen here. you won't be able to

see it, but like the the yo-yo that Ether's gone through this year has been quite insane. So, if you if you say at the start of the year, uh if you look at the the chart here, I'm just looking at it here, we started at 3,400, we went down to 1,400, right? Like you guys remember that period, right? The first kind of 3 4 months of 2025. We're not fun for Ethereum. Then from there, we went right back up to like 5K, technically a new all-time high in August. And now since then, obviously we've come back down and we bottomed at around 2,600. Well, so far we've bottomed at about 2,600. We'll see.

We'll see if that really is the bottom, right? Um but it looks like the market wants to go up. I don't know. But as I said, like I think longer term, I I really do think this is going to start reflecting in the price because if there's one thing that you can point to Ethereum um doing is shipping and shipping regularly and shipping upgrades that actually improve the network in a substantial way. And I think the time it was just a coincidence because we launched Pectra in April and that's when ETH bottom this year. I think that was a coincidence and it may be another another coincidence now where we're launching for Saka and maybe the ETH price bottoms and where it is now. But I do still believe that ETH is so heavily undervalued. I do believe that it's a beach ball underwater. I do think that

there's obviously been like a lot of selling to drive ETH down u in in price especially because you know there's been a lot of buying so there must be a lot of selling to to offset that because the DATs like um Tom Lee for example still buying a lot of ETH but I think that I've said this before where essentially we're in a period where a lot of like the OG investors of both Bitcoin and ETH are offloading a lot of ETH and I know this from speaking to friends as well. They've been in it for a long time. Some of them 10 years, right? Some of them since the ICO and they're thinking to themselves, well, this is a good time to be offloading, right? Like, uh, you know, they're not bearish on ETH, but like, hey, they've made so much money, they've taken some off the table. And

there's these obviously like big players that are happy to buy this ETH off them, so why wouldn't they take that opportunity? The same is true for Bitcoin as well. We've seen this. We've seen like a lot of ancient wallets wake up and and start selling these assets. But, I don't think that's bearish for these assets. I think that's a natural kind of course of things where as long as you have new buyers stepping in, even if the price goes down temporarily, as long as you have new sets of buyers stepping in, long-term, it should be net positive for the price. And we do. We have new sets of buyers. We have the ETFs, right? We have the DAT companies. I know some of them have sold some of their ETH recently uh in order to do like share buybacks. I they're the smaller ones. Like I don't actually

think that that that's that big of a deal. I think that the the two biggest a bit mine and sharp link I don't think they're going to be selling any ETH and Sharink is actually going to be providing a lot more value to Ethereum because they're using their ETH within it obviously closely tied to consensus and Lana and Bitmine is staking all of their ETH as well or sorry sharpling is taking staking all the ETH bit mine plans to so when you do that you're not you know you're not planning to sell sell sell ETH here so I think when you look at it from from that perspective it's been a healthy churn of like OG investors in ETH in BTC to newer investors And I think that churn uh at this point is mostly over. I think that uh you know if you've wanted to sell,

you've sold this year. And I think that at the risk of of kind of like cursing it and then we go down further from here, I do feel very optimistic about you finding more and more new sets of buyers and also these new sets of buyers buying based on fundamentals actually seeing the fact that yes, Ethereum has shipped. Yes, it keeps growing. Ethereum is where all the activity is happening and uh scaling is is really in not an issue anymore. We know how we're going to scale and we're doing it. We're doing it in in various different ways from blobs to gas limit increases to ZK to L2s doing their own stuff. Like there's tons happening on the scaling front here guys. So yeah, I I do think that going forward that's going to be positive for price as well. But in saying all that,

not investment advice as per usual, right? Uh you should take profits when you need to take profits for yourself. You should always worry about yourself there and you should not be like kind of like buying and selling ETH based on anything that I say on the show. I've always said that to you guys. I'm perm I'm a permabull. Permabulls and perma bears. It's the same thing. Like we're going to be wrong sometimes and right other times. Uh I'm I I personally don't play the market. No matter what it is, whether it's ETH or other assets, I don't care about playing the market. And I take profits when honestly a lot of the time when I've taken profits, uh it's because I think something's overvalued. I mean, as you guys know, I haven't sold ETH, but like other things that I've sold, I thought they were

overvalued. I think a lot of alts, honestly, overvalued. I think a lot of them aren't shouldn't be worth what they're worth. I think a lot of them end up opening like when they first start trading, opening at a ridiculous market cap, and then that has to come down over time. And there are bargains out there. If you're a risk taker, there's plenty of bargains out there. I'm not going to tell you what those bargains are. You have to find that out for yourself. As per usual, not going to give investment advice, but there are. And I think there's still opportunity to be had. And I know that this year has been quite funny cuz stocks have gone nuts. Gold went nuts and it sucked a lot of the capital out of crypto, but just like in any market cycles, right? It's all cycles. And I'm not talking about the

four-year cycle. I'm talking about market cycles generally. Things work in cycles. So if the AI stuff cools down, if gold cools down, if stocks cool down generally, then maybe crypto becomes appealing again because you look at crypto and you think, "Wow, crypto hasn't really done much. There's all these assets that are like on the floor. maybe I'll scoop them up and take, you know, I'm happy kind of buying these things. I'm happy taking this risk uh because I feel like I'm buying at a at a discount or at bargain prices. I don't feel like I'm buying into a bubble because obviously right now crypto is definitely not in a bubble. Like there if anyone's telling you that crypto's in a bubble, they're insane, right? Uh but then obviously there's the other side of things where people think that 2026 is going to be a bearish year, four year

cycle, all that. I'm not going to guarantee that that won't happen, but you guys know my view on the four-ear cycle. you know that I don't believe in that stuff anymore. Uh and you you know that I I I definitely think that with these new sets of buyers coming in, they're going to be more fundamental sensitive than the traditional buyers that we had cuz retail definitely doesn't really care much about fundamentals for the most part. They definitely are the more DJing crowd, they're not here, guys, right now. Like they're not here and they haven't been here for a while. So I do think that these institutional buyers, these kind of like more trady buyers, yes, there's some DJing in them. Yes, some of them are stupid, right? But for the most part, I think they're more sophisticated buyers. So that's that's all going to be

going to be great there. But anyway, enough on the markets. Last few things to get through for today's episode. So um yeah, this is the ZK stuff that I was talking about. I basically tweeted out the ETH proofs website and I said I don't think people are ready for um what's happening with ZK and they're not ready for Ethereum to outscale every other chain while still being the most decentralized network on the planet. That's the key here. We don't just want to outscale every other chain. we want to do it while maintaining Ethereum's core most important property which is decentralization. Like I I I think like that is the most important property. And I think if you were to just drill down a little bit into that and I guess like what is kind of like the ying to decentralization's yang is censorship resistance. They go hand in hand. So as

long as we can keep Ethereum censorship resistant because we've kept Ethereum decentralized and then we can scale this to the world, we win. We win in every timeline you look at, we win. I know it's taken a long time to get here, but that's that's what happens when you try to preserve decentralization. You can't take shortcuts. You have to take the long road. And I'm glad that we did because now Ethereum is in a phenomenal position to capture that. And we also have the L2s which capture that even more. Like this is crazy like the the the I guess like the foresight that the Ethereum researchers and developers have had has really paid off in in a big way. Uh here.

All right. So, the ETH Panda Ops team introduced a new website called The Lab. Now, I think they had like a a similar thing to this uh I guess like a few months ago, but this is a new website that they've they've kind of put out there which allows you to keep track of the current, I guess, status of the network. Now, what's really cool about this is that as you can see on my screen here, you can see what's happening on the network per slot. So, uh I guess like as you guys know, cuz I've talked about this before, a slot on Ethereum is 12 seconds. And in that slot there's a bunch of different things happening. So a block is prop is kind of like built within that slot. 4 seconds of the of those 12 seconds is that and then a attestation's come in from the 4se

secondond mark to the 8second mark and then everything's aggregated from the 8 to 12 second mark and then a slot is proposed on the network by a validator here. Now you can see this happening in real time. You can see the block coming in right and then there's attestations coming in and then there's aggregations coming in from there. Uh and then the slot is proposed here. Now I believe some of this stuff happens in in parallel as well. It's not like there just kind of like strictly on those kind of 4se secondond intervals there. Uh but you can see it all happening in real time here. And then you can see the lagards coming in the the lagard testers coming in. It's probably my rock 5B node just the testing really late by the way because that thing's so underpowered now. But that's that's kind of like um

what you can see on this page. Now you can go to the different kind of pages here. You can see per epic what's happening. You can see per slot what's happening. You can see the entities on the network here. So you can see uh entities broken down by like you know Binance, Solo Stakers, Unknown, Ether, Coinbase and see how many validators they have. Uh they probably have more than this but this is just what the lab is seeing. Uh and then you can see uh uh uh information about the forks on Ethereum. So this is the next upgrade. This is just for the consensus layer. By the way, guys, as you guys know, the um names of forks are amalgamations of the consensus layer upgrade name and the execution layer upgrade name. The consensus layer upgrade name is Fulu and that's why it's like Faka because uh the

um the execution layer one is Osaka, I believe. So like becomes Faka. Uh so Fulu is the next upgrade going live. As you can see, there's a countdown here in 7 days, 19 hours, and 38 minutes. I don't know if I'm actually going to be on the Fusaka live stream now, now that I think about it, because there is a Fusaka live stream happening, but I don't know if that's going to be happening when I'm asleep. Uh I'm I'm going to uh Google this quickly so I can see Faka live. Uh Faka live stream. Uh no, I'm not I'm not getting any kind of results here in a time that uh that I know. It's 8:00 p.m. UTC. So, what's the current UTC for me? It's 12:11 a.m. 12 hours. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to

be on that live stream. I may be uh if I'm if I'm doing the time conversion right, but there will obviously will be a live stream uh for that there. Uh but yeah, so there's that page there. And then there's, you know, contributors page, geographical checklist, so on and so forth. You can see who's contributing publicly. You can run this, you can run contributor, which is the software alongside your beacon node to share valuable network data um which you can do on this page. And there's a bunch of other stuff uh stuff kind of here like fork readiness and so on and so forth. So yeah, this isn't a full view of the network by the way guys. This is um definitely from from my understanding uh of view of the network based on who's contributing their data to this. Um uh like I am I am part of this. I'm not

going to dox like like like um my validators here or anything like that, but I am definitely part of this. But this is actually and the reason why I bring this side up is not just because it's cool, but this is actually informing a lot of the decisions around core development because as I was talking about earlier, the when upgrading the network in terms of like the gas limit and also the blobs especially, we always need to know okay like how much can we push this thing before the network starts becoming unstable. And that's what the lab is trying to do here. or at least one of their roles is essentially tell the core developers, hey, this is safe to do based on the data that we're seeing because it's not going to kill the network if you do it this way. And this is very valuable. We've not had

something like this for I guess like majority of Ethereum's life. And this means that we can keep making data informed decisions on the gas limit on the um on on the blob increases so that we can scale while not you know compromising any decentralization but also scale while not hurting the network because that's always a risk right that's always something core developers worried about and that's why the gas limit stayed at 30 million for so long I think we were there for like 3 or 4 years before we started upgrading is because we just didn't have good data on what what was happening here and the core devs would basically default to being extremely conservative, which is actually like a fine default to have because that's what you want. But, you know, in saying that, we want to be able to scale the network. We want to be a be

able to improve the network while also preserving decentralization while also preserving that 100% uptime that Ethereum has cuz that is very important especially for institutions. So, yeah. Anyway, you can go check out this website for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, last up here was a big announcement out of uh Dev Connect. So as you guys know interoperability is one of the core roadmap items of Ethereum uh that the EF is spearheading here. So number one is scale L1. Number two is scale the blobs. Number three is fix the user experience of Ethereum which includes interoperability. Now the what was announced at the at DevCon connect was something called the Ethereum interoperability layer which is which has the goals of making Ethereum feel

like one chain. So you have oneclick swap across the different L2s, use funds from anywhere, no bridges, no network switching, same security and sensorship resistance. Now there's not too much information on this just yet. Uh but this is an effort that's being spearheaded by the EF, which is really important because the EF works as a really nice shelling point. So if this becomes the I guess like default interoperability layer which is going to be a public good. It's not going to be uh it's not going to have a token on or anything like that because the EF is doing it then this will solve the interropability issues in a really elegant way. So I will keep an eye on this. I'll keep you guys updated on this. If you have more information about this that maybe I've missed feel free to share it in the Daily Grade Discord

channel. But yeah, I thought that was just worth bringing up with you guys because that's the last thing I think besides scale. The last thing is to kind of I guess make sure that it all feels like one Ethereum chain between the different L2s and Ethereum L1. If we can fix that, then we we win even harder. Like I I think that's the last kind of barrier there in terms of like a UX kind of thing or a major UX thing. Obviously, there's other UX barriers, but that's a major one. And if we can fix that, then we're on a really nice track there. But uh but yeah, anyway, that's going to be it for all the Ethereum related news.

Now, I did tease earlier that I'm going to reveal what my what my special project is, and I said I was going to reveal this when I was like 80% done with it, but I I I'm I'm about 50% done with it right now. Um, so yeah, first a little bit of context. I'm going to I'm going to keep you guys hanging for just another minute here. So, a little bit of context. I was saying earlier about how I've kind of used this year to get my kind of I guess like life maybe not like back on track, but like in order, so to speak. So, where I feel a lot more comfortable, stop burning myself out, and feel a lot better about myself. Now, that started with my fitness kind of routine, which has been amazing this year, and I talked about that at length

on the last refill episode. You can go check that out if you want. I'm not going to rehash it here. Uh, but um, you know, as some of you are are aware, because I mentioned it last time, I do that in the morning. So, my mornings are dedicated now to fitness. I'll get up. I'll check some things on on you know Twitter on Discord while eating my breakfast. Then I'll do my fitness routine uh which goes into lunch and then after lunch I'll work on my uh my kind of new project here. So my new project is taking up my afternoons. Uh so I guess like I work for maybe like 3 4 hours on it a day. It's taking up my afternoons. Uh and then uh my night is basically like free to do whatever I want. Spend time with with the fiance obviously have dinner. Maybe do some

more Ethereum related stuff. maybe record a refuel at at uh you know at night or something like that. Uh going forward obviously in the new year I'll be doing them every week. So on the on the Monday I may do it in the afternoon. I may do it at night. I don't know. But that's like the main the three main things I'm focusing on right now in my life. Uh and it's been really great because for a long time I was suffering from a lack of kind of purpose. You know Ethereum is and and educating in a daily way is definitely a purpose for me. But I feel like I've kind of conquered it. I feel like I spent so long in this industry. I've kind of done everything that I wanted to do h in this industry and now I'm in like maintenance mode.

And maintenance mode for me means that I'm doing the daily. I'm spending time kind of keeping on top of things. I'm, you know, spending time in the in Discord channel with you guys, talking to you and just like generally keeping up to date with things, but not trying to like go to the next level because I feel like for me there is no next level. I'm pretty much content with where I am with Ethereum. But with that brings kind of I guess like the question of what am I going to do next? And that's what I've been kind of I guess dealing with for years now. I would say at least the better part of 3 years I've been dealing with this I guess like dread you could call it of am I going to do anything else? Am I going to find anything else

that captures my attention like Ethereum did? Is there something else that I can challenge myself with? Fitness has become one of those things which has been great but I needed something more than that. I needed something for my brain. Like fitness is is definitely like physical obviously mostly physical. does have a mental uh uh component to it, but it's mostly physical and that I feel like I, you know, I'm on a really great track there. I'm not anywhere near like I I guess like what you would call maintenance in fitness yet, but I'm on a really good track to getting to what my goals are. And I've discussed these goals before. I want to be, you know, at least 50 15% body fat. I want to look really kind of athletic, really kind of um I guess like ripped for a better word, right? Grow my muscles, things

like that. Um uh so that's what I'm kind of going towards. And I think I can achieve that within the next year. Uh because I've been really strict with it. I'm in a really good routine. I have the time to dedicate to it. But there was still that that last thing missing that I felt was missing. I felt that piece was missing for a long time. And I figured out kind of what that was going to be a few months ago, but I didn't start on the project until a month ago. So what this project is, and here's the grand reveal, right? I've kept you guys hanging for long enough. It's something completely different to crypto. It's something, as I said, that none of you guessed in the Discord channel, which is funny because I I like seeing all the guesses. But what it is is I'm writing a

fiction novel. So, yeah, that's that's what it is. I'm writing a fiction novel, a story. I've wanted to write this for quite a while now. I actually had the idea for the story a while ago. Um, but I know nothing about writing, right? Like, I don't know anything about writing a fiction novel. I've written non-fiction things a lot obviously with my newsletters that I used to do for the Daily Way newsletter. But on Twitter, I write a lot of uh posts and things like that. I mean, I write a lot, right? But it's all non-fiction. It's all just very casual. Whereas writing fiction is a completely different ballgame. I start from zero and I have to teach myself everything. Uh and what I'm writing, it's not fantasy. Uh fantasy is I would say the hardest genre to write. So definitely if you go into fantasy as a

first-time writer, you're I wouldn't say you're setting yourself up for failure, but you're like you're setting yourself up for a really hard time. So, my story is I would say closest to sci-fi. It's not like hard sci-fi or anything like that. There's no aliens. U but it's closest to to sci-fi. And I'm not going to tell you guys what it is because honestly, I'm like 50% through the first draft. That's what I mean by like being being halfway through or 50% through what I what I want here. And the first draft I wouldn't let anyone read. It's it's pretty it's pretty bad in terms of like there's plot holes everywhere cuz I keep thinking of new story items to add as I keep writing. Um, and the grammar is like terrible because I don't really care about that. Like getting the first draft out is all about just getting the

bare bones kind of thing on paper. And that's what I've done. So, I'm aiming for a 100,000 words, which is the average length of a novel. I'm at about 50,000 words today. And I want to get this done by Christmas. Uh, because it's quite easy for me to write this um because I if I can average 2,000 or a bit more than that, words per day until Christmas for the next 30 days, I will get to 100,000 words. And I've been able to average that. Honestly, some days I write less than others. It was funny. On the plane to Dev Connect, I ended up writing 6,000 words. So that's three days worth. But while I was at Dev Connect, I wasn't really writing anything cuz I didn't have the time to.

So I was So you can see how the average moves there. But if as long as I can average 2,000 a day, I think I'll hit that that milestone by Christmas. And that's a deadline that I've put in for myself. And that's only the first draft cuz then I then for the second draft, I have to go back and obviously edit everything, fix the plot holes, so on and so forth. But that's what I've been focused on. Uh, and that's what I that's my new project uh there guys. But I'm not ready to share any details about the story. I I did share some of them with people that I um spoke to in at DevConnect. But if I shared too much, it like ends up spoiling it and I don't want to spoil the story because it's in my opinion a really cool story. There's

a lot of mystery to it and and saying really anything about it ends up spoiling something or um because it's it's just me saying it, right? Like it's hard for me to describe my story without spoiling things. Uh but that's what I've been I've been working on there. And it honestly feels amazing. I feel the most excited about this that I fel that I've felt in a long time about anything really. It's really working my brain. It's making me think. As I said, I'm starting from zero, so I have to learn everything myself. It feels awesome learning something completely new that I have no experience in at all. Um, and it really does feel like that thing that I've been searching for for the last 3 years to focus my attention and energy on something new. And it feels it feels great. And that's why I've been saying

that I am in a really good place now. And I'm in such a good place that I feel like bringing the refill back to regular cadences. I I I you know, I feel like I'm I'm I I'm living um leading a fulfilling life at this point. Uh and I'm really excited honestly for you guys to eventually read my book. You know, I don't even care like like I'm not writing this to make money or anything. Like I'm writing this as like at this point it's a hobby, but eventually I just want to I want to get this down cuz it's a story that I wanted to tell. It's a story that I think is pretty cool and I'm excited for people to read it. And even if people think it's bad, I don't I don't care. Like it's like obviously my first kind of novel, but just getting it

finished and and eventually publishing it would be a huge milestone for me. Um so I'm excited to do that. But as I said, only halfway through the first draft. It's going to be a long time before this thing gets published, but I wanted to kind of put it out there that that's what I've been working on. Um if any of you maybe have worked on something similar in the past, I'd love to discuss this in the in the Daily Discord channel with you. But yeah, just just um I guess reflecting on the last I would say I've been writing it for the last like 6 weeks at this point. Um actually like I've written a lot in 6 weeks cuz I've just been super motivated to to get down and write it. U but in terms of like being able to learn how to write, it's been a roller coaster

because I do this thing where I'll read my own writing and I'll be like, you know what, that's that's not bad. You know, it's it's it's it's decent. And then I'll I'll do this stupid thing of like I'll go and read a published book and I'll read through it and be like, "Wow, this is amazing." And then I'll compare it to my writing, which is the dumbest thing to do because I'm reading my first draft, a first draft, mind you, of of someone who's never written fiction before, right? So obviously it's not going to be anything like what a professional published kind of author's work is going to be like. So, um, I was basic I'm basically comparing myself as an amateur to a professional. That would be like an amateur kind of basketball

player comparing themselves to to Michael Jordan or LeBron James or other kind of I guess like famous basketball players or anyone like it'd be like a an amateur at school running a 100 meter race comparing himself to Usain Bolt, right? So, when when you look at it from that perspective, I have to stop myself from doing that sometimes. But, I also want to keep reading because it teaches me things. It it it shows me how other writers have been able to kind of get around problems that I run into and write things that are compelling and that don't bore people because writing is is definitely a very it's a very complex art to it. I've I've discovered very quickly it's it's it may sound really good in your head and then you put it down on paper and you're like, "Wow, that's bad." Like that's bad and

boring and like how is it so bad? Like why did it sound so good in my head and now it sounds so bad on paper, right? Or it reads so bad on paper and because it's an art, you know? It's like imagine you it's like any any kind of art, right? Imagine you think of a of of an image in your head and you're like, "Wow, that's really cool. I want to draw that." And then you go to draw it and your drawing is just absolutely horrendous. I'm sure everyone has done this at some point in their lives. I know I have. It's the same thing where what sounds good in your head normally does not translate well on the first draft anyway on on paper. And that's what I'm kind of doing right now. I'm just trying to get through the first draft. I have the the structure of the

story. I already know what the story is going to be. I already know most of of it. Like there are things that I'm adding as I go, but I know like where I want to end the book. Like I I actually came up with the ending first. Um so I know where I want to end it and it's just working towards that. Uh but it's been Yeah, it's been fun, guys. has been really interesting and it's really different to anything I've done in the past. So, I'm excited to keep going with it. And yeah, maybe I'll uh I'll let you guys know when I finish the first draft. Maybe that will be the next update cuz as I said, I want to finish it by Christmas. This is the last refuel until the new year. So, yeah, maybe this keeps me accountable. U maybe by, you know, on

5th of January, which will be the next episode, I'll be like, "Hey guys, I finished my first draft and it wasn't so bad after all." So, we'll see. But yeah, that's my secret project. That's what I've been working on. Not so secret anymore. Uh but going forward, those are the three things in my life that I'm going to be focusing on, right? My fitness, writing my my story, writing my novel, uh and and obviously the daily way and everything Ethereum. So, I guess on that note, I've gone over an hour again here, but those are going to be the episodes going forward. There'll be an hour or more uh going forward here. But uh I'm going to wish you all a merry Christmas, happy new year, all that.

Hope you have a good holiday ahead of you. I'm actually going to be on the bankless rollup this week as well. So, uh you'll see that Friday. I'm filling in for David cuz he's climbing another mountain. I'll be on with Ryan. Um, and then I maybe will be on the Faka live stream. But you, yeah, you guys may see me on those things uh there. But until the new year, until we go back to a weekly cadence, that's going to be it for now. So, thank you everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give it a thumbs up newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all in the new year. Thanks everyone.