ETH ETFs approved, Into the Ether returns and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #772 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of De refuel where cup latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is the 24th of May 2024 right everyone let's get into it God it feels good to say that after a 2 and 1/2 week break and wow did I come back at an amazing time so obviously a lot to talk about today but before I do that I just wanted to give a quick big shout out to wack Whack Attack for filling in for me while I was gone he did a bunch of great coverage around not just Rocka pool but ethereum so you can go check all of that out on his ET fuel YouTube channel so yeah just again another big thank you and shout out to whack Whack Attack for that all right moving on to the biggest piece of news is the fact that the ETF

was in the end approved now of course I don't think I have to even say this at this point but this has made me one of the happiest people ever and and when I found out about this on the 20th of May the fact that there was some substantial movement within the E ETFs it became one of the best days of my life not because of the ETF itself but because of the fact that I had held so strongly on my prediction that they were going to get approved not based on just hm or based on nothing I had done such a thorough analysis over the last five or six months on the refuel and on Twitter that seeing my analysis actually come true in the face of pretty much everyone else saying it wasn't going to happen especially a lot of the quote unquote

experts a lot of the lawyers a lot of the uh the the polit the people involved in the political process in the US they all said it wasn't going to happen now of course it happened very abruptly there was was a 180 degree kind of spin around from the Democrats on crypto generally it wasn't just the ETFs it was that fit 21 bill as well that got passed through the house with a lot of Democrats voting in favor of it that have traditionally been bearish on crypto so I'm going to get into all of that but before I get into the ETF stuff the fit Bill stuff uh you know a lot of the kind of infighting that I actually saw uh happen in the last 2 and a half weeks within the ethereum ecosystem I do want to talk about what I did on my

break now one thing that I really wanted to hit on and I've been very much looking forward to hitting on this with you guys because I think it's a very uh insightful kind of piece of information that I uh not information but piece of kind of I guess like maybe maybe Epiphany is the the the better word for it it's an epiphany that I had while I was on my break but essentially it was funny because what I ended up happening was that from May 6th until about May 20th I had zero exposure to anything crypto related I removed all the apps that I usually use like Twitter and Discord and trading view from my home screen I disabled the notifications I basically made it so that I wasn't exposed to crypto in any way at all I went full cold turkey on it as you guys

know I've described my relationship with crypto as an addiction it really was that so I went full cold turkey with it and that meant that I was not exposed to it at all I wasn't exposed to it in mainstream media I wasn't exposed to it watching you know TV watching you know going out and and hanging out with people friends and family and stuff like that I wasn't exposed to it at all now the reason why I say I had an epiphany here was because it really verified or at least kind of validated my my long-term held thesis that most of the world pays zero attention to crypto for most of the time like I think that in the last maybe 6 months of a bull market is where the rest of the world pays attention to it and that's simply because the mainstream media the kind of

mainstream sphere is just not talking about it when the prices aren't going up every day when BTC and eth aren't at all-time highs every day obviously this isn't a new insight but it really did show me just how true that is because I went from being so involved in crypto from literally when I woke up to I went asleep being so exposed to it every single day that I had lost sight of the fact that we live in such a small bubble we may think we're much bigger than what we're what we are but we live in such a small bubble where we're exposed to this stuff every day so we must think that everyone else sees this we must kind of think to ourselves why can't everyone else see how good of an asset eth is how awesome of a network ethereum is and the

simple answer to that is the fact that as I said most people don't pay attention unless Ethan BTC are hitting new oldtime highs every other day mainstream media is covering it there's fomo in the air right and that usually signals the last like six or so months of a of a bull market of course especially when it's like everywhere in the mainstream kind of cycle there but and it also validates my thesis that retail still isn't here really it's really been a institutional driven ETF driven kind of like inside a crypto money driven bull market up until this point which is usually what early bull markets are like early to mid bull markets are like there so that was probably the most unique Insight that I kind of validated on my break and honestly unless you've actually done this you probably won't understand and or I guess like fully appreciate what

I'm saying here so maybe that's a little bit of a I guess advice to you guys if you are thinking of taking a break from crypto generally just to see what it's like to not be exposed to it every day like even just a week you don't have to do the full 2 and a half weeks but doing a week it really is cathic it really is uh eye opening for sure um but that was my my one Unique Kind of key insight there but a lot of you I wanted to know what I actually did on my break I'm not going to spend too much on this I'm def I definitely want to move on to the ETF stuff but mainly I did things that I just wanted to do outside of crypto I didn't force myself to do things like I had a whole list of things that I wanted

to do and I looked at the list and I'm like you know what I'm just going to do what I feel like doing I'm not going to force myself to do this force myself to do that I'm not going to say to myself oh you've only got two and a half weeks to do this and then it's back to the crypto grind I didn't want to do that I didn't feel like that was the best use of my time so what I did was I looked at the list and I basically turned it over and I'm like you know what I'm going to ignore that list I'm going to do what I feel like doing and that's what I did I spent a lot of time with friends and family uh I did a lot of uh kind of uh stuff around uh you know not on not not

on my computer essentially I tried to go more with with my friends doing non-computer stuff tried to uh spend more time with my fiance spend more time with my family just do non-computer things but when I was on the computer I was playing games now I think there was really just one game that I played for the majority of the time and that was World of Warcraft you guys know uh if you've been listening to me for a while that I was a really big World of Warcraft player back when I was a teenager I basically was my whole thing as a teenager and I've played on and off since then but Lord of Warcraft currently has two main modes they have the retail mode which is basically the current version of the game and they have something called wow classic which is the classic version of the game that

they re-released about 5 years ago so I played a lot of that and there's a mode on classic well called hardcore where if you die you die permanently on that uh server uh so that was really fun it kind of rejuvenated the game for me so I'd been doing that for really the bulk of the time that I was on a computer like it was kind of funny whenever I was on my computer I was kind of bored cuz I'm like you know what I not doing crypto stuff on here and that's all I've been doing on a computer for a very long time now besides playing games here and there so really anytime that I was on my computer I was just playing uh playing World of Warcraft really uh and and when I was off it I was doing a bunch of other things there and also in in that

same kind of uh on that same note my phone also became incredibly boring because I'm not really on other social apps I mean I'm on Instagram but I don't use it I don't really post pictures there my Instagram feed is is very trash uh you know the Snapchat I I don't use anymore I haven't used that in years Facebook I definitely don't use so you know most of the stuff that I did on my phone or the vast majority of it was was crypto stuff and when that was gone I had no real use for my phone outside of uh being on a few chat apps with friends and family that's all I was really using it for I wasn't really using it for anything else so that was also kind of freeing there um but last thing I'll say on on my break as well is that uh the

special thing for me wasn't just being able to do what I wanted outside of crypto and just like basically uh uh relaxing and doing that it was being able to focus cuz usually when I would play a game or when I would do something else even away from my computer I wouldn't be able to focus because I'd be checking Discord I'd be checking Twitter I'd be old tabbing out of my game to to something else be i' be be uh you know checking something crypto related i' be checking emails doing this doing that there was no kind of like Focus there was no hey let's just play this game for a couple of hours and don't do anything crypto it was okay I'm going to play the game for 10 minutes alt tab all to reply to some Discord messages I'll go on Twitter and then I'll go back to my game

for 10 minutes that's not playing a game and the game basically becomes like a void fil when I'm not doing something in crypto so it was really good to be able to just actually focus on things and not be distracted by crypto and in that vein as well I actually was able to have my first land with my best friend my best real life friend who's not really into crypto so that was really helpful as well uh in 5 years so the last time we did uh L actually was with two other friends so there was a total of four of us at my old house and we actually did it for w classic when it first released in 2019 but even then like I wasn't off crypto I was still very distracted by it so wasn't the same experience whereas this time it was just full on playing

the game focusing on that chatting with each other about a bunch of different things just not doing anything crypto related at all uh and that was also really refreshing and really awesome and I had kind of Forgotten what that felt like cuz it hadn't been something that I had done for a very long time there so that was basically the bulk of my break there not too long 2 and a half weeks I mean it did feel kind of long because of the fact that I did actually experience withdrawal symptoms from crypto after the first few days it was funny like the first few days of my break I was like yes uh this feels awesome I'm I'm free you know do I even want to go back is kind of funny how the mind works but then I think like on the fourth or fifth

day of my break I started having withdrawals I'm like oh my God I miss it so much oh my God what what's happening am I missing something and I had a little bit of a fomo but that only lasted for about a day and then from there it was mostly I would say smooth sailing and then on May 20th was when one of my friends messaged me my my real life friends he messaged me and he just said bro bro bro bro bro and when he did that I was just like like look I kind of know what this is about so hey if it is about what I think it's about then I'll just Google so I Googled the eth ETF before I even replying to my friend I just Googled e ETF and that's when I saw what had happened with the um the 19 B4

forms uh actually having movement on them and then the Bloomberg guys upping their chances of the approval from 25% to 75% so essentially I uh you know I saw that and then uh from that I actually jumped on Twitter for a little bit just to see a bit more comments about that and that's kind of where half of my break ended I think on the 20th of May because of that I think that's a pretty fair thing to do cuz I checked the price as well and of course I knew the price had rocketed from there so yeah I checked that but then since then I've been trying to like not go on Discord not go on Twitter too much uh and then of course I came back fully today I woke up at earlier than usual I woke up at 8:00 a.m. today my time and I

saw that the ETFs had been approved so that's when I put my first tweet out asking people if they studied May 23rd because of course I was right of course I was one of the only people that was right on this and you know I'm not one to stroke my ego I don't want to do that I'm not one to kind of uh brag or one to to go on Twitter and start like making fun of people who were wrong you know they were wrong that they were simple as everyone knows they were wrong and it feels amazing being right in the face of everything but I think there's a wider story here and this is where I think like my conversation about my break ends and the conversations of the ETF uh moves to now or conversation mov to the ETF stuff because there is a lot to

unpack here guys it's really not just about the eth ETF you know as excited as I am about the fact that the eth ETFs has been approved and as bullish as that is for eth as an asset you know over the longer term especially there is a much bigger picture being painted here when it comes to regulations uh towards crypto now I will jump into that in a sec I do want to just talk about the actual eth ETFs for for a little bit here so what what exactly happened here what you know what is the movement happening here when are they going live for trading all that so from my understanding from what I've read what happened was that the 19 B4 forms were approved D for all of the issuers from what I can see but there are still the s-1 forms that need to be processed for

the ETFs to actually start trading now this can take up to a few weeks from here so essentially the ETFs are approved today but it's not like the BTC ETFs where they're going to be trading you know maybe next week on on Monday or something like that we're going to have to wait a few weeks for this to happen which is totally fine you know I don't think it matters whether they start trading today or or on Monday or in a few weeks time I actually think it might be more bullish but that they start in a few weeks time because as you saw from the price action literally everyone was offside on this guys like the the fact that everyone was basically fuding eth of the last 2 and a half weeks from what I saw I went back and read a bunch of

Twitter comments there was so much fight about eth people saying eth was dead you know eth BTC was going down other coins versus eth were going up it was just like really really bad sentiment and I saw some like old uh kind of longer term investors start capitulating from from what I read on Twitter I went back and and checked it all today and I I kind of looked at that and I'm like this is giving me like 2019 2020 Vibes cuz in late 2019 early 2020 it was the same thing and then what pulled us out of this negative sentiment was defi summer essentially in mid 2020 there and obviously what's pulled pulled us out of it this time is the eth ETF uh that that kind of happened there but yeah I I fully believe that most people if not the vast majority of the market is

completely out of position on eth and I don't think we've seen the bulk of the move at all here I think obviously we saw eth put in its largest ever daily candle but I think most of that move was Traders obviously speculating on it lot of shorts getting blown up a lot of lot of people foming in and just the fact that the market had been pricing in a denial for many months now it had not been pricing in an approval at all anyone who still thought it was being approved was called crazy it was called insane was saying you know give up on that what the hell are you smoking I mean I know I took the brunt of this because I stuck to my May 23rd prediction uh you know up until it got approved right so the market is very very offside here and that's what makes

this incredibly bullish because it means that not only are we now going to get ETF flows into e just like BTC has had the ETF flows which have been constant and steady as I've described before their passive flows but we also get all of the Crypton native money that has been offside on eth now flooding back into eth because they don't have a position when you're out of position you want to try really really hard to get into position but you don't want to disturb the market you don't want to be Market buying you know say you want to buy $100 million worth of eth you don't want to be Market buying that because you're going to move the market price you want to get your best price that you can whether that's via uh T whether that's via OTC whether that's via just firing into the order books and trying

to trying to stack eth and you want to do that before the ETF start training because you may be comparing it to when the BTC ETF started trading where essentially they BTC went to alltime high after that yeah it kind of like dumped off when the ETFs approved and talk about a month to start going up again or or or kind of break where it was at the ETF approval date but from there it went to like 70k plus so you're looking at that and you're thinking holy right I was not expecting the E ETF to be approved I've got all this money that uh is stuck in these assets I now think what everyone's going to do is they're going to flood into eth I need to get it to eth as well so what you're going to see is you're going to see

basically eth become these black hole that sucks a lot of this crypto native money in way before the ETFs start trading I know I said the ETFs will start trading in a few weeks time you're going to see the bulk of this happen within the next couple of weeks in my opinion and I don't think it's crazy to say that eth will be at all-time high before the ETFs even start trading because of the fact that there's just such a fomo now the market does not price things in in 3 days it's only been 3 days guys since we started getting um you know wind of the fact that they're actually going to be approved publicly because the Bloomberg guys changed their stance here and that's where the majority of the market changed its stance as well until obviously the it became reality today with the approval

there or reality yesterday with the approval there so you're going to see some very positive movement here so that to me is one of the most bullish things for eth uh going forward but then you just throw in all the other reasons why eth is a bullish asset all the things that I've been talking about for years guys the fact that it's net deflationary the fact that it's being used in staking more and more over a Time the fact that the layer 2os are growing the fact that the uh the the that we have new money coming in for E via the ETF so there's so many reasons to be bullish on eth that uh you know the ETF stuff really is just more fuel to the fire here and finally finally the negative sentiment around ether ethereum has changed as much as I hate that it's changed because

of the price action but it it that's how crypto works right and it's changed and now people are actually looking at everything else and thinking to themselves W okay you know eum is not dead e not dead where it was just the ETF stuff that was holding eth down which I had said for months was happening as well but as I said I don't want to strike my own ego too much yeah uh but all of that has has kind of happened there and on top of that as well what I will say with regards to the ETFs is that the Bloomberg guys like uh the main people that I've been following since the BTC ETFs and they've been really good with their analysis with the BTC ETFs they were kind of eh with their analysis of the E ETFs they kept ignoring some facts like the fact that

they H you know they kept going on about the fact that oh there's not going to be much demand for an eth ETF because there wasn't much demand for a the future's eth ETF um and then they ignored the fact that uh there's going to be lawsuits because if if it was denied because of the fact that grayscale already sued over the same thing with the BTC Futures there's a bunch of stuff there and I didn't really appreciate their analysis of the E ETF uh uh stuff there at all and then you know it was kind of funny CU right up until this week I think it was Monday or Tuesday when their odds changed from 25 to 75% they were just like Mega bearish on it right though I'm really really bearish on on the E ETF stuff and then of course I think it was Eric balunis basically

said that the people who got the prediction right were just wishcasting or were just lucky which you know it kind of annoyed me because I'm like you know I'm not going to go over here and struck my ego and kind of dunk on you guys but hey the fact that you were saying that we just got lucky the people who actually believed in May 23rd just got lucky really really annoyed me and that was because of the fact that I actually had been calling this based on a lot of thorough analysis that I've done all of you guys that have listened to and watched the refu over the last few months you know this so I'm preaching to the choir here but essentially I even picked the political stance because a lot of people are saying that the reason why the Democrats changed their tune here and this will

probably bring us into the conversation around how this is bigger than the E ETF and this is more about the regul regulatory side towards crypto that it seems like I'm not this is speculation I don't think I don't think it's all this but it seems like the Democrats changed their stance on crypto due to the fact that Trump endorsed crypto I believe it was like a day before they changed their stance Trump just went really hard on crypto endorsed it started accepting crypto donations and obviously it being an election yard that's a really big deal now this is not something new guys this is not something unknown I called This months ago I said that the political ramifications of this are vast I did say that I didn't know how big the voting block was for crypto within the US I didn't know if the Democrats

actually cared enough about crypto to change their policies based on the fact that they could lose an election based on it or if they believe they could lose an election based on it but I think we now have some proof that it is a big voting block I do think we have proof that crypto is making a lot of waves within DC within the US political sphere here and again this is not new I predicted this months ago that one of the reasons that I foresaw and one of the big reasons and one of my strongly H beliefs that the pivot could come where the SEC would basically be forced to approve the ETFs was because of the political pressure so that was not luck that was not wishcasting that was proper analysis done based on the facts and circumstances and the most hilarious part about this is is that I am not

someone who's paid to do this I'm not a Bloomberg an analyst who is paid to do this whose entire job job is to do this I am an ethereum commentator I am an ethereum educator I focus most of my time on the ethereum tech side and not focus on the ETF for most of the part you know most of my coverage of the ETF probably took what 5 to 10% of my time time over the last few months even though it obviously is a big deal I didn't spend all day every day on this I'm not an expert on it I don't know what a 19 B4 form is or an S1 is I don't know us the politics I don't know the inner working of the SEC I don't claim to know any of that I don't claim to be an expert on any of that but what I do

know is how to follow the facts and circumstances I do know how to apply logic to situations I do know how to reason from first principles I don't just rely on hopium I don't let my bias cloud my judgment or at least I try not to people were saying oh you're just an eth Max that's why you're biased towards the E ETF not at all I was following the BTC ETF using the same thing I was basically one of the the earliest people saying that I thought the BTC ETFs would be approved from from the earliest day from when Black Rock filed for the ETF here and I I think that uh that's the only thing that I kind of got annoyed about here is the fact that I was right and people were still saying it was just luck when anyone who had been following

me for the last few months knew that it wasn't luck knew that it was based on thorough analysis of the actual facts and circumstances available to us here anyway I don't want to kind of go on more about that it's a bit of a rant there but what I do want to do is open this up to the conversation about how this is more than just about the E ETF because of the fact that yeah it seems like the Democrats overnight based on you know whether it's based on Trump's rhetoric or not I'm not going to kind of aine on that but they they changed their stance here they seem to be very Pro crypto now not all of them not Gary GZA he definitely is still negative towards crypto not uh some of the other high ranking Democrats such as Brad Sherman and I think Maxine Waters those people

especially Elizabeth Warren I don't think they have changed their tune or anything like that but enough Democrats have that it seems to have shifted things and it's not just the fact that they approved e ETF even though there were a lot of signs that they were going to deny it there are a lot of signs that uh the ACC was going to try and go after ether as a security which actually I should mention that the fact that the SEC has approved a commodity based trust for these ETFs for eth means that the SEC has basically admitted that they are going to let eth be regulated as a commodity and not a security so we've put to bed the security aspect or it's like the security argument against eth like that's it it's finished we should not hear about it again staking is a whole another argument and I saw as I

predicted that all the issu is removed staking from the ETF because that was obvious that they were going to do that but I do think the S is still going to go after various staking products so we're going to have to see how that plays out there uh for being a security or an investment contract whatever you want to call it but when it comes to the actual asset we know as eth right obviously um that is there's no there's no deeming that of security and that has Downstream effects into the sec's case against coinbase and binance and Kraken over the other assets that they have that they have um said that are securities that has has effects there as well so there's just the Pandora box that has really been opened here with this change in stance but there was also a a new set of legislation that was

passed uh through the house so it still needs to pass the Senate and then needs to be signed by Biden to make it into law but it is a very nice piece of legislation that was passed uh called the fit I think it's a fit 21 act uh now this had been in the works for a while and it actually sets out some pretty uh clear guidelines on how to regulate crypto now I don't have the uh the guid in front of me but I'm going to bring up this tweet thread from jaspar uh you guys know jaspar I'm going to bring it up here for you guys this does a really great job of breaking down uh what he believes to be the most important aspect of the fit21 bill which is a a five prong decentralization test to determine whether or not an asset is a digital

commodity now you can go give this thread a read I'll link in the YouTube description below but the bill is full of things like this there are some things in the bill that aren't great and can be amended before it's voted on at the Senate uh on the senate floor and then before it's signed law by by President Biden here U but essentially uh the the the fact that they've got something like this in the ACT basically says to the SEC you know you guys haven't been regulating crypto as you should we have to basically put in new legislation in order to regulate crypto and to to Define what is a security and what is a commodity so here it is essentially so this is not only as I said good for the E ETF that the Democrats have changed their tune here but the fact that this passed the house

with a lot of democrat support means that it is now possible that it could pass the and then we voted into law and we actually get good crypto legislation or any crypto legislation really that can protect crypto's interests in the US and protect crypto in the US and end or hopefully kind of really weaken this absolute cluster that the SEC has brought upon crypto over the last couple of years so that to me is the most bullish thing about the last week or the last few days not so much the ETF being approved as bullish as that is for eth this is bullish for all of crypto obviously for eth but for all of crypto which is going to benefit all of us so I actually can't believe that this happened I was very surprised that this happened because when I saw the E ETF

news I was just like okay I'm not too surprised about that because I went I went and looked at the reasoning on on the 20th and I saw that there was a political shift there so I was like you know what I get that the Democrats probably don't want the sa to to be in the news for the next few months leading up to an election and only in the news for the negative stuff like getting sued over not approving the E ETF and breaking law again because they had to approve it they even said in their approval message that they were uh approving it because it basically fit the law to approve it there was nothing against the law uh to to to to disallow it they even looked at the uh Futures and spot correlation analysis and said okay yeah this checks out this is what

we want to see here and on top of that the funny thing is that that the Commissioners delegated the approval authority to the SEC staff so the Commissioners themselves didn't even vote on this because they don't have to vote on this they can be just be approved um uh from from my understanding by the SEC staff with delegation powers and they didn't comment on it either so gzel didn't make a stupid comment on Twitter about it the other Commissioners didn't make their comments about it whether they were for or against it we don't know how they voted and we probably won't know how how they voted if they do eventually vote on it internally here as kind of a you know a stamp of approval or I guess like dotting your eyes crossing your teeth sort of thing which again falls into the fact that what I said a couple of months

ago where essentially the SEC is done racking up losses the the Democrats can canot afford this because what's going to happen if they did deny the eth ETF this is the calculus that I think that they did is that because Trump is now kind of pandering to the crypto audience and he's like Pro crypto here he would hit on that and he would keep hit hitting keep hitting the Democrats keep hitting the SEC on this and keep saying as we're leading up to the elections in November oh the Democrats are anti- crypto look at them breaking the law here look at them doing this and he keep putting attention on it and that's something they definitely do not want and I remember I even said like even maybe a couple months ago I don't know exactly when I said it someone find maybe find the video if you want to I

said that I thought that the SEC would end up just approving the eth ETFs because they want to get it out of their hair they don't want it have hanging over them especially in an election year for the Democrats they don't want it hanging over there they don't want it being in the news cycle they just was like okay let's just approve this and we don't have to deal with this for another couple years at least because there's no other assets that are going to get ETFs because no other assets have regulated Futures markets and and so on and so forth and that seems to be exactly what they did the fact that the Commissioners themselves didn't even vote on it is even more hilarious because it means that essentially they were like we don't want anything to do with this we hate that we have to deal with this

especially ginla let's just delegate it to the staff they'll approve it let's do it quietly uh and then you know that's it we're on a mar away from there it's out of a hair we don't have to worry about this anymore it's not in the headlines anymore which is really great to see but as I said the bigger picture item here is the fact that the Democrats seem to not all of them but like a nice bulk of them seem to have shifted their stance on crypto and a more Pro crypto here which is what we all want to see especially those living in the US the tides have turned my friends these are bullish Tides definitely I do think that with the betta and E both having ETFs now that's going to mean that both of those assets go into price Discovery again relatively uh shortly I think you

could see this over the next few weeks definitely and then they'll be on a Level Playing Field as well I'm very glad that eth is on a Level Playing Field with BTC now I didn't think it was fair that BTC had an ETF and eth didn't uh and then there is the long tale of crypto assets that are still going to be majority I guess like I mean pretty much not even just majority like 99% of the money that goes into these other assets will be crypto Natives and new people to crypto so keep that in mind when playing with other things I think you know it's not investment advice but essentially Ethan BTC are now in their own little world and will be there for quite a while whereas the other assets still exist in the Crypton native world so it's going to be very hard to invest and

trade other assets going forward I think I think e very easy at this point you just buy and hold like you always always do you know if you want to take profits as I've always said you want to be taking profits when things are really really hot when it feels like you know new money retail is here and I'll kind of give my opinions on that as as time goes on then uh but yeah that's that's basically everything on the kind of ETF side of things everything on the political side of things I will probably cover this fit 21 bill as I learn more about it i' I haven't had much time to catch up on things because I've only come back over the last I guess like 48 hours and a lot of that time has spent uh catching up with a lot of of people

one-on-one had a lot of messages I had to reply to a lot of work related stuff I guess like work rated stuff meaning like non daily gr related stuff there and I also wanted to just check what I had missed out on which bring brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about which was I'm not going to spend too much on this because I don't think this is is something that a lot of people want to relive from what I say for the last two and a half weeks but essentially what happened was that I went back and I looked on Twitter and I looked at a bunch of things that happened so there was a lot of infighting in the ethereum community and I think this was definitely because the eth price was what stuck at like 3K I went back and looked at the chart it's

basically stuck at 3K eth BTC went to a new local low uh some of the other assets against eth were going up and people were just coping over that and people were just bored of the market because of that um and because of that we saw a lot of infighting about things like conflicts of interest between ethereum Foundation people taking advisor ships at Big ethereum projects we saw a lot of infighting about people saying oh ethereum needs a marketing department because no one knows about ethereum we saw a lot of infighting around various kind of things like oh no one understands the ethereum bur map this is why e sucks which if I was around at that time I that that that rhetoric reading that on Twitter like just just seeing how toxic it was that probably would have burnt me out completely I probably wouldn't even come

back like that's how bad it looked from going back on it now and how bad I felt reading it honestly I was reading it I was like wow this is really bad and then of course all of that changed because of the price action all that changed because of the ETF news which kind of annoys me because I think my number one issue after having my break I think I kind of came to the conclusion that my number one issue with the crypto ecosystem is that everything is so closely tied to the price action whether it's conscious or subconsciously people do this all the time even like the long-term ethereum Believers were coping over this on Twitter when essentially whether the price is going up or down shouldn't be relevant to things because as I will actually um actually show you guys in a sec there was nothing

fundamentally wrong with ethereum or E during that period perod again it was only a 2 and 1/2 week period but there was nothing wrong there was actually a lot of things right and I actually went I looked at grow the P which tracks layer 2 usage as you guys know look at this we're at all-time high layer 2 usage over the last 2 and a half weeks so okay eth isn't dead e theum isn't dead the layer twos are growing so where was all this negative sentiment coming from you go to l2b the uh the activity is still at the high it's not all the alltime highs but the scaling factor is still at the highs um the tvl is basically at uh I mean like at the highs as well before even before the ETF news pumped everything it was basically at the highs uh so all and and E staking as

well was going really well people are still staking validators are coming online it's getting more distributed you know L's Market Shar is coming down all those good and positive things there as you can see on my screen so why was there so much negative sentiment in the community and it was really just because of the price action because the short-term price action was not reflecting the fundamentals and this is as I said my number one issue with this ecosystem and actually what ends up burning me out the most is the the fact that the sentiment so closely follows the price which is something that I try not to do I don't try to be bullish or bearish on something just because e is you know going up one day and E is going down another day I try to be bullish based on the long-term prospects of

these things that's what's keep kept me so bullish on the ethereum BR map on the ethereum ecosystem if you're just looking at the short term of course you're going to burn yourself out of course you're going to feel really shitty because you're looking at the short-term price action and you're looking at like a you know maybe even a few months of price action and you're extrapolating that out to like the 5 to 10 year road map of ethereum and you're Imagining the 5 to 10 year road map of ethereum as those few months which is completely wrong so when I saw of this when I read back on all this drama and then I saw the Whiplash in sentiment because it literally was a complete Whiplash there was one day it was the day before the ETF news came out where sentiment was literally at Rock Bottom

I'd never seen it so bad not since late 2019 early 2020 had the sentiment been that bad and the thing is is that in late 2019 early 2020 it was somewhat Justified because there was still an open question around Will ethereum Survive will ethereum actually provide value here is defi actually going to be a thing that people like and use like so on and so forth right whereas this time there was none of that we know all of the stuff that ethereum can do we know that the l2s are working the l2s are at all-time high usage we know that the ethereum road map is very well defined now and is being executed on there's so much stuff that's happening there so again why was the sentiment so bad it was because of the price because as soon as soon as the ETF news came out and as

soon as the eth price uh went up a lot and as soon as e BTC went up a lot the sentiment literally changed completely it was like a binary change it was zero one day one uh one the next and it was actually insane to to go back and look at the the mood look at the Whiplash yeah because what I did was I went to different people's profiles and I went to their replies you know like uh people in the etherum ecosystem like David Hoffman and and DC investor and Eric Connor all the big names and I went to their replies and what they were replying to and went to the sentiment and kind of judged it from that and I saw this and I'm just like and I spoke to them also uh kind of during the dat today as well and and I saw all this and

I'm just like holy that change in sentiment is actually insane and it's it's not just insane from kind of um the perspective of the fact that we're so sensitive to price movements of in crypto but it's insane from a mental perspective as well because imagine what that does to a mental state to be Whiplash like that just based on price like can you imagine if you're the kind of person that is either bullish or bearish on ethereum based on what each price is at any given day like that to me is insane like you shouldn't be bullish or bearish on ethereum just based on the eth price on any given day it's a random walk no one knows what the price of eth is going to be on any given day longterm obviously I strongly believe the eth price is going to continue to go up I strongly believe the

ethereum ecosystem is going to keep winning and I strongly believe that the ethereum road map is the best one that exists within crypto to scale a blockchain sustainably to the world but that's not going to play out over the couple of days guys like this is just insane to me that people do this and I understand if you're new to crypto like you don't know any better but these are long-term people that were doing this and I was looking at this I was was like holy like I might you know this is flashbacks to late 2019 early 2020 but without the fact that back then it was existential for ethereum now it's not we know ethereum is winning regardless of what the price is doing so that Whiplash as I said is probably the number one thing that I hate about the crypto ecosystem that burns me out the most and

I'm going to try my best to avoid that going forward I'm actually going to change my relationship with crypto going forward I forgot to mention this before I'm allocating a maximum of maybe 2 to 3 hours I probably extend it out to 3 hours cuz I think I need 3 hours a day to crypto and outside of that I'm not going to be doing crypto stuff I'm not going to endlessly scroll through crypto Twitter I'm not going to spend all day on Discord as much as I love hanging out with you guys in the deadly great Discord Channel it is mentally taxing because there's a lot of stuff that goes on in there I'm not going to look at the eth price every you know every so often uh and kind of look at it and be like oh okay e is this price here e is that

price there because I don't even know why I do it since I don't even care about what the short-term eth price is it is has no relevance to me at all as I just finished explaining why so I'm yeah I'm going to allocate maximum of 2 to three hours per day to crypto and I'm going to time that I'm going to make sure I'm disciplined about that uh there as well and also it kind of falls into the the lifestyle changes I made with my break as well I forgot to mention that on my break I actually started riding my bike again so I'm I I was doing 90-minute bike rides in the morning so essentially I changed my sleeping pattern so I now go to bed at 1:00 a.m. wake up at 9:00 a.m. have breakfast and coffee out of the house by 10:00 a.m. on

my bike ride back by about 11:30 a.m. 12:00 p.m. depending on you know if I leave at 10: a.m. exactly or not have my lunch and and then I jump into other things that I was doing so that's how I'm probably going to do it going forward when it comes to crypto maybe I'll do half an hour while I'm having my coffee and my breakfast then I'll go on my bike ride then I'll be back into it for a little bit uh and then later in the day I'll do my video of course do the refuel uh but that's going to be my new kind of pattern with crypto because being exposed to it like I was as basically an addict who always needed his fix was not healthy at all it definitely was not healthy it was not something that I recommend anyone should

be doing we are not made for that as humans we are made for being U more expressive with our time being more being made to do different things not just one thing and not not doing one thing like constantly as well like that is what burned me out I think there uh but yeah enough on the infighting stuff I don't want to rehash all of that because it seems to be fine now which is which is good uh but yeah I think that's it on that one now the last thing I want to talk about today and as I said before I wasn't going to cover all the news from the last 2 and a half weeks because I wanted to ask you guys what you wanted me to cover so again a reminder uh the next episode of the refie will be on Monday there'll be no mega episode

there's not going to be split up episodes that I'm going to do over the weekend or anything like that the next episode will be on Monday please let me know what you want me to cover from the last 2 and a half weeks that you really want my opinions on that you really want my takes on let me know anywhere YouTube comments Twitter Discord I will check everywhere I will coate that all together and then I will give my thoughts on Monday cuz I I I have an idea of what happened outside of the inviting stuff of all the updates that happened over the last couple weeks the cev stuff especially I'm going to cover that regardless on Monday I think but also the stuff with as I mentioned before the conflicts of interest with uh the advisers to i l particularly like Justin Drake and Dan crad uh and what

that means for the ecosystem and I'll give my take on that and also I I think that Ian L ended up announcing their token shortly after I went on break so I'm going to talk about all of that but anything else you want me to talk about just let me know and I will talk about it on Monday there now before I finish off today's episode wanted to quickly talk about the fact that uh while I was on break Eric Connor messaged me randomly on telegram I did tell you guys I was checking telegram every couple of days but Eric Conor messaged me and he's like hey you want to restart EOB and I'm like oh okay what would that look like and it's basically restarting the Into The Ether podcast so EAB as it was used to be a newsletter website and podcast we we're just going to restart the the

podcast here into the ether as you guys know I've been doing semi-regular episodes with Eric for a little while on The Daily grade drive-through But Eric wants to restart the podcast and go beyond what we were doing with the drive-through so what he wants to do is essentially have guests on because you know guys know I don't really do guests on The Daily gay uh and he wants to have different segments that are covered on there and he basically wants to make into the of the eth Maxi podcast he wants it just to be all about ethereum he doesn't want to go into other ecosystems or anything like that he wants it to be all about ethereum he wants to do the eth Hub weekly recap again where me and him get on once a week and we talk about whatever you know we'll kind of like um do what we're

doing with the drive-thru but it will be part of the Into The Ether brand now I do want to make it clear here guys the delu is not going anywhere just because I'm doing into The Ether again with Eric does not mean I'm spending any less time on the daily guay I'll be doing the daily gay as normal there'll probably not be any more daily gay drive-through episodes because we'll be doing them on the Into The Ether podcast inste instead but I I I'm very glad that the Into The Ether kind of effort is being revived here uh for two main reasons one it gives us another ethereum media guess like organization that will exist outside of the daily guay outside of bankless and and a couple others out there uh and also the second reason is the fact that uh I think that we can

stick to a more regular Cadence Eric and I with doing this rather than doing on the daily gu here and I'm glad that it's more of like I guess like an eth maxi podcast where essentially you're only covering ethereum stuff not branching out into other stuff because obviously bankas has got a lot of criticism from the ethereum community because they branched out but as I've explained before they did that for good reason they did that for the fact that bankless is supposed to be a crypto brand not so much an ethereum brand they want to Branch out to new users and to do that they can't just be covering ethereum they're also a business where they have employees like I doubt into the E is going to have employees or anything like that it's really just going to be a way to uh further spread the word around the

ethereum ecosystem uh here but yeah it is going to be distinctly separate for the from the daily guay it does not mean the daily guay is going to be stopping anytime soon uh or changing anytime soon I'm still going to be doing my daily episodes but I will be doing a weekly podcast with Eric um on on Into The Ether there and be helping him in the background with a bunch of the other stuff that he wants to do with this now final note on that one the podcast will will be going live on June 4th the first one so uh I believe that will be the one that me and Eric do has like basically a reintroduction to Into The Ether for all the people that had been listening from way back when they probably still subscribed to us uh on their podcast apps and things like that uh and all the

new people that will be listening from there so I'm super pumped for that but everything will remain the same with the daily guay I'll be doing both of them I know I said before I'm going to try and spend less time in crypto and and limit myself I think I can make it work I I think the whole kind of I think the the the main takeaway besides the Epiphany I had about the fact that uh normies aren't exposed to crypto at all when they're not looking at crypto the other main Epiphany I had is that if I don't strike a a a work life balance with crypto I will burn myself out again and then uh it might be permanent next time so I really don't want to get to that stage again because it like before I took my break I it it was really bad

guys like I I'll be honest with you I was almost ready to call it completely quits at that point I remember how bad I was I was I had my finger over the button of disabling my Twitter account and I just I stopped myself I'm like no no take your break and see how you feel I'm glad I did that but it also opened my eyes to the fact that I need to strike a good work life balance I can't continue doing what I've been doing for the past 7 years of non-stop crypto it doesn't work anymore I mean I'm mentally just like exhausted all the time when I was doing that I don't want to repeat that I want to be charged I want to be bullish all the time but I want to do that without getting burnt out and I think I can strike that balance uh there

now I I I did say that was going to be the last thing I spoke about there's one other thing I want to talk talk about and I I have to because it's about the eth ETFs and I feel like I I haven't really taken many Victory laps here because everyone already knows I was right I don't have to to keep going on about it but one thing I do want to say is go back to my Mantra you guys know I love this Mantra but I want to go back to it again just to remind you about how powerful this Mantra is I always say the narrative can be more powerful than the reality but the reality will always catch up with the narrative The Narrative had been over the last few months that the eth ETF was definitely being denied it was not getting approved

the SEC hates eth blah blah blah so on and so forth and you were not you could be forgiven for believing that given that what we had seen given all the rumors that we had seen but again it was a narrative there was no reality reflecting this there is no SEC lawsuit against anyone that we've seen we haven't seen the deta dets of it yet uh saying that they think eth is a security or trying to go after eth as a security or any of that sort of stuff there was nothing really from the SEC that we saw and the reality ended up hitting where they approved the ETFs so until you see the reality everything else around that is speculation and the reality will always hit a narrative does not last forever the reality will hit whether it's now whether it's sometime in the

future but it will hit at some point and I know you know there are some exceptions to the rule where essentially there are narratives that can persist for a long time uh and but but again like those are more belief style narratives than speculative narratives like belief systems like religions for example rather than speculative narratives around what the SEC is thinking right this is very different things here but when it comes to crypto the ecosystem that runs on narratives you need to understand these narratives have an expiration date and once they expire when reality hits they expire very very quickly and that's what we saw with the EF stuff this week that's what we're going to see with a bunch of other things going forward so just don't get caught offside by that stick to the facts and circumstances speculate where you have to but make sure you're doing

it in a balanced way and make sure you're listening to people who aren't ambulance tracers who aren't clickbait uh people who aren't just saying that makes no sense honestly if you see someone saying stuff that makes absolutely zero sense more than once you can probably safely ignore that person because it means that it's a trend for them it means that it is the thing that they do it means that it's something they're not going to stop doing I can forgive someone who does it once or once in a while and maybe they do it accidentally or maybe they do it out of uh kind of like frustration or something like that but someone who continuously says crap who continuously spreads fight who continuously says things that don't make sense like the Bitcoin maximalist for example against ethereum you can safely ignore those people they are

complete noise there is zero signal to be had there and you're filling your head with just and I'm not going to say that you should only listen to one person or this person or other person I'm not even going to say that you should listen to me I've always maintained that you should just follow the facts of circumstances and make sure that you're not getting scoped into various different things that can uh you know become big narratives within crypto but then the reality sets in and you're stuck holding the bag of the narrative if that's what you're you know you're kind of doing with with your trading with your investing or anything else out there but 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 Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Monday thanks everyone