ethPandaOps in 2026, Blob count increased and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #852 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of daily refuel where recap the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host Anthony the 12th of January 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So I hope you all had a good week over the last week. Kind of still seems a bit quiet out there. I think uh at least on the crypto front of things. I know uh it's not very quiet in the kind of broader macro sense. Uh obviously a lot of you are probably following all the events going on around the the the world right now. But in terms of like crypto specific things, yeah, it has been a little bit quiet. But I think maybe some people or even a lot of people are still kind of on their holiday break there cuz it is only the 12th of January. But I'm expecting I

guess things to ramp up from here basically as we enter really fully into the new year of of 2026 here. Now, the first thing I wanted to cover today was well, there's a there's a bunch of things here, but you guys have probably noticed if you follow Vitalik on Twitter and you pay attention to to kind of I guess like his tweets and his blog posts, he's been on a post rampage lately. And it's been great to see because a lot of his posts are really kind of I I guess like they seem to have the goal of realigning the ecosystem on what's important because over the years there's been a lot of discussion about what Ethereum should be, who it should serve. you know, Ethereum is not moving fast enough. Uh, and because there's these competitors out there that are moving faster. Ethereum should be

competing on this. Ethereum should be competing on that. And there's just been a lot of noise around that. And you guys know my opinion on on on this overall. Like, I've been saying the same thing for many years now. And I think that Ethereum is in its own kind of category, its own lane. It's doing its own thing. It shouldn't aim to copy what other ecosystems are doing. It shouldn't aim to, I guess, like compete with ecosystems that are basically playing a completely different game, right? And and a lot of this speaks to the heart of the core protocol itself. You know, Ethereum is obviously not the most scalable layer 1 out there. Uh but it is the most decentralized layer 1 out there, right? So we get that trade-off there between kind of scale and decentralization. And that trade-off is always going to exist. Even though I

know that Vitalik kind of tweeted out saying that we solved the the scaling trilmma, even though that's uh I guess like a talking point, it doesn't mean that we've kind of made it so that we have infinite scaling on layer 1 or anything like that. We will never have that, right? Ethereum L1 just by virtue of being a distributed system will never be as scalable as a centralized system. But that's not the point, right? The point is to create a system that uh is is you know is is decentralized, secure, reliable, resilient, 100% uptime as we know Ethereum has um and at the heart of it basically be be a system that anyone in the world can trust with their wealth with their assets with auh various different agreements uh you know with lots of different kind of use cases and

not uh I guess like uh have a have that risk of some central party or some central figure being able to control it on a whim because as I guess like we progress further and further into I guess latestage capitalism, it it definitely seems like everything is just becoming more and more centralized, right? Like all of these massive companies are buying up other massive companies and it just really seems like in the next, you know, couple decades even, we may only be left with like a very a handful of mega corporations that run everything in the world. Uh and and that has not traditionally been the case, right? that traditionally like over the last 100 years it started off quite I wouldn't say decentralized but quite distributed in terms of power within the world but then through the you know through I guess like postworld

war II through all the prosperity that came with that and then into what I guess is like latestage capitalism right now it certainly feels like it especially when it comes to the the fiat system and the fiat cycles and how the dollar seems to be in the latter stages of its of its cycles here uh we're seeing this massive cons consolidation here and we're also seeing this wealth being used to more influence politics more and more right so all of this centralized stuff is going on and in that area and in that arena we definitely want to have something that's like a counterbalance to that and I think that's Ethereum I've always thought that was Ethereum but I think going forward it's going to be more important than ever to preserve that about Ethereum and that's what Vitalik has kind of been talking about here so

his first tweet that I wanted to cover today was uh basically this concept of increasing bandwidth and reducing latency now this is something that the Salana ecosystem popularized as a term. So IBRL increase bandwidth reduce latency and it's essentially their mantra for scaling their L1. So increase the amount of uh scalability of of the L1 by increasing the bandwidth, increasing the um I guess like the megabytes per second or gigabytes per second that the um the network can can process and then reduce latency to do that. So basically make it so that transactions can happen even faster. you know, their 400 millisecond kind of uh uh times right now on on Salana. They want to try and get that even lower and

lower and lower. But where Vital comes in and where he he's coming at this from is that increasing bandwidth is safer than reducing latency. And reducing latency for an L1 protocol shouldn't really be one of the main goals. And this goes to a discussions we're having in the Ethereum community about, you know, what should we prioritize going forward for uh the the next fork after Glamsterdam, so Hegotar, or the fork after that, which is currently camed AR in 2027. Should we be prioritizing shorter slot times, right? Should we be reducing slot times from 12 seconds to 6 seconds first or should we do fast finality first? Because as you guys know, Ethereum finality takes around 13 minutes uh today whereas other chains have much faster finality than that.

There is a massive asterisk on that though whereas these other L1s they don't have economic finality whereas Ethereum does. So in my opinion Ethereum's finality even though it's uh you know 13 minutes is still stronger than any of the other finality that comes from the other chains but it's not I guess a strictly strictly technical thing. It's an economic thing and as you guys know and as I've been talking about for for for a long time on the refuel we would rather do things technically than economically. like when if you can do something technically, you're better off doing it technically than relying on on economics. Cryptoeconomics has its purpose and it serves a really great uh great role. And it's not a meme to say that Ethereum has economic security. But if you can do it technically rather than with economic security, you want to do

it technically and then economic security can go on top and have another kind of layer of security there. But when if we were to reduce from 12 to 6 seconds times, that is reducing latency, right? But then people will make the argument about okay well why do we need to do that like who is that actually kind of servicing versus faster finality like if we go from 12 to 6 seconds is that actually going to improve the end user experience uh in in a substantial way I would argue probably not because the end user experience what they want is they want transactions that are confirmed on their front end right when they and and and when they see confirmed on their front end it doesn't have to be confirmed on chain but just on their front end when you click a a swap on a

on your wallet or something like that and then like a split second later it comes up and says your swap is completed. That doesn't mean it's completed in the background necessarily. Uh and also it can actually take longer than that. Even though the chain can be faster, it can take longer than you to get a um a reply from the RPCs, from the APIs, from the the front end that you're interacting with uh due to just inherent lag in those systems. So yeah, the chain could be super fast uh in in confirming your transaction, but then you the user won't even see that for a few seconds sometimes. So when it comes to actually improving the user experience materially, um shorter slot times won't do that, at least not from 12 to six.

That's not to say that we shouldn't do it, but it's in contention with doing faster finality because we can only do one of these things at once. And there is typically a 6 to9 month uh lag time between doing I I guess one and then doing the other. So if we want to do um something that I guess like benefits the most amount of users, should we be doing faster finality uh first? And there are a lot of arguments popping up around this now saying that well yeah because it also falls into the I guess like strategy of Ethereum L1 trying to be the most secure, most decentralized, most resilient and reliable chain out there.

And it also helps users for things like uh centralized exchange deposits. You know, right now you have to wait quite a while on Ethereum L1 for your deposit to clear because of the fact that exchanges like to wait for that finality, right? That economic finality of around 13 minutes. But imagine if we had single slot or three slot finality. Three slot finality in a 12 slot uh in a 12cond slot world is under a minute to finality. Uh right, that's um that's a that's a substantial I guess like um improvement there. But even like single slot finality at 12 seconds, that's an even bigger improvement. So it it counts a lot for that for centralized exchanges. uh for bridges between uh between different chains. Council a lot for that. Council off for L2s being able to post down and being able to say, "Okay, well, we're secure now. We've got

finality here. This is this is more secure than waiting those 13 minutes and they can do faster bridge transfers, native bridge transfers between L1 uh and and the L2 uh specifically on ZK rollups, right? So, it it does have a a a bigger material impact on end users than faster slots does. So that's why you know Vitalic here or at least this is one of the things Vitalik's talking about here is that uh increasing bandwidth is safer than reducing latency and I I guess I went off on a little bit of a tangent there talking about finality but increasing bandwidth is obviously doing things like adding more blobs to the network and increasing the gas limit right and that's what Vitalic references here you know with with pure DAS and zero knowledge proofs we know how to scale and potentially we can scale thousands of times compared to the

status quo the numbers become far more favorable than before uh there is no law of physics that prevents combining extreme scale with decentralization. Reducing latency is not like this. We are fundamentally constrained by the speed of light and on top of that we also constrained by needing to support nodes obviously around the world needing to support sensitive resistance and the fact that running a node in a non-s super concentrated location may not may be not only possible but also economically viable. So this is what I've talked about a lot as well where I I I think I've said this in the context of these kind of L1 chains that are trying to be faster than L2s. It's it's not possible, right? Because of the fact that you are literally constrained by the speed of light. There is no one

nothing we nothing that can go faster than the speed of light. So these L1 founders who think that they can beat the speed of light on a distributed system are delusional at best and just lying to you at worst. And I think a lot of them are just lying. They they know this. They're not that stupid, right? But it's a good way to kind of gas line. It's a good way to, I guess, pump market cap, pump pump coin prices. But when it comes to L2s, they don't have this problem. They don't have to deal with that. This they can just be a super uh super beefy um uh I guess like pro sequencer. That's the word I'm looking for. Super beefy sequencer with with which some of these L2s have opted to do. And they will they can collapse times uh I guess like block times or

slot times. I can collapse these down to not zero but like very close too. And you just can't do that with a distributed system. Uh now again this goes back to my point before about the fact that this sort of stuff matters for like I guess high frequency trading and matters for like I guess bots doing stuff in the background but for actual end users it's not like the difference between 1 second and 100 milliseconds there's no difference to a human right. uh you won't feel that especially because everything that on the fin front end needs to update as well to show you that change in state you know if you make a swap or if you send uh money out of your wallet the front end is only as fast as everything that is feeding information into that front end all the API calls or the RPC stuff going on it's

only as fast as that and again that is um limited by the speed of light because it has to make these calls over the internet which is limited by the speed of light so if we're talking about things that have the biggest kind of net user impact here. Reducing latency uh you know is cool to a certain point to like 1 second as I've discussed uh many times before as well but increasing bandwidth is safer than doing this because you know if you reduce latency too much then essentially things centralize and that's why we don't want to kind of that that's why the goal of I guess like Ethereum L1 is not to reduce slot times you know as as much as we can. The goal isn't to get slot times down to 400 milliseconds. The goal is to essentially reduce slot times while preserving decentralization. But we can

increase bandwidth uh which means kind of like scaling up the chain uh in in a much safer way because we have things like podas and zks and that's the kind of path that we're on here. Um and Vitalik also touches on the fact that we can decrease latency overall as well with like things like peerto-peer improvements uh and and and smaller node counts uh per slot. So not smaller node count overall but smaller uh node counts per slot and and can remove the need for an aggregation step allowing the entire hot path to happen in one subnet which would actually substantially uh speed things up. Uh but this plausibly buys us 3 to 6x and he thinks moderate latency decreases to a 2 to 4 second level are very much in the realm of possibility.

So as as I said about like slot times getting down to 4 seconds is the long-term goal here. I think beyond that it's probably not going to be a thing that happens. And Vitalic says 2 to 4 seconds here. You have to think of this in terms of percentages. Going from 12 to 6 seconds is a 50% reduction. Going from 6 to 4 is not 50%. It's something like 20 something% um if I'm doing my math correctly there. But then going from 4 to 2 is a 50% reduction. So it's a pretty substantial reduction to go to two from four even though the numbers are closer than 12 and six for example. But you have to think of it in percentage terms because that's um that's the right way to think about it.

And and then Vital kind of uh uh says here, but Ethereum, you know, is not the world video game server. It is the world heartbeat. It is not trying to be the lowest latency system at L1. It is not trying to host um you know, first person shooter games where 20 milliseconds is like what you want to have or less in terms of ping. It's not trying to host highfrequency trading on the L1 itself, like all of the the orders being routed through that. No, it is trying to essentially be a maximally decentralized system and secure and resilient and reliable um while also giving the ability to other constructions to be built on top like layer 2 that can fill these needs like the high frequency trading and and what have you, right?

So, I thought that was just a really great tweet from Vitalic basically realigning everyone on, you know, what exactly Ethereum is and what it's being built to be. It's not being built to be all these other things. And that's, as I said before, why I've always said and why I've been very adamant about this is that Ethereum is its own thing. It does not compete with anything else in the ecosystem because nothing else is even close to Ethereum and not even trying to be anything like Ethereum L1. And and I don't I don't even think it's possible to recreate what Ethereum L1 is today. The closest thing, and it's not even close, but the closest thing is Bitcoin. And it's it's nowhere near close because Bitcoin doesn't have client diversity, right? Bitcoin has centralization risks with proof of work. Bitcoin has no ways to punish attackers. Like with the proof

of stake, we have slashing, right? To punish punish attackers. Uh you know, Bitcoin um I mean obviously Bitcoin doesn't do what Ethereum does in terms of smart contracts. Like it's it's just not the same thing. Um and Bitcoin also has big threats coming up for it. The security budget issue and the quantum issue, which Ethereum doesn't have. It doesn't have the security budget issue um at all because we have tail inflation or tail issuance. uh and the quantum threat while it is a threat to Ethereum it is something that Ethereum will fix because we have a culture of fixing things and upgrading things and doing hard forks whereas Bitcoin does not have that. So that's why I say, you know, even though Bitcoin is the closest thing, it is not close. And then you have the long list of other L1s out there who I wouldn't even consider to be

playing on the same planet as Ethereum. Like they're all the way out there doing their own thing, doing, you know, and some users find value in that. Some people find value in that. And that's fine. But that's not what Ethereum is. It's not what Ethereum is trying to do or compete with. And I'm glad. I'm very glad because Ethereum is opinionated about what it wants to be and it wants to be credibly neutral, which is kind of ironic because to be opinionated about something is to not be neutral. But Ethereum is opinionated about being incredibly neutral. All right, if that makes sense. Maybe it's an oxymoron, but it is definitely that um as well there. So, there was that from Vitalic. But there was also one other thing uh that I wanted to highlight as well. He he put out another tweet here as you can see

where he said Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set uh people free. Now, this is something that I think Vitalik uh wrote about as part of the trustlessness manifesto, which a bunch of other people were a part of as well. Um, so I just wanted to focus on on that first quote and then another quote that was in the the post here. So, it says here, Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free. So, yeah, Ethereum L1 is not created to make the, you know, most efficient financial system ever. It's not created to make uh to be like a high frequency trading trading chain at all as I just discussed. and and Ethereum L1 is not um it doesn't exist to make apps convenient itself. Yes, you can build

apps on top of it and add conveniences to it, but those conveniences come with trade-offs as well. It means that you're probably trusting a third party in order to make that app convenient because as you guys know, if you want to do everything as like a self-s sovereign individual on top of Ethereum, run your own node, use it as your as your own RPC, even kind of run your own block explorers and interact with the contracts through your own node or through your own front ends. That's all extremely inconvenient, right? That is not something that it's easy to do. That's not something that the lay lay person can do. It's not even something that I think that I could do without guy guides telling you to to do certain things here, right? So from from that perspective, Ethereum L1 is not being built to make apps convenient. But it is

trying to be built to make it so that other people can build things on top of it. But that's where the I guess like additional trust assumptions come in. That's where the additional centralization vectors come in. Uh but yeah, Ethereum is is not basically being that. Now another quote that was in this tweet which is something that really resonated with me was Vitalik said you know block space is abundant but decentralized permissionless and resilient block space is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient Blockspace and then make that abundant. And this is basically the whole thing, right? This is this is Ethereum L1's entire deal. Like Blockspace is extremely abundant across all of crypto. You can go to so many L1's out there that have block space and L2s as well that are dead. You know,

there's no one there, but they have the block space, they have the scale. Even the ones that have activity and have more scale because they sacrifice decentralization, they have it, right? They have tons of it. But in terms of decentralized permissionless and resilient block space, well, that is incredibly scarce, right? I would argue Ethereum is the only one that has that. Bitcoin may have it just for BTC transfers and some really weird kind of hacky stuff like ordinals and and ruins, but in terms of things like actual smart contract applications and tokens and NFTTS and stuff like that and I guess like obviously um trading assets uh and moving assets around moving the best asset in the world, ETH of course um the to do that in a fully decentralized

permissionless and resilient way you do that on Ethereum L1 and that block base is not abundant and will never be abundant. It will be scalable to a extent but it will never be abundant. It won't be something that um that is freely available all the time at a you know basically cheap a really cheap cost or or basically free cost. Even today at the lower gas prices that we're at, it's not free uh to to transact. It's it's still like what 20 cents to send some tokens around or something like that. So that is is definitely you nowhere near free. Um, and Ethereum L1, even though we've kind of upped the gas limit to 60 million, the the block space is still not abundant there. But that's the point, you know, that's that's the whole point. And I'm glad that Vitalite called

this out because this should be what we basically focus on over the next few years as we ship the rest of the Ethereum road map. uh as we kind of deliver lean Ethereum, as we deliver the ZK EVMs, as we continue to scale up the L2s via blobs and all the other really good cool good and cool stuff that we're trying to do with Ethereum, um we have to basically all be on the same page. And anyone who's not part of this vision or who doesn't think that this is the right vision or doesn't like vibe with this vision, um they can either get on board, which I think they should because it's a really cool vision, or they can go work on something else. I don't think you should be working on something that you don't actually vibe with. Like that just seems silly to me, especially if

you've got options. Obviously, a lot of people work on things that they don't care for because they don't have any other option and they need the paycheck, right? And that's totally fine if if that applies to you. But if you're a, you know, if you're a a smart qualified uh professional that has options to go work on something else and you really feel like Ethereum is not where you want to be, then go work somewhere else. Like, as I said, I don't get the point of staying somewhere where you're not happy. Like that's just I guess like a human thing. It's not just a Ethereum thing. Um, but yeah, Ethereum is not straying from from this path. I don't think I I think Ethereum is going to stay on this path. I think it's the right path, but yeah, if you don't vibe with it, then there's plenty of other

communities out there uh for you. Not that we don't welcome you in Ethereum, but hey, that's the strategy, right? All right. So, uh, ETH Panda Ops. Now, you guys know this team. They came out, I guess, like last year or the year before, and they've been kind of ramping up their activity within the Ethereum ecosystem over the last couple of years. But essentially, the ETH Panda Ops website is one of my favorite websites to uh kind of visit these days, especially the lab website that they've got here. And I've shown you guys this before on the refuel. Essentially, you you've got like a kind of live view of the entire Ethereum network. Not the entire Ethereum network, I should say, but like the Ethereum network as um if people are running the sidecar software that that Panda Ops put out, it shows up here. uh and you can see uh kind of

blocks being propagated across the network uh attestations happening and then aggregations of those attestations. You have so much kind of data here to see different things. Uh but the reason why this exists or at least the major reason why this exists is to give more data analysis uh and kind of those sorts of things to core developers and researchers in order to inform uh what the Ethereum L1 road map uh looks like going forward and how to basically scale it and secure it and um and improve it. And the reason why I'm bringing it up today is because they published a road map for 2026. Now this is a quite a detailed blog post here. Uh I didn't expect it to be this detailed to be honest. I thought it was just going to be a few dot points saying you know this

is what we're working on. Uh if you you know if you want to help here's how you can help so on and so forth. But they actually went into a lot of detail about how they're are kind of ramping up here. So obviously you guys know Amsterdam and Hegotar the next two hard forks. They they talked about that here. Uh they're going to be ramping up their tooling for scaling and they they discuss how they're doing that here doubling down on Zatu which is an internal tool that they were using in December 2022. uh but has now evolved into a fullyfledged data pipeline uh that it's now open source and available to the community which is basically this here uh from my understanding um and uh they open sourced the data set in March 2024 and they've been uh uh uh collecting and transforming data from multiple Ethereum

networks for for a while here so they're doubling down on that expanding the lab of course um uh you'll of course be able to kind of query the the zadu data data set I should say um and there's There's also a bunch of other, I guess, like upgrades coming to that. They're evolving their data pipeline. Uh they're going to be uh having a fully open data infrastructure as well. ZKVMs, they're going to be covering that stuff. They're going to be covering how Ethereum is hardening the protocol. And there's so much happening here, guys. Like, I'm not going to read out the whole blog post for you, but I wanted to highlight it because it's very much worth reading this. I think the ETH Panda Ops team is one of the best teams in the Ethereum ecosystem today. They are so valuable for the core developers and the core

researchers to get actual data and to get actual feedback on what they want to do with upgrades because in the past before panda ops existed there would be analysis done on certain things like increasing the gas limit for example or adding more blobs to the network and it would be like a rough analysis it wouldn't be totally informed by I guess like the live network itself and I guess uh the impact it would have on all the stakeholders and so on and so forth and that led to upgrades being a a lot more conservative. But now that we have actual real data with um a lot of I guess like smart people behind it dissecting it and massaging it, making sure that it's readable for everyone, now that we have this, we can actually be a lot more aggressive with uh with our kind of I guess upgrades. And that's

why we have been I think that's a major reason why we have been and we've been ramping up that aggressiveness. We're doing more EIPs. We're we've been a lot more open to scaling the L1 now. uh we're doing um not just scaling the L1 but also improving the L1 via uh things like considering uh obviously reducing the slot times but also single slot or three slot finality things like that uh ZKVMs like all that sorts of stuff increasing the gas limit um which maybe I mentioned before but yeah all that sorts of stuff that is definitely being informed in a really really critical way and important way by the I guess tooling and the data that the ETH panda ops team has put out. So, just a huge kudos to them for putting this out and I can't wait to see what the the lab looks like

at the end of 2026. I can't wait to see wait to see all the stuff that these guys put out because they've done a killer job so far over the last I guess you could say like 18 months that they've been relatively public in their I guess like um and what they're doing. But yeah, they're ramping that up a lot this year. So, I'm I'm super excited to see uh how that shakes out there. Another person who's been really great at giving us a lot of data data on Ethereum and Ethereum related things for a very long time now is uh Tony here from the Ethereum Foundation. Now, he's actually uh uh uh kind of I guess works with the the Panda Ops team as well. I don't think he's like officially part of the Panda Ops team, but he works with them uh on on various different things,

but he's been putting together lots of different websites as I've I've covered on the refill before like me boost.pix um and uh censorship.pick. pix like all those sorts of things. Well, now he's got two new websites out. Me, sorry, bids.pix and xof.pix. So, bids.pix shows the me boost auction uh in real time, including bids, their timing and dynamics that are usually opaque. And you can see that here. Now, this is another thing that's going to inform core developers and researchers on changes to the network as well. Very, very important uh here. But you can actually see this. You can see the builders on the right hand side here.

they're building uh uh blocks and you can see the winning builders there and then you can see them coming in and the and the time like the 12 this is over a 12 second slot of course you can see like the the pre- bids the slot beginning block scene you know and that's it right basically so uh and then you can see who who's who's won here and now xofpix shows private exclusive order flow at the block level uh and you can basically explore a block so if we click here and load this block it'll show the uh the order flow of that block with transaction hash and whether it was private or public order flow. I don't think something like this has existed before which is kind of interesting that it hasn't existed before but uh it's pretty cool to see this. You can see

here that in this block in particular there was 42% of all transactions in that block were from a private orderflow mempool here. So not the public meool. Sometimes that can be pretty high. It depends like it it depends on network activity overall I think. So for example, if network activity is high because there is some vol you know event that it spiked uh due to spike the volatility then you would probably expect private order flow to be higher. Uh but yeah on average it seems to be I mean 40 50% or something like that. It just depends like on on a on a on any given day but uh you can kind of like view different blocks if you want here and see which blocks you know have more uh order more private order flow than others. Cuz like if I go back a block,

if I go to the previous block, let's see what that was. I want to see I actually want to see if there's like a huge variance. Yeah, this was 65%. So I'm I'm I'm assuming there's like a pretty big variance between blocks. Let's change this to Let's just do 00 here. Um I should say slots here, not not um uh block. No, blocks make sense. Um yeah, this was 30%. So yeah, there's a pretty huge variance. Um I wonder if there's going to be like a chart on here that shows this. I'm sure Tony will add that. basically shows like over each slot a chart of uh you know what the percentage was of private versus public order flow and then you can get like an average over all of the blocks over a certain period of time. I'm sure he's he's he's probably working on that. But yeah, very

cool to see these new websites. I'll link this all in the YouTube description. You can go check it out uh for yourself there. All right, so some of you may have missed this because there wasn't really much fanfare about it because I guess it's not really that exciting cuz we've already had one of these. But the second uh scheduled blob parameter only fork went live on Ethereum mainet on January 7th, so a few days ago. Now, this increased the Ethereum blob target from 10 to 14 and the blob limit from 15 to 21. Now, this is the last blob parameter only fork uh that had been scheduled in Fusaka. So, for the next one, it's going to be in uh if we do schedule one, it will probably be in Glamsterdam. But if

you actually look at blob usage right now, uh it's not even at like the it's not even at like the six uh target. And that was the target before the first blob parameter only fork. So we're up to, as I said, like a a target of 14. And the average over the last 3 days is 4.8. So we are pretty far away from getting to the target right now. So I would argue that I don't think we're going to get to target for a little while. I don't expect us to be there by uh by um uh Glam Amsterdam. So I don't expect us to do another BO fork like and we obviously had Pas go live as well with um with Fusaka. I'm sure that's going to keep getting improved as well as we um as we as we continue here. But

yeah, it just definitely doesn't seem like we're going to be getting to that because I mean you can see the the kind of trend. Obviously 2025 has been a I mean most of 2025 and particularly like the back half of 2025 was kind of quiet but if we look at the the chart here the longer term chart we we were kind of you know it was funny when we're at three we were at like three blobs as the um the target we're basically at the ceiling from the 1st of November 2024 to the 5th of May 2025. So yeah, you could say 6 months, but then after that, the only time we had been at the target of six and just was in November of 2025. Um, and I I think that yeah, I'm not I'm not

sure why that was the case in particular. Uh, but yeah, since then it's kind of been coming down a bit and kind of stayed at like the 4.8ish, I guess, like target here. Four, between four and and five average 4.5 and five is an average here. So, for us to get to 15 or 14, sorry, I should say. Going to be a while. Going to be a while, but still, we had that go live. It's a little fanfare. Everything went well, which is really uh awesome to see. But yeah, I'm not expecting another BO fork to be scheduled uh anytime soon. Uh unless we somehow jump up to close to that target cuz it we don't need it.

Like there's no use adding more blobs to the network if we uh if we're this far away from the limit. Like I usually I would say that it's always good to add more scale if we can. But if we don't need to because we're so far below the limit, then there's no point adding more and putting more load on the network when we could maybe increase the gas limit instead instead of doing more blobs cuz everything you add to the network adds load to the network. Um so if we instead of adding more blobs, let's say we add uh sorry, we increase the gas limit some more. Uh, and then as blobs get closer and closer to the target over time, then we can talk about uh uh adding more blobs there. But yeah, I think at this point in time, I'd rather see the gas limit go up more than

more blobs added because it just makes more sense. Uh uh because if we can scale the L1 uh even more uh and we can get to that 180 million gas limit this year, which is what I want to see, then let's do it, right? We've blobbs have already scaled a lot. We don't need to scale blobs more right now. I mean, in the future, maybe we will, or I mean, likely we will, but uh but not now. Uh but on that note as well, I do want to just finish up the the blob discussion here with a tweet from VC. Uh so you all know that Robin Hood is building an L2 on Ethereum. Uh VC was quoting Robin Hood's CEO here I believe or one of Robin Hood's executives where they said the reason we did an L2 was we wanted to get the security from Ethereum, the

decentralization from Ethereum and also the liquidity that is part of the EVM and to be able to really focus on what we are good at. And then uh VC says, you know, Ethereum L2s is where is the best business model in crypto. And I believe this as well. If you are a business coming into crypto and you want to build your own thing, you build as an as an L2. Don't build it as a a new L1. That's just silly. You build it as an Ethereum L2. And that's the best way to to build a business because you get access to all of this really cool stuff. The EVM obviously is huge network effect there. The liquidity, huge network effect. uh the decentralization of Ethereum. Uh you get access to to to essentially uh the best construction of any chain in in crypto because an L2 is always better

than an L1 in terms of like speed and efficiency and all that uh as well. Uh, and it's great to see Robin Hood putting out this, I guess, message out into the world because it means that other big kind of financial firms and and others will look at this and be like, "Okay, well, you know, the Ethereum L2 model is a serious thing to look at." Like, we should actually have this as part of our, I guess, due diligence process to see what we want to choose here. So, I'm super excited to uh to see that message being put out there because that's exactly what I've been advocating for for a long time now. U, but it's great to see that vision kind of materialize there. So yeah, very cool to see that.

Um, but yeah, I think that's everything I had for today. Uh, there was one other thing that I wanted to talk about because this just happened just before and I didn't know if I was going to talk about it or not. Uh, but essentially there was a video um from Jerome Powell. This is a markets talk by the way guys. If you're not interested in that, you can you can click off now. Uh but there was a video from Jerome Powell that basically uh uh was a response to the Department of Justice opening an investigation into the Federal uh reserve uh over I think it was the Federal Reserve not providing funds to build something at the White House for Trump like his ballroom or something like that. Forgive me for getting the exact details wrong. I don't really pay much close attention to this sort of

stuff because politics just melts your brain especially American politics. But um the reason why I bring this up is because in in the markets broadly and and I'm talking like not just crypto but like just worldwide markets and and the US dollar as well like there's always been I guess like at least a service understanding that you know the Fed operates independently of the government and this is true of of of a lot of western especially western nations where the the Federal Reserve or whatever it's called in in a various nation the the the thing that controls the interest rates and the the institution that controls the interest rates and controls the money uh I guess like the money printing uh that should be independent of politics right it doesn't matter

who's in power at any given time it should be independent of of politics uh and while that may not be literally true because there's always bias in in different parts of things I do think that the Federal Reserve in the US for all the crit criticism that they get I think that they've stuck to that for for the most part um in terms of you know keeping in in terms of like I guess like changing interest rates based on uh the market data that they have, based on the economic data that they have. Now, the video that was put out, and you can go watch the video for for yourself. I'm sure you find it online. The video that was put out was from Jerome Powell, the current chair of the Fed, basically uh saying that what the Trump administration is is doing by by getting

the Department of Justice to go after the Fed for this is uh is really bad. Basically, it's it's unheard of. It is not the way these things should go. it is basically interfering with something that shouldn't be interfered with. Um, and whe whatever your view on this is, whatever your politics are, it's irrelevant to to this discussion. This discussion is particularly about the markets. And this is the reason why I'm bringing it up is because like if if this is kind of uh true that this happened, which I believe it is true, I don't think um, you know, drone power would go on and lie about this. Um, and and the markets are not going to like this. And I think that if you take it to its logical conclusion and you know that um Jerome is out in May, uh that his term is up in May and Trump basically

gets to a point the next Fed chair, which is kind of funny cuz he appointed um Jerome Powell originally and apparently doesn't like him now. But I think the expectation and I think this is a big reason why gold has been rallying as well. But I think the expectation for a while now is that once Derome Powell's term is up, Trump is going to put in just someone he can control into the position and then drop interest rates to zero for various different reasons. The obviously like the top reason that people speculate is because it's an easy way to pay off debt, right? Pay off the US government debt. But dropping interest rates to zero in this current environment is just going to lead to massive inflation. Now what this means for markets is anyone's guess because like

there's always this kind of funny thing where if you had told people that with when co happened that uh the assets were going to go absolutely nuts over like the 18-month period from I guess you could say March 2020 to like the end of 2021. A lot of people would have called you crazy because they're like no how's that going to happen? Like no one's working, no one has any money, you know, inflation is going to go go rampant. This is really really bad. But then that 18th month period was insane. Like everything went up crazy. Like crypto obviously, but like so many other markets just went crazy. Uh it was it was really ridiculous. So I think that it can go either way this time. Like if this happens, if interest rates get dropped to zero and then inflation starts going going up again and starts

creeping up again, there'll be people who say, "Well, this is really really bad for markets. You know, everything's going to go down. Everything's going to crash." It's like, yeah, maybe maybe it will, maybe it won't. Maybe it's going to be happen uh like with what happened with CO. We don't know that. That's the thing about markets is you never really know. You can position yourself in different circumstances. But then at the same time, every market is different. Like what happens to stocks may not happen to precious metals, may not happen to crypto. Like will you know if stocks crash, maybe gold just keeps going up. If stocks go up, maybe gold stops going up. If crypto goes up, maybe and stocks and gold go down. That's a possibility as well. So if you if you kind of look at it from from that perspective, it's just even becoming

harder and harder to kind of I guess be in the markets at this point. This is something that I think about uh quite often um these days because I'm always looking for new opportunities within different markets within crypto in particular. There's not that many within crypto these days. I've discussed this before on the refill of course. U but then in the broader markets I look at all these kind of things that are doing well. It's all the It's all the AI companies obviously uh and and related tech companies, all the tech companies that manufacture or are part of, you know, um GPUs, RAM, hard drive, solidstate drives or you know, CPUs, all that sorts of stuff. But then I look at that and I'm just like, well, it's so obviously like a massive bubble to me.

But then I know that the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent. So I I kind of look at that and I'm like, well, I want to kind of maybe buy some stocks and maybe want to, you know, play in that market. But then I just see everything going parabolic and I'm like, I saw this in crypto. Whenever I've wanted to buy something that's gone parabolic in crypto, it usually crashes at, you know, in the next couple of months at least. So it's just become like very difficult, I think. And now throwing in uncertainty with the the I guess like the whole thing with the Fed now, that just makes it even more difficult. Uh, and I think a lot of people maybe will default to, well, I've got no idea where the market's going now. Everything's just so hot and and

everything's so unpredictable. Maybe I'm just going to like sell now. Maybe I'm going to sell. And that might lead to a short to medium-term selloff as well. I don't know. Obviously, none of this is investment advice. I'm not an expert on this. Uh, I'm not going to say like I'm an amazing investor or anything like that, but I thought it was worth discussing because of the fact that I know a lot of you guys spend time in the prices channel and the daily great discord channel and a lot of you guys obviously invest in this sort of stuff and I thought it was just worth kind of giving some of my initial thoughts on this. But we're going to have to see because it's not just the Fed stuff, right? It's also the uncertainty around will Trump actually go after Greenland, will he actually go after Cuba and

Mexico? And will he actually go after Canada? There's all that uncertainty too when it comes to I guess the US side of things. But then there's also the China side of things. Will China go after Taiwan now that the US went uh and and kind of like kidnapped Maduro from I don't I'm probably not saying his name right, but from Venezuela, right? Like there's all this uncertainty on top of the Fed stuff now on top of an already raging kind of market in I guess not in crypto obviously, but like in the stock market and then there's already like the AI kind of bubble which is just ridiculous. Like AI is real, don't get me wrong. like it's a real technology.

It's doing a lot of real things. It's providing a lot of real value. It's also producing a lot of but it's providing a lot of real value. But that doesn't have to translate to the insane speculation that's going on within that area right now. Like if you actually go look at all of the charts of all of the I guess uh companies that are even just slightly related to anything got to do with AI, they're all just vertically up. They're just all parabolas. Now, that is not sustainable because eventually like eventually just these these things just stop. These things just stop going up. They come down and the things that have gone up the fastest usually come down the fastest because they were only going up due to the rotation game. And we know the rotation game because we've seen it in crypto time and time again. People

keep screaming alt season, guys. The alt season is happening in stocks and we know what happens at the end of an alt season. It's not good for alts. It's not fun. So I think when you look at it from that broad kind of macro perspective there the really the conclusion that you can draw and the conclusion that I that I've drawn after you know a little while of thinking about this is that I've got no idea where this is going to go and I'm playing it safe. I have I still have a relatively large cash cash position which I kind of feel uncomfortable with as well cuz I don't like sitting on on cash. I like investing my money because c sitting on cash just means inflation. Um but you know interest rates still relatively high. am getting a pretty good rate um through my um through

through kind of that uh with my cash. Uh but then at the same time, I'm still itching. I'm like, "Okay, I need to put this cash to work. Where do I put it? Where do I put it?" And everywhere I look, I'm just like, "I don't want to buy this." Like I maybe I'll just go buy like a boring index. I don't want to do that either because I feel like I I I'm a bit more like I I'm able to like be a bit more involved with this stuff than just buying a dumb kind of index and just sitting on it. But obviously you can split things up like have a percentage in the index, percentage somewhere else, blah blah blah, so on and so forth. But yeah, just wanted to kind of put that out there to say that if you guys feel like this stuff is, you

know, very difficult to navigate around, complex, I'm I'm with you on that. Like I don't think anyone thinks this is easy, especially within crypto. Um, but yeah, that's the that's the kind of game that we play. And hopefully obviously the the game is we invest and make money, not invest and lose money. But it has become very difficult to do that I think over the last particularly 6 months, particularly within crypto. But that doesn't mean that the things are going to always be like this. But I'd love to see more normaly return to things. I'd love to see more certainty return to things. I hate all this uncertainty. It just sucks. Sucks not just from an investment perspective, but just from like a mental health perspective as well. Just like waking up and you know get being exposed to some news about how this is is happening or

that is happening. And there are some good things happening as well. Don't get me wrong. It's not all doom and gloom. But obviously the social media algorithms and I guess like the internet as a whole loves to just push doom and gloom into our feeds and that's what a lot of us consume without even realizing it. But yeah, anyway, I'm not going to go off on a tangent about all of that now. I'm going to stop myself before I do cuz I have a lot of thoughts there, but I've I've talked about it plenty of times in the past. So, I think on that note, that's going to be it for today. So, thank everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to sub to channel if you haven't yet. Give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all

next Monday. Thanks everyone.