Market meltdown, Core dev updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #847 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the daily refuel where I cap the latest news in Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host Dan this 11th of October 2025. All right everyone, let's get into it. So it has been what almost 2 months I think I checked today uh since I've done the last refuel. Uh a lot of you have probably wondered is the refuel dead? Is the daily guay dead? The daily guay is actually quite active. Uh if you are in the Discord channel then you'll know that. Uh and there's a lot of people in there regardless of if I'm active or not. they're all talking amongst themselves and there's a lot of great information in there. So, I guess if you haven't joined the Daily Way Discord channel yet, you should definitely do that. Uh, but I guess the question is around like the video, the

podcast, all that sorts of stuff there, the refuel really. Um, and it's not dead. It's just I guess the same as it's been over the last few months or at least probably just I guess the majority of this year. It's kind of I'm doing episodes whenever I feel like it. And today I feel like doing an episode, which is funny because today is probably one of the worst days in the markets ever. And for some reason, I feel like doing an episode. So maybe I'm just not affected by the market movements at all anymore, which which is kind of weird. Um, but I guess like a bunch of you are probably wondering, you know, what I'm doing besides kind of crypto these days because I've actually kind of taken a break from Twitter as well. I'm not very active on there at all really. And I

guess that's separate to everything else because Twitter is like I mean social media generally just keeps getting worse and worse. And you guys know my thoughts on this. I've given them plenty of times before, but every time I post a tweet, I just get flooded with like AI bots replying and and I think to myself like, why am I even posting this tweet? I used to love getting replies and engaging with them and reading them and seeing kind of real people reply to to my tweets and now it's just all bots. And it doesn't seem like a fix is coming for this. It seems like it's kind of a feature, not a bug uh to to Twitter and to other social media platforms cuz it's not just Twitter. Like you go on Reddit, there's plenty of bots there. Facebook don't even have to mention how many bots

are on there. Instagram, I mean Instagram's even worse because like every third post on there is just an ad. Uh, and it's all retargeted. So, if you like Google something once, all of a sudden you're flooded with ads for that product or service. And it's just super annoying. And I I I think generally like I have actually kind of become burnt out on the internet. Not just I guess crypto, but on the internet generally and like the digital kind of world that we're all accustomed to. And maybe it's because I've been online for such a long time now. I would say I've been online for over 20 years at this point. Uh from when I was a child to today, uh there are going to be people who are being online, you know, for their entire kind of life. And then there already are people who have been online since they

were born, but you know, they're younger than I am, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, all that stuff there. And I feel like everyone just is going to get to the same point of just being burnt out. And I say the internet, but it really is social media, right? Like the internet has become social media at this point. I remember when I took my break last year. You guys remember maybe before the ETH ETFs were approved. It was it was Mayuh of last year. I took that two two and a half week cold turkey break from uh crypto which is really a cold turkey break from social media as well. And I I kind of was bored. Like I didn't really know what to do on the internet. Like I wasn't bored in in life generally, but I was bored on the internet because there wasn't really that much to do. The

internet is great. I love the internet. I love, you know, going on various different websites and and and and things like that and and I, you know, I use AI services like chat GPT, but if you don't have social media to endlessly scroll through, then there's not that much to do. And I think obviously the social media companies know this. That's why they created like the endless scroll. That's why they are trying to keep you as engaged as possible because they know that uh if they do that, they can serve you more ads than they can make more money off you. And that's why everything has basically become engagement bait to to an extreme. I mean, it's it just gets worse and worse. uh it doesn't matter how much you try to curate your feed. Doesn't matter how much you try to avoid it. It's just

really unavoidable and there's just feels like a constant stream, constant bombardment. It feels like your mind's being doss attacked essentially. And that's how I felt for quite a while now. Um and this is especially true within the crypto ecosystem as you guys know because everything is engagement farming. There's money to be made. So everything is engagement farming. You go like I scroll through my my Twitter feed and I would say nine out of 10 tweets are engagement farming. there's like one out of 10 that actually has some useful information on there and that's actually not trying to just get as many likes as possible and as many eyeballs as possible, but generally the incentive is to to engagement bait. And happens on YouTube as well. Like I scroll through YouTube and I'm like, "Oh my god, like everything is clickbait. Absolutely everything is clickbait." And the

YouTube's even worse, I think, because like when you're making videos, you're making content and you run out of things to kind of talk about. If your brand is like a particular topic, for example, uh like obviously the refuel and the daily gray is about Ethereum. I don't necessarily run out of things to talk about because there's always stuff happening in Ethereum, but there are certain kind of industries where you've got these influencers, they talk about these things, but they do so many videos on on the same stuff and then once they exhaust all of that, they have to keep coming up with new content. Like it's it's a it's a forever kind of content machine. And then what that means is that the content just gets worse and worse and worse and and degrades and and becomes slop. Like we all know that, you know, the term slop, it's been thrown

around not just for AI slop, but just general slop on the internet. Uh, and that's what it's become because that's the incentive. You want to make money and you have to get eyeballs and everyone's competing for the the same eyeballs or similar eyeballs. So, you do clickbait, you do engagement bait, and that's what it's it's kind of become there. Um, and that's yeah, that's what's burned me out, I think. And I think I may not have realized that to the extent that I have without taking the kind of step back that I have. I thought it was kind of crypto because I'm in crypto all the time. And I mean it is to an extent, but I really think it's just the general way the internet is today. Like I, as I said, like I grew up with the internet. I grew up before the internet was uh was kind of as

ubiquitous as today. It was very small when I started going online for the first time. I had dialup internet. Uh and it was very different. Like there wasn't even I don't think Facebook was live publicly yet. I think it was live for like the universities in the US and and and things like that, but I don't think it was actually live publicly yet. I think MySpace was still a thing, but it was very different obviously. And then over the years, I, you know, saw everything kind of evolve. Facebook started out great, actually. I loved it at first because it's like, oh, I can connect with all these old people that I don't talk to anymore and I can stay in touch with friends and and things like that, but then it just got worse and worse and worse. Same with Instagram, it was cool to kind of browse through

pictures and see other people's kind of photos. Then it got worse. Twitter, same thing, right? Reddit. Reddit is actually one that I mourn the most because I love Reddit. Like, I love Reddit because there's different subreddits for for I guess like different things. And I still use Reddit quite heavily. Uh because if you go to the various I guess niche subreddits you can call it uh they're still pretty good. They're not overrun by bots. But like generally the the rest of them like the most popular subreddits it's all just bots, right? Uh and it's all just kind of I mean Reddit's like a really big e echo chamber as well. So is every social media platform but Reddit like takes takes it to another level.

It's actually crazy. Um, you know, just a recent example of this is that everyone on Reddit, doesn't matter which subreddit you you went to, they were all kind of trashing the Nintendo Switch 2 because of the the pricing for it. They're like, ah, this is going to be a flop. No one's going to buy it. Uh, it it's too expensive. So on and so forth, right? And I was reading that and I'm like, these people are all wrong. Like this is like the minority of the minority opinion. And of course, I mean, for those of you who don't know, the Switch 2 went on to become the bestselling console of all time and it's only been out for a few months now. So that's just an example of like how you know these echo chambers form and how wrong I guess like these things these I

guess like little internet communities can be. Um and those echo chambers form I guess like they can form naturally but you're also pushed into it by the algorithms which which rule everything now. Um but I really do think we've kind of accelerated this I guess like march towards maximum slop on the internet because of AI. Like you don't even have to actually put in any effort anymore. You can just get the AI to do it for you. just set up an AI bot and away you go. Like I'm sure you all see it across Twitter whenever you post anything, especially I mean if go look at my tweets when I post something straight away it's just all AI bots and I and they they all sound like it's actually like it's pretty bad reading the replies because you know they're AI and it's just it's so bad because all they do is

take your tweet and they reward it in some in some way. So you it's basically it's this weird feeling of like you read the reply and you're like this is AI and I'm just reading my own tweet just kind of said back to me in a different way in such like a cringy weird way where it's because it's cuz it's the AI there. So yeah, that's um that's obviously a big thing there. But in terms of like I guess what I've been spending my time on now that I haven't been doing you know the refules as uh very often and I haven't been on Twitter and honestly I haven't been uh I guess like paying much attention to crypto besides the Ethereum technical kind of developments. I've actually been staying on top of them you know pretty pretty I guess regularly like I would say every couple of days I

check and make sure I'm on top of it there you know the upgrades like Fusaka and and Amsterdam and all that which I'm actually going to talk about of course. Um, but and besides that, I mean, I've been sticking to my fitness regime that I started back in April that some of you may know about. I think I've spoken about it before. There's a fitness channel in the Delhi Discord channel. I've been sticking to that pretty strictly. That basically takes out most of my mornings. And then in the afternoon, I mean, I've been playing uh video games. Uh, you know, playing uh I I played Hollow Night Silkong recently. You know, that was my one of my most anticipated games and it lived up to all my expectations. 10 out of 10 for me. I know like a lot of people complain about the difficulty of the game. If you've

played it, you know how hard it is. But for me that's a feature. I love kind of playing it, learning it. Uh and and kind of I get a sense of accomplishment from it. Um but then yeah, just generally doing that. Uh and then just generally doing life things, you know, friends, family, so on and so forth. And a few other hobbies that I kind of um won't get into. Not you know, besides the stuff you see behind me like the figurines and stuff that that is always going. I'm always getting new figurines even though it looks like there's no room left in this room. There really isn't. But like I I can kind of maneuver things around and find room there. Uh but that's that's kind of what I've been feeling filling my time uh with there.

But but when it comes to I guess like crypto generally uh and Ethereum and like my involvement going forward, there's actually something that I've been thinking about a lot lately and I did a lot of soulsearching around this and I think that while it may sound a bit negative, I actually think it's a positive. So we we take a step back here and we look at I guess where crypto started and where it is today. So crypto started obviously with the launch of Bitcoin in 2009. The white paper was 2008, but 2009 is when it launched. And you could say like the first couple of years it was very underground. It was, you know, there was basically no one involved in it. There was a very small community involved in it. And then it kept ramping up, ramping up. Obviously, Silk Road had a very big impact on

getting Bitcoin on the map essentially. And then the first altcoins launched like Litecoin and others out there. And then you had the first really big Bitcoin bubble in 2013 uh where it ran from I think it was like $50 to over $1,000 into 2014. And then of course Silk Road got uh shut down during that in I think it was April of 2013 it got shut down which I think is a big reason why it pumped as well is because like that was huge news at the time and everyone kind of was was speculating and Bitcoin had already run up so much so there was a bunch of FOMO and then MT GOX exploded which ended the bull market. 2014 15 16 was was really quiet.

Uh as you guys know Ethereum launched in 2015. Ethereum white paper was published at the end of 2013. I believe 2014 was the ICO. So there was still stuff happening but still very underground. It wasn't mainstream at all. No one really knew about it still. I mean I actually didn't hear about Ethereum until 20 I think I think it was late 2016 I first heard about it but I didn't pay attention to it till early 2017. So, a lot of people did that as well because obviously 2017 we had the ICO mania that was huge at the time that got Ethereum on the map. Like people a lot of people knew about Bitcoin at that point, I think. But that got Ethereum on the map and then from there we had I guess like the rest of stuff. We we had the the bare market again and then we had like

DeFi summer. Then we had the bare market again because of FTX and Terra and stuff blowing up and then we had the recent bull market with the ETFs. But I think if you kind of take a very broad kind of bird's eye view of this, you could argue that the 2009 to 2023 period was the I guess like cipher punk underground niche counterculture period of crypto where it wasn't accepted as you know broadly as something real as something you know lasting. if you believed in it, you were considered crazy to an extent and not just in in terms of investing in it, but also the underlying technology. But since the BTC ETF was filed for and launched, we've seen an absolutely

massive wave of institutional kind of interest in this asset class. And the ETH ETF only accelerated this of course in um May of 2024 when it got approved and then launched in June. So I I would say that 2023 onwards has been this kind of institutional era and macro kind of adoption era of crypto that I don't see slowing down anytime soon. So even though I may be personally burnt out on a lot of this stuff and personally burnt out on the internet, I guess generally because of social media, I think that we're just getting started on an even bigger journey for crypto for Ethereum specifically. And that journey really is the mainstream journey. I think that at this point you could argue that it's I mean I would argue that this stuff's no

longer underground guys. It's not counterculture. It's not uh you know niche. It's not something that uh that no one you know people haven't heard of before. You talk to really anyone and they will at least have heard of Bitcoin. Like anyone like I I I I've tried this. I talked to just random people about it unless they're like completely uh you know not plugged into um the internet for example uh or even I guess like mainstream news and stuff like that. uh like older folks like I would imagine like a lot of kind of older folks like I'm talking old old like 70s ' 80s sort of thing probably haven't heard of it. Maybe they have now because I guess Trump's been talking about it. Uh but you know there'd still be a bunch of people who just they may hear the word but like they don't

remember it. They just kind of filter it out of their brain. But you could very easily make the argument that like Bitcoin at least most people have heard of Ethereum to an extent. But like crypto as well the word crypto I don't think that's a niche word at all. I don't think it's an underground word at I think most people will have heard of it at at this point. Um, and it's just obviously going to keep growing from there. Now, heard of it and bought the assets are different things. Heard of it and used the underlying technology are different things. Uh, cuz I've always argued that the asset valuations are way ahead of where the technology is in terms of adoption. And that's still true today. But when you have such major organizations getting interested and uh in in crypto and actually building on it, and I'm talking about like the

biggest organizations in the world, right? We had Swift recently announced that they're going to to actually be using crypto. You know, Ripple keeps going on about Swift and the banks using crypto for like 10 years now. And no, they haven't been using Ripple. They haven't even been involved in it, but Swift announced recently that they have been doing some work with Lana uh with Consensus. Uh and this is real work, guys. And uh and and then they're like one of the biggest, but there's all these other I guess institutions out there. Obviously, Black Rockck is doing a bunch of things. Fidelity, all these other ones. They're all coming, but they move slower. You know, they move slower than the retail investor. And and you could say, you know, again, that 2009 2023 period was mainly dominated by retail investors or by specific kind of funds and VCs that had been set up for

crypto. But now we're having I guess like the inflow of all the trad, you know, a funny thing is is that a good place to actually gauge this is LinkedIn as well because LinkedIn is uh the I guess professional social media platform, right? It's like the it's not just for Tradfy, it's for every industry. But like if you go on there and follow a bunch of Trady folks and how they talk about these things, they talk about these things like they're eight years behind essentially like they're back in 2007 sort of uh sorry 2017 sort of thing, but they're talking about it and they're getting excited about it and they they know and buy into the fact that this is the future now in large part because of things like stable coins which show them the obvious use case of these things. uh not just with

being able to send assets, you know, uh basically instantly across the globe and and and and for cheap, but also the fact that um it's just like a very obvious use case, you know, stable coins, okay, payments and and and things like that. Like that's very obvious to them. Whereas a lot of the other stuff is not as obvious. I mean, some of the finance related stuff like lending and borrowing, sure, but then the more convoluted and complex stuff that we invent within crypto, uh is is definitely not something that resonates with a lot of them or they don't understand on the surface. But finance they do and they're getting really excited about it. So even though I'm saying all this other stuff about uh I guess like and I've said it in the past as well about how I think that a lot of

crypto has become kind of toxic and a lot of crypto has become ugly. I think for the most part that's concentrated at on the retail side of things. And because we're in this institutional era now I actually don't think that matters that much anymore. I don't think retail has really any kind of bearing on where this stuff goes uh going forward. I think that this is why I believe the four-year cycle is dead. I I I I've said in the past this is why I believe a lot of assets are going to have a very very hard time appreciating in price. There's no more BTC goes up, ETH goes up, then the alts go up. It's it's more like whatever the institutional and macro side wants to buy and buy in size, which so far has only been BTC and ETH.

They're not really buying anything else in size. Um, and then from there they'll be assets that I think uh are good assets and actually tied to good projects, but they're not going to get like random speculative bids like they have in the past. They may over the like very short term, but in terms of holding that value, it's just not really going to happen. I mean, in the past in the in the past cycles, you saw these things kind of go up for like 6 to 12 months based on nothing other than the fact that the whole market was going up. And I really don't think you're going to see that going forward. I mean, we haven't. Like last year, we didn't. it was just meme coins, right? All the energy went into that and we know what happened with those, right? Uh so maybe that's like a

perfect kind of segue to talk about what happened in the markets today because as you guys know, the markets I mean it's kind of funny. Okay, I'll take a step back here. So the markets have been weird for a while, right? Like as I was just saying, it's not really a retail driven phenomenon anymore. It's institutional driven. Everyone's getting really frustrated because they hold all these altcoins and like oh my god, like they're not doing anything. uh BTC went up a lot and of course people were frustrated with ETH because it wasn't performing as well as they thought it would but then ETH started performing really well and everyone was sid sidelined on ETH because they all thought ETH was dead and so on and so forth. So there's just been a lot of like coping going on within the ecosystem. And then you kind of fast

forward to today and what happened today is actually the biggest dump on I guess they called altcoins, right? Or the long tale of assets I think in crypto history because ETH and BTC dumped as well. Sure, but like they didn't dump that much like on the day I think like at most ETH went down like 15 20%. I think BTC went down 10 to 15% if you kind of look at it from the open to close of of the day. But if you actually go and look at the longtail of the other assets, they went down so much more than that. Like I I I actually So while the market was dumping, I was on a live stream. I was doing it with the uh the Estaker guys. I was talking to uh Patricio, the founder of Pope, about Dev Connect and

about Argentina. We were going through a bunch of people's questions about Argentina. You should actually go give that a watch. It's on the East Staker YouTube channel, I believe, but I'll I'll I'll retweet it and share it in the Daily Grade Discord channel once it's out. But I was on that live stream and then I just randomly opened the the the the chart and I saw things like absolutely, you know, nuking. I saw I mean I only really watch uh BTC and ETH so I saw them kind of going down. I'm like, "Okay, well I guess we're dumping today, right?" Like I didn't really think anything of it. And then I went to Coin Gecko and I refreshed the page and I see like all the alts just decimated. Some of them were down like 40 50% on the hour and I'm like okay I've actually

never seen this before. Even during like co it didn't happen this fast. the co dump was like a 3 to 4 day thing. This happened in like 1 to two hours, guys. So, these these alts kind of like just tanked and some of them went down 90 plus%. And these are not just your random coins, guys. These are actual kind of uh tokens that are tied to legitimate projects and they just got absolutely decimated. I had never seen that before. You can actually go look at the chart of most of these things and they will have the biggest kind of red candle that they've had in history. And I mean it's not really a candle now because they obviously went back up and then there's like a wick on it. But like that whole candle I mean it's ridiculous. It's it's absolutely ridiculous how uh I guess much these

things dumped. Now there's a lot of speculation around this. Like why did this happen? Obviously I think you can tie the fact that Trump announced some tariffs on China again um to like the I guess like the wider market dump and maybe what kind of triggered it. But we've seen that before and I think we know that he's probably going to walk that back. It's probably not going to happen the way he's saying it is. We know there's some kind of like uh shenanigans going on there. That's not a not a secret at this point. But like for for these longtail of assets, for these alts to dump as hard as they did, there's more going on here. Now, this is just preliminary kind of I guess things that I'm I'm looking at here and things that I've seen. But if you've been paying attention over the past few

months, the I guess like per DEX meta has been a thing. And it's been the only meta I think in crypto over the last few months besides the um strategy the ETH strategy companies and obviously ETH going up a lot and just DATs generally digital asset asset treasuries generally. But if you look at what has been a cryptonative meta it has been the perexes. Now the problem with this and I think this is actually in large part what caused such a a huge dump today is that these perexes off so so the the ones I'm talking about obviously is like AA and Hyperlid and lighter these ones you all hear about on on on Twitter and elsewhere the thing is with with this is that they make it really easy to leverage so to leverage trade and I

think what happened and this is just a theory and I'm recording this like a few hours after this dump happened. There's just a theory here. But I think what happened is that people got really impatient with the fact that things weren't going up. You know, their altcoins weren't going up and they had all these alts and they're like, you know what, I I think maybe because ETH is going up again and BTC is going up and BTC went to a new all-time high, I think these alts are going to, you know, catch a bid, right? And some of them were going up as well, of course, like it's not just BTC and ETH that goes up. The old alts go up, too. But I think what happened is a lot of leverage built up in the system and a lot of retail investors, a lot of new retail investors

on boarded onto these platforms, especially the uh the the ones that have promised airdrops and the ones that you know don't even have a token yet like LAR and they're farming the points, right? So they're not only going long on assets and leverage long on these assets, they're also farming the points from these things so that they can get like tokens. So I think what happened was that a lot of these coins are relatively illquid. A lot of them had a lot of leverage building up in the system. You can do things like cross margin which just exacerbates the problem and then because of that because we had the dump today it triggered what is referred to as a liquidation cascade.

Now for those of you who don't know what that is it basically means that price dumps right bunch of people get liquidated but when you get liquidated those tokens are sold. So, what will happen is a liquidator will come in um on chain. It's usually like an ME searcher or something like that. They'll come in, they'll kind of liquidate that position, they'll earn some money off of that, but they don't want to hold those assets, right? They're going to just like sell those assets. So, and people will sell assets as well to try and cover their position before they get liquidated. So, what do you think happens when everyone's trying to sell an asset that is falling already and people are getting liquidated and then more people are trying to sell the asset? that's falling more like obviously the price is going to go down

really very very quickly and we've seen this happen plenty of times in crypto before the last time it happened to this extent I I I think it was Terra it actually happened to ETH because Terra imploded there was a bunch of leverage in the system because of like leverage looping u liquid staking tokens uh and then they got all unwound and then ETH kind of like dumped really hard because of that but it was yeah it was a marketwide sell-off at the time as well but because of these liquidation cascades I think it's kind of a self-fulfilling thing because anyone that's wanting to buy these things, they like a trader for example or market makers putting orders in and trying to I guess like fill orders, they're looking at this and they're like, "Okay, well, I'm not going to buy that." Like, I'm not going to stand in front of uh, you

know, moving kind of train. I'm not going to sacrifice myself to to to I guess like buy here. I'm just going to wait and see when the dust settles and then I'll buy. And that's why you see the violent bounces as well. and and also the fact that like the market just runs out of liquidity and no one's willing to sell that low because they're like, "Wow, this thing just dumped 90%. I'm not going to sell 90% down. I'm going to set my sell orders higher if you want to sell." Um, and then people just start buying it up because they're like, "Well, this is a massive opportunity to to buy up an asset that's just gone down 90% in an hour. That's that's ridiculous." So, I think, you know, that that's essentially what happened. who had a massive liquidation cascade from leverage that had built up

that otherwise maybe wouldn't have built up because of the fact that we have this very easy to access leverage with the perexes. But you can also access leverage easily on centralized exchanges as well, right? And every day it seems like there's just more and more ways to leverage trade. And you guys know like from basically day one of this show, anytime I've talked about kind of trading, I've always said to avoid leverage and avoid especially avoid leverage on like everything except Ethan BTC because pretty much all of that is relatively illquid. But even on Ethan BTC, I would I would say to avoid kind of leverage even if you think you have a really safe liquidation price. Like for example, let's just say that you uh kind of leveraged up on one of these alts and you're like, "Okay, even if this thing

like my my liquidation price is like 50% lower than uh the price of this alt, that's not going to happen. You know, it's not going to go down 50% in like a day, I'll be able to save this position if I need to and then it goes down 50 plus% and even more in like an hour or or less than that and you're just liquidated." So there there's no such thing, I think, as safe leverage. Now, people talk about this this thing, oh, it's it's safe. It's safe. It's safe leverage. I'm like, I mean, you relative, you can talk in relative terms. You can be like, well, my leverage price for my kind of ETH leverage is $100. I'm like, okay, well, fair enough. That you could argue that that's like safe because if ETH goes to $100, I mean, there's a lot from from

from I guess the current price of whatever it is, $4,000, there there's probably a bigger issue going on right here. And there there's probably like a massive issue going on here, right? And and you're probably not worrying about your leverage position at that point. maybe nuclear war just broke out or something, right? Like that's the kind of thing there. But the problem is is people don't have liquidation prices that low because if it's that low, you're not really kind of borrowing much against your asset. If you're if you're putting up all this collateral and then you're borrowing only enough to keep your liquidation price at $100, you basically borrowed nothing. So essent I mean nothing compared to your collateral. So So what would happen is that people don't have a liquidation price that low. They post post this collateral. They're like, "Oh, I can borrow this much against it. Oh, let's

do that. Let's go buy more of this asset or let's go buy more of another asset. This is awesome. And then it builds up. It builds up and then we have the the liquidation cascade. So, I think that's what happened today. I also think, as I said, there's a bunch of shenanigans going on. I do think there's a bunch of insider trading going on. I mean, that's pretty obvious. Like, I don't even think that's a conspiracy. It's very obvious that there's a bunch of insider trading going on. Uh, you know, Trump has done this plenty of times in the past, and it's not just Trump. Like, I don't want to get political here, but like, come on, guys. you you look at the the fact that it's actually legal for um you know, Congress or for senators and politicians in the US to insider a

trade. You look at their net worths, right? And you can kind of draw the conclusion that they're all doing it. Like doesn't matter what kind of aisle political kind of side you sit on, they're all doing it. I guess like the others just do it better in hiding than Trump does. Like Trump just does it obviously. Like it's just very obvious that he's doing it, but the others all do it as well. So, so don't like get me wrong like this is not a kind of blue or red thing, left or right thing. This is a everything thing in in the US. And then you have all the insider trading that happens within crypto, all the insider trapping that insider trading that happens within the centralized exchanges and and stuff like that.

That's all going on, guys. Like, if you think it's not, then you're incredibly naive. It's going on every single day. There's so much of this stuff happening. So, throw all that together and I think you you get what happened uh today in in in the markets there. Do I think it poses any kind of I guess meaningful risk or meaningful I guess like uh uh uh I guess narratives going forward? I don't think so. You know, one or two things are going to happen going forward. We're going to either recover over the weekend pretty violently um or it'll just like hang around here for a while and choose a direction eventually.

I I mean some people are saying that well the four-ear cycle was meant to end this month. uh we just had like that blowoff top and this you know the the the cycle's gone the cycle's over and now we're going into another bare market. I mean I'm not as as you guys know I don't believe in the four year cycle anymore and and I don't think that's like a very convincing position given the fact that we didn't even have anything like the previous cycles in terms of the runup and in terms of like the I guess froth in the market. Yeah, as I just explained, there was a lot of froth due to leverage in the kind of like altcoins and the um longtail assets, but like there was froth, but there wasn't like people were leveraging up, but then the prices weren't really moving that much. For anyone who's been

around for previous cycles, you know what it feels like. You know what it looks like. It just didn't look like that this uh you know, over the last few months at least. And I think ETH going up so much was just due to the fact that it got beaten down so much. I don't think it went up so much because it was like some kind of I guess um FOMO that everyone was getting in and everyone was buying it because we're about you know this is like the last leg of the bull market and we're about to go into a bare market. So I don't think that's going to happen but I obviously don't have a crystal crystal ball and I don't generally give investment advice or anything like that but I do think that you know people move on from this crash like it yes it was violent. Yes it was

the biggest ever on a lot of these assets but people move on uh things repair themselves. Um I think it'll be okay. Maybe it takes a while, maybe it takes a few months, maybe it goes into next year. Obviously, we're coming up on the end of the year now. It's it's already October, which is pretty crazy, right? So, yeah, generally, I don't kind of foresee this being like a permanent kind of mark against crypto or anything like that. And as I said earlier, Ethn BTC held up relatively well compared to the rest of things. So, I think that's in large part due to the fact that Ethan BTC have become institutionalized assets at this point. They're macro assets.

They also have much larger market caps, but some of these other assets had relatively large market caps as well, and they just got absolutely nuked, which was which was kind of crazy to to see there. But as I said, you can go check out the charts for yourself and see what what these things look like. You won't really find similar candles on any point. Like I went and looked at actually really old assets as well as new assets on any of the relatively new assets like maybe say they're 3 years, four years old. They've all never had a candle like this before. And then you go look at the older assets like uh I looked at Litecoin because that's one of the oldest asset like altcoins you should you could say, right? I looked at Litecoin. It actually like went down today as much as it went down in the CO

dump, but the CO dump happened over like 3 days. This happened in an hour or 2 hours. So like in terms of the I guess uh price drop when with the in the context of the time it took. Yeah, this is the worst really. uh which is pretty crazy when you think about it given that you would expect the I guess liquidity profiles of these things to mature over time. But I guess it also speaks to the fact that there's just not that much liquidity in these other assets and their market caps definitely do not reflect how much liquidity there is there and neither does their trading volume. That's one thing I think a lot of people uh one mistake a lot of people make is that they look at trading volume and they think that that means that there's that amount of buy pressure on

an asset on any given day. Like for example, today uh ETH has hundred billion worth of 24-hour trading volume according to Coin Gecko. Uh ETH didn't get hundred billion dollars worth of buy pressure or sell pressure today. What that number is is essentially all the trades that have happened at any price point over the last 24 hours. And most of these trades are just bots, just arbitrage bots. It's just like market makers. So the trade itself is not actually or I guess like volume is not really influencing the the price in any big way. It's not net buying or net selling. It's just how the market moves, how the market works. But then when you look at uh liquidity at any given price point, that's what you're really most

interested in. Because let's say you wanted to sell $100 billion of of ETH somehow, not even $100 billion. Let's say you wanted to sell $10 billion of ETH. Let's say Tom Lee woke up and he's like, "Ah, I'm not an ETH bull anymore. I'm going to sell my $10 billion of ETH. Like, you can't just go to the market and do that in one day without affecting the price. Like, even OTC, it would be very hard to sell that amount. And even doing an OTC would have an effect on the price. Maybe not an immediate effect, but it would. But the these volumes um that are on Coin Gecko, as far as I know, don't take into account OTC deals unless they actually hit the public order books here or the the um the Binance or Coinbase order book. So, if you do would were to go to the order

book and and and like $10 billion kind of market sell at $4,000 ETH, you're crushing the ETH price to I mean maybe not zero, but you're crushing it by a substantial amount. There is just not enough liquidity to eat that at that price point. That's how these things work. Um, but yeah, anyway, I just realized I've already gone over half an hour and I haven't even gotten to any of the technical stuff yet. But yeah, hopefully that gives you guys a lot of context around kind of where I'm at with I guess the ecosystem, where I'm at with the internet, where I think the ecosystem is going forward, the I guess like a bit of a recap of the crash today, which I mean, I'm sure we're going to see more about this going forward. Probably see some big players that blew up and stuff like that cuz it

was a pretty substantial crash. Um, but other than that, I think I want to spend the rest of the episode on some of the technical stuff that's happened. Now, as I said, I have been paying attention to the tech side of things on Ethereum. uh even though I've been on a bit of a break, but it's really only the core dev stuff in terms of like projects and what they're doing. I haven't really been on top of that so I uh can't really cover it uh in in great detail today, but there is a lot of other people and there are a lot of other people out there that do cover these things. I mean, Banklist recently launched their new Ethereum weekly newsletter. Um the Ethereum Twitter account is a lot more active now. They actually post this tweet every couple of weeks talking about the

biggest things that happened in the Ethereum ecosystem which you should you should check out because that gives you a really great overview there. There's a bunch of other people that are doing uh you know uh daily kind of ETH updates and stuff like that. Leo Lanza who um is on is is on Twitter. If you don't follow him yet, you should. He does a lot of uh really great updates as well. Uh so yeah, there are a lot of people doing updates on daily, weekly Ethereum happenings on various kind of uh project uh level or kind of app level stuff as well as things like the L2s and infra and um institutionalized uh adoption and stuff like that. So yeah, you don't necessarily need the refuel for for that I I guess at this point. And I think Christine Kim just started a new series

on core dev related stuff as well, so you can go check that out too. But yeah, I mean there's a there's pretty broad coverage at this point of everything happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. So I will link that recent tweet from the Ethereum account about everything that happened. So you can go check that out. But what I wanted to kind of focus on was I guess the latest core dev stuff. So as you guys know, Faka is pretty much around the corner at this point. The mainet target date, uh, Thorston here actually tweeted these out a little while ago, but basically the mainet target date is still early December here. So it still is going to happen this year, which is pretty cool. But we had the Hleski test net fork on the 29th of September that went through relatively smoothly. I think there was a

bit of a drop off as there usually is on these things cuz people forget to update their nodes so on and so forth. I think there was some kind of bandwidth issues uh and things like that with with Podas. As you guys know, Podas is the is the major um EIP that's coming with Fusaka. Uh but for those of you who don't know as well on on the topic of PIDAS, the blob uh I guess um the blob uh the amount of sorry the amount of blobs that is coming with with POAS at least from from day one is not going to be the the the maximum like it's not going to be the the 40 blobs or whatever it was.

It's going to be pretty conservative. I think it's going to be a target of six with a max of nine. Uh and then from there they're going to be doing the the um the blob only kind of uh parameter changes in order to scale that up as the network kind of proves its resiliency and proves its reliability at any given uh blob target and and blob max limit there. So I just wanted to kind of I guess uh talk about that. That's also on forecast. You can go check that out. I I I believe. Um but in terms of where we're going from here, next test net the fork will be Solia. That's happening on the 13th of October. So a couple days from now. Then we if Then we have Hoodie which is forking on the 27th of October.

And if all goes well with all these test nets and everyone's happy, there will be mainet releases in early November for a mainet release date or mainet fork date in early December. Now Thorston has here 3rd of December. Don't know if that's the concrete date yet. It may not be 3rd of December. If I was a betting man and I haven't paid close attention to this yet as you guys know, but I would say maybe that gets pushed back a week to like 10th of December or something like that, but we'll have to see. It really doesn't matter. Like it's so close, less than two months away now uh before we have Faka live, which is actually great because in case you guys didn't know, blobs are pretty much at capacity now. I remember covering this a bunch of times over the past few months and you know it

kept going up and up and up, but it pretty much is at capacity now. You can see today we're basically at an average of 5.9 blobs. So the the the um target is six. Uh we're basically there now. You as you can as you can kind of see here, which is uh pretty which is pretty cool. It didn't take very long like when when was Pectra in April, right? Um when we kind of uh forked here. So uh from there we yeah it's only been a few months and we're already at uh the kind of maxia and that's due to the fact that obviously L2s are getting more and more adoption. There's more L2s coming online. So it's pretty much ideal not perfect timing but ideal timing for for Pas uh live there. But I guess beyond Fusaka

uh is Glam Amsterdam and that's another thing that's been I guess like a main focus over the past couple of months since Faka kind of came into view in terms of getting it on test nets and everything. You can still check out the everything going into Fusaka on the forecast website. I'll uh link that in the YouTube description below. Uh and the forecast website has been updated a bunch of times as well. It's got a lot more information on here so you can go check that out. But of course a lot of the attention has shifted to Glamsterdam now which there is a lot of EIPs that have been kind of proposed for Glamsterdam. Only two have been accepted for inclusion so far or scheduled for inclusion and those are the headliners which are EPBS and bals or block level access lists. I think Fossil is still

being considered. Yeah, it is still being considered for inclusion but it is not a headliner. It may or may not go in. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. We don't know just yet. But then there are 23 other EIPs that are proposed for inclusion. I would assume that a lot of these aren't going to go in Glamster. They'll be pushed out to the next fork here. In terms of Amsterdam timing, I think June I was a date that I or a month that I um that I uh saw thrown around, but there's no concrete dates on this yet. We're still very much not uh you know, we're still not there. Uh but that's okay because we're we're still pretty far away from from the fork generally. But I'm pretty happy with the headliners here. APBS and and bals. I was bow pilled a little while ago. I

wasn't talking about it very much, but then uh Tony uh Worst, the guy who runs like the MEB boost picks website, but runs a bunch of other websites and does a lot of great research within Ethereum. He kind of shielded me on bowels and I'm like, you know what, that makes a lot of sense. I'm on board with that. Let's do that. EPBS I've been on board with for a very long time. As you guys know, I have um championed that for a very long time. So, I'm glad to see that going in. I really want to see fossil going in as well because that's another one that I've championed for a while and I think is critically important given the fact that censorship resistance is becoming more and more important in the world generally. Uh, and then the rest of the the EIPs here, I mean, some of them are,

you know, I I I I really think are important, but uh, yeah, I mean, at the same time, as I said, not all of them are going to make it in here, but if you want details on all of these, you can check them out on forecast because as soon as you click into one, as I just did, you get a a a kind of summary of what's going on here, links to more details, as well as things like stakeholder impact, so how it's going to impact you as a user or someone who uh is an infrastructure provider or a developer, things like that. So yeah, I I mean I again I can't uh I guess um compliment forecast enough. This is seriously such an awesome resource and it allows me to quickly get up to speed on core dev stuff as well. If I'm off

for for a few days and I miss a bunch of things, I can just load up forecast and I feel like I've missed nothing which is which is really great there. So yeah, I guess the round up the the updates there for we've got the test nets going seems to be going well. mainet early December Glamsterdam is the main focus now I guess because of the fact that the Fusaka kind of stuff is is generally kind of done. We're just in the testing phase now. Uh and then from there we'll go on to I guess like the next fork after that is the H fork which I don't think has a name yet. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I missed that. It's not even on forecast yet. But that would I assume include a lot of things that get kind of taken out of Glamsterdam uh here as

well. Not sure what the headliner would be for the Hfork. if Fossil gets kicked out of Glamsterdam, it may end up being Fossil. So, I guess like we'll see there. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff kind of that people want to get into the network uh there. But outside of uh Faka and Amsterdam, there is a uh I guess like I mean this has been around for like a year at this point and it was known as the Beam Chain, but there is a very big kind of push and a very big uh I guess kind of movement around what's been renamed Lean Ethereum. So essentially, you guys know from Justin Drake's talk at Bangkok, um, sorry, at DevCon in Bangkok last year, uh, this beam chain thing, which is essentially like the

endgame consensus layer and basically it includes a lot of really fancy ZK stuff. It includes uh, a bunch of other kind of upgrades to the consensus layer here. Uh, and there are some kind of sister things uh, with regards to the execution layer uh, as well. So there is a website for this now at leanroadmap.org where you can follow along with all of this stuff, follow along with the um the upgrades, what's going on, like what the the progress is for each of the research tasks and the the client teams. There's apparently 15 client teams working on this now. So nine new teams with six existing teams building a lean Ethereum client, which is pretty which is pretty crazy actually. Uh but yeah, this website is your one-stop resource uh for

this. And I think uh you know I was it's funny I was talking to Medi from Sigma Prime cuz there was an event on in Sydney that I attended um during the week and I was talking to Medi about this and and kind of lean Ethereum and and how we've gotten to the point now where it essentially looks like when it comes to the consensus layer and when it comes to Ethereum generally we're breaking up the roles of the stakeholders on the node operator side. So you guys have probably heard this a bunch of times from people like Vitalik and of course Justin Drake talking about the fact that we want Ethereum to be light to verify but but the inevitable reality is that it's going to be heavy to produce blocks. it's going to be heavy to do the um uh to do the actual

kind of work so to speak do to do the I get like it's not proof of work but to do like the heavy lifting and this is because today the reality is that 95% of the network outsize outsources its block production right it outsources it to the ME boost network you run the MEV boost software and then uh that kind of um outsources your block production to all of the searchers and then it goes through that whole pipeline there and I've explained before the concerns with that and the concerns are really mostly around I guess livveness and censorship resistance. More so censorship resistance in the terms of the fact that we only have like five dominant builders and when the OFAC sanctions hit the the majority of them were censoring and the relays as well were censoring the um tornado cashache transactions and

because everyone was using the the these relays and using the me boost uh software it ended up that a lot of the the network was censoring these things. It wasn't the validators themselves. It was that kind of pipeline there. So the and then we kind of took a step back. I think the researchers took a step back here and they looked at this like okay why is this the case? Why is everyone using MEV boost? And it very quickly becomes apparent that it's just economic incentives at at the end of the day. Everyone's using me boost because they make more money doing that. Okay. Well, in that world, like is there any way for us to bring block building back to uh I guess like the um solo staker to the validators themselves and make it more profitable than outsourcing it to these centralized block builders, to these me

bots and searches. And it turns out there really isn't. Um but it's okay. It's okay because there are ways to mitigate the trade-offs here. And it's all about trade-offs. This is what Medi and I were actually discussing. It's all about trade-offs. It's always been about trade-offs. And like I used to be more concerned about this than I am today. And this was probably a while ago. I haven't been concerned about this for a little while. And I was explaining to Medi, I'm like it's it's kind of like learning to love the nuclear bomb. When you first read learn about the nuclear bomb, you're like, "Oh my god." Like what happens when one of the one of the I guess um one of the uh the nations around the world just sends a nuke to another nation. Like that that's game over. Like everyone will just start

sending nukes everywhere. It's m mutually assured destruction destruction like what are we going to do about this? Like this is this is an issue and that that obviously what was discussed during kind of like the cold war a lot as well and you know following World War II and stuff like that but like as a as a person today like a young person learning about this you you may get concerned you're like what the hell like what's going on? But then over time you slowly kind of learn to I guess love kind of the the bomb or love the fact that this exists because the there's a trade-off, right? The trade-off is yes, global annihilation if nuclear war does start. But the positive here is that it actually uh can act as a preventative measure against global war. Because if you know these nations have nukes, then

uh and you know that kind of like getting into a full-scale war and getting to the point where you force them to use their nukes is bad for everyone. And then um you know you don't want to use the nukes because you know, as I said, it's mad. It's mutually assured destruction. You're most likely not going to do it. Now, of course, you can throw a spanner in here and say, "What about the crazy dictators who have nukes and the crazy religious people that will nuke you because they think that doing that is going to send them to heaven or something, right?" Like, yes, sure, there's bugs in the system, but again, it's just a trade-off spectrum. We're not saying it's perfect. We're not saying it's a solution. It's just a trade-off spectrum here. And the reason I use that analogy because I think the

same is true for what I'm talking about with regards to light verification, heavy block building, because we have things like Fossil, which is the um forced inclusion list, right? uh essentially we basically give power back to the validators to enforce censorship resistance on the network so that these builders can't just censor whatever transactions they want. They actually have to include certain transactions as dictated by the validators and the node operators themselves which are much more diverse, much more distributed and much greater in number than the block builders are.

So that that's a major reason why I have learned to love that. Uh, and also there's the performance benefits of this too, especially when it comes to zkying everything and especially when it comes to um heavily kind of producing these proofs because being able to produce these ZK proofs requires more hardware than it does to uh to kind of like attest to blocks and and to to to verify things. So the the the overall thinking and this is plays into the whole lean Ethereum road map is that okay well we'll accept the reality we'll learn to love the reality that going forward we're going to optimize around a heavy block building world but that doesn't have to mean that Ethereum centralizes because we're going to keep the verification of the chain and um you know the the the the kind of I guess

note operator network we have of home stakers and and and institutions and other staking providers. We're going to keep them all online. It's all going to be good because we're going to have things like Fossil. We're going to make verification really light in terms of reward. You're still going to be able to get the same or similar rewards that you had before. And there's going to be different roles for you in the the network here. And that's also part of rainbow staking which is something that has been proposed which you can go kind of Google and you'll find information on that. Uh but that's part of I guess uh lean lean lean ethereum here. But another part of of lean Ethereum as I mentioned is zkifying everything like enshrining zk directly into the protocol which can potentially get us to a lot of TPS at L1 Ethereum without sacrificing

decentralization. There's also the thinking around oifying Ethereum. So essentially getting it to the point where the Ethereum L1 doesn't really change much um which has a number of benefits of course like uh Ethereum prides itself on its stability. Well, it becomes even more stable and even more secure and even more reliable if we oify it. if we if we don't change it every 6 months and maybe we change it every a few years because we need to do a a security upgrade um you know quantum resistance all that sorts of stuff there but generally the thinking is that we want to move towards oifying Ethereum because uh we'll have you know there's always going to be stuff that you want to get into the the the network but there's also the trade-off of the fact that the more that we include maybe the more complexity happens uh and and and I

guess like the less reliable Ethereum may become and so on and so forth there so yeah that's the general kind of thinking around that that's coming to view a lot recently. Um it is very much the main focus of a lot of researchers now and it is being done in parallel to all the other stuff that's happening on the core dev side like Faka Glamsterdam so on and so forth and a lot of these things are going to be included in those upgrades anyway and you know for lack of a better term here I actually would call this Ethereum 3.0 know at this point um I don't know if it's going to require another merge like I don't actually know if this new kind of consensus mechanism that they're trying to create that is going to be I guess like ZK friendly light client friendly all that sorts of

stuff is going to require a merge like hard fork but if it does we can do it but at at the same time I don't I think that's just like an implementation detail in terms of the scope of this and how big of a deal this is I would say it's in it's as big if not maybe bigger uh than the ETH 2.0 effort here generally. And again, I I stressed this. It's all being done in parallel to everything else. It's not like how people flooded it last year and said, "Oh my god, we're going to have to wait 5 years for Ethereum to do any of the major upgrades it needs to do." No. And Justin Drake gave a talk on this at the Bankless Summit in Bangkok last year as well where he basically said that we're going to be doing all this in parallel

to what's already happening on the network. And of course, outside of the the core development on the network, you also have the L2s. So, yeah, it's all happening. Uh there's a lot of upgrades coming, but if you want to keep up to date with the lean Ethereum road map or the lean consensus road map, you can go check out the website. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, just a couple of other things I wanted to talk about with regards to where a lot of the focus in Ethereum has been shifted to recently. So, two main areas, privacy and AI. Now the Ethereum Foundation seems to be championing this the most but there are other organizations working on this. Uh I know that you know Coinbase is is kind of involved in this. Uh Etherealize is very involved on the privacy side of

things and there are a bunch of different projects in the ecosystem involved with with this. But really the the focus has kind of become on privacy and AI because those two things are going to be critically important going forward especially privacy. I think like when it when it comes to on boarding institutions, the number one thing that they're concerned about is privacy. And we need to have good solutions for them in the Ethereum ecosystem so that they use Ethereum and not something else. And I'm not talking about like a privacy chain or privacy coins. Like I know Zcash has got a lot of attention recently because the price went up, but that's just like a narrative trade. No one's buying Zcash because they suddenly care about privacy and want, you know, to protect their privacy. I mean, the vast majority of these people are buying

Zcash on a centralized exchange where they're already docked. So, obviously, they're not doing it for that those reasons there. But if you look at where institutions are today and what's missing for them, privacy is a big thing there. And I know this for a fact because I talk to people who talk to these institutions and they all say the same thing. It's it's privacy. So, that's that's good because like the reason why I think the Ethereum ecosystem is focusing on it is is maybe different to why the institutions want to focus on it. the institutions want to focus on it because they don't want all of their data being leaked everywhere. They don't want everyone every other business around the world seeing their data. They don't want everyone seeing their data. Their customer data obviously needs to be private. But when it comes to why I guess like the

Ethereum community cares about privacy, it's more of like a cipher punk kind of ethos there, right? It's it's it's less about I guess that and more about like protecting your own data and more about making sure that nation states and governments can't just like have access to all your financial data and use that against you sort of thing. So, it's kind of a a double whammy there, which is a positive. Like, it's not a negative at all, but yeah, there's been a huge focus on on privacy here. And, uh, one of the tweet threads that I I I encourage you guys to go read, I'll link it in the YouTube description below, is something that was made public recently called, uh, Kohaku, I think it is, um, which is a privacy initiative that has been kind of born out of the Ethereum Foundation here. And uh essentially what what it's

described that is that it's a set of primitives that enables wallets to be secure and to process private transactions while minimizing dependencies on trusted third parties. It is a first wallet SDK and a reference implementation of a browser extension. So that's where you really want to hit it first, right? The wallet, the end user interface, and that's what uh Kohaku is doing here. So you can go check out the rest of the thread. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. They also have a road map you can check out too, which is really cool. But that's been a big focus there. Now the second big focus over the last few months has been AI. Now there is something called uh ERC8004 which is the trustless agents ERC which has been uh co-authored by uh David here from the Ethereum Foundation uh Jordan from Google and Eric from Coinbase. And

this is a draft ERC still. Uh but essentially what they uh are doing here is trying to uh push this kind of notion that agents AI agents are NFTTS essentially. So you can mint these, view them in wallets, transfer them and manage them including delegations to operators using existing the existing ARC 721 infrastructure and apps. This makes them portable because you can uh you know obviously send them around to different wallets. You can put things like reputation on chain. They support things like um M MCP uh and there there is something called the X uh X402 protocol here which is payment proofs uh which can uh uh enrich the AI AI agents as well as a bunch of other features

here. You can go give this a read for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But I think a big reason why there's been uh a focus on AI agents on chain is because of the fact that we all know that most of the I guess people not not people most of kind of what's on chain today is bots right there are bots running everything. Bots do most transactions. It's not humans doing that. So the logical extension of a bot is an AI bot. You know before the bots were I guess you could call them quote unquote dumb. They were still very smart but they weren't like AI smart I guess for lack of a better term here.

And these AI agents can do a lot more than just like those regular bots can do. So, we want them to be able to do that on Ethereum, but also have the flexibility to do whatever they want. So, they're not just like locked into one paradigm of doing things or one other paradigm of doing things. They can do whatever they want. They can enrich themselves with a bunch of different features and they get a lot of benefit from being on either Ethereum L1 or the L2s. And that's a major driver behind this ERC here. So, you can go give that a read, this thread a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below. But that's another big thing. So privacy and AI are the two things I would focus on going forward in terms of like if they become a meta or not. I mean unless you

can speculate on something, it doesn't really become a meta. As I just mentioned, people think that privacy is a meta right now because Zcash is pumping. I I don't think that so. I think it's just a narrative that that it is. I think if you were looking at like uh this becoming a meta, probably not. But at the same time, it's going to be stuff that is critically important, especially for institutions. And it's going to be stuff that's used. And I know like AI coins had a meta as well, but it was like it was the coins that was the meta. It wasn't the technology. No one really cared about the tech. It was more oh my coins going up. So I guess that's like true of most if not all metas in crypto. But privacy and AI is also going to snipe a lot of people

from other industries too. I mean obviously the AI boom is still going on right now. There's a lot of interest in it. So, it' be cool to see people from like the web 2 AI world come to the web 3 AI world because of uh efforts like this. So, yeah. Anyway, you can go check out this thread. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. Now, to finish us off was a great tweet from Grow the Pie today. Now, because of all the I guess like turmoil in the markets today, there of course was a lot of activity on chain, not just on Ethereum L1, but on the L2s as well. and the Grow the Pie team tweeted out that the Ethereum ecosystem had a TPS all-time high today of 2,835 TPS across um the L2s here. As you can

see, Arbitum one did uh 1,400 TPS. Base did about 1,000. Optimism, mainet, Uni Chain, and and Cello did between like 70 and 20 TPS here. But really, I mean, Arbitra and Bass are the kind of main drivers here. Uh which which is which is pretty cool to see. Now, this obviously is natural when you have a lot of volatility in the market. As we know, most transactions are related to finance stuff that's happening on chain, but I wanted to use this as a springboard to talk a bit about the L2s because if you go to L2 beat today, there's been some changes with the the L2 rankings here, which has been interesting to see. If you rank them by TVL or I guess like total value secured, you can see that obviously arbitum and base are still number one and two. OP mainet is still

number three somehow. I actually am confused by that because I don't know many people who use OP mainet. I don't really use it that much. I use arbitrum base mostly. But then you scroll down and you can see oh Lana is now number four. That's interesting. Lighter a new per uh exchange on on Ethereum is now number five. Uh and then you you scroll down you see the usual suspects still here. ZK Sync at sixth uni chain seventh. Stark eighth so on and so forth. Uni chain is an interesting one because I remember saying to you guys that I don't know if I was bullish on oni sorry on uni chain because of the fact that I didn't see really much use of it because of the fact that uni uni um swap was already on the other L2s and I don't know who was going to go to uni

chain just to do unis swap stuff. I know they have an integration with their own wallet, so that's driving some kind of activity there. But if you actually look at their their kind of TVL, it's basically h haveved since what is it July? And I think this is because a lot of the incentives ran out. Um, and you know, people just aren't really interested in going and using that chain if there's no incentive to do so in terms of like token rewards and stuff like that. Not to say it's like a complete failure or anything like that. It's been cool to see them experiment with different technologies and and use different things like flashbots uh uh um uh I think it no it's not called flashbots it's it's called um it's called something else like a way to um do like uh very very fast transactions

um but yeah like they've kind of like fallen fallen from there but arbitrum one and base have staying power guys like they're the major L2s and it's interesting that they're both still optimistic roll-ups whereas Lana is a validity rollup I think Lana's growth obviously recently has been because they did their token, but also consensus and Joe Luben have been saying that they're going to be going to be using Lana a lot themselves. They're going to be onboarding uh you know, whoever they can onto Lana. So, they're really doing a lot of BD efforts there. And then the long tale of L2's uh I guess like fighting for you know to climb up this ladder here. But as I've always said and I've said this for years guys, there was only ever going to be a handful of these L2s that that really got big and then

you're going to have the long tail. And that's true of really anything in crypto is a massive power law effect around these things. But I'm I'm kind of happy to see that that point validated at this point. Um but then if you look further out and look like longterm, let's say 5 and 10 years from now, what does this actually look like? I think you, you know, we may get it to a point in a world where everything is just like a based rollup that that all kind of talks to each other in a really kind of atomically composable way and the lines are blurred about what chain you're using because you can just like use Ethereum L1 and be on Ethereum L1 and then like atomically compose and do transactions without having to bridge with base with arbitr whichever L2 that you want to do and then it all just

becomes Ethereum, right? Like that's one of the main goals of the Ethereum Foundation. There's those three main prongs. Scale the L1, scale blobs for the L2s, and scale the user experience. Well, this is the third prong. Scaling the user experience uh or sorry, improving the user experience uh means making it seamless. So, if we can get to that point where everything is so seamless that all you're doing is interacting with Ethereum. It feels like you're just interacting with Ethereum. There's no need to bridge or change your RPC or anything like that. It's just all composable and all great. Then that's the end game. And that's what we're going towards. That's actually what we're marching towards, guys. Like we're getting closer and closer to that as time goes on. Probably still a while out before we get there, but we are going to get there, I believe, there. So, yeah,

L2's still killing it. Still doing a really great job here. Still increasing in user activity. Um, I know some people are still fing L2s, but they're always going to FUD L2s. I mean, at this point, you kind of have to accept that the u the fight on Ethereum is never going to stop. And so, um, we'll we, you know, we'll we'll we'll deal with that as as time goes on, uh, there. Uh, but yeah, I think that's everything I had for today. In terms of like when the next episode is going to be, as you guys know, I'm not making promises anymore. It's just I'm going to do it when I do it. Uh, it's weird when I feel like doing one. Like, I literally I I think it was like just before I started recording today, I said to my fiance, I'm like, if you hear

me talking, it's not me talking to myself. I'm actually doing a video. And it was just random. Like, I didn't even think about it. I'm just like, I feel like doing a video. I was actually playing a video game. I was playing World of Warcraft. And I was like running around and I'm like, you know what? I feel like doing a refill today. And here it is. And it's Yeah. And it's funny because I I remember mentioning last time that people accused me of only doing a refill when the market's up. Well, hey, one of the worst market crashes in history and I'm doing a refill. So, you can't accuse me of that anymore. Um, but yeah, going forward. Don't know, guys. I'm still active in the Delhi Discord channel, so you can you can get in touch with me there. And there's a lot of people that are in

there, a lot of people that are active in there. Plenty of ways to keep up with what's happening in Ethereum. As I said last time as well, I wish I could do these more often. It's just yeah, it's just I'm not going to make promises because I don't want to I don't want to break hearts. I don't want to I I don't want to make promises and then people kind of like, oh, you know, you said you were going to do an episode and you didn't. So on and so forth. So, we'll see. Maybe I I mean, maybe I'll try to do one before Dev Connect because Dev Connect's in like what, a little over a month from now. Uh I hope to see a lot of you there, by the way. I'm very much looking forward to Dev Connect. I love Ethereum conferences more than really

anything. Um, but yeah, we'll see if I do one before then, but it will be if I feel like it. As you guys know, that's my rule of thumb going forward there. But on that note, that's it for today. So, thank everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the 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 time. Thanks everyone.