Post-quantum Ethereum, Fast Confirmation Rule & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #862 - 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 Anderson the 26th of March 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So apologies again for missing Monday's episode. Just h been busy uh you know in my uh kind of uh non-crypto non-ethereum life the past few weeks. Uh but I am doing an episode episode today obviously uh it being Thursday today. Uh but I have some other bad news for you guys. Uh there won't be an episode next week. Uh I am planning to take another kind of I guess cold turkey break from everything from like the online world uh starting next week uh to the end of Easter cuz I do want to enjoy that period of time without the distraction of uh you know social media and all

that. So I think I'll be basically breaking from next next Monday so the 30th to the following Monday. So the 6th of of April. So 30th of March to 6th of April. I won't be on Discord. I I mean I'm not even really on Twitter these days. cuz I kind of retweet things, but I won't be on that at all. Won't be checking price or anything like that. It's very similar to the break that I took uh before the ETH ETF was approved, you know, a couple of years ago now. Um, and I've been meaning to do one, you know, I haven't done one since then. I've been meaning to do one for a long time because I think as I discussed on on the episodes back then, uh, it was very freeing uh, to be able to kind of take a step back from everything and

kind of break that addiction because I think a lot of us maybe are in denial about the fact that we are addicted to our phones. social media, the online world, and I really did feel withdrawal symptoms when I did that kind of break. Um, but then, you know, a couple days later, it felt really good, and I felt, as I said, like freed from this hold that this thing has on me and I was a lot more productive in other things that I was doing. So, I'm hoping that I mean, I've been able to, like, you guys know I'm writing my my book. I'm almost at the end of doing the first draft, by the way. That's that's the kind of update there. But I'm hoping that the break from social media will allow me to focus even more on that because I do find it

difficult to focus sometimes. Like I try to get rid of distractions but it's just it's just very hard. So I'm going to be doing that uh from there. But enough about that. Let's jump into the news over the last week and a half. So there's been quite a bit of movements. Uh I think you know price has not really done anything but you know that's okay. Like price goes sideways sometimes. That's just how it is. But in terms of tech developments, I think the biggest things uh I guess like there's there's a few themes here, right? The biggest things are obviously the continued core development work which um I will cover uh in a little bit here. Um I think postquantum kind of stuff like quantum resistance of blockchains generally, not just Ethereum has become a a pretty huge topic and of course all the

institutional stuff happening as well. I think those are the three main kind of themes right now uh with regards to what's happening within uh I guess crypto or I guess within Ethereum and then crypto more broadly we have uh a lot of movement on the clarity act we don't know if it's going to go ahead or not yet there's obviously a lot of stuff happening there but that's got to do with you know DeFi stable coins things like that but again that to me falls into maybe the more institutional bucket because clarity matters for them you know for retail investors it it matters to an extent but like For a long time now, retail inverses have been able to pretty much like have relative freedom doing stuff, you know, within the crypto world, whereas institutions are more hamstrung by regulations and and and laws and things like that. So, that's

that's more for them. But, yeah, those are the three kind of main themes that I'm I'm seeing right now within Ethereum that are the most exciting things happening, I think. And yeah, I I guess like for a lot of people that may not be something that excites them. They may be like, you know, I'm a cipher punk. like uh I care about, you know, um all the cypher punk values. I care about synergy resistance. I care about privacy. All that sorts of stuff. And that's all being worked on too. That's all part of the I guess like core protocol umbrella that I that I spoke about the core protocol theme. Um and then of course like the postquantum stuff comes into it as well. But at the end of the day, guys, like I think I've said this many times before, I think we kind of

saturated the the cryptonative retail side of things where if we wanted to get kind of more adoption of this technology and to go to the next level, it's the institutions now, right? And they're going to bring in the next wave of users. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just how these things happen. Um, but obviously like the main concern is, you know, can we on board institutions or preserving what makes Ethereum great? And I think we can. I think Ethereum is really the only ecosystem that can do that. I think every other ecosystem is either going to be captured um by these institutions in some way or another or they just never really had those properties to begin with, right? And there's just no way for them to get those properties at this point. Like a lot of these L1 chains will launch and say, "Oh yeah, we'll

become decentralized later or we'll become permissionless later or we'll, you know, we'll have more validators later." And it's like, no, you won't. Like, you just won't. That's just not going to happen. uh you know Tempo launched their mainet recently and they were like oh yeah uh you know we're going to have permission permissionless validators eventually and it's like cool but like in for all intents and purposes even if anyone can run a validator there'll be a very very small validator set because I don't know if you guys saw the hardware requirements for a validator on tempo but they're really really high and there's going to be no culture of running your own node or anything like that it's a corporate chain right like it's not cyberpunk at all so when you look at that from that perspective Ethereum is really the only there that exists there and that has a

chance at resisting that kind of coercion and capture. I think Ethereum has done a really great job up until now. Uh but I think the next maybe you know 5 10 years is the real test as the institutions come on board. And I think Ethereum really is set up to defend against it from, you know, I guess like all the way from the lowest level protocol work, the lowest level kind of I guess protocol protections we have in place like slashing, inactivity leak, stuff like that, right? To to the highest level stuff, right? Um so when when you look at it holistically, I think Ethereum is the only chain that has a chance at resisting this sorts of stuff. Um, and on that note as well, uh, uh, I think, um, that that segus me perfectly into the first thing I wanted to talk about with regards to the

updates for today. Uh, postquantum Ethereum. That's one of the themes I just spoke about and that's a big thing now for Ethereum. Uh, there's a new website at pq.ethereum.org that covers all of the work going into making Ethereum quantum resistant. Uh, now this is being spearheaded by the Ethereum Foundation of course, but there are a bunch of different teams kind of working on this. Um, and I would say that this is like extremely critical work for Ethereum. Probably the most critical thing for the Ethereum protocol over the next few years because if we aren't postquantum secure, like if we if we aren't quantum secure, then the protocol stands to basically be attacked and and and killed essentially, right?

Like I don't think any not just crypto protocol but just like anything I don't think anything was going to be able to exist any any anything I guess technical will be able to exist in a world where it's not quantum secure. So you know the Ethereum researchers and Ethereum developers are very acutely aware of this and that's why they've kind of spun up this effort. But as I've mentioned before this effort is not something new. It's been going on for a few years now but like we're just formalizing it at this point. Uh and and that's what this website has done here. So you can check out the website uh for yourself. But essentially uh what I mean when I said earlier about the fact that like I think Ethereum is one of the only chains that stands a chance at at kind of you know

becoming postquantum secure. There are other chains out there that I guess like are pretty much irrelevant that claim to be quantum secure already. And I don't know if they are or aren't. But even if they are the point is is that if no one's using them, if they're like ghost chains, then it doesn't really matter, right? Because no one is even going to care to to to attack those chains. And even if they do get attacked, no one's going to care that they've been attacked. We already have proof of this with things like Ethereum Classic has been 51% attacked multiple times in the past and no one cared. No one gave a [ __ ] The price actually went up, I think. So like if if it's if it's on a chain that no one cares about, then you know it's whatever. But then there are

obviously like a handful of chains that people care about, right? You have obviously Ethereum, you have Bitcoin, uh you have some other L1s that have managed to kind of get some usage like BSC chain for example, and then you have um Salana obviously you have Tron with the stable coin stuff. There's not really much more after that. There are some here and there, but for the most part, most chains, and I'm talking about L1 chains, obviously we have the L2s as well, but I'm just talking about the L1 chains for now. Um most of them are dead chains, right? So no one's going to care if they get attacked. So then you you zoom out a little bit and you're like okay well which ecosystem can actually implement this sorts of stuff which has the best um chance of implementing this stuff and doing it in a timely manner as

well. I think Bitcoin stands very low chance of doing any of this. I don't actually have much confidence that Bitcoin is going to be able to become fully quantum secure. I think there are going to be parts of it that will be more secure than others um just the way the protocol is architected. But that that's not good enough because if only parts of it is secure then that means parts of it is vulnerable and that kind of breaks down everything from there because if if let's just say early Bitcoin addresses that hold lots of BTC are vulnerable then that BTC may end up getting stolen and then uh you know sold on the market and may it may end up being a lot of of BTC and that just shakes confidence in Bitcoin right that that completely shakes confidence in Bitcoin in the Bitcoin protocol. So I I

just I don't have much faith there. And I've gone through this before, but I just don't have much faith that Bitcoin is going to become quantum secure on any reasonable time frame uh going forward. Ethereum I have all the faith in. And I'm not just saying this cuz obviously I'm like an Ethaxian. I'm unbiased or whatever. I'm saying this based on the available information. Like there is no equivalent website to this for Bitcoin as far as I know. No equivalent postquantum, you know, Bitcoin website. There is no plan. There is some stuff here and there. like some Bitcoiners who watch this will correct me on this, of course, and I I I I encourage you to do so, but from what I've seen, there are some there are some work. I'm not going to say there's nothing going on here, but for the most part, it's not really,

you know, formalized. It's not really kind of quote unquote official. And I don't mean official as in like some, you know, some central body has said this is how we're doing things, but it just seems like everything's very splined. There's no like kind of road map here on the on the Bitcoin side of things. Whereas with Ethereum there is literally a road map right and there are there is so many uh kind of like different efforts going on there's so many resources going on and there is a uh I guess like agreed upon standard that people are are kind of pushing towards right uh the whole community is behind this like no one is saying that we shouldn't do postquantum Ethereum obviously the intricacies of how we do it is very important and it's going to be very different depending on who you talk to because people will disagree on

how to do these things but like the actual goal of making Ethereum quantum resistant, no one is debating against this. Whereas, you know, when I look in the Bitcoin community, some people are still denying this is even an issue, right? Just like they they deny the the um the security budget kind of issue with Bitcoin as well. Um so, you know, you just don't see that in Ethereum and and you know, Ethereum aren't shy about voicing their concerns when they're actually against something, you know, so they're not just like saying, you know, keeping it to themselves. they would say something if they had an issue here, but like it just seems insane to me that you would have an issue with wanting to make something quantum secure. Like it just that's just silly to me, right? So yeah, as I said, if I zoom out, then I feel

like, you know, Ethereum, I'm full faith in Bitcoin. Very little faith in the other L1s, the ones that people care about. Look, BSC is just an EVM chain, so they could probably adopt a bunch of the stuff that Ethereum is working on for their own chain. Uh Salana, I don't know how hard or easy it's going to be for Salena to do this because they are obviously very different to Ethereum. So they would have to do it themselves. They can't just piggy back off what Ethereum is doing. At least for the most part. They could probably kind of see some things and and translate it across, but for the most part, I believe they're they have to do their own thing. Um and and it's kind of sad to say this, but I have more confidence in them, you know, being quantum secure and Salana being

quantum secure than I do in Bitcoin being quantum secure, right? Um, but then I still don't have that much confidence either in them because they've promised many things over the years that they haven't delivered, right? Like Fire Dancer that, you know, has has barely been delivered. Like there is some kind of I guess beta version on the network and they still call it, you know, mainet beta as well by the way. Um, but like the actual original promises of it just weren't delivered at all in any capacity. Whereas Ethereum has a very long track record of delivering on its road map uh and delivering you know major things. Obviously the merge being the biggest, but like so many other things, right? So I have full confidence in in that uh there and the confidence in in the Ethereum ecosystem to be able to be able

to deliver on these, you know, ambitious kind of endeavors here. And then the rest, you know, Tron again is an EVM chain, so they can probably just copy what Ethereum does. I'm just going down the list here on Coin Gecko that there really isn't that many relevant L1s. Like I mean there's Hyperlid U, but they're like separate again. Uh you know, they've got the EVM chain, but like that's very small compared to their per protocol. I don't know how difficult it would be for them to to I guess like make it quantum secure. Probably not too difficult to be honest. Uh especially because like Hyperlid is for all intents and purposes decentralized. Like people who say that it's not centralized, I mean come on, it is like and and you know they say they're going to decentralize one day but like I just don't buy that. Um and then you know

besides that like there's Monero and Zcash which are the privacy kind of L1s. I I don't know what the status is with their quantum security, but yeah, beyond that, there's just really nothing else that people kind of care for on the L1 side of things, right? So, and honestly, that's good. That's a good thing for me. Like, I like that. I like that nature is kind of healing there because the the endless list of L1's that we've had over the years that promised the world and like almost all of them have been griffs. Like, I'm not going to say all of them have, like, but almost all of them have been griffs. Um, and you know, a lot of them have been borderline or outright scams, right? Um, but that's besides the point of the quantum secure stuff. Ethereum is going to be quantum secure and you should check out the

website if you're at all interested in how it's going to achieve that. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. Now where these two kind of worlds meet with the themes that I mentioned earlier with institutions and quantum security u they meet uh like uh pretty often because these big institutions these big enterprises these big corporates they're not going to want to adopt and use a chain that is not going to be secure long term for them like these guys don't think in day monthly time frames right uh they're not like memecoin degenerate traders they think in yearly decade kind of beyond timelines here. So, they're looking at Ethereum and they're being or looking at crypto and they're being like, you know,

what where can I can I put my business? It's going to be secure. It's going to be long lasting. It has a serious team behind it, you know, so on and so forth. And that's it's really Ethereum, right? Um, so Will here, who is one of the leads of uh of the lean Ethereum effort, presented Ethereum's postquantum security strategy at uh the institutional Ethereum forum that took place in uh New York City. I believe this was a few days ago or March 24th. So only a couple days ago actually um which was a summit put together here by I believe Etherealize was was um the Ethereum Foundation were heavily involved in this and this forum was attended by executives from every major kind of fintech in the world or fin you know every major kind of bank every

major financial institution and and fintech here and you can see the list and David Walsh who's the head of enterprise at the Ethereum Foundation said that $250 trillion in combined assets were represented here. So this is literally everyone guys like this is all the the money in the world basically right uh you know the likes of Black Rockck, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, PayPal, Stripe, Visa like everyone here like and also cryptonative um kind of uh companies and protocols like a unis swap consensus and some some VCs and stuff as well. Uh but this is like the who's who of the financial world, right? And they were there in a at an event called the institutional Ethereum forum in New York City. the you know the the ba basically the center of finance of of the world like one of the centers of finance in

the world right so they were there um and you know will you know presented Ethereum's postquantum security strategy to them so essentially telling them like hey we have a plan for this you you're going to be hearing about this in the news you're going to be hearing about this you know over the next few years as things get closer and closer as quantum gets closer and closer and look the Ethereum Foundation uh is leading this effort the Ethereum ecosystem has this plan has this roadmap map to become postquantum. And here's a website you can go read this yourself or you can give it to your interns and your analysts and they can read it and you can have confidence that based on you know the the fact that we that Ethereum has delivered these major upgrades you can have confidence that the Ethereum ecosystem will deliver a postquantum

strategy and will become quantum secure. So that obviously translates into these enterprises being more open to taking the bet on Ethereum because as I said they will do a bunch of pilot programs with you know everyone basically and you see this constantly right there's just pilot programs everywhere but if we're talking about like serious capital coming onto these chains and serious uh products being built on these chains for for the long term not just for pilot programs they're going to be looking at all of this stuff this matters to them greatly and you know VC from Etherealiz talks about this a lot on Twitter in podcasts that he does. This is non-negotiable for these institutions, right? They need this. Like this is not something that's an optional extra for them. This is exactly what they want,

exactly what they need. So, I'm really glad this event was spun up to begin with this institutional uh Ethereum forum in New York City. As I said, like it's called the Ethereum forum. So, it's all about Ethereum. There was Ethereum in the room everywhere. Everyone was talking about it. ETH and Ethereum were at the center of things here. And that just basically sets uh a kind of like tone within these institutions that Ethereum is the serious player here, guys. Like it it is the second largest chain, but like Bitcoin can't do what Ethereum does. So Ethereum is the biggest smart contract chain by far. Uh it has the you know the the best technology. It has the best people working on it. And it is open for business. You can build whatever you want in it. You know, you build layer 2s, all that sorts of stuff, which I'm

actually going to talk about in a sec with regards to or a little bit later with regards to to L2s. Um, but yeah, there's just so much going on here, guys. Like so much to be bullish about. But as I said at the start, if you're not really vibing with the institutional side of things, I totally get it because like for me personally, I had my most passion within crypto uh during the I guess like retail era of crypto. Like that was where I was most passionate about about Ethereum. Like I'm still super passionate about Ethereum. I still love Ethereum, but like the vibe shifted obviously. It's no longer a retailled phenomenon. It's an institutionalled phenomenon. And I'm just not in the institutional world. I my personality does not vibe with that world at all to be honest. I am definitely a cipher

punk. I'm definitely someone who's like a massive nerd. You know, I could talk to these people. They're normal people. It's not like they're going to bite my head off or anything like that, but they have different kind of priorities, different concerns about things. Um, and they work within big corporations, right? Like I've always kind of well for for the most part worked on my own within this industry. I haven't worked at big corporations. The only company I ever worked for was Set Protocol and they were a small startup. There was like six of us or something like that. So, so from that lens, you know, I I totally understand why you wouldn't be like super excited about this. But as I said before, it's just the natural progression of these technologies, guys.

And you know, for better or worse, that's how it is. Like that's it's how it's been with the internet. It's how it's been with all technology, right? Like it starts off as like a fun thing that's underground that you you know, you tell your friends about and you're all kind of enjoying things. Like I remember all of this because I grew up with this, right? like I'm 34 this year. Uh so when I when when technology was really taking off, when computers were taking off, when the internet was taking off in the late '9s, early 2000s, you know, I was coming into my uh into my teenage years uh at that point, right? Like I was uh well I mean not I was eight in the year 2000, but like as social media started picking up in like 2004, 2005, 6, I was a teenager. So I

rode that wave. I rode the early technology wave as well with computers and I wrote all that and it was really fun at the start, right? like really really fun. Um, and it was exciting and it was new and it didn't like dominate your life. You didn't have a smart, you know, the smartphones weren't really a thing yet, so you didn't have them everywhere. Uh, but like then fast forward 20 years and it's completely different. Like I actually find myself hating the modern internet like a lot to the point where like I'm, you know, pretty much like at the at the point where I just want to quit it altogether because I just I don't see much use in it anymore. And the modern internet is just unfortunately synonymous with social media. It's the same thing essentially like you yes you can use the internet for other things right that

improve your life like for example doing your taxes online instead of having to go into uh the the tax office to do them um or or kind of like doing like paying bills online instead of going to the post office to pay them and stuff like that right or going doing your banking online those sorts of things right that are like complimentary to your existing life like online shopping pretty cool right to an extent like online shopping's also become a disaster because they're just like trying to extract as much money as they And but when it comes to the other side of the internet like social media and everything like it's just just really really bad. Um I don't think that's going to happen with Ethereum because with Ethereum because it's permissionless and decentralized you can't exactly ex exert total control over it. Like the internet as much as it

you know tries to be decentralized and and permissionless. It's not right. It it's it's not really. Um and and the internet as I said as we know it today is mostly social media and all of that social media is not decentralized. It's it's is backed by centralized companies. They feed us crap through algorithms. Um and you have basically zero control over it except quitting. That's your only control you have over it. You can try and tune your algorithm. You can try and tweak things. You can buy their premium version. Whatever you try to do, it doesn't matter because eventually they change something or they just like don't even give you the option of of of um tuning your your you know your recommendations or anything like that.

Like no matter where you go, it's all about maximizing revenue and maximizing profit. Whereas on the Ethereum network, it's very different because for example, let's just say a bank offers a product to their customers and says, "Okay, well, this product can earn you a yield and we're going to put your money into this protocol on Ethereum." Fine. You can you can do that today with centralized exchanges, but in in the future, banks will do this as well. You you know, you'll kind of u know that you maybe getting x amount of yield on your dollars or maybe you're like borrowing against your assets, but maybe you don't know what the protocol is in the background being used and you're fine with that. like you're you're happy going through a centralized intermediary. Most people will be. But then you also have the option of not doing that. Like as a cryptonative, you

can get your own self-custodial wallet, put your own, you know, money in there, put your own ETH in there, your own stable coins in there, whatever it is, and then go do everything on chain that you want to do through either centralized frontends or host them locally. You don't have to go through these centralized intermediaries. Whereas the existing banking system, you have to do that. Like you got no choice, right? cash is is quite useless in the modern world. Um it's it you can't use cash online because uh to use cash online you have to put it in a bank, right? And they just give you an IOU. So that's where the the key difference lies that you have a lot more control over your own involvement with you know Ethereum even if it becomes like heavily dominated by institutions. Uh which I think is pretty cool. Um and not to say

that things can't be captured. I'm sure some protocols will be captured. I'm sure some uh chains will be captured, right? Uh, but when it comes to Ethereum, I don't see how the Ethereum chain could be captured in the foreseeable future. Maybe, you know, a long time into the future where no one cares about Ethereum anymore. I don't I don't know. Like, obviously, anything can happen if we look far enough out. Um, that's how I kind of view these things. But when it comes to to the internet side of things, yeah, it just it's it's just not, you know, it's not there anymore. And and same goes for like even things like computers, like building your own computer, stuff like that. Like hardware prices are so expensive now because of the AI stuff that a whole generation of people aren't going to be doing that. And I would even

argue that like Gen Z and Gen Alpha probably didn't really do much of that because they had things kind of handed to them, right? Like they had smartphones more powerful than computers that we had back then, right? Way more powerful than computers that we had back then. They have access to everything. Like Wi-Fi is ubiquitous everywhere. They don't have to mess around with the internet. They don't have to mess around with things like dialup or anything like that, right? That that's all completely foreign to them. They they may as well um believe that it didn't even exist. There's just some stories we tell to scare them into thinking that, oh no, if the Wi-Fi goes out, you know, you have to do this, this, and this, right? Um, and I saw actually a picture the other day. It was funny on on Twitter actually, uh, where someone was

comparing like the the amount of clicks you have to do to get into like the actual advanced settings of Windows because they've just like put layer and layer and layer on top of it where they're trying to just dumb it down for like the lowest common denominator where if you go back to obviously the older versions of Windows, it wasn't like that. Like, but I understand why they do that. But then the thing is is that you don't necessarily have a choice. You have to jump through all these hoops to even get that back. There there are various things you can do. Like there are scripts on GitHub you can download that um load into power uh PowerShell and like modify your Windows, but like it it gets to the point where it's just like okay well what's the point? Like I'm just going to go to Linux. Like I

still use Windows as my as my main driver. I have a MacBook as my laptop. Linux desktop leaves a lot to be desired especially for things like gaming. And I know there's like the whole Linux cult. It's just like you, you know, use Linux desktop. It's awesome. I use Linux for everything else except my desktop experience. Like all my servers, all my source taking, everything like that's all Linux based, right? But like for my desktop, I play games on it. I I I'm used to it. And yeah, it's frustrating at times, but like it's there. But Windows 11 honestly has been a bit of a like thing for me where I'm just like, [ __ ] it's just it's just becoming too much now. like there's bloody co-pilot everywhere, which I managed to kind of disable using the PowerShell script, but it's like how long until they make it so

that you can't disable it. I mean, I don't know if they would be able to do that. Um, but maybe they will or or how long until it's just like you disable it somewhere and then it just pops up again later. Like when you go on YouTube and you say, "I don't want to see shorts." And it's like, "Okay, we'll tune your recommendations." And then a few days later the shorts are back. It's like, "I don't want to watch YouTube shorts." Like, it's such brain rot. Like, why are you pushing this into my feed? and I pay for YouTube Premium because I don't want to see the ads, but then I'm get and I know there's Adblock. I have Adblock installed. Um, but the thing is is that uh Adblock is like hit or miss these days. Like Google's trying to kill it as well. Like you have to kind of um enable

developer tools and like do some uh kind of backdoor installation of Adblock these days. Um so yeah, it's just become all [ __ ] And I know I'm going off on a little bit tangent here, but I think it's it relates back to, you know, the institutional adoption of Ethereum is that some people think that, you know, it we're losing the magic here. And that's just natural. I I would say that we have lost the m some of the magic, but that's just because of the fact that the magic existed because this thing was smaller, because it was more underground, because it was more like if you know, you know. Uh now it's like, well, we all know and it's it's the future and we accept this and that's what we wanted, right? But something dies for that to live essentially. Um but yeah, that's that's on on the

institutional side there. Um yeah, I think that's everything I wanted to discuss with regards to quantum Ethereum institutional side of things. Uh but there's a bunch more stuff to get through here. So let me get through it. So a big uh I guess like protocol related update that came out last week. There's a bit of debate about this was something called the fast confirmation rule. So the I guess point of this is to be able to do single slot confirmations for Ethereum. So essentially do a confirmation within 13 seconds. That would be similar to finality but not strictly finality because there's been a lot of discussion around single slot finality. So essentially doing Ethereum finality in 13 seconds instead of for about 13 minutes. That's going to be a

while away and that's requires a hard fork and a core protocol change to do it. This fast confirmation rule does not require that. But I was having a debate with few people about this. I actually think that it confuses people because like when we already talk about Ethereum transaction confirmation, we already say that a a transaction is confirmed after one slot, right? Um well, if you've paid the right gas fee and then your transaction gets included in a block within one slot, we say that it's confirmed. So to say that there's now, you know, fast confirmations within 13 seconds, it confuses the terminology.

But what as I said, what they actually mean is that it's like getting to the point where you can have relative confidence that the transaction won't be reverted and it'll be like having finality. Um, someone came up with another term for this called pretty good finality where essentially it's obviously not strict finality, but like it's pretty good finality. I think that might be a better term than fast confirmation rule, but at the same time, I'm arguing semantics here. At the end of the day, what matters is what impact this has. and well it has a pretty big impact if adopted. Essentially what it means is that you get faster confirmations of things like centralized exchange deposits. So right now I believe that on the average a centralized exchange will wait 6 minutes for um for to credit you a um a

transaction on the Ethereum on Ethereum mainet. So if you deposit ETH into an exchange, it'll wait 6 minutes worth of of um confirmation of block confirmations or slot sorry confirmations I should say before it credits it into your account. um and then uh you know it'll it'll credit it there. Whereas if they were to adopt something like this it would be done in 13 seconds which is obviously considerably faster. Secondly would be things like layer 2 deposits and withdrawals and layer 2 interoperability. If uh arbitr both adopted this theoretically you could have native interoperability between these two chains within 13 seconds right you could have atomic transactions between them if they both adopted this.

But there is a drawback here with this is that it's not like 100% secure. You essentially will uh would have like security over these things not being reverted I think 99% of the time or something like that. But there will be 1% of the time where it's it's not the case. So it it really would be up to the exchanges and the L2s and bridges and stuff like that to adopt or not adopt this. But then there is from my understanding a variance here as well where you could adopt it in the I guess like multiple case where essentially you say well I'm not just going to wait for one Ethereum slot or one fast confirmation slot I'll wait for like four or five or something like that

right I'll wait up to a minute that's still considerably faster than it is today but then that also requires the services and the infrastructure to adopt it as well uh and obviously it's not as attractive as as 13 seconds I will say this is like a stop gap solution until we have fast finality on Ethereum. This is not something that I consider to be I guess like a permanent thing. It's just the fact that like people want fast finality today and if we can give them pretty good finality, you know, to use that term, then we should. And I agree with that. Um so yeah, you can go check out this post from Julian here that talks about this in much more uh detail and what the assumptions are and stuff like that. Uh and there's also a new website you can check out called

fastconfirm.it it. Uh that'll be linked in the YouTube description as well for you guys to check out. Um and that yeah, and that explains everything in much more detail, but I think I covered it from a high level there. Um uh but yeah, you can go check that out for yourself. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right, so just an update on the EF Treasury. So, as you guys know, the Ethereum Foundation is going to stake up to 70,000 ETH within the Ethereum protocol. And they had their first validated index assigned to them uh on the 20th of March. So, this is almost a week ago now. Uh and as Nixo explains here, it took a while because there's been so much influx into staking that the entry Q peaked at 71 days in February. I think that's come down quite

a bit because I believe back then um Tom Le's Bit Mine was was staking ETH, but it's still it's still quite high. You can see on my screen here, the entry queue is still at almost 3 million ETH. Uh, it's come down from a high of about 4.1 million. The exit Q is basically non-existent. There's like what, 62,000? Oh, no, no, no, not not even. It's like uh yeah, 62,000 ETH as of today, which is a rounding error compared to how much is is is entering here. Um, but yeah, so it's great to see that the EF has officially started kind of staking on the network. You know, it's uh it's active, the validator is active here.

Um, but you know what? It's funny. It's like with the amount of staking that's come kind kind of come into the network here. If we go to Hillby's dashboard, we can see that the amount of ETH staked has uh kind of still is still down from the highs. I think I discussed this last time where the high was about 39 almost 8 million ETH staked and we're at like uh 38.2 million. So, we're we're not that much off the highs, you know, 1.5 million off the highs here. Um but uh in terms of like the ETH uh kind of deposited here, we're we're definitely down from from the peak. So even though there's been a large influx of staking, uh there's also been an an um you know, an outflow as well. Uh and interesting if we look at the top 10 here, there's

been a little bit of movement. So Coinbase is number four now. So Ether took over Coinbase and is number three. And Coinbase over the last six months has lost 28% of the ETH that it has um staked on on on Coinbase. Now, I believe this might be because of their fees. Their fees are quite high. Um, if you stake with Coinbase and I think that Coinbase obviously being very retail dominated and the fact that retail has uh really kind of exited crypto a lot over the last uh you know 6 to 12 months that may explain that. Um, but then Ether over the last 6 months has gotten a 10% inflow. Lido 5% and Binance 1% here. Um, which uh is interesting because we don't know exactly where these uh things are coming from. Either

does offer a higher yield than Coinbase because they do restaking. Um, Lido obviously being the biggest still uh, you know, we we'll tend to see kind of inflows because they have a lot of node operators underneath them that work for those inflows. It's not just Lido, it's all the node operators within Lido. Same for Ether to be honest as well, but they don't have as many note operators as Lido. And of of course, Binance is the biggest exchange, but even then they've only added like 1% over the last 6 months. So again, that's showing that kind of like I think you know retail exhaustion there where retail is just not really around but Binance's eight staking fees are definitely a lot lower than Coinbase's uh from memory there.

And then you know you have a bunch of others like Kraken has gained 7% over the last 6 months. I think that's because they um I think that's because of the change of the SEC leadership. Um I I remember that Kraken had to shut down their um uh their retail side of things, but then I think they've reenabled that from from memory. Uh and then you've got Block Damon here had a massive increase of 33% uh as well. So yeah, just a bunch of um of changes over the last 6 months. It's it's sad to see that Rocket had a pretty big outflow here at 22% um and K at 60%. But we know why Kil had an outflow is because they had that security issue. So, they had pretty big outflows and it doesn't seem like they've had the inflows uh back in yet.

I don't know if that will come back there. Um but yeah, we'll have to we'll have to kind of see um there. But yeah, that's just to show that when it comes to staking, we're pretty much you just going sideways at this point. Like not really kind of going up too much. And that's okay. I actually think that's fine. I as I've said in the past, I think we've been overpaying for security for quite a while now. I think we've hit diminishing returns on the amount of ETH staked. And I'm much more concerned about getting more node operators on the network uh and making sure the distribution of of power remains uh you know like this or better. Like Lido is still pretty high but Lido has made a lot of good kind of uh strides and efforts towards decentralizing themselves and making sure that um you

know the Lido Dow has minimal power over the note operators. So kudos to them on that. But still I would like to see their share you know continue to to drop. But I don't know it feels like it's kind of stagnated at this point. and it feels like it's going to going to kind of stay there. And and just for those listening to the podcast and not watching here, their market share is around 23.2% right now. So that's down from 33% by the way. That's a pretty substantial difference. Um but yeah, so they're much bigger than second place, which is Binance at 8.7%. So yeah, anyway, moving on from that. So the EF protocol team has published an EIP champions handbook. Uh now this uh Dixo says here, "Getting a feature into the protocol through a decentralized governance process can be [ __ ] hard.

These resources aim to help EIP champions give their features the best shot at getting included, including how to go about getting feedback from the rest of the ecosystem and make sure that the feature will get adoption." This is something that I didn't know needed to exist, but now that it exists, I'm like, of course, this should exist, right? Because if you like think about it, and I I mean I've talked about this a lot in the past, the the process of of an EIP, how it goes from getting kind of um I guess like created uh to getting included. A lot of the time it is definitely I wouldn't say a popularity contest, but it's definitely a thing of like if you have no attention on your EIP, it's just not even going to be talked about, let alone included. And a lot of people, especially technical

people, struggle with being able to get attention and marketing things because it's just not a skill that they have because they're engineers or they're technical people. It's just not something that they're used to doing. So, this handbook and this this guide basically gives you everything you need to know about how to do this and how to give your EIP the best chance of getting included if it's obviously something that um is liked by the core researchers, core developers, the community at large, right? Obviously, there's a lot of EIPs that will never make it in because they're just like bad EIPs or maybe they conflict with another EIP or maybe they're um way too controversial, right? So, we've had every one of those over the years. So, as I said, didn't know this needed to

exist, but very glad it does. So, if you are someone who, you know, maybe you're thinking, I think that this should be included in the Ethereum network. I think this should uh be an EIP. Well, it's not just enough to create the EIP. You have to be a champion for it. You have to promote it. you have to get it in front of people's eyeballs in order for it to get included. It's like, you know, it's kind of funny cuz it's exactly how, you know, bills work to get made into law, right, within the the US or or or or, you know, or any kind of sovereign nation. I'm using the US example because we hear about that the most essentially like there's a reason why these bills have catchy names cuz that's just free marketing, right? like um for example Obamacare like that was

that was named that because it was it's a brand like Obama's the brand because he was the president um and it was healthcare so care and then it's Obamacare but the actual bill name itself and the actual details of it we're were not that like it didn't I believe it was called something else um it wasn't called Obamacare but that was like the marketing slogan for it right and then there's uh there's there's plenty of examples of this right like the chips act for bringing um manufacturing to the US for for chips like computer chips and stuff like that, like chips, right? Like it's just it's it's a catchy thing. So there there's plenty of this sort of stuff that goes on. Um and that's why uh and that's just marketing as I said. So just little things like that add up in a really big

way in order to get your EIP in front of, you know, as many eyeballs as possible and as Nixo said, give it the best chance in getting included in the network if it actually is a good EIP. So you can go check this out. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. So I mentioned earlier about uh talking a bit about L2. So the Ethereum Foundation uh put out a blog post uh with regards to um how L1 and L2s can build the strongest possible Ethereum together because as you guys know uh there's been a lot of debate over the last few months I would say about L2s and their role in Ethereum. Um and the TLDDR is that uh uh Josh Rudolph here who is the team lead of um the platform team at the Ethereum Foundation

says we should continue to lean into the unique capabilities of each layer and make sure all users users have a clear path to securely and seamlessly benefit from the core properties of Ethereum. In layman's terms, this basically means L1 is scaling, right? L2s can scale as well, but L2s also can offer many other things that the L1 cannot. And I've talked about this to death on the refuel. I've talked about how I believe that L2s, the customizability of L2s is their strongest suit here. And this is basically just the Ethereum Foundation kind of qualifying that tweet that Vitalik said uh put out a few weeks ago about the fact that L2s really need to differentiate themselves. They need to do things that are unique and they need to do things that have product market fit. They can't just rely on being more

scalable because no one cares about another EVM chain, right? Unless your EVM chain does something different, unless it is as differentiated enough from its competitors to want for for users to want to actually go there and do stuff on them because as we've seen there is a long list of L2s now that are basically graveyards. And I'm bringing up L2B here to show you like even Uni Chain for example has the brand has everything. It TVL has just gone down only because no one was asking for this. It didn't really need to exist. And I remember when when this launched, I I I'm pretty sure I said that this is an experiment to me. This is not something that I consider to be uh that that will have that that I thought would have high

chances of success um because of the fact that it's just not offering something unique to the market. It's experiment in a bunch of different technologies that are cool but not unique enough to get people to migrate from their already favorite L2 or from L1. And you can see that TVL has dropped over 90%. This is also because they had incentives as well. So, a big reason why it went up was because of incentives, but you always see um you know, who's been swimming naked when the incentives run out. And we see this across L1's, L2s, doesn't matter. Uh and then, yeah, I mean, really, it's just like Arbitum and Bass I would say, as like the clear leaders. Um and then you have lighter as the, you know, the per decks here. And you have like a long list of other L2s, uh even more than this. And you know,

some there's different tabs here of all the L2s and some that aren't even really L2s and roll-ups and you know, all the kind of constructions that we have here. A lot of them are just like not something that people care about, right? So, yeah, this blog post basically says like leverage the unique capabilities of what you can do as an L2. Uh, you know, be unique. Don't just copy the L1. Don't just rely on scaling to get users because that's just not going to be enough. And we have enough evidence of that to prove that to the market. And I also remember like all those years ago, like many years ago, I said that there was going to be a long list of L2s that just went nowhere. Um, and just because you're an L2 doesn't mean you automatically have product market fit.

And that was very obvious to me at the time. But I'm glad a lot of the ecosystem seems to be cluing into that now. But I think you do have to go through that process of like camber explosion of things happening, then things consolidate down, a few winners emerge, and then everyone licks their wounds and says, "Oh, maybe that wasn't like a great idea to do that." Same thing happened with L1's. Same thing happened with things like reststaking. Same thing happened with DeFi and NFTTS and and and I mean meme coins were just all a disaster, but you know what I mean, right? It it happens the same thing with every new technology, every new innovation that comes along. There's always a gold rush. Then things, you know, uh the tide kind of um goes out, you know, you see who's been swimming naked and then from there you you build

slowly over time and you build lasting things from there. So, if I was to put, you know, any bets on what L2s are still going to be around in 5 10 years, it would be Arbitum and Bass, uh, Arbitum one and Bass, but they could be dethroned by other L2s that come online. There could be, uh, an L2 that comes online that does crazy things that users are like, "Holy [ __ ] like, I can't do this anywhere else. This is awesome." We just don't know at this point. So, that's essentially what the Ethereum Foundation is encouraging here, which I think is the right thing to be encouraging. But, you can go give their blog post a read. I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so. All right. Another big theme of Ethereum that maybe kind of is a subset of all of

the three themes that I mentioned at the start of the the the podcast, right? Like the enterprise stuff, uh the protocol work, um and then uh what was the the other one? The other one's kind of eluding me right now. The postquantum stuff uh is privacy on Ethereum. So privacy on Ethereum has been you know like I guess like a thing over the last few years but like not a thing in so far as it's uh I guess evenly distributed I should say cuz we had to cache obviously we know what happened with tornado cashache we have a few other protocols like rail gun and privacy pools and stuff like that they haven't really got too much adoption but they're there and then we have like other chains claiming to do privacy and then we have like privacy coins but like on Ethereum itself there has been a mis

you know just like a bunch of different experiments that have kind of been hit or miss uh for for privacy. So the reason I bring that up today is because um you know Soy Spoke here who's a researcher at the Ethereum uh foundation has uh been looking into this and and you know they've they've kind of uh come up with this construction here as you can see in the image of how to do private how to do um swaps privately on the L1 uh and do do this trustlessly as well. So the TLDDR is that um you know privacy protocol users today depend on broadcasters that can see frontr run and censor their transactions. So like how a um mav me relayer or builder can sensor tornado cashache transactions for

example. Uh and then he says, "In this thread, we show how how four future protocol upgrades can remove this dependency step by step uh with native account abstraction and two-day nonses that let users self-submit with no off-chain infrastructure. And encrypted frame transactions can hide swap parameters until after the block ordering is committed. And then Fossil ultimately guarantees inclusion as long as one honest including in the public mempool. So this is essentially making it so that it privacy on Ethereum is uh for all intents and purposes guaranteed. Um so you're not just relying on all of this kind of trusted infrastructure to get your transactions in. Uh which I think is a really noble goal here and I think it's achievable as well because so spoke mentioned here that uh there are

already things in the works like native account abstraction the 2-day nons and then um encrypted frame transactions. Frame transaction EIP is a bit controversial right now. I think I've got I'm going to talk about that in a sec. Uh and then Fossil, Fossil is already going to be included in the in the network here. And same I believe with native account abstraction as well. They're they're two things that are already included there. But speaking of of frame transactions, well, you can go give this thread a read for yourself. I'll link in the YouTube description below of course. But speaking of frame frame transactions, um Soy Spoke also put out a post about this called encrypted frame transactions. And he says uh the TLDDR encrypted frame transactions build on Lucid and EIP8141 which is the native account abstraction EIP to hide execution parameters until after the blocks ordering is locked.

This design unlocks same slot encrypt encrypted execution interled plain text and encrypted transactions and is future compatible with postquantum schemes. So the reason why I mentioned that there was a controversial controversy around frame transactions at least from from my all the frame transaction EIP from my understanding is that people think it doesn't give the modularity and optionality that uh it should or that other um I guess like uh encrypted meool related EIPs give. Uh, and I think this is Soy Spoke's way of saying, well, if we couple these things together, we get that we get that stuff that you guys want. And he explains it in this thread here. And it it is quite technical, but you can give it a read if you would like to yourself. But really, the holy grail would be essentially uh something like

this where you can have 100% guarantees that your transaction will be included and it w and and it will be included in an encrypted way. Uh, you know, your private transaction in an encrypted way. It won't be front ran. and it won't be meed. It won't be dropped from the from the mele or anything like that. And also, it's future compatible with the the postquantum stuff because that's a that's the kind of another thing that maybe I forgot to mention before. Pretty much like all the pro core protocol work going forward has to be compatible with postquantum Ethereum. And that's why the postquantum Ethereum exists as well is because there's not only the postquantum Ethereum work, there's also all the other core protocol work, the straw map stuff, right? Like as I said, um as I went through last time, if you go to

strawmap.org, or which I'll bring up here for you guys. Like most of this stuff isn't directly related to quantum, but like all of it needs to play nice with quantum Ethereum. So by getting a start early on on what that's going to look like, we can make sure that all this stuff plays nice with quantum Ethereum. So I'm glad that we're early to this because again, this is something that every network has to deal with. like maybe bitcoin doesn't because they don't have to they don't do upgrades and they don't change anything but then again as I mentioned like bitcoin also doesn't have a plan for this at all like for for postquantum so or for quantum resistance I should say um but other networks like salana like BSC like uh you know hyperlink whatever it is they

do upgrades they change things so those all have to be considered as well when working on quantum resistance too but anyway you can go give that um thread a read from soy spoke I'll link it in the YouTube description below as well. And I just noticed the episode's 50 minutes. So quite a long episode today, but obviously a lot to talk about. But just a reminder, that's going to be it for I guess like the next almost the next couple of weeks. I should be back on the 6th of April for the next episode, which is a Monday, of course. Uh or if I miss the Monday episode, it'll be during that week there. And as I said, I will be off from maybe even this weekend until like the that Monday that I'm back off Discord, you know, off off Twitter, off everything off. and I I probably won't

be contactable. Um, so yeah, if I don't reply to your messages, if you do try to message me, don't take it to heart. It's just because I'm taking my break there. Uh, but I think it's going to be good. Uh, I I really do. And I encourage you guys to take breaks like that as well. I'm talking like full cold turkey. It doesn't work if you just do like, oh, I'll only be on social media or the internet or whatever it is for 30 minutes today. No, no, no. It I've done that. It doesn't work. It's not the same thing. You have to be completely off it. You have to remove the apps from your phone. You have to um uh lock it down on your computer. There are many Chrome extensions that you can get that actually block websites. So even if you type it in, it'll just remind you and

say, "Hey, you blocked this website. You're not supposed to be going here, right?" Um, and for me, I found the easiest thing to do was to plan that those days and know what you're doing on those days, right? Besides work and everything, but like know what you're going to be doing in your free time. um and plan that plan that out or at least have multiple things that you could do so that you don't just be like pick up your phone and be like, "Oh, I'll just install Twitter again or I'll just go on Instagram or whatever it is." Right? So yeah, um but yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Anyway, I'm also looking forward to coming back and covering all the stuff that I'm going to miss over the next week and a halfish. Uh but yeah, I will see you guys then. But anyway,

thanks again for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give a thumbs up, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all on the 6th of April. Thanks everyone.