Post-quantum Ethereum, Glamsterdam is coming - The Daily Gwei Refuel #854 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of daily refuel where I recap the latest news in the Ethereum system. I'm your host and this is the 26th of January 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So another crazy week I guess in the world. Uh not so much in crypto. Crypto is just kind of puttering along here. Obviously as you guys know uh the price has really just been going sideways for quite a while now. I'm going to talk more I guess about the markets at the end of today's episode. Um but yeah, in terms of like price action, it really has done nothing for the last kind of 3 or so months. uh while I guess like other markets have obviously done quite well uh you know gold in particular right everyone's talking about it everyone's talking about precious metals and stuff like that but as I said I'll talk more about

that at the end of today's episode uh but another big topic that I guess has been around for a little while now but is kind of coming more and more to the forefront of things uh in particular over the last kind of year is quantum computing and the threat that quantum computing poses not only to the existing kind of centralized based systems like financial systems and technology systems. Um but also uh blockchains uh because as we all know blockchains are completely public or at least most of them are completely public which means they have huge kind of I guess bug bounties on them where you can see the value that they're securing and then if you can somehow break that whether it be through a smart contract hack or potentially one day with quantum computing you stand to profit a lot by

doing this. So in response to this, you know, a lot of the community's been talking about this and there's been various different kind of I guess uh ways people are thinking about this. The Bitcoin community in particular doesn't think that it's a huge risk. They are putting a little bit of resources towards it, but um you know, not enough. Uh, and I think I I discussed this on Bank list recently with David Hoffman on an episode of the weekly rollup that I did with him uh about kind of how I think that this is probably the number one risk to Bitcoin other than the security budget kind of thing that I've talked about before. Uh, I just don't think that they have the culture to build and fix this stuff. I don't think that they have the ability to do this and I think that quantum may be the

Achilles heel of Bitcoin in the end. Um, whereas Ethereum is the exact opposite. I think Ethereum has the culture to, you know, build new things. Obviously, we ship major upgrades every six to nine months. Uh, and we have the culture of fixing things. And that brings me to a tweet from Justin Drake, which I've got in front of me here. Uh, where he basically announced something called the postquantum team that is being uh, kind of formulated or has been formulated within the Ethereum Foundation to tackle the quantum computing threat uh, towards blockchains generally, but specifically, I guess, Ethereum in this context here. Now this isn't something new in terms of I guess uh addressing the quantum threat. The team is new but addressing the quantum threat is something that has been discussed within Ethereum for a

very long time now especially by Vitalik who's been on top of this for quite a while now. But in terms of I guess like having a more serious uh um I guess activity around this and serious kind of work put into this uh it has been done since 2019 and has been on the long-term road map uh since then. So what this new postquantum team is doing is basically uh I I I guess like directly addressing this issue now where I'm going to do deep research into this build the you know correct kind of stuff that needs to get built here to defend Ethereum against these quantum threats because they are real and you may hear people saying well it's only like 10 to 15 sorry it's still like 10 15 20 years away we don't have to worry about it for

quite a while and like even if that's true even if it's still you know even if it's still 30 years away let's Okay, like it's better to start early and be proactive about this stuff rather than be reactive because I believe from everything that I've kind of read into this topic and people that I've I've spoken to, I believe that it is way closer than 30 years. I believe that we could see functional quantum computers that could break some uh you know some of the cryptography used within within blockchains within the next 5 years. I don't think it's 30 years away from from what I've seen, especially given that there is just so much investment going into obviously AI uh and into computing hardware and that's getting better and better all the time. AI is going to uh you know AI is obviously like it's it's

a huge thing, right? It's a huge people some people call it a fad, some people call it a bubble, whatever. Like it's it's huge. There's a lot of garbage with AI, but there's also a lot of good stuff with AI. It's going to accelerate a lot of industries. you know, the the medical industry is going to be accelerated by we're going to be discovering cures to things that we haven't had before much at a much faster rate. Um, it's, you know, it's doing a lot of great stuff and I think that one thing that it's also going to do is accelerate timelines uh with with quantum computing. So, I'm very glad to see this new team formed here uh by the Ethereum Foundation. I think that it is uh as I said, very proactive. I think that it is something that uh Ethereum can use as a narrative

going out to the world as like a key differentiator saying that well the Ethereum ecosystem has been thinking about this since 2019. There is a whole team dedicated to this now and Ethereum as an ecosystem will be able to implement these things because we have all this evidence of implementing major changes to Ethereum uh to to kind of lean on here especially something like the merge right with the merge uh we we uh that was like the in my opinion biggest kind of thing in crypto uh let alone you know one of the biggest things to happen in in the world and I know that it didn't receive nearly as much fanfare as some other things within the world but in terms of its impact in terms of uh how difficult it was in terms of the kind of coordination difficulties in particular, uh it stands

up there kind of like really really um high here. So I think when you look at that and you look at all the other upgrades Ethereum has done, no one reasonable could doubt that Ethereum can pull this off. And I I truly think Ethereum can pull this off. And I do think that we can uh become one of the only chains to be quantum resistant here. And it is, as I said, a very big key differentiator for us against uh other chains, especially Bitcoin, which is huge because if you actually look at and talk to folks in the Trafy world, they are putting disclaimers on their products. Like I think Black Rockck even has a disclaimer on their BTC ETF saying that uh one of the risks of holding Bitcoin is quantum computers and I've seen a few Tradfire reports uh start

mentioning it more and more where they say we don't even want to allocate to Bitcoin right now or crypto generally because of this quantum threat. So Ethereum can kind of I guess break away from that Ethereum ecosystem break away from that and kind of stand on its own. I think that's just going to be good overall uh for Ethereum. Yes, there's probably going to be like a long period uh where where things kind of I guess aren't great. And I'm not talking about just prices where like I guess Tradfire becomes a bit more hesitant to get involved cuz they're like, you know, this is a risk and it hasn't been addressed yet. Yeah, you say you're going to address it at some point, but still it's a risk. So, they're very, you know, risk averse obviously. Um but still it's it's obviously worth doing and it's obviously part of the the

bigger Ethereum road map here uh like the that we're that we're kind of delivering over the next I guess like few years. You guys know all about that that road map like lean Ethereum ZKVM stuff like that that I've talked about before. Uh but but also on top of all of that I think that as a broader topic here around crypto generally is and I've always believed this and I think that it's actually going to become true over the next couple of years. I [snorts] think that for a long time we've needed to expel a lot of the just crap from crypto. Like we just needed to get rid of it all. And like you may think that I'm only talking about the obvious scams and the obvious griffs and stuff like memecoins, but I'm talking about like a lot of these projects that pretend to be

legitimate that are actually just a waste of money and time that have actually generated value for no one except insiders such as uh VCs and the team members themselves. And I would argue that 99% or more of the industry falls into that bucket. And I think that we're we are going through that expelling period where these coins just keep dropping, right? Like these the prices just keep dropping and dropping and dropping. There is no relief here. No one wants to buy these things. There's no demand for them. Yes, ETH BTC are also not doing, you know, amazingly. They're doing uh uh they're doing amazing against other the other assets in crypto, but against like the stock market, against like precious metal, stuff like that. They're obviously struggling and they're just kind of going sideways and not really doing

anything too exciting. Um but against the rest of crypto, they're they're they're doing very very well here. Um, and I think that over the next couple of years, as I as I mentioned just before, um, that Ethereum has a really good shot of just separating itself from the rest of crypto because crypto also has like a really bad reputation outside like to the outside world. Uh, and that's driven, you know, in entirely pretty much because of the scams, right? cuz every time you go to a a mainstream media website or a mainstream financial publication and you look at the headlines, it's always almost always about the scams or or if the price has gone up a lot, they'll cover they'll cover that of course, but really most people know crypto because well, a lot of people kind of I guess like know of crypto or associate crypto still with

FTX, right, and SPF and Terra and all these really big scams that happened. But then also they may have heard of like these chains or these random chains that get shield to them by YouTubers or whatever and they just think it's all the same. Like I've spoken to to many people in my real life who have absolutely no idea what Ethereum is beyond the coin. They just think that ETH is like BTC. They have absolutely no idea that you can build things on Ethereum. They have no idea that just how different Ethereum is from Bitcoin. They have no idea how different ETH as an asset is from BTC. So like all of that I think it's going to take a while for that like it's not going to be the next couple of years but it's going to take a while for that to kind of I guess

change but I do think within crypto so just talking about like within the crypto ecosystem itself not including the outside world Ethereum does stand a really good chance over the next couple of years to take control of the narrative completely uh and and position itself uh kind of standing alone within the entire ecosystem and essentially create like its own like we can have the crypto ecosystem and then we can have the Ethereum ecosystem and I know that sounds very ETH Maxi. But at this point, I don't even care because like there's just been enough scams and grips and just really shitty projects that have gone nowhere and as I said, just enriched insiders that I'm just sick of these things. Like I'm absolutely sick of these things. And I I do think that they've been a massive net negative for the industry and they've severely

damaged the industry in many many different ways. Uh and they've hurt Ethereum as well. Uh and I think you know obviously anyone listening to my show will agree with me that Ethereum is special. Uh Ethereum is special among all chains. there is nothing like Ethereum out there. So, I really want uh us to kind of break away from the rest of crypto and stand alone here and then we can also work on standing alone outside of crypto, right? Uh and and kind of uh I guess like get it across to the outside world that Ethereum is not like the other kind of stuff in crypto. Ethereum is a serious technology. It is a serious platform. It is a serious ecosystem that wants to do serious things and it wants to change the world.

And our leadership is like that where you know our leaders don't shill meme coins and scams like the leaders of other chains. Our leaders aren't uh in it to like become cult leaders like other chains are. Like there's you know Vitalik actively tries to get out of the spotlight, right? And that's always been my barometer for things as well. It's like anyone who tries to be in the spotlight I'm I'm usually pretty bearish on. So like for example, I've got you know Justin Drake's tweet up here about the quantum computing thing. He barely tweets. And when he tweets, it's something major, right? Like he doesn't care to be in the spotlight. He'll go on podcasts and stuff like that, but it's usually just because he's got something to say about what he's working on. It's not because he just wants to be in front of a camera and people to listen to him

and to form a cult around him. Same goes for Vitalik, right? He rarely posts. He's posting a little bit more recently, but that's cuz he's got a lot of stuff to say, but like he's very very quiet. And then all the other ones as well like a lot you you know what most of the I guess people are within the kind of like higher I guess um ranks of of Ethereum research and development uh they are not interested in the spotlight at all. Uh and they they kind of like barely tweet they barely go on podcast stuff like that. Then you have the other end of the spectrum which is the likes of people like Charles Hoskinson, right? Like he's I guess the extreme side and there's a lot of people like him but he's the most obvious example here where he his whole thing is attention. Like he loves the

attention. He's got a massive ego. That's all he wants. That's all he cares about. So I'm glad we don't have those kinds of people in Ethereum. Like yes sometimes we had them within projects within Ethereum but in terms of Ethereum core development uh it's definitely not like that, right? Definitely out of the spotlight which I think is a net positive there. Um, but yeah, going back to I guess like the topic uh uh uh on hand here with with Quantum. You can give this tweet a read from uh from Justin Drake. But essentially, uh there's a lot going on here. It's not just the formation of the team. There's money being put towards this. There's going to be uh you know, workshops spun up. There's going to be a road map coming soon. There's going to be education being done. There's just like a whole suite of things being done here

by not just the Ethereum Foundation, but also teams outside of it. And you can see here that there's already some postquantum devets being uh spun up with different teams building uh uh new consensus layer clients which are going to be part of the lean Ethereum road map such as uh Ze here or ream uh labs pier 2 uh you've got uh gan or gene I don't know how to pronounce that one there the eth lambda team here so you have you have a lot of teams working on this here so this is definitely as I said not something new the team is new and the form you know the formalization of this effort is new but it's been worked on for quite a while and it is part of the wider lean Ethereum road map here. So, you can go check out Justin Drake's tweet uh if you would like there. There

was also this tweet from Bingji here who also works at the Ethereum Foundation. You've probably seen a lot of his tweets over the past year. He's been very active on Twitter, but he has a tweet here basically breaking it down for us mortals about why uh the quantum strategy from the Ethereum Foundation is one of the most important announcements in Ethereum's uh history. and he he you know he breaks it down pretty well and I'm not going to read through the tweet here. You can go give this a read for yourself but it essentially kind of puts the risk front and center and explains to you you know what why this is a risk uh and essentially why it's coming you know soon and why we need to address this and you know as I explained um you know just before it is definitely an

existential risk to blockchains. It is something that we need to figure out and I really do think Ethereum stands alone here. Yeah, some of the other chains will probably just like copy what Ethereum is doing and implement it there as well. Um, but they're mostly irrelevant. I would say that the most relevant chains are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Uh, and if Bitcoin can't get their together, like that's that's pretty that's that's that you know, it's pretty bearish, right? Like if you if you kind of imagine two possible timelines here. So, one timeline is that they figure their out. They fix it uh however they can like um and and then you know, we all go on our merry way and it's it's all, you know, it's all kind of fine there. Uh but then the other timeline is that they they don't fix it, right? And by they I mean like the the

Bitcoin community and the Bitcoin ecosystem, right? They don't fix it and then things start getting hacked, things start getting exploited. uh old wallets cuz they'll be the first ones to be to be cracked like the the you know some of the first wallets Satoshi's wallets they start getting drained the you know the the BTC starts moving that is like nuclear fallout for crypto generally because it wouldn't just be contained to Bitcoin at least in the short to medium term it would be like a nuclear level kind of fallout event for all of crypto um now if you think about those as the two timelines and then you put the odds of each happening people would say, "Man, okay, maybe it's like 50/50." I'm like, "No, no, I don't think it's 50/50." Like, from what I've seen, from

all the discourse that I've seen in the Bitcoin community, a lot of them still don't even, you know, acknowledge that this is an issue, or at least a near-term issue. They think, "Oh, we've got 30 years. It's fine." Okay. Uh you can you can think that. Um uh or there is just no kind of cultural appetite to and cultural drive to build something in order to fix it. So if you were to put probabilities of it, and I I can kind of put some rough probabilities of it of my own, I would say 80/20. So 80% chance that they don't fix it and 20% chance that they do. And I know that, you know, may seem a bit crazy, but a lot of people, you know, for example, if you want to use a recent example of something that a lot of people thought was crazy, a lot of people thought it

was crazy to call terror a Ponzi and then it collapsed in 3 days, right? uh if you were if you literally were calling it out as a Ponzi and saying that it was going to collapse as it kept going up mind you right it didn't stop going up the US price kept going sorry the um the Luna price kept going up the the to the supply of of the stable coin USD kept going up if you know even a week before it exploded or imploded if you had said that it was going to go to zero because that's what it did uh you would have been called crazy right so on the balance of probabilities yeah I would say 8020 that's my kind of probabilities there maybe that can go up or down depending on what happens over the next couple of years, but I'm just

not seeing anything good from the Bitcoin community. Uh, and I I mean, I haven't seen anything good from them for ages because they've just they're just like uh got their heads in the sand about everything. Um, but then even if they solve that issue, they've still got the security budget issue which there is just no good solution for for them. So, yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I obviously am still kind of way more bullish on Ethereum than I am on Bitcoin. I would say I'm net bearish on Bitcoin and this just makes me even more bearish on Bitcoin. Um, but you guys can make up your own mind on that. Uh, there. All right, moving on. So, Checkpoint newsletter number eight from Nixo is now live. Now, just to remind you here, these newsletters go over all the latest uh workings or happenings within the

Ethereum core developments uh world here. So in this one, Nixo is recapping Fusaka, the BO forks, looking ahead to Glamsterdam, and then looking at a timeline here, along with the uh EIPs that are going to be going into to Glamsterdam, and then looking ahead uh to Hegotar, which is the upgrade that's coming after Glamsterdam. Uh, and then, uh, kind of going over that, like going over the headliner, the headliner that we have so far, which is Fossil, linking to a bunch of different things, and then down the bottom got a comprehensive timeline for you guys here. But what I wanted to focus on was essentially her kind of timeline here. Like I've already talked about Faka and the BPO fork, so there's no need to to kind of cover that again. But, you know, the timeline

around Glamsterdam and Hegotar. I've said before that Glamsterdam I thought was going to be like mid this year in terms of uh, when it's going to get released. Uh, and that kind of I guess think I think this fits into her timeline here. You can you can kind of see she's not really giving timelines on the bottom here in the the timeline road map, but you can see here there's another road map with just like the days it takes to do things. So, uh, Glamsterdam is somewhere around here. So, so essentially like the the um, non- headliners are being selected. EIP specific devets are being spun up and then we have a kind of long period of a feature freeze coming up like very very soon. Then we have generalized dev nets for 30 days, security review for 2

weeks, permission test nets for 2 weeks, permissionless test nets for 30 days and then a 30-day buffer into a mainet fork. So if we just extrapolate from this and sorry Nixo for extrapolating from this for for a timeline, but I'm going to use it anyway. So if we say that well we do the feature freeze by the end of this month, let's say. All right. And then we have three months of through this feature freeze of of you know building everything building all the EIPs CL and then having client releases for the generalized dev nets. So fe that that's February March April right generalized dev nets for 30 days in May security review two weeks permission test nets for 30 days altogether in June and then permissionless test nets in July for 30 days and then 30-day buffer a you know

August or end of August here. So I think that with the feature freeze it could be probably less than 3 months. Maybe maybe you have like two months there. So if it's two months then that does fit into like the kind of I guess like August timeline for Glamsterdam to go live. Now I've said before that like if that happens I just don't see a world where Hegotar is going to ship by the end of this year because you know August like like even the start of August then we got to do this kind of all again for Hegotar. Unless it ships in December somehow, it just won't be shipping this year. That's okay. It's not a big deal, right? But I think I've said that before where just the timeline is just not kind of timelining for me. But I'm I'm be very happy to be proven wrong here. Like

I don't want to be right about this, but I'm just setting expectations like I normally do around timelines. So if I was to give a specific kind of month here, I would say sometime in August for Amsterdam. That's my rough estimate right now. Don't hold me to it. It could change. That's just based on on information that I'm seeing that's public to everyone else. Uh and then Hegela Q1 next year. I would not bank on it coming out uh this year. Unless it's like like Foraka December, but I don't know. We'll we'll see how that uh how that kind of um shakes out there. But yeah, uh you can go read this for yourself. It's a short read. I'll link in the YouTube description below. But I think uh in terms of the EIPs that are going into Glamsterdam, these are pretty much the ones that have been decided on

at this point. Um, I think that I don't I don't think any new ones are going to be added. Um, maybe some of these get taken away or one or more of them get taken away. I don't know yet. I think we'll find that out at the next all core devs call, of course. Uh, but yeah, it feels like we're at the feature freeze stage almost. Um, but also I should actually note here that Nixo kind of has an asterisk saying that features can actually be removed during the feature freeze uh stage as well um if they're determined to be in insufficiently ready or complexity issues arise. But new FE features should not be proposed to be added. So we've seen this before, you know, EOF got removed like pretty, you know, during the during this kind of period here. So things can be removed

during the feature freeze period, but don't expect things to be added unless it's like something that we need to add for a critical security issue or something like that, right? Um, but in terms of just normal features, no, they probably wouldn't be added um during during this phase here. So I think it's pretty safe to say that this these are the EIPs that we're going to be having in Glamsterdam. And as you guys know, the headliners for Glamsterdam are EPBS and block level access lists. Two very exciting EIPs. Again, you can go read all of about these on the Forkcast website, which is at forkcast.org. Uh which I will of course uh link in the YouTube description below for you to check out. Uh but yeah, that's all there is on the uh the core dev side there.

All right, just wanted to highlight this tweet from James, who is the head of ecosystem at the Ethereum Foundation. uh he said that during 2025 or sorry I should say um since the Ethereum everywhere team uh was launched uh every 30 days uh since then there has been an Ethereum community community hub launched which is pretty cool because like these are all over the world you can see on the map here there's one in San Francisco one in London one in um Dubai Hong Kong Lagos Berlin and Rome I believe um and there's going to be more that uh I Rome's coming I think uh yeah Rome's not there yet. Um, but yeah, and there's going to be more obviously uh as time goes on here. And these community hubs are really important for recruiting

and bringing in new people into the ecosystem. So, existing people are probably there as well, but where they really shine is bringing in new people and bringing in new people from around the world, not just from the US or from Europe, right? Those are the two biggest markets within crypto. But we want to have these community hubs everywhere around the world. Now obviously these ones are in the major places so far you know Hong Kong, Dubai, uh uh London, so so on and so forth. U but we also want to have them in smaller places around the world cuz we want to get those people on boarded. We want to make a difference to those people whether they be as users or developers uh and give them new opportunities and get them involved with Ethereum specifically

because this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the fact that we need to make sure that the world starts to understand that Ethereum is very very different to the rest of the crypto ecosystem and stands on its own in terms of legitimacy and in terms of the health of of the Ethereum ecosystem versus others out there. So yeah, I just wanted to shout out here to the Ethereum Everywhere team at the EF. They're doing great work here launching these community hubs around the world. All right, last up here is something that I think is a really good kind of slogan or tagline for Ethereum that VC from Etherealize has been pushing a lot but also some other people in the ecosystem where he basically says Ethereum is the b best place to do business. Now this is not just within

the I guess crypton native context of business but also outside of it and he was sharing a screenshot here where uh you know Black Rockck basically obviously is very um involved with Ethereum uh but there was a quote of uh someone a representative of Black Rockck saying if you're an investor looking to play the growing adoption of blockchain technology one of the best and probably fastest growing use cases right now is tokenization and Ethereum is a beneficiary of that trend and Larry Frink recently at Davos was saying that there there's only really going to be one kind of single chain for this tokenization stuff and there's only going to be kind of one settlement layer and obviously that's going to be Ethereum. Like I don't think there's any other chain out there that can fulfill that role. But it goes way beyond that guys. Like in terms of Ethereum being

the best place to do business. I think that the the um I guess most obvious example of this is the layer 2s out there. Now, I know, you know, some people will ask me the question of, "Oh, why do we need layer 2 if layer 1 is scaling and we got ZKVMs coming and, you know, so on and so forth, but I've always been pretty consistent with this view that scaling for any chain is table stakes." Like, if you're not scalable, then, you know, you're kind of useless as a as a chain. Um, at least a generalized chain. Obviously, Bitcoin is different because Bitcoin doesn't do generalize anything. doesn't actually need to be more scalable than it is today because it's really just supposed to be a dumb ledger for, you know, securing BTC. If that's what the Bitcoin community wants it to be, then sure,

fine. But when it comes to generalized chains, they all have to be quite scalable, right? Not equally as scalable. Like Ethereum L1 is never going to be as scalable as the L2s, but they should still be scalable. But then the layer 2s, like scaling, as I said, it's stable stakes for them. Like if you're not a scalable layer 2, then you're just useless. Um and but on top of that is the fact that like a layer 2 gives you uh control and customizability. Now control is good for decentralized businesses. Layer 2 is not you know most of them aren't going to be decentralized guys and that's fine. The whole point is that like a layer 2 can be anything. So if a company wants to come in or corporation wants to come in and say where hey we want to get involved with the onchain economy but we

don't want to be you know decentralized or anything we want control over everything because of privacy reasons regulatory reasons so on and so forth. The easiest way for them to do that is to just build a layer 2 on top of Ethereum. Uh but then on the flip side you can also have a decentralized layer 2 but then you don't have to abide by Ethereum layer 1's restrictions. Like you don't have to be EVM you can be another virtual machine or you don't have to do um you know things a certain way. You can have like native kind of gas abstraction if you want or native account abstraction or give everyone a smart account from when they interact with the chain. They can't use EOS. They can only use smart accounts like or just be private like privacy L2 like Aztec for example. So there's just many

different ways to do this. So that's why Ethereum is the best place to do business is because you can customize the chain that you want for any business use case and just plug into the Ethereum ecosystem via an L2. Uh, and I, as I've said, like this has been a very consistent view of mine for many years now. You can probably see this um, see me talking about this at least 5 years ago at this point. Um, and I think that as more and more of these kind of um, outside of crypto institutions and companies and corporations clue into this, they'll just settle on Ethereum.

Like there's nowhere else really to to kind of settle on here. Just like it's Ethereum and then it's layer 2 on Ethereum and that's really it. Like that's what we need. That's what the world should have. And people will say, you know, some people will hit back at me and say, well, you just want people to build on Ethereum because it's good for your bags. It's like, well, that's just a stupid argument because like I didn't like I hold ETH because I believe that um you know, for for a variety of different reasons, but I also believe that Ethereum is going to win on its merits. And yes, of course, I want people to build on Ethereum um because like that's my ecosystem that I'm part of and that's what I think is the best kind of um way of doing things, but at the same time, it doesn't matter what I

think. It just matters what Ethereum offers. And I do just truly believe Ethereum offers the best way for businesses to come on chain. Um, and I think that it has proven that out over the years and it's going to continue to prove that out through things like, you know, quantum resistance, through things like um, uh, ZKVMs and lean Ethereum and obviously layer 2 and getting more mature there. So, there's all that stuff happening, guys. So, so that's definitely something that um, is going to become more of a trend, I think, going forward. And I think that that fits into what I was saying earlier about the fact that I hope Ethereum and I I'm pretty confident at this stage that we can get Ethereum to move past all the baggage of crypto and just stand alone as a serious and I guess like credibly neutral ecosystem there. All

right, that's all the news to cover from the last week. I did say that I want to talk a bit about the markets at the end of this episode. Now, people have been asking me for a bullish rant. Uh as you guys know, I do those from time to time. uh specifically obviously about ETH. I will do that, but I also want to give like a broader view here on things. So, I think that my view like of the four-year cycle being dead hasn't changed at all, like for anyone wondering about that. And my views around why crypto is the way it is in terms of prices and markets are very similar to what I mentioned last time.

But I think what I wanted to kind of hit on was something that I said in the Daily Discord channel that may have confused some people. I said that I think ETH and crypto maybe more broadly suffers from the fact that it's just inherently difficult to understand and a lot of people just don't understand what the value is and they don't understand what this technology is good for. And people will make the same argument for something like, you know, AI. They're like, well, you know, AI, if you actually dig deep into it, is kind of hard to to to kind of reason through. It's hard to understand. But for some reason, everyone, you know, understands AI, the value of it. They're bidding up all the kind of software companies.

They're bidding up all the the um the the precious metals that go into making, you know, uh kind of hardware, bidding up all the hardware companies. But to that, I'll just say, well, it's because they have an obvious way of interfacing with AI, right? So there I mean, uh OpenAI claims that a billion people have used Chat GPT. Now, that's going to be obviously like way over what the amount of real people that will have used chat GPT is, but let's even say 100 million people have used Chat GPT. Let's take like the lower lower end here and say only 10% of the claimed has used chat GPT. And that's only chat GPT by the way. Like there's Gemini, there's Copilot, there's Claw, there's all these AIs out there. That is a direct interface into this technology and and a very human interface, a very kind of

nice interface for people to use and immediately get the the hype around it because as soon as you go to one of these AIs like Gemini or Chat PT or whatever and you type in anything, it'll spit back something to you. And even if you just go to Google, it'll give you AI results for things now, right? It has for for a little while, but you know, people are being exposed to it in real time on the platforms that they're already on. On Twitter, you've got Grock, right? So, and that's everywhere. You can see here like there's the Grock button. If I press that, it's going to give me more context around Vivex post. And I actually find myself using Grock quite a bit on Twitter to explain things to me, maybe things that I'm just not aware of. Um, which is actually pretty cool. Like, I'll I'll give it that. I've

given Twitter a lot of over the years. I still think it's like a cess poolool cuz it's full of bots and everything like that. But Grock is is pretty good. It's not bad. Like I mean it's got its faults, but I I do I do enjoy using it at times. But again, this is the integrated into places that people already are. But then on the other end of of the kind of spectrum here, you have crypto and you have like Ethereum and and you know, Bitcoin, whatever. And they're not really integrated into into much of the things that people already interface with. They have their own kind of insular economies like the Ethereum onchain economy is big but like it's very insular right you don't see uh you know payments of like stable coin payments integrated with everything you don't have it integrated with every Shopify store for example yes

they've got the optionality there but it hasn't been forced on you like AI was forced on people right like like it's forced into your Google search results you can do things to I guess remove it from search results but the average person isn't going to do that so it is forced on you grock is forced on you like I can't remove grock from Twitter I can't remove this this icon here. Uh, you know, it's it's it's there, right? And in the replies, it's there. So, and obviously it's all in the media and all in the news and everything. So, when people have a direct interface into things, it it's easier for them to reason about and value it. Whereas within crypto, the only direct interface most people had into crypto was buying the asset on an exchange. It was never actually using the technology. So, the

the the the whole crypto ecosystem to these people was just the asset. Whereas there is a separation of this within other industries like within AI. Yeah, you can go buy the companies uh that are powering AI or have integrated AI. Yeah, you can go buy the hardware manufacturers that are bidding up all the hardware like uh obviously Nvidia, but there's, you know, Intel, AMD, SanDisk, Sega Gate. There's so many out there, right? But then people also feel the negative effects of that with hardware prices going up, right? And hardware getting more expensive. So that all just is it leads to people interfacing directly with this. But within crypto, most people, you know, unless you're buying the assets, like they just have no interface to it at all. They're not using the onchain products within their everyday apps that

they're already using. Like could you imagine if on Twitter, for example, on every single post there was a little button here that you could press that says, you know, support this creator with USDC or support this creator with ETH, right? And that was on every post. Non-negotiable. You can't remove it. It's there. like that would immediately give people a a pause to be like oh oh this is crypto right oh wow I can actually use crypto for something right so just something as simple as that but that has not happened that has not materialized as much as that some of these things have been teased over the years just not has materialized yet so because of that and and that's why I said in the daily go discord channel that I think a lot of this stuff is just misunderstood and that leads to lower

valuations for crypto generally because if you can actually go see and I'm not just talking about like Ethan in BTC here, but you can go look at some of these tokens within crypto that have real revenues like tied to them because of the products that they're tied to. They're generating real revenues. Some of them are pretty undervalued at this point, but like no one knows about it because no one's interfacing with it besides cryptonatives. We're not breaking outside of this bubble. We're not interfacing with real people. And that you could argue has always been crypto's biggest issue is that the only exposure to the outside world that we get is via as I said at the beginning the headlines of scams and grips but also people only buying the assets not using the onchain products. So that's what whenever I see like um you know

Coinbase will tweet about this or some other kind of I guess crypto business will tweet about this where they say or some research will say well 80 million Americans or whatever 100 million Americans um you know use crypto or whatever. It's like no they don't they don't use crypto. Okay, they may have one at one point in time bought crypto on a centralized exchange just like they would buy a stock on their brokerage, you know, through their brokerage account or whatever. Like that's not using crypto just as much as me buying Apple stock is not using Apple products. So there is a very distinct difference here between buying the asset and using the the the technology. Um and and there's just like a very huge divide here between the people who have actually used onchain products and the people who who have um bought the coin.

And you could say that well a lot of people you know bought the coin on chain. They went and bought memecoins on chain. It's like yeah okay sure but that is still a very small amount of people compared to the amount of people that are using these other products. Like there is no way that we have have anywhere close to 100 million people who have ever done something on chain and something on chain that's actually beneficial to them. You could argue that a lot of the stuff that people have done on chain is buying the tokens, right? But then they would have gotten wrecked because buying the tokens usually gets you wrecked. So, it's been a net negative experience for them. Like interfacing with AI, for example, is not going to lose me money. I mean, not unless I'm doing something stupid with it, of course. Like, there there are

ways to lose money. But me asking AI a question at most it could maybe make me feel like upset because it gave me an answer I didn't want to hear or something like that, right? Um, but like it's not going to lose me money. Whereas, within crypto, there's that aspect to it as well. Like, you're going to lose money doing this uh buying these these kind of things. So again, until we get the point to the point where the technology is actually being adopted by people and used by people, even if they're just interfacing with it through centralized intermediaries, I I think just crypto struggles to break out of our little bubble. And we've always struggled at that besides the, you know, the ups and downs of the traditional four-year cycles where the boom and bust periods brought a lot of people in just to buy the coins, not to use the

technology. So the most bullish thing for Ethereum is the adoption of the technology, not the adoption of ETH the asset. Like yes, we want more people buying ETH the asset and that's cool and all, but if it doesn't come with adoption for the chain and it doesn't come with uh new people fig, you know, um realizing that this is more than just a coin and using the products and getting this integrated with everything, it's not going to come with long-term uh kind of price appreciation here for these assets, not just ETH, but other assets as well. So that is just a general kind of broad view I guess like of of the market now in terms of like a more guess microscopic view about what's happening. I think that a lot of it can be explained by the fact that every other market is just sucking out the

money of of from crypto right because you haven't just got like the money going into the AI related stocks I guess you could say. um like not just the AI companies themselves through private investing but also I believe some of them are uh are publicly traded or at least I don't think there's many of them that are but then the money is going into the hardware manufacturers as I said or the software companies right but then as on top of that you've also got a um a massive historic bull run in precious metals like gold and silver and others which hasn't happened for a very long time you know if you look at the gold chart you can very clearly see that gold just did nothing for a long time.

And that's the gold chart not factoring in inflation. I actually just looked at the inflationadjusted gold chart before. If I was looking at it right, which I think I was, um, gold had didn't hit an inflationadjusted all-time high for 45 years. So, from 1980 to 2025. Now, someone may correct me on that. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but um, yeah, I I looked at this this chart that I had in front of me. Actually, I may be able to bring it up for you guys cuz I I was only looking at it very very recently here. Uh, if I go to inflationadjusted gold price, this is the website I was looking at. I don't know how what this website is, but you can see it on on my screen right here. So, this apparently is the inflationadjusted gold gold price. You you can see here this is uh

1980. This is December 19 December or February or some somewhere some some kind of month here, but that's that's 1980 there where gold was $3,400 inflation adjusted, right? And then when it got back to that all-time high was in at the end of uh well no not not yeah towards the end of 2025 or like mid2025 or something like that but still like that's 45 years there guys. So like when you look at it from from that perspective like everyone's getting FOMO over precious metals and gold and and and stuff like that. I think the silver chart similar to this. Everyone's getting FOMO over this being like oh crypto is doing nothing blah blah blah.

It's like, okay, yeah, yeah, sure. But then if you look at this, if you had held gold through this entire period, like, yeah, okay, you could have bought at different periods and been up and so and so. You could have bought down here in like the year 2000 and then rode it up for 10 years and then, you know, cashed out here and stuff like that. Like, yeah, sure, you could have made money and stuff, but if you're looking at from alltime high to alltime high, inflation adjusted, it's it's pretty like dire in terms of like um in terms of how long it took to recover. And then you can also see during the entire period of like 2011 to basically like 2024. So over a 13-year period, it didn't break that kind of high that it set in in 2011 here, which wasn't the

all-time high, but it didn't break that high. Guess what crypto was doing during that time? It was going nuts, right? Like we were making fun of gold bugs. You can see this in like the BTC gold ratio chart, which now looks, you know, pretty bad for BTC, but it looked amazing before the last couple of years. So, so whenever I kind of see these things and see these kind of I guess FOMOs and stuff like that, I I kind of think to myself, well, you know, you didn't look at gold because you didn't care about gold, like because it was doing nothing and it sat sideways forever. You didn't know it was going to was going to kind of go to like that. Um, but now that it is, it's a huge um drain, I think, on available capital that can go into crypto because crypto

has obviously been compared to gold a lot like BTC saying that it's digital gold. But if gold is going nuts and BTC is doing nothing, what do you think a lot of fair weather crypto investors are doing? They're cashing out of their BTC and other crypto assets and they're going into gold or they're going into the stock market, right? And that's just a drain, a massive drain on the amount of available capital for crypto. Now, the obvious question is, is this always going to be like this? Are we just stuck, you know, in the corner not getting any demand? And is crypto just going to slowly bleed out until it goes to zero? Obviously not, right? Like that's not not how things work. But there is also like multiple real time timelines that we could go down here.

Timeline one, which is probably the worst timeline. Crypto does nothing for like 10, 20, 30 years like gold did in terms of inflation adjusted prices, right? That would suck. That would absolutely suck. That would be like just the worst possible scenario that I can think of in terms of uh in terms of crypto because that would just be maximum pain for everyone. Do I think that timeline's likely? I mean, I'm obviously bullish biased towards crypto, but I just don't think that timeline's likely. like I don't think that things move that slow anymore. Um I think things move a lot faster due to the information age, right? Um and I think that obviously when it comes to the financial system, it still needs to be massively upgraded and Ethereum is the way to upgrade it. So just not bearish from that perspective. But then there's

the the the kind of like other timeline of well, you know, if the precious metals bull market kind of cools down, maybe it doesn't end or but it cools down for a little while and then stocks blow off like the AI stuff blows off and they they come down. Does crypto follow that or does crypto get the bid because crypto is the only asset class that hasn't done anything for a little while? That's a possible timeline as well. So this is again why I was saying last time that I think investing has become like very very difficult. Um it's always been difficult but I think it's just become more and more difficult because so many things have gone up like the stock market um precious metals stuff like that. Crypto hasn't really done much. So crypto investors are basically sitting here being like well I have all this

crypto exposure but I have no exposure to precious metals and stocks. I fall into that bucket. I only recently started buying uh buying some stocks with with cash that I've had for a while. And I mentioned this last time where I said I was indecisive, but I've just bought some some really safe ETF kind of plays, like the safest stuff you can buy. Um, Aussie ETFs, uh, VAS and and VGS. Um, VAS is Aussie stocks. VGS is international, but they're nominated in AUD and they're and they're serviced in Australia, so better for like tax purposes and and and stuff like that. Um, but like I've only just started with with that sort of stuff there. But then there there is that question of like am I buying the top here? Like am I buying the top of these stocks? Like obviously these things are long-term investments,

but never it never feels good to buy the top on things. Like if if for some reason the stock market goes down 10% this year from where I bought or 15% this year from where I bought like last week, I'm going to feel about that obviously. Like even though I've decided these are long-term kind of things here. Uh but then I've still got a lot of crypto exposure as well. So I'm trying to like balance my exposure personally. And I'm not this is not investment advice. This is not me telling you guys what to do. But I think that's what a lot of people have indecision about. They're like, I don't want to give up my crypto because crypto's done nothing and what if everything kind of rotates into crypto? What if I'm buying the top on gold? What if I'm buying the top on

stocks? And it's just it it sucks. It sucks that that's kind of the what you have to think about. And that's why traditional kind of advice for for people has been, you know, don't try and time the market. Don't try and buy individual things with, you know, massive amounts of your capital. Have like 90% of your capital in relatively safe investments and then put 10% in your moonshot bets if you if you need to. And then you can adjust that percentage based on where you are. Like if you're if you're 20 years old, I I don't think you should be doing a 9010 split there because you probably got very little money to begin with. I think honestly it should be like maybe the other way around where you're using 90% of your money on like risky bets and 10% you're putting away because then that

10% will slowly add up like over time. Um and then as you progress and get older that becomes a larger and larger share and hopefully you've you know you've you've kind of played some some things well and taken profits from those other moonshot things that you put money into. And then you you balance it as you go. But yeah, it depends where you are. Like where I am today, like I definitely shouldn't be like the the 90% risky 10% safe. I should be the other way around. I'm more so playing it as like an 8020 thing. I'm doing 80% in those um ETFs I just told you about. Uh and and some other relatively safe ones and then keeping 20% for like my moonshot things.

still crypto in that as well, but also potentially buying individual uh kind of stocks or riskier kind of ETFs or um precious metals, stuff like that. So, I'm still keeping that sort of stuff, but then I'm also fully aware that it's a big risk to do that too because um it means that I could lose money on that. It could go down 50% or something, but then it but then if because I'm doing it as an 8020 split, it's not going to, you know, be a massive drag on my portfolio because it's only a 20% exposure rather than the 80% exposure to to that, right? So, it's all about managing your risk. It's all about um uh you know, making sure that you you kind of take profits as well and then rotate that into less risky things because staying 100% exposed to super risky things is a sure

way a shorefire way to roundtrip everything as well. Um but again, not investment advice. Uh but yeah, that's I think all I had to say on the on the market front uh for today. We'll see how things go. It's still only January. I'm still quite bullish for for things this year, but I'm always bullish. So, take that as you as you may there. Um, but I think on that note, that's going to be 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 the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.