Updated Ethereum roadmap, Layer 2 chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #711 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the dway refuel where C latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony s the 3rd of January 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so I'm back after around I think 10 or 11 days since I went on break during the Christmas period there I hope you all had a great uh kind of holiday break and a great New Year's I did remember to say 2024 instead of 2023 in the intro I sometimes screw that up in the transition over the year because obviously during the whole year I'm saying you know the 2023 for like all of last year and sometimes I screw that up but I got that right but yeah welcome to 2024 I honestly think this year is going to be a very bullish year overall I think that's the general Vibe and

sentiment right now obviously we're on the eve of the ETFs being approved or Pro probably being approved which I'll talk about in a sec um but yeah I think that the break was really good for me honestly I didn't get to do everything that I wanted to do during it I did want to play you know kind of play some more video games and things like that I didn't get to do that honestly um I was kind of like doing a bunch of things outside of outside of the home you know visiting friends and family stuff like that during the holiday period that really the only game that I played was Mario Kart uh 8 on the switch because it's like a pick up and play game and I'm actually quite good at it so it makes it fun when you're good at something right uh but other than that I

tried to play uh Boulders Gate 3 that was one of the games that I really wanted to play and I just didn't get enough time to do it and then there was some other stuff that happened in my personal life that prevented that uh but generally I think I've had a really good kind of refresh and I'm really really glad to be back honestly I've missed you guys I've missed doing the refuel I mean I've been active on Twitter and in the Discord Channel um but really missed doing the refill so anyway enough about my kind of like time away let's get into today's episode kicking us off is some news around the Bitcoin ETFs well maybe not news but I mean like we're what a few days away now from these things being approved you know some people think that they are going to be approved

this week uh so obviously there's only 3 days left of this week but some people think there's going to it's going to be approved this week but that deadline is fast approaching that Jan 10th deadline that we've been talking about for a very long time now I mean it feels like forever like it feels like it's been years but has only been like I guess like 6 months the majority of it I mean since since Black Rock filed the ETF in June I think is obviously the um the thing that kickstarted all of this but really it's been it's been a ride that's for sure right obviously the market has priced a lot of this in we've seen Bitcoin move from 25k uh to you know 45k and it continues to move up slowly over time I mean pretty much at yearly highs right now I mean it's it's only been

three days of the year but like I like saying that joke you know we're at yearly highs right um and then a bunch of other things have been moving around that as well obviously the market generally is is is heating up um you know and I did say that we were in that transition from like crab to bull market I think we exited that trans transition maybe like a week or two ago uh and I think we're firmly in the the bull market now we're like you know the early stages of the bull market but we're firmly there obviously marching up towards all-time highs uh which could still take until I mean I know I I think I said that I I expected maybe in Q2 now instead of Q3 but it could still take until Q3 this year to happen right I think people underestimate how long we

can go sideways for during a ball bull market still or during the early stages of a bull market and this cycle actually looks a lot more like the 25 2015 to 2017 cycle rather than the the the 2019 to 2021 cycle uh just if you look at the charts it's been more gradual and obviously the 2019 uh and to 2021 cycle had a bunch of different things happen there that didn't happen this time I don't know how many of you know about this but in 2019 there was a massive Ponzi out of China called the plus token Ponzi that uh led to a lot of buy pressure on BTC and eth and that's why you saw BTC and eth go up a lot in 2019 and then come come back down a lot as well it's because that Ponzi got shut down the the uh the people behind it

were arrested in China I believe um but that that that caused that kind of anomaly there and then if you look in 2020 the there was another anomaly caused by the co dump right which basically delayed the the bull market by I think at least 6 months if you actually look at the charts whereas this time around we haven't really had much of that right all of the the the kind of bad stuff happened last oh not last year 2022 right with everything blowing up but it blew up quite quickly quite spectacularly and and then we recovered into 2023 and then we had the recovery uh become even stronger because of the Black Rock ETF filing which I I've said to you guys brought things forward uh because it's just such a such a bullish Catalyst there and now we're at the point where we're on the eve of I guess

like these things being approved I mean Jan 10th is is next week guys Jan 10th is next Wednesday that is the final deadline so even if it doesn't get approved this week it is pretty much guaranteed to be approved next week I think the entire Market is expecting this obviously there is still like a I don't know 1% chance that these things get denied and then I don't know what's going to happen in the market uh but yeah we're we're on the Eve basically of of this stuff yeah and you know maybe it gets approved today maybe I'm just like rambling in before the refu even goes out it gets approved but we'll see obviously the people that follow are the usual people that I've been talking about on the refuel like James Cipher and Eric baners two of the ETF analysts that I've talked about a lot over the

past few months and of course once the Bitcoin spot ETFs are approved we get to do this all again for the eth ones because the first eth spot ETF deadlines are in May I believe or final deadlines are in May may I believe so we get to do this up until May at least um and I don't know I I I kind of like I I I I I I definitely think that it's going to there's more of a chance that they're going to be approved than denied at this point simply because of the fact that um you know the has lost a lot of court cases as I've said before and they're just not really in favor right now uh with with the political kind of parties that back them uh and definitely I think that just to proving the PTC and E spot

ETFs would be enough to I guess like satiate the market and maybe stop the law it's coming in as well but yeah we'll have to see how that kind of plays out there but yeah guys I think uh the next few days are going to be definitely very interesting we'll see if they get approved this week or next week but yeah we're on the eve of it right now uh and exciting times ahead all right so vitalic was very busy over the holiday period uh in particular he publishing a bunch of blog posts uh one of them was titled make ethereum Cipher Punk again now this was probably my favorite one that he published uh he did publish one about potentially changing some things about proof of stake on ethereum to to basically Harden the protocol and make it U make it more efficient and more reliable but in this

blog post where he titled it make ethereum cyber Punk again he basically calls for us to return to Our Roots because I think that due to the financial incentives and financial nature of crypto the roots of crypto the things that that valalik has mentioned here which I'll mention in a sec um you know the meat of V is basically in this part of the the post they've kind of been pushed to the Wayside in I guess favor of DJ casino gambling stuff and I'm not making a moral judgment here I'm not saying that something's good or bad but I think that the ideals that crypto was founded on are always taking a back seat to that because those ideals are definitely more longer term they're not something that's going to you know potentially make you rich they're not like appealing to the casino D genen

types out there they're more of like the long-term in it for the tech kind of values and and things that people kind of value over I guess like decades right not the not the short-term stuff here and what what are those things right well they're listed here in balic post where he says the main values here uh that uh anyone in the world should be able to participate in this network so open Global participation of of the network decentralization obviously sens resistance auditability credible neutrality building tools not Empires and Cooperative mindset those are like the core pillars that metalic has has addressed here or has kind of noted here as being something that makes ethereum Cypher Punk that basically is the Cy cyer Punk ethereum values but not just for ethereum also for Bitcoin Bitcoin started this whole movement right but I

think as I said a lot of this stuff just gets lost a lot of that stuff gets lost in the noise of of of the markets of the the financial side of crypto but it's kind of a necessary evil because the financial side of crypto is what enables this stuff to exist in in the first place right we wouldn't actually be able to have blockchains at all if it wasn't for the financial incentives but I think what valal is trying to do with this post is basically balance it out and basically say Hey you know it's not all about the casino DJ games right there are so many other things happening within crypto that are non-speculative he calls out stuff like you know public goods funding for example which in part obviously is well I guess like a a lot of it is funded by the djen activity but

it itself is not a djen activity right funding public goods like that is a a a a a very uh great thing that has come out of the ethereum ecosystem I think he calls that ens in this blog post as well as another non-financial uh kind of use case here that's has has taken off in a really big way I think payments as well is something really cool because when you look at payments like payments aren't inherently speculative right I know people do payments on chain for a bunch of speculative reasons I mean for example if you're paying someone to buy assets off of them like if you're I don't know just use a personal example here if I'm doing an angel investment I'm going to use stable coins in order to do that that is a speculative investment right but if you're just buying like a coffee or buying you know

some some product or or paying for some service with a stable coin that is not a speculative thing right so stable coins can be used for both but I think that uh you know people are using stable coins as a non-speculative thing as well they're holding their wealth in it right they're getting access to US Dollars those kind of things uh and then yeah I mean there there are a lot of I guess like applications out there that are non-speculative but of course they're not talked about that much not spoken about that much because of that nature right there's no I mean some of them have tokens attached to them but like they're not shielded like other things because if people want to Shield a token they're going to Shield a meme coin like a dogcoin or something because that is just that that is just what the I guess

current meta is and that is what the the the um the Traders love and that's the narratives that get pushed like for example ens has a token but no one chilling ens and saying like you know ens is huge buy ens because of such and such reason ens isn't a meme coin it's not like some super speculative thing uh it really is a governance token at the end of the day and it actually works to govern the ens protocol but that's not exciting for people that that's not exciting for the D gen people and the casino goers and things like that right because at the end of the day a casinos I mean I'm sure a lot of you have walked into an actual physical casino before they're not boring places when you really break it down right they're very very vibrant places I mean there are

lights everywhere there is noise everywhere they're constant basically uh there are people coming um you know walking around with drinks I mean you can get a drink from anywhere BAS basically and yes of course you can play all the casino games which are laid out for you so casinos are not a place for you know serious discussions about things or for for serious investing or anything like that a casino is a place where you go and you know exactly why you're there you're gambling right and that's exactly what happens in crypto a lot of the time right people are gambling on these assets and as I said I'm not making a moral judgment here at all I'm just kind of laying out the reality of the two sides of crypto the very Deen Casino minded side of crypto and then the very I guess like Cipher

Punk side of crypto that are in it for the tech that don't necessarily care about the dgen stuff or the casino stuff they may be making tools that enable that but what they care about is basically advancing their technology and advancing these values that uh that I just mentioned before so anyway you should go definitely read vitalik's blog post if you haven't yet it's very important I think uh to ground Us in in reality here and to ground us into actually what we're we're actually building here because the saddest thing I think for crypto would be that let's say longterm you know 10 to 20 years time crypto is still just a giant Casino and really 99% of the activity is just Casino DJ stuff we haven't actually delivered any real value to the world outside of that that would be I guess like the most bearish outcome for crypto

in my mind is that it succeeds but it succeeds for I'm not going to say wrong reasons but it succeeds for reasons that the I guess like movement didn't start with the movement started Cipher Punk and then it just ended up being like Casino DJ and stuff and no one cares about these values of decentralization and sensitive resistance or anything like that anymore all they care about is making as much money as as possible so yeah we'll have to see how that shakes out but you can go read V's blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right another thing vitalic published over the holiday period was an updated ethereum road map diagram now this to me is the most exciting thing that came out of the last two weeks I mean I was actually saying to a friend a couple of days before

vitalic posted this saying I said to him like I bet you vitalic post an updated road map um because it had been a while since he updated this road map and I think a lot of people out there were wondering what the current state of a lot of the the upgrades were uh now I'm not going to go through each of these upgrades individually you can actually check out doy's annotated version of the road map here this is actually really detailed and I highly recommend checking this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but it annotates the entire kind of road map here each of the road map items and what they mean for the network you know what what the current I guess like work is is being done on it uh yeah I mean just go check this out it's it's it's really really

great but what what I will say and a few of the comments I will make about this uh is that the first thing I want to say and the Reas I say this is because I think there's a lot of confusion still about this this road map diagram is not sequential right this does not mean that the merge happens and the surch happens and the scourge happens no it doesn't work like that these are all parallel so basically what happens is that all of these things are being worked on at the same time as you can see by the little green uh progress bar on each of the road map items each of them are being worked on uh in in parallel at the same time there is no order where we can say okay we're going to work on every item in the Surge and then we'll move on to

the rest of them no not at all I mean you guys know this like take the Verge for example with veral trees there's already test Nets and Dev Nets live for those things right uh and we're not even close to to um vcal I mean we're relatively close I mean they probably go live 2025 but in in terms of kind of uh I guess I getting to onto the network uh we have uh IP 484 going live first and then towards the end of the year a bunch of other IPS that I don't think anything have anything to do with the Verge but it's still being worked on same with the stuff under the purge and and and the Splurge here it's all being worked on in parallel so I think critically important to understand but if you actually look at the road map there was a the main

critique that people made when they basically said that oh it looks like on the ethereum road map that layer one scaling has been abandoned it's all about layer 2os now and I thought this was funny because one layer one scaling has not been abandoned per se but it's not new that layer 2's are the way ethereum is going to scale like that's not news that's been around since vitalic published I mean even before vitalic published the rollup Centric ethereum road map it's been like over 3 years now of ethereum having a rollup Centric road map a road map that re that um where the L1 upgrades itself to service the l2s but on the other note around it being abandoned like L1 scaling being abandoned I don't think that's true at all because for example with the Verge and with verle trees we

could actually uh increase the gas limit once we get the Verge and I believe some road map items under the under the purge as well in like light clients and things like that into the network uh because now the network is uh is able to kind of purge old stuff there's less um I guess like demand of the full nodes of the validators of the people running the network and we can potentially increase the gas limit by like 10x right so the gas limit is essentially ethereum's block size ethereum l1's block size and we could increase that and that right there is a scalability Improvement yes it's obviously not nowhere near enough for what for global scale but it is a scalability Improvement for L1 and there are a bunch of other road map items for that as well but I think the main criticism fell to sharding you know us

at the ethereum ecosystem abandoning execution sharding that was abandoned a long time ago I don't know why this is news for people I think it it have to be at least 3 plus years since execution shiing was abandoned in favor of the rollup Centric road map so it always blows my mind that people are just cling into this and what's even funnier about that is that people have finally started talking about EIP 4844 guys I I I don't think you I don't know if you guys realized this cuz I didn't it's been two plus years since EIP 4844 has been in development and just now like 3 months before it goes live on mainnet people are paying attention this is how far behind this ecosystem is and this this is I guess like why it's so frustrating when I go on Twitter and I see this I'm

like why are you futing ethereum about this like this has been on the road map for like three plus years so the reason execution shouting was abandoned was because it was not viewed as a long-term sus sustainable and scalable solution it was not viewed as something that was actually beneficial to the ethereum ecosystem so we said okay can we still do sharting yes okay we can do data sharting which is dank sharding which is e 4844 and what's data sharting good for well it's good for rollups and that's exactly what we've been doing with what we've been delivering that's exactly what's going to be delivered in hopefully March right with denune IP 4844 laying the ground workor for full dank sharding with data availability sampling and getting to the Holy Grail of um you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of transactions per second

on on rollups themselves right and actually on that TPS note as well I do want to note that when talking about transactions per second or transactions generally you have to kind of break it down into what those transactions are because there Technically when an L2 or when a rollup posts its data and its proof obviously to ethereum L1 that is a transaction right but if it's posting it it all as a bundle right posting the bundle to L1 what it's doing is it's bundling up a bunch of transactions at layer 2 and then just putting them on on L1 as one transaction so when you look at it like that you could have potentially like tens of thousands of transactions bundled up into one transaction on ethereum L1 right so you have to kind of I guess like get that

nuance and get that understanding before or you can talk about TPS numbers and transaction numbers but I have full confidence that rollups are going to easily scale to hundreds of thousands if not millions of TPS um and then they'll be able to scale to the world basically and as I said before the end game is to to basically make all of these transactions free but through subsidization and all that good stuff there so so yeah I mean that's that's the kind of like uh I guess like The Surge part of the road map is is basically increasing the scalability of L1 for l2s then you've got the scourge which is all about me uh and meev has been tackled I mean parallel obviously to all this other stuff there is so many people working on that that it's bound to be solved I mean solved is maybe the

wrong word but it's bound to be tackled in the right way The Verge I mean I just spoke about that how there are Tes Nets and Dev Nets live already and you can actually uh for the Verge if you want to track the progress on this I actually uh linked this to to a friend today you can go to veral doino and I think I brought this up on the refill before but verle doino has all the information you need about verle tree so if you're interested in keeping up with that definitely go check that out but that's part of the The Wider statelessness Road map as well and and running light clients and things like that uh which will allow us to actually scale the L1 too right and then you have uh the purge here which is essentially history or state expiry EIP

quadruple 4 is the main EIP on this and making it so that we can essentially have it so that uh by clearing old history the chain becomes lighter to run you can do light clients that sort of stuff I mean The Purge and The Verge kind of couple together in that in that respect and then you have the splurge and the Splurge is named that way because basically it's the bonus content where essentially we look at the the stuff that that we need to fix that will probably take longer term to fix because it's not urgent but we want to fix it uh and there a bunch of items in here like improving AIP 1559 um you know a559 is live but it's not in its end state yet improving the evm you know maybe snar ifying the evm stuff like that right that's probably more longer term but

this road map covers like the next 10 years at least of ethereum development uh there but in saying all of that vitalic also has his own thread describing uh some of the road map items himself you can go check that out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh but yeah I mean this is this is great like I really really do enjoy when vitalic post this stuff because like as I've said before I can post about this as much as I want I can make as many videos about this as much as I want I can talk about it as much as I want but I'm never getting 3 million views on a tweet right I'm not vitalic I don't have how many followers does he have on Twitter I don't have 5 million followers on Twitter right I have like 250,000 which is way less than

5 million followers on Twitter uh and vitalic being the founder of a eum being such a well-respected individual within the crypto space even outside of ethereum and the fact that the media obviously will repost this and and we'll share it like he he anything he posts just goes way way further than anything I or anyone else could really do and I don't think that means that ethereum is centralized around vitalic or anything like that he just has the most reach and all this stuff being worked on I mean vitalik's not even part of most of the stuff being worked on in this road he works on the things that he obviously works on but he's one guy right he's just one dude working on the ethereum protocol and there's plenty of other people working on it as well and they're working on each part of this kind of um

each part of this road map uh diagram here so yeah anyway you can go check this out for yourself check out valalo twe thread for yourself but definitely check out doy's annotated version of the road map uh it gives a lot more information with a bunch of links to things to kind of read further I mean you could literally spend months on this by the way guys like there is so much here and just huge props to domothy for putting this together because it's helped me a lot when I've whenever I wanted to learn about something on the road map that I haven't learned about before I mean I look at the road map diagram I'm like okay like 90% of the stuff on this I I kind of like have a high level overview of but like I don't have a deep overview of that at all

there's so much going on here and 10% of it just goes completely over my head where I'm just like yeah okay I'm not even going to bother trying to learn about that until it becomes clearer that it's actually going to be you know included and things like that because there's no guarantee that it'll be included in in in the way that it's currently described right and all that kind of stuff there but anyway go check those links out I'll link them in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of E4 4844 Franchesco here who is a researcher at the ethereum foundation has posted a 4844 uh to dank sharding road map essentially so the tldr is that we can gradually scale to 32/64 blobs 10 times 4844 and eventually Beyond up to full dank Shing mostly with tools we are

already familiar with more blobs are coming now if you guys are familiar with with the way IP 4844 works or basically with with the way blobs work is that we're essentially starting with a a small number of blobs and then increasing that over time as the network becomes more stable and more reliable and more secure of course and this post basically describes all of that it is a really awesome post guys like I highly recommend going and reading this I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do to do so but essentially by increasing the blob size as we basically obvious Sorry by increasing the number of blobs we essentially allow more uh data from the RS to be stored which means more scalability for the rollup so IP 4844 really is the ground floor it is the Bedrock of dank sharding

it it basically is the very start once it's in place we're going to be able to increase the amount number of blobs we're going to work towards full DK shiding which is data availability sampling which allows us to essentially scale up to what metallic was describing in his uh diagram there of hundreds of thousands if not millions of transactions per second on these l2s now the fun thing about this is that this is a strictly an L1 Improvement for the l2s for the rollups whereas the the rollups themselves and the l2s themselves are going to be able to increase their scalability uh using many different many different tricks and and and many different kind of improvements to their own stack like you know improving the compression of things improving impr cost stuff like that right so that's all happening in parallel to this so I think

that the people who are impa who are maybe still a little bit impatient and being like Oh my God the l2s are still so expensive they're really not I don't I don't think they're really expensive even today but once 4844 goes live um for those of you who remember it doesn't share a fee market with the normal L1 ethereum fee market so essentially we get like a brand new fee Market which may or may not be filled up by things like I don't know ordinals and inscription inscriptions and stuff like that in the short term but really I mean if you go to L2 fees.in and look at what the fees are like today a swap for a token on optimism is is 12 cents right uh according to L2 fees. info that's dropping to like a cent or something in 4844 even even potentially less than

that and that's a full rollup that's not the L2 storing its data offchain that's a full rollup that stores its data onchain so there's just so many scalability improvements coming guys that I think that the the notion that ethereum is too expensive is just going to die this cycle obviously L1 is still going to be expensive but I think the notion that ethereum can't scale is going to die especially as more of these kind of l2s and rollups approach uh stage one and stage two uh uh rollup Milestones where they become more decentralized and stuff like that it's just all additive guys but anyway you can go check out this post from Franchesco I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so we have some rough analysis done by ewave on the max possible reduction of validators from increasing

the max effective balance now just a refresher here you guys know that there is currently an EIP that is currently slated for the Petra upgrade which is the upgrade the next upgrade after denune that essentially allows us to stake up to 248 eth per validator which means that we could reduce the number of validators on the network while still keeping the same amount of eth staked or I guess like more eth Stak more if more eth gets staked there now what ewave has done is basically Tak in uh each individual I guess like staking entity such as Lio and centralized exchanges look at the total number of validators they have and then say okay well if they Consolidated all of their validators into all of their 32e validators into 2048 validator uh eth validators what would the total validator count be of L

of centralized exchanges and of all the other validators and the analysis here is that L would go from 285,000 validators to just 4,466 so a massive reduction in the amount of validators there which means a massive reduction in overhead on the ethereum network and especially on the PTP layer there uh and in centralized exchanges same thing 255,000 validators down to 4,000 and then in the other section here others a bit hard to reduce but he they basically reduced it down from 358,000 to 179,000 so that would give us a total of 18755 3 validators for reference there are currently almost a million validators live on the network I think I mean I haven't checked lately but I think it's at it's definitely over 900,000 I'm just checking on the on the number here yeah it's 93,000 so you

could assume that we'd be at A Million by the time um by the time the Meb proposal goes through so we at a million and even just like I don't expect all of this to be Consolidated but even if we could have that to like 500,000 that's just a massive Improvement and it allows us to increase the blob uh the blobs on the network as well because it means that there's less overhead for for full nodes less overhead for validators and there's less risk of uh you know lower power devices getting kicked off the network and and stuff like that so yeah just a great little analysis from eth wve here you can read the thread for the for full analysis I'll link that in the YouTube description below uh but essentially that is a massive reduction I mean I I doubt Lio is going to do this

to be honest and centralized exchangers are going to do this because they at least so by do this I mean at least to this extent like and and there's two reasons two major reasons one they it's it's it's a it's a lot of overhead I think of to do it because I mean it is opt in you're not you're not forced to do it and in Li's case in particular the not operators are based basically independent of each other so they would be doing it at different timelines as well and they have their own setups they have their own way of managing things uh and two some of them may be worried about the increased slashing risk but I think that might be addressed as part of this um proposal as part of the AIP so we're going to have to see how that shakes out there but the increased

slashing risk is not something I think that should be worried about because from my understanding the thing people worry about is that okay well you know let's say I have 10,000 validators today and then uh I get slashed on on on on you know 1,000 of them well it's only that 1,000 that loses the some of the eth right they get that get punished my other 9,000 don't get punished uh but and it's better to think of that in terms of like eth uh instead of validators but just for the sake of of argument here it's the I'm just going to use validator count but let's say they consolidate that down to a th000 and then they're like okay well I get slashed on all I get slashed on all thousand but then all of the eth is affected by it but the thing is is that

the way you would get slashed is by you'd be connected to the same full node anyway and you'd be in the same kind of on the same infrastructure anyway so and and there are other Technologies to help with that like DVT and and puffer and stuff like that so when you think about it from that perspective I don't think the risk is really that big and I think that the benefit is huge of reducing the amount of validators on the network because we still have the same level of security because there's still the same number of node operators there still the same number of full nodes on the network but in terms of validators it's redundant to have this this many because the execution shouting road map was abandoned and we originally wanted a lot of validators because of that original design F now it's just Tech debt and it

adds so much overhead to the network that we don't need and that it limits us from doing other things like increasing the size of blobs increasing the amount of blobs on the network stuff like that right increasing the gas limit even so we're going to have to see how that all kind of shakes out there but it's great to see this little analysis done by ewave here all right so just wanted to give this a quick shout out uh n's Dow and the line Studio have a collabing on an EIP 4844 animation so this trend says here this one Min animation celebration the work of ethereum contributors bringing EIP 4844 to main net expect an nft release at the upgrade proceeds go to the protocol Guild so I can't wait to to to Mint this nft uh especially because the proceeds go to the protocol

Guild but what I can't wait for more is this animation itself I mean it's only going to be a one minute animation but the fact that we're getting a whole animation about EIP 4844 and how ethereum contributors brought that to to main net is going to be really cool it's going to be really sharable I think it's going to be something that the community can rally around and especially because it's an nft that once you mint it the proceeds go to the actual contributors you know the the protocol Guild in order to to reward them for all of their hard work here so really really great to see this just wanted to shout it out but you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so over the last two weeks

there's been a bit of a Revenge Arc I think for ethereum and l2s because obviously you guys know from like I guess the September period to like the December period we had a lot of fud around etherum and l2s mostly to Sal the salana price going the so price going up and salana activity going up and all that stuff that happened there I mean you guys have all seen it there's no point me diving into all of it because most of it was just noise but because of that I think a lot of the people in the eum community especially the L2 leaders like Steven Gold fed fed here who is the co-founder at offchain Labs who builds arbitrum they were like what the hell guys like this makes no sense the l2s Ikea they work they've been around for a long time the ethereum L2 road map is

not something new it's scalable works you know arbitrum it works so well I mean I use arbitrum all the time arbitrum one all the time it works so well just as an example here so you know Steven put out this tweet where he says you know ethereum said we're going to scale by building a rup Centric ethereum and then all these alts or I guess alt um layer ones and stuff like that said okay we're going to scale at the base layer and ethereum said okay you go do that right you go scale it layer one that's totally fine and then fast forward for a years the oldal one proponents say oh my God ethereum still hasn't scaled and ethereum says well we scaled with L2 is ex like we said we would and then the the other people the old L1 say well l2s don't count actually

if you're not scaling the L1 it doesn't matter so this is the kind of narrative F that really annoys me and that I talk about a lot but it also annoys people that are obviously building this stuff because it makes no sense it's not even based in reality here it's like a pure narrative that where essentially you're denying the fact that ethereum has had this R out for 3 plus years and you're denying the fact that ethereum has scaled via l2s just like it said it would we abandoned L1 monolithic scaling because it's just not a good sustainable path to scale and we're already seeing the cracks in some of these designs to be honest I mean uh not not to pick on salana but I'm just talking about like monolithic chains generally there are already cracks there uh in terms of like fees going up because chains get

congested and people are paying priority fees right in terms of uh in terms of uh stability issues of of supporting infrastructure in terms of kind of economic sustainability as well which I talk about a lot on the refuel and something that more people are paying paying attention to now uh but it's something that I've talked about for years so all of this just goes hand inand with with each other here around these kind of bad narratives and I think this is just the worst the fact that people are saying you l2s don't count you haven't scaled the base layer so you know you haven't scaled ethereum that just is not true at all ethereum has scaled it's scaled via ler twos and it's going to continue to scale and we're really only at the beginning still I mean Le 2s have so much further to go

not just from a scalability perspective but also from an experimentation perspective which brings me to my next tweet which is from Dino here who is also an L2 founder at fluent which are building a zwm L2 here Doo tweeted out you know ethereum is not just the evm ethereum l2s can support general purpose languages parallel programming models novel or optimized data databases custom isolated or private State vertically integrated tools or apps novel economics or governance and and l2s are boundless so the whole point of this is basically that okay well l2s bring scalability but scalability is table Stakes if you're building an L2 scalability is baked into that like you don't build an L2 without scalability in mind like that doesn't make any sense right so if if a SC

ability is table Stacks if there like the bare minimum to be an L2 well what else can these l2s Do Well turns out they can do anything you want you can be you can literally do exactly what the l1s do at L2 you can do the exact same thing far better far more securely far better from uh an economic sustainability perspective you can tap into an already massive ecosystem within ethereum you get better bridging infrastructure you get better supporting infrastructure and you get to experiment in the infinite Garden that is ethereum without being tied to the evm and this is another really uh strong point against monolithic l1's in my opinion where essentially at least the way they're currently architecture architected you are limited to that l1's uh design you cannot experiment with other designs you're limited to its what

it's using for its VM you're limited to what it's using for its kind of like economics like it's it's its fee mechanisms right you're limited in in in what it's it's what it's doing for its consensus layer and stuff like that right and and it's and and and meev and ordering of transactions and all that kind of stuff there so in that world like how does that compete with a modular road map that ethereum has where the l2s can basically be that L1 but as an L2 it doesn't have to be limited it can edit itself as much as it want it can change itself as much as it want yes it's going to be centralized for a while but the thing is is that experimentation is is always done best in a centralized way because if you're experimenting you want to move fast and you can't move

fast if you're decentralized like that is actually the pillar of decentralization to me if you're moving too fast and you're changing things too fast you can't say you're decentralized like like for example within ethereum L1 if we were shipping an upgrade every month I'd be like what the hell guys this isn't decentralized there's no way you can coordinate 10 client teams in a month get everything built right in in in a decentralized way in order to ship an upgrade a month it just doesn't happen and so that's why upgrades in ethereum L1 take forever whereas the l2s you can do that because there may be just be one or two clients or client teams working on the L2 it's a very centralized kind of team working on it but the thing is that's the whole point they can move faster they can potentially uh you know I'm not going to

say break things but they can take more risks they can experiment more and they can get a lot more juice out of what they're building whereas ethereum L1 as a settlement layer for these l2s it shouldn't be doing that at all it should be very decentralized which it is it should be very slow to change very slow to move and those changes should be relentlessly tested for a very long time before they even think about getting into the network which is exactly what happens with each upgrade so yeah I mean I thought it was just a really great Point here that Dino brought up that ethereum is not the evm you do not have to be an evm Al 2 to be considered ethereum right if you're an L2 if you're settling down to ethereum uh you are ethereum in in my mind at least so great

tweet from Dino there and there's a bunch of replies to this Twitter as well if you want to read through them I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do do so all right so you probably been wondering what's been happening with bass lately so bass is obviously coinbase's L2 on ethereum well Jesse paac put out a tweet in reply to DC investor here talking about what they're actually working on to get out very very quickly I guess get get this out shortly oh wait sorry he says that working on getting this out shortly which is basically a public road map for base but essentially he highlighted the main uh things coming here so the tldr is that they want to get to stage two and then stage sorry stage one and then stage two decentralization ASAP while supporting the network to achieve

99.99% plus availability driving down fees to less than 1 cent with Erp 4844 further with Dank sharding and L2 optimizations themselves accelerating smart wallets by default default with 4337 pay masters and bundlers which uh I guess like pay masters and bundlers are things like paying gas in any token you want essentially uh unlocking best in-class on ramps and stable coins for every geog geography in the world supporting coinbase to bring its users assets and products on chain and enabling developer tools to make it easi as possible for anyone anywhere to build an onchain app so just great to see that tldr road map there but great to see that Jesse will be publishing a public road map on B I think that B has been I mean it started off with a lot of

fanfare and then kind of go gone by the wayside a little bit because of obviously the other narratives that have taken over but in terms of people that can be on boarded on chain in terms of where they're going to on board to like I can't think of anywhere better than bass because not only is bass closely tied to coinbase and obviously coinbase can can get these users onto bass very easily bass is offering like free usdc transfers for example right they have that thing where you can essentially verify and tie your coinbase account to one of your addresses on chain uh and essentially get perks on the base Network you have coinbase with their world-class engineering team managing base uh and building it out you have them committed to actually decentralizing the network ASAP which I think is is incredibly important

obviously and I think that's that's definitely a moe for a lot of these l2s and also Bas is built on the op stack so we gets to inherit all of those really great things from the op stack all those really great improvements there and I know that still fraud proofs aren't live in the op stack but they will be relatively soon I think there actually like coming soon TM hopefully right uh but like once that kind of get gets done and once that's live there I think that's like the biggest knock against the op stack right now uh but that's coming very very soon so yeah just a really great tweet from Jesse here highlighting uh the Basse Road map but he also tweeted out as well about how on ramping is going to work onto these l2s so he said the days of on and off

ramping via ethereum L1 are over the vast majority of new users will on board directly to L2 then have cheap fast easy ways to do anything a base value from the beginning has been a bridge not an island because we want to enable exactly this so there's been a lot of fight around this recently where people are like oh you know people tell me to use l2s but going from L1 to L2 cost me like $20 in gas fees or whatever it's like okay that's I'm not going to say that's like a good thing but like you got to think about the marginal user coming into crypto like the new users and things like that right they're not going to L1 right if you're talking about new users I'm not talking about existing users here that's a different story but new users they're not going to L1

they're going straight to L2 right so the major exchanges like coinbase and binance they already support these L2 they support arbitrum and optimism and bass so going from the from coinbase to Bas for example costs less than 10 cents from uh and I think from binance and okx as well as Jesse mentions here and that is very similar to the fees charged on other networks out there uh to to kind of like onramp onto them um and that will obviously come down over time as well and the reason why they can do this so cheaply is because the the coinbase isn't uh isn't bridging from L1 to L2 themselves to give you your assets on L2 they've already got a balance on L2 so they're just basically doing an accounting change here where essentially they're sending you the asset on the L2 from their L2 address not from their L1

address so that's what it's going to be the future of of onboarding uh is onboarding directly from a centralized exchange it's not going from L1 to L2 because at the end of the day most users are never going to go to L1 anyway so there's no use of them going to L1 and then L2 they're going to go straight to the l2s um and they're going to they're going to enjoy all the benefits of of that there and then from L2 to L2 as well they're going to be doing uh but we're going to get the cost of that down too uh and there are obviously different risks involved with that and all that good stuff there uh but yeah anyway just wanted to highlight that from from Jesse here uh but great great things coming for the l2s guys I mean I think 2024 is

going to be a really really bullish year for l2s generally there are so many things happening you know not just 4844 but all of the l2s themselves uh are making you know tons of Headway tons of upgrades I mean I think arbit wants to become a stage two rollup this year uh which will be be the first stage two rollup um well not not technically the first stage two rollup but you know the first stage to roll up with any economic activity on it because arbit is the biggest L2 right now so that would be a huge milestone hit because then we can get rid of the fud of oh all l2s are centralized like well no you know arbitr one is not centralized and the others will follow and then eventually we'll get to that place where these l2s are all decentralized well at least most of

them you know not all l2s are created equal a lot of them will fail a lot of them W won't even get any traction but that's just the way these things play out and on top of that as well I think that you know there are other exciting things happening within within the l2s but each of them have their own kind of road map that you can go check out in their own respective communities uh but yeah I think 2024 very bullish I mean the three things I think that that very bullish about 2024 for ethereum the three main things at least obviously spot e ETF uh l2s and reaking I I I still think people are underestimating the impact of reaking especially if the market is in like full bard mode like reaking is going to be ridiculous guys and you guys know that I'm an investor

in igen ler but I've been talking about IG ler for a very long time and I I just want to be very transparent about like how bullish I am on them I mentioned in the deadly way Discord Channel today that I'm more bullish on reaking as a primitive and obviously ion layer by extension than I am on on kind of like l2s right now now it's not a competition really I mean l2s are a broad category obviously reaking is is not as broad but it's kind of hard to pick any of the any of the kind of like one l2s there's so many l2s I think there's only three reaking protocols right now with Igan layer being like 99% of the the market share um but in terms of just like what it enables because Igan L is infrastructure that that enables better l2s as well it enables things like

decentralized sequencer networks you know decentralized um data availability networks like Igan da for example right that where the L2 it doesn't want to store its data on ethereum L1 you can store it on igen da those sorts of things and or you know oracle networks really anything there's just an explosion of things that are going to happen so so I'm just like really really bullish on on those three things like the main things in 2024 but there are so many other things to be bullish about as well right um but yeah I'm going to digress on that point there move on to the next bit of of stuff that I wanted to talk about which is just a tweet that I actually wanted to highlight here from Sam mcferson this tweet is all about maker so maker is a Powerhouse there's no other way to put it maker is an

absolute Powerhouse of a financial product or a def5 product on on ethereum here but the reason why you may not hear about it very often is because it's quote unquote boring right it is not something to be excited about it is not dgen it is not Casino it is really at the heart of it a a a a a platform that issues a stable coin in die and there's a bunch of other things that feed into that they've been really big in the real world asset space recently bringing a lot of real world assets on chain that in itself is not exciting for DJ as well that's why you don't hear about it but in terms of what I mean by Powerhouse here maker makes a lot of money like they have a lot of Revenue you can actually see that in this tweet which I

highly recommend giving a read it's uh it'll be linked in the YouTube description below but essentially I believe maker is uh is making about1 to $200 million a year or something in Revenue that is a crazy amount of of revenue for for a defy project um especially because of the fact that this is real Revenue guys this is not dgen Revenue this is not token Revenue this is real Revenue driven by real world assets so I just highly recommend giving Sam's tweet a read if you want to kind of get bullish on makeer I'll link it in the YouTube description below but yeah I mean it's kind of funny because at the end of the day when you when you kind of like uh you kind of think about the fact that what do people get excited about and what do people kind of speculate on

It's usually the DJ Casino stuff but what has lasting value in this ecosystem is the boring stuff and even if it's boring it can still be exciting from from a different perspective but you can go check this out I'll link Sam's tweet in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right just the final couple of things here uh remember that ethery contest or Christmas contest that I was running uh with the ethery people here you can go check out the thread uh that was put together together announcing all the winners so congrats to all of you guys there was a lot of great submissions I really enjoyed reviewing all of them I did a little video talking about the top winners here so you can check that out uh for yourself but yeah you can go read the thread of the winners here and congrats to all the

winners I know some of you are deadly gr Discord community members so great to see you winning I didn't pick you because you're a deily great Discord Community member I tried to be as objective as possible uh on on who I picked uh the first place actually went to zofi here who uh you may have seen on the refi before they make these really really cool kind of Contraptions you can see here these 3D printed kind of ethereum related ethereum themed Contraptions they're awesome I mean I love this stuff like so much and I mean the fact that they put this much effort into into this stuff uh and and the fact that they've put so many kind of like Easter eggs in it and described why they've done it uh and all the stuff that they've done in terms of uh kind of translating for ethereum.org and

everything around it I mean there's so much and also being a solo Staker as well so just a crazy amount of of stuff that uh or value that zofia has added to the ecosystem here that I felt like it was it was an obvious choice for first place but definitely go check out all the other winners as well they're really great I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to do so so last up here I just wanted to mention the bankless ethb podcast that I did that came out I think last week for premium Bank list members but this week for just regular bankless members here so this was the episode I did with obviously David and Ryan uh but with Mike iolo and Jordy Alexander here who you know what's funny about doing it with Mike and Jordy was that they aren't

your typical eth Bulls they're very bullish on eth and ethereum but they come at it from a very different perspective as to what like myself and some other of the traditional eth Bulls come at it from obviously David and Ryan probably more aligned with with my thinking with with an E bull case but Mike and Jordy came on came at it from different directions and we all agreed on most things honestly once we kind of described how we viewed things to each other I think at one point in the podcast Mike even mentioned he's like oh we actually agree on a lot of stuff I think that maybe he he he thought that we didn't agree on as much stuff because maybe he just had a different idea there but I think that's what generally happens happens when you kind of talk about things and people just don't know

you very well and and you haven't like kind of talked to them one-onone they tend to assume your views on certain things uh based on maybe a tweet that they saw or based on some other comments that they saw whereas when you actually talk to people and talk to them kind of in a in a on a panel or one onone and you kind of give breath to the conversation you can find Common Ground pretty much everywhere so it was just a really great podcast and I hope you guys that have listened to it enjoyed it but if you haven't seen it yet or listened to it yet definitely go check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I think that's going to be it for today's episode So yeah thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you

haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to new L join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone