The Bull & Bear Cases For Ethereum | Roundup

0:00Blockworks co-founder, Michael, and Palito here. Quick break to talk about something we've just launched, Blockworks Investor Relations. As the market shifts toward institutional capital, investors want more transparency, more standardization, and a higher level of professionalism. But the traditional IR model is slow, manual, and not built for how crypto works. If you're building on chain, your data is already live, your business is already transparent. The challenge is turning that into a clear, credible story for investors. That's exactly what we're solving with Blockworks IR. It's a single platform that brings together real-time analytics, branded investor portals, and hands-on advisory support so you can communicate what matters. If you're an on-chain business looking to level up your investor strategy, check out blockworksinvestorrelations at blockworks.com slash investor-relations. Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice.

1:00Our guests and I may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. You got me, Miles, Zave. Zave and I are coming live from the Ethereum canton conference. I'm just kidding. It's easy. Here in Khan. Actually, Khan is, I will say, Khan is absolutely beautiful. If you're going to pick a location for a conference, is it nice to be in Khan? Oh, Miles, come on. I had to get that in. Oh my God, you're front running your dad era of jokes. I can see you in a pair of A6 in front of a barbecue. I love it. Yeah, actually, it's really nice that it's in March, as apparently last year it was 100 degrees here, which this is made quite nice, but we're actually, so to preamp the topic for this week, we're going to be talking about controversially the bull and bear case for Ethereum.

2:03And we're going to be talking about ETH, the asset, and ETH, the ecosystem, or Ethereum, the ecosystem, maybe separating those two things. But before we get into that, Zave, I'm curious, what have your takeaways been from conference so far? Yeah, I mean, we were chatting before the show. I think it's clear that there's probably more mind share in US right now. So we had the fast last week, of course, which we all attended and lots of institutions and suits there, and also a lot of builders. And in Europe, there's probably less fresh talent, to be honest, I didn't meet many, like, 20-year-olds to 25. There's a bit more sort of mature people with me across companies. And the whole space is, there was more mature. ECC in the past, we were mentioning, like, modular summits or less, there had some really big kind of events going on on the infrared side. ETC, this conference, it wasn't about infrared, I don't know, in fact, I barely talked about infrared one person, or, like, layer twos or anything. It was really about RWA's tokenization and, you know,

3:04some privacy agents, of course, as well. But it's really about this next phase of Ethereum, which I guess we'll talk about in the show today. So I think times are really tough. Like, there's no doubt on the social side it can creep through, like, you know, many projects aren't raising, some funds aren't raising. But what I do think is quite interesting is that European funds seem to be raising still, which I think is interesting. So, like, maybe if the talent's not here, yeah, it might come back because the capital is still here. So, yeah, overall, I think it's been a really great conference and formative conference, like, the people who are here in business, and that means that you're spending time with really high-quality people that, you know, you can get a lot of insights from. So, yeah, I've enjoyed it. It's been a great conference, but I'm also wondering, as of you see, now, like, where are the best founders? Are they still coming to this kind of events? Like, East Denver and HEC, or do they go to, like, the Stripe events now, maybe, which is definitely a thought that I've been having more recently, and so I will be attending that NSF in a few weeks, and I'll be able to get back to you then. Yeah, I think, I have a lot of the same thoughts.

4:05I think, you know, someone, like a year ago, put this in really concise, interesting terms, which was a lot of people in crypto treat it like a lifestyle, and I've been reminded of that statement walking around con, because you're in con. It's sunny, there's palm trees, and the general sentiment that I've heard from people is like, yeah, this is a, there's, you know, some business to be done here, but this is really a place that I could hang out by friends. And I think that it's very interesting to juxtapose that with, you know, I think if you look at some of these other ecosystems that are playing to win, it's a very different mindset. Obviously, a much smaller, they're not even ecosystems in the same comparable way, but there's a very different attitude. And, you know, it's kind of interesting to a lot of the conversations that I had with founders, especially on like the smaller side. There's a pretty common thing I think, which is a bunch of founders have raised, especially in like, you know, the infraspace, something like that over the course of last three or four years,

5:08haven't been able to find PMF and are just kind of slowly bleeding. You know, I would, I would guess that over the course of the next year, so there's a lot of folks either closing up shop or potentially, you know, M&A, that kind of aquahire type situations and consolidation, especially in the infraspace. I will say, I do think there's the opportunity for a valuable, a couple valuable infer businesses to get built if you can vertically integrate and consolidate. So there'll be like one or two very valuable, I think winners that are kind of last man standing that emerge from that category. But yeah, generally like the trend of the conference of last couple of years is smaller and smaller. And, you know, it's not bringing new people in. Compared to last week is that are like the topics roughly the same, like it was just, you know, top of mind for everybody. I guess that was my one, my first question. The second one is like, was there, you know, one big announcement, you know, from like a core Ethereum developer

6:11because there's usually like one big thing that, you know, the powers that B want to push out at these things. And I would think that like now of all times is probably the time to be making big announcements and get people excited and rally the troops. But I haven't heard anything. So I'm curious, just if there was anything I missed or if that's not really the case, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess Mike and I were hanging around more side events and maybe spending a bit less time in the venue itself. But at least from those side events, I'm sure some things were announced. But it didn't seem like anything in particular was like extremely hot in terms of like an announcement on the technical side at least. On the business side, yeah, I feel like a good way of describing the difference between DAS and NCC is like, DAS business is done, you know, like there are deals done, shaking hands at DAS, if that's like quite valuable. ETC, like just because we're in such a bad marker right now, it's tough, I think, to strike deals.

7:12And you know, you mentioned consolidation, but the reverse is also true of like these new startups popping up. Like the funding is like actually not there. And I think a lot of founders also still at ETC haven't come to terms with this yet. So I think the industry is in like a tough place. So like if you have the money coming to Khan, one takeaway was I read this on X, and I've actually heard this from quite a few people, like a lot of the side events haven't had like great food and drinks because I didn't have certain money. So maybe that's like a state of the market. But like I think the overall takeaway for me is like just tough, like still some cool ideas and cool people around the place, like spiking up. But I think we're going to look back on this year, 2026 is like similar to 2018, when you had to be like a very true believer, like kind of half-lost your marble was to believe, but this is going to absolutely come back in a big way. Because right now it feels like it's not going to happen. But of course, we're all in the industry because we believe it will. Who would remind me of a Cosmo spare market conference? Just no money to go around. Oh, Miles, don't say that. Because it was the bad guy back.

8:14That's not a good job. Hey, but we had our bad kids meet up and that was fun. Hell yeah, yeah. I still have the bad kid. I love the bad kid. The other thing I'll say too is it feels like the crossover, the things the events that have been good here, the RWA summit and vault summit, actually shout out to Morpho here, who got some team sweat. Morpho just whacked better than any company in crypto. They absolutely crush it, but those are the events that people want to, you know, want to hear. Because there's a lot of PMF that's happening on the vault side of the event. Yeah, I would say like bold so by far the most disgusting. I think it's definitely, definitely. All right, speaking of all of this, maybe this is a good lead in for the Bolvers Barra case on everyone's favorite L1 here, which is Ethereum. And maybe just to give some of the setup and context, you know, the history of Ethereum I feel like is,

9:14it was the chain that really sparked. It was the chain that opened up the potential past just, you know, the digital gold, you know, digital pet rock money app that was the Bitcoin chain. And that's where you have the ERC 20 standard and a bunch of like ICOs, like capital formation, DeFi Summer now actually real institutional capital moving on chain and being organized in vaults as the sort of, you know, ETF evolution, kind of credit, credit wrappers. At the same time, you know, I feel like sentiment and actually activity really peaked on Ethereum back in like 2021 or 2022. And from a price standpoint for ETH and actually just from a network activity standpoint has been a really challenging last. At this point, three or four years, I think for Ethereum. And there are certainly bright spots in terms of, I think it's absolutely like we can get into maybe like starting with bulk case.

10:15There are certainly bright spots in terms of, you know, momentum around DeFi and, you know, it feels like they're at least for a little bit there where there was more focus around building on main chain. But yeah, it feels very much like we're in a little bit of a limbo period here. And I think people are looking for context. So why don't we start on a positive note here and start with the bulk case. So does anyone have a, maybe, Zave? I can kick it over to you here. What's the, what's the bulk case for Ethereum? Yeah. I think my bulk case for Ethereum still lies when two things I think mainly. One is the real asset. So I have like, it's kind of clear that assets are coming on chain and Ethereum still like the main menu for that. So it seems like this conference outside of vaults, the next topic is really RWA is coming on chain of what assets those are and how those are being used

11:15financially, et cetera. So there's a lot of like curators around the place here and it's very clear that like vault management as like an industry is going to continue growing over time. And I think right now you're seeing most of that vault management being done on Ethereum. And so as capital keeps flowing into Ethereum, of course, as a liquidity, I think that Ethereum will capture probably the most amount of value there, especially obviously that's the slide I'm used. They came out recently. I think like Salon and DeFi is like kind of tough, actually, it's in a tough spot right now. And it never really caught up to Ethereum. I don't think any chain has really caught up to Ethereum DeFi. So to some extent, I think long term if you believe in DeFi, then you believe in Ethereum being a winner in this space. That's the first thing. The second thing which is related is I believe pretty strongly that like AI agents will use crypto rails and I think that Ethereum at least right now from a credibly neutral standpoint is the best chance of actually receiving agenteic activity on chain outside of centralized players

12:16like Tempo, et cetera. Like I think Tempo et cetera will have a lot of agents and they will get a lot of volume et cetera on their chains. But I think like I have spoken to some startups here in Khan this week who are building really interesting kind of AI agent infrastructure and or products as well. And so I think we're in a really really interesting place right now in terms of like what that future looks like on Ethereum and how much agenteic activity they can actually obtain because if they manage to get a bunch of agenteic activity long term like that market would actually outpace the market how we're using crypto today is as human. So yeah. You fell one, they're building like agenteic products on. Yeah. You always think of like micro payments and you know needing really, really low fees when you think of agenteic activity. So that's all right. So I think like it's a good question Miles. I mean, from what I understand where the market actually is on the Ethereum L1 it's more of that kind of like credit space like lending borrowing kind of like lower latency activity

13:16of higher value. So it's going to be like less throughput and something like a tempo so maybe less payments but more like credit I would see emerging it's quite a big market long term for agents on Ethereum. Yeah, I think maybe to add to that and Miles won't attack you in here but it feels like all of the one observation over the years is that when a chain wins a specific use case it tends to be very sticky and I can't really think of any example actually where a use case like a sector really found product market fit and then fully migrated to another chain. And I mean, ETH really got it right with DeFi Summer and ICOs. I mean, really what that is is finance, right? It's capital formation and then asset management and it hasn't really ever migrated to another chain and I think Solana has had some recently promising growth on the RWA side but it's definitely still very dominant

14:18on ETH and I think that that's still where the critical mass and momentum is. And just if you look at startups in general once there's a winner that emerges as a category leader it's just typically very, very difficult to unseat, right? Like once that flex started winning and streaming they just kind of continued to win and I think the same thing is happening with Polymarket and CalShi at the moment. It's just it starts to become like, well why would I build anywhere else kind of thing? So and that's starting to happen. I also think weirdly a bulk case for Ethereum is that while it hasn't scaled to the degree that people would have hoped we also have far less demand than people expected in a weird way so it actually has worked out in such a way that the fees are pretty reasonable on ETH main chain right now. And they're slowly scaling the L1 and there are some pretty meaningful improvements like the prioritization of single slot finality which should also be big for the wider Ethereum ecosystem, I think. And I also think on the bulk case for Ethereum

15:20and this will get into, I mean my ultimate view here but I think ultimately over a number of years that is a very, very powerful fact. Like even if you look at something like Tempo we talked about this Tempo in Stripe I think that the biggest challenge in uphill battle that they'll have is their competitors even if they're not directly competitive in the market that Stripe is competing for which is that the L1 fees that they're able to generate competitors won't want to entrench or give Stripe an advantage or an entrench remote that they might be able to build. So Ethereum is this neutral space I think which is really, really positive. And now the other thing too is a big takeaway from this conference has been the amount of hacks. I mean Drift was just exploited for some 280 million and we also saw the resolve, the USR kind of bug that happened earlier and it's really top of mind for everyone. And Ethereum by just re-emphasizing credible neutrality,

16:24security, I think it works from a brand standpoint. I think of Ethereum, Mainchain is being quite safe. So I think that that's actually all of those things are really deeply working in its favor. Yeah, I totally second that. I was catching up with my old friends or my old colleagues at Fidelity this week and last week and it's great to see that they're getting pretty aggressive with wanting to put out D5 products or products that happen to D5. Yeah, it's not even a question that they would be deploying on E. It's everybody's like first place that they deploy and I could see them just having no reason to kind of deploy anywhere else, right? It's like you're already taking some risks in putting out this new product. Why would you risk the chain infrastructure as well, by trying out some new chain? So that's the bull case for RWA, D5

17:28and I think there's a lot of reasons to be bullish on that category in general and that's likely going to be on ETH. The other two reasons to be bullish on ETH are like just technical trends. Like ZK is getting really good. Like ZK has come a really long way since I think everybody's last time trying like a ZK rollup or like hearing about the metrics and things like that. So I think the scaling roadmap that is very ZK-centric is going to make a lot of sense. It is going to actually be competitive and they're going to solve interop very soon with the L2s and then quantum I think is interesting because Bitcoin can't get it shipped together. So if I am thinking about like even maybe a straw man like bull case for why should Ethereum's market cap which is $245 billion already go up significantly?

18:29And it feels like catching flows or outflows of Bitcoin ETFs into this thing because some talking heads are very, very concerned about quantum and Bitcoin actually cannot give it shipped together historically. They've never been able to do anything fast enough on the development side. I'm not worried about that for Ethereum. We'll get like lattice signatures in or something like that and they'll solve it. And maybe that actually ends up catching like a good chunk of Bitcoin's market cap but I don't know. Others failing is not a great reason to be like your main bull case for an asset. I'm sure there's others, but yeah, anyways, so I'll pause there. I agree with that. I think ultimately the quantum stuff for Bitcoin is I think it's Bitcoin deserves to get punished for it now especially because the knee-jerk reaction of frankly everyone, every sort of max most crypto but Bitcoin pioneered this is just knee-jerk of,

19:31oh, you're fudding and that's just not what you wanna hear as an investor when there's like an existential risk which quantum's not really an existential risk. The protocol's not the problem, it's the wallet side of things. And yeah, I haven't heard any particularly good solutions proposed for the Nakamoto wallet. I mean, that's an enormous amount of sell pressure right that could come onto the market. And the Wall Street like gets that. Like if you go Satoshi's wallet is gonna get hacked like they kinda get that's not a hard thing to get that's not super tactical. Can we make the bull case for Ethereum that sailors putting out the most ridiculous ads for his new stretch product too with like AI generated images of women being like you're not meant to live an uncomfortable life. It's gone, that's like, it's okay. At least Vitalik is not doing that. At least, at least our boys say a lot of other issues but yeah, not that.

20:32All right, let's get to the bear case here. I don't know if anyone has who wants to go first. I mean, we can start there like leadership. It's not inspiring, it's not in touch with reality and it felt like they were turning things around by like putting in some real like commercial business leaders and then they left and it seems like Vitalik's more like focused on AI doomer posting than he is on like understanding the needs of like what people want and just reading the market and like, you know, the other like, let's say like periphery leaders. You know, they made a big push into DATS, not great. When they, you know, I just, I kind of get what you're doing. Like you're just trying to get like, manufacture a bid for this asset, make it easy. But in general, like if I was just evaluating this asset

21:34and then comparing the teams that are, you know, I'm comparing this asset, you know, too like Solana, Kanton, all of the others. I don't, I don't have a ton of confidence, but that's always, that's never really bent on Ethereum's problem. I just think it kind of, I don't know, it's an underappreciated problem. Like I wonder if there was like, if there was a team leadership team in place that was super in touch with the market where we'd be right now. Well, you know what the analogy that I'd give you here on this is, you know, Bob Eiger has been the CEO of Disney forever, and he really built Disney into the juggernaut that it is today, and he put his Imagineers in place, and he said a very specific culture, a guided vision. You know, he's grooming his replacement Bob Chapick. Hey, okay, Bob, you're in charge now. But then Bob Chapick starts doing stuff that Bob Eiger didn't like. He's deprioritizing those Imagineers. Hey, that's the foundation. And what does Bob Eiger do?

22:35He comes back in and says, actually Bob, you're not in charge, I'm back in charge. I feel like that's what we just watched play out for the last year, was kind of like, hey, I'm listening to the market, and we're going to put this commercially oriented guy to manage in charge here. Ooh, I don't actually like how that looks now that I see it, and now I want to go talk about crops and the stuff, which by the way, is I think going to end up being very long-term value, but also it's his vision, right? I mean, ultimately at the end of the day, I get that Ethereum is decentralized. People look very much to Vitalik, like a spiritual leader, and they look to him for explicit guidance. I think James Presswitch said this incredibly well one time, which is, Vitalik has perspectives. And you have to kind of divine, you know, like Susie, because he won't tell you them directly, but he obviously has the perspectives. And so you kind of indirectly find out via his actions and these long manifestos. But yeah, Miles, to your point, it's just not what the market wants to hear.

23:35And my long-term prediction for this is that, look, it's an enormous place. It's easy to forget that Vitalik's a very young guy. Like, he kind of, you know, wrote this program, and Ethereum became what it was. It's an enormous position of responsibility to find yourself in. I also think that he's a person just like anyone else. I think after a couple more years of pain, he actually will respond, because I think he might find out that you can't actually have a successful ecosystem if the tokens going, bleeding down into the right the entire time. So I think he might end up finding, like, to me, those, the price appreciation of ETH and the mission of Ethereum, I think he views them as different, but I view them as an explicit, like, you can't have one really without the other long-term, I think. But I think he'll respond, or just think he's responded yet, that's pretty good. Maybe on the foundation point. So I think Ethereum was going in the right direction,

24:39and I was starting to get more bullish in the last six to 12 months. But it seems like Vitalik is back, and I feel like maybe not back necessarily for the better. In terms of the stage of maturity of where Ethereum is at, it needs business people bringing assets on shame, making it exciting to people in institutions, et cetera. So the problem with Vitalik is that, I think his vision for Ethereum has had for a long time. Like, I'm not sure that the next, well, the market is at all right now buying it, really. It's like, okay, like AI might come, and there's the doom of post that Vitalik has, and maybe Ethereum is private. But like, the question is like, who's he trying to address? Like, I think Ethereum, Solana worked this out. The foundation is really great top down. Like, if you're a builder in Solana, Solana is all over what you're doing, and they're trying to support you. If you're a builder in Ethereum, it's impossible, you know, support, impossible. Very, very similar to Cosmos, and we all know what happens to the Cosmos. And so if you want to grow the ecosystem, you actually need to support the fresh blood,

25:40and I feel like Ethereum does not do that. It was doing that in the last six or 12 months, but I think now it's changed, even at this conference, I felt it. And so it's very clear that the business people have come and gone from Ethereum in the last six or 12 months, and unfortunately, now we're back to Ethereum. What it was in the last few years of, like, less growth, less, I mean, I just don't think they're genuinely excited about RWAs. I really don't think the original DeFi apps and what worked, these were like World War III resistant apps, with eth as the quote asset for everything, right? And when eth is like the money of this ecosystem, that's what makes it like a self-contained ultra-sensorship resistant type of application, right? If you notice, nothing is quoted in eth, not much anymore, it's all USDC, it's all USDT,

26:42and it's being paired with other RWAs, right? Which at the end of the day, it's like, okay, what was the point of having everything self-contained and everything like, you know, using this asset and all the 32-E, then like, there's just so many more like decentralization shortcuts that you could have taken if you weren't like dead set on this being like World War III resistant apps with World War III resistant asset being the money of the ecosystem. And I think that's honestly what they still like, that's the vision that they're pursuing, and so it's hard to reconcile that, but the fact that what they're winning on is like very, very different, you know, in its nature and in terms of like RWAs and stables. Can I show you, I hate to do this, but I'm gonna pull up this tweet mine from 2024, which is actually that RWAs could be bearish for eth the asset, because RWAs are actually competitive with eth the asset,

27:44which could erode its network effects, and it's exactly what you just described miles. It also goes beyond just like the quote asset, right? Like, this was originally what drove demand for eth the asset was ICOs, which was raised in eth, which created this demand, but then eventually when ERC20s took off, you know, on Uniswap originally, you had to pay every pair in eth. But then, you know, you had these other, you had like the borrow lend protocols, right? Like, this was the original use case for, actually like maker back in the day in AVE and more so. If you look at what Morpho looks like today, both from a deposit standpoint, and from OpenC, OpenC buying all the NFTs with eth. Yeah, but if you look at like the amount of deposits that are in, you know, that are in eth, it's a super tiny percent, right? And if you look at like what people want to borrow and lend is their dollar assets,

28:44or actually some CBB, there's about 25% of deposits that are in Bitcoin because of the Coinbase integration. But yeah, it's really, actually the RWA use case, this is kind of the idea of like, this is an old idea that the Ethereum ecosystem could succeed, but eth the asset could not. Like, we're kind of watching that play out in real time because all of these RWA's that are coming on chain, they're eroding demand and the network effects of the actual underlying asset. There used to be entire funds that like, denominated the fund in E. Like they would like exit assets to E. And that was just, it was just a stockpile, right? Yeah. I think that level of belief is gone now. And ironically, the only, yeah, I mean, the only funds that are, the only like version of that today is how people like, really, really bullish how if you're into it. And maybe Bitcoin, but yeah, that level of like conviction,

29:45I think is totally gone. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, and by the way, it's a $250 billion asset, right? Like, yeah, people have to remember this is insane that it's gotten this big in the first place. This is the other thing too. I mean, the two other things, these are all old debates, but they were never settled. They were never settled. So the first is that North Star debate for Ethereum that people put food. It's an unclear story. I actually, we did a, our desk conference last year in London, we had Nigel Farage come. Nigel Farage used to be a commodity straighter. And I caught up with him for like 30 minutes before he went on stage. And he said something about silver, which is really interesting. You know, he's comparing silver to gold. It's like, ah, silver never found its story. And I was like, oh, wow, that's really interesting. Cause you know, you think of gold is very clear what it is. The story value people had it for 5,000 years. But silver, it's like kind of like that, like a lesser version, but also it's an industrial,

30:46it has more industrial use. It's like a complicated story. And eth is never gotten that. You know, if you would describe what eth is in a couple words, you'd be like, well, it's kind of like RWA chain on chain finance, which gets you there a little bit. First of all, I don't think that's what a lot of people, you know, that are like OG type of problems with light. But that's what we're, where we're coalescing. But the question there is, how does that actually translate into fees? And this is the value capture versus value creation argument. Even if there's all this borrow lending activity that's happening on it, it's not, it's generating an extremely de minimized amount of fees. And like I've always been on, I feel this has always been my perspective that this chain is going to get valued based on the fees that I can generate. And my hope is that people start coming around to that viewpoint because the asset keeps trending in the wrong direction. But I just, even if it wins this, I actually don't see how eth generates a bunch of fees. So... It takes me back to my point before of like,

31:48Ethereum is a low throughput chain. And so like, Solana, what they've focused on is like volume, high throughput, activity, trading. So if both these chains come back in a big way, I think Solana's probably going to be better off. Like Mike, not only I guess as well with Ethereum, you know, the infrastructure itself, you need high volume for the infrastructure to be valuable. And I think Ethereum right now is still looking for more use cases with PMF, more projects, like more value, I guess, on the chain itself and more apps doing bigger and better things. And I feel like in Ethereum more recently, there hasn't been any massive drivers of like value, especially on the O1 and so forth. Like on Solana, you know, Hayda or Lava, they had pump farm, they had genuine apps like driving a lot of activity to the chain. I think on Ethereum, there's less inspiration for some of these apps, like it might pop up in the near future, but they're like, again, it takes me back to the ETH Foundation point. Like if you want activity on the chain, you need to support new builders. Going back to I think Miles' point before as well

32:48around RWA is, I think I agree like Ethereum is less bullish on this RWA kind of use case and coming on chain and they want ETH to be the base asset for these pairs. And then like that's how they want to create network effects. But that's just not happening right now. We're seeing that in real time. And so I think the trouble with Ethereum is that the direction the chain is going and isn't necessarily the direction the foundation wants it going in. And that's like the big disconnect right there. Separately, as we've talked about in this podcast before in the past, applications are crewing a lot of value now. And infrastructure's being left to dead, also Solana. So there's a bare case there around like, can Ethereum capture more value as more applications live or the applications themselves and or protocols going to capture most of the value going forward? And that for me is still like a TBD. I don't think anyone has like a massive take on like, it's probably going to be both the emperor and the apps. But at least right now, if I look at the value of Ethereum and Solana, I feel like they're pretty fairly valued. Going back to your point, Mike, on if they're valued by fees or not, like more and more every conference you go to, like people are valuing businesses now encrypted.

33:51Like they want to value the revenue, the cash flow, you know, profit, et cetera. Ethereum I think over time will be valued more and more like this for better or for worse. In the past, I think it was valued like money. That is another bare case I think for Ethereum, by the way. So I started getting valued as a business and the business doesn't look great and it's not growing or that's a terrible time for the asset. So I do think that could be another bare case of like, just how investors start fundamentally valuing these projects and unless Ethereum starts growing, they're pissed the pie. And again, going back to my bookcase, I genuinely believe the next economic actors are going to be agents. And so like if you want to target a new market, it has to be the gigantic market. I think if Ethereum do not get the gigantic market right, they're in a really bad spot. Right now it's kind of hard to see like what this actually looks like, but like humans aren't coming to a Ethereum really anymore. Like some institutions are with RWA's and stuff like that. Consumers aren't there for sure. Consumers are on Solana, like even me personally, I use Solana more than Ethereum as an end user. So if Ethereum's not going for the end user, consumer crowd is going for the institutional crowd.

34:51I think if they want to keep it decentralized, keep those values incredibly neutral, I think agents like going back to your point earlier in the podcast, Mike, security and safety on Ethereum. Like agents on Solana even just asked talking about it right now and his podcast, like probably you might think there's some extra level of risk maybe because the infrastructure is less mature or battle tested, whatever it is. On Ethereum, it kind of feels like you can get the security and those guardrails from these agents. And it just feels like you can trust the brand of Ethereum and the infrastructure and the EVM. And so that has network effects obviously now that people trust. So I think that there is a bookcase to be made around agents, but yeah, I think Ethereum really needs to push as in the foundation, better growth, more teams, more inspiration, and better apps to be honest, on their own itself. Last point I want to make is we haven't also made it in the podcast as a bear case. I know you guys, I was bullish on base the coin as I am, like I think base would be a pretty big coin. And I think base stands to capture a lot of value away from Ethereum. So when base, like if Ethereum is already in a bad spot right now,

35:51I could imagine base coming out as well in the next six to 12 months and that market cap really growing in Ethereum is really not growing whatsoever. So yeah, curious to see if you guys got that one, guys. My perspective, I have no insight knowledge. I just, I'm very bullish on base the chain. I think that I don't know if they would launch a token. So I don't know if there's no perspective on that. But I was actually going to just add to outside of even base just there's an opportunity for like these competitive chains like Canton and Tempo in the same way that hyperliquid successfully counterpositioned Salona, I think there's the opportunity for a more opinionated chain to counterposition for the RWA and kind of finance use case. So you're already seeing that on the payment side of things with Tempo and you're seeing that on the kind of RWA side of things with Canton. And it's unclear, these are kind of, I have a lot larger take here maybe for a closing dot

36:52for me on kind of the corporate chains than how this story ends with the theorem. But that's another big risk coming down the pike. Like I don't, yeah, I mean, building on Canton here or Tempo is probably not a bad call, maybe, maybe. Yeah, that's the hard way. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's almost like they're trying to unbundle Eiff, right? Like Eiff was this big bundle of activity. And if you can just pick one of the things that's happening and do it better than them, right? You're going to siphon off some of that activity. And we've seen that, like, breed consistently over the last five years. So my app chain thesis, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the cost of sector sector sector sector. Yeah, sector, which ended up being correct, I think. And I, my, so actually to knit, maybe these perspectives in terms of what I actually think is going to happen is, I think the big trend actually right now is corporate chains.

37:53Like every what, like the cause most thesis is playing out in a number of ways here. And I think that the knee jerk reaction of institutions, like the stripes or the DRWs of the world is like, I want to have control. I want to own the full stack platform. I'm going to launch my own chain. I think eventually after doing that, and having a chain live for a number of years, I'm like, ooh, there's a lot of maintenance and work. And actually, it's that value chain episode that three of us did. I think they're going to look and say, you know, really what I want is all of these get generated this execution layer. I don't really need this, you know, this layer underneath. It's more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. And I could just, you know, apparently, it's okay to run a single sequencer roll up. So I think what I think is there's going to be a, you know, this Cambrian explosion, I don't know if people used to say that all the time, Cambrian explosion of corporate chains. But I think they're going to re-centralize and focus around Ethereum. And I think that'll play out on like a, I don't know, like a two to three year time horizon.

38:56But even in that world, the, I think that Ethereum at this point has critical mass, the credible neutrality. And honestly, they're scaling the text slower than everyone would like, but there's also, again, less demand. So I think actually the Ethereum ecosystem here is going to continue to be successful. I see success at least in the finance use case. What I still, I think it really just depends how vitalic response to pressure. And if he says, you know what, if he comes to the conclusion that Ethereum needs to be successful, the asset needs to be successful and we're going to generate fees, I think the asset will be successful. And I still think that's the most likely case. But I could also see a world where, it's like I got my 50 year vision on crops and doesn't respond. And I think in that instance that token is not successful. That would be my, so Mike, do you think it really just comes down to the talent himself? Yeah, I think it, yeah. I mean, I'd like look,

39:56I know that this is a radical encryptor. I don't believe in this idea of like decentralized leadership. I don't think that's not a thing. People follow people, even in super decentralized organizations like countries, there's a reason there's one person on top because it has to come from one person's unified vision for something. And I think there are multiple options here, right? But either, I think it either has to be Vitalik, you know, takes the, which it looks like he's doing. He's kind of stepping back, you know, into the driver's seat here and, you know, putting his vision into the protocol in the ecosystem or he has to fully abdicate. He can't do the barbed wire thing. He has to really fully delegate, you know, someone or a group of people to lead the more commercial vision here. And honestly, I don't think it really makes sense to do like, there's this alliance here and this institutional part and it has to be one, one thing, one or two confusing right now. So that would be my, doesn't my perspective, yeah?

40:59If it just comes down to that, at least as of right now, I would probably be like neutral, like I don't know if I'd be bullish or bearish, like I think there's things that could go right, but at least right now there's, it looks like some things are actually going wrong as well. So if it's just the leadership and that's how you present a ball of their case, like the foundation itself and the leadership of that foundation and the change of guard and now going back to what it was a few years ago, which didn't perform very well, ultimately. I think, yeah, maybe a potential issue, but I do think that it's probably beyond just the leadership and with or without the talent like Ethereum can probably be like a great chain long term, currently neutral, secure, et cetera. But yeah, right now, like it's tough to see, like I don't know if I'm a buyer or a seller right now, I don't know about you guys, but it's in an interesting place. I think the threat of Salana, we haven't actually mentioned in this podcast as well. Like Salana was really threatening through him at some point in time. Now it seems like that threat isn't there so much anymore, which actually could be another small ball case.

42:00Yeah, the other one, yeah, the other one, facing a lot of the same challenges that Ethereum is facing, I think at the moment from what it's worth, yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say the other like, slightly ball cases that like launching your own chain or like your own roll up, like that's not really a thing anymore. Uni chain coming back, like that's a good sign, right? You wouldn't want. We saw how that worked, and then they ended up with on their own islands on L2 and it just net net wasn't worth it. So in general, I mean, yeah, like activity is coming back, but you'd get with the program. Also, Ethereum has by far the biggest ecosystem. It's a prize money actually. So Salana is still way thinner as an ecosystem. I don't know, I think that is bullish. Like it really does attract, cause also when if you work at a bank or big asset manager and you're looking into the space for the first time,

43:00we're kind of like, all right, we're all the people at. It's much less sophisticated than you might think, right? Like we've all been debating and arguing the pros and cons of these different chains for a long time, we're kind of just, where is the liquidity in the users and the people and they look at that first and Eve has the lead there by far? And I should also say to you, I am very, like I want Ethereum to work 100%. And I want it, first of all, it's absolutely gonna work. And I want it to continue to be successful and for the token price to go up. That's very much my desire, but I do think nothing's inevitable. I think crypto has made the mistake of thinking that this stuff is inevitable, and that's how we've gotten four years of underperformance on basically everything other than Bitcoin. And the tokens, especially, are guilty of this, right? So the point in these episodes are to say nothing is taken for granted, right? Like there's no, oh, we're all gonna make it. Like we're not all gonna make it. Some people are gonna make it. And it's gonna be depending on the people that make the right choices and design to work really hard.

44:01So that would, you know, that's my, I don't know. I don't want this to seem like, you know, not being supportive, you know, absolutely am. But yeah, we, you know, nothing's written in style. But that sounds like we're all pretty neutral. Like I think like none of us have bearish, but also none of us have massively bullish. I think that there's a lot to still work out, but they might actually end up doing a fantastic job and it just remains to be saying. Yeah. All right, guys, maybe we can call it here have a relatively short one today. But this was a ton of fun, and we will do this again when, at least on backstage side and save your home and home in a home. I want to knock you when you're home. All right, all right. It's great. There's one one, guys. Let's do it. Pfft.