The EF Mandate, Staked ETH ETF live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #861 - Ethereum Updates

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DerbyRefuel, very carefully latest news

and if you're a mega-system, I'm your host Dan, this is I know, it's a 16th of March 2026.

Alright everyone, let's get into it.

So apologies for not doing an episode last week, I actually forgot to say on the last

brief field that I did that I wouldn't be doing an episode last week because I was traveling

to Sydney for a couple of crypto-related events.

So yeah, that's why there wasn't an episode last week, but of course I'm back today.

Lot to get through actually, I mean, there's been a bit of drama, I guess, and that's kind

of part for the course when you're in the cryptocurrency system, of course, but it is about

the Ethereum Foundation again.

Now, the reason why I guess like this drama exists, I think, like, I mean, I maybe I've

mentioned this on the refuel before, but I think getting at the heart of it is that there

are a lot of competitors out there, a lot of competitors to Ethereum out there, and

they thrive on making out as if like the Ethereum Foundation is doing everything wrong and

they're guiding Ethereum on the wrong path and they should do this and should do that

and so on and so forth.

And on the other side of the same kind of coin, there are a lot of people who want to imprint

their own vision of what they think Ethereum should be, what they think the Ethereum Foundation

should be, and when they don't get their way, they tend to act like a disgruntled kind

of ex-employee of the Ethereum Foundation or of somewhat, you know, some project in the

Ethereum ecosystem, or just like a child, it's very immature, a lot of the language and

behavior that I'm seeing from people around this, and it really does feel like if they don't

get their way, they just kind of lash out, they crash out, and they have a sick about it,

they have a cry about it.

So the reason why I'm bringing this up today is because the Ethereum Foundation, well,

the Foundation's board released what they're calling the Ethereum Foundation or EF mandate,

and they released this was a couple of days ago now, so it's still pretty fresh here.

And essentially, the mandate is clearly stating what the EF is focusing on going forward.

And they say, yeah, these are their own words.

The EF will, above all else, remain focused on an Ethereum that is censorship-resistant,

open source, private, and secure, and they have a last little acronym here called Crops

for this.

And then in the service of user self-sovereignty, resistant to extraction and with seamless

UX.

And they continue and say, these are conditions that make Ethereum worth building, using

and defending.

Now, they have a blog post here and a tweet thread.

You can go give this a read if you haven't yet.

It's quite, I guess, like, lengthy, not the blog post itself, but the actual mandate,

like the PDF.

It's actually quite lengthy, like, it's what, 38 pages worth, yeah, I mean, there's a lot

of graphics as well.

And people will kind of rub the wrong way about these graphics, but like, hey, I love stuff

like this.

You know, it's kind of funny.

Like, no matter what Ethereum tends to do, it's like, if it's infinite guard and stuff,

or if it's some other kind of graphic stuff, like there's always someone complaining.

I mean, that's just kind of, again, powerful the course in the ecosystem is that no matter

what Ethereum does, no matter what the EF does, someone's going to complain.

And you know, that's just just kind of the way it is.

But if you want to read the whole thing, you can only get a YouTube subscription below.

But my take is not going to be necessarily on the mandate itself, but more, I guess, like,

on the ecosystem's reaction to the mandate.

So I will say one thing about the mandate, at least, which will that be that, of course,

I agree with this.

You know, I've been paying this drum for years on the refuel that I strongly believe the

only reason for an L1 chain to really exist is to be these things.

To be censorship resistant, to be open source, private, and secure.

Like I don't really understand why you would build an L1 to do anything, but those things

long term.

I know there are some L1s out there that are like the complete opposite of this, right?

Like, for example, hyper liquid is the complete opposite of this.

And they're not like a general purpose L1, they're kind of like an L1 that focuses on

one specific thing.

I know they have like the EVM chain, but that has very little usage compared to the

purpose platform that they have, right?

So they're very focused on one thing.

But as I've said before, I still think that would be better off being done as an L2, but

I feel like they did it as an L1 as kind of this regulatory arbitrage play.

But then again, like it's very, very centralized, and I think the only reason why they haven't

really been hit with anything on the regulatory front is because of the current administration

in the U.S.

Just not caring about that stuff.

You know, they seem to be fine with corruption and illegal stuff going on, you know,

unless it's on the other side of the political spectrum, then they're, you know, they're

not fine with that.

I'm not going to get into politics here, but like it's very clear that, you know, we swung

from Gary Gensley's SEC and the Democrats kind of being in power there, having like the

worst policy when it came to going after cooped up actors because they went after the good

actors and not the bad ones.

And then you have the other side now of the spectrum, which is the Republicans not going

after anyone, unless they're, you know, these people are like pro-democratic, like heavy

pro-democratic, something like that, heavy pro the other side of the politics here.

And I said this actually, I think I said this to someone at the event I was out last

week, that I think the only reason SBF hasn't been pardoned yet is because his parents and

himself were pro-democrat, right?

If he was a pro-Republican going into the election and he's, you know, even before the election

and he supported Trump and everything like that, he would have gotten a pardon, like maybe

not day one, but like pretty early on in Trump's presidency, like I'm pretty, pretty confident

in that.

So, you know, there's a lot of politics going on here with that sorts of stuff.

So to bring it back to what I was saying about like hyper-liquid, for example, yeah,

I just think that what they did was kind of maybe a regulatory arbitrage play above

all else because it was built, I guess, before the more friendly regulatory environments as

well.

But, but yeah, I just think that that construction would be better as an L2.

But if you talk like, you speak about like generalized L1s and what an L1 is and what

it's actually good at, it's these things.

Like if you want to build anything else, it's either an L2 or a centralized database.

Like I just don't understand why you would build a generalized L1 to do something that

is better done with something else unless you're building the generalized L1 to be these

things, to be maximally censorship resistant, to be open source, private, and secure.

Now, to me, there are actually no chains out there that achieve this except Ethereum.

I don't think Bitcoin achieves this and I think Bitcoin, like I know this is not a popular

opinion still, but I truly do, and I mean, I've been saying this for years.

I truly do think that Bitcoin is going to keep losing relevancy and it's going to be

keep becoming irrelevant as time goes on.

And I do think that either the quantum threat or the threat of not being able to secure

itself is long term going to kill Bitcoin.

And by kill Bitcoin, I basically mean make it irrelevant.

I don't mean like literally kill it because I think it will still continue on in somewhere

another.

But like I just think it's just going to keep losing relevancy over time.

So if you exclude Bitcoin from this conversation, which I think you should, because it really

doesn't fit into a lot of these things, yes, it sends you persistent open source, but

it's not private.

And to be fair, neither is Ethereum, to an extent.

I mean, you can use things on Ethereum to make your transactions private in a way, like

Tornado Cash for example, but we all know there's a whole other kind of can of worms there.

And secure, that's, I mean, it's not subjective, but like there are differences between the

security of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But like I think as time goes on, Bitcoin becomes less secure and Ethereum becomes more secure.

Bitcoin becomes less private.

Ethereum is going to become more private.

Ethereum becomes more since your persistent will Bitcoin becomes less, right?

So yeah, if we just like look at that, and we can, if we want to be generous, we can

say that Bitcoin fulfills a lot of this criteria today.

But like as I said, I don't think it's going to in the future, but like I look at every

other kind of L1 out there.

And I mean, I'm talking like maybe it like generalized L1s because you could say that for

example, Minero, you know, fulfills a lot of this stuff and sure it does, but it's not

a generalized L1 has a very specific purpose is basically an app chain.

So when it comes to generalized L1s, there really is only Ethereum.

So what the EF is doing here is basically saying this is the value prop of Ethereum.

This is what is going to drive value to Ethereum long term to ETH long term.

This is what Ethereum's product market fit is.

So we're doubling down on that.

We're not going to go off on this direction, this direction.

We're not going to be pulled over here and over here and do all this sort of stuff when

the EF exists as an organization to fulfill these conditions, to keep building towards these

conditions.

And as you guys know, there is an entirely updated roadmap at strawmap.org that is basically

encapsulating all of this, right?

Like all of these different things are in service of those things that the EF is talking

about, the increased censorship resistance, stuff like fossil, right?

Open source.

I mean, that's just the given across anything that the Ethereum ecosystem does, like everything

is open source already.

So we're doing pretty well on that regard.

Private.

There's plenty of stuff on here with regards to privacy, right?

Encrypted mempools is something that's being talked about a lot, which I'm actually going

to touch on on this episode as well.

And secure.

I mean, there are so many things on here that I've got to do with increasing Ethereum security

and then user experience as well as on here, like it's all on there, right?

So they're guiding the ecosystem and being the stewards of the ecosystem to deliver on

that roadmap, which basically is an umbrella over all of this stuff, right?

So then it comes to what people want the EF to do and what they're just not going to

do and why people get kind of upset about this.

A lot of people seem to want the EF to be an elite when it comes to onboarding users

or when it comes to growing the ecosystem and by that, it means like growing the apps

and onboarding users via apps and onboarding more kinds of that, I guess, like stakeholder.

That's not the EF's job.

It's never been the EF's job.

It's never been what the EF is good at.

And there was a tweet today from someone from Coinbase, one of their engineers, that I felt

was just really irritating, and I don't know if I don't have it up here right now.

Maybe I can find it and bring it up for you guys, but it really irritated me seeing this

tweet.

Yeah, it's, yeah, I've got it in front of me on my screen.

So, you know, they started the tweet by saying, if Jeremy is on a trajectory to become

the net scape of crypto, like for starters, this analogy makes no fucking sense.

Like I'm just, like I'm actually angry about this analogy.

Like this makes zero sense.

Like if you actually know the history of net scape, then you would understand that it's

completely different to Ethereum.

It's not even the same ballpark of what Ethereum is, but I guess like, regardless of the

analogy here, you know, you would continue instead, unfortunately, Ethereum is destined

for a relevance due to its inability to focus on what matters.

Okay, okay.

Ethereum is more than the EF.

Yeah, like even if you think that the EF is doing, you know, something wrong, Ethereum

is so much greater than the EF, right?

And then you go, continues and says, just as net scape waste the time on a rewrite from

version four to six at a time when Microsoft was absolutely killing them, the insist, the

EF insist on focusing on cyberpunk values at a pivotal time when the institutions are

finally coming on chain, often to other networks.

This is also wrong, like the institutions are coming on chain to Ethereum in a really

big way.

Rappen who just launched their own L2 for God's sake, Larry Fink, the CEO of the largest

asset manager in the world is all in on Ethereum and constantly talks about it.

BlackRock does not have an ETF for anything except BTC and ETH.

They just launched a staked ETF, which I'm going to talk about at the end of the episode.

So again, this is just like, I don't know, this is really bad engagement bait, maybe.

And then you have finishes by saying an EF determined to win would focus on how to make

Ethereum the best chain for finance.

That's not what it's doing today.

That's literally what it's doing.

The best chain for finance is one that is censorship resistant, private, secure, and has

good UX.

That's literally what they're doing.

So I don't understand this take.

This actually made me upset today reading this.

I was like, I just couldn't, like I didn't, I actually didn't even want to see this

tweet because I didn't want to get upset about this, but I did.

So it's stuff like this and I read stuff like this and I'm like, this is a fundamental

misunderstanding of what the EF is.

And it's really rich coming from an engineer at Coinbase and maybe they don't work on

Coinbase.

I don't know if they work on base or something else.

But think about this for a second.

Base exists as the largest L2 today, right?

It gets basically free security from Ethereum, right?

And why does it get that?

Well, it's because of blobs.

Okay.

Who made blobs a reality?

The Court of Alps.

Okay.

What does the Ethereum foundation do?

It stewards the protocol, the stewards the core protocol, it has under its wing and in

its workforce, a lot of the Court of Alps is in research of Ethereum.

So Coinbase is directly benefiting from the Ethereum foundations core principles and what

they're working on in regards to those core principles, right?

So it's just rich seeing this tweet kind of come from them there.

Now on top of that as well, base is, I mean, well, Coinbase, but also base within that is

one of those organizations who should be focused on user onboarding.

That is their entire job.

The Coinbase's entire job is getting people on board into crypto and then on chain via

base, right?

So they are doing what they think that the EF should be doing.

But the thing is that like if you were to ask someone the question, someone at least knowledgeable

in the industry, the question, who do you think would be better at onboarding users into

this ecosystem?

And I mean, end users such as like everyday people, the EF or Coinbase, like anyone who's

even got half a brain cell should always answer Coinbase, right?

And also the other question could be who do you want onboarding users into the ecosystem?

Coinbase and companies like Coinbase or like Robinhood, for example, or the EF, 10 times

out of 10, I would answer, I want the companies like Coinbase doing this.

I don't want the EF doing this because if the EF was to do this stuff, guys, that would

pull away so many of their resources from what they're really good at, which is the Ethereum

protocol itself and upholding these values that they've put into their mandate.

So when you actually walk through this and you actually understand where all of this,

you know, where all the places, sorry, where all the pieces are on the board, you kind

of understand why the EF does this, right?

Why did I play to their strengths, rather than going down this other path, which they're

not as strong in, which there already exists plenty of other entities there.

So why would the EF focus on that?

That would be like asking Coinbase to pivot from all of their other stuff and focus on

core development, right?

Why would they do that?

They focus on Ethereum core development when that's not what they're good at.

That's not what they've been doing for many years now.

That's not essentially their business model.

So the EF isn't a business, right?

But you could think of it as a business and say, well, their business model is the core

protocol, is researching development of the core protocol and upholding Ethereum's type

of punk values.

If you wanted them to have a different business model, well, then you either have to try

and change the entire EF, which is not going to happen or you create your own company,

or create your own organization to do that.

You are free to do that.

No one's stopping you from doing that.

So that's my, I guess, general view on all of this and a lot of that isn't not news

to you guys and I'm preaching to the choir here, I know.

But it's something that just gets me frustrated because it just feels like no matter what

the EF does, people are going to be upset, right?

The EF could literally cure cancer.

They could save babies from burning buildings.

They could bring animals back to life, right?

Come up with something that brought people's beloved pets back to life and someone somewhere

would still have an issue with it just because it came from the EF.

It just feels very much like the EF is everyone's scapegoat.

It's just, let's blame the EF or the EF does this, the EF does that.

Let's blame them.

Like the other day, the EF announced that they sold 5,000 ETH to, to bit mine.

People complained the EF sold again.

So if the EF announces that they sell, people complain.

If the EF doesn't announce when they sell, people complain.

It's literally an unwinnable situation here.

So I am more than happy to just let the EF keep doing what they're doing because I think

they're doing a really good job at it for starters, but also it just, they can't please

everyone.

They're never going to please everyone.

And anyone who is not pleased with the EF and doesn't think what they're doing is the

right thing, then you can literally do something else.

You are not forced to be in the Ethereum ecosystem, you're not forced to be with the EF.

And there are high-profile people who have left the EF, right?

Like Downcryd, for example, and gone somewhere else.

Because it's very obvious to me, it was obvious to me at the time, but even more obvious

now, that Downcryd wanted to imprint his own philosophies and his own kind of strategies

on the Ethereum foundation.

And when he wasn't able to do that, he basically left.

And now he's acting like someone who is a disgruntled ex-employee because he's always lashing

out and no matter what the EF does.

That is very immature to me.

That's childish to me.

It's like, move on, bro.

Like, okay, you didn't get what you wanted.

Now you're working at that tempo, like, move on, like not to just call that Downcryd.

There are other people out there who have done this, but I just think that it is extremely

childish.

I don't think it actually helps the ecosystem.

And I think it is something that actively hurts the ecosystem.

But if people want to do that, they can't, you know, it's a free country, as they say,

right?

They can do what they want.

But yeah, that's my general view on all of that there.

But as I said, you can go read the EF new mandate for yourself, make up your own mind.

You don't have to agree with me, you don't have to listen to me.

I'm just giving my opinions and thoughts, like I always do on the refuel.

But yeah, this is nothing new from me, guys.

Like I've always, always beaten this drum around the EF.

I've always said that I believe the EF should focus on what they're best at.

And honestly, in the last 12 to 18 months, they've gotten even better at that, right?

Like they had Tomas come in.

I think Tomas helped a lot and to pull the EF into a certain direction.

And I think they're continuing in that direction, just in their own way.

The EF was never going to do like a complete 180 and become a completely different organization.

They're definitely very different to what they were pre-Tomas, but at their core is what

their mandate is here.

Like that's the core of the Ethereum foundation.

And honestly, like a lot of people I think would get a lot out of talking to people who

work at the EF because they are going to be telling you guys the same things that I have

said to you guys.

I've never worked at the EF, but I talk to a lot of EF members.

The same thing always comes up with them.

They want to work on stuff that is meaningful, that gives not only themselves meaning, but

gives meaning to the world.

They want to work on something that they feel like can positively impact the world.

And honestly, there's not that many of those things left in tech anymore.

A lot of the AI stuff that's being worked on does not positively impact the world.

I would argue that it negatively impacts the world.

Like all the content creation stuff, I would say negatively impacts the world.

I actually don't think anything good is coming out of the AI content creation stuff.

Maybe you could say like 5% of it is good, maybe because it's like lowering the barrier

to entry to do like some graphic design stuff, but most of it is not that.

Most of it is being used for political propaganda.

Most of it's being used to create slop just to keep you scrolling on your phone on social

media, right?

But there's a lot of good that's coming out of AI too, right?

Like coding.

But that is a universal thing.

Like, Claude, you can use Claude while working on a theorem.

And a lot of the theorem developers do this, right?

This is not something that is exclusive to you have to go work in AI to do this.

No, that applies everywhere, right?

But then all the other tech stuff that you could work on, most of it is honestly a

negative for humanity at this point.

There's so much surveillance tech being created right now.

I was just reading something.

I don't know how true this is, but like, I've been following this stuff for a while.

I was just reading something that someone has a theory that Palantir has gotten themselves

so integrated with the US government that their end goal was essentially to become too

big to fail so that they can't be ripped out.

And then they can just have like these massive surveillance run by private companies, right,

private corporations in the US and beyond so they can log everything and do all this

nefarious shit with it, right?

So obviously if you're working on something that empowers people or want to work on something

that empowers people and gives more sovereignty to people, you're not working on that, right?

You're working on a theorem or something adjacent to a theorem, some open source software,

maybe you're working on Linux or something, right?

Something that empowers people and yeah, so much other kind of tech stuff that you could

work on, like social media.

I mean, I don't even have to explain why that's a net negative for humanity, right?

Even though I do still use Twitter, I don't use any other social media at this point.

It's literally just Twitter because I need it to keep up with the theorem stuff.

But even that, like, you guys have definitely noticed, I don't tweet nearly as much anymore.

Like I don't remember the last time I tweeted anything.

I retweet a few things for the refuel stuff like that.

But again, going back to my original point about people who work at the EF, it's always

the same thing from every single one of them.

They want to work on something meaningful, guys, even if it means getting paid less, which

they usually are getting paid less than they could elsewhere, but they want to work on

something meaningful.

And again, like I'm going to say that they shouldn't be paid more.

Of course they should.

I strongly believe that they should be paid way more than they are.

And I'm glad things like the protocol guild exist.

But like, the thing is is that they still stay.

They're not like forced to stay there.

They're not in jail, right?

They're not like a gun to their head, or you have to stay at the EF.

They could go anywhere else and get more money.

But again, it's more about the fact that they want to work on something meaningful, they

want to empower people, they want to do something, they mean something.

And that's what keeps me in the take a system too, even though I've crashed out and burnt

out a lot over the years for various different reasons and these days are spend less time in

the ecosystem.

I'm still in the ecosystem.

I'm still doing the refuel.

I'm still part of Ethereum because I want to see it continue to empower people around

the world, continue to give freedom people around the world.

Ethereum is freedom technology guys, like ethys freedom money, like that's what I'm here

for.

If you're not here for that, go somewhere else, like don't stay in Ethereum just on the

off chance that you may be able to make Ethereum more corporate if that's what you want

to do.

Like, it's just not going to happen.

It's not in Ethereum's DNA, right?

There's just no way that that can happen.

So yeah, anyway, enough ranting about that.

I think that I got all that off my chest stuff that I've been brewing on for the last few

days.

You can give this a read for yourself.

I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so.

All right.

So, I guess, like, maybe this is related to the EF mandate stuff, but like Barnaby put

out a really great tweet here that I thought was pretty, I guess, like relevant to the discussion

around the EF, but also goes broader than that.

So, people always argue about, like, what is Ethereum?

Like, what is it?

Ethereum?

Like, is it a product?

Is it a protocol?

Is it a platform?

And Barnaby basically put these three up and said, well, the thesis is that Ethereum is

a protocol.

The anti-thesis is that Ethereum is a product.

Well, but the synthesis is maybe Ethereum as a platform, a protocol for long-term resilience

in open adversarial environments, a product for delivering value to its users and upgrading

itself in the right order, and a platform to offer services which other products consume

to build permissionlessly.

And there's a whole thing called the platform team at the EF now, by the way, guys.

I actually resonate with this most.

I would say that Ethereum is a platform.

It's not an app, right?

It's not some kind of product that needs to be marketed like a product, and it needs

to be built like a product, but it's not just a protocol, either.

It is probably a mixture of a protocol and a product and a malgumation, which is a

platform, because its product, as Barnaby says here, is delivering value to its users

and upgrading itself in the right order.

Well, the users of Ethereum are a lot of different entities.

It's like end users like me and you layer twos, big organizations, big institutions.

There's many different types of users here, but Ethereum isn't just a product, right?

Like it's, again, it's also a protocol for this.

So I think the synthesis here is that Ethereum is a platform.

It's a platform for everyone to use, everyone to build on if they want, and no one can stop

you from doing that.

It's permissionless.

So I thought that was just a really great little tweet here from Barnaby related to what

I was just talking about with regards to the EF mandate and things like that.

So yeah, I mean, I just wanted to bring that up for you guys out there.

Right, another hot topic of debate that has been raging on for the last few weeks since

Vitalik put his tweet out about altos in their place in the Ethereum ecosystem is I guess

like people can kind of taking that tweet the wrong way and thinking that Vitalik saying

that altos are dead.

No, altos are not dead, obviously.

And I think that debate kind of ran its course, but Ethereum, sorry, Ethereum lies, put

out a really great post here, which only can the YouTube description below saying, you

know, why scaling Ethereum is bullish for altos because we are scaling L1 here.

We're also scaling Ethereum L1 for altos as well, but like we're talking about direct

L1 scaling like gasoline increases, DKVM stuff, right?

That's what we're talking about when it comes to direct L1 scaling crease.

But if you realize this post here is pretty great.

And essentially like it's not this is not like a summary of the entire post, but like the

heart of it is that altos are still going to exist for various different reasons.

And it's what the reasons that I've argued over the years as well.

It's not just for scale, it's way beyond scale.

And they mentioned Robin Hood as a great example here about the fact that like Robin Hood

is going through scale, they're kind of crypto endeavor via the L2 for sure.

But they also are creating an L2 so that they get the best technology, the best way to

do business on on in crypto and also get to be able to kind of pick and play with

what they want, their L2 chain to be.

There's obviously going to be centralized controls in place, but that's what they want,

right?

And the L2's, the L2 model offers the best way to do that.

And I think that it's kind of funny because a lot of people will rage against this and

say, well, this isn't in the spirit of like the cypherpunk values that we talk about.

This isn't in the spirit of what Ethereum is trying to be.

And yes, that's true, but we're not doing this at the L1.

This is the whole point of doing it at the L2's.

It's like a sandbox environment, essentially, where whatever happens on the L2 does not

affect the L1 protocol.

That is the whole point of this.

It's to separate these things from each other because when you don't separate them from

each other, essentially what you do is you get the worst of all worlds.

And that's what monolithic chains do.

They basically centralized, so they get the worst of that and their performance is worse

than L2's, so they get the worst of all worlds.

They get less security, they're centralized, less performance.

And they still don't give the control that a lot of these institutions want because

they can't control the L1 chain itself because it's trying to be like a general purpose

anyone can build on it, sort of thing.

But then when you have the splitting up here of concerns, you have the L1 which remains

decentralized, secure, censorship resistant, completely open to everyone, and then you

have L2's.

They can build on top, take advantage of that, right?

Maybe not take advantage of the security, but take advantage of the ecosystem and liquidity,

don't have to spin up on L1 because that's more expensive, and basically get what you

want and essentially do that on top of Ethereum as part of the Ethereum ecosystem.

So that's what a lot of these posts basically boils down to, but I still highly recommend

reading this post because it covers a lot, as you can see I'm scrolling through it.

It's got a lot going on here, so I'll link that in the YouTube description below.

But as I said, like the L1, L2 debate, it's been done to death at this point guys.

If you don't like L2's, then just go away, like if you don't like L2's, then you don't

like Ethereum.

Simple as that.

Ethereum has the L2's as its strategy for both scaling, you know, just scaling generally,

but also onboarding new users, new institutions into the ecosystem.

And if you want to just do everything on L1 and want like a monolithic L1, there are plenty

of those out there.

There are actually more, way more monolithic L1's than there are chains like Ethereum where

it's trying to keep the L1 minimized and do things via L2's.

I would say that really the only other chains like Ethereum in that kind of architecture

is Bitcoin and Bitcoin's doing it horribly because the line in network sucks and you can't

build general purpose L2's on Bitcoin without doing a lot of really weird stuff and it really

just makes it centralized in the end and it makes no sense.

It's not, like as I was saying before, Ethereum is the best place to do business, Bitcoin

is not when it comes to L2's.

And then there are a couple of other chains out there I think that are doing this as

well, but they're mostly irrelevant chains or pretty much all irrelevant chains.

So yeah, you've got like a long list of other kind of heavily centralized monolithic L1's

that will cater to you if that's what you want out of this ecosystem.

So I don't understand why you'd still be in Ethereum if that's what you wanted.

And I've always said that.

It's like there's no shame in it.

There's nothing kind of like evil about it.

It's like you want to go work on something else that resonates more with your values

and what you care about.

Go do that.

And try to change Ethereum to suit your worldview because it's just not going to happen, right?

And that's like, game goes back to what I was saying before about disgruntled X employees

of the Ethereum ecosystem.

They just childish.

They just really can't get over the fact that Ethereum is not going to bend to their

will.

And honestly, I'm glad those people aren't in Ethereum because that's not what Ethereum

is about.

Like if you're trying to control Ethereum, if even if even you're trying to push something

that you think is best for Ethereum, but everyone else doesn't think it's best for

Ethereum, then by definition, you are not in Ethereum.

You're not someone who cares about Ethereum.

You are anti-a-theorem, like by very definition, because you're anti-a-theorem cares about

what Ethereum is being built to be.

So I'm glad those people are on the Ethereum ecosystem, like I'm just going to be honest

with that.

But anyway, you can read this post, I'll link in the YouTube description below for you

to do so.

All right.

So I covered this on either the last refill, the refill before with regards to adoption

of Max EB.

And just to refresh for you guys, Max EB is the EIP that went live a couple of upgrades

ago that basically allows you to consolidate your validator.

So instead of having only 32th per validator, you can have up to 2048th per validator.

Now there's a new dashboard here from Buddha on Dune Analytics that basically tracks this.

I showed a couple of other dashboards last time I covered this, but you can see here

what this currently looks like.

Obviously, trending in the right direction, but like not there yet by a long mile, we basically

want the gray part of this chart to essentially dwarf the orange part, but we're getting there.

And I think that towards the end of the year, this will look a lot different.

I've heard that a number of the bigger staking providers and node operators want to consolidate

and consolidate in a big way.

So I'm sure we're going to see this happen.

But yeah, this is just another dashboard for you guys to keep track of if you want to

only get an YouTube description below for you to do so.

All right.

So there was a bit of, I guess, drama.

This became like, you know what, a bit of drama is understanding this.

This became like the main talking point on crypto Twitter over the last few days.

And for those of you who haven't heard about this, there was a, just to summarize and give

the highest level summary I can here.

There was a user who did an order on cow swap over the, oh, sorry, on other via cow swap

over the weekend.

I think this happened like on the weekend or Friday or something like that.

And the order size was $50 million.

Now due to a bunch of unfortunate circumstances, this $50 million turned into, I think, $36,000

and a lot of different, I guess, like entities within the transaction pipeline of Ethereum

took the rest of that money.

And there was a breakdown here in this tweet, which essentially said that the user got $36,000

out of this order.

So they wanted to swap, I think they wanted to swap like, what was it?

Is this the C or something for $50 million worth of RV or something like that using, using

cow, sorry, using RV's front end, which routes through cow swap here.

But instead they got $36,000 worth of RV.

And the rest of the money went to, so $620,000 went to cow swap for their silver fee.

$9.9 million went to an Mav bot that background, that transaction, another $2.6 million went

to the same Mav bot for back running the $50 million transaction here.

So a separate transaction, I think, a $34.3 million fee went to Titan from the Mav bot.

So Titan is the number one block build on Ethereum, which includes $1.2 million to Lighto as

the block propose are, and $3.5 million in deck swap fees, plus residual, residual, smaller

RV transactions.

So that's where all the money went.

OK, so why did this happen?

Well, this happened because the user accidentally swapped the wrong tokens.

I believe they swapped the RV receipt token, or one of the receipt tokens from RV, or

attempted to swap it for RV here.

And by doing that, yeah, so sorry, they attempted to swap the A-Eath USDT.

So basically, this kind of receipt token from RV for RV, which there wasn't enough liquidity

for, sorry, for the receipt token of RV here, there wasn't enough liquidity for.

And essentially, the trade ended like this, $50 million, like there was just a ton of slippage

if you want to call it that.

But essentially, there wasn't enough liquidity for this trade.

So why did this trade still go ahead?

You may ask.

Like, why did this basically happen?

Well, there's still kind of, I guess, like post mortems coming out about this, the latest

one came out today, I believe.

But essentially, what happened, and I'm maybe getting some facts wrong here, guys, because

there's a lot that goes into this stuff.

But essentially, what happened was that when you're making a trade like this, the RV

front end will warn you and say, like doing this trade will result in X amount of slippage.

In this case, the RV front end told the user, hey, if you do this trade, you're going to

lose 99% of this to, I guess, I don't know if they actually use the word slippage on there,

but they basically told the user that you're going to lose 99% of your money if you do this

trade.

So the user clicked this, checked this box, and basically said, I'm okay with this.

Okay.

Well, first of all, like, why would you do that?

But I don't even know if we know who the user is yet who did that.

But like, first of all, like, that, to me, is user error.

And this is a debate that I was having in the Delegate Discord channel about this.

But to me, that's user error, the user should not have done that.

Okay.

But the user did that.

Okay.

So why wasn't there any other safeguards in place becomes the next question?

Like, why do the protocols even allow this to happen?

Like, people will argue and say, there is no reality where anyone would want to do this

trade.

Like, this trade makes absolutely no sense because you know I want to lose 99% of their money

because the thing is is that even if you were like incredibly bullish on a token, you

wanted to get into it really quickly to make that money back on the token, the token would

have to go like a thousand X, right, or something stupid like that.

So like, even meme coins don't do that, right?

So when it comes to, to that kind of thing, when it, you know, run through that logic,

you would make the argument that this order should not have been processed to begin with.

Like, Ave or ChaosWop should have just blocked this order altogether.

They should not have allowed this order to go through.

And that then brings up the debate of, okay, well, then where should they block this

order?

Should they block it at the front end or should they block it at the protocol level?

I think that they should always do it at the front end.

I'm very against doing anything at the protocol level in terms of blocks and stuff like

that.

But then the arguments made that like, okay, but in what reality would anyone want to

do a 99% slippage order on the protocol level?

And I sympathize with that.

Like, that's, that shouldn't be a thing, like no one's going to do that.

So then it becomes the question of, okay, where's the threshold here?

And I think that ChaosWop has, has introduced something called, no, so Ave introduced something

called AveShield, which is a feature that will automatically block swaps with a price impact

above 25%.

I believe that's on the front end.

I don't know if that's in the protocol.

I think it's on the front end because to do a protocol change would be, it would take

a lot longer.

I think this is actually live today.

So that's on the front end.

But again, like that, that's, you know, that's 25%, like that's, that's still pretty big.

But like I can understand why a user would maybe want to get out of a trade even with 25%

slippage because maybe it's a super volatile meme coin.

Those things can go down 30% in like an hour or less, right, or in one trade that these

things are very, very, very volatile, right?

So I can understand why a user would want to do that.

Like that's not as extreme as 99%.

But if it's at the front end, like I don't have an issue with it to be honest, because if

you really want to do that trade, you'll find another front end to do it on or you will

do it through the contract itself, like if you really want to do it, like you could do

it because you could ask, even if you don't know how to interact with contracts on Ethereum,

all you have to do is ask an AI how to do it, and they'll walk you through how to do it,

like because they know I've done it myself, right?

I'm not an expert on how to read, eat the scan, read smile contracts, but doing stuff manually

is pretty simple and pretty straightforward by asking AI, because I'll just give you a

step by step of how to do it.

Now, of course, you have to be careful with that too, because AI can be wrong.

So like there's that aspect to it as well, but then again, like the vast majority of

trades are never going to want to accept 25% slippage.

So I get that.

So Arbe has already put this into place, and the question then becomes like why didn't

they do this before?

Well, they just didn't, right?

Like regulations, as they say, are written in blood, right?

Like think about all the regulations for the airline industry.

They're all written in blood.

Like essentially a plane has to go down for some reason, and then we identify the reason

why the plane went down, and we're like, okay, well, let's introduce this regulation,

or this safety feature, or this and that extra kind of a safeguard there, so that we can

stop this from happening in the future.

That's just the way of the world, guys, like that's just the way things work.

And unfortunately, this user had to lose that much money for this to happen.

Now, I don't know what the end result of this is going to be, like, are these various

different entities going to return that money to the user and basically say, hey,

this wasn't fair, this is ridiculous, like, here's your money back.

We don't know, because I believe Titan actually sent this money to Coinbase, so Coinbase

will know who the operator is off Titanian, who the person in charge of it is here.

Maybe Coinbase gets involved and says, hey, guys, like, you know, this is your money,

you know, we're not going to, maybe they're not going to freeze the money or anything like

that, like, you made it fair and square, but hey, like, this is ridiculous.

Like, if you were a bank, you would return this back to your user, to the user as like

a good will thing.

So I don't know, like, I don't know what the solution is there.

Like, I actually don't have an opinion on whether they should return it or not.

Like, I think that there's just multiple kind of screw ups here that happened to use

off for clicking that box, just dumb.

Apparently, they had $50 million on a phone.

We don't know the details here.

Maybe the phone was only a signing device, like, if it was, then it's different, but if

they actually had $50 million on a mobile wallet, then that to me is really dumb to begin

with.

So this user doesn't seem to be very smart, but like, we don't know the full story.

So it's me just assuming things here.

And then, yeah, Castleop and Arve should probably just never have processed this trade to

begin with.

And they should have inbuilt controls for this.

But Arve does now on the front end, doesn't have at the protocol level.

I don't think it should be down to the protocol level.

But then Castleop can also enforce this outside of the protocol by enforcing it as part

of their kind of like sober market in their private mempool.

And actually on the mempool note as well, it seems like that the reason that Castleop

didn't protect the user here was because the transaction actually leaked out of the

private mempool into the public mempool for some reason.

I don't, that just came out before like a few hours ago, that news.

So I'm waiting for more analysis of that before kind of giving my giving more of a take

on that.

But yeah, that's what people have been, I guess like talking about over the last few

days and the summary of that.

I've probably gotten some things wrong.

You can come into the other way.

Discord channel.

There's a lot of discussion there.

But on that note, people have been talking about encrypted mempools again.

So there's this really great thread here from Julian who works at the, who works in

research at the Ethereum foundation.

And he starts off this thread by saying, if Ethereum needs an encrypted mempool, and

it needs it fast, it's not just about stopping sandwiching and cryptid mempools are how

Ethereum materials is on chain markets.

I just published a post on why Ethereum needs encrypted mempools and here are the core

arguments.

And you can go through these arguments yourself.

I think the number one argument that I, that he leads with is that private mempools

are brittle.

And every 40 seconds a user gets sandwich on Ethereum.

But it's more about the users that we are missing.

You cannot send the users through, or the user orders to an opaque and trusted network

of, I'm regulated into media areas with encrypted mempools they don't have to.

This is probably the strongest argument I've seen for in favor of encrypted mempools.

Because I remember I talked about this a few weeks ago and I was kind of on the fence

about it.

And I was kind of like, you know, you know, we don't need that that urgently because

like there's lots of private mempools and people just use private mempools anyway.

But like the strongest argument now for me is that like we've got clear evidence that

things leak from the private mempools into the public mempools anyway.

So if we can make it that even if there are leaks into the public mempool, it doesn't

actually favor anyone and the public mempool becomes like a credibly neutral common good,

then you would make the argument and people have made the argument that a lot of the

order flow would go back to the public mempool because it's encrypted.

And then because of that, everyone would be able to get like the same fair treatment.

And I vibed with that argument.

Now these are the arguments that have been made in the past and I wasn't entirely convinced

before, but I'm becoming more and more convinced over time.

And I do think this is something a theorem needs.

And it seems like we will get an encrypted mempool EIP as part of Hegelta.

It definitely seems like that's going to be maybe the EL headliner at this point, still

pretty far away.

But hey, definitely seems like it's going to be a thing.

And yeah, I'm definitely a lot more in favor of that as I was as opposed to what I was

like maybe a couple months ago, because I've learned a lot more about it.

I've started a lot more.

I've seen more arguments about it.

And this is really the beauty of the I guess like a theorem called development, called

protocol kind of process here is that someone puts out an idea, we all pick it apart.

We all give our opinions on it and that causes people to give better and better arguments

and defend their kind of EIP, so to speak, from all these different people coming in with

their opinions saying, you know, this is why I can't work, this is why I can't work.

And then eventually we get something that looks really good that most people are happy

with.

And then the ones who maybe aren't happy with it, they, you know, I mean, they can either

suggest something better or give them more feedback or eventually basically capitulating

so, okay, well, the vast majority of the ecosystem wants it, then that's what it is.

I remember there was a court of alpha working on death for a long time that was against

EIP 1559, but then towards the end of that whole kind of process, they ended up being

in favor of it because they studied it a lot more, they understood the arguments and

they said that, okay, well, this is a huge net upgrade for Ethereum, I'm now for this.

And that was actually a pretty big way, way to voice in the Ethereum ecosystem.

And his endorsement was essentially the last thing a lot of people needed to be like,

okay, well, a lot of people who were against it, to be like, okay, well, this makes sense

now, we're for it.

So in the end, EIP 1559 had like 95 plus percent of people in favor of it, there was

some holdout still, I think most of them were just the miners and miner adjacent kind

of companies, but eventually everyone was on board with it and that's just what happened

with these things.

Either eventually everyone gets on board or everyone isn't on board with it and the

EIP just never goes through, okay, it's in point EOF, right, that's one that was very

decisive.

And this is generally what happens if something is very decisive, sorry, divisive, not

decisive, something is very divisive, you know, it's splitting things 50-50, that EIP

is never going in.

So such thing is a 50-50 split on an EIP that makes it into the network.

You need, I would say, 80-90 percent of people in favor of an EIP for it to make it into

the network.

It's just not happening on a 50-50 split, right, it's just, there's way too many people

against it.

It's not a democracy, like Ethereum, quarter-element is not a democracy, guys, it is a,

it is basically like, it's not, it's, it's, it's kind of like this weird, there is a name

for it, but it's kind of this weird thing that's like an amalgamation of a bunch of different,

I guess governance mechanisms, but I think at the heart of it is that 90, 80, 90 percent

plus of the ecosystem of the stakeholders in the ecosystem need to be in favor of an EIP

or as it's just not going into the network.

So yeah, anyway, you can give this thread from Julianna Reed, I'll link it in the YouTube

description below for you to do so.

All right, last up here, I did mention this earlier, so BlackRock's staked ETH ETF is

now live.

I don't think there are any other staked ETFs live in the US, except maybe some really

small ones.

BlackRock is definitely the biggest by far, and had a pretty good launch here, you can

see James from Bloomberg said that the majority of the trading of the first day is done and

$15.5 million in trading volume for the BlackRock staked Ethereum ETF, very, very solid for a

day one ETF launch.

So yeah, I mean, it's out there now, guys, like I think you're going to see a lot of

inflows into this thing, even though the yields are kind of lower, I guess, these days,

but that's low relative for us.

I remember when the ETH staking yield was above 10%, but it was never going to last, like

as more ETFs get staked, the yield goes down for everyone, unless fees can kind of

catch up, you know, keep up with it, which just hasn't because it's just not, it's just

not going to happen for reasons of outline before I'm not going to rehash that here, but

I still think like two, three percent on, on ETH is very appealing, especially because

like if you're already owning ETH, then why wouldn't you stake it?

Now, of course, this brings up the questions around like staking centralization again,

like how much you staked ETHs, too much staked ETHs, so on and so forth.

But I've discussed that to death on the refuel.

So again, I'm not going to rehash that here, but monitoring the situation, right?

We're going to see what happens there.

I mean, ETH stake is going up again, I think if I bring up the staking dashboard here,

just quickly for you guys to see a hill, Dobby's infamous ETH staking dashboard, you can

see here that, you know, it's actually not, it's actually still down from where it was.

I mean, we peaked at like 39.2 million ETH that was in like January and we're down to 37.8

million.

So yeah, we're down quite a bit still here, guys.

And yeah, I'm actually glad I'm glad that is like, I don't think we need more ETH

staked, to be honest.

So I'm glad that's kind of what's going on.

And you can see actually over the past month, so it'll just be net outflows of ETH

stake.

Six months are still net inflows for the top 11 staking entities, but for pretty much

everyone over the last month, it's been outflows, which I'm not having too much of an issue

with, to be honest.

I think that's okay.

Obviously, like, we don't know where that ETH's going, you know, is it being sold?

Is it just being, you know, held as normal ETH?

Like, are they just over like getting only two to three percent on their ETH?

Who knows?

But, you know, price is going up right now, so I don't know, like, it doesn't, it doesn't

have to affect the price over the last, well, over the last three months it kind of has,

but then you could blame, like, it's price going down on a million different things.

Like, it's, you never really know here, guys, but yeah, that's, that's the kind of,

I snapshot here of, of the ETH staking as it is today, as I said, monitoring the situation,

going to keep tabs on that.

But I think for today, that's going to be it for all this episode.

So yeah, thank you for watching, be sure to subscribe to the channel you haven't yet,

give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the newsletter, do it in this good channel, and I'll catch

you all next week.

Thanks, everyone.