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- [00:00]
Anthony Sasano
Foreign.
- [00:05]
David
Is time for the bankless weekly roll up. Giving you this a day earlier because it is Thanksgiving week, at least for our U.S. listeners. And today I am thankful to be joined by Anthony Sasano. He is fresh back from DevConnect. I'm pretty sure he woke up bullish because it is morning time in Australia time. Anthony, how you doing man?
- [00:26]
Anthony Sasano
Good, good. And yeah, you're correct. I did wake up bullish today for sure. It's about 8am My time. So very excited. I mean especially seeing eth back over 3k. That's been. That was nice.
- [00:36]
David
You feeling okay about that? Like I was going to ask you, how are you feeling about these markets overall?
- [00:40]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, I mean obviously there's a lot of kind of uncertainty in the kind of markets, maybe not just crypto but also the wider markets. Everyone's kind of discussing this AI bubble, like is it going to pop? What's going on here? But for me, I tend to just focus on Ethereum most of the time and what ETH is doing. And honestly I think Ethereum is really well positioned right now to have a great 2026. We're firing on all cylinders.
- [01:04]
David
Oh my God. Okay, so since Anthony is here, we got to spend a lot of time talking about Ethereum today, including next week is the next Ethereum hard fork upgrade. It's called Fusaka. What's getting shipped? We'll talk about that. Also, what's the upgrade after the next upgrade? I want to hear Anthony's take on that too. And Justin Drake demonstrated Ethereum zkifying and this is all happening sooner than we think. Also a few other things. Tom Lee seems simply unbothered by these markets. He says we're still in a super cycle. I got a clip I want to play. Also Monad goes Mainnet, the CFTC clears polymarket for US users and it kind of seems like bitcoiners are waking up to the quantum threat to their network. There's a Nick Carter episode article I should say I want to get into. That's worth discussing. Before we get in to this episode though, we got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Raya. So Raya is a perps Dex. Perps trading has a problem right now. Either you get the speed of a centralized exchange or the security of a Dex, but oftentimes you can have both. Well, Raya is giving you both. They're closing this gap. They have a based roll up chain upcoming with ZK Proofs sub 1 millisecond trading, 0 trading fees. And this inherits 100% of Ethereum's uptime and security. I know Anthony's very much into this. This is kind of a new architecture based roll up that they are pioneering and they're already one of the top six dexes perps, Dexs out there. They've got an upcoming token. 80% of the fees from this token go to Raya and 20% are actually going to ETH buy back and burn ETH. So this is kind of deeply aligned with Ethereum economics. It's very exciting. Go check that out. There's a link in the show notes. OK Anthony, let's get to markets today. You phrased it as good news because eth is above 300. We've got bitcoin about 90k. Eth is above 3000 I should say. Oh my God, not 300. And we've got bitcoin about 90k. So that is up about 1% on the week. Eth up 4% on the week.
- [03:11]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah.
- [03:11]
David
How are you feeling about Ethereum right now and the markets? Is this like in your mind kind of end of cycle and we're entering a sustained bear period or do you think the concept of cycles is over? We've, we've not had a chance to talk about that.
- [03:26]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, I mean that's a big discussion in the crypto ecosystem kind of always right. Like this concept of a four year cycle and if you believe in the four year cycle then October was the top. Like you believe that we topped in kind of October and now we're going into a year long bear market until next October or Q4 next year. I've been pretty vocal for a while now that I don't think the four year cycle is a thing anymore. At least how it has been traditionally defined by the crypto ecosystem. I think cycles are always a thing. You know, markets working bull and bear and kind of like sideways cycles. So that's, that's always a thing. I don't think that's going to change. But the concept of a four year cycle is up for debate I think and it's something that we're seeing play out right now because obviously the prices came down a lot from their October highs. We had that massive wipeout on October 10th that took out a lot of people, you know, that were on leverage, especially with all the altcoins. But now the open question is are we going to go back up? Are we, you know, in a super cycle as Tom Lee has said, or is that it? Are we just going into a bear market for a year? My personal Take is that I think that the, as I said, like the four year cycle is not a thing anymore. So I think going from here on out it's very kind of difficult to know where we're going to go. But I think that ETH is really well positioned to capture any kind of, I guess like investable money that's coming into crypto, especially on the tradfi and macro side. And I think that Ethereum as an ecosystem is honestly like in the best place it's ever been. There is so much happening across so many different areas. And you know, I think Ethereum is leading where it matters most with stablecoins, with institutional onboarding, with DeFi. So if those things continue, which I think they will, I can't see a world where that doesn't actually play out in the price of ethics.
- [05:07]
David
Okay, but why no four year cycle? Has something changed? Because we've always gotten these four year cycles. Do you think that investor, like institutional investor flows have kind of changed the entire structure? The happening matters less. Why are four year cycles not applicable anymore?
- [05:24]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, so it depends on how you define this because there is actually disagreements around how to define this in crypto. Some people kind of measure four year cycles from top to top. So you know the cycle top of BTC at 125k, if that was the top right to, to the next top or from like 70k to 100, you know, 25k over, over cycle, over cycle. And some people will measure it from bottom to bottom. I think bottom to bottom is the one that traders like to measure it from. So that I guess like seems to be the canonical way of doing it. But then you have a lot of crypto natives who say, well the four year cycle is only a thing if we follow a defined pattern, pattern of BTC goes up, ETH goes up and then altcoins go up and then everything crashes and we go into a bear market.
- [06:05]
David
That's right.
- [06:06]
Anthony Sasano
We haven't seen that at all.
- [06:06]
David
No, it didn't happen this time. It's been weird.
- [06:08]
Anthony Sasano
No, no. And I think what we saw is we saw BTC go to all time high before the Haring, which has never happened before. And that's another thing people look at to you know, define the four year cycle by. We saw BTC like if you look at its price action on a, on a chart you can see it's behaved very differently to. It has in previous cycles. It's a lot less volatile actually compared to previous cycles. And it seems to be following like a step up Architecture where like it'll go sideways, step up, sideways, step up rather than like go up really, really quick and then come down, you know, just as quick kind of thing like a Christmas tree. That, that hasn't, hasn't happened really. And obviously we have new sets of buyers with ETF buyers with DATs and things like that, which has changed the landscape of things. But if, yeah, if you actually look at how, I guess like, if you want to call it a cycle from the 2022 bottom to today has played out. We, yeah, we didn't get an alt season as it's defined. Bitcoin dominance didn't really crater like it has in previous cycles. And all of the, I guess like speculative energy that was left went into meme coins. But that was a very quick in and out thing. A lot of people got, got wrecked on meme coins. And I think that retail investors just aren't really here anymore in crypto. They've gone elsewhere. So if you take all that together, I just don't think that like the four year cycle, no matter how you define it, has, has really played out at all at this time. And that's why I believe that it, it's kind of dead. And I think the last thing I'll say is that it's kind of a red herring as well because if you actually look at the liquidity cycle versus I guess like the crypto cycles, they have matched up historically where essentially when rates go lower, crypto goes up, you know, because there's more money in the system, more liquidity in the system and, and, and you know, vice versa there. But this time around we're actually, we've actually been pumping into an environment where like the rates are still very high relatively I should say, compared to where they were. And if we're going into an easing cycle now, because I saw yesterday the chances of a rate cut in December actually spiked up to like 80%. If we're going into an easing cycle, then how does you know if that, if that's how the four year cycles traditionally played out based on liquidity cycles, then it stands to reason that crypto should go up right during that along with, with other markets as well. So if you take that as I guess like the, you know, the truth or kind of the reality, then yeah, I just don't see how you can justify a four year cycle still being a thing.
- [08:26]
David
Somebody who agrees with you, Anthony, is Sir Tom Lee. Okay, this is the strategic ETH reserve reporting that bit mine added 200 million ETH to its balance sheet that is Tom Lee's a digital asset treasury holding company for Ethereum. So Now Bitmine owns 3% of total ETH supply. It's been incredible how fast Tom Lee has gotten to this. Actually somebody asked Tom in an interview about his Ethereum price predictions. He talks about the super cycle. I'm just going to play this clip. You've made a 60k call on ETH but right now the market seems to be thinking about things differently. We've seen it pull back eth, pull back under 3k. Personally I think it's a great entry point. Why do you think this disconnects for something that is so obvious to you? Pretty obvious to me. Why are we trading as we're trading right now with Ethereum?
- [09:13]
Tom Lee
Ethereum and Bitcoin are public tokens and so their price isn't going to be purely anchored on fundamentals. You know, they're going to be reflecting investors perceptions because both Bitcoin and Ethereum are not mature platforms. Their best utility and growth and innovation are in the years ahead. Right, so we're already, we're 10 years in, but there's more growth in the future. The percentage of market share of crypto of total assets is so small that we know that mathematically that's true. Whenever you're, when you have something that has a hyper growth on ramp and you're discounting the future, it's going to be very volatile. So does Ethereum's price going from 4,800 to 2,800. I mean that is a staggering decline. But that probably is a minor change in 2030 fundamentals that that is being priced and repriced by investors and that's why there's hyper volatility. It's one reason why Bit Mine ended up engaging Tom Demark as a strategic advisor because he is the king of sort of price discovery. You know, he is the father of systematic timing. And in our conversations one when he looks at Ethereum he sees what looks like engineered or systematic liquidation taking place. So there is someone that is.
- [10:34]
David
And.
- [10:34]
Tom Lee
In crypto we know it's, you know, market makers play a big role but there is someone that is probably capital constrained and is therefore bleeding or having to sell reflexively as price falls. That process is painful but in, in his sort of rough timing range his downside target, and you know we talked about this a few weeks ago, was 2500 for E. So I think we're so close to that it would be ideal actually for us to actually bleed to that level because then that that is creating what he calls a buy setup, you know, a bottom in prices for him is when the last seller has sold. So that stock, a stock or crypto no longer falls on bad news.
- [11:10]
David
I mean, so Anthony, he's talking about maybe someone was carried out on a stretcher on October 10th and some of that is unwinding as well. But overall he thinks Ethereum is still in its, its super cycle. What do you think about that idea that some of this is just Margin Call. Someone got out over their skis and this has caused kind of some of the cascade since October cascade down that we've seen?
- [11:34]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to it if, if people aren't aware that October 10th kind of crash was the worst if in altcoin history. Not so much for Ethan BTC, because they didn't go down as as much, but if you actually look at all the other charts out there, all the altcoin charts, within a, a period of like two hours, they went down an astonishing amount. I think some of them went down 90 plus percent, which is.
- [11:58]
David
Do you know Cosmos, you remember Adams? Yeah. They went to $0 at one point, like it just the entire order, but sent it to zero, man.
- [12:05]
Anthony Sasano
Yep. Yeah. And that's insane because that, that just basically shows that, you know, yeah, big people got kind of liquidated, but also the market makers who usually provide liquidity just disappeared. Like they just vanished for that period of time for one reason or another. And that's also led a lot of people to think that there was some funny business going on, especially with these kind of offshore exchanges like Binance, for example, which, I mean, I've been pretty vocal in the past about Binance, you know, being still being shady, I think even though they kind of obviously had that whole thing with the Department of Justice going after them, finding them, stuff like that. I think that a lot of these exchanges are still very much black boxes and they play games, various different games they may trade against their customers. I'm not saying that Binance does this, but other ones have actually been shown to do this. So if you're in that environment of like obviously hyper speculative, hyper volatile assets, coupled with the shenanigans going on, you know, coupled with the fact that this is a 247 market and it trains on weekends, it trades when most people are asleep. So there's more kind of, I guess like stuff that can go on there then. Yeah, it stands to reason that like some big players blew up on October 10th. They need to cover debts that they may have. And Ethan BTC are the most liquid, I guess assets by far. So if you have debts in other that you know, if you blew up on altcoins and you have debts now you have to pay, but you still have Ethan btc, you're probably going to sell those off to pay those debts because you, even if you've got like these altcoins, the liquidity there is just very, very small if you're a big player so you're not going to be able to sell those things. You, you may, I mean we've seen them decline too. So you may be selling those things but you won't get the same amount of money as you would for your Ethan btc. So I do agree that there's some kind of systematic stuff playing out. But yeah, I mean these, the, these markets are so big now that it's really hard to kind of pinpoint where that that is in the system. But you can see from the price action that it does seem like a very kind of. I guess, I guess the sell off seems very unorderly I guess you could say where if it feels like someone has been forced to sell a lot of these assets or someone's has been forced to sell a lot of these.
- [14:06]
David
Assets, some people are saying that to actually entities like Tom Lee bit mine, dats are to blame. Here's a, here's a tweet I read this is all over my timeline this week. DATs are terrible. They're bas turned decentralized pristine assets like Bitcoin and ether into VC bundled scams with overhang. Even worse for alts, there's another take from Rand Nooner. Ignore the source here, but basically his take was that the crash on October 10th can also be linked to a decision by the MCI Indice. This is the world's second biggest index company and of course kind of the, the free money print for microstrategy has always been well, if you can get included in some of these big stock equity indices like eventually S&P 500, then you become de facto a part of every investor's portfolio who buys an indice. Right. And so the MCI is kind of questioning whether these crypto DAT companies should be included in indices at all. There's another decision being made but one of those decisions was on October 10th to actually like, you know, not include some of these DAT companies at the time. Haseeb has a, has a counter take to all of this and he says it's actually wrong like blaming dats is kind of silly. They're not levered up. He says to the extent that DATs start doing buybacks, they're selling tokens they were originally buyers of in the first place. Right? Buying and later selling the same asset is nothing, it just undoes the original buy. This means that dats on a whole are not net selling pressure, it's net nothing. Even if they completely unwind, which they won't likely they stop once they return to 1x M nav and maybe return cash. You think there's any ticking time bombs here with some of these DATs or do you think this is flood?
- [15:49]
Anthony Sasano
I mean, I think we've seen DATs of assets other than Ethan BTC, which look kind of dodgy to me and they really do look like, I guess like some of these, I guess financially engineered products that only exist to enrich insiders. So I think there is an argument to be made there. I do kind of disagree with the CPR that like it's an. It's kind of a net zero kind of thing if that's buy and then sell. Because there's different liquidity at different times in the market, right? There may be lots of liquidity at one point in time and then way less liquidity at another point in time. So your buy and sell will have different impacts on the market. So I don't think it's net zero. I think that's a kind of a naive way to think about markets. And yeah, I don't agree with that. But like, I do agree with the thing that, you know, with these DATs, especially Ethan BTC ones, the ones that are selling, they're doing it so they can return to one XM Nav because they kind of have to do it. Like as a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to their investors to make sure the stock doesn't, you know, go down. Right. Like, and with these DAT companies, the only way the stock, you know, either stops going down or goes up is if they generate enough money, I guess, like, or I guess increase their ETH or BTC per share in order to get back there. And some of these things are also kind of like hunted as well. So there's like hunting the shorts or hunting the longs and playing manipulative games and stuff like that. But yeah, I think when, when these big crashes happen, everyone looks for a reason as well. And you can look at a million different reasons and try to explain it a million different ways, but you're never going to get to the source. You're never going to get to the truth because it's really hard in especially a 247 global market to kind of pinpoint one thing. There are a lot of things that kind of can come together and create this sorts of stuff. But I always find it funny how people will only look for a million different reasons when things are going down. But when things are going up, like it must be, you know, the market is right, the market, you know, is bullish, everything's fine. But no one really tends to look for reasons why things are going up. It's more that when it goes down. So when I see that I just think, okay, well it's humans being humans, they want reasons for, for things going down and that's fine. But yeah, I think if you, if you think too much about it, you end up going crazy because there's just too much going on. There's too many moving parts to a market. It's very hard to pinpoint the one thing there. But there is truth to some of the things that people say. I think I largely agree.
- [18:09]
David
I think this is a case of maybe narrative following price a little bit. There will be an unwind, but it's not going to be a severe unwind, I don't think. Anthony Next I want to pick your brain a little bit more on Ethereum because we've got a big upgrade that is happening next week. Fusaka is coming and we'll talk about the upgrade after that. Also a big milestone for Ethereum on ZK proving technology. Justin Drake has re executed Ethereum blocks without actually he's run an Ethereum validator without re executing all of the blocks he's run. Essentially a verify. This is part of the lean Ethereum roadmap. We'll talk about all that and more. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.
- [18:52]
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- [21:40]
David
All right, Anthony, next week, Fusaka, the upgrade goes live. I think that's December 3rd. I'm going to give you a few headlines of what this does. Maybe let's align it to the Ethereum Foundation's roadmap that they set out in 2025. So first scaling L1 33% more throughput on the layer one 60 million gas limit. In fact, I think we've already achieved this actually, so we'll talk about that. Number two, we're scaling blobs, so there's now a path to get 20x more capacity with some technology called Peer Das. That's a headliner. And number three, we have improved the user experience, including one feature that supports native pass keys. Okay, so you know your phone's ability to face ID sign an Ethereum transaction. Can we take those one by one? Because I think those are the main things, but you might have a few others to talk about. Let's start with scaling the L2 and what we're doing with blobs. So this is forkcast.org it's got the 12 EIPs that were included in this Ethereum upgrade. Let's talk about data availability and throughput and the current blob target. So I'm actually pulling up one of your tweets. This is average blob count per block. I think this is where we are now in terms of block capacity and blob capacity. What does peer DAs get us and what does the Fusaka upgrade get us in terms of L2 scalability?
- [23:14]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, yeah. So the headline of Fusaka is definitely Peer das, which is this massive scalability unlock for blobs. It essentially does, I guess, like you could call it a form of sharding on blobs where the 100% of the network doesn't need to hold 100% of the blobs. So the DAS stands for Data Availability sampling. So essentially 50% of the blobs only needs to be held by any one kind of node operator. And then you do some complex kind of stuff in the background that I'm definitely not technical enough to understand in order to make sure the data is available still. So it's a really cool technology. It allows for, obviously, as I said, greater scalability, but it's being rolled out gradually. So Peer DAS goes live with Fusaka on December 3rd. It's in the network, it's there. But when we're talking about the actual kind of blob increases. So going from the current target of six blobs per block to something higher than that, that actually kicks in in what's called blob parameter only forks. So these are things that are baked in with, with Fusaka that basically I guess increase the number of blobs we have on the network gradually so that we can make sure that we aren't, I guess like overloading the network, which is always obviously a risk when doing these kind of upgrades. So the first blob parameter only or BPO fork goes live a week later on December 9th. So this kicks in automatically. There's no need for node operators to upgrade their software or anything. This is already built into the Fusaka upgrade and this will increase the blob target from 6 to 10. So almost a 2x increase in the amount of capacity for blobs on the network, which for those of you who don't know, layer twos or roll ups on Ethereum, use blobs. And so if there's more capacity for blobs, they have more capacity for scale and keeping their fees cheap as well. And then the second BPO fork that's scheduled will go live on January 7, which increases the blob target from 10 to 14 so over a TW increase in the span of a, of a month here after Fusaka goes live.
- [25:08]
David
Now, is it right to call those forks? You're calling these forks. But they do happen in the background. They're not like big version upgrades, right? And like when are they triggered?
- [25:18]
Anthony Sasano
I mean, they do change the underlying protocol kind of code. So technically they are a fork. Like I may be wrong on this because the terminology can sometimes get confusing, but they do change a parameter that is in the, you know, I guess like protocol code. So I think it would be accurate to call them a fork. But as I said, it's already built into the Fusaka client, so node operators do not need to upgrade their software. Again, they've already done it for Fusaka, so that's fine. This is actually a relatively new thing on the network, a new concept of doing this. And it was done because the core developers and researchers agreed that it'd be the safest way to, to upgrade the blobs, because we don't want to overload the network. Because if, you know, peer dash has a theoretical, I guess, limit, at least the current iteration of P, which is called one dimensional P has a theoretical limit of I think 72 blobs per block. So if you were. Yeah, if we were to go from straight from 6 to 72, the network would definitely become unstable. We would lose a bunch of node operators because it's just a lot of load to put on the network. So we want to gradually go up from here and there will be more BPO forks I think, like scheduled or at least put into the network in 2026, I believe so. So, yeah, we're doing it kind of gradually here. But these are pretty substantial upgrades, especially because, as you can see from my screenshot, we're almost pretty much at the current target of 6 or pretty much.
- [26:37]
David
Yeah, yeah. So we've consumed. Because we just increased it. Did we just doubled it, right, earlier this year?
- [26:43]
Anthony Sasano
Yep. Yeah, we went from three to six in. In Petra, I believe. Yeah, it was. I think it was three to six.
- [26:49]
David
That was in April.
- [26:50]
Anthony Sasano
Yep, it was in April. So we've basically got straight back up there, which is, which is kind of cool. And it's actually funny, the timing of this too. Like we've gotten to the, you know, the capacity here, but now we have Fusaka going live with. With the BPO forks, which have come just in time. So. So good timing, I think.
- [27:06]
David
Yeah. Okay. And is this going to get us. Do. Do you know what this is going to get us in terms of block blob count per block in 2026 with all of these BPOs. So we're going to get to 10 and then the next upgrade, January 7th or so, that gets us another increase and then we can expect to see some steady increases next year. You said this could go all the way to 72 per block. Is that 72 going to happen next year or is it more spaced out?
- [27:38]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell. I think it definitely relies on a lot of the data that we'll get once we do these things. So once we go to 10 and then 14, we'll be able to see if the network has kind of degraded at all or if there's too much load on the network and then we can kind of schedule the other ones from there. So I do think it's going to be more of like a touch and go sort of thing rather than a. We know that we can just do it every month, so let's just do it every month because we don't know that we have to, you know, essentially test the waters, especially on, you know, Mainnet, where we have 100% uptime. And we want to preserve that. There's this one way of doing that, because I do think there is a Pretty big risk if we were to go to straight to 72 that the network would potentially go offline or something would happen like that because it's just too much load. And also the fact that we're increasing the gas limit as well, which puts even more load on the network. Taking that all together, we definitely need to be safe here.
- [28:32]
David
And just to put some context out there, I was reading Coinbase, a base blog post about how Fusaka essentially allows them to scale and they have some other things that they're optimizing within their stack. But in the first half of next year they expect to get to around 10,000 transactions per second just on base. And so this puts them in, you know, the 500 mega gas like range. And part of that is due to these, you know, the additional data availability that Ethereum is providing. So it's really taking off the limiters for L2s. It's like a super stimulus to L2 block space and it's just going to increase from here because Peer dash is the thing that unleashes this and makes it all scaling. This is not full dank sharding though yet, is it?
- [29:19]
Anthony Sasano
No, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, this is one dimensional peer das. You know, I think, you know, Peer Dust can be upgraded. I don't think it's going to happen for a while though. I would caution against like I guess looking forward to this anytime soon. But it will eventually happen, I think, where we kind of upgrade Peer Dust into multidimensional Peer Dust. In my understanding that would give us an even greater sense of scale. I think hundreds of blobs per block or that's what I guess Justin Drake has spoken about in the past. But yeah, I think it's kind of hard to tell like on timelines there because it does depend on observing the network over time and seeing how much it can handle. But then when we unlock zk, well, it may not apply to blobs, it applies to the rest of the network and then we can just like trade off all of the savings with ZK on the execution layer side, apply that to consensus layer, which is where blobs are, and just go crazy with it.
- [30:11]
David
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, this is definitely. We're entering Ethereum scaling season. There's actually another EIP that was bundled in here that, that isn't talked about as much, but there's a different pricing structure that's being implemented for blobs as well. I mean some people are calling this a fair, fair pricing structure. This is EIP7918 and it adds a reserve price floor for blob fees. My takeaway for this is L2s are now are going to be giving more to ETH holders by burning eth in exchange, of course they're getting this super stimulus of additional supply. But now there is going to be some sort of minimum fee for L2s and kind of the fee structure scales with the execution layer fees as well. So I don't think we'll expect immediate burn. Right. But it should be more a burn than previously. I'm actually not sure how to model this other than to look at eth burnt from L2s over time and to see how this is impacted. But there's some sort of minimum fair pricing scheme here. Do you have anything to add to that?
- [31:13]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, I mean this is something that the community has asked for for a while. Right now blobs are pretty much free, which I personally don't have an issue with because I look at blobs as a loss leader for Ethereum growth where essentially we're subsidizing this thing, you know, with blobs so that we can keep bringing more and more L2s and L2 capacity to the network, which captures more and more users, which is good for Ethereum overall. I also don't think that fear of renew is a huge value driver for eat the asset, I think. Value. But yeah, with this ERP that you mentioned, essentially what it does is it makes the Blob base fee more, more, I guess like smoothed out and reactive and ties it to the execution layer so that we don't have these I guess like periods of time where it takes a long time for the base fee to actually increase when blobs are in demand. So that, yeah, we drive more value back to ETH holders obviously via the burn and also stakers via rewards. But I don't expect this to be a large kind of, I guess amount of revenue for, for quite a while because of the fact that as I said, blobs are being positioned as this loss leader for the network, which means that we're going to subsidize them for. For quite a while, I think.
- [32:22]
David
I agree. Okay, so that's scaling layer twos. Let's talk about scaling the layer one. So Ethereum L1 gas limit is now 60 million. That's already happened and it was also scheduled to happen at, at Fusaka. Can you explain how this works?
- [32:38]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, so the gas limit can actually go up or down outside of a hard fork. So what validators can do what node operators can do is they can set a gas limit manually on their kind of software to increase or decrease it. We've seen this happen this year two times already. So essentially we went from 30 to 36 million gas limit at the start of the year. That was done without a hard fork. That was just not operators voting it up. And then we went from 36 to 45 million again, same thing. Now we've gone to 60 million before Fusaka went live for I guess like it's a bit of a different reason here but with Fusaka the clients have defaulted to 60 million. So the clients, the software can actually have a default set and it has to have a default set. You can override that default yourself as I said, with that manual change. But because the default is now 60 million, everyone who's upgrading their clients to the Fusaka clients in ahead of the upgrade on December 3rd is now at 60 million automatically. And that's why we've seen increase to 60 million before Fusaka, because yes, you can manually change it, but a lot of people don't do that. It's kind of a social coordination thing. It's. It's difficult to do. But because the default is at 60 million, we're there now. So yeah, it doesn't require a hard fork to do this. And yeah, we reached this yesterday. 60, 60 million. Which is for those of you who may not know the I guess context around this. The gas limit is Ethereum's block size. So you could say that we've effectively increased the block size of Ethereum by 2x this year from 30 to 60 million which has doubled the capacity of the network. So we've scaled the network 2x this year on the, I guess L1 side and then L2s we scaled by more than 2.2x but when the first BPO fork goes live on December 9th. So we've done a huge bit of scaling of the, of the network this year on both L1 and L2, which has been awesome to see.
- [34:23]
David
That's right. And I don't know if you've looked at transaction fees on the L1, but I've never seen them this cheap. I mean it's been a long time since I've seen this cheap. So. So users are feeling that already. And okay, so we have done a 2x this year. We can also further increase that. You've got this in the second half of your tweet onwards to even Greater increases in 2026. Let's aim for at least 3x to 180. Maybe translating some of this, Anthony, to TPS would be helpful. Transactions per second would be helpful too. I don't know if we're, you know, with 60 million, we're about 30 to 40 transactions per second. Really depends on the complexity of the transaction. But how do we get another 3x on that next year? Is that through these gas increases from the validators or like, is there a path to that that you've seen?
- [35:11]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah. So I think for me, I personally am not a huge fan of like measuring things in tps because I think when you look at it from a user perspective, all that really matters to them is cheap fees and fast transactions. Right. I think that if you, as you mentioned earlier, L1 fees have really never been this cheap and I guess like on a sustainable way except when Ethereum first came out. Right. So, you know, it's definitely like when.
- [35:35]
David
I had no users.
- [35:36]
Anthony Sasano
Exactly, exactly. So have a lot more users, a lot more activity, and the fees just keep coming down because we keep doing these, I guess, gas limit increases while also I guess like offloading some of the load to the L2s as well. Right. Rather than on. On L1 here. So I think that that's how I generally view it. And as you mentioned, depending on the complexity of the transactions, we get different TPS numbers. Like if every transaction was just an ETH transfer, the TPS would be into the hundreds. Right. Whereas if every transaction is a really complex defi transaction, then it would be like maybe 10 TPS or something. Just because different transactions use different level, different amounts of gas on the network, that's how we meter things. So in terms of increasing this next year, so the general kind of consensus that's been set from the core developers and researchers is that they want to aim for at least a 3x increase in the gas limit for the next couple of years and maybe the next three years, because then it becomes like the ZK era from there because that stuff's moving so quickly. So, yeah, the goal is to get to at least 180 million next year. Now I've seen 5x thrown around as well. Some cool researchers are pretty comfortable with going to 5x next year. And there's a lot of moving parts happening here to make this a reality because the way I think the Tyler tweeted about this today as well, the way to look at this is that we can actually do things on the protocol level to do what's called repricing of different OP codes. So essentially what we can do is we can make it more expensive to do certain things and, and I guess cheaper to do other things, which I, yeah, I've tweeted about here with regards to an EIP that'll probably go into Glamsterdam. So for example, you've got the tweet up. We can lower the cost of a basic ETH transfer from 21,000 gas to 6,000 gas, which is a over 70% cost reduction while keeping the gas limit the same. Right. But the thing is, is that when we do these reductions and when we increase the cost of other things, we can actually increase the gas limit. So we're basically trading efficiencies here, which increases the overall scale of the network.
- [37:36]
David
And this is your proposal, right? To actually decrease the gas fee down from 21,000 to 6,000 gas for ETH transfers and does that effectively basically subsidize ether movement? You know, is it, is it a boon to ether the asset? Is that why you're proposing this?
- [37:51]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah. So I mean, I wouldn't say I'm the proposer of this. I am a co author because Ben Adams, who is the champion of this EIP now has been talking about this and proposed it for Glamsterdam, I believe. But this EIP is old. It's like four or five years old. You can see when it was created, 2020. Okay, so this is, this is an old EIP. But the, the reason why I'm a co author on this is because I spoke a lot about doing this on the, on my own show and Ben is a, Ben Adams is a core developer. He works at nethermind. He listened to my show a lot and was inspired by it to bring this back. And the reasoning at least I guess there's two major reasons why I think this should be done is, is one, it is the only decentralized asset on Ethereum. It is the best asset on Ethereum. So we should treat it that way. We should treat it as a first class citizen. And yes, we should make it cheap to transfer ETH on the network, which, which is a boon to everyone because everyone uses Ethernet work, whether it's to pay for gas fees, use it as collateral, staking, whatever it is. We use eth, you know, we want to use ether's money, we want to promote that. And the second reason is because we don't want something else replacing it, right? Like, like stablecoins or LSTs even, which are ERC20 tokens. We want ETH to remain that premier money, that premier asset on Ethereum. So, but we can do this in various different ways, but I thought this was just like a really easy way to do it.
- [39:10]
David
I love it.
- [39:11]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah. And, and, and from my, from my understanding this is actually something that's going to go into Glamsterdam, which upgrade happening maybe like, you know, late Q2, early Q3 next year is a rough estimate. So yeah, it seems like this is actually going to make it into the network, which is really cool.
- [39:26]
David
So you think it's realistic to 3x gas limit again next year?
- [39:30]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah. You think that's the floor? To be honest, I think that's minimum. I think we can go higher than that. Yeah.
- [39:35]
David
This is very, very, very bullish, Anthony. Okay, so let's talk about maybe the next Ethereum hard fork. And Forkast does a great job of talking about this. This is called Amsterdam. I just want to say, incredibly impressive that Ethos shipped two major hard forks in 2025. This year we're starting to get some velocity for that. There's no date for the 2026 hard fork. That would be the one after Fusaka. This is the next one. There are some candidate headliner eips. One is epbs, this is proposer builder separation. It's really getting enshrined. We've done episodes on this. The other is block level access, it's called Balance. And a third is like a maybe, it seems like right now, which is Fossil, which would really improve Ethereum's censorship resistance attributes. My take is I think EP and BAL get in their block level access and this is going to. I mean we don't have time to probably get into what specifically these things are doing. But this is also going to allow us to increase block size as well on the layer one particularly block level access does some parallel transaction processing that will just free up some resources for us to be able to do that. What's your take on Glamsterdam and when do you think that that happens?
- [40:53]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah. So I would say you mentioned we've done two upgrades this year with Petra in April and now for Saka happening in December. I would say that next year I think we're only going to do Glamsterdam just because of the fact that Glamsterdam alone is a huge upgrade and it's going to take time for this stuff to be built out tested. EPBS is a very substantial upgrade on the network. I, I think it's very complex. I think that there is a lot of moving parts to it and there is still a lot of contention around it. I agree with you that I think EPMs and, and bows will be the headliners of Glamsterdam. They'll be the two major EIPs that go in. I think Fossil will end up in the fork after Glamsterdam, which is currently called H Star. It doesn't have a proper name yet, but that will probably happen in 2027, maybe early 2027. But yeah, if I had to guess as like a really rough estimate on Glamsterdam, I would say late Q2, early Q3, but that's just my own personal view on this. It's still too early to tell on timelines, but yeah, I think EPBS is, is a huge upgrade for the network. I think that everyone kind of seems to want it, but there are, there is contention around how to do certain things within it. I think the biggest contention is around how to do trustless payments as part of epbs. If, if that like gets resolved then we should get Glamsterdam earlier. But if that takes longer to, to, you know, get get resolved, it'll probably happen later. And then bowels, as you mentioned, does this kind of paralyzation of, of transactions on the network, which does kind of afford us more, more scalability here. But I, I do want to say that even though we're only getting one upgrade with, with, with Glamsterdam next year, likely to only get one major upgrade, we still have the gas limit increases that are going to be happening outside of these upgrades. As I said, validators convert clients can release new versions and just have the default set to whatever is agreed upon. And then we also have the BPO forks, so we do have one on January 7th. But as I mentioned, we are probably going to get others throughout the year to increase blobs. So there's still stuff happening here, not to mention all of the stuff that's happening on the ZK side, which is just even crazier.
- [42:54]
David
But yeah, so you want to talk about that next? I mean, let's talk so something really cool that happened. So Justin Drake came on Bankless a couple weeks ago, talked about Lean Ethereum and one of the things he was going to do by Eth Proof Day, which happened I believe earlier, earlier this week or maybe last week. Late last week.
- [43:13]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, it was on, it was on Saturday at DevConnect. Yep.
- [43:16]
David
Okay. So he was going to run validators, I should call them maybe verifiers that would finalize blocks without re executing the transaction. So essentially using ZK magic to verify blocks instead of, you know, re executing everything. And of course this is going to unlock an even faster scalability path for the L1. Justin Drakes thinks we can get this to a hundred X, even a thousand X L1. Like I'll convert this to TPS just for some listeners. 10,000 transactions per second or one giggas per second. So he did it, he actually did it and he did this from his home. Pretty incredible. I think a massive milestone and it seems like ETH proving, ZK proving is just like happening faster than everyone anticipated, particularly at the beginning of this year and certainly three years ago. Do you think this is a big milestone for Ethereum?
- [44:15]
Anthony Sasano
I think, and I maybe caution myself here, but I will say I think this is one of the biggest milestones in Ethereum's history. What Justin has achieved here in such a short period of time. But not just him of course, all the teams working on this. So he tweeted out and he said that we can now prove Mainnet ethereum blocks with two 50, 90 GPUs. Now I want to put some context around this. Now. 250 90s obviously is not, you know, cheap. It's, it's still quite expensive to do this. You know, they're high end GPUs. They, they do cost a lot of money. But I don't think people realize that just a few months ago it took order like an order of magnitude more GPUs than this. It took like 32 or 64 GPU clusters to do this, which is obviously much more expensive. Now fast forward to today. We're doing it on two 50 90s which as I said, like it's very hard for me to contextualize this for people who may not know the history, but that is honestly an insane improvement. So insane that I doubt even Justin Drake saw how far things were going to improve.
- [45:16]
David
No, I don't think he did.
- [45:17]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, yeah. So I think that if you fast forward another few months, we could be down to 1:5090 or even weaker GPU like a 5080 or a 5070 on you know, a home PC to, to, to verify these things. A couple of years ago if you had told someone that this was going to happen this quickly, they would have called you utterly insane and you would have been laughed out of the industry. That's how crazy it was because of the fact that it was so expensive to do it back then. And now we're at this point where it's not. And what Justin Drake actually showed in his demo was that he could do this on the network, no hard fork, nothing without using an execution layer client. So he owns crazy consensus layer clients to do this. And yeah, it's a reality. So I think when you fast forward out the next two, three years of Ethereum, you like we actually, it's crazy how like we've been stuck at, you know, 10, 20, 30 TPS for years and within the next two to three years it is actually not far fetched to say that on L1 we can get to 10,000 plus TPS. Like, I think that's a reality.
- [46:20]
David
Yeah, that's wild. Also this, this is a take that goes dovetails with what you were just saying is we can increase gas limits in the way that you were saying. Also we'll have more full nodes out there. So this is return of the cult of the full node. This is from Vitalik's keynote at DevConnect. And it's basically the idea that more people can run full nodes from home because they're just verifying blocks rather than re executing all of them. And so maybe we have 15,000 or so full nodes out in the wild out there. It's hard to find reliable estimates. We could 10x that we could have 150,000. This is the take. If you don't have tens of thousands, ideally hundreds of thousands of full nodes around the world, you don't have a world computer. You have a computer waiting to be captured. And Ethereum's path is really hundreds of thousands a full nodes. And it can do this because of ZK proving ZK EVM technology. Very exciting.
- [47:19]
Anthony Sasano
Yep. Yeah, exactly. And the dream that Vitalik has spoken about for a long time is being able to run a full node or even a validator on a smartphone. Right. Or like something that is, you know, necessarily has the power but is very constrained in terms of like bandwidth and, and other kind of things like that. So yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy. Like it's a crazy next couple of years in Ethereum, that's for sure.
- [47:41]
David
Okay. There's so much more we could talk about, including Ethereum interoperability layer. I haven't had a chance to fully dive into that, but that's coming potentially in 2026. Also maybe a little further out there, the idea of native rollups. But you were at devconnect yourself. So what was the most exciting thing that happened there, in your opinion, Anthony, what was your big takeaway?
- [48:04]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, there was a lot of things that happened at DevConnect. A lot of different tracks from, you know, DeFi to L1, scaling to L2 scaling I would say that if I had to kind of pinpoint where a lot of the energy was focused, I think it was on the EF itself and how the EF has reinvented itself this year in order to be a much more consumer facing organization, I should say like, or a user facing organization where historically the EF had been quite closed off, quite kind of tight, you know, tight knit like amongst itself and you had to really be in the weeds to know what the EF was doing. But with this new ef, since Xiaowei and Tomas took over as the new co executive directors, they're a lot more forward facing with everyone. And I saw the EF like obviously DevConnect is an EF conference, but I saw EF presence everywhere, across everything in a way that I haven't seen before, in a really loud way. And the Ethereum foundation members are really proud to basically show off what they're working on. I'm really proud to be part of the community. They're listening to user feedback, they're working on things that, that people actually want. So that was the main thing that I saw. But definitely the biggest thing that a lot of people were talking about was the ZK stuff, not just from a scaling perspective, but also from a privacy perspective. I know that Aztec's been in the headlines recently because they're doing their token sale right now. They're doing a private L2 based on this, the ZK technology. But also institutions demand privacy as well and I think ZK applies to them in a really big way because of that. So yeah, I would say the main theme is definitely the ef just seeing the reinvented EF on full display. But yeah, scaling is, is. It was a huge theme as well. And Defi Defi was everywhere at DevConnect too, which was really great to see.
- [49:50]
David
Next year, Devcon in India Mumbai, India so the fourth quarter of 2026 and that was announced as well. Anthony, we've got a few more things to talk about, including Monad launched this week, so we'll talk about that. Also quantum computers and Bitcoin. What could go wrong? We'll discuss all that more, but before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
- [50:13]
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- [51:54]
David
A high performance layer 1/ parallel EVM called Monad. It launched this week. I did an episode with Keone late last week. I've recorded it, I believe it came out this week and what what they basically done is they've re engineered the EVM and consensus layer from the ground up and really focused on I guess taking all of the engineering bottlenecks out of it. And so that is what has launched monad. The token price is I guess doing fairly well. You know 4.6 billion on that was really interesting and striking to me was just the departure in path. So Monad is really scaling with kind of like this this engineering type focus re architecting the EVM and consensus Layer not scaling in the way Ethereum is via zk. But it does have a, a reasonably low hardware footprint. Not going to be as low as kind of a ZK EVM and Justin Drake setup, but that's the way they're scaling. Do you have any, any takes on on Monad? Of course it has number of competitors out there. There's a lot of high transaction throughput execution chains out there. And you could point to Solana, you even point to something like Tempo, you could point to L1s like mega eth and Rise. What's your overall take on Monad?
- [53:14]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, I think I have a general take. Maybe not so much on Monad, but like on these chains that are coming out now in 2025. I think when you talk about scale and high performance, that's like table stakes at this point. Right. So we already have a lot of high performance chains, a lot of chains that offer cheap fees and fast transactions to users. So if you're bringing out another1 In 2025, I think your differentiator isn't scale anymore. Like no one's kind of going to a chain because you have more scale than another chain now. Because honestly, if you're on an L2 like base or Arbitrum, the fees are already extremely cheap and it's already fast to do transactions, only getting faster.
- [53:51]
David
I mean, we didn't Even talk about L2s like base and Arbitrum. I mean next year they're going to at least 10x, maybe more.
- [53:56]
Anthony Sasano
Exactly, exactly. And then there are obviously other L1 ecosystems like Solana as well, that, that have been, you know, cheap and fast for a while now. So if you're bringing out a new chain, whether it's an L1 or an L2 in 2025, you obviously default, have to be scalable. Like that's table stakes. You know, if you're not, then you're just not going to be in the game. But then I think if you want to grow as an ecosystem, you have to be differentiated from the other chains. So if you just release another chain, another EVM chain that is just kind of fast and scalable. Well, does that actually bring new applications to the ecosystem? Like, does it enable new applications that haven't been able to be built before? Is it doing something different? Does your ecosystem have a reason to grow and exist? Do people have a reason to bring money there? That's how I kind of think of it these days. I don't really think of it as kind of L1, L2, whatever. It's more about the fact that like, why are you creating this thing? Is it actually doing something different? And I think Monad has been in development for a very long time now. I think like four years or something. So they obviously started developing it when this wasn't the case. The case was we need faster and cheaper chains. But yeah, in 2025 we already have plenty of fast and cheap chains. So I'm going to be curious to see how Monad does in terms of growing their ecosystem. But also they have competition too. Like Mega Eth is launching soon, as you mentioned, as an L2. Rise is launching as an L2. And these are EVM chains. Right. So they're essentially the same thing as Monad. But as I said, I think the winning chains are going to be the ones that build up their ecosystem in some way and have a reason for people to go there. Because right now I have no reason to go to Monad instead of staying on, you know, base or arbitrum in terms of like fees and scalability and apps that I want to use. So again, like, why would someone else go there? Like that's, that's always the open question. And it's not just with Monad, it's with everything. Every kind of chain that's launching from here on out, I believe.
- [55:44]
David
Yeah, I agree. One of Monad's secret sauces though is it's trying to actually have nodes that can run from home. But one of the takes I have, and you know, I'm not sure what you think about this, but basically they could run into a latency problem. So they're launching with 400 millisecond latency and there are some kind of like high frequency trading types of pressures that start to build up when you're going to that low latency. I mean Vitalik has talked about you play the HFT game and you kind of lose your soul. That's going to be something that's interesting to watch because I've been talking to some validators that run kind of, you know, ETF services, from Ethereum validator services to Solana and others. And some of the high throughput low latency chains have a tendency to co locate and centralize. Right. So a whole bunch of the Solana network, let's say like the top 20 validators, runs in a data center in Amsterdam. Right. Just because of reasons. And when you're co located you can have certain advantages and that's something to watch out for is it's not just about running nodes, it's the entire Block production supply chain that can co locate and centralize and be a vector there. So I'm going to be interested to see how that plays out as well. The CFTC purportedly is allowing Poly Market. They have approved Poly Market for us registered brokers coming to a trading platform near you. So I thought this meant I could go to polymarket Anthony and start using this as a US user I guess in Australia you don't get the geoblock, do you? It's fine to use polymarket in Australia.
- [57:25]
Anthony Sasano
I'm not sure because it's changing all the time. I think that it was fine and then it wasn't and then maybe it's fine again. Unfortunately these things just tend to change based on I guess some new regulation or something like that. But as far as I know I can still access it. But yeah, it might have changed again, I don't know.
- [57:45]
David
So what is being allowed with the CFTC just approved is for Poly Markets to be able to be displayed through brokerages. So a brokerage account like Charles Schwab or Fidelity or something like that is now going to be able to list Poly Market markets. So you won't necessarily be able to go to Polymarket as a, as a US user and use it directly but you might be able to use it through like E Trade in the future. And certainly this opens the path to Robinhood, this opens the path to Coinbase and crypto native exchanges to list this. So this is Shane saying much props this the CEO of polymarket. Much props to our legal and US ops team. This process has historically taken years. It took us four months. Late nights, early days. This admin and commission are built different. The pace, thoroughfeedback on applications, working through the weekends, unprecedented. He says bravo to one of the commissioners of the CFTC. A complete 180 from the regulatory environment that we saw last year where Shane was basically FBI rated and getting arrested for Poly Market. So that is good progress on an app built on crypto that has scaled to mainstream.
- [59:00]
Anthony Sasano
Yep, definitely. I think people forget how bad it was under Gensler and I, I don't think people realize how good we have it now. Hopefully it remains this good and keeps getting better. But yeah, it's, it's unfortunate that it's become even more political now. Crypto I think, I think the Democrats have just dug in their heels and still really hate crypto. Obviously the Republicans have embraced it but there are some stuff going on there with like the scams and the Griffs and, and stuff like that too. So I Hate how political it is because like the worst case scenario is if, you know, the Democrats come back into power and start being on an anti crypto crusade because they don't like Trump or something.
- [59:39]
David
It feels like there's going to be a backlash though, right? Yeah. Doesn't it feel that way?
- [59:42]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, but I guess the saving grace is that if we can get legislation kind of in, then it's really hard to reverse that. So at least we get that win. But yeah, I feel like for the next few years like we have it good now, but it's still going to be a battleground in the US in particular around this because it's so like politically charged now.
- [60:00]
David
I think Quantum has been back in the focus a little bit more. There's been some headlines, but I'm starting to see some notable Bitcoiners actually wake up to the quantum threat to Bitcoin. Anthony, I'm sure you haven't read this yet. You just woke up. Nick Carter posted it. It was his second post on Bitcoin and the quantum problem. This is part two and it's like a 14,000 word essay. I had a chance to actually read it this morning and he makes a pretty compelling argument actually that the quantum problem is a massive problem for Bitcoin and it could happen sooner than anyone expects. He says as early as 2030, 2032. Nick Carter I think is an. He's very talented at going deep and researching kind of thorny technical issues and his research is all here in the article. But let me give you the high level summary. The problem for Bitcoin is quantum can basically break its signatures. And so the worst case scenario, if Bitcoin does not upgrade its cryptography to quantum secure cryptography, up to 1/3 of all bitcoin supply could be yoinked by a quantum computing attacker. That's like 6 million to 7 million bitcoin or something like that. That's called a long range attack. There's also the possibility of short range attacks. If you have a sophisticated enough quantum computer where every transaction you submit on Bitcoin, you know that 10 minute or so lag from it getting fully confirmed, you could be at risk of losing your bitcoin during that 10 minute transaction. So that's like worst case scenario. And that sounds existential to me. You know, third of all, Bitcoin is a big problem. That's if they do nothing, if they don't upgrade it, if they are able to get their shit together and actually upgrade all of the cryptography to quantum resistant Cryptography, which to be clear, there's no real plan for right now. But if they are able to do this, there is a path to doing this. It still means almost 1.7 to 2 million bitcoin. Satoshi's bitcoin that essentially has never been touched, that would still be susceptible for a quantum attack. And that's the best case scenario. You watch through this article and he gives 10 reasons that quantum timelines have actually gotten shorter. And a lot of this progress has happened in the last 12 months. It seems like it's just a scaling problem at this point. So error correction has been a big issue for Quantum. Right? The difference between physical qubits and logical qubits. And you know, there's a lot of technical complexity here, but we figured out some of the error correction around this. Also, funding has massively increased, both privately and then it seems like we're at the beginning of a kind of a US vs China AI type race towards Quantum. So all of that could further accelerate the timeline. In other words, like 2030 is actually possible for Quantum and that could pose a big threat to Bitcoin. Now, I don't want to throw a fud. I mean, there is a path where they could correct for this, but I feel like bitcoiners are starting maybe slowly to wake up to this fact. Have you studied this at all? Anthony, what's your take on what Quantum is going to do in crypto?
- [63:21]
Anthony Sasano
I wouldn't say I've studied it too deeply, but for a long time now my. I guess like two biggest existential risk factors for Bitcoin has been the security budget, which has been covered on Bankless, I think a number of times, and Quantum. And I think for me, I was always focused mostly on the security budget stuff because that seemed more pressing than the quantum stuff because obviously Quantum has been talked about for a while, but people didn't realize like how much progress has been made. So they still thought it was like decades away. But as you mentioned, it could become a problem as early as 2030 here, which is only a few years away now. But I will say that if you kind of look at the ecosystem as a whole, obviously Bitcoin isn't the only one that's susceptible to this. Ethereum is also susceptible to this, but it's something that the Ethereum ecosystem, and Vitalik in particular has talked about for a very long time. And Ethereum has a culture of upgrading the chain, right, and has the people that can actually build the fixes if we need them, whereas I Think Bitcoin's biggest issue is that it doesn't have that culture. So in order to fix this, if they want to fix it, they have to go through the entire kind of pipeline of getting this built and then getting it into the network. When traditionally bitcoiners have been very resistant to doing hard forks on the network because this would require a hard fork in order to change the, the, the, the code so that this could, this could fix Bitcoin. But as you mentioned, Nick also says that the best case scenario is that it's not a full fix. It's. Well, there are still 2 million BTC or up to 2 million BTC that could be susceptible to these things. So I'm not, as I said, an expert on this. I'm not sure on the, on the intricate details, but yeah, it's definitely something that I think more and more people need to be focused on. If I had to say, I think that Ethereum could, could fix this. Like the chain could be kind of made quantum resistant relatively easily. But when it comes to Bitcoin, I, I feel like another civil war is brewing here over this. Like, how do they even come to consensus on what upgrades to do or what we, you know, who get to get to build the upgrades? Because then there's always the question around capture, like can someone sneak in and capture the chain in some way? And it's going to be, it's just going to be like a really big kind of complex issue.
- [65:29]
David
It is now. Now, of course, it could take still decades for Quantum. I mean, some of the estimates are, you know, 2040, 2045, but, you know, 2030 or to 2035 are some more recent estimates. And actually one of the people who's changed his mind is someone we had on the podcast about a year ago talking about Quantum. So he's a massive name in this space. His name is Scott Aronson and he has really changed his tune in the next year. He says this could become a problem as soon as the next presidential election. So he's actually talking about some RSA type of encryption being broken possibly, you know, in the late 2000s or, sorry, in the late 2000s, which is an incredible departure from even 12 months ago. Actually, Justin Drake gave a part two on this and we asked some questions about how Ethereum is, what the readiness for Ethereum is for Quantum, and a few things, you know, we talk about Lean Ethereum, which is consensus execution, the full stack upgrade, all of that is going to use quantum secure algorithms. Right? So replacing Things Justin Drake says replacing things like BLS that's already planned, BLS signatures with something quantum resistance that's already planned effectively in the next five years of the Ethereum roadmap. And so almost quantum is less of a threat, it's more of a forcing function to just get Ethereum to upgrade to lean Ethereum a little bit sooner. There's also the lost and exposed. ETH is just a tiny percentage of supply. It's because Bitcoin, a lot of the Bitcoin submitted put the pub key on chain and Ethereum is not like that. Justin Ballpark's about 0.1% of ETH supply is actually susceptible to these attacks. So I do think overall, at least according to Justin Drake, who is definitely in the know on this, Ethereum is in a much better place with respect to Quantum though the full stack needs to be upgraded. I mean, if quantum computers happen next year or 2027, the entire industry is screwed. So cross your fingers on that, I guess.
- [67:36]
Anthony Sasano
Yep. Yeah, exactly. It is definitely a threat. That's as I mentioned, like not decades away now and as you said, like it's become more of a pressing thing. But when it, when it comes to Ethereum, I'm much less worried about it than I am about like other networks, obviously, especially Bitcoin, because Ethereum can like, if we need to, we can do, I guess like an emergency fork if we needed to. Right. Like, yes, it would probably be a mess, but we could do it. But Bitcoin, I just don't see how they, they do it like it just does. It's not in a DNA. Right. It's just crazy.
- [68:06]
David
They're ossified. Very ossified.
- [68:08]
Anthony Sasano
Exactly.
- [68:09]
David
Anthony, thank you so much for filling in for David. It's been a pleasure to have you. As always. The Daily GWE is coming back to a regular cadence starting next year. I saw you announce that this week. That is very bullish. So I knew you kind of took some time away from the Daily Gwei. It's been less frequent. In 2025 I actually listened to the Daily Gui, the portion about you kind of getting, getting super healthy and super fit and that. That was incredible. I know that's been a journey for you too. And I mean it's, it's great to see you doing that. But next year, starting in January, the daily gwe, is that going to be on a weekly basis?
- [68:46]
Anthony Sasano
Yeah, yeah. So it's going to go back to a weekly cadence. I mean, as the name implies, it used to be daily quite a while ago. But then I. I think what happened was I just burnt myself out and I kept burning myself out. It's, you know, it's a crazy industry. So I needed to take a step back, as you mentioned, like, take more care of my physical health. And I think I'm in a really good spot now generally to. To bring back the show on a. On a regular cadence, which, yeah, it's going to be weekly, so every. Every Monday, I'm going to aim to get an episode out for people to enjoy and, you know, maintain that as long, as long as I can, because I think weekly. I'm not going to burn myself out if I do that. But, yeah, I don't think I'd be going back to daily, unfortunately.
- [69:24]
David
That's awesome, though, and it's going to be great to have that back. So we'll include some links in the show notes. You can get that on YouTube, Spotify, all the regular channels. Got to let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad to have you on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
- [69:44]
Anthony Sasano
Sam.