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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast, presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
- [00:15]
B
All right, everyone, welcome Back to the Crypto 101 podcast. Hope everyone's having a good day. Hope you're all having a good week or month, you know, even if you're listening in here at a future point in time, and this is one of those past episodes where you're like, man, I just needed to listen to this because today we're going to be talking all about Ethereum and gas fees and how the ecosystem has changed and scaled over the years. So we wanted to bring in Kevin Lepso. He is the founder of ETH Gas. Kevin, welcome. And it's good to have you.
- [00:47]
C
Thanks for having me, Brendan. Really, really excited to go through this. I've been following you guys for a while, so it's. It's an honor to be here.
- [00:54]
B
The honor is ours, my friend. It's. It's so awesome because when you look at the Ethereum landscape, it has changed vastly over the years. And I think everyone sees that if you've been in Ethereum for any amount of time, it has changed so wildly from cycle to cycle, year to year, and the rate at which things are moving feels like it continues to accelerate. Now, prices are always going to be volatile at the time of recording this. We know that, right? We've seen a lot of volatility in price actions, lots of ups and downs and a little bit of negative price action. But the fundamentals continue to move onwards and really to the upside, I would say for the better. You know, one of the. The big things that we want to talk about here today is just everything that has happened to Ethereum and what you all have been working on at ETH Gas. And I think it's the perfect time to do it because there are some big headlines that came out in regards to ETH and its scalability and what's happening. And I think the average person has questions about Ethereum, saying, hey, you know, is this really scalable? Can it ever get to the point that it's fully scalable, where it's affordable and efficient for people and companies and, you know, the general population to use? And you've kind of worked towards a solution to that as we could, you know, kind of dive into in today's episode. But before we do that, I mean, let's just start from the very beginning. You spent about two decades across all of finance and technology, and it led you to this point where you're like, you know what I Want to push towards crypto, I want to focus on crypto and more specifically I want to focus on Ethereum. What kind of led you to that?
- [02:36]
C
Oh, wow. Yeah, well, I started in Tradfi. So my first 12 years were in Tradfi. I started as a, a volume trader, FX option trader, interest rates, credit correlation. I got really, really deep into the, the tradfi scene. And you know, there's a lot of people who trade, but the area that we were in were in the credit markets and the mortgage markets. And of course in 08 we had Lehman and the, and the credit crisis. And so it was during that time when I realized that credit really drives the world in many ways that people don't understand. Like for the most part many of us follow like the stock market. We see, you know, stocks or the indexes going up and down, but you know, like our money goes towards our mortgage. It goes towards like these like long term payments that we need to make. And so having seen kind of the, the underbelly of that in 08 and kind of the reconstruction, I was like mind blowing because I didn't understand. But I was like, this is messed up because fundamentally between someone that would lend money to a bank and someone that would borrow, there's about 12, 13 intermediaries in between and they're all making money on everyone. And so, you know, that brings us to maybe 2011, 2012 when I left finance. But it was around that time I started mining bitcoin with a buddy. And you know, it was like, there's like Silk Road. It was just funny stuff kind of going on and just tinkering around at the time. But then, you know, there's this idea like, well, what can bitcoin become? And you know, a bit of skepticism on my side, but just kind of tinkering in the space. Lo and behold, Ethereum comes along and here in Hong Kong there's a lot of these like OG crypto players in the scene here. A lot of the exchanges started in the region here as well. And Vitalik was coming through here talking about this new chain called Ethereum. And I was like, whoa, that that's a little different than, than bitcoin. You can actually do all these things. And so fast forward at the time, obviously it was an idea. It was like, if this takes off, it really will work. But you know, I couldn't see it at the time. And so defi summer comes along and then I realized like, hey, we have those rails in place now for a financial system. Like it's not just the technology. We're starting to build the fundamentals of a financial system. And it was just the right time. You know, I had done a decade in tradfi at like the heart of the financial markets. I built an enterprise tech company and I was like, let's jump into the space. So that, that's kind of how I, how I got into it. Um, yeah. And I guess I, I'll chat a bit of eth Gas specifically maybe, or what do you think?
- [05:25]
A
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- [10:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, I guess before we even get into eth Gas, like, let's, let's set the stage here, because before you even got into ethgas, like, how did your background in financial engineering and market design and all of that shape the way that you look at something like block. Block space, for example? Because most users still kind of think of it as just gas fees. Right?
- [10:45]
C
For sure. So there's, there's a couple parts to this. One is that, like, there's a lot of people in this space think about the technology, and they don't necessarily think about what are the economic rationales, like, what drives people to act in the way they do at the microeconomic scale and kind of at the macro side of things. And so on the micro side of things, yes, we're paying gas and gas fees kind of go up and down. Why do they go up and down? Why does MEV exist? What is it? And can I really feel it or can I not? There's that part of it, and then there's the, the macro part of it, which is, well, you know, block space is the single most valuable instrument in crypto. Like, without block space, Ethereum is worth zero. All the assets on Ethereum are worth zero. And so Ethereum's block space is worth more than the network itself. And yet in the real world, we have commodity markets. You know, we trade, you know, energy, precious metals, base metals, pork bellies and everything. Right? But in the real world, we have these markets because they provide transparency. They help people within that ecosystem manage risk. They help to eliminate cartels. And that's exactly what we have in crypto. Because Ethereum is run by. And every blockchain is to a large extent run by cartels. You have a very small number of people that take advantage of everyone else, and they're able to kind of move these markets around. And so on the macro side of things, I felt that we need a block space market to provide this transparency in, in crypto on Ethereum. And when we do that, that'll just unlock all these other things which, which we can get into. So that's it. So there's. There's a tradfi element. It helps you kind of think big, think of, like, why is the world the way it is? And then there's a tech part which is like, you know, just tinkering around, like, fundamentally, like, how does this component work? How does this person talk to this other person? How do blocks get built? And why do gas prices go up and down? So putting the two together, it, it's a fun mix, but it's, it's not like a left and right side of the brain, but it's just, you know, two different parts of the background.
- [13:05]
B
Yeah, well, that's kind of where Eth gas comes in, right? You start working with this stuff and I mean. Yeah, let's just dive into that. I mean, let's tell us about Eth gas and what you've been working on over there.
- [13:17]
C
Yeah, so. So as I was alluding to earlier, it was like, let's create this market to just trade block space. And so, you know, every 12 seconds a new block is created. And these blocks are just created on the fly every. Every 12 seconds. And yet, you know, what happens if, like, we wanted to create, like a futures market around it? So it's like, hey, Brendan, like, you're a validator. Your block is coming up in 10 minutes time. I, Kevin, I have someone who actually wants to buy your block ahead of time, and they'll pay you a premium. Maybe a block is traditionally worth a hundred bucks, but someone on this side says, hey, Brendan, I'll pay you like 105. So you're like, sure, I'm getting paid 5% more than I typically do. Like, why not? Right? And so that's basically what we created is that ability for validators to sell their block space in advance for someone to buy it. And now that person can trade it just like a commodity. You can trade block space back and forth. It is the physical pipeline. So you could actually control what trades go through in that specific block. You could, I mean, you could censor everyone else if you want. That doesn't change anything. People can already do that. But it just provides this new kind of arena where it's like, I can buy a barrel of gas. I can buy a barrel of, you know, Ethereum's gas. And so when you do that it really unlocks these other things. And one of the other things that came up was we once you have access to a block, we realized that instead of waiting for 12 seconds to build that block, what if we just built it every like 50 or 100 milliseconds. What if we took a block, broke it into hundreds of pieces and that kind of creates like a real time Ethereum experience. And so I happy to dive into that a little bit more. But that's eth gas at a high level trade block space and do do cool stuff with it.
- [15:15]
B
There's two things I want to talk about there. You know, the first one is that you mentioned. People can essentially like buy a barrel of, of eth gas, right? Yeah, or buy a barrel of gas, Ethereum gas. Let's. Yeah, not literal, that would be wild. Although with tokenization, you know, who knows? But no, when it comes to buying that, let's dive into how that works. Because ethereum fees over the years have been all over the place. They're cheap. You go look at 2021, 2022, absurdly expensive to the point of where I would say the average retail trader really couldn't or wouldn't want to do it theory because it got so expensive. And then you go back to the current day and it's gotten, you know, fairly cheap again. And especially with different L, you know. Well, I was not going to say different L ones. You know, different L ones are cheaper, but especially with the addition of a lot of L2s, Ethereum gas fees can be all over the place. Does this mean that people can buy it when it's cheap and then use it when it's more expensive? Like walk us through that process.
- [16:21]
C
So, so not just yet. So there, there's actually two parts of gas. One is the base fee which kind of goes up and down and two is the right to land trades in the block. A little bit abstract, but we're starting with the latter, which is the right to control the block and dictate which fees, which transactions go through it. Soon, however, we will have the ability to basically buy like, like tokenized Ethereum gas. So I could buy like a, a million units of gas now and just like a perp, I could roll it almost from block to block and, and that's to what you're getting at, which is like, you know, I, I need on a daily basis or whatever, I need X amount of gas. I just want to buy it. And so when I use it, I've pre bought this stuff at a cheap level and you know, maybe now it's expensive, how do I kind of spend it? And so that's possible, but there's some complexities around that. So we're tackling the first part, which is the ability to land trades in a specific block and then from that we can build a base fee market where effectively I can just buy, you know, 1 million gas, 10 million gas, and use it when gas prices are high, or you know, sell it when it's high, buy it when it's low, that type of thing. Funding rates however, will be very interesting though, simply because the base fee is so volatile that you will see funding rates into the hundreds of percents on a, on a regular basis.
- [17:52]
B
Yeah, I mean for all of the degens out there, like that's the thing that you need to take home. You know, if you are one of those NFT traders, meme coin traders, maybe you're just a very frequent trader or a whale. I mean, I think that that's going to be something to watch out for because it has, I mean, as we just said, it's been all over the place in recent years. And although it looks like Ethereum is scaling pretty, you know, efficiently and effectively at this point, you just never know when activity is going to surge and gas fees are going to go up and it would be a really cool feature. And I know like a lot of people would love to, to be able to execute on that, you know, just kind of like you always make sure. Well, I can't say everyone, but a lot of time you make sure like, okay, hey, my phone's charged. Okay. I make sure my car has gas in it. It's always good to be prepared. Oh, there's a big, I live in the south. Oh, there's a big hurricane coming. Maybe I have like a little generator, maybe I get some extra food and water. Like it's always good to kind of be prepared and I think it makes sense for your finances, finances as well, especially if you are active or if you hold a significant amount of assets in the Ethereum ecosystem. Why not have a little bit of extra gas stored up and so it kind of just makes sense. Right. Because we use it in all these different other aspects of our life. We're able to be prepared everywhere else. We should be able to be prepared here as well.
- [19:15]
C
Absolutely. So yeah, maybe rephrasing what I was saying earlier, the first thing we'll be working with, wallets on is like a, you know, many wallets have like a, like a slow, medium fast in terms of like landing trades on chain and there's like a different fee associated with it. They'll be having a fourth option called like instant. And so like that, that's the real timeness, right? So, so that's the first step. Once we have the instant button, earth button there, basically the next thing is like a gas tank. And this is exactly what you're saying where, hey, I just want to buy and store some gas and it's there for when I need it. And so at that point the full stack is like available to the end users. There's this behind the scenes, really fast, really easy user experience. And there's the, I don't need to think about gas prices anymore. I've bought enough gas for, you know, this week or this month. And there we go.
- [20:09]
B
So when you say instant, like how, how instant are we talking? Are we talking you blink in the transactions done kind of thing? Like, how does it compare to maybe doing a tradfi transaction? Because that's always, I feel like the benchmark that people use is they're like, oh, well, can it be as fast as like the traditional financial routes? How does it compare?
- [20:29]
C
Not yet, but. So in November last year, we were able to make Ethereum about eight times faster than Solana. So Solana is about, I think each block is 400 milliseconds, but on Ethereum we made it about 50 milliseconds. So that's pretty good as a, as a first shot. So 50 milliseconds, it's basically the, the time that you would like press a button or click a button and you kind of unclick. So it's. That would feel relatively instant. From a human perspective, it's not real time. From a computer perspective, it's not as fast as like the NASDAQ or, you know, cme. But I'd say from a human interaction standpoint, that's effectively real time.
- [21:10]
B
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, when I go to the, the grocery store or any store and they're like, okay, we'll put in your card or tap your card. Sometimes I'm sitting there for five to 10 seconds waiting for it to process and this and that. So I think so so long as it's relatively competitive to that experience, I think it makes sense. You know, it's not going to be something that takes 30 seconds. It's not going to be something that takes a minute. I think the fact that it's, you
- [21:35]
C
Know, one second, I would say.
- [21:36]
B
Exactly.
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C
I'd say it's analogous to. It would, it'd be faster than your web2 checkout. You know, like once you've entered your credit card details in and you're like pay, there's often like even the time to load the page takes a while. Right. But here you're not loading. Exactly, you're not loading an entire page. It's just like this small little like applet or, you know, this little component. So faster than web2, faster than web2 UX.
- [21:58]
B
And how close are we to this today? I know you're.
- [22:02]
C
Yeah. So we pushed the prototype to mainnet in November. So it's like, hey, this works. Now we're at the point of integrating this end to end with everyone. And so in November we had the validators on board and these are guys like block daemon, figment, Coinbase, like those types of guys, they're not necessarily on board with us, but those types of players. But from there to us, to the wallet, to the end user, you'll have some information very soon, maybe this week or next. So yeah, it's basically coming online very soon. It'll be kind of end to end where the end user can do this. However, it will not be on 100% of all of Ethereum's blocks. Ethereum's validators are beautifully diverse, but the, the beast of it or whatever is that they're so diverse we can't get them all on board at the same time. So we're fortunate. We have about 5% of Ethereum flowing through us right now, but we know about 40% they're in our like, immediate network. They're a mix of our investors and friends. So it's easy for us to kind of scale this quickly. And so, you know, not every block is going to be, is going to have that instant functionality. But it's reasonable for us to scale up pretty quickly where hopefully by, I don't know, Q3, Q4, we'll see where we are towards the end of this year. But I think a meaningful chunk of Ethereum will be real time. So every, if every block or every third block, whatever, like, that'll feel awesome.
- [23:38]
B
Well, I want to talk about what that means, like what enabling that kind of instant process does and the standard that it sets. But before we do that, yeah, I guess two follow ups. Number one, how much more does it cost to do this instant measure? You talked earlier about how there's kind of three gas fee tiers you can, you know, put it to the back, the middle, the front, and then now there's the instant option. So number one, you know, how much more does this cost to kind of use the instant feature? And then number two, who is the target market here for what you all are building and designing at E Gas? Is it retails institutionals that everyone. If you could walk us through both those for sure.
- [24:18]
C
So how much more this is, this depends. So it's, it could cost less, less than it is right now because yeah, I guess that's, maybe I won't go down, go down that path. So yeah, it could cost potentially less because there's a lot of like MEV trading and searchers and snipers who typically would drive up the prices of block space, making it more difficult. So they would kind of disappear in this equation and making it more fair for everyone. So there's a world where it would be less, however, it will be more and I don't know exactly how much more. So in 2026 we have kind of two hyper scaling aspects coming into effect for Ethereum. So one is the amount of block space that we have per block it will increase from in 2025 we had about 30 million gas per block and this year we're looking to get to 200 or 300. So that broadly just means we can get 10 times the amount of trades through within a single block, hopefully in 2026. Now if we can get 10 times the amount of trades through, gas prices will absolutely drop. But on our side, if we're now saying Ethereum is real time, then people are really going to want the real time experience, right? So all of a sudden you have 10 capacity but you have like a hundred times better usefulness. So you know, how is that going to kind of offset each other? Either way it's a good thing, right to, to have both of these scaling at the same time. So I don't know where it's going to go, but are they going to change materially from where we are now? I don't think so. So that, that'll be my first question in terms of where a gas cost is going to go.
- [26:00]
B
That makes sense, that, that makes total sense. And when it comes to target market here, who is the target market?
- [26:08]
C
So our target market is literally every single user on Ethereum. So there is like, like Brendan, like you just kind of like transferring to someone or like on Uniswap or AAVE or whatever it might be. If you need that instant experience, I want it available for you and all your listeners, everyone watching this to Just make it faster and simpler. So that's one part of it. The other part is, well, who else benefits? And you have guys like Uniswap, for example, right? Where currently, you know, people who are LPs at Uniswap, they just kind of passively earn fees on trades. But, you know, traders can only trade once in that 12 block period. But if traders can now trade three times or five times within a 12 second period, these LPs are going to make two to three times more money, right? So all of a sudden Uniswap is going to make two, three billion dollars more a year. And like, where is that going to go, right? Like you have like them making this money. It can get paid to, you know, to access that revenue, they might pay it to the validators. So the validators of Ethereum benefit. Yeah, this, this really touches every single user in Ethereum. So target market people on Ethereum, I
- [27:24]
B
think that's the way that everyone hopes that Ethereum would go, right? You kind of join in and you're saying, you know, that is the perfect world, is that we get to a place where anyone and everyone can do this. Sometimes we bring guests on and they have these really awesome ideas and they're really cool and innovative and then they're targeted more towards the institutional side. We have people who reach out and say, hey, you know, is there any way for, you know, the average Joe like me or you to, to get in on this? And then sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is maybe at a later date. Sometimes the answer is, well, if you're an accredited investor. But I think for anyone to have the ability to kind of flip this on is useful because I think before the institutional, and maybe I'm a little bit wrong in this now that I think about it, but I would say before the institutional side comes in, it usually needs retail people there first, right? There needs to be the demand before the supply is actually built. Otherwise, you know, why would they kind of take the risk? And so I think it makes sense, you know, saying, hey, if you want to use this, you can. If you don't, you don't. If you're an institution, if you're small, big, large, you know, if you're a minnow or a whale, you know, come and have the ability to, to try this and check this out. Because who knows, you know, there's going to be someone in a unique situation where they're going to say, oh my gosh, I'm in a rush, or oh my goodness, I need this Done right now there's going to be people who care more about time than price. There's going to be the vice versa. And so I think letting people have the option to do this is so important because again, going back to just like real world examples, that's the way the real world works, right? It's competitive, there's options, and people get to do this. And if people want to have the option, you're saying, hey, here it is available for you, go ahead and kind of do it yourself.
- [29:09]
C
Absolutely. So there's, you know, like, how often do we need a real time experience? You know, not all the time.
- [29:14]
B
All right?
- [29:14]
C
Now of course, the, the trading firms, they would very much prefer a real time experience, so they will make avail of this a lot more often. But the, the driver, one of the main drivers behind this is, is the goal is, is the desire to eliminate like MEV and like predatory players. Right? Because currently, as, as I was mentioning earlier, within the 12 second block, everybody puts their trades ahead. And then there is the, there are these auctions where it's like, hey, I'm going to front run these users, you're going to front run those users and let's compete to see who can front run and extract the most value from the everyday people trying to land trades. And so by sequencing trades, sequencing the block in real time, that disappears for the most part, you know, but like 93, 95% of this predatory behavior just disappears and it goes back to the everyday person. So that's, that's one of the, I wouldn't even call it unintended side effects, but that's one of the great side effects of this. But yeah, coming back to your point, in reality, how often do we need something real time? Not all the time, but when, when, when we do want it, we can have it.
- [30:19]
A
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- [32:27]
B
a hundred percent. And immediately my brain goes towards, you know, I was just in an Uber the other day and there's like options where you can like, hey, you can expedite your Uber or Lyft, you pay a little bit of an extra fee. Same thing with like doordash or a food delivery. You can do an expedited fee and get it to you faster. I was just getting a suit and they said, oh hey, we got to tailor some things and this and that. It'll be ready in two weeks. You know, what if I'm someone who's like, oh no, I need it going to a wedding, I need it in a couple of days. They say, oh well, we could do it in a rush. You know, a rush fee and this and that. And it's, it's so true that it's like, you know, are you always going to need that? No. But when you do, you do. And to have the option there just makes sense because we already see it in so Many of our other different aspects of life.
- [33:13]
C
Absolutely, yeah. I was just gonna say you have that certainty as well. So it's like it's going to happen. Whereas sometimes you say, like, I'm gonna put like, you know, low gas fee and, you know, it doesn't go through in that block and then, well, is it going to go through in the next block? Like, you just, you just don't want to sit there with the loading. Like, you just want things to happen sometimes. Right. So frankly, if it's like 10 cents extra or 20, you're just like, okay, fine. Or you know, like doordash, food delivery or maybe the delivery driver is going to stop somewhere else first and drop something else off and like, I just want it now. Like, I'm hungry, hangry, whatever it is.
- [33:48]
B
Yeah, 100%. 100%. So, you know, we're, we're seeing a lot done on the L2 side and we've seen that built out. Where do you kind of factor this in, in, like, the role of L2s? Why is it important that Ethereum's execution layer reach this kind of standard as opposed to just saying, you know, the L2s can handle this and they can handle these scalability features.
- [34:15]
C
Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of parts to this. So I think of Ethereum as kind of like downtown and L2S is, you know, like, you know, uptown or like a suburb. And of course, you know, going back to, as you were saying a few years ago in like NFT era, for example, like, gas fees were crazy, but, you know, without people trading JPEGs and which are largely worthless now, but, you know, without, without trading JPEGs, we wouldn't have brought on hundreds of millions of people into crypto. Right. Like, that was, that was the thing that brought so many people on board. And so it's those people who spent gas, which, you know, thank you. Which kind of made ethereum and the L2s what it is. Right. It spawned kind of like that L2 roadmap where we desperately need scaling today. What do we do? And poof, there's that L2 roadmap. And with roadmap, we've shifted some of the demand and some of the pressure over to the L2s. Meanwhile, we were able to scale the L1, right? And so now the L1 is able to scale to, you know, 10 times or 10, 20 times the number of trades. L1 is now as fast, if not faster, than many of the L2s. Now all of a sudden, this Downtown core, which got congested, has like fast forwarded into a. I don't know, I need to find like a, like a Westworld, you know, third year, third episode, whatever, third season, when it was like really futuristic or like a 5G era type of thing, you know, like we're on the cusp of that era in downtown. So all of a sudden downtown is going to look like super hot futuristic cypherpunk, you know. There we go. Right?
- [35:52]
B
Yeah.
- [35:52]
C
And, and when that, when that L1 is that much faster and that much better, the entire ecosystem benefits. You have a lot more trade between the L1 and the L2s, a lot more faster, predictable interaction between the two. And we'll see where it goes from there. So yeah, you know, some of the liquidity might shift back to L1 just because downtown's cool, you have all the nightclubs or whatever and like things are happening. But both, both sides get stronger. The whole ecosystem benefits.
- [36:20]
B
Yeah, they do. And we've talked to both, actually I would say most of the major L2s at this point and we've talked to their teams and we talked to some of the ETH mainnet devs and I think that they would both agree with that statement because again, Ethereum is the main chain. It is the base layer. You improve that. I think everything else from there on, everything that's built on top of it, everything improves and the whole ecosystem and also everyone benefits. It almost creates a win win scenario the more we build this out.
- [36:50]
C
Absolutely.
- [36:50]
B
And it's so easy. Most people forget just how new this stuff is in the bigger picture, in the grand scheme of things. When you look at Ethereum, in most of the blockchain stuff that has happened, you know, most of it's been in the last decade or so. And when you look at every other form of like major technology or financial technology and stuff, it's had a lot longer to build all of like, of everything that's in existence than, than just that. And so I think Ethereum and all of crypto, it's, it's doing it fast, but people are impatient and sometimes people are fickle and it's easy to judge it and say, why are we not already at the end game? You know, it's been 10 years and then they look at everything that the tradfi industry has been building over the last, you know, century. And the hardest part is getting started, right? The hardest part is getting started. And then I think you see an accelerated curve from there. And so that is just something I would tell People say, like, hey, you know, we're getting there. And now there's the conversation. You know, they're starting to be conversations about gasless transactions. And now gasless transactions are starting to get mentioned a lot more in crypto. You know, is there any validity to that? You know, is there a world where you could see gasless transactions? And if so, maybe how far out?
- [38:13]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So gasless in the purest sense.
- [38:17]
B
No.
- [38:18]
C
But will people need to think and care about gas? Like, we can get rid of that part. And so one of the things we're working on is we have this open Gas initiative, we call it, and basically it's working with protocols to shift the responsibility of gas fees to the protocol and away from the user. So guys like Pendle, etherfi, Eigenlayer, a couple others, basically, if you're like staking, trading, you know, interacting with these protocols, you might pay, you know, 25 cents, a dollar, whatever the gas amount is, like, you're still going to have to pay it, but at the end of the month you're going to get rebated that amount of gas back to you. And what that does is it makes you realize, like, oh, I don't need to think about where the gas prices are when I'm going to transact. I just, I just kind of hit the button. Right. And so that's analogous to like currently, like if you pay for, if you buy a coffee, imagine it's like $5 and 10 cents today, $5 and 13 cents the next day, $5 and 6 cents. Right. Like if it was just $5 and 10 cents every single day, it would be so much easier. So, so that's basically what happens here. The, the protocols will pay for gas on behalf of the end users and they'll just bake it into their transaction fees. So if you normally pay whatever, like a 10 basis point transaction fee, maybe it's 10.5, but at least there's no gas. You get all that, all those payments back.
- [39:41]
B
Yeah. And yeah, I think that's just the way that it would work. Right. Is that it gets to be at a point where it's so small that it's like, all right, I don't care, I don't notice it. And that is the end goal. You know, it's never going to be in the absolute most, you know, specific definition of free. Not necessarily, but when something's so cheap that you don't have to think about it, I think that's what most people would care about. You know, where maybe a dollar Or a couple cents will go just forever, right? It'll go, you know, imagine if a couple cents would last you the whole year. You're not going to think about it. Half the time it stores here. You know, I'm in Florida. You know, there's, oh, you're gonna have to pay a little bit more if you don't pay in cash, Right. And that time it's like a noticeable difference. Sometimes it's, you know, I don't know what. Sometimes it's a matter of sense. Sometimes it's a matter of like, oh, your meal's gonna be an extra dollar, dollar and a half, two bucks. And so I think so long as it's like that much, where you're like, oh, a dollar could cover my entire year of fees or something less than that, I don't think anyone's ever going to bat an eye or complain or worry about it. But one of the interesting things. Oh, yeah, go ahead.
- [40:50]
C
Yeah, sorry to cut you off there. You know, from an everyday person standpoint, you would think that's the case, and I agree with you as it relates to, like, everyday people. But the folks that have the hardest time trying to understand this is tradfi. So I've spoken with a number of banks, and the thing that they can't deal with is like, well, why do gas prices go up and down, like. And like, from my perspective, it's like, come on, you're a bank. You're used to paying like $50 to settle a transaction or like $100. And in those conversations, it's like, well, it might be 50 cents or 75 or like a dollar 20. And it's like they can't fathom a variable transaction fee. And so I don't know if that's like an education thing or it's. Or it's something they actually need to hedge. But it's surprising how, again, they're used to paying 50 bucks to, like, to settle these things, and they're uncertain if it's like 50 cents or a dollar 150, like, they struggle with that. So something we just work on together and as a community, but we'll figure it out.
- [41:52]
B
Well, I think you're right. I think it's an education thing because people are used to wire transfers and all these other different things. And it's like, oh, you're going to be paying much more and it's going to take longer. And now it's like, hey, you have this option where you can pay less and have it faster. And they're like oh well, but there's a variable feature to it and we, we can't do that. You know, God forbid it goes from you're going to pay a couple cents to a couple bucks and it's going to be near instant and then they, they kind of scoff at that and it's I think just going to need to be an education thing. And I think as time goes on people are going to be more open to it in the same way that in, you know, the early days, you know, I'm fairly young myself so I can only speak to this so much. But you know, in the early days, you know, people were hesitant to do websites, people were hesitant against the Internet, people were hesitant against smartphones. When you're saying oh, I'm gonna put my, my credit card information online or on my phone and pay for things that way, you know, is that even safe? What about all these different moving parts? And I think people are just going to warm up to that idea as blockchain becomes so integrated that it's borderline seamless. And I think the end goal, at least in my opinion is for us to get to a point where you don't even have to necessarily know or care that you're using blockchain technology and have it just working in the background and making all of the infrastructure and your overall life and experience better. And again, I think we get there. I really do.
- [43:20]
C
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [43:23]
B
So let's talk about Ethereum. Just like the state of Ethereum, you know, some of the transactions we mentioned this earlier, just recently here, you know, in 2026, Ethereum transactions hitting all time highs here fairly recently. And at the same time gas fees were going down to. Well, I think it was multi year lows. Gas fees were under $0.01 at the same time that Ethereum's transaction count was at all time highs. Which is fascinating because again a couple of years ago you go back and you look and that would have broken a lot of people's brains. They're going to say what do you mean we're able to do more than deep by summer and the NFT boom and the meme coin surge and we're able to do more than all of that. I think it was almost double that. I could be wrong. And then the fees are still under a cent. Like where is all of this coming from? Have you been able to like look into that at all? Because it. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
- [44:19]
C
Yeah, well, I guess a little bit. So I, I saw something earlier, I don't know if it was today or yesterday where it was like it was cheaper to do either a swap or a transfer on Ethereum versus base. And like that's interesting. Right? And, and I think what happens is that like, like on base you have like so many transactions, but they're like much smaller. Right. It's like a hundred dollars, two hundred or whatever it might be. But again, like on Ethereum, those small, relatively micro transactions, they don't exist as much on Ethereum they could and they probably should because you get less slippage with Uniswap than on base. I don't know. But Uniswap still has, sorry, L1 still has the vast large pools of liquidity. So we'll see where that goes. Right. As I said, the L1 itself is going to have 10 times the block space. So if that goes from a cent to a tenth of a cent, you'll see a lot of activity shift Back to the L1. We're in a great situation here for Ethereum as the broader ecosystem, but we'll see what happens. Maybe people are happily stuck not trading downtown, but in the suburb. I'm happy where I am, out in the pasture or wherever they are.
- [45:33]
B
Yeah, spot on, man, spot on. So if people want to get involved here and they want to utilize some of the features that we have talked about today, how do they do that? Can they just. Do they need to go to a website? Do they need to sign up? Can they do it from a Metamask wallet? Like walk us through that?
- [45:51]
C
Sure. So there's two parts to this. The first part is the real time trading part. So we are speaking with about a dozen wallets at different stages of integrating the real time capability into the wallet. And so I'd say by, you know, summertime, you know, we'll have some of the major wallets integrated. On that front there's a, I mean there's a wallet. Yeah, I'd say give us a, give us about a month from now and about 100 million people will have access to this, assuming the numbers that the wallets have are true. So yeah, well, about 100 million people will have access within about a month. And then for kind of the gasless experience, we've onboarded a handful of protocols into this in our Open Gas initiative. And in that case on our website we have a list of our partner protocols for that. And so if you are again trading, swapping, interacting with those protocols, then at the end of the month you can come to our website and just hit claim and get that gas back and so we'll be kicking that off likely starting in a week for end of this month. So like March 1st or March 3rd. You'll be able to start claiming back your gas fees spent with our partner protocols in February.
- [47:10]
B
Wow.
- [47:11]
C
I can't believe we're in February already.
- [47:14]
B
I know. I, I was doing, I was doing a call just yesterday and I kicked it off and I said, welcome back. It's January. Wait, no, it's actually February now already. It's just. Yeah, time. Time is flying by, my friend, for sure. Another thing you know is, so people want to get involved, where can they follow you on both your website and your socials? Where should people search for you at?
- [47:39]
C
Yeah, so on my X I'm just lepso at lep. So our team account is eth Gas official. Hit us up there. Say hi.
- [47:50]
B
Awesome. Well, that's going to go ahead and wrap us up, everyone. Kevin, once again, thank you so much. It's been super insightful getting to hear about what you're building and just how you guys are moving this side of the industry forward. I mean, it truly is fascinating to anyone who's using Ethereum on a somewhat regular basis. And if you are, definitely go check them out, guys. They're doing a lot of cool stuff. Obviously, so many different awesome topics that we got to talk about today. But the big takeaway for me here is that looking at what this enables for the future of crypto, what if we are able to get near instant transactions? What if we are able to make gas fees go down so much that you don't have to think about them? What if we are able to enable so many different forms of innovation that weren't previously possible because of some of these issues. And so Kevin and his whole team over there are working hard on this. So, Kevin, once again, thank you so much for watching.
- [48:45]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [48:46]
B
Appreciate your time.
- [48:57]
A
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