Can Ethereum Still Win? | Roundup

追加: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]opening comment you made like, "Yeah, they're still doing pretty well." Like, that to me is the crux of the problem because if you if you take that attitude, right, which is kind of I think then a lot of the leadership's of like, "Okay, you guys are trying to push the urgency, but like, look, we're still doing pretty well." Um and the reality is like, that's the wrong attitude to have when you're like of net new activity, your your market share is like less and less and less, right? So, like, competitors are coming out and they are beating them on payments. We have competitors that are beating them on like in terms of like net new growth in the space. Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

[00:00:57]Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. Today, Miles and I are holding down the fort. Miles, how are you doing, buddy? Fantastic.

[00:01:05]Um everybody can wish Zev a happy 30th birthday. Wow.

[00:01:10]Do you think somewhere he's just suffering through existential crisis of >> [laughter] >> No, he's taking Yes, yes, taking a few days off from the the crypto existential crisis uh and switching over to his life one. The personal life one. Yeah, just to mix it up. Why not?

[00:01:27]You have to do that every I think every good every once in a while. Uh and yeah.

[00:01:33]It just reminds you and I of how old we are. Um we crossed that crossed that bridge a while ago, never looking back.

[00:01:40]Boomers.

[00:01:41]Yeah, exactly. 30s are the best. 30s are by far the best. 100%. You like you you have your fun during the daytime, you come you're done by like sunset, you know? It's like like farmer schedule.

[00:01:56]Um and you feel great in the morning. Yeah.

[00:02:00]Unless you work out or you drink, and then you feel actually considerably worse than you would in your 20s, but that's that's fine. You know what? Ever since moving out here, um to mountain time, it's shifted my already uh earlier schedule even that much earlier cuz, you know, work starts at I still work East Coast hours, so work starts at 7:00.

[00:02:20]Mhm.

[00:02:21]9:00, 9:30 p.m. I shouldn't even be talking about this on air, but yeah.

[00:02:25]It's beautiful. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, Yeah.

[00:02:31]All right. So, speaking of existential crises, uh life, all of that stuff, uh we actually we're planning on doing an episode about the general malaise and sentiment in crypto writ large, but um as a jumping-off point, we thought we would talk about maybe the maybe the most salient way of representing this is David Hoffman, friend of the pod, uh selling his Ethereum. So, couple of days ago, uh David posted that, uh you know, quote, "Is this Is there a general sentiment shift uh that's happening here, or is it just that I've sold the rest of my ETH?"

[00:03:05]And Ryan, um you know, came out and said, "You know, I'm slightly changing my, you know, positioning here at at Bankless, and still going to be on the rollups, but, you know, letting David take more of a lead role." This is also against the backdrop of an exodus of talent from the Ethereum Foundation.

[00:03:26]Um [snorts] so, I'll share my screen here, um but here's a pretty good summary. You know, there've been at least five pretty high-profile um departures within the last month alone.

[00:03:37]Um you know, so Julian Ma, um Trent, uh who's been there for a very long time. Uh and now he's to be at the Protocol Guild, um which is very similar. Um Josh, um who's a, you know, very, very long time contributor there. Uh Barnaby.

[00:03:54]And you know, obviously we had a Tamash, um who was who took over a lot of people are very excited about taking over as the executive director. Um basically last a year. Yeah. So, what do you think, Miles? Is this an ETH thing? Is this a general crypto thing?

[00:04:10]What are your thoughts?

[00:04:11]I mean, I think ETH has always just uh in general I think uh they've had a people and a culture, you know, I would say problem um for the past four three or four years. Reason I say like problem in quotes here is because it kind of like depends on your perspective. You can definitely say that like uh there's the majority of people that care about ETH, that hold ETH, that have worked on it directly, um you know, they are competitive people, right? Um and people have uh vested like commercial interests or uh economic interest in ETH going up. Um and there's just been so many like back-and-forth swings, right? Of like, "Okay, we're getting our [ __ ] together.

[00:04:57]We're going into like wartime, you know, ETH mode, right?" As these faster, more aggressive, nimble, more commercially minded competitors have emerged, you know, starting with Solana a few years ago.

[00:05:09]Um and then tons of infighting about you know, the road map and and the relationship with with roll-ups. It's just it's been a ton of noise that has made it really, really hard I would imagine to like, you know, invest time and effort and energy and uh for for years now like into this project.

[00:05:29]Um and so yeah, I think uh it's a combination of factors like people are hitting kind of like their their breaking points or their tipping points.

[00:05:36]Um to be fair, like a lot of these folks just might want to go work on something else. Like if you worked on if you had the same job or been at the same company for five or six years, eventually you want to go do something else, right? And and this point in time with AI, like I think is pushing a lot of people to go look at, you know, maybe starting something new. Um but the other side of it, of course, is that like the commercially minded factions that, you know, were put in place to really help get ETH back into, you know, being like competitive, um you know, just kind of gotten shut down and pushed out. So, that's the tough part. Um and if you just look at like, you know, the the numbers from the game on the field, you know, they're losing kind of across the board.

[00:06:21]Um even even in things that have seemed untouchable like RWAs.

[00:06:26]Well, they're still I think they're still the market leader on RWA. They outside excluding stablecoins. Also, there's a little bit of a nuance here on a true tokenized version of an RWA versus, you know, the actual ownership, you know, exists somewhere else.

[00:06:41]>> Represented, right?

[00:06:43]Yeah.

[00:06:46]Yeah, but they're still doing pretty well. I mean, however you cut it, they probably still have, excluding stablecoins, 30% of market share or so.

[00:06:53]Um also, Tether's a little bit of an outlier, their relationship with Tron, but they're still doing pretty well on stablecoins.

[00:06:58]I mean, I think that this comes down to leadership in general. Um and you know, I think couple years ago, people started to understand that things were changing in crypto. It all does come down to this It's been There's so much emotional baggage around this debate and word, but the North Star debate. I mean, people People can't even decide how to value something like Ethereum. I mean, if you've been listening to Bel Curv for years, to me, it's fees. Like, as soon as you can generate fees, that is how you will be valued.

[00:07:30]Anyway, I have a very strong opinion on that, but I think that it's fees. Either way, you There's There's not even an agreement on what we should be optimizing for here. Um couple years ago though, it did seem like it did seem like there was going to be a change in the guard and uh Tomaj was going to come in and do things differently. The problem was Vitalik was still in charge um whether he wanted to admit it or not. Again, an analogy used on this podcast before, Bob Iger, revered CEO of Disney, many years, built up the Imagineers, you know, that they became known for, all this stuff.

[00:08:05]Then what ended up happening is there was another Bob who was his successor, Bob Chapek. But as soon as Bob Iger leaves, uh you know, Bob Chapek starts making changes. Suddenly the engineer or the Imagineers don't have the vaunted position that they did and blah blah blah. And then Bob Iger says, "Wait a second, I actually don't want to leave."

[00:08:20]Come back comes back and kicks out Chapek. I think that's what we just saw with Tomaj. You know, I don't think that Vitalik, once he saw the direction that the EF was starting to take, actually liked that. And so now what have we seen? We've seen a changing of the guard, people that were excited about that vision leaving, which is okay.

[00:08:39]Um but I think that the crops direction that Ethereum is moving in just places it pretty firmly in the in the Linux in the Linux camp. I think that's people have long used that as an analog for Ethereum, but I think that's pretty clearly what it is. It's obviously very useful. It's obviously a huge gift to the world as well. I mean, you one way to think about it is they're they're choosing not to capture a bunch of the value that they could building something very useful.

[00:09:06]But that also doesn't mean that the asset that it's associated with it has to go up. This was always the you know, potential eventuality here.

[00:09:13]>> Yeah. Um I don't know, man. I feel like the your the opening comment you made like, "Yeah, they're still doing pretty well." Like, that to me is the crux of the problem um because if you do if you take that attitude, right, which is kind of I think been a lot of the leadership's of like, "Okay, you guys are trying to push the urgency, but like, look, we're still doing pretty well."

[00:09:35]Um and the reality is like that's the wrong attitude to have when you're like of net new activity, your your market share is like less and less and less, right? So, like competitors are coming out and they are beating them on payments. We have competitors that are beating them on like in terms of like net new growth in the space. It's not going to Ethereum at like a share, it's a declining share, basically, is going to Ethereum.

[00:10:02]Um And so the people that really wanted to push the urgency, um, and like be super proactive about doing things like BD, having a voice in in DC God forbid, like actually like, you know, building things at the application layer, um, or directing, you know, some of the network's revenue to like an organization that is just stood up to for to be in like the the commercial interest of like ETH holders. All these ideas that like very easily could have been implemented still seem like this, you know, um you know, there's there's not a level of urgency to to push it across the line and still seems like kind of like, um, a violation of of ETH's identity or at least what the, you know, Vitalik wants ETH's identity to be, right? So, this started like going back to like Dankrad leaving to to Tempo. Um, and I think Yeah, yeah, go for it. Here is a Here is Dankrad's take on this. The way to save Ethereum, the community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it. The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There's no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it.

[00:11:13]If we want to get Ethereum back to winning, one, create an organization with credible funding, minimum $1 billion as a start. It's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250 billion market cap. Find a leader who's competent and wants to fight.

[00:11:24]Make it accountable, a board of people who want ETH to go up and a charter that holds the org accountable to it. Fund it permanently. A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it.

[00:11:33]Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way and it will probably happen. It just may take a long time before this is consensus. Oof.

[00:11:40]This gives me Cosmos vibes um of like, you know, the people that were trying to fix the coordination and the leadership, the lack of leadership, and the lack of value accrual like problems with with Adam like back in the day and they had the same sort of like, you know, big economic zone, right? Let's like pull in the roll ups and we're all going to like fight like basically force alignment through through like economics.

[00:12:07]And and pushing people towards a particular like architecture.

[00:12:10]Um you know, these things all could have happened. It's just it it feels like this is just not not the direction they're going with and if you don't have buy-in from from the powers that be, aka like the board of the EF, and majority of those seats are Vitalik, then it's never going to happen, right?

[00:12:27]And so people just kind of like lose faith, lose you know, um motivation, um especially when there's like all these other alternatives now that you can go work on which are not no longer seen as like taboo, right?

[00:12:39]Like God, imagine like, you know, POA like pseudo corp chains popping up in 2022.

[00:12:48]Like there would been outrage from Bankless. And now >> [laughter] >> Yeah, exactly.

[00:12:54]Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like all these things just, you know, it it it's it was it was too it was like very very like emotional back then and um I think the entire space is just moved towards like a much more like practical commercial mindset. Um And the teams that were ahead of that were Solana and Hyperliquid. Um and those are the teams that are doing best today, right? Yeah.

[00:13:20]Agreed. Yeah.

[00:13:21]I mean, this revenue meta thing is again it's just so funny. I mean, I understand why people when they come from other industries like finance or AI or tech, they look at crypto and they're like, "What?" I I saw, you know, this whole idea revenue meta. I mean, it's so I still don't really get why a lot of the same people who worked in finance, it took like years to come to the conclusion that revenue matters and we haven't gone below that in terms of dissecting different types of revenue or margin or growth or whatever. I mean, there's so many different ways of looking at the financials of an entity.

[00:13:57]So, I I think maybe revenue is just simplest, but I I don't know why it's it's like pretty obvious that revenue is not the only thing that you should value something off, but it's obvious we just haven't had any of it in in crypto thus far. So, you know, the hyper liquids of the world are getting rewarded in addition to all the other, you know, strategic uh you know, things that they've accomplished. Yep.

[00:14:17]That's kind of where we are. Um Yeah. And listen, I mean, like Ethereum did have quite a bit of revenue at one point. Right. Um like it would have been a great fit for the revenue meta uh except we, you know, like uh pushed a lot of that like proactively pushed that activity, you know, out to roll-ups.

[00:14:39]And and that I think hurts, but there's probably I I haven't checked the charts in a while, but, you know, I think Ethereum is probably still like in the top 10 at least of revenue.

[00:14:50]Oh, yeah. Yeah, top top three or four.

[00:14:52]Uh Yeah. Yeah. It's still there. It's just not 250 billion-dollar market cap revenue necessarily. Yeah.

[00:15:01]So, that's kind of where it is. I As an open question to you, I'm curious, again, something we've debated a lot and something that my mind has changed uh over the years, can an ecosystem win like Ethereum and the price of ETH not go up?

[00:15:16]Historically, this space has been so reflexive that I don't I didn't actually think that was possible. versus now I'm much more open to the idea that I think these systems can work these ecosystems can gain a lot of activity um and have the the price of the asset largely be some somewhat independent of that. Um at least for the time being.

[00:15:37]All all of this changes by the way. I'm going to caveat all of this changes with someone who actually has real credibility and you know, in Ethereum today this would be Vitalik but maybe it's someone it's someone else in the future saying we're changing the way that we're doing things and we're now aligning towards generating fees and capturing value. All of this changes in that in that scenario. Unclear how long they're going to have the opportunity to do that.

[00:16:00]But uh I think in hindsight like Consensus being the commercial arm and being like very separate from Ethereum is probably a mistake. I understand like I you know, it's that is such like a hindsight 20/20 you know, comment and there's absolutely no way in hell like even back even with the hindsight like maybe like Joe Lubin and and Vitalik would would make that decision.

[00:16:26]Um but when we talk about like the need like that suggestion that you you pulled up from from Dan Ryan like there are organizations that look like what this thing should be, right? Um and it Consensus is probably the the clearest one with with MetaMask being like, you know, um it the the initial revenue generator but like you know, we had a bunch of pushes to to like create these daps last year, right? And that was all part of that same wave of like, okay, we need to like you know, rally rally the troops around ETH the asset and like market ETH the asset.

[00:17:02]Um I think daps in general were just like um I don't know. I was never really a big never really bullish on them. Um never really a big fan of the concept. It always felt pretty pretty scammy and weird. Um Also, I I don't think it makes sense to I don't think this holds up to cuz you often hear this. You heard it about L2s before you heard it about that. They were going to be the block space resellers, maybe commercial arm of Ethereum, and it's like, "No, people want to talk that Imagine we worked at a big Wall Street asset manager wanting to tokenize our funds.

[00:17:39]Like, okay, who do I talk to about this?

[00:17:42]You want to talk to your immediate intuition is I want to talk to people that have credibility, are in charge, can answer my questions. Having Having like some mix of Chainlink like if you realize it just doesn't make any sense. There's not real authority and decision-making there. It's all tertiary. It's confusing. It doesn't make any sense. Right. Right. And the And the lack of like a, you know, centralized like, um, commercial organization like that to do things like BD, customer success, and all of that.

[00:18:14]You know, people would reach out to Coinbase. They would reach out to Circle, right? They would reach out to Stripe and Bridge, and that would be their main mode of interaction, right?

[00:18:23]As they're like or I'm talking about like net new institutions, fintechs, etc. entering the space.

[00:18:30]Um and, you know, the problem for ETH now is that all of those like, uh, companies that actually owned the the customer relationship are now launching [clears throat] their own infrastructure, right? Um, and they're taking those those relationships with them. Um and so, you know, if you're launching If you want to like deploy into Morpho and there's now uh there's a version of Morpho that's on ETH and there's a version of Morpho that's on Arc, right?

[00:18:58]Um and you want a closer relationship with the the issuer or you just want basically the things to be easy like Yeah, there's not I don't I don't think there's a lot that's going to stop you from deploying on Arc. Um, you know, we used to talk about like censorship resistance uh a lot more than we do today as relates to like who controls the settlement layer.

[00:19:18]And so, um I think people are now taking the opposite approach where, okay, let's we can keep these settlement layers like as centralized as possible until people demand, you know, higher degrees of decentralization and censorship resistance.

[00:19:33]The trade-offs are worth it, I think, at the moment for the demand side. Like I'd rather just work with a company, um yeah, you know.

[00:19:41]Um I totally agree. I I also think there's an opportunity here, for what it's worth. I just use such a simple analogy, but it looks like it it could just manif- could be a very similar outcome here.

[00:19:54]For Linux, there was Red Hat, which people wanted to build on Linux, and I do think just I know that it's it's like almost part of the problem that they're still success, but I do think people just want to build on Ethereum. I still think that people want to do that.

[00:20:08]Uh but it's difficult and challenging and slow and whatever. I I think there's an opportunity honest I mean I I think Arbitrum is the best suited to capture this, but I think Arbitrum is best suited to be the Red Hat to Ethereum's Linux at this point. I mean uh the there's opportunity to create in and I think that there's a little bit of a difference here, by the way, in terms of it might be something as simple as just purely positioning, right? Instead of saying, "Hey, build in my ecosystem."

[00:20:36]You know, the pitch becomes "Use our stack to make it easier to build on Ethereum." And you can, you know, I don't think that most of these organizations are going to care that there's this separate sequencer that batches and sends down to like I don't know. And And I think that that space is going to consolidate so much that maybe the the winner does have the authority or they create such an easy UX and an experience that they can act as kind of the BD. Or it It doesn't make sense to have multiple ones. There there will be a cost to doing that. Like there'll be a cost to Ethereum's ability to command its own economics, but there's a huge opportunity for someone that wants to rise up and do that cuz right now the kind of two roads here is for the EF to say, "Hey, we want to prioritize this. Let's make a third of the organ."

[00:21:24]It doesn't even have to be entirely BD.

[00:21:25]It could just be there could be a commercial part of the organization.

[00:21:28]Like they probably either prioritize it or someone else will do it cuz it's too big of an opportunity not to. Yeah.

[00:21:34]But there, you know, at the same This is another part of their like positioning and messaging that they need to figure out because they've flip-flopped back and forth between whether like they want rollups to, you know, be considered part of Ethereum or if they say, I think more recently like, "Yeah, no, rollups are not Ethereum, right? They they settle to Ethereum, but they're separate blockchains."

[00:21:55]Um so, it's a lot of these things are just kind of like hard to go back and fix, right? Um there's already been so much private funding into all these ecosystem projects that are, you know, completely distinct um in terms of their incentives to Ethereum.

[00:22:12]They're not completely, but the overlap is not as strong as people thought it was originally. Um and you're like, "Okay, well, let's just kind of maybe reset from scratch. Let's do Let's like build um you know, these native rollups that have like have interop, you know, they all like actually share state. They have native interop. They have privacy.

[00:22:33]They have all these features." Well, like all the people, you know, have already kind of like left to go to other projects. Um so, the concern to me is like the talent to execute on those things is no longer there. Um Yeah.

[00:22:49]Right? Like a lot of the a lot of the teams that even the ones that were building rollups have now like gone to work on, you know, the the new L1s of the world. Um and so, yeah, I don't know. Like what would you do if you were, you know, Arbitrum right now? Because it does seem like Optimism is kind of like, I don't know who's still around. It feels like, you know, ZK I'm saying Arbitrum, but it could be Optimism as well. Uh Arbitrum had just sprung to mind, but I think Optimism is is well-suited.

[00:23:18]>> Like, look, would you be maybe more more specifically, would you be trying to get closer to the to the EF, and would you be trying to like get sentiment around ETH, even though you have your own token, too, right?

[00:23:31]Like, back up and show like real unity here, and show like commercial muscle, um or would you just kind of take the road of like uh you know, I'd let's just prioritize ourselves, right? And we're probably like you know, if anything get like further away from ETH in terms of like, you know, how you No, I mean, again, it's been framed like so polemically. There Here's the This is what I would do if I were in charge of one of these. I would I would fix the message.

[00:24:02]The the problem The problem is the valuation gap, probably, from here to there. But again, Red Hat sold for $60 billion. That'd be an amazing outcome at any L2 valuation at the current moment.

[00:24:11]Um also, I'm speaking definitively. I know lots of these L2 teams have maybe thought of this or tried something else, or, you know, not an expert here. Take this with a heaping uh tablespoon of salt. But what I But I think that the opportunity is instead of saying, "Hey, come build in my ecosystem." There's a bunch of fintechs, banks, financial services companies, DTCC, all these different entities are going to want to build um you know, I mean, the backdrop of all of this is the SEC is saying, "We're going to move finance on chain."

[00:24:41]Like, I think it I think they mean that. Um They want tokenized equities. That's That's nuts. All of this happened in the last week. So, I So, what I would say is, "Hey, um I would position it Again, I would just look at Red Hat and be like, hey, the best place to build is on Ethereum.

[00:24:59]We make it really easy. And here are our services. Like, we reduce your cost, we make the UX super easy, we give you white glove service, um all that. And then I would just package that up into an offering. And I wouldn't I wouldn't say our ecosystem. I wouldn't talk about the single sequencer. They don't care.

[00:25:17]They don't care that the transactions are being submitted to one sequencer in batch down. No one No one cares about that. Um so, that's that's what I would do. And I would focus purely on we make building This is a stack and a platform that makes building on this ecosystem that you've heard so much about and is the most Lindy, trusted, safest one. And then I you know, like your fee model, I do think actually the sequencers are pretty good idea. Like, have it all submit down to one sequencer, extract MEV there, batch it down to L1.

[00:25:50]So, wait. So, you would basically launch your own rollups and then go try to get all these guys to issue, you know, assets on the the native ETH rollup.

[00:26:01]I mean, I wouldn't even use any of that language. I would just >> No, no, no, I know. But, I would just say you're building on Ethereum. We're just making it easier. That's what I would say. You're building on Ethereum.

[00:26:11]Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Now, now, there are some tradeoffs. Like, here's like here's some weird edge cases. Right. I would just Hey, you are building on Ethereum.

[00:26:19]Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what they're fighting against is like, let's say, Canton is like the privacy features that might want. Um I think there is something to be said for like reversibility of transactions, like a POA chain. You can just like roll back, you know, a hack or something like that.

[00:26:37]But, that also it's a feature in a book, right? Like, they can then say like, we're the only ones that, you know, can't actually censor your, right? You know what's so funny? I mean, the reason you could never have done this in 2020 two or three is because, you know, Togro would have gotten on and said, "You are not building on Ethereum for this and this and this." and it would have gotten 1,500 likes and you would have gotten But now now no one If anyone's going to do that, it's totally irrelevant. No one cares. And actually all of the things that you used to get roasted for it's PoA, it's reversible.

[00:27:13]All of those are features to the enterprise. They like that stuff.

[00:27:17]I Yeah.

[00:27:19]I think that that's the marketing and branding and positioning opportunity that no one's taken. Like that's the way that I'd just say we're Red Hat for Ethereum. You are building on Ethereum.

[00:27:28]Here are these small subsets of tradeoffs. By the way, here are these great features that we can do. Um James Prestwich had a man, I I don't even know if anything ended up happening with this, but he in before was the name in it for the tech and he was talking about building rollups with the ability to do rollbacks and things like that. That's I think he's still doing it. Super Yeah.

[00:27:49]We're interested Exactly. Um really good. Um Yeah. So yeah, I mean like so much of this stuff we just have to really You almost kind of have to throw it out and then just I think it's easier to think about things from the the customer lens. The customer in this case is the enterprise.

[00:28:07]What do they care about? Forget all this jargon that you learned like native rollups and all of this stuff. Just literally what properties do they want?

[00:28:14]And it turns out some of the stuff I think is useful that we've talked but also a lot of the stuff that the rollups used to get a lot of crap for, I think will actively be features for the >> Yeah. enterprise. Yep. 100%. Well. Um and the challenge is that those features are like built into the new competitors, right? Um so how do you add those features while also like counter positioning, you know, for all the right reasons against them? Um you can have both as Ethereum, right? That's what rollups are for. Well.

[00:28:45]>> So.

[00:28:46]Yeah, I agree. I agree. Um I just don't know who's going to do it. Who has enough ETH to be motivated to do it, right?

[00:28:53]So, speaking out loud, um you Well, what is it? Um it it I like the in the two in the two realms here. Here Here are the two, I think, diverging paths that can happen and I'm unclear of There's probably some critical tipping point where it won't be up to Ethereum anymore, but one in it like which way, Western man? In In one way, you know, if the Ethereum ecosystem decides it still want to have still wants to have a relationship with its customers and have an organization which is funded and it's like the Dankrad solution. That case is almost definitely better for the price of ETH. In the other In the other which way, um I think that an independent organization will spring up to fill that gap and they'll just kind of win the right to do that and they'll build a monster business. That's That's what I would guess. Um So, I I think probably now the most likely scenario is that second one.

[00:29:50]Um Actually, I know L2s are one of the most hated categories, but it's a huge opportunities for huge opportunity for L2s. But, I think it's almost the opposite positioning of so much You know, you really have to think pretty The opportunity is to to take a risk and cuz, you know, they spent so long saying, "We are Ethereum and we care about all this stuff." And yada yada and you really have to change the positioning and take a big risk from from the uh brand standpoint that, "Hey, all this stuff that L2s used to get [ __ ] for, we're doubling down on all of that." Yep. Yep. Yep. I agree. I agree.

[00:30:23]I don't know. I could I could also see like just the Cosmos like 2.0 route happening. Um you see like treasury token swaps between these projects to try to align incentives and I I hope we don't go down that path and I hope it is something a lot more simple as just like Don't you think companies have funded to go do this?

[00:30:43]Don't you think that the world gets more simple though if there aren't tons of companies?

[00:30:48]Yeah. Yes.

[00:30:49]Yes. Yeah, I know. I know. And that that that that's why this thing has to be like incepted that we're talking about, right?

[00:30:58]Yeah.

[00:30:59]Um I'm not sure what you do. I I guess what I'm saying is I don't even think you need this organization. You need the organization only if you want the price of E. E needs some coordination.

[00:31:10]If E is going to be valuable otherwise the market will find a way.

[00:31:14]I think. Um like I don't think you actually need an organization like this.

[00:31:19]In in a way I mean if you talk to people from the EF even up till pretty recently the goal of the EF is to fade into the mist. That might actually kind of end up happening but there's a trade-off for not having an organization that's organizing things.

[00:31:34]>> Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

[00:31:36]Just that starts to you know kind of fade away just like like Linux did at least to like you know the the end user.

[00:31:44]To the end user. You know though it Linux has been experiencing somewhat of somewhat of a renaissance in recent I was just listening to a podcast with the Evan Spiegel of Snap and they built their entire operating system for their AR glasses who you know TBD if that actually takes off on Linux or like a a Linux fork or something like that.

[00:32:08]>> That's super cool. Yeah, I mean it's um Linux is actually a well run better run than the EF as an organization. Uh cuz they know what they are, right? And they actually optimize pretty well for it. Um And so that's the challenge is like there's also just a definition of not knowing what we want we are want to be or like crops is just not what E holders wants to be. I think that's actually the latter is the tension there. If Ethereum didn't have a token that people held and wanted to go up it'd would great. People would be like, this is awesome. This is the best thing Yeah, exactly.

[00:32:40]Like Linux, yeah.

[00:32:42]But Linux is going to be interesting for the next cycle as like we we're just you know, talking about the challenges here with ETH. Um and Bitcoin has its own, you know, existential Bitcoin has its own crisis coming up, too. So, it's like hyper liquid. There's definitely I mean, it's not just Ethereum. Like we're talking about Ethereum as the jumping off point, but there's lots of >> Right. Right. Right. Right. And so, like you know, there's a lot of things being repriced. Um and I do wonder if just like the macro environment gets better for like, you know, crypto assets broadly, if it just looks like past cycles again, where where Bitcoin and and ETH do catch like relative bids. Um or if they both get kind of skipped relative to like, you know, a lot of projects that are it's a lot easier to underwrite right now, especially given valuations and like relative like growth prospects.

[00:33:34]Um So, we'll see.

[00:33:37]Yeah.

[00:33:37]Yeah.

[00:33:38]All right, partner. This is all the time we have. Short one this week.

[00:33:41]Um Zave, hope you're enjoying your 30th.

[00:33:43]Um >> Yes. Yes, have a blast, Zave.

[00:33:47]All right. Take care.