Ethereum Isn’t Competing With Solana… It’s Coming for Wall Street

[00:00:00]I've heard a comment from you that I thought was really insightful. You said that Ethereum's true competitor is not a Salana or a Canton or another one of these um blockchain ecosystems, but it's really the legacy systems that institutions have billions of dollars of sunk cost on and years of inertia built up on. How do you view going about, you know, breaking this this stronghold and sort of getting these institutions to begin to make the move to Ethereum as opposed to sticking to these legacy systems they've got so much inertia on?

[00:00:28]I I made that comment on a podcast on Thursday, but Joe, you take the answer because you answer was thinking Joseph. I said Joe, this is gonna happen a lot. I knew this.

[00:00:37]>> I was about to say that uh I don't remember making that comment. I wouldn't frame it that way. The way I would frame it is that uh one of Ethereum's biggest near-term opportunities um is the legacy financial system. uh given the mindblowing redundancy in place in not not just across let's say banks but within a single bank if you you think about uh how many banks an organization like JP Morgan or or city or Bony have have rolled up over the years uh I'm sure they tried to to streamline things but uh they do have parallel infrastructure inside those organizations um I I've heard it said that uh um banks are reconciliation companies um that al also offer financial services to to people and organizations. Uh and so um you don't really need to uh reconcile uh a single source of truth. You just need to uh to make use of it in much more efficient ways. And so uh there are lots of crypto people inside of financial institutions.

[00:01:48]uh uh they were the the weird kids and then um became less marginalized. Uh Joseph uh uh led that pretty early uh inside Black Rockck um and now um they have a lot of influence inside u major organizations and some of them have convinced uh their CEOs uh very loud prominent CEOs to to also lead the charge.

[00:02:14]>> Yep. And John, what's interesting is I think if you took all these large financial institutions and you generalized about them, they're pretty predictable. They don't like change when they're moving from one rail to another.

[00:02:27]They don't want to go from one vendor lock in in one proprietary database or a million to another. They care deeply about three or four things. And this is a generalization, but I think it applies to every one of these institutions that make that is making a decision. They want to go where that their new form of assets are going to be most secure with uptime predictability where the rules of the road are not going to change.

[00:02:53]Especially when you go from T+1 settlement to same day where you can't pick up the phone and call a counterparty and say, "Hey, we've been trading together for 40 years. Do me a favor and reverse that trade." In blockchain space, it's immutable, which means you need that sense of security and trust. And then they're also very very clear that when they trade they want to be where they can get the best execution for their clients which is where there is the depth of liquidity and Ethereum is leading that by a mile uh if not more. And so I think these institutions are consistent. They like security, they like trust, they like predictability, they like decentralization because it represents trust and security. Oh, and by the way, if this is the chain with the most assets and the depth of liquidity, um, that's where they want to be. Now there is some fragmentation and at some point um to me one of the most exciting things happening in crypto which will actually be very beneficial for both retail and crypto and institutions is this idea of synchronous composability that even though you have mainet a number of L2s even Solana the ability to compose a transaction with multiple legs where you do not need to worry about what chain they're on or whether one leg fails and the other one doesn't. These are really exciting things. So, institutions care about not only what I described but the usability and Ethereum is going to have incredible capabilities around um composability in a more synchronous way and I think that is going to be a huge lift for for how actual institutions trade and for the ability of them to have a better user experience than what they have today in crypto. So, I'm beyond excited. You don't have to convince institutions. You just have to give them a front door and you give them a path to the scale that they need.

[00:04:49]>> Yeah. And so we've been talking about uh Trady quite a bit on this call. Um I remain a uh a decentralization maximalist and uh and a pragmatist. I think a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem even from the start felt that unless we made proper decentralization available to as much of the global economy as possible uh we won't really have succeeded. Uh and so what Joseph was speaking about uh synchronous composability uh and near synchronous composability across private permission networks and layer 2 networks and layer 1 is essentially the holy grail uh that uh uh comes close to competing completing uh the Ethereum rollup ccentric roadmap vision uh where we can have scalability and modularity um where um things can be in their right place uh and still they can benefit from the full security guarantees and the rigorous decentralization uh of the Ethereum protocol even if they're sitting on a private permission network and and so you can uh coming to a to a wallet or a browser near you 6 n 12 months from now >> we are at a very crucial point in time right now AI stocks have ripped they're going to keep ripping our analysts on the AI side are up like literally 100% or more on quite a few calls and crypto is about to boom again or at least it feels that way. If you want all the insight on what we're buying, what our analysts are doing, what's on their watch list, all of that is in Milkroad Pro. So, join at the link below.

[00:06:26]>> Joe, let's build on that idea. You know, you've spoken about this a little bit, but you said you're a decentralization maximalist. Vitalic recently said he wants the Ethereum Foundation to just be a node among nodes in the governance of Ethereum. Now that we have these new organizations, do you think that we have all the nodes that we need? Are there new nodes that you'd like to see built out or how do you just see the evolution of Ethereum's governance uh going forward from here >> evolving? I I guess I'm I'm not uh of the belief that I or anybody can cop can top down design it or or control it. Uh and so um all these uh uh complexities keep popping up in human society and uh humans are really good at uh at solving them. Uh, and uh, we're going to get so much more capable uh, as uh, as machine intelligence supercharges all of us.

[00:07:18]>> Jo Joseph um, Joseph Shalom. I [laughter] see when I worked at Black Rockck, Joe Shalom was was just what I called him. It was always >> two words together. Joe Shalom.

[00:07:28]>> Yeah, John, we did this to confuse you.

[00:07:31]We did this to confuse you. This was a grand scheme going back 60 years ago.

[00:07:35]>> Yeah. Well, it's it's worked out beautifully. Uh Joe, shalom. You've spoken a lot about the coopetition between Bitmine and Sharlink. I'd love to hear about the relationship with Bitmine here. You touched on this a little bit, but at the the top of the letterheads for ETH Ethereum institutional and ETHLabs, um Bitmine's name is right next to Sharp Links.

[00:07:54]What's that relationship like? And then I'd like to hear from you also about this co-opetition, right? Like these are not all these these foundations, ETHLabs, ETH institutional, Ethereum Foundation, they're not all the same entity. there, you know, theoretically could be some tension between them in terms of strategic vision or activity.

[00:08:09]What what would you like to see there?

[00:08:11]What does a healthy coopetition look like in this ecosystem?

[00:08:13]>> Well, I think in the Ethereum digital asset treasury ecosystem, I used that word going back to I think late July.

[00:08:20]the idea that there were six or seven Ethereum digital asset treasuries who had land launched last summer and fall who were competing for capital. They were competing for talent. They were competing to accumulate ETH. But at the same time, they had a very common mission. The idea that they all collectively believed with conviction that there's a massive Ethereum opportunity out there, a multi-deade opportunity. And we were all set up with the idea of giving people access to that opportunity. I think as you've seen the ecosystem evolve, there are two or three of us left who've been able to get scale, build trust with investors.

[00:09:01]Several DATs have fallen away, have essentially um changed their strategy to do other things. Our relationship with Bitmine is actually very positive and very strong on both the institutional level. you know, we were able to collaborate to, you know, along with Joe Luben fund these two organizations, announce it, agree on the governance frameworks. They're going to be not for profofit. They're going to be controlled and independent. They're going to be neutral, but at the same time to realize that we actually have more in common than we have apart. Uh we speak on a relatively frequent basis. We appear on panels together. And I would say it's as positive as it can be among people who have the same mission, who are competing for the same investors. So I think it's at this point become more cooperation than competition. But at the same time, we each have our shareholders and we have different swim lanes. We have chosen to be at Sharlink the more institutionally focused at and we have a super clean balance sheet and um we're doing the right things for our shareholders and despite the downturn and consolidation in price we haven't done anything to deviate from our core principles but yes it's co-opetition but I think the cooperation is more positive than people could even imagine. Joe I'd love your take because many times it's three of us on these calls. Yeah, if you look at all the things that uh that Sharpling cares about and that that Bitmine cares about, I would say 90% of them are aligned. Um, you know, it's uh it's all about uh growing the Ethereum ecosystem uh growing um the value of the Ether token. Um and that ramifies uh very positively for our shareholders and theirs.

[00:10:49]>> Joe Luben, I wanted to ask you a question. As you said, this conversation has been very focused on institutions, but Ethereum is still very much a grassroots project. Um, and we recently crossed a milestone of 1 million developer contributions to the code in the Ethereum ecosystem. And I wanted to get your your thought about this. You you tweeted about this, I believe, but what's the significance of this milestone to you personally as one of Ethereum's earliest developers? And what does this mean for Ethereum overall?

[00:11:14]>> Well, it it's a tremendous milestone.

[00:11:16]our our friends at Electric Capital um sourced that uh fact and pointed it out uh and uh so we've been leaning into talking about that a little bit uh a few years ago uh at the Osaka Devcon. One of the things I said in in my keynote was that uh we should make it a goal um to have a million Ethereum developers. Um uh we looked at the world at that point and there were 30 something million developers um in different languages and in different disciplines around the world. Um and uh and so we thought that was a nice round number um to and to put the call out uh we're already uh the dominant uh developer ecosystem in the in the blockchain space and uh years later um we continue to be and uh um and I I think uh I think we will remain and grow our dominance.

[00:12:12]>> Yeah. Okay. Great. That's very helpful.

[00:12:14]Well, I I want to ask both of you this question because I think you both will have different answers to this and I'd really be curious to hear this. The Glamsterdam upgrade is coming to Ethereum sometime in Q3 of 2026. I don't believe that there's a firm date set yet. Um, and we don't have to go into a deep dive on Glamsterdam right now, but I'd really like to hear your thoughts about what you're most excited about from this upgrade. What is this going to unlock? This, you know, the biggest upgrade since the merge. A lot of people are calling us that. Um, decentralizes block building. It introduces parallel processing. Um, and I'm just curious, what are you most excited about from the Glamstone upgrade? What does that unlock for Ethereum and for Sharlink? Uh, Joe Luben, you want to start with this one?

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