Ethereum’s Strategic Reboot: Why Layer 1 is Back in Style?

Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly rollup. Each week I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the news. And this week is the last time that I do that. Bringing up the rear, bringing up in the caboose. So I have the pleasure of being joined by Brett. Brett is a crypto Twitter educator who's also working on Mega E. Brad, happy Friday. Happy to have you. H. It's kind of appropriate that you introduced me as the caboose uh given my given some of my uh pictures for those who know for Yeah. If you don't know some sometimes I post pictures of my ass online. So um yeah

and everyone likes it. Uh we were going to have you on last week, Brad. Uh but the tariff news just continued to rock the world. Uh and we swapped in Hib to to talk about tariffs. But hib also uh I think uh underhanded us with a lot of what we're going to talk about today which is the Mega ETH test net came out last week. Uh it's been one of the most anticipated uh mainet relaunches that's coming. Still mainet not here yet but with the test net people can start to play around. Uh and then the Mega ETH project has really

just done a very good job attracting uh unique apps like not not crypto's 200th per exchange uh but some unique uh applications that are being found and being built on on Mega ETH. Uh so you um you grew up your your branding educating on crypto Twitter and then decided to land uh a position at Mega. Maybe you could talk about just your arc uh for people that don't know you and then talk about your the decision to to join me. Yeah, sure. Uh, that's actually a little bit of lore for everyone else listening is like, you know, you and I

even talked about like potentially working together trying to do something because you're right, I I cut my teeth over the last like year and a half as like uh educator is how you introduced me like I I come from a history of in web 2 where I worked in actually the the medical industry on the IT side. So like I traveled the world basically talking about complex technical stuff to clinical people. So like no one no one knew any of the underlying stuff. So, I got pretty good at at just talking about comp complex topics uh in, you know, normal ways. Uh, and I enjoy it,

frankly. I like educating and it teaches me uh uh some of these deeper concepts. So, yeah, over the last like year trying to uh like really take this place on full-time. I I um was spending a lot of time on the timeline talking about things that I was interested in which was which was the technical stuff uh and doing it in in relatable terms. uh trying to look for just basically opportunities to contribute to the uh industry. And whenever I saw Meg ETH come along back in I think it was July, I just reached out and I was like, "Hey, I got time." I'm looking for a team that

actually resonates with me because I didn't want to like try to sell something I didn't believe in. Uh I saw that saw them, reached out, tried to to contribute uh more heavily. Bing actually took uh the actual co-founder, she actually turned me down. She was like, "Oh yeah, join our Discord. Like we're not we're not opening roles, but you can like hang out in our Discord." I was like, "No, no chance. there's no chance I'm not going back to the Discord dog days. Uh and I just kept doing my my education stuff on the timeline and eventually uh actually in November of last year they came back and like yeah we actually need someone that's uh uh

forward on on crypto Twitter that uh you know can represent us and and actually talk about our technical concepts and at that point I joined the team and it's yeah been fun ever since. I think we are still in the hype phase of many of these blockchains, Mega ETH included, uh, Monad, but there's a bunch of, you know, not life chains that everyone is very stoked about. And so people's imaginations are allowed to, you know, go go pretty wild. The, uh, line that gave us last week that I really liked was that this isn't just like a blockchain with very fast block times.

This is so incredibly fast that it starts to really change the form factor for what even a blockchain looks like because the block times are are so fast. 10 millisecond block times that it's a streaming block chain. And so the chain of like, you know, discrete blocks doesn't doesn't it's not really the same because of how fast it goes. And maybe I can emphasize that for the listeners with uh one of your guys' oracles, Redstone, which is updating the price on chain on Mega E every 2.4 milliseconds. And so that's 416 transactions per

second of just Oracle pricing updates. Uh and so things are just going so fast in the mega world. Uh the the hype that everyone's getting excited about is that this does is actually doesn't really fit the same form factor as a blockchain. Maybe you can uh share a little like behind thescenes peak of what that looks like uh on the team side of things because I know you guys have had some additional challenges because you know me is just building a blockchain that doesn't look like any other blockchain. Yeah, I mean you alluded to it last week whenever you were talking for anyone that saw that. It's just like yeah, a

lot of the things that we built into or have as like just standard stuff in our ecosystem just isn't ready to handle it. One is just like the little like logic and like low latency um uh updates you have to do to your systems to make stuff work. But other stuff is like something as nuanced as we're used to a confirmation spinning wheel coming up, right? So like if you think about your user flow in our space, someone comes, they click swap, a modal pops up, it gives you a message to read, it's got a little spinning dial, and then after, you know, half a second, a second, multiple seconds if you're on Ethereum, it goes away. You can move on with your

life. And with us, we're finding that the applications are building stuff out. And a lot of these flows just straight up don't they don't work. Like they just like you have no time to read a message in between your click and it being confirmed on chain. And we're only able to do that because we, you know, obviously we're in L2, so we can offload consensus down to Ethereum. And we're just really, really, really leaning into this, right? We're trying to shrink this this what would be time filled with consensus, which was a block time, to basically zero. It's at 10 milliseconds. Now we're aiming for 1 millisecond. And you're right, like like visualizing stuff just is very very hard when you're at you're operating at that level. So

like, you know, we you deem it as like the streaming blockchain. We're calling it the real-time blockchain because it feels real time. It feels instantaneous. Um, and it is just, yeah, it's a world that is, yeah, you're showing there some comparisons with like, uh, Discord messages, uh, you know, Stripe payments, uh, and like n, yeah, Netflix seek, like I, we talk about a lot of this stuff in like really esoteric terms within the blockchain world. So, you know, I made a point to to write an article. It's like, okay, like let's talk about something that you actually can relate to, an Instagram story, right? Like the time it takes for the stuff to swipe and show up

on your screen. And whenever you start visualizing like the time it takes for us to process with things that you use dayto-day as opposed to like some random swap on another exchange that you've never actually used, it's more relatable and you kind of like understand contextually like what level we're operating on. And yeah, a lot of stuff breaks down at this level. So the the news last week was that the Mega ETH test net was out. Uh what has that looks like? Uh maybe you can again show us a little bit behind the curtain. What's what's going on now that the test net has been out for like 10 days or so? uh how has the community received it? What

are they doing? What's happening? Yeah, we're I mean we're just scaling it up, right? We're like we're pointing out to a lot of stuff that's breaking down, a lot of infrastructure stuff that we realize is just not ready uh day one. So, uh things like you mentioned the Oracle, we had the Oracle drop out the other day and it's like now people can actually build games. Like the one of the reasons this actually even came up is like we have we have people are trying to build games on chain and they're like oh I can't even track the person because we need to we need updates uh within these this 10 minutes like an interval and it's just you need to get stuff on par with your actual

block so that we can do like you know motion tracking all this kind of stuff but yeah we have a bunch of apps uh launching a lot of them are novel because they are consumer forward because they are uh operating at the speeds that you're used to with your mobile phone like just like a normal phone you or app you download from the app store. So, a few that I'll call out is like uh uh that I'm really excited about is Noise is one that that popped up. That's one where we trade mind share, right? So, it's just yeah, this one is is all over the timeline and this is the only place you can get it because it's a consumer forward app, right? Like it's it's uh instantaneous. They they're replicating the the EIP uh 7702. So,

like there's no approved swap flow. It's just all right there inside the app. Uh one click that everyone loves that everyone thought brought down Ethereum. Um but it's really exciting. People are coming to it and playing. Uh another one that like there's more consumer forward. If you go down, you can actually even see uh like Yeah. So like this is GTE uh that this is our normal deck. You can see a little bit higher. Um you can see like the speed at which the the approvals are actually happening right there. Yeah. You see like he's clicking right there on that screen. You can see the swaps are instantaneous. Each click is just it's swapped. It's swapped. It's

swapped. Right. So like for them the button coming up and showing like or the modal coming up and showing approved and then swapped, confirming then swapped doesn't make sense. like maybe you just change it to the button is just a color change because that's all the time you have to process anything. Um and then we have some other stuff like guest best and uh euphoria is coming which is a tap trading uh uh tool but people are just like starting to ramp up starting to find the cracks in what was like a traditional app inside of web 3 and seeing how they need to modify that to work with a real-time blockchain. really all of these questions getting

the background of mega eth I think was to really get to what is actually like the news of the week which uh like you alluded to noise is just on the timeline everyone not not everyone but like a good number of people are talking about noise which is again a app a mega eth app that's on testn net I think the construction of noise is pretty interesting it ingests a kaido oracle about mind share of a particular subject or a project or you know something category uh and then it creates say perpetuals exchange around that oracle. And so the oracle is a single source of

truth and then people can go long or short on the movement of you know the growth or decline of mind share. Uh and so people are just like being able to bet on the mind share of particular projects. And so if they think this one thing is going to have more attention in the future, they can go long. If they think it's going to have less attention in the future, they can go short. Uh and this is inside of the same cate we're going to talk about later. uh the base creatorcoin debacle, but this is actually in that same category of we people are very interested in trading

mind share and this is what Allon from Pump Fund likes to say is what Pump Fund is doing is actually culture coins, memecoins, they're actually like mind share markets. Uh, and I people are trying to find more ways just beyond pump fun like you know static memecoins to trade mind share and that's what I'm seeing happen with noise and I think why a lot of people are making noise about noise. Yeah. The uh so like you're you're correct and I'm person I'm personally not someone that gets in the trenches deeply, right? Like I'm not and they're playing a bunch of meme coins because I

understand the probabilities of of like being directionally correct but picking the wrong coin, right? like AI agents came along, you would be like AI agents is is going to be a thing. Like you can clearly tell everyone wants it, but there's a gajillion gajillion coins and it's like I don't know which one to pick. Was it AIXBT? Is it you know I don't know there's like a thousand of them, right? Fartcoin like they're all like they're all have their own cutup stuff and it's like I would like to to say that I believe this thing is going to be a tra a trend which is their tagline. It's trade trends. Um, I wouldn't believe that this is going to be a trend and it will be something that

people will be talking about, but I don't want to spec I don't want to pick a specific coin. Uh, there was actually a tweet that uh we fired off around Ethereum where it's like uh if you're in ETH or if you're in ETH, pivot to # ETH because ETH has been like the conversation for a very very long time and like mind share for ETH is trending up whereas like the price unfortunately has been trending down a little bit. So, it's like that that specific uh uh outcome kind of shows you what they're trying to go for. And to be honest, I was a little worried that um uh this

would be too easy, right? Like you in something like this, you need people to lose, frankly, right? Like you need people on the other side of a bet to make sure that you're actually like being able to fill up the order books. Uh and I was like, it's too easy. You just pick trends and you're doing stuff, but I'm losing my ass on on test net. So, I am now happy to say that there there might be a product here because like Yeah, it's it's not as easy as I thought. I'm getting blown out on a few trades. It's But it's like test debt money, right? It's not real money. Yeah, of course. Of course. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm just like, you know, I I picked the wrong trend. I I thought it

was going down for sure and it it did not. At least according to uh Kaido, right? Yeah. There are a bunch of different constructions about these like mind share trading applications that are cropping up. Uh and even even Zora is trying to position itself. Again, like I said, we're going to talk about the uh the base uh token debacle. Uh anything else going on on Mega E that we should know about before we move on. Yeah. So, like a lot of the apps that I we call in that that um that article which is like about Omega is like only on mega apps. Uh a lot of those teams are are born out

of our incubator, our accelator, accelerator. Right. So, we have a mega mafia program where it's like we've co-lived with, you know, upwards of 15 teams, 18 teams for 30 days at a time. We did Berlin and and uh Chung Mai before DevCon um last time. And we literally help them like do everything they need. They go through raising, they go through uh uh finding co-founders, they go through like PMF, like working on their product, you know, go to market, all this [ __ ] Um and a lot of these these applications were actually all of these applications were born out of that outside of guest best. And we're

we're going to do another round of that. Uh I think you should see an announcement here soon. Um and I think it's a very exciting opportunity for people to really come to us uh understand our technology, work closely with our our technical team, our engineers, actually like dictate some of the the outcomes of the chain like the current mafia team cuz we meet weekly to to go over stuff, help them do things like we've specifically implemented things on Mega ETH because they've been requested by the teams that are building on Mega Eth because like we want to be the best place for that. Uh, and we're going to open up another cohort here soon, and it's an exciting opportunity.

So, I would say look out for that. I know you guys are just getting the preliminary data from the test net, right? The test net went live like 10ish days ago. So, you still have a lot of test net left, but if you had to give a best guess about when mainet would come, are we talking like, you know, this year, Q3, Q4? Are we waiting to next year? What What do we think? Yeah, I think Q3 is a is probably comfy. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to be aggressive with it like on balance. Like I think the um one of the the mindsets we have obviously we don't want to jeopardize anything like but some of the

some of the things that have been uh seen as a downside in the past right Salana's going down because they're being too aggressive they're scaling too fast like some of the stigma associated with being just like hyper fixated on performance and moving fast breaking things a little bit of that fafo energy like we're not afraid to to maybe step into that realm. Obviously we want to avoid it if we can but like you know we're trying to be aggressive. All right, let's pivot into uh let's go back down to just ETH, not mega ETH. We're going to talk about the strategic pivot going around in Ethereum. The slow strategic pivot is kind of what I'm

calling it. Uh there's going to be an episode that comes out with Dunkrod and I'm so hyped for it. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be good. And that's that's where the words I I don't know how the words uh strategic pivot is going to land with the Ethereum community, but I that's what I'm like kind of like branding it as. It's a slow strategic pivot. Uh we're going to get a lot of this conversation. Before we get into that conversation about all the tweets that went out about uh Ethereum slowly pivoting, first a message from our friends and sponsors over at Wallet Connect. Wallet Connect, if you don't know what it is, it's a bridge for signing transactions and messages

between apps and wallets used by over 255 million connections, 40 million unique users. Uh they have recently introduced their last building block of the Wallet Connect stack. Of course, the wallet connect token. After Wallet Connect has eight years of development, they're doing their token at the very last stage of the development. Uh I think it was pretty admirable that they waited until the very very end. I recently had a conversation with Pedro Gomez on Twitter about this uh doing the token last not first. It was pretty cool. uh if you are familiar with the visa model or even the swift model of

messaging and uh ownership uh this is not this is starting to follow something similar like that where ownership over wallet connect is being passed around to people sending the messages uh and wallet connect's finally ready to embed itself deeper into the internet and it needs to launch a token to do that to make their nodes permissionless. So if that just piqu you follow wallet connect on Twitter there's also bankless.cc/walletconnect to stay ahead of what's next. All right, let's go ahead and get into it. That one actually surprised me, by the way. Like, well, the the their specific uh token, I saw

it and I was like, that doesn't make any sense what's going on. But then I read into the documentation. I'm like, oh, okay, there's actually like full infrastructure that's going on behind the scenes and it's like, okay, like they're actually trying to spin up some of this stuff like like this surprisingly like I see this. Okay, cool. I think that was a lot of people's first reaction. That was my first reaction to the wall connect token is like this is a piece of very thin middleware. Why does this need a token? And then you and then you I Pedro again like watched that watch that video gave a very coherent very like rational pitch as to like this is a going to be a like

commonly owned share like infrastructure shared by wallets and and everyone and uh and and then now we get to actually embed it deeper into the internet by decentralizing it allowing people to permission permissionlessly run nodes and be like stakeholders of the network which is exactly how Visa and Swift bootstrapped their network. It's It's actually kind of brilliant. Yeah. Kudos to them. Yeah. Big kudos to them. Yeah. Okay. So, there is a bunch of tweets that went out outside of the Ethereum community. One from Tamas, who is the incoming executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, which he uh had a

delayed start. Um he signed he agreed to sign the job, but then he has a bunch of um uh just he has his role at Nevermind, which he I think he needed to appropriately uh sunset or at least just, you know, put on the back burner. Justin Drake put out a st a tweet that uh talked about scaling the Ethereum layer 1 by 1,000x a very classic Justin Drake tweet followed up by a tweet saying that uh the Ethereum layer 1 will be for the top.1% which did not sit well with people. The context matters. We'll talk about that. Uh and overall there's just been a growing rabbling of interest

around the Ethereum project. So we we'll start with this Tomas tweet. He tweeted out I've this week I officially signed the contract with the Ethereum Foundation. I have been waiting with some of the communication until this happened. Then he talked about a delay on his side, but I'll skip skip through that. He says, "Since the beginning of March, I have had around 150 calls and in-person meetings, listen to feedback, and constructed a very broad strategy document." I think that particular thing, the idea of a broad strategy

document for the Ethereum ecosystem is something that has been missing. And I think this is being represented uh the the shift in in strategy the the pivot in strategy from the Ethereum project the Ethereum ecosystem is like being is is uh symbolically represented here by this new executive director coming in creating a strategy document. Any takes here Brett? Yeah, it's just good to see some opinion coming out of them, right? Like it's that that's kind of what a lot of people have had uh against the

ecosystem broadly. So is it kind of like how do you define yourselves? What are your goals? Right? Like you've been clobbed over the head with the IBRL of the Salana road map versus like the picture of the 10year 35,000 item whatever splurge gurge merge durge like stuff, right? So like that that doesn't resonate as quickly with people. So it's good to see like you know there is some top down and remember it's a decentralized protocol. like he can say all this [ __ ] uh and it means nothing. I actually think I I quote tweeted this one specifically and I was just like it's kind of wild that he's coming forward with a lot of these these uh

posts because it's almost like you're in an all hands meeting back in like if you're in the corporate world, right? Like it's uh you would have these meetings where the the boss comes down and says this is what we're aiming for. This is direction what we're doing. These are some of our steps. These are the people we're meeting all this stuff. And what's going on with that is like it's wild he just shoots that off into the ether here with crypto Twitter because like we're the people that he cares to like rah rah, right? Yeah, I got a lot of tweets going out these days. Um uh uh so he we're the people he's trying to rah and with that like

and he still doesn't have the power to actually change anything, right? Because you need to convince all the client teams, you need to get social consensus, you need to do all this stuff. So it's just interesting to see someone that is serving as almost a CEO role within a decentralized ecosystem doing his best to to build up conviction in the direction that he in the vision that he sees. So uh it's needed for sure. Mhm. The um the episode that I did with V um Onscar and Dunkrad uh did illustrate that there is this coherent again strategic pivot in like I'll I'll kind

of identify so I'm writing an article that'll come out on Monday and so I'll identify like the the five maybe there were six article uh six points that I collapsed into five um but these uh where this strategic pivot is uh being manifested. So a doing after this podcast with Onsgar and Drad they just helped identify that something that I think the community has broadly known which as at the core of Ethereum's issues is a strategic misalignment between long-term ideals and short-term execution. I think everyone kind of generally understands that but that problem has manifested in its own way in

different parts of the Ethereum like eco social techno stack right so there's the layer one underinvestment because we the Ethereum project zoomed forward 30 years to do this like rollup ccentric roadmap thing same thing there's a product mindset deficiency there's a leadership vacuum with organizational ambiguity there's ivory tower culture and then layer 2 fragmentation and I think all of these are kind of downstream of this same exact issue which is a strategic misalignment between long-term ideals and short-term execution. And I'm seeing

uh again heavily informed by this podcast with Onscar and Dankrad that these five things are being addressed one by one because again it's the same problem manifesting in five or six different arenas but it's they they're being addressed one by one and this one what we're seeing from Tamas is the leadership vacuum uh and organizational ambiguity and this broad um broad strategic like um what what did he call this? he called this a a very broad strategy document. I think is helping align all these stakeholders to first

off he's he's being a much more stronger executional force than I think IO was. Uh but then he's also creating this document for reference across the ecosystem that I think can uh remove some of that organizational ambiguity and kind of get everyone onto the same page. That's at least what I'm seeing. Yeah, I'm super excited to hear those two talk because like Dunkrad's been one that's been very vocal like he's been the the counterweight to Justin Drake I would say on the timeline for the last year maybe a little longer like he's been very vocal that like he does not believe in this the like the virtuous

you know 10ear vision he's like we need to deliver value to the mainet we need to make sure value acrruel is something that we're discussing he's just he's been very forward with that and I he's been open about it too which is you know refreshing I followed him put him on alerts a long time ago um and Onscar's in that same boat. I remember in like a lot of the blob discussions cuz that's actually where I I earned a lot of uh attention within the Ethereum ecosystem when I saw the blob stuff come to market. I was like guys this doesn't seem to make sense like like broadly like how all these things hey the misaligned incentives all this [ __ ] and Onscar was someone from within the

Ethereum foundation that was just like yeah I actually see this too. Um I think we can deliver in X Y and Z ways. It's very pragmatic very like uh direct and but very like not head in the sand with with how we viewed everything. And then we we talked on the stage with uh um Saucil and and Onscar and and DevCon which was awesome just to have that counterpole or counterpoint. Um but yeah, I I I'm excited to hear him talk about stuff and I think the the directional stuff again it doesn't have to be very super specific. I'm glad he's saying broad like as long as you have some directional stuff for the ecosystem

of line around I think it's uh it's good news for everyone. Do you remember what the thing was that what didn't make sense with the blobs? Was it just simply that there's just not enough of them for me? Uh yeah, the thing that when you were saying the the thing that you cut your teeth on with getting attention from the Ethereum community when you're identifying the lack of like pragmatism, was it was it just the lack of total supply of blob space or what do you remember what that was? For me, it was just like a lot of the misaligned incentives that that that injected into the the model like I I know I come from the school bank list like I've been

listening to you guys for years, right? So it was like I was so fixated on ultrasound money and this stuff and I was like guys this nar this narrative is going to blow up with this like it's it's going to die because of like the you know a lot of it being uh non-obligatory posting to the L1 not even utilizing blobs like a lot of the incentives to like just kind of shift away from them entirely to alta like meg we're using alta because ethereum just is not big enough to handle the stuff that we're trying to do. Yeah, it's a it's a pragmatic decision and I like now on the the performance competitive uh vertical, right? You have chains like us

that come forward and the everyone that's in the middle of the path that's a true rollup is going to see us and go, well, the users don't give a [ __ ] right? The users are going over here because it's a better experience. They don't care about the underlying. They don't do whatever. It's like now they're forced to compete and like they have to make a decision between like, do I post post down to Ethereum, pay a little bit more, cost my users more stuff? I'm slower. I can't I literally can't be as performant as I want to be. That's what Bass is fighting with now. And like now I'm in a position where I have to choose between like quote unquote alignment maybe some underlying technical properties or being the best chain I

want to be to compete with people that are like already made that decision right and like I just saw a lot of that and I was like with all this stuff in line like we're still not even we're still not over 50% capacity with blobs. We're actually even going down a little bit these last few weeks um after a year. It's been a year since they've been released. Saturation isn't here and we're trying to blow it up even more. So, it's just like I don't I didn't see it as something that would be a long-term value, a creative thing for the ETH the token. Mhm. So this has resulted in a reconsideration of what the Ethereum layer 1 is doing inside of the Ethereum

ecosystem like broadly and previously there has been communications uh from the EF and then therefore us at Banklist because we we saw the vision and we we pared it but the idea of like getting off the layer one like Justin Drake said this at least a couple times on bank podcast that we had him like that the layer one is not for users get off the layer one the floor is lava These are lines that we used to say and now everyone is starting to like okay well may maybe actually the layer one is the place to be. Uh and Justin Drake after I

asked does anyone remember which episode Justin Drake said this because we've had so many Justin Drake episodes I couldn't remember. It turns out there's two of them. Uh he said um here's my updated stance. He's we can scale the canonical layer 1 EVM by 1,000x from 10,000 transa 10 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second using ZK EVMs. This is something that like a lot of the Ethereum researchers are pretty stoked about is the idea of ZK VMs. Um the while this seems like, you know, moon math, and it kind of is, uh they're all

everyone is pretty excited about this not being a long-term thing and instead being a medium-term thing on the one to twoyear time horizons. uh and he just does some some basic um uh explanation and talk about how like you can get to up to 10,000 transactions per second on the Ethereum layer 1 in like a 2yearish uh time horizon. Uh and then uh Storm from Paradigm says ZK VMs are very exciting. However, I still think you should explicitly disavow the stance that the layer 1 is not for users even

if you still believe that most activity will happen on the layer 2. Layer 1 quality is critical. messaging these who shift from a layer two centric roadmap to a layer 1 and layer two road map which I love that idea a layer one and layer two road map and then Justin Drake follows up and says on Twitter again I hereby disavow the stance that the layer 1 is not for users and I read that and I'm like that is great and then he follows up with he says it's for the top.1% early adopters rollups wills arbitrageers institutions enterprises

nation states now I get what he's saying here there's going to be infinity transactions in across all types of blockchains. Eventually there will be infinity trans there will be more transactions that anyone can count. And so what he is saying here is that Ethereum the layer 1 will represent the top 1% of the most valuable transactions right DeFi anything that has any meaningful amount of gas fees like just the most valuable one top 1.1%. that does not read well to anyone and it is what I will call extremely high

dunkable surface area and that's exactly what happened on crypto Twitter. Yeah, man. Like this is so bad because you're right. Like you had shown my my picture before, right, of like uh you know the current overlap is 100% within L1 L2s and like this is what it needs to be, right? Like Vitalic put it in his blog is like one of the directional things you can do and like he's saying the exact same thing, right? Like he's saying the exact same thing. It's just whenever you're never going to find it. You might. Um Okay. No, just you here it is. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

So like so he's saying the exact same thing as this except whenever you see this everyone can insert themselves into this the bottom picture of like I'm the one that can stay on Ethereum main and I'm the one that can do whatever but whenever you say.1% you immediately turn on especially in like this new like uh um new political landscape where like everyone's against the richers and everything is like oh the the.1% the elitist like the oh you want to do it so like it it it invokes something that is deeper and rooted with everyone but he's saying the same thing like which I totally agree with I think it sounds

like you do too. It's just that like yeah man like you need users because users are are this all boils down to value acral like that's that's all this is cuz like there there's a future where Ethereum is Ethereum I'm going to say with quotes because this encompasses all the L2s and whatever rolls up in there like addresses the capacity of the world and can handle infinity transactions and everything's great and everyone's on chain everything's cool but if that doesn't result in Ethereum the token price going up like I don't know that everyone's going to be happy right cuz everyone has an underlying like I want to have a piece of this because I was

here early. I want my thing to go up because I got in early. I want ETH to be valuable, ETH the asset to be valuable. And this is a a step towards like trying to get that right. You need users on the L1 because that is the one to one SCOP uh correlation with fees acrewed, right? You need usage. You need that dollar 100% of that dollar to go to Ethereum as fees or whatever so that people can do their discount discounted cash flows. Even if you don't believe in that, you need people to like be able to put that in their mental model as like a conviction for the asset. Like you need

some of that element there. And by offloading 100% to the L2s, right? The actual fee acru I saw roll up some rollups today like 95% of every dollar. So 95 cents of every dollar was going to the L2 team. Like that's just it's just not a sexy picture and it it's gets fuzzy for people. So yeah. Yeah. downstream of this, you're seeing uh people like Kane, and Kane is just one of many people who are tweeting out the same sentiment where he says, "Literally spent the last six years of my life helping to meme layer 2 into existence only to land back on mainet. Cannot make

this out. Uh per v4 make mainet defi grading." He's talking about talking about uh synthetics. But there's just been this general shift towards the Ethereum community that like, oh, uh, the layer 1 is actually a fantastic place to be despite its flaws, despite its 12-second block times. It's actually got the richest DeFi ecosystem. It's got the most volume. It's got the most users uh or maybe not the most users, but uh just the most activity, the most broadstrokes activity. And so there's been this general shift of like, oh, let's let's actually go back to the