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Back from #Token2049! Will Pectra revive #ETH?
Recorded: May 7, 2025 Duration: 0:50:58Space Recording
Short Summary
At Token 2049 in Dubai, attendance surged to 15,000, reflecting a growing trend in crypto adoption. The upcoming Pectra upgrade is set to revolutionize Ethereum with innovations like account abstraction, while bullish sentiments suggest potential price growth for ETH as institutional interest in staking rises.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Petra Petra Petra Petra what's going on Seth hey GM man Petra is uh it's all it's all
the buzz I'm here to I'm here to talk to you about it but I also I shared a little something in the
nest there for us to discuss as the conversation unfolds.
Thanks for the invite, man. As always, it's a pleasure being on the Moving Media Space.
Appreciate you. Appreciate you, Seth.
Yeah, I landed about three hours ago.
I got a good amount of shut-eye on the plane.
I think I got about four, well, I guess a good amount for a plane, four to five hours.
I guess, good amount for a plane, four to five hours. And so, um, sipping some coffee here and
token 2049 Dubai that the whole week was pretty incredible. I had a great time.
That's amazing. Let me, let me do this then. Let me ask you real quick.
I know you're running on about four to five hours sleep and, uh, and whatever the strength of the
coffee is that you're sipping on right now. let me ask you to unpack a little bit about your experiences at token 2049 before we jump into the all the stuff about pektra uh if that's cool
because i think it's going to frame really well what people's expectations should be from maybe
the price performance of pektra if you let us know what you saw on the ground in terms of sentiment
and intent in dubai yeah so that's a good idea.
The first event that I went to,
actually my buddy Nima.Eath, who's in the audience,
first event that we went to was Staking Summit.
And it was actually there that I met a couple of people
building on Eath.
One was a cracked out dev and the other one was,
I believe, a node provider.
But they sincerely believe that Pectra is going to 180 ETH and it's going to allow for ETH to
feel more like consumer chains, like Solana. Sorry, I'm a little tired here. But yeah, no, so Petra is, it seems bullish.
I don't know how bullish it's going to be for each price, but that was staking summit.
Token 2049, one of the things I noticed quite quickly is that these conferences are becoming more and more mainstream, or I guess newbie oriented.
mainstream or I guess newbie oriented as crypto becomes more mainstream I find that the conferences
are they're attempting to cater to a more broad audience and uh like token for example they also
they let in 15,000 people this year as opposed to 10,000 and you could really feel that in the
first day it was I felt like I was at a music festival in a mosh pit
or something. It was just so hard to get around. The second day wasn't as bad towards the afternoon,
but generally a lot of the booths that I was seeing at token and that I've been seeing at
conferences in general are more B2B. I'm not finding as many B2C companies paying for these types of booths. I don't see that many token companies
or rather token projects. But overall, the networking was awesome. I think that these,
first of all, token is the biggest conference in the game right now. And we saw how great
Singapore was. I think Dubai was right up there. The city's a bit bigger, so it takes longer to
get around from networking event to networking
event, but it's an incredible city.
And I could go into why Dubai is an incredible city, and no city in history has been able
to build over the course of seven years what they have.
And so I think that it being an international hub and it being a crypto hub just allows
you to brush shoulders with the right people if you're coming in for a week like this, Sui Basecamp, I did not have the time to go to,
although I'm hearing good things. I heard it was very much like a Solana breakpoint type feel,
early days of Sui where people are still, I think it's like $300, right? So people are still
learning about Sui, people still finding out about
it, that the on-chain volume doesn't really reflect the price, or rather the price appreciation
doesn't really reflect the on-chain volume at the moment.
But I think Sui is pretty bullish.
So I mean, like this is so much to talk about, Seth.
And I'll just pause right there if you have any questions.
Yeah, no, that's huge, man.
Thanks for the recap.
Hey, as far as general sentiment,
what you're saying in terms of on-chain
and expectations from alt-chains,
you know, not ETH like Sui,
I'm pretty much,
we're pretty aligned, man.
So I'm not going to be able to give you
a lot of counterpoint on today's show.
I promise I'll keep my opinions entertaining.
But I think we're going to be thinking very similarly there there there's a lot to be excited about and i think
we're all expecting you know not not to be precisely the way that previous bull runs have been
but you know i mean dude we've heard it a million times history doesn't repeat it rhymes oh i'm an
accidental poet maybe it was on purpose but like but But as far as the price action for all these alts
kind of leapfrogging after there's some liquidity or volume that moves out of Bitcoin,
I think what we're noticing is that what makes this market legitimately different, genuinely
unique and special from bull markets that we've seen in the past is that there's so much global interest in Bitcoin
that by the time there's any kind of liquidity that moves from Bitcoin, it's going to come from
sectors that we didn't expect. So I think that you're right to be looking at some of those
alternate plays outside of just ETH. But ETH is one of those, that if Petra does go off without
a hitch, if we see some of the performance hitch, if we see some of the performance gained,
if we see some of the stability gained, first off, it is the incumbent. Let's just point out
the 800-pound gorilla in the room. People who think that DeFi is going to magically switch to
Solana are like, dude, give me whatever they're smoking because that that's amazing that's a that's amazing mental gymnastics
you're able to engage in if you believe that that there's any chain that is going to easily
this place eath because it just hasn't happened yet the tvl doesn't lie that's kind of what i
mentioned in the post that's pinned to the nest the tvl doesn't lie you can fake on-chain volume
you can fake number of wallets you can fake fake daily active users. All that stuff can be programmatically faked. What you're not normally able to fake is people committing their value into the chain by either tokenizing real-world assets or by backing stable coins with dollars or even when they're collateral,
when they're collateralized debt positions,
putting some kind of collateral up.
They're putting their money where their mouth is.
And ETH just has that in spades.
They've got it well over double the nearest competitor,
which by the way, I mean, inconvenient truth,
Tron is the nearest competitor in terms of that metric.
But any of the other
competitors that talk about like whoa defy will be taken over by these alt chains my my brother
in christ no look at the tvl look at what people are actually doing not what they're saying look
where look where their money is not where their mouth is and eth is not going to be easily displaced so really what we're looking
for from this upgrade is stability and long-term viability as a good enough solution to get the job
done with the value that's already there that's it that's all it has to do the bar is actually
incredibly low for eth and so as long as it does as long as the devs don't fuck it up and it keeps running, then yeah, ETH stands in a really good position to keep being the rails that DeFi runs on.
So that's kind of my macro thesis about the Pectra upgrade in general.
Now, whether or not that makes ETH, the ticker symbol, ultra bullish and slingshot to the moon, orhot a little bit outside of, you know, the reach of gravity for a few hundred meters up. I think most of us would take, you
know, something, anything, you know, over the current price action, then that's great. But I
think it's a little more nuanced than just expecting that an upgrade will make the ticker
symbol perform, Noah. It's complex. Yeah, it is complex, right? And I want to just double up and say I
never personally believed that Solana would become the home of DeFi. I was wrong about Solana in many
ways. And I think that Solana is amazing for, you know, so many different retail activities such as trading
and shit coining and, you know, Solana, PumpFun, Photon, Axiom, you know, these things coming
together have made the blockchain, playing on the blockchain feel as fast as the internet,
the way that it's supposed to. And I don't think ETH has that. But on the flip side,
you know, whether it's outages, which I don't think ETH has that. But on the flip side,
whether it's outages,
which I think Sol has done a good job of solving.
I don't think they've had a major outage in a couple of years.
Or whether it's RPC nodes
not accepting transactions,
which is what you had during,
if I'm not mistaken,
the Melania token launching.
I got into it with some ETH devs on Twitter and they were basically saying
I don't understand how it works.
And the point is, is whether or not I understand how it works is irrelevant.
The fact that I couldn't make transactions, like the fact that, you know, the market could
be tanking and this is an issue and I can't get my funds out of a lending platform and
sell when I want to sell, that makes me not want to keep my net worth on Solana.
And so I never
really thought that ETH would lose that crown. It is the most decentralized. It is the most
battle-tested, right? If I'm going to keep millions of dollars on one chain, it's going to be ETH.
Now, the price, they say this is the, in terms of Pectra, they say this is the biggest upgrade since, God, man, I am blanking on names
that I know very well. The Merch, they say this is the biggest upgrade since the Merch. And
the Merch was a big upgrade. But if you haven't looked at the price of ETH, it has lost about 80%
of its value against Bitcoin since the Merch. And at the end of the day, you can love
the chain and you can use the chain, but not want to hold the underlying asset. I don't really get
why the underlying asset wouldn't be performing as well as the chain is. But you can point to L2s
for that, right? L2s do not give that much of the revenue back to ETH. You can point at the fact that high throughput chains like Solana and like,
I guess now Sui are coming around and they're more retail oriented,
but I want to go through some key features of the Pectra upgrade, Seth,
and I want to hear your thoughts on, let's see,
combo you're trying to come up.
I want to hear your thoughts on this.
So account abstraction,
I think account abstraction is introducing features like batching, transaction batching.
And if you're wondering what that is at a high level, if you play on Solana, if you want to swap one token for another token on Solana, you go on Phantom, you click confirm, it confirms.
There is no like allowing the token or giving the token permission.
When you do it on ETH, there's multiple transactions that's being made.
So from what I understand, it's going to allow for those transactions to batch together. So if you're going
to go on Aave, for example, and you're going to lend a token, you can just click one button and
boom, that's it, you're lending it. And that's the way that Web2 feels. So I think that's
kind of massive. But I want to pass it to you, Seth. Do you want to add anything to the
account abstraction that we're getting
from EIP 7702? No, absolutely. Just as a general concept,
account abstraction is super important for mainstream adoption. And these are the kinds
of primitives that, as you mentioned before, Sui launched with because they had the benefit
of building on the shoulders of giants, right? They came in well past, I mean, numerous phases
into the blockchain experiment the
grander blockchain experiment so the sui devs had a lot of really great examples to uh to build on
and a lot of great warnings to avoid in terms of pitfalls and you know problems that and pain
points that we've all experienced with blockchain since you know since bitcoin launched gosh i mean
think about it the white paper 17 years ago bitcoin is on the cusp of becoming an illegal adult, Noah.
It's almost illegal adult.
But we've got a lot of years.
We've got a lot of years of this experience.
The SUI devs had the opportunity to look at, you know, what works with those systems and also, you know, what's been a pain point with Ethereum.
And Ethereum, they're, you know, they are, for lack of a better metaphor,
they are the man in the arena. They take a lot of hits with new protocols coming out,
new standards coming out, ERC token standards coming out. But with account abstraction,
it's been one of those things that we've known has been a hurdle that needs to be overcome
for mainstream adoption. Now now why is that because most
people don't want to memorize a seed phrase and most people don't want to don't want to deal with
the possibility of a uh of a public key encryption having some massive problem that they can't
possibly understand because they would need to they'd need to understand quantum computing and maybe even a level of
mathematical or STEM prowess that approaches knowing calculus or something. This is advanced
stuff when you get really deep into it. Even Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper
mentions a Poisson distribution, which is rather heady math for people who haven't, who aren't mathematicians
or didn't study advanced maths in their graduates, in their collegiate or graduate studies.
So account abstraction helps to make things simple. It's a very, you know, it's a less
commonly used phrase, but it's going to help the average person use common language to control Bitcoin or cryptocurrency wallets.
And having that as a primitive inside of Ethereum is a long time coming.
Because ENS did a good job of helping people just put an address like mobimedia.eth.
Very easy to remember, right?
When people are watching your show, you tell them, hey, do you feel like contributing or donating to the show?
Do you like these free community conversations
that Noah's been doing for years?
You could just donate to MobyMedia.E.
First off, please tell me you have that.
The ENS.
I don't want to like...
I don't want to...
I actually...
We don't.
We don't have it.
And to be quite frank, I'm not really – I've never been so interested in having an ENS because I don't particularly want people to know where our funds are. I don't know. That's just me, though.
No, for sure.
Call me a cypherpunk maxi. taxi well well consider that that the nice thing about services similar to ens i'm not gonna i'm
not gonna sit here and shill the ns there are many solutions that do this theo network does
as well right i'm just saying yeah no but i mean i'm not i've got i said nothing to gain
um and so i'm not trying to like i'm not trying to chop wood or carry water for any one of these
services the point is that there are several that do it and think about it like DNS control on a website.
You can very easily point up a web domain like MobiMedia.com.
You could point it to a different server address, server IP address at any point that you wish because you have control of it.
That's the power of things like naming services, right?
Dynamic naming services or, you know, the Ethereum naming service.
You can absolutely reassign it to a different wallet address anytime you want to. So there's that. And you can have it reroute to,
say, a Bitcoin wallet address if you wanted, or a Monero address if you wanted. There's a lot of
flexibility there. But they're not the only ones that do that. My point is, by any other name,
this is a form of account abstraction. People are not interacting directly with your account.
So what's old is new again.
And this time it's native.
So hearing that Ethereum is doing this,
seeing that Ethereum is going to be rolling this out as a primitive is great
because it means that you will be able to manage your funds more simply from one place,
It means that you will be able to manage your funds and more simply from one place, but be able to in the public facing address aspect of dealing with cryptocurrencies, you'll be able to put forth donation and payment and remittance addresses that don't make it so obvious which account you're controlling the funds from. And you know, being a guy who works with a lot of freelancers, and who actually runs a business that's crypto native, you know how
incredibly nerve wracking it is to think about like, oh, did I just pay a freelancer from from
the wrong account? Did I just accidentally give away competitive intel to somebody who, you know,
who maybe doesn't have my business's best interest at heart? Did I put too much money in the wrong wallet or leave it in the wrong place or make it too visible?
These are things that will at least be partially addressed by account abstraction.
So long overdue, super welcome addition to the Ethereum native core stack.
That's kind of my thoughts on account abstraction, Noah.
This is very good news
for the industry at large, not just Ethereum. No, I couldn't agree more. And I think that's
just one step that Ethereum needs to take. What we always say, Web3 needs to feel like Web2 in
order for mass adoption to happen. So great. Account abstraction, we still have issues with
speed. I want to talk about that here in a moment but
first let's talk about the increased validator stake limit previously validators were limited to
staking 32 east um and so this eip 7251 raises the cap to 2048 so you have basically what you
have right now is you have multiple entities that are running dozens of validators, right?
So because there is a small cap.
So now that you have basically almost a 10x or sorry, almost 100x increase in that cap, you can have validator consolidation.
This reduces the number of total validators and it also alleviates network strain
and improves block finality and performance. Now, do you think that this is, and we'll see,
but do you think that this is going to alleviate strain and improve performance to the point where
we might get a layer one ETH that is competitive with its alt layer one and layer two counterparts?
Yeah, that's a lot to hope for. I think it'd be, it'd be great, right? It would be really great if
the, uh, if native layer one ETH could be like the main event and like, and you know, the, the,
the primary game in EVM style blockchain. I think that's too much to hope for right now, Noah. I
think we're going to, just like with the merge, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I want to see ETH win over Bitcoin.
I think that's always been an apples to oranges comparison.
It just doesn't make sense to me.
I guess I'll die on this hill of saying Bitcoin is interesting,
but getting yield by LPing Bitcoin, wrapped Bitcoin of some type on ETH is literally interesting. It literally
bears interest permissionlessly. So there are things you can do with these systems that other
blockchains just can't. So knowing that we're going to maybe alleviate some congestion with
some validator consolidation is probably a good thing. What I'll say in terms of my gut level
response here, look, life's too short. I'll just tell you exactly how I feel.
When I hear that the staking limit for validators is going up that much, my first thought was immediately, oh, wow, they are in the business of king making now.
So there will be entities that can very quickly just say, I'm not mad at them because some of those those new you know the new kings or princes or you know or or dukes of of the ethereum the kingdom of ethereum will be
retail right now what people who we know are going to come up based on this people who we know are
going to operate nodes and I'm not talking about the big players I'm talking about people who we
know who were previously in the mining space, for example, and who've been missing the opportunity to run critical infrastructure at the scale that they'd
like to, to be able to get a little bit more of a piece of the pie. And frankly, on a merit basis,
right, where they're running the critical infrastructure with the correct amount of
uptime, but they needed more stake, right? They needed more skin in the game. Now, some of these people will be able to bring more to bear, right? Do the
whole family and friends raise, be like, hey, you got some ETH lying around? Help me stake it. Let
me stake it for you. And I mean, hopefully we see more of that happening in the trenches with people
whose names we know and people whose mortgages can be paid by this kind of activity as opposed to ultra centralized mega corporations that are already
buying up all the real assets in the entire observable universe we want this to help people
right we don't just we don't just want this to help large corps that are becoming increasingly
automated um so my first thought is yeah they, they're king making now. Who among our
friends will be in the chosen cohort? Who will be able to pull a sword from the stone and make it
into that category of like, all right, I maxed out a validator stake with friends, family,
associates, or through my own industry, i just i knocked enough you know metaphorical
doors to get that 2048 eth and and i'm running this this critical infrastructure and this is
now my job that's cool to think that there could be some people who we know that could fit in that
in that category this is interesting okay so what so you're saying that, for example, I could spin up, and I don't even know, like, what infrastructure do I need to spin up a validator?
I do, I can, you know, I see here that EIP7002 allows validators to, basically flexible validator exits, right?
to basically flexible validator exits, right?
More programmable and automated staking workflows.
I don't know exactly what that means,
but what I am guessing is that it's going to make,
it's going to slightly remove friction
and lower barrier to entry
for folks that do want to get involved in the staking game.
Now, this idea of someone's full-time job
being a e-validator is interesting to me.
Can you extrapolate on that a bit?
Yeah, absolutely.
So this is something that was kind of, this was one of the big hopes, right, with other proof-of-stake networks in years past.
Dash, right, I won't say RIP, Dash has done a lot of work to help lay out mass adoption in places.
I mean, they've gone places and done things for the blockchain industry that should be the stuff of legend when we finally start teaching blockchain history to whatever special
humanities class still exists in higher education in the future.
Dash should be remembered for the contribution, I think.
So it's worth mentioning that, yeah, the project you know uh network was that sort of a thing where it at its peak i think it was it was it had topped
seven figures of capital you know capital required to max out or to to even qualify for a what was
called a masternode in the dash network now fast forward fast forward to today with Ethereum finally rolling all this out, or I'll rewind a little
bit, the Cosmos, the Cosmos Hub ecosystem.
There are some groups who are professional node runners, professional validator groups,
and they have been in the business of getting in early for new network launches in Cosmos
Hub and providing that critical infrastructure and
benefiting and it's been the sort of thing where yes it is that kind of a proposition for some of
these groups where all they're doing is providing that critical infrastructure early phase and then
it's not so much set on rails because network upgrades have to happen they need human action
they need human decision making and human action to then make the decision as to whether or not the next upgrade should occur because there are moral and ethical questions being asked with all of these upgrades. unless you want to consider humankind as a form of AI. I don't know. I don't want to get too deep into an ontological debate here,
but we require human action, right?
Human intervention, human thought, right?
And we need to tangle sometimes with ethical and moral dilemmas
as new upgrades are being proposed.
Vote on them and then vote with our feet
if you're a node operator or a validator operator
by saying, yeah, I choose to install the upgrade and help the network shift to this new system.
Or in some cases, be a conscientious objector, vote no, and say, I refuse to run this upgrade.
Or at the most contentious, say, not only do I refuse to run this upgrade, I now choose to fork the chain with others who think like me.
You see, this is, it's a far more political process than most people realize when you're
talking about running a validator. In the same way that I remember with the merge. I'm going to,
I'm going to bring back a little bit of a little bit of mining history here since we're so far
post-merge. I think, are we past the statute of limitations no am i gonna go to jail for saying this no i won't okay so uh not legal advice thank you so much i'm now mentally unburdened but uh
but before the merge happened i jumped on a youtube live stream with serpent x tech great guy vega uh
i hope you get to hear this this snippet at some point in the future but he helped to coordinate a live stream among every major crypto mining influencer on youtube in north america and i mean
i mean the big boys bitsby trippin a guy who's consulted in dc for the last 10 years heavy
hitters the people who just said we disagree with the way the Ethereum Foundation is doing this. And then they invited on Tim Bako from the Ethereum core dev group, the Ethereum Foundation.
And we discussed some of the implications of EIP-1559 at the time, as well as the merge.
And we got to the bottom of questions like MEV, and then formed an advocacy group where all of these mining
influencers said, hey, we're going to reach out to our favorite mining pools and tell them how
we think they should vote on this upcoming chain decision. And we swayed the Ethereum core devs.
They postponed the upgrade for two full months human action matters in blockchain i'm
just saying two months is better than zero months and in blockchain time you know we we we measure
things one block at a time right like in some cases especially when you're waiting for a
transaction to go through you measure crypto in in block time not in months. Two months is a long ass time to put off an upgrade that's going
to cut out your livelihood or cut out the fee structure or change dramatically the fee structure
that might affect humans and human livelihood. It matters, bro. This stuff matters. And it is
intensely political at times. So that's why I bring it up. But yeah, being a validator operator will be tantamount to being a large scale mining operator, say in Bitcoin. So these are things that
we have to tangle with. There is legal precedent in which I believe it was the SEC that engage in
some language that was technically overreach in claiming that oh well we we believe that the majority of
ethereum validators are in north america ergo we have jurisdiction see what i'm saying this stuff
gets important it gets really the the fine print is going to start to matter in the upcoming uh not
only the remainder of the trump administration but whoever comes in next who we hope will be as
as with the program as trump's administration is you you know, vis-a-vis crypto.
But we don't know that for sure.
So we do have to think about some of these things because there are humans that get involved and it can get messy.
But yes, validator operation and node operation.
Absolutely.
depending on the scale that it's done and depending on the network it absolutely can provide for not
only a human life but for a household a mortgage the things that we equate to like an air quotes
job right these are these are things that are going to matter in the not too distant future
so so yeah i mean i've i'm pretty well versed with that stuff and and i will maintain that
that these are jobs in crypto that we want humans to do for as
long as humanly possible right are you so are you familiar with what is required in order for
someone to set up their own validator uh yeah so you need to have uh you need to have the correct
the need the correct server set up and then as you mentioned earlier the you know it's not an
insignificant amount of of eth to stake when you're talking about Ethereum.
At this point now, with the upgrade launching today, over 2,000 ETH you can stake.
So those fees should be a little more substantial and more worth your time to run that critical infrastructure.
But it would just be a high-performance server that helps to respond to network needs in in terms of validating transactions
it's uh but i mean the the specs i couldn't tell you like hey go buy this much ram right now
yeah what's that what's that oh just saying like i as far as the specs i couldn't tell you today
like oh yeah go buy this exact system here and this much RAM and and set it up this way that that's a little bit of a moving target but you know thank
God for that too if the if the standards weren't being raised at the bar weren't
being raised over time then we would know that security is slipping right so
sure yeah okay so I'm gonna look this up after because I feel like I could do something like this.
I could run an Ethereum node, figure out the logistics, and have plenty of friends that hopefully would be happy to stick to my node.
Let me drop one name for you. I believe that they are still viable, but a software ecosystem called DAPNode, D-A-P-P,
node. And they make a very easy to manage user interface for setting this up. And then they have
guides on the current best practices for hardware. But think of it as almost like, you know how
there's all these like these very simple front ends for running a bitcoin node you know on a raspberry pi or something all these different software makers os makers that's what dap node is for eth
but it's value added anything that's similar to eth like avax or polygon right or any other evm
style chain even something as esoteric as doge chain which is like launched to like almost no TVL and maintains almost no TVL still today, but it's still inexplicably like alive.
You can even run their infrastructure on this software called Dapnode.
So, Noah, I think you're totally right.
You absolutely could run it with software like that.
It's totally within your capabilities.
It's totally within your capabilities.
And yeah, it just takes a couple of Sundays of spare time and maybe a few more cups of coffee and you're there.
Yeah, I got to look into that.
Okay, so a bullish catalyst for Petra and specifically for ETH, the ETH price.
Because a lot of people, they believe in ETH, they believe in the network and they hold ETH as a result.
But for whatever reason, like you mentioned earlier, the ETH price is lagging. of people that they believe in eith they believe in the network and they hold eith as a result but
for whatever reason like you mentioned earlier the eith price is just lagging and it's um it's
lagging pretty poorly right it's it's one thing to say all right well eith eith is uh it's falling
behind bitcoin because bitcoin dominance has been going up and typically these cycles start with
bitcoin first at 80 80% of your value
after a major upgrade, not even three years ago, is pretty substantial. And so I'm curious to know
what would be some bullish catalyst for Petra, right? Improved user experience is one of them,
which would obviously attract new participants and would
increase demand for ETH. Scalability boost, maybe, but again, a lot of these roll-ups,
they don't kick back too much back to the layer one in terms of revenue share or even gas.
I think the validator consolidation is one that I find quite exciting,
especially, like you said, Seth, an institution might not want to just sit around or an institution
might not want to churn up, I don't know, 90 to 100 different nodes if they want to be an institutional participant in ETH staking. But one validator
with 2,000-something ETH becomes a lot more enticing. So I could see that being a bullish
catalyst, like you were mentioning earlier, right? Institutions saying, hey, now this seems
more practical. We want a piece of this pie.
World Liberty is buying ETH. It's the OG. There's a lot of good tangible use cases for ETH still.
And so why don't we participate in this consensus? And well, let's just spin up a note or two and
fill it up with ETH and go about our day. We can hire people to run it for us. What are your
thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think that's exactly right noah i think the the validator consolidation in my mind is one
of the biggest draws of the peck draw upgrade because i mean i got that background in mining
right that's where that that's actually where you know the whole my my crypto moniker came from
was originally doing mining content and you know rather at this point i guess legacy mining content
since before the merge well before the merge in fact you can find a quote of mine on the altcoin
daily channel where i expressed to them extreme doubt in the in the price performance of ethereum
with the merge before it happened i think they were a little bit they were a little bit disturbed
by it i think they were really hoping that the merge would be the most bullish news ever. But guess what? When you cut people out of the critical infrastructure, cut humans out of the critical infrastructure of a given system, they tend to get a little less bullish on you and your governance.
without me saying anything critical about the Trump administration,
because I think they're making a lot of very good moves.
And the Department of Government Efficiency is quite necessary.
There's a lot of waste in this country.
What I will say, though, is that on the ground, boots on the ground,
being friends with law enforcement and with people who have had a full career,
retired fire department, firefighters,
that some of these people who run unions are less excited about
what they perceive
to be cutbacks to their livelihood in areas where they've, in some cases, they've dedicated their
lives to this particular type of critical infrastructure or what they believe is critical
infrastructure. Now, whether or not there's waste there to get through, that's not mine to judge.
I'm just saying that people who work these jobs I've seen have
been, they've been very disturbed by the thought of them being cut out. Everyone wants to believe
that their job is important. And as humans, we're facing global mass automation across every
conceivable human endeavor. I mean, everything, not just knowledge work. But now, with the advent of
widespread robotics, Noah, we're going to see the optimist robot. And in some cases, brave souls who
decide to import the unitry and other Chinese robots stateside. We're going to see them in
people's homes very soon, extremely soon in some households. So we're facing um in the minds of some people they
believe this is an existential threat so this same principle applies i think with with cryptocurrencies
and blockchain and it is applicable to the pectra update and that people will view like well i know
how to do this and like you like you suggested you're right you can do this you you can run
critical infrastructure for
Ethereum. You could have done it yesterday. Today's a great time too, right? Now that you know,
there's more at stake, literally. But you could have run it at any time.
Well, Seth, I mean, think about it like this. Okay. So let's say I have 32 ETH, right? Or let's
say I have like 100 ETH, whatever. It's not that enticing to me,
right? Okay, I can set up a validator, I can stick my own ETH, and then what, right?
If I was to be a node operator, institutional node operator, or just a big node operator,
I would have to spend up tons of nodes. I'd have to spin up like 10,
20, 100 notes in order to make it worth my time. And like you said, now I can do that with just
one. I think actually, the more I talk about it, the more bullish I get on the idea.
Yeah, absolutely. And you're not the only person, right? So I think that you're right.
That is one of the biggest draws is that you have individuals, you have humans who are saying, hey, that's a great idea.
And I can see there's maybe some upside for myself in a world so full of uncertainty right now with automation.
This is kind of a ray of hope.
And it's something that, frankly, the Ethereum core devs, hey, maybe it's a little bit reactive, better late than never.
But maybe they're responding to what they're seeing in terms of, yeah, people, retail people. And the trench warriors, the people that made the Ethereum network so full of TVL and committed so many tens of millions in private, right, in private equity and in private capital.
So not, you know, and I don't mean like, I don't mean to say anything bad about VCs
or about large institutions at all.
I don't mean to say anything negative about them at all.
But you have a lot of individuals who have states millions upon millions
in personal capital on this network.
And I think this is one of those good faith moves
on the ethereum core developers part to say like yeah you know we will make it more possible
um at least for a few of these people even if you're not techie you know find find your friend
who's also an investor in e who is right and you band together and you can you can get a little
more yield for staking your whole bag in one validator and then get those rewards on a good block and
on a good day. Get more of those rewards by processing those weightier transactions on
your validator that time. So yeah, this is one of the most bullish parts of the upgrade.
The account abstraction is great. It's long overdue and it's also a little bit reactive
by comparison to other networks. But these other networks are are standing on
the shoulders of those who were standing on the shoulders of those who were already standing on
the shoulders of giants like they are very late to the game they just played it very smart um but
if you know they have no excuse they've also got literally all the tbl in the world 10x over the
nearest recent competitor um if we cut out say networks like
Tron, but so much more. So, so yeah, with that much at stake, they do need to be involved
in that virtuous cycle of giving back to those who provide them critical infrastructure like
they were doing with mining. Okay. Well, the, the, the Pectrara update do you know what time it's going to be alive
i don't know the block height but i mean they said may 7th i didn't say the uh the exact time
zone or block height all right well we'll see when it goes live i think we covered everything
right we could get more granular but the point, this is the biggest upgrade that ETH is about to undergo since
the merge. And there's a lot of, in my opinion, or I guess in Seth's opinion as well,
objectively, well, I guess not a, things that should be objectively bullish catalysts,
specifically the validator consolidation, right? I think the account abstraction is very cool
because of the front-end user experience
feeling more like Solana,
feeling more like Web2 applications.
Instead of having to improve three transactions
in order to lend,
I can just approve one and boom,
it's in there and I move on
to the next thing I want to do on my list.
And I think that the potential scalability boost as a result of the validator consolidation
is interesting.
I don't know how much it's going to help with each speed, but again, the validator consolidation,
most exciting component of that for me is just the potential to signal institutional participation and whales
being able to consolidate their stake, as well as newcomers being able to join and not just stake
their ETH, but instead of having to churn up multiple validators, just have their friends
and family or whoever, their colleagues stake in the validated that they're already running with
their own,
with their own pot.
So that's really exciting to me.
Seth,
thank you for joining.
I don't know if you have anything to add.
I think it's a good stopping point.
I've,
I have been going hard the last two weeks with the networking,
with the,
the meetings,
the conferences.
So I need a little break and I'm looking forward to catching up with everything.
I've already been responding to messages.
Conferences, if you've got the right conference weeks,
they are just bangers.
It's so good for growth.
Absolutely.
Noah, God bless you for making this space happen today,
even on such a little sleep.
Will you be in Las Vegas?
I've got to ask.
I don't think so.
Oh, no.
Wait.
I don't think so.
It's unlikely.
Okay.
Well, I'm going gonna miss you this is
gonna be one of the first live events that i go to and it and if i can do a little teaser it might
be one of the last ones i go to for a little while i just i have so many other things also
but man life gets in the way right and uh and business development business developed in in
blockchain is not always served by going to every event um but i'm glad that you were in dubai you
know eyes on the ground,
boots on the ground to see what was going on there. One thing I'd like to add is if and when Dapnode sees you tag them, because we've mentioned their name more than once. Hey, Dapnode, Noah is a
phenomenal content creator on X. You should probably try to furnish him with one of your premium
hardware offerings so he can do a review for you.
And you should probably look him up to do an AMA because this is a guy who will help make your name a more regular household name.
Noah, I've spoken to long-term mining content creators that hadn't heard of Dapnode.
They can do better and you can probably help them.
I'll leave with that.
I appreciate that, Seth. And yeah, Dapnode would love you can probably help them. I'll leave with that. I appreciate that, Seth.
And yeah, DAP node would love to hear more about them,
potentially work with them.
And I am interested in running a node
and figuring out what components
or rather what steps I need to take
and what components I need to bring together
in order to make that happen.
So anyway, thank you all for joining.
This is a short episode of the Aquarium,
but we are excited about Pectra. A lot of good stuff happened at Token 2049 and the Staking Summit,
as well as the SUI-based camp and all of the networking events that revolved around those
events in Dubai. So hopefully we'll get some more big news and big guests on our podium.
Remember that everything you hear on these
broadcasts is meant for educational purposes only. Nothing is financial advice. So be safe
out there and we will see you all on the next one soon. Take care.
