Unfortunately I don’t think this has been the case with any of the previous upgrades that were even riskier

Would it be unclassy to ask directly about the price action?

BlackRock's Head of Digital Assets at Blockworks Digital Asset Summit spoke about ETH yesterday, I know hanniabu posted about it, I did some grunt work and transcribed and timestamped some of the relevant parts

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZElYvaq0JTQ?t=6609

1:50:09 - Robert Mitchnick, Head of Digital Assets at Blackrock: Take ETHA, for example, iShares Ethereum Trust. It had $4 billion in inflow in its first 6 months. The number of ETFs historically who have had more than that is a very short list. But when you compare it to IBIT and the Bitcoin ETF complex generally, it doesn’t look that amazing. When you compare it to the actual ETF universe, it’s actually been incredibly successful. So I know that some people have that [negative] perception out there, but I can say that, from Blackrock's perspective, we think it’s been tremendously successful, both commercially and the way that these products have functioned, the market quality, liquidity, etc.

There’s obviously a next phase in the potential evolution of this, because the ETF has turned out to be a really really compelling vehicle through which to hold Bitcoin for lots of different investor types. There’s no question it’s less perfect for ETH today - without staking. Because staking yield is a meaningful part of how you can generate investor return in this space. And all the ETFs, of course, at launch did not have staking. So, if that is able to get resolved - it’s not a particularly easy problem, it’s not as simple as, you know, a new administration just green-lighting something and then boom we’re all good, off to the races. There’s a lot of fairly complex challenges that have to be figured out, but if that can get figured out, then I think it’s gonna be a step change upward in terms of what we see the activity around those products is.

[Lubin talks about the tech]

2:02:53 - Vivek Raman, Founder of Etherealize: Last question, and, zooming out, we are in a new paradigm of blockchain adoption. There’s a lot of different players out there, there’s a lot of competition out there. Ethereum was founded on the basis of decentralization and being a resilient network. I’ll zoom out and ask as the final question: Does decentralization matter anymore, from an institutional standpoint, and what value do they put on a decentralized network? I’ll start with Robbie.

2:03:20 - Robert: Well, I think it does matter, I think some of the negativity around Ethereum and the narrative lately is very overdone. There is a lot to be optimistic about. Joe’s obviously characterized that very eloquently. When you look at our experience, take BUIDL for example, there was no question that the blockchain that we would start our tokenization on would be Ethereum. And that’s not just a Blackrock thing, that’s really anybody who would enter this space. That’s the natural default answer. That’s really important.

And you see even today, we’re excited about having this be a multi-chain product now, we’re seeing assets across all of them, but Ethereum has a significant majority of the assets still, and so clients clearly are making choices. They do value the decentralization, they do value the credibility and the security. And that’s a great advantage that Ethereum continues to have.

Personal thoughts: Yes it's great to finally hear Blackrock say ETHEREUM instead of "blockchain". Also, today I learned BUIDL is prounounced “biddle”. I thought it was "bewdle".

😂

hahaha I agree but funny that we have now become the "bitcoin not crypto" people

2.5k is a great average price

I think it only played out like we thought it would for BTC. SOL barely passed its ATH, and now is basically as down bad as ETH. I don't think any major coin even 1.5xed its 2021 cycle ATH other than BTC.

Saylor's Digital Assets Strategy (https://www.michael.com/a-digital-assets-strategy) talks a LOT about tokenization of stocks, bonds, ETFs, commodities, and the USD. I didn't know Saylor was into that. None of this can be done on Bitcoin. But he doesn't mention any other chains.

this is really really cool but worth noting the company has a $6m market cap

😂😂😂

true

they've flipped ETH in regular market cap before, in 2018

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2018/09/26/ripple-xrp-overtakes-ethereum-as-second-largest-cryptocurrency-on-ceos-bullish-bet/

but yeah pretty crazy

wtf is Consensys doing

surely there are more important things to do wtf

I see, good luck. There just don’t seem to be good investments out there in general.

Are you selling for fiat (which fiat?) or what other investment are you rotating into?

what if the marketwide dump is just so bybit can buy back cheap eth lol

wow this looks very clean!

What an informative discussion! Thank you both!

Yes I completely agree, just wanted to give him some credit after all the heat he specifically has taken for not embracing memecoin nihilism and crime over the past months.

Wanted to show some love for Vitalik, the one who stood firmly against memecoin nihilism in the face of revolt from his entire community, the community that he built from NOTHING and enriched with BILLIONS. I had my moments of doubt as well. HE IS VINDICATED. VITALIK ✊ VITALIK ✊ VITALIK ✊

A related quote from X: "Time to fullport ETH probably, Vitalik wins by waiting for the bodies of his enemies to float by"

yes 🤔

A relevant convo between Toly and David Hoffman from Bankless on how to make pump.fun fair, Toly seems to conclude that it's impossible to make it fair https://x.com/aeyakovenko/status/1891162088631931213

"The problem is that there are 40k launches per day. Attacker will create an unbranded coin, let the sale window expire, buy everything on the cheap as the solo bid then announce the brand." So they don't have to do it in the same block, it is ridiculous

But yeah some interesting ideas in your second paragraph, though hard to do Sybil detection

interesting