22nd July 2022 > > Ethereum.

tl;dr

There are big plans afoot for the Ethereum (ETH) network.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A lot of noise that the ECB no longer imposes negative interest rates.

I am not convinced that 0% is much to get excited about, but the more important announcement is the anti-fragmentation tool TPI (Transmission Protection Instrument), aimed squarely at the rocketing spread between 10-year German bunds and 10-year Italian BTPs.

A challenge as to the legality of the ECB’s original programme of quantitative easing resulted in the German constitutional court initially finding that it did not respect the “principle of proportionality” in 2020 before reversing that decision in 2021.

It is inconceivable that the TPI will not be subject to the same degree of legal investigation, with potentially catastrophic consequences, which none of us want.

Occasional Series – Tesla sold BTC in Q2

Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy:

“If you sell 75% of your BTC, you will have only 25% left.”

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The future of Ethereum (ETH)

At the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris yesterday, co-creator of ETH and one of the world’s all-time greats, Vitalik Buterin, explained his thoughts about the future development of the network.

Everyone here already knows about The Merge unless you have worked hard to not pay any attention to my daily scribblings.

For Vitalik that is merely the start of a period of rapid innovation with ETH just 40% complete now and just 55% complete after The Merge.

The next step will be The Surge – the addition of Sharding, which again all readers are already familiar with. Sharding will not only lower transaction fees, but importantly TPS (transactions per second) will increase from the 15-20 seen today, to 100,000.

That compares very favourably with estimates for the TPS of VISA ranging from 1,700 to 24,000.

Next up is The Verge, utilising a mathematical concept known as Verkle trees (for the masochists out there https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html). Once ETH has fully transitioned to PoS (Proof of Stake) validators with 32 staked ETH will confirm and verify transactions. However, the amount of data that must be stored, and the complexities of doing so, means that effectively only large organisations that specialise in staking operations can act as nodes.

As an aside, my favourite and one I use for almost all my staking across several blockchains is stake fish (https://stake.fish/en/).

The Verge will allow users to become validators without having to store extensive amounts of data.

Following on will be The Purge - a regular process of housekeeping, removing old network history from the current blockchain, though of course that history will still be available to view.

Finally, there is The Splurge, which Vitalik describes as “all of the other fun stuff.”