Unchained - Did the Merge Make Ethereum 'the Most Secure Blockchain in the World'? - Ep. 397

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, talks about the Merge, how this transition affects Bitcoin, where Ethereum’s road map is going, and more.    Show highlights: how Justin was feeling prior to and during the Merge whether the upgrade is complete or there are other things to watch out for why Ethereum has slashing and why it is a better form of removing any attackers the concern about centralization due to liquid staking derivatives providers, like Lido or Coinbase how the Merge affects MEV and the long-term vision of proposer-builder separation whether the Merge puts pressure on BTC to also transition to proof of stake what impact ETH’s more deflationary nature will have on BTC’s narrative as digital gold why Ethereum is the settlement layer for the internet of value whether there is a winner take all dynamic in the blockchain industry why Ethereum is more secure than Bitcoin, according to Justin what Justin thinks about the ETHPoW fork and its team and the risks of interacting with the ETHPoW fork the next steps in Ethereum’s roadmap     Thank you to our sponsors!   1inch Crypto.com Messari Justin Twitter    Previous Coverage of Unchained on the Merge: How Traders Are Thinking About the Merge -- and a Potential ETHPoW Chain Arthur Hayes, Former Ethereum Skeptic, on Why the Merge Makes Him Bullish on ETH With the Merge, Will Ethereum Take Over Bitcoin’s Title as Digital Gold? Why Kevin Zhou Believes Ethereum Will Have 3 Forks After the Merge Post-Merge, If Lido Becomes Dominant, What Does That Mean for Ethereum?     The Merge: Vitalik announcement of the Merge Ethereum carbon emission reductions A guide on the Merge by Dan Chen from Sequoia Capital   ETH Post-Merge Dynamics: Ultra sound money ETH issuance and burn Cumberland on the Ethereum dynamics after the merge  Miles Suter on the implications of the Merge The triple point asset   Post Merge MEV: PMCGoohan’s tweet Pintail on post-Merge MEV   ETH Proof of Work Poloniex announces a different token ETHPoW team Mainnet announcement   Ethereum’s roadmap: ETH Vision Haym on Ethereum’s roadmap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto seven years ago, and as a senior editor, Forbes, was the first Metri-Meter reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the September 16th, 2022 episode of Unchained. Want to know what you missed in the last 24 hours? Unchained Daily Newsbits are now on YouTube with the biggest headlines and significant. 60 seconds or less. Don't miss Mainnet, the most anticipated crypto event of the year, September 21st to 23rd in New York City. Get $300 off your pass today by visiting mainnet. Events and entering promo code unchained at checkout. See you this fall at Mainnet

2022. With the crypto.com app, you can buy, earn, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code, Laura. Link in the description. One inch is a top dex aggregator that finds the best rates across multiple networks. Why use a single decks when you can use them all? Get one inch on your phone now or swap on one inch.io. Today's guest is Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. Welcome, Justin. Hi, Laura. Thanks for having me again.

Congrats on a successful merge. this was a truly exciting event, a huge deal in the world of crypto. Tell us about your experience of the merge. What were you feeling beforehand and what did you feel once the transition happened? I was a little nervous to be fair, beforehand. Maybe the day before, you know, I started feeling, hey, this is real. For a long time, it was just theoretical. And it's been so long that I've been, you know, used to thinking that it's in the future.

but no, it was actually coming. In terms of how I feel, how I felt in the moment, I was extremely tired. And the reason is that we almost pulled a whole all-nighter with the ultrasound money team. We were pushing as hard as we could to get this feature where you could basically track the supply after the merge and see how much it had decreased or increased

relative to the point of the merge. And actually, my partner, who's here right next to me, Alex, Tesla Michael, just pulled a whole all-nighter. And so he's kind of the hero that we deserve. And I am just so, so impressed by how the merge went. Just so impressed by all the devs. You know, as a researcher, I'm powerless, right?

Because my job in a way was to help write the specs, and that was done, you know, two years ago. And so now it really all laid in the head. of the client developers and the node operators and both have done a really steady job. The merge has gone way better than I expected. Participation rate is over 98%, which is really, really good. We haven't had any disruptions that I really know of. Nothing major.

Wow, yeah, it's really quite an achievement. And it definitely, I mean, for someone who's not technical, just even, you know, from what I read, it seemed like everything was extremely smooth. So, you know, congratulations to you all. And I was curious. So now that Ethereum is in this proof of stake world, is this sort of like done? Or are there issues that you and other core devs are kind of watching out for to just make sure everything really went smoothly? Yeah. So we'll be keeping an eye on postpiration rate. We'll also be keeping an eye on possible unexpected forks. So it could be that one of the consensus clients or maybe one of the execution clients

starts misbehaving. And so we would see some fraction of the validators going off on a separate fork. And actually, if it happens to one of the execution clients, one of the minor execution clients, that could give us insight into the distribution because it's relatively easy to tell the distribution of consensus clients. and actually there's a website client diversity.org, which gives us that distribution. But for the execution clients, that's much more hidden. But ironically, when there are failures, it allows us to glean into this distribution of execution clients.

And so for how long will you be watching that before you guys feel confident that this really went off without a hitch? The way that the Lindy effect works, in my opinion, is kind of logarithmic. So the fact that the merge was successful for one second is already a huge breakthrough. The fact that it was successful, one minute is a huge breakthrough, 10 minutes, a whole day, a whole week, a whole month, a whole year. And I think if it can survive the next few days, the next few weeks, next few months, this is high, high confidence that, you know, this is reliable. I must also highlight that the proof of stake chain has been running for a very long period of time. It's been running for, you know, over a year and a half now. It's the most secure blockchain in the world now.

it has $20 billion of economic security. And also, unlike proof of work chains, it has the ability to recover from 51% attacks thanks to slashing, the ability to identify and remove attackers if and when there is an attack. Yeah, and just to draw that out, it's because in contrast, in a proof of work system, they would still have their equipment. So it's kind of like harder to keep them off the network. Is that the implication there? That's correct. When you are under attack in proof of work, you cannot distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. All the hash rate is fungible. And so you can't just target the data centers of an attacker and kind of remotely burn them down. But this is effectively what we're able to do with proof of stake because every unit of stake is identified and can be removed from the system. Either automatically, for example, in the context,

of two inconsistent finalized points. There's an automatic process whereby anyone who voted on both sides of these finalized chains will get automatically slashed. And there's also a process, if required, called social slashing, whereby as a community, we kind of observed, for example, that there's been censorship on the chain and we can react with a soft fork or hard fork that removes the attacker from the chain. So I'm glad that you brought up this comparison to proof of work because I'm sure you're very well aware that Bitcoiners have long said that proof of state can lead to more centralization. And as you probably know, even Ethereum Core developer Danny Ryan pointed out that one of those possible vectors would be the liquid staking derivatives market. People are saying that's a market that will tend to be more like winner take all. And obviously people will have a huge incentive to try to get liquidity.

out of their state ether. And I did notice that already Martin Coppulman, who, you know, he's obviously an Ethereum person. He's been involved in the community for years. He tweeted that of the first 1,000 blocks, 420 were validated by either Lido or Coinbase. So are you concerned about the potential centralization that liquid sticking derivatives providers might cause an Ethereum? So zooming out on the comparison of centralization between proof of work and proof of stake, there are like really big strong points for proof of stake specifically.

One of them is that the barrier to entry to becoming a staker is actually very, very low. You know, it's on the order of one eif, let's say, or even less than one eave. On the other hand, if you want to be a profitable miner, you need to make a multimillion dollar investment. And this is because there are economies of scale when you work with proof of work. And this is actually a second source of centralization, because it means that the largest miners get the largest deals on the hardware, for example, or on the electricity, and they're able to gobble up all the other miners. And actually this is something we're seeing. Right now, the proof of work miners are in the context of Bitcoin are under stress. There's mergers and

acquisitions happening, and the big fish are eating up the small fish. Now, on the topic of liquid staking, it is true that people do want liquidity on their stake. And so far, we've had exchanges that can provide this as a centralized service, and we've had more decentralized pools. So we've had Lido, as you highlight, we've had Rocket Pool. Now, the good news about Lido and Rocket Pool is that they're very decentralized. If you look at Lido, it's composed of, I forget exactly, but I think 28 operators. So the stake is actually not controlled by one operator, is distributed.

the LIDO itself is a DAO, which is governed by a token. And in the long run, it will be especially difficult to attack Lido. One of the reasons is that the risk, which, for example, is smart contract risk. What if there's a bug in the smart contract will go way over time as the lindy of Lido increases? and also the LIDO project is setting up this idea of the the Staked-EF token holders to put forward vetoes to any consensus decisions that are made by the LDO token holders. So even if the LDO token is subject to a 51% attack, they can't push through bad governance changes because those will get vetoed.

Now, we still do want a huge amount of competition, right? We don't want to be in a position where there's one or handful of these decentralized staking pools. And this is something that I've done a little bit of research in, and it turns out that it is possible to simultaneously be a solo validator from home and to benefit from liquid staking, basically the ability of turning your steak teeth. into a liquid token and being able to sell them at any point that you want. This is infrastructure that is still at the research level, but I expect that over time,

we're going to have more and more and more decentralized options to have liquidity over your stake. All right. There's just so many issues there. There's so much of being an impact. Probably it would take another show. But there's also many other things that we can discuss about this transition. So we're going to cover all those later, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make

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And I saw that someone who I think takes a certain kind of more anti-M-M-AV view, P. McGuin, tweeted that post-merge sandwich attacks had actually drastically dropped. I'm not sure how long that will last. But I was curious how you thought the merge would affect MEV. Right. So right now, well, pre-merge, most of the MEV went through FlashBats, and there was these private auctions happening, and that allowed for, you know, toxic MEV like Front Running and Sandwiching to happen. Post-merged, I think right now it's a minority of people that are using the FlashBots infrastructure or proposer-builder separation. And so what's happening is that they're not extracting as much value as they could, and in particular, they're not extracting some of the...

of that toxic MEV. What I expect to happen is that ultimately the incentives to participate in proposal-builder separation will kind of dominate. And over time, more and more people will play this game of basically proposing blocks that are built externally by sophisticated so-called builders that can extract as much value as possible from the blocks.

Now, there's two pieces of good news in terms of the long-term, vision of PBS. One is that we have this research gadget which is called MEV smoothing. It's this idea that as a proposer

you don't get to pick the type of block that you select from the builder market. You have to pick a specific block and you have to pick the highest paying block. And so that removes the discretionary power that proposers might have to do bad things like

censorship. The other really exciting gadget is this idea of an encrypted mempool. It is that when you make a transaction on-chain, before you broadcast it to the mempool, you encrypt it. It gets broadcast to the mempool. It gets included on-chain and only after it's been included on-chain does it get decrypted. And so that removes the vast majority of toxic MEV, which is only made possible because the sandwiches and the block builders can see the contents of the transaction. So once you remove that, you remove most of the MMV. And what you're left with in terms of MEV is the so-called good MEV, things like arbitrage,

things like liquidations, which are useful for the proper functioning of Defi and don't directly harm any specific one user. Oh, okay. I think this is the first time I'm hearing that that was on the roadmap. Is it on the roadmap? Well, one of the interesting things is that it doesn't have to happen in consensus on Ethereum layer one. Instead, it could happen for each individual roll-up. So, for example, Arbitrum is looking to do something like that, where they have these

encrypted transactions that get decrypted in a batch after the batch has been included on chain, and they have so-called threshold decryption, where they have a committee where when the majority of the committee decides to decrypt the batch, that's when it happens. And so no single bad actor within the committee can preemptively decrypt and front run the transactions inside. Okay. So at the moment, it's not something that will be built into layer one on Ethereum? It's something that could be built into layer one. One of the things that we want to try and avoid in layer one is so-called threshold threshold assumptions, this idea that you need at least one half or at least two-thirds of the actors to be participating in a specific way.

The good news is that there is this form of encryption which doesn't have a threshold assumption, which is called delay encryption. It's this idea that you encrypt your transaction and then automatically after a period of time, it could be 10 seconds or it could be 20 seconds or one minute. This is configurable. The transaction gets decrypted. So the flow would be you send your delay encrypted transaction. It gets included on chain.

And then once it's been included, kind of a few seconds later, automatically decrypts without the need of a committee or a threshold assumption. All right. So we're going to just switch topics slightly because I myself just did an interview with a mainstream news outlet. And what they were interested in was what this shift meant for Bitcoin. And I know you started. as a bitcoiner, you may still consider yourself one. And I wondered what you thought Ethereum's

transition of proof of stake and its decreased environmental footprint does, in terms of pressure on Bitcoin to also make a similar shift. Right. So there is this say, I forget who said it, could have been Anthony Sasano, which is that Bitcoin is the idea and Ethereum is the execution. And one of the things that Hall said, you know, 13 years ago was that he was looking into ways to make Bitcoin, you know, more energy efficient. You're talking about Hal Finney. Yeah, exactly. And it's widely thought, you know, that Hal Finney could be Satoshi.

And I personally believe that is the most likely candidate. And here we are 13 years later after Hall Binney kind of wrote this. we now have basically a more secure version of Ethereum, which doesn't consume nearly as much electricity. It consumes roughly 5,000 times less than Bitcoin. And I'm sure you're aware that also recently in Bitcoin, there's been this interesting trend where a number of previously hardcore Bitcoiners have kind of come out against Bitcoin maximalism. And I wondered now that ETH will likely be deflationary, what do you think happens to Bitcoin's narrative as digital gold.

Right. So from a cultural standpoint, what I think is happening is that the Bitcoin maximalists are becoming more and more extreme in their maximalism. And the Ethereum are just staying very, very open, which they have been since the very beginning. We have a culture of openness and welcoming. And so what's happening is that everyone in the middle is kind of gradually moving away. So I started, you know, Vitalik started as a bitcoiner and he moved away. I started as a Bitcoiner, I moved away. And now we're kind of moving through the spectrum of maximalism. And the one by one, there's a brain drain towards Ethereum and away from Bitcoin. Now, I think that Bitcoin was an amazing, you know, experiment for the world. And it kind of

showed us the way in terms of getting bootstrapped and with key ideas for settlement layers. But I really do believe that moving forward, Ethereum will be the settlement layer for the Internet of Value. And that looking back a century into the future, Bitcoin might not have been, you know, the success that it could have been had the culture been slightly different. And can you flesh out that vision a little bit when you say that Ethereum will be the settlement layer for the Internet of value? What does that look like? The purpose of blockchains as a product is to deliver secure block space. And you have these network effects at play because the most secure block space is going to be the one that attracts all the applications. And we know now with research and shodding and roll-ups that we can have a single blockchain scale to, let's say, 10 million transactions a second.

And that's enough for every single person on Earth to do 100 transactions a second. And so if there is going to be, if the scalability roadmap is correct, then there should be a winner-take-all dynamics where everyone bills on top of the most secure blockchain. And already today, Ethereum is now four times more secure than Bitcoin in terms of economic security. it has roughly $20 billion of economic security versus Bitcoin's $5 billion. And proof of stake, as I mentioned previously, has this magical ability to identify and remove attackers if and when there is a 51% attack. And what I think will happen over time is that as ether increases its monetary premium

and as the cash flows of Ethereum through the fee burn increase, the market cap of Ethereum will be, and therefore the economic security of Ethereum will become so large that even nation states are not in a position to attack Ethereum. And at that point, Ethereum will become effectively part of the substrate of the Internet itself. And it will be hopefully settling the Internet of value, which today we're seeing, you know, as Defy, but it's also going to include non-financial applications, such as, as as ENS. All right. So I just have to ask this. As you know, there was a lot of noise made by this Ethereum proof of work team that they

were going to fork and launch a proof of work chain today. And I was wondering what you thought of that effort. Yeah. I mean, I haven't been following very closely. But it seemed like the effort was extremely unprofessional. They made a lot of like very basic technical mistakes. And it seemed to be like, the cheerleaders seem to be some of the less, you know, savory community members.

And I just saw on Twitter, I don't know if this is correct, but apparently Justin Sun and Polonics have decided to declare the real Ethereum proof of work token to be yet another chain. So now there's two Ethereum proof of work chains that are competing with each other. And it's a great big mess. I don't expect any of these proof of work chains to really have much legitimacy. and therefore much value in the market. And will that cause any technical problems for Ethereum under proof of stake or the users? It doesn't cause problems, but I do want to highlight one thing,

which is that if these blockchains are not configured properly, then there could be a risk to interacting with them. Specifically, what could happen is what's called a replay attack. So, for example, if you want to try and sell your EVE proof of work tokens within a proof of work token, and they haven't properly done the replay protection, then you'd also be doing the same exact transaction on the main chain itself.

So be very careful if you do plan to sell these tokens and keep in mind replay protection. You know, like you said, you have been working on this for years, and the part that you were really involved in is a while back. So I was wondering if you could give us some highlights of what Ethereum's, roadmap will be going forward, what the next focus areas are, and especially how any of those

might help users dealing with, for instance, high gas fees. So I think there's two big themes in the roadmap. One is this massive feature that we want to deploy, which is known as sharding or dank sharding. And that is going to dramatically increase the scalability of roll-ups by roughly 100x. and then there's this other kind of long tail of incremental security upgrades that we want to do. And there's about a dozen of those. And I think the strategy moving forward is to try and focus on the big feature sharding unless we feel like there really is a pressing need to address some of the security weaknesses in the short term. So one example is a secret leader election.

Right now on the beacon chain, every single validator address and therefore IP address is known ahead of time. When you're proposing a block, the whole world knows that you will be proposing the next block. And so it's possible for an attacker to perform a distributed denial of service attack using the networking. And we can patch these attacks if we feel they're important. But if there are no attacks that really happen, I think the main focus will be proto-dank sharding, which is the first step towards full dang sharding. As we know, Ethereum development is fairly slow, but I expect that these initial steps will happen in the months to come, maybe six to 12 months.

And there will be some amount of relief with proto-dank sharding. Now that the devs can move away their focus, from the merge to the next big feature, which is sharding. And the dink sharding is a way of kind of lightening the data load. Is that how would you define it? Yeah. So there's two, you know, resources, computational resources that blockchains provide.

One is data availability, which you can think of it as bandwidth. And the other one is execution. And really what we're doing is we're dramatically increasing the bandwidth of the chain. So we can just put more data on chain. and have this strong data availability guarantees around it. And it turned up that roll-ups, the resource that they consume is data availability to a large extent and almost no execution. And Ephem today provides enough execution for roll-ups.

So really, the focus is primarily on data availability. All right. Well, I mean, this is just such a great recap of what happened and where things are going and what this means for the space. I so appreciate that. You took the time. I hope you get some sleep after this. Thank you.

Yes, we will sleep a lot. And again, congratulations. This is a huge achievement. I think everybody in Ethereum should be very proud. Thank you so much for having me. Bye. Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap.

Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. The most anticipated crypto event of the year is back. Join us at Mainnet 2022, happening this September 21st to 23rd in New York City. Connect with 4,000-plus crypto builders and thought leaders for three days of can't-be-missed keynotes, fireside chats, demos, networking, and more. Get $300 off your pass today by visiting mainnet.com and entering promo code unchained at checkout. That's mainnet. dot events and promo code unchained.

See you this fall at Mainnet 2022. With Amex Platinum, $400 in annual credits for travel and dining means you not only satisfy your travel bug, but your taste buds too. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap. SELCIA CEO dreams up a hail. Mary to skepticism. SELCIA CEO Alex Mishinsky is pushing for a revival of the firm,

according to a leaked recording handed to a SELCUS customer who also gave it to the New York Times. According to the NYT, Mishinsky outlined the plan in a meeting with employees last week. The CEO wants to revamp the company, building a business focused on crypto custody and charging fees on certain types of transactions. The plan's name, Kelvin. Mishinsky compared his firm's bankruptcy to other company's bankruptcies. Does it make the Pepsi taste less good? He asked employees. Delta filed for bankruptcy. Do you not fly Delta because they filed for bankruptcy? Thomas Brazil, bankruptcy expert, called the plan a joke and encouraged Mishinsky to step down. He also said, Delta is not a financial firm that operates on faith or trust. That's the big

difference between financial and non-financial bankruptcies. Even though Mishinsky seemed enthusiastic, the plan would require approval by federal judge Martin Glenn. In addition, the creditor committee has serious concerns about it and also about Mishinsky's involvement with Celsius. On Wednesday, the judge approved an order to appoint a neutral third party as an examiner of Celsius' financials. Using an examiner in Chapter 11 bankruptcies is not very common. Lastly, on Monday, two lawyers from the Federal Trade Commission requested permission to represent the regulator in Celsius's bankruptcy case that what's unclear what the agency's intention is. Treasury allows recovery of tornado cash funds,

but leaves open questions. On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, updated its frequently asked questions, or FAQ document, which provides guidance on how to remain compliant with the sanctions against tornado cash. As per the updated document, American citizens who used the virtual currency mixer before sanctions were implemented, will be able to apply for a license to recover the locked funds. OFAC also provided an update on the issue of celebrities and famous crypto community members being dusted with small amounts of ETH from tornado cash, instead it will not prioritize enforcement against them. However, OFAC did not address the sanctions compliance responsibilities

of various participants involved in validating transactions under proof of stake. The exact questions many members of the crypto community have been debating since the sanctions. This week, Crypto Venture Capital firm, Paradigm, laid out legal arguments against the sanctions on tornado cash. The company said, we believe that under current OFAC guidance, base layer participants are not required to monitor or censor these addresses as part of a risk-based sanctions compliance program. According to blockchain security firms, PEC shield, and CERTIC, a hacker laundered $500,000 through tornado cash on Tuesday. The exploit happened in August of 2021, due to a bug and the company. the Dow-Makers smart contract. A South Korean court wants Do Kwan arrested. A court in South Korea issued an arrest warrant against Do Kwan, CEO of Terraform Labs and founder of the failed Terra blockchain.

Last month, Kwan said in an interview with Kloinage that he was not being sought by investigators. However, after the news of the arrest warrant broke, Khoinage tweeted that Kwan told the media outlet, he has yet to receive any warrant from Korean prosecutors. The warrants, the warrants, warrant will be valid for one year and authorities expect help from Interpol to carry out the arrest of Kwan and two other Terraform lab employees, all believed to be based in Singapore. In addition, South Korea's Ministry of Finance is looking to void Kwan's passport. Doing so would force him to return to South Korea, where he would most likely be arrested. During the week, the price of Luna has experienced a crazy ride. It rose more than threefold from $1.91 to $7.6,

and is currently trading at around $3. After the news of the arrest warrant spread, someone created a token called Jail Kwan, ticker J-KWN. Inflation tanked crypto. On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the Consumer Price Index or CPI for August. The numbers came in higher than expected,

showing an 8.3% inflation rate over the last 12 months. The news was taken very negatively by the market, which started to price a higher interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve. Consequently, all speculative assets plummeted, including cryptocurrencies. The price of BTC fell almost 10% that day, and ETH suffered a 7% drawdown as well. According to Coinglass, more than $110 million was liquidated during the hour following the release. During this high volatility period, crypto exchange FTX's interface froze. Later, founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried apologized for the inconvenience.

Fidelity Investments plans to offer Bitcoin trading. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Fidelity Investments is planning to offer spot Bitcoin trading to retail customers. Fidelity handles over 34 million retail accounts on its brokerage platform and is one of the largest asset managers in the world. Earlier this year, the firm allowed companies to incorporate up to 20% of BTC and to their 401K retirement plans. A day later, Fidelity Digital Assets, together with other investment, giants, such as Charles Schwab and Citadel, announced the launch of EDX, a new cryptocurrency exchange. This move follows Black Rock's decision to enter the industry by partnering with Coinbase to offer crypto trading to its institutional customers. It appears that despite the bear market

and crypto prices underperforming, institutions are not giving up on crypto. In other adoption news, the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, in New York, announced it might sound. $70 million worth of art to expand the museum's digital footprint, which could include buying more digital art such as NFTs. The foundation plans to auction a number of masterpieces that were lent to the museum and includes paintings and sculptures by Picasso, Renoir, and Rodin. MoMA director Glenn Lowry said of the fact that the museum has so far resisted purchasing NFTs. We're conscious of the fact that we lend an imprimatur when we acquire pieces, but that doesn't mean we should avoid the domain.

Gary Gensler slightly changes his tune on tokens. Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, wants the SEC staff to recommend a pathway for crypto tokens to register as securities. In a written statement, he said, given the nature of crypto investments, I recognize that it may be appropriate to be flexible in applying existing disclosure requirements. The news comes after Gensler's recent comments reiterating

that he believes the crypto industry fits within the standards of current regulation, and that nearly every token in the crypto market is a security. As lawmakers are deciding how to regulate the industry, Coinbase added a feature for U.S. users to see the crypto sentiment scores of Congress members. CEO Brian Armstrong said that it will help users get educated on the crypto positions held by political leaders where they live. Will ETHPOW team make it? After the successful implementation of the merge, the ETHPOW team released the main net

information of the fork, including the RPC, the chain ID, and the currency symbol, which will be ETHW. The official EFOW Twitter account previously announced that the fork would be deployed within 24 hours of the merge. However, as Justin Drake just mentioned earlier in the show, Bolognax, which is owned by Tron's Justin Sun, decided to list the coins of yet another fork called Ethereum Fair, which Polo has now listed with the ticker, E.T.E.T.E.E.E.E.E. In its announcement, Polo said, based on the market situation and the consensus of users and the community, Polonex has decided to choose the fork chain Ethereum Fair, ETF, which is supported by the community's majority and more proof-of-work computing power as the main chain for ETHW tokens.

In related news, Ethermind, the world's largest Ethereum mining pool announced this week that it will stop offering proof of work services after the merge. Also, the hash rate of Ethereum Classic shot up by 280% following Ethereum's transition to proof of stake, which signals that miners are using their resources to mine other coins. Another network that has apparently been chosen by miners is Ravencoin, which experienced almost a 100% increase in its hash rate within hours. Novagrats' Galaxy Digital gets sued. Bickgo, a digital, digital asset platform filed a lawsuit against Galaxy Digital for breaking a merger agreement. Last month, Galaxy Digital announced the termination of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Bicco.

According to a press release, Galaxy is not going through with the deal because Bicko failed to deliver audited financial statements for 2021 that comply with their agreement. Bicco tweeted, Bicko filed a lawsuit against Galaxy Digital seeking damages of more than $100 million arising from galaxy's improper repudiation and intentional breach of its merger agreement with Bitco. Binance is another crypto company that's getting sued. A group of Italian and international investors initiated a class action against Binance, seeking to recover losses sustained during exchange outages. Time for fun bits. The Talox Hammer defeats enemies to merge. Have you watched

that final scene of the Avengers when Thor comes with its freshly minted hammer to save the day. CMS, in turn, a crypto account, released an edited version of that scene featuring Vatolic as Thor. The video is hilarious and it shows Votelic who is buzzing off green tea and wine, defeating all the crypto problems and enemies, including Warren Buffett, with his merge hammer, aided by optimistic and zero-knowledge roll-ups. It ends with Votolic jumping with his hammer, defeating the evil creatures, and then the words, $10,000, eth, flash on the screen. How much would you pay for this? Vanity blocks and NFT project paid $31Eth, or around $50,000 to mint an NFT of the last Ethereum proof of work block. It was the sole transaction of the

block. The NFT is now on sale on OpenC, and it's called the last proof of work block. The best offer at press time was 10th, or 50th. $15,000. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about the merge and Justin, check out the show notes for this episode. Don't miss my daily roundup of the biggest news in crypto and the Unchained Daily. Go to Unchainedpodcast.com to subscribe. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with up from Anthony Yun, Matt Pilchard, Wattneranovich, Pamajumdar, to Shank and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.