Hello solo stakers
Let us start with the data as of 25th October
TOTAL ETHEREUM STAKED – 15,232,925
TOTAL VALIDATORS – 449,712
CURRENT APR ~ 4.0%
The Merge has happened and everyone wants to know what it means. For regulation, for staking, for the price of Ethereum and obviously Solana :).
Life ain’t nothin’ but data and money
The Merge has not brought about world peace or made me taller or more attractive. Do not worry:
- Firstly – I’m ok
- Secondly – since 2008 the level of global peacefulness has deteriorated by 2%, with 75 countries recording a deterioration, while 86 improved.
So it’s not all bad, even though this search for post-Merge meaning still eludes us. Without 6-8 months of actual data on validator returns post-Merge that won’t change.
Once we have that data it will clearly show how validator node earnings perform, comparing those running MEV Boost and those not, which will give a numerical difference between returns 6 months pre-Merge vs 6 months post-Merge. This data will highlight the opportunity that staking represents and make it extremely interesting to new pools of capital that are currently some distance away from staking Ethereum.
EY’s global blockchain leader has written an article explaining why all the Ethereum killer blockchains are now zombies. I would not waste your time reading it, I have just given you the best bit.
What I would do instead is to subscribe to Glassnode and see the key performance indicators that demonstrate Ethereum’s increased usage for new applications, and new active addresses. This will give you a far better understanding of the network’s general growth.
The Ethereum ecosystem’s humility is not about denying its dominance, rather being so open about its current problems. A less humble analysis for Ethereum leverages Dr Dre’s wisdom expressed in the challenge that “Ethereum tried to pay attention but attention paid ETH”.
NFT house on Ethereum
I was delighted to read that the first house that has been sold as an NFT is in South Carolina. I have written before about how my lack of understanding of art-based NFTs is not a value judgement, rather an acknowledgement of my ignorance. Conversely, I see the obvious value of NFTs in real estate. The idea of a home being split into 3 NFTs is obvious to me:
- The home’s sale value
- The mortgage debt on the home.
- The potential rental yield.
Deep liquid real estate markets, underpinned by homes, broken down into these three core chunks of value and traded would be an innovation that would be highly useful and I look forward to seeing it come to fruition. This first home sale seems like that first big step.
Gilt Gods & Markets
Liz Truss angered the Gilt God and was subsequently sacrificed at the Tory party altar. The Conservative government begged forgiveness and promised to worship the Gilt God correctly by installing the appropriate managerial class of politician in Rishi Sunak. The Gilt God has also issued a proxy warning to the Labour party, clearly indicating that it will not tolerate any deviation from fiscal austerity and anti-inflation policies. Making me ask how effective a Labour government can be if there is no money to spend, and the Gilt God puts them on the naughty step for trying to spend money on our public services to get them out of the crisis.
The crypto rub on this is equally interesting and makes me wonder, when will a country’s holding of BTC and ETH, both inflation-proof assets (albeit with high volatility), warm our vengeful financial deities’ heart? Will those countries that do hold them (maybe even stake them) be gifted with lower borrowing costs? We will find out much sooner than most people think.
Happy staking.
Jaydeep
