Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on Macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, March 14th. Today we are talking Ethereum upgrades and more.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

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breakdown pod. Well, friends, Ethereum has completed the Denkoon upgrade, unlocking significant scaling improvements.

The hard fork was completed yesterday morning with no major problems on mainnet.

Blocks continue to be produced throughout the update, and they now include blobs.

And by the way, for those of you who are not familiar with Ethereum's, let's call it colorful and interesting terminology, you're going to hear a hell of a lot of weird words

on this episode, so be prepared.

For example, while Denkoun introduced a number of changes to the code, the most impactful

one is the introduction of proto-danksharding.

This allows larger data bundles to be written to blocks in an area known as the blob

space. These blobs validate the state

data for Ethereum's numerous layer 2 roll-ups and are available as discounted block space. What the hell

does that mean? Well, stripping away some of the jargon, this means that fees on layer 2 network

have been dramatically slashed. Indeed, we're already seeing the results with regular transactions

on popular L2s like optimism reduced from around 30 cents to a few

hundreds of a cent. The implications of this cost reduction are obvious for accessibility,

making Ethereum Layer 2 use affordable for a much wider range of people. It'll take a few days

until we know where the fees will settle, but at the moment it looks like the reduction will

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