When ETH's price was going up in 2021, the EF's culture was considered revolutionary. The infinite garden. They were building a public good utopia ripe with abundance.
With ETH's price going down, the EF's culture is considered lazy. It's uncommercial. A socialist ploy with dwindling resources. Think like a startup!
As far as I can tell nothing that consequential has really changed. Some technical upgrades have been shipped, and some turnover has happened, sure. But ETH's objective hasn't moved. It was never designed to be a startup. It took lessons from Bitcoin. And was designed to be a programmable, decentralized store-of-value.
So when people say they want Ethereum to be more like a startup, they don't really mean it. What they really mean is they want a Michael Saylor.
@arbitrum is voting to retire Timeboost, its paid transaction-ordering auction, and move Arbitrum One to Priority Gas Auctions (PGA).
Timeboost sold priority through an ahead-of-time express lane that required custom tooling. @EntropyAdvisors found it captured just 1.74% of the chain's arbitrage revenue - a sixteenth of Ethereum's rate - with three firms taking ~97% of the wins.
The replacement lets any transaction bid for priority using the standard fee field, sorted every 125ms, with an anti-starvation rule so cheap transactions still get included within a couple of blocks. 97% of the fees go to the DAO treasury, 3% to a new Arbitrum Developer Guild.
In the same window, Aribtrum is extending DRIP, its incentive program, to July 2027 with no new funding. About 63.7M $ARB remains from the original 80M $ARB budget for a better-timed Season 2. @EntropyAdvisors reports Season 1 grew yield-bearing stablecoins on Arbitrum from $130M to over $1B.
Both proposals were written by the entities whose work they govern - @Offchain on PGA and @EntropyAdvisors on DRIP.
@griffgreen backed both but asked who actually runs the Developer Guild. @kaereste opposed the DRIP extension, calling it a "blank check" without independent review and quoting @EntropyAdvisors' own 2023 transparency arguments back at them.
More than 1,080 wallets have voted on each, near-unanimously in favor. Voting closes June 25th at 4:40pm UTC.
Proposals at https://t.co/YIN1sMMDWq.
Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH
Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.
The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but bounded. Finance is approaching a similar moment. As value, assets, and markets become digital, the world needs shared settlement infrastructure.
Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become that shared base layer, the neutral foundation on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation.
What we believe:
• We believe credible neutrality matters. Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person.
• We believe ETH matters. The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum.
• We believe DeFi matters. Markets, liquidity, credit, exchange, and coordination, open to anyone.
• We believe adoption matters. Principles do not change the world until people benefit from them.
We sit between two worlds: real usage from the builders at the frontier, and the protocol that has to support it. We work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core devs and researchers, then turn what they actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products.
Ethlabs is independent but Ethereum is a shared project. We are one node in a much larger network of stewards. This is the multi-node future.
We have spent the better part of the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development.
We are opinionated and transparent. We move with urgency, learn in public, and course-correct when we’re wrong.
We are building a lean, talent-dense team for people who want to do the most important work of their careers: [email protected]