John Vincent

Building @otus_finance | Previously with @Revolut, @Klarna & @blockchain

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

🎯

[Aya Miyaguchi @AyaMiyagotchi]

Vitalik shared his perspective on where @ethereumfndn is heading. Here is mine, another part of the same story.

The EF Mandate from the board was something I proposed late last year. Two main things prompted me. First, debates that were meant to be technical had started to become political and personal, and at times shaped by quieter incentives. Second, as EF grew, more and more versions of "what EF should be" began pulling at the core of the organization from every direction at once. I became convinced that trying to satisfy all of them would leave us achieving nothing at all. It was time for us to restate our role and underlying principles clearly, both the parts that have been clear from the start and those that have been informed by over a decade of experience.

We have said it many times: EF is one of many nodes in Ethereum. I know that is hard to hear for some, because EF was the first group, and in the early years it was essential for making things happen. But it was never meant to stay that way.

I have been in crypto since 2012, before it became an "industry." I joined Kraken in 2013, shortly before the implosion of Mt. Gox, which I helped to clean up. I am very aware of how real growth works, and also aware of the real risks of centralization. So when I became ED in 2018, I understood that Ethereum growing beyond EF would be essential to fulfill its real promise as a public blockchain. The goal I set for myself was to ensure that this happens.

The opposite path has always been untenable: Ethereum's future is too big for any single organization to bring about. So EF made deliberate choices to distribute power. We did incubate and release, like Uniswap and ENS. Support to seed a new norm, like ETHGlobal and the hackathons that are now everywhere. Funding the funders, like Gitcoin and Moloch. We always asked the same question: how does this stand on its own, without us?

Those experiments, alongside the work of countless others, contributed to where we are today. Ethereum is now far bigger than anything EF could coordinate alone. EF now holds less than 0.2% of all ETH, and the return on all of that shared work, together with extraordinary people across the ecosystem, has been beyond anything we could have built by ourselves.

That is exactly why a focused EF is possible now. The Mandate states simply the one thing EF must keep carrying: preserving and accelerating the properties and goals that keep Ethereum uniquely valuable, competitive, and worth building on. That is: CROPS - for the sake of inalienable user self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination. We cannot do it alone, and we do not intend to. But defining this as the north star for the mission, and coordinating with the allies who share it, is the responsibility we are keeping.

None of this means EF stops caring about adoption, for everyday users or for institutions. The opposite is true: everything we do is ultimately for the people who use Ethereum. Supporting adoption, including institutional adoption, remains part of our work, pursued in the ways that fit our mission. The value proposition of Ethereum for both everyday users and institutions rests heavily on this.

As EF becomes more focused and more opinionated, the team naturally becomes smaller and more concentrated. That is part of the choice. New leaders are already stepping into this mission and growing within it, and you will hear more from our management in the coming weeks, about what they are doing, and about the new structure and strategy taking shape.

The mission we carry is not a smaller one, but a clearer one. Special thanks to those who have stepped in to support, defend and advance it.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

Brilliant initiative!

[OpenZeppelin @OpenZeppelin]

Open standards are how the @ethereum ecosystem moves forward.

We are proud to have collaborated with the @ethereumfndn Platform team to build the Open Intents Framework core components: solver, broadcaster, and APIs.

All open-source and fully audited ↓
https://t.co/0vF9MExxrY

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

Sounds very promising!

[Liquity @LiquityProtocol]

Ethereum gave the world credibly neutral money.

Liquity and BOLD extends that to stablecoins.

- Borrow against ETH, wstETH, and rETH only.
- No governance
- Fully censorship resistant
- Immutable

The stablecoin @ethereum deserves.

Be $BOLD.

[Otus @otus_finance]

If you've got idle USDC sitting on Coinbase, you're leaving money on the table.

The shortest path from idle cash to working money: move from Coinbase to Otus in minutes.

Deposit into Smart Yield Account and start earning.

[Otus @otus_finance]

We're now Otus 🦉

A new name and a new brand for the mission we've been building toward all along: wealth management that's personal, protective, and available to everyone.

A smarter home for your money.

More coming this week.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

@LayerZero_Core If 1/1 DVN is unsafe enough to refuse signing now, it was unsafe enough to reject at setConfig. Docs warnings don't survive teams optimizing fees at scale. The knob is the issue, not Kelp turning it.

[The Ethereum Economic Zone @etheconomiczone]

Welcome to the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a framework for synchronously composable rollups.

What does that mean?

One deployment. Shared liquidity. Single transactions across L1 & L2. Identity verified anywhere. Smart wallets connected everywhere. No additional trust assumptions.

This means L2s that are as credibly neutral, economically aligned, and publicly governed as the base layer itself.

EEZ furthers Ethereum as the leading decentralized economy.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

George Polya’s "How to Solve It" is a timeless classic, and even more relevant in the AI era.

Before, it was a book about solving problems.

Now, it feels just as much like a guide to spotting non-problems before you reflexively throw AI at them.

https://t.co/KoRoTJKDUs

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

Today, the Foundation’s Board released the EF Mandate.

This document, which was first intended for EF members, reaffirms the promise of Ethereum, and the role of EF within this ecosystem.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

Nice Article!

TL;DR: AI is an amplifier, not the inventor.

Building is cheap now - judgment + taste are scarce.

AI will 100x your existing patterns - the good and the bad.

Early stage: sprint with AI to learn fast.

Post-PMF: judgment must steer execution. Be an agent master, not just an AI user - or you’ll end up paperclip-maximising at monkey-with-a-machine-gun speed.

[YQ @yq_acc]

https://t.co/860OTKLD3v

[Otus @otus_finance]

Your savings account is losing you money every day.

We built an agent that actually fixes that.

Introducing Smart Savings Account 👇

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name” emerges through craft: iterating a structure until the whole fits its context and feels alive.

Vibe coding can support that - let AI do the heavy lifting while we keep steering for context, coherence, and aliveness.

But today’s "vibe coding" loop is often just prompt -> glance -> ship: judging by surface output, not the system’s inner coherence - so you ship something impressive that never quite solves the thing that matters.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

The Bitter Lesson isn’t just for training models - it applies to agentic apps too!

Stop micromanaging agents with brittle step-by-step prompts. Instead, give it high-level goals + clear success criteria.

Focus your attention on feeding high-quality data to your agents for in-context learning.

And invest in a solid infrastructure to schedule goals, monitor the agent’s progress, and build reliable verification methods.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

This is refreshing. It feels like the Ethereum community is consciously returning to first principles - decentralization, censorship resistance, and explicit security guarantees.

Over the last few years, those lines have blurred, with highly centralized systems (including some L2s) gaining significant traction largely on the basis of throughput alone.

This post is a timely reminder of what actually matters.

Hopefully the EF keeps pushing in this direction, and L2s align more clearly around this vision.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:

* L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
* L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026

Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.

First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.

This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.

We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.

What would I do today if I were an L2?

* Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features
* Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
* Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?)

From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.

The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).

This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://t.co/9jy6v1X6Fw and https://t.co/gZmu3YjebM ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add.

This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

"Centralized tokens with admin privileges undermine the practical experience of censorship resistance for users of those tokens."

That’s a valid critique of stablecoins, not of Ethereum’s base protocol.

Saying “Ethereum isn’t censorship-resistant because some token issuers can freeze funds” is a category error - it conflates application-level governance (USDT) with protocol-level properties (Ethereum).

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.

These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network.

To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far:

BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus

Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated*

Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth

The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains.

This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: https://t.co/Fa0jKFgObW , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here.

Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out:

* In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node
* In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe
* In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network

A third piece of this is distributed block building.

A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that.

Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness.

Onward.

[Dougie @DougieDeLuca]

https://t.co/q5LVbaaPpx

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask:

"What do you think about xyz"?

There is no "you". Next time try:

"What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?"

The LLM can channel/simulate many perspectives but it hasn't "thought about" xyz for a while and over time and formed its own opinions in the way we're used to. If you force it via the use of "you", it will give you something by adopting a personality embedding vector implied by the statistics of its finetuning data and then simulate that. It's fine to do, but there is a lot less mystique to it than I find people naively attribute to "asking an AI".

[Otus @otus_finance]

1/ At Blueprint, your safety and security are a top priority. We know that we have to earn your trust, especially when it comes to new tech at the cutting edge of AI x Crypto.

We’re building a platform where AI agents can safely automate onchain workflows. Here's how 🧵

[John Vincent @0xUUID]

Upgrading the world computer without disruption is no small feat - yet Ethereum has done it time and again. A testament to great engineering and planning!

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Upgrade complete. 0 down time.

A bug in the Prysm client showcased how Ethereum's client diversity creates resilience. 10 other clients ensured the chain kept finalizing.

Full upgrade notes: https://t.co/3TOda5KRNA