0xBreak

" Solidity Developer | Web3|| Rust | DeFi
| Smart Contracts"
0xbreak.eth wallet

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

Finally found wallpaper that perfectly matches my system.

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@VittoStack That sounds interesting; I'd like to try it out.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year.

Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world.

Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.

Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list):

* The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals.
* PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer
* Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate.
* Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds.
* EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale.

These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play.

In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin.

The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.
https://t.co/iZiOonRYzR

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@AndrewLewisPye There’s quite a lot of interesting stuff here; it would be great if there were some photos and other links to further information

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@alexabelonix Well, Oleg Tinkov certainly knows what he’s talking about

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@MrBeast impossible

[Chaofan Shou @Fried_rice]

Chinese LLMs can hack better than state-sponsored hackers with properly evolved harness -

Kimi K2.5 managed to find and exploit 6 vulnerabilities in browsers: a single page view or an extension install by victims equal full system hijack.

Check https://t.co/d0SZSf1KqF

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@lal1996948 Good job

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@marskiano13347

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Engineering is real magic

[etherscan.eth @etherscan]

🆕 Contract Tab Revamp

Navigating contract source code used to mean a lot of scrolling. Now you've got a full IDE-style code browser, plus refreshed read/write tabs

Here's what's new ⤵️

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@0xSweep

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@blockful_io @ethereum Good job

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@HackenProof

[0xBreak @0xBreak]

@ProgrammerSmart 👎

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

Claude: “I estimate this will take 1-2 weeks to complete”

Me:

[Kritika @kritikakodes]

App: 1mb

Files: 1gb

[LetsDefend @LetsDefendIO]

HTTP vs HTTPS

[Math Files @Math_files]

𝐹 = 𝑚𝑎
𝐹𝑖𝑡𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 = 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑐𝑙𝑒 × 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social.

If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top.

In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with https://t.co/BJ3J4TvNNu, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants).

But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway.

Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop.

Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social.

The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets.

I plan to post more there this year.

I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web, all on the backs of a suite of technologies.

Ethereum: the blockchain. The world computer that could give any application its shared memory.

Whisper: the data layer. Messages too expensive for a blockchain, that do no need consensus.

Swarm: the storage layer. Store files for long-term access.

Over the last five years, this core vision has at times become obscured, with various "metas" and "narratives" at various times taking center stage. But the core vision has never died. And in fact, the core technologies behind it are only growing stronger.

Ethereum is now proof of stake. Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs. Thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS, the "sharding" vision is effectively being realized. And L2s can give additional and different kinds of gains in speed on top.

Whisper is now Waku ( https://t.co/uj5h9iSpIL ), and already powers many applications (eg. https://t.co/owlo5yoS68, https://t.co/hDizYCFjuq just to name two I use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has increased. Fileverse (decentralized Google Docs and Sheets alternative: https://t.co/ZIKj4U5pQe ) has seen massive gains in usability over the past year.

IPFS is now highly performant and robust as a decentralized way of retrieving files, though IPFS alone does not solve the storage problem. Hence, there is still room to improve there.

All of the prerequisites for the original web3 vision are here, in full force, and are continuing to get stronger over the next few years. Hence, it's time to buidl, and buidl decentralized.

Fileverse is an excellent example of the right way to do things:

* It uses Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for what they are good for: names, accounts and permissioning, document registration
* It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate changes to documents
* The application passes the walkaway test: https://t.co/xO1dNLlnhf (even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve them and even keep editing them with the open source UI)

This is what we mean by "build a hammer that is a tool you buy once and it's yours, not a corposlop AI dishwasher that requires you to register for a google account and charges a subscription fee per month for extra washing modes, and probably spies on you and stops working if you get politically disfavored by a foreign country".

If you think this criticism of corposlop is hyperbolic, well turns out, it's literally a concatenation of these three:

* https://t.co/GBNaXOa454
* https://t.co/saD3cNp4Ae
* https://t.co/skoJ58vbqz

In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it and send them to other people to collaborate. The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.