メーラン

Crypto researcher | Tech enthusiast

[メーラン @0xcryptRo]

As Nassim Taleb would put it, let's find the sting. This is it

https://t.co/OgFB2KyMJg

[Ondo Perps @OndoPerps]

Ondo Perps Public Beta is live.

Starting today, the first wave of Public Beta users can trade equity perps on the platform. The deepest liquidity in the market, available to select traders.

The waitlist is growing. Claim your spot now:

https://t.co/TGIuHER1eT

[RWA.xyz @RWA_xyz]

BREAKING: Tradable is Tokenizing $1.7B of Private Credit on zkSync Era

The ParaFi-backed protocol partnered with $330B asset manager Janus Henderson to bring part of their asset-backed lending portfolio on-chain.

Just the start for RWAs in 2025.

[Hibachi @hibachi_xyz]

https://t.co/QJe8gZZVwN

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.

First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.

The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"

Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.

As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.

One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.

My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.

Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.

Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?

EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.

And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.

This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.

To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:

* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.

* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.

* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.

Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.

The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

[メーラン @0xcryptRo]

I just got on the @dekantfi waitlist! The first prediction market where you don't pick a side, you draw a curve.
Join me here: https://t.co/xx87yL52Wp

[ZKsync @zksync]

📌Update: $ZK Staking Pilot Season 1 ends today

Total Stake: ~350m $ZK
Total new active delegation: ~200m
Total active delegation: ~1.2B

This was your 🫵 pilot too. Thank you for proving it.

A Season 1 Summary & Key Takeaways Report will be coming to the forums soon.

[メーラン @0xcryptRo]

Use my referral link to join the JTX waitlist. https://t.co/1kFvEhhn6F

[ZKsync @zksync]

📌Update: $ZK Staking Pilot

▪️Total $ZK Staked: 350M
▪️Current target rate: 10.0% APR
▪️Rewards distributed: 5M $ZK
▪️Total active delegation: ~1.2B

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Self-serve soda was invented to handle dine-in customers. McDonald's no longer has dine-in customers.

McDonald's discloses 70% of US sales now run through the drive-thru and 40% through digital channels. After the overlap, the lobby is doing maybe 15-20% of business. The fountain machine is operational infrastructure for a channel that has effectively collapsed.

Now run the SKU math. Fountain soda costs the restaurant about 5 cents per serving in syrup, carbonated water, and cup. It sells for $2-3. That's a 98% gross margin product, the best on the menu by a wide margin. Free refills via self-serve turned one transaction into 2-3 pours. The "water cup filled with Sprite" workaround turned it into zero. When dine-in was 60% of the business, the leak was tolerable because foot traffic compounded the rest of the ticket. When dine-in is 20%, the leak is just a leak.

Crew-poured drinks add maybe 10 seconds of labor per order. On a 98% margin SKU, the trade pays for itself the first time a refill doesn't get poured.

The 2032 timeline tells you the pace. This is a remodel-cadence rollout. Every store coming up for renovation loses the fountain. By the time the last one comes out, the lobby customer who would have cared will already be a rounding error.

Self-serve fountains are downstream of a bigger shift. McDonald's is stripping every piece of infrastructure tied to the lobby because the lobby no longer pays for itself. The fountains are the visible casualty. The dining room itself is next.

[ZKsync @zksync]

📢Introducing the next ZKsync protocol upgrade.

v31 is on the governance forum (ZIP-16):

▪️ZKsync Connect: native interop between ZKsync Chains

▪️Stage 1 support for L1-settling chains

▪️Expanded ZKsync OS compatibility

[ZKsync @zksync]

Everything $ZK, all in one place.

The network. The architecture. The role.

One network. One asset. $ZK

[メーラン @0xcryptRo]

Join me on Rally! The first decentralized marketing protocol. Earn rewards for your influence 🚀 https://t.co/j3UFsBJ9VP

[ZKsync @zksync]

📰Hot off the press

The real competition isn’t Banks vs Crypto. It’s legacy rails vs programmable settlement.

The latest @reflexivityres report examines why Tokenized Deposits and Prividiums are the banking system’s path onchain.

[ZKsync @zksync]

Material token information should be on the record, not guesswork.

$ZK is listed on @Blockworks Token Transparency Framework communicating a standardized set of essential information and bringing necessary transparency to the market.

[ZKsync @zksync]

"Banks understand that when it comes to connect with each other, the only standard that can win is an open standard. @ethereum has won. It is the global settlement layer for global Finance"

@gluk64 on why Prividiums, anchored to Ethereum, are the best solution for Institutions.

[Moosa @questmoosa]

ADHD STACK (FULL)

You don't have ADHD. You just have low GABA & dopamine levels in the brain with elevated glutamate (excitatory and toxic to the nerves).

Here is the STACK to reverse this:

-Magnesium Bisglycinate (100-300mg)
-Blackseeds ("The cure for every disease except death") or 1 teaspoon of blackseed oil daily
-Vitamin B6

-Vitamin B3 (lots of people say that niacin and/or niacinamide worked great against their ADHD anxiety)

- 🚨 T3 (Thyroid hormones not only lower excess glutamate (excitatory) by increasing its conversion to GABA (relaxation molecule), but also enhances glutamate uptake.)- but be careful with this one - only add to stack if your symptoms are extremely severe and you have hypothyroidism. 🚨

-Taurine

-Caffeine (200mg)
-Saffron

This stack will help to reverse ADHD by increasing GABA,Dopamine & balancing excessive glutamate and inflammation levels in the brain.

If you want proof of studies - CHECK THREAD 👇

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This post just deployed behavioral activation. It's the rare psychotherapy that matched antidepressants in a head-to-head trial for severe depression.

Depression collapses anticipation. The brain's forward-looking circuits go dark. Dopamine fires when the brain predicts a reward is coming. The firing happens before the reward actually shows up. When those prediction circuits stop firing, tomorrow stops existing.

Behavioral activation rebuilds that circuit one specific anticipation at a time. The therapist's job is getting the patient to schedule small, concretely-imaginable pleasures. Coffee tomorrow morning. A specific cat. A book already sitting on the shelf. Vague futures don't fire the circuits. "I'll feel better someday" does nothing. "The songs that will become my new favorites" does.

Hal Hershfield's work at UCLA shows people who can vividly imagine their future selves act more protectively toward them in the present. The distance between you and future-you shortens. You start showing up for that person.

Seven anchors in this post: unread books, unfinished anime, unpetted cats, the smell of rain, morning coffee, new favorite songs, and versions of yourself you haven't met. Each one specific enough to imagine. Each one a tiny dopamine prediction the brain can lock onto.

Forty years of clinical research, compressed by a stranger on the timeline at 3am.

[jeff.hl @chameleon_jeff]

1/ Controversial take: hard work is more important than smart work.

It's a myth that we only have a few hours of good creative work per day. Train yourself to grind long hours first. You will surprise yourself. The work naturally become higher quality, less distracted.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain stopped releasing dopamine for your daily routine months ago.

Dopamine neurons are surprise detectors. They fire when reality differs from what your brain predicted. The same commute, the same gym, the same apartment-to-office-to-couch loop. After enough repetitions the prediction error goes to zero. Your reward signal flatlines. You're functionally numb to your own life by Wednesday.

Scrolling makes it worse because it feeds the exact circuit producing the feeling. Your default mode network activates whenever you're not focused on a task. It runs rumination, mind-wandering, self-reference. The phone hands it low-resolution inputs to chew on while your attention network sits idle. Three hours later you feel worse than when you started.

Novelty is the only thing that resets the system. Walking a neighborhood you've never seen generates hundreds of small prediction-error signals per minute. The hippocampus encodes a new spatial memory. The VTA fires. Your brain reads that as being alive.

This is what the "side quest" framing is actually pointing at. The human attention system was calibrated for forager environments where every day contained dozens of novel spatial and social inputs. The modern equivalent is three screens and a one-mile radius around your apartment.

Hedonic adaptation finishes the job. The brain returns to baseline on any repeated reward within weeks. Even pleasant routines stop registering. Same gym, same restaurant, same Friday plans collapse into background noise.

The fix is mechanical. One unfamiliar neighborhood per week. One conversation with a stranger. One activity you've never tried. Enough input for the hippocampus to encode a new memory and the VTA to fire. That's what shifts the feeling.

[ZKsync @zksync]

Finance is moving onchain.

ZKsync is where it's landing.

One network. One asset. $ZK.