GM web3 lovers!
Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem is seeing record network activity despite the bear market!
Let’s go through some metrics that will help us evaluate the success of Ethereum L2 solutions. 📊📈
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🚨 Google Wallet recently integrated ZKPs for private age verification.
Many of the use-cases that have been written about for years (self-sovereign identity, private digital credentials) are finally being deployed to consumers.
2025 is the year ZK goes mainstream.
If you believe relaxing Bitcoin's OP_RETURN max data size policy:
* Introduces new vulnerabilities
* Increases burden to run a node
* Makes mass data storage cheaper
Then you have been deceived by false narratives.
movement’s token rose and collapsed before it even launched a working chain
and even so its MC and FDV are still 5x something like initia that’s fully live with 14 chains built on top
hot take:
crypto taught builders to optimize for grants and hackathons, not users
and now everyone’s surprised there's nothing people actually want to use
Stablecoin transaction volumes hit $1.82 trillion last month, a record high.
And organic, non-speculative uses appear to be growing, even as crypto trading volume fluctuates.
Still, it’s easy to underestimate the promise of stablecoins.
So we’ve rounded up a quickstart guide for understanding stablecoins — from what’s *not* a stablecoin to reimagining money from first principles.
Check out the guide: https://t.co/TQkQhyXUWW
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One of Ethereum's biggest issues is that we often let the detractors/bears set our narratives for us and essentially alter perceptions around what the reality actually is.
Take the recent narrative that Ethereum has somehow "pivoted" to scaling/improving the L1 when in reality, it's just a reprioritization of roadmap items *that already existed*.
Here is Vitalik's roadmap diagram from November 2022 - I've circled in red a bunch of things (but not everything) that people think Ethereum has "pivoted" to even though this diagram was published 2.5 years ago.
The main reason why L1 scale/improvement has taken center-stage now is because core developers have the breathing room to focus on it and a lot of the r&d from previous years (client optimizations being a major one) means the network is in a healthy position to scale the L1.
From 2019-2024, core devs had a lot of other things in focus on:
- Beacon Chain development and launch (2019/2020) alongside new CL clients built from scratch
- A bunch of EL + CL forks with various EIPs attached
- EIP-1559 went live August 2021
- The Merge was the focus from 2020-2022 and went live on September 15th, 2022
- Focus then shifted to staking withdrawals (live in April 2023) and blobs
- Blobs then went live in March 2024
- Plus all of the r&d that happened on every other roadmap item during this time (rip EOF though)
Don't call it a comeback for the Ethereum L1, it's been here for years.
Ethereum's short-term value leakage to L2s yields long-term wins:
L2s could experiment, giving us open-source projects that Ethereum R1 can reuse.
In case of R1, the surge stack from @nethermind and based on open-source code by @taikoxyz.
VC funding didn't go to waste.
.@binance has 8 ways to launch/debut a token, I squeezed them into 1 cheat-sheet so you know their differences and how to participate in each one of them.
• Launchpool
• Binance HODLer Airdrops
• Megadrop
• Vote to List
• Spot listing with seed tag
• Pre-market trading
• Perpetual Contracts (perps)
• Binance Alpha
@cz_binance@heyibinance $BNB
So far, this is the area arguably hit hardest. Big companies like Apple got tariff exemptions but all the little companies importing widgets and stuff are the ones still facing the brunt of it.
Right now Michael Saylor + MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin stake is arguably the largest concentrated position in any globally traded asset by a private company or individual.
Not a fan tbh.
Stage 1 represents a critical shift towards a fully secure, unified Ethereum scaling solution.
Interop builds atop this foundation, opening doors to global adoption and innovation.
Congrats to Base, OP Labs, Unichain, Ink, and all the Superchain teams involved.
The future of Ethereum is secure, interconnected, and limitless.
Slightly different format this week: in the 2nd @craicoverflow pod, I break down what to look forward to in the upcoming @ethereum Pectra Mainnet release, scheduled for May 7.
00:00 - Intro
00:09 - The Pectra Network Upgrade
00:39 - From EOAs to Smarter Contracts
01:05 - Gas Sponsorship and Onboarding
02:37 - Validator UX Improvements
03:39 - Blob Scaling and Data Availability
04:55 - Increasing Blobs per Block
05:03 - Realizing L2 Benefits
05:38 - Petra Changes Introduction
05:55 - Client Updates and Compatibility
06:17 - FAQ on Network Upgrades
07:08 - Ethereum Network Upgrades Process
07:54 - Adoption and Forks
08:20 - Ethereum Governance
08:29 - Outro