ALTeresko

Explorer, creator, and lifelong learner. Passionate about technology and innovation. Constantly seeking new challenges and ways to make an impact.

[Tom Lehman @dumbnamenumbers]

PSE interviewed 38 teams working on privacy, and the takeaway is clear: Ethereum should standardize private transfers as shared L1 infrastructure.

How? EIP-8182. It proposes adding native private transfers to the Ethereum L1 via a protocol-level shielded pool for ETH and ERC-20s.

Here’s the support from @PrivacyEthereum’s report

—

(1) A standardized, shared private-transfer layer.

PSE found "limited or no standards for private tokens, compliance, or wallet interactions," raised by 8 of 38 teams. They also found that "shielded pools are fragmented across different dapps and chains, reducing the effective anonymity set for all users," and that "each new privacy protocol must bootstrap its own anonymity set."

The interviewee’s requested fixes?

- "A protocol-level shielded pool... including requests for private ETH transfers and a multi-asset shielded pool."
- "Shared primitives to avoid fragmentation."

This is the entire point of EIP-8182: bringing the ecosystem together around a shared default for private transfers. Wallets, apps, exchanges, payroll providers, and treasuries finally get one thing to integrate against, instead of every team bootstrapping its own pool, anonymity set, wallet support, and tooling.

—

(2) Wallets, key management, hardware wallets.

PSE reported "privacy features... are not natively integrated into major wallets. This forces reliance on specific dapps, and significantly damages UX." Ten of 38 teams raised this. They also note that "hardware wallets do not natively support ZK-friendly curves and signature schemes such as EdDSA over BabyJubJub," and that key management complexity is itself a UX hurdle.

This is a first-class concern for EIP-8182: users must be able to make private transfers from their existing wallet, even if it cannot create a zk proof (e.g., is a hardware wallet).

EIP-8182 achieves this by splitting spend authorization from the ability to prove. A wallet can authorize a spend via a signature and then the user can construct a proof around the signature on a more capable device.

—

(3) Cost.

PSE's two most-mentioned technical problems were ZK proof generation time (14 of 38 teams) and ZK proof verification gas (13). They cite sub-second proving as the threshold where this stops being a UX problem.

Current EIP-8182 reference numbers:

- Pool circuit: 42,959 constraints, 19 public inputs
- Native rapidsnark proving (M5 Max): 0.68s
- snarkjs WASM proving: ~1s
- Pool proof verification: ~316K gas

—

PSE’s research points to one conclusion: Ethereum should prioritize cheap, accessible, shared private-transfer infrastructure. EIP-8182 is a concrete path.

[Tom Lehman @dumbnamenumbers]

https://t.co/R7zWztBUhs

[MilliΞ @llamaonthebrink]

Damn this sucks

Solid team and protocol… very unfortunate.

[Mikko Ohtamaa @moo9000]

The EU 🇪🇺demands access to Anthropic's "Mythos" LLM, which is not publicly available.

They are concerned their banks run on crappy legacy software full of exploitable bugs (true), and only Mythos can save them (false). If the EU cannot access good models, it cannot fix bugs, and all the money will soon be gone (false).

But the EU AI Act prevents models from being imported into the EU until the necessary compliance paperwork is done. This is exactly the scenario I warned about with overly broad regulations: in order to protect something-something, the EU took the shotgun to its own foot and pulled the trigger.

Because the EU has failed to develop its own equivalent champions to the American and Chinese models, it now relies solely on imported models to keep up with productivity, including in cybersecurity.

However, nothing makes sense, and it's just marketing bullshit. If you have been following LLM development for some time, you know that there is nothing special in Mythos. Dario, while still working at OpenAI, ran a similar campaign titled "GPT-2 is too powerful to be released." Security researchers have demonstrated similar flaw-finding capabilities with free Chinese models, as much security work is about harnessing, not the model itself.

https://t.co/beRXNR71Nd

"Defenders shouldn't have to wait for access to a gated model to secure their software. These vulnerabilities have been sitting in codebases for decades."

So, the marketing campaign was well executed, European banks are soiling their pants.

As reported by Bloomberg

https://t.co/3htCFKSURQ

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@DefiIgnas And Ton seems to be trying to become Solana, or more accurately, Plasma/Tempo/Arc.

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@DefiIgnas Ton used to dream of creating a censorship-resistant decentralized internet with Ton websites, Ton proxies, Ton storage, and Ton messenger. As of 2026, none of this exists yet, and it's possible it won't, while TG, VPNs, and most of the internet are blocked in Russia.

[Ignas | DeFi @DefiIgnas]

I use Telegram daily yet I don't use TON on TG anymore.

I used it to buy eSIM data and test a few apps. It means the Foundation failed.

But Telegram + TON's potential is much bigger.

Payments are obvious: when I was in Bali I paid bike rent in USDT on Tron, but TON would have been a much easier option.

Plus, integrated apps (Lighter's perp integration being one), prediction markets on phone (seriously, such low hanging fruit for Polymarket), and gambling/game apps (coz retail loves this)

All of it could pump Telegram and TON revenue.

No other app besides X has this potential for consumer adoption.

Dreaming bigger, Telegram is a freedom of speech platform with Pavel as a strong proponent of libertarianism.

But I worry about TON's centralization.

SEC blocked Telegram from running TON in 2020, forcing the community to fork the code and keep the project alive.

Turns out it was fake decentralization.

A 'community fork' isn't really one if Pavel can retake control this easily.

We've gone full circle.

But if regulators push again, he'll need to decentralize TON for real next time.

[James | Snapcrackle @Snapcrackle]

https://t.co/nnA7XCDkTA

[Tom Lehman @dumbnamenumbers]

https://t.co/9urkhJAEKq

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@DefiIgnas European authorities are consistently opposing cryptocurrency and tightening controls over people's money. I don't think there's any point in lamenting the lack of a Eurostablecoin if you'll soon have to obtain written permission from your bank to transfer crypto.

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@randhindi By the way, similar laws are currently being adopted in Russia.

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@ton_blockchain When will Ton become L2?

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@DefiIgnas Trump puts more pressure on business than many socialists. Perhaps cyberpunk and cryptocurrency are not about individuals, but about protecting business from the "dictatorship" of the state.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[Matter @Mattertrades]

Last time Vitalik sold ETH, it was around $1.6k and after that, the market went on to rally all the way to $4.2k. The whole timeline was wild, but people keep misreading it. What many don’t understand is how his donations are structured across years: they’re planned in advance, and the ETH gets sold to fund those commitments whether the price is $20,000 or $1. Treating every sale as a market signal completely misses that context.

Vitalik has always been transparent about using ETH to finance long-term philanthropic and ecosystem goals. So when he moves or sells tokens, it isn’t some secret bearish call on Ethereum it’s simply the mechanics of turning crypto into real-world funding. Making a big deal out of it without understanding how those donation schedules work just leads to unnecessary noise and bad takes.

[AdrianoFeria.eth 🦇🔊 🛡️ @AdrianoFeria]

Ethereum is not simply a financial platform attempting to recreate Nasdaq as other networks aspire to.

Ethereum is a neutral, global financial coordination layer used by institutions, governments, and corporations across competing geopolitical blocs. Its unique value lies in credible neutrality, programmability, and trust-minimized settlement, that allows actors with conflicting interests to coordinate without relying on shared ideology, centralized intermediaries, or political alignment.

This is why Ethereum adoption is geographically diverse and politically non-aligned, spanning democracies, authoritarian states, developed markets, and emerging economies.

From this perspective, Ethereum has virtually no competition which is why it's becoming a shared global infrastructure for finance, identity, payments, and asset issuance, not just a DeFi or smart contract platform.

Key Examples of Ethereum's Global Adoption:

-Sberbank is Russia’s largest and most systemically important bank and is launching Ethereum-backed loans and digital asset infrastructure as part of the country’s broader effort to de-dollarize and reduce reliance on Western financial rails.

-JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets, has accepted ETH as collateral and settled real economic value using Ethereum-based systems, signaling institutional confidence in Ethereum as a monetary and settlement layer and in ETH as a digital store of value.

-Bhutan is using Ethereum at the sovereign level by building a national digital identity system serving roughly 800,000 citizens, while also buying and staking ETH to directly participate in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus and earn yield from securing the network.

-Dubai has integrated Ethereum into public administration by accepting ETH for government payments, reinforcing its strategy to become a cashless, blockchain-native global financial hub.

-Société Générale, one of Europe’s most systemically important banks, has issued a permissionless euro-denominated stablecoin directly on Ethereum mainnet rather than relying on private or closed blockchain systems.

-BBVA, a major multinational bank operating across Europe and Latin America, now offers ETH trading and custody services, integrating Ethereum directly into traditional retail and institutional banking.

-BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, together with UBS, a global systemically important Swiss bank, are tokenizing funds, bonds, and real-world assets such as real estate on Ethereum, validating it as institutional-grade settlement infrastructure.

-Kyrgyzstan is modernizing its monetary and settlement systems by launching a gold-backed stablecoin issued on Ethereum.

-Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange with tens of millions of users globally, has built Base, a major Ethereum Layer-2 network designed to scale Ethereum for mass adoption while preserving its security and neutrality and onboarding users, developers, payments, and tokenized assets into the Ethereum ecosystem.

-Robinhood, a mainstream retail brokerage serving millions of users, has deeply integrated Ethereum by enabling ETH staking, expanding wallet functionality, and building its own Ethereum-based Layer-2 optimized for tokenized stocks, ETFs, and real-world assets.

-Sony, a global Japanese technology and entertainment conglomerate, is operating Soneium, an Ethereum Layer-2 built with the OP Stack and backed by Samsung’s venture arm, positioning Ethereum as core infrastructure for gaming, digital media, creator economies, and consumer-facing financial applications.

-Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank and one of Europe’s most systemically important financial institutions, is building an Ethereum-based Layer-2 through its Project DAMA initiative while planning stablecoin issuance and large-scale asset tokenization, signaling that Ethereum is becoming foundational infrastructure for regulated institutional finance.

-Linea, an Ethereum Layer-2 built by ConsenSys, is being used in large-scale stablecoin and cross-border settlement pilots, including trials with SWIFT, the global interbank messaging system serving over 11,000 financial institutions, highlighting Ethereum’s L2 stack as a viable foundation for institutional stablecoin payments and international financial messaging.

No other blockchain network comes close to Ethereum in reach, scale, or diversity of real-world financial adoption. Ethereum is simultaneously being used by sovereign states, systemically important global banks, asset managers, fintech platforms, payment networks, and consumer technology companies, often across adversarial geopolitical blocs and incompatible regulatory regimes.

This is why Ethereum is the uncontested internet of finance, and the asset that backs all of this is ETH.

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@etheraider UNI holders knew what they were buying.

[ALTeresko @AITeresko]

@crypto_condom I think Tether's management doesn't care about the price of XPL at all, they make money on stablecoins, and if Plasma increases the profitability of their core business, then it's a win.

[vassilis (∎, ∆) @TziokasV]

🧵On Ethereum & ZK as Civilizational Technologies

1/ A list of seemingly unrelated things that took place the past weeks (the CT drama about Tempo L1, my two-year anniversary at @the_matter_labs, the stablecoin boom, the media coverage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination) urged me to write down some thoughts on why Crypto is much more important than most people understand and why the debate about permissionless and censorship resistant systems is worth having.

I make the case that Ethereum and ZK are literally civilizational technologies that will define a very big part of the global equilibrium in the near future.

[Nick Almond @DrNickA]

Ok no, it’s not a death sentence. But it could be. If the wrong decisions are made.

If Ethereum tries to compete with Tempo directly it will fail.

It’s going to ship faster, be quicker and have better distribution via Stripe’s integrations.

So if Ethereum tries to do normie payments and optimise the chain over time for it. Rekt. Tempo will simply make the trade offs and do the centralised regulatory capture games necessary to take payments. If it’s lucky.

Tempo itself will also be competing with a plethora of other corpo chains attempting to do the same. Google, other stable slop L1s, VISA, banks, central banks are all gonna have a bash.

It’s just a use case not meant for highly decentralised and permissionless architectures.

So Ethereum must go the other way. It needs to become the cypherpunk chain. It needs to be programmable money. Bitcoin adjacent. Strong immutability, permissionlessness and ultimately privacy.

There will be voices in the Ethereum world that want it to institutionalise. They will want to kill solo validators, go to sub-second slot times, play low latency games and concede to regulator demands. Ethereum simply cannot win on that frontier. It neither has the consensus, nor the bankroll for it.

Earlier in the year I gave a talk called FORK OFF at @protocol_berg in which I made the argument that we should think about forking away from the crypto stuff that is less value aligned. Not how I imagined it to happen, but effectively this is what this is.

The corpo-institutional technological trajectory is exiting Ethereum and finding its own trade off space to execute in. Good.

But, Ethereum must find its own space now. It needs to hit technological vectors that the centralised chains will not. Things like hard privacy tech, decentralised stablecoins, infofinance, DAOs, agentic systems, crowdfunding, permissionless DeFi. And fundamental freedom tools we haven’t even imagined yet. Serious cryptonative cypherpunk technologies.

It also has something that tempo will never have. Culture. Ethereum needs to go more subcultural and capture the mindshare of the artists, the revolutionary thinkers, the anti-corporate minded, the disaffected, the academics etc.

If it plays it right it will be basically the “Bitcoin but better” asset and without the security budget time-bomb.

Optimistically this might be the best thing that ever happens to Ethereum, but it must go its own way to win.