namic

Propagandist @0xMoneyLeague ¤ Researcher @protostable ¤ Contributor @letsgethai @reflexerfinance ¤ Noderunner @partynode ¤ Lunarpunk

[namic @daonamic]

Summoning @protostable - a research initiative exploring whether Ethereum can define its own unit of account without USD, oracles, or external anchors.

No token. No assumptions. Just first-principles experimentation.

[namic @daonamic]

@auryn_macmillan @theInterfold only if the auction didn't require kyc

[namic @daonamic]

Through our work with HAI @letsgethai, we found that @CurveFinance customizable pools are particularly well suited for controlled-peg systems. As the pioneer of the vote-escrow model, the long-standing home of stable asset liquidity, and the foundation of a robust ecosystem of protocols and integrations, Curve is a natural fit for the next generation of onchain monetary systems @0xMoneyLeague.

[Money League @0xMoneyLeague]

Welcome @CurveFinance as the newest member of Money League.

Curve will serve as the standard liquidity infrastructure for all Money League deployed stable assets.

veCRV holders can now activate their Merit accounts to start mining gold.

[Money League @0xMoneyLeague]

Welcome @CurveFinance as the newest member of Money League.

Curve will serve as the standard liquidity infrastructure for all Money League deployed stable assets.

veCRV holders can now activate their Merit accounts to start mining gold.

[namic @daonamic]

what do vitalik, the ef, and ethereum have in common? they're all lean.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.

The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/9e2AQ6rhz6, and I attached a picture of it to this post.

My own high-level takeaways:

* "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced:

- Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol
- Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives
- Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today
- Multidimensional gas
- State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available
- Changes to client architecture
...

At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again.

* H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another.

* Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?"

* Formal verification of everything for security.

* FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.

* Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months)

* Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount.

eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state

This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state)

Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees.

Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration.

* In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area.

* Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V.

My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away.

* Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.

Ethereum is CROPS.

Ethereum is scaling.

Ethereum is reinventing itself.

Onward.

[namic @daonamic]

@_Enoch most results come from in the kitchen not the gym

[namic @daonamic]

DeFi dollars will never be able to truly compete with their centralized counterparts. They are less efficient with a worse UX. It's unfortunate but true. There are several memecoins with bigger mcs than the biggest defi dollar. And that's exactly what they are missing: memetic power.

@reflexerfinance was on to something real with memes like 1 RAI = 1 RAI. It cultivates new ways of thinking about money and the global financial system. To disrupt the fiat paradigm is the ultimate act of rebellion against a system we did not opt into. And to do it through sheer memetic willpower would be the ultimate show of force and coordinated effort we possess as individuals.

We tried to meme ETH is money. That idea breaks down when people need stability. I am a firm believer ETH is destined to become ever more valuable serving as the pristine asset powering the blessed world computer. In the long run ETH becomes the global reserve asset. Its properties make it 100x more robust than BTC. But it's still in its infancy and extremely volatile.

The world needs its own credibly neutral unit of account that is stable, scalable, immutable, uncensorable, and maybe most importantly memeable. Totally permissionless, censorship-resistant, not owned or controlled by any single entity, completely unstoppable. The only place something like that could ever exist would be on Ethereum.

We need more experimentation around novel monetary system and policy design. We need to support more cypherpunk builders. And we need to do a better job at surfacing the best models. Then we meme them to the top of the leaderboard. This is the only way we have a shot at competing with the centralized stablecoins that have captured our networks, laid the foundation for CBDCs, and psyoped the masses into giving up on the original values that drove us here in the first place.

[Money League @0xMoneyLeague]

Inflation follows from expanding debt, discretionary money creation, and bank privilege. The Fed sets the price of money without public consent, banks capture the upside, and households lose purchasing power.

Fork the Fed.

[namic @daonamic]

it's great to see more flags being raised recently about the inherent risks of capture that come with token voting and delegation systems. especially those that manage a treasury without any direct redemption mechanism or ability to hold large stakeholders or teams accountable. but unfortunately majority are already captured. you probably just don't know it yet. study power DAOnamics.

I believe the trend we're seeing with major labs and foundation teams with "DAOs" stopping the decentralization theater larp, as we've already seen across several projects in recent times, is actually good. users and investors need a reality check. it must be common knowledge by this point that token voting is plutocratic where minority has no actual power, and all delegation systems only compound that effect. power consolidation is inevitable, voter apathy is real, and no amount of councils or committees will fix it.

what will fix this problem along with many other security concerns? more immutable non-upgradeable code and properly implemented value accrual mechanisms from day 01. hardstop.

if you're a team building a product and plan to generate revenue and have a token, here is some food for thought:
- core contracts should be immutable
- teams can ICO and keep the funds
- teams can get a token allocation
- but ALL value generated from the protocol/product should accrue directly to the token, preferably via staking.
- vote escrow systems are good when you need a curation mechanism.
- emissions can be good if automated and monetary policy is hard coded and predictable.
- these things will deeply align all participants.
- if the market decides the protocol/product is useful, value will compound.
- if the team doesn't sell their allocation, they can continue to fund scaling or dev new versions off their token earnings because they are incentivized to generate more value to the token.
- if the market finds new immutable versions better or more valuable they will migrate, if not they won't.
- if the team sells or the market decides it's not valuable, they don't get to ask for more. they literally can't. and that is how it should be.
- failure is okay. rugging users and retail investors isn't.

the key takeaway here? we all need to raise our standards as users and investors. research and fully understand what we're getting involved in - don't trust, verify. hold teams accountable to build better. give more support to those that are.

[apoorv.gwei @apoorveth]

milady

[namic @daonamic]

ethereum was built as an uncensorable sea where sovereign users, free software, immutable code, and permissionless coordination can swarm with enough force to make capture unprofitable and domination impossible.

let us not become an aquarium for the same predators we came here to escape.

we preserve ethereum by making our blessed waters too alive to conquer.

[namic @daonamic]

the best accountability mechanism for DAOs has existed for years: ragequit @MolochDAO @DAOhaus

[sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / @pcaversaccio]

the latest tornado cash proposal 67 is _malicious_: https://bafybeie5hxovqc4ifcnrnhvmjbefxgeix6oqvzaspyytdxiyscji22v5pu[.]ipfs[.]inbrowser[.]link/governance/67

decompilation of the proposal: https://t.co/JstkIaMpEZ

the try to set the governance address to a vanity address that looks almost like the governance address:
- spoofed version: `0x5EFDa50f22D34F272c7077689d6ABc42F15E285f`
- real governance address: `0x5efda50f22d34F262c29268506C5Fa42cB56A1Ce`

same for the staking governance proxy:
- spoofed version `0x2fc93484614a34f7dbf98d7f7e997f6424e54a32`
- real staking address: `0x2FC93484614a34f26F7970CBB94615bA109BB4bf`

furthermore, worth mentioning the function `nullifyBalance` checks against the spoofed governance address above; so whoever controls that vanity address can zero out any relayer's balance at will.

this is a governance attack on Tornado Cash and i ask all TORN tokenholders to reject this proposal

[Ethereum @ethereum]

0/ The Tornado Cash legal saga continues.

Alex Pertsev is still fighting for his freedom.

Guest thread by @ameensol spotlighting @alex_pertsev's legal case in the Netherlands and the ongoing battle to protect privacy. 🧵

[namic @daonamic]

maybe @z0r0zzz 👀. got my .wei awhile ago.

[namic @daonamic]

time for a new name service?

- immutable protocol
- zero governance
- name normalization at the protocol
- keep fee model to prevent spam and squatting
- a new rev share token
- 100% of fees to rev share token staking

ship it

[namic @daonamic]

going lean for the spiritual war ahead makes sense

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy.

We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks.

Find a brief introduction to the new structure, and learn more about how we are supporting the people who are leaving in the full post below:

[namic @daonamic]

we're building @0xMoneyLeague as a modular platform on top of an immutable permissionless factory and marketplace that enables *anyone* to design, deploy, and contribute to onchain composable sovereign monetary systems ruled by code. powered by a shared incentive layer which aligns all participants behind the primary objective of surfacing the most scalable designs that can serve as models for potentially replacing existing legacy central banking systems. this is the early vision of @reflexerfinance coming into fruition. pioneered by @delete_shitcoin and @ameensol. and it's not just about better central banks. it's about truly disrupting the fiat paradigm. and only ethereum has the infrastructure capable of making this future possible.

Fork the Fed.
By code, not committee.
On Ethereum. Forever.

[Money League @0xMoneyLeague]

We're bringing a new primitive to DeFi. Moving upstream of so-called stablecoins. Disrupting the fiat paradigm. Enabling the creation of self-stabilizing money onchain. With permissionless, immutable infrastructure accessible to everyone.

[namic @daonamic]

only ethereum has the infrastructure to confidently build permissionless immutable composable sovereign monetary systems, knowing they will live on long after we're gone from this world. and the ecosystem to bravely experiment with new models that can one day have the potential to replace the legacy systems we came here to liberate ourselves from. and the values to align us behind common goals that can drive us toward a future free from oppression and censorship. but it will not come easy. moloch will continue to entice us with shiny objects designed to capture and corrupt us. so we must continue to build and support technology that empowers us to become unstoppable in our mission to defend ethereum as the infinite immortal blessed world computer designed to save humanity.

[namic @daonamic]

The EF is for preserving Ethereum's soul within the immortal blessed world computer.

[Aerugo @aerugoettinea]

1. Intro

Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution.

We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable.

The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about

2. What the EF is not for

We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats.

3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses

We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion.

We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage).

The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible?

The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer.

The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries.

If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space.

None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity.

In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen.

MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here.

Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second.

It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust.

Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points.

The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible.

Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide.

4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities

Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including:

* Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed.

* Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it.

* Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense.

* Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this.

* Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms.

* Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load.

We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum.

Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

5. Addressing departures

There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content.

Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle.

Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs.

6. Addressing EF spinouts

Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation.

The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work.

Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding:

“Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?”

EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency.

Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate.

EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not.

We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.