Fernando Pertini

Global macro investor. 30+ years across cycles. PM at DecodeMarkets AMC

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Own $ETH but frustrated by the price action?
Spend 30 minutes on this

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

What if he still thinks this about $ETH?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@McMurchie @alexmd2 @Techmeme @CatherineShu At this point, I want ETH even if it is a scam

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Markets are forward-looking

Debt restructuring. IMF engagement.
World Bank dialogue.

The story is no longer about what Venezuela was.

It’s starting to become about what Venezuela 🇻🇪 could be

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

The more I learn about Ethereum, the less Ethereum I feel I own

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

The genius of this structure is simple:

$MSTR uses debt to buy $BTC

$BMNR is attempting to use Ethereum own staking yield to help finance the purchase of more Ethereum

Raise capital. Buy $ETH. Use staking rewards to support the dividend.

More $ETH per share
No debt maturities
Less pressure to sell

The $300M raise is interesting.
The precedent is the real story.

$ETH may be becoming the first digital asset capable of helping finance its own accumulation

Do your DD

[BMNR Bullz @BMNRBullz]

🔥TOM LEE & BITMINE JUST FILED FOR A STRC STYLE PREFERRED STOCK

Bitmine is offering 3,000,000 shares of 9.50% Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock.

That is a potential $300M preferred stock raise with weekly cash dividends.

Strategy did this with Bitcoin.

Bitmine may now be building the Ethereum version.

$ETH $BMNR @BitMNR @fundstrat

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Cloudflare CEO says bot traffic has now surpassed human traffic on the Internet for the first time in history.

Elon response with a “Wow”

What’s fascinating is that Sam Altman started World in 2019, years before ChatGPT changed the world, around a simple question:

How do humans prove they are human once AI agents dominate the Internet?

Today, that question is no longer theoretical.

And $ORBS happens to own roughly 9% of the circulating supply of $WLD, making it the largest publicly disclosed institutional participant in the Proof-of-Human ecosystem.

The market is obsessed with AI.

It may soon become equally OBSESSED with proving who is human.

Do your DD

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Steffan Szumowski @UnoMasReactor]

https://t.co/e3C1ePteDG

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

May 2026 $ETH metrics are out

Ethereum secures over 50% of stablecoins, DeFi, tokenized assets, and on-chain economic activity… yet captures less than 10% of the value.

$3T in monthly stablecoin transfers.
$16.8B in tokenized assets.
$42B in DeFi TVL.
413M unique addresses.
896,000 validators.

And still only 9.8% of the combined market value of the assets built on top of it.

At some point, the market will stop valuing ETH as a “coin” and will start valuing it as the infrastructure securing a digital financial system.

[Joseph Chalom @joechalom]

https://t.co/CEhi4vF5rL

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

BlackFriday for $ETH in May

[World日本公式（World Japan） @worldnetworkjp]

【政府が公表、AIに人間による判断の仕組みを】

日本政府は今年3月、フィジカルAIとAIエージェントに「ヒューマン・イン・ザ・ループ（人間の判断を経る構造）」を義務づけるAIガイドラインを改定しました。

ロボットの誤作動は安全事故に直結し、AIエージェントによる自律判断もリスクをはらみます。

いずれの領域においても、AIが単独で判断するのではなく、背後に人間を配置する設計が求められています。

オンライン・現実世界の双方で、AIの裏側に「人間がいること」の証明の重要性が、ますます高まっています。

Worldは、AgentKit（エージェントキット）を通じて、エージェントの背後に認証済みの人間がいることを確認できる仕組みを提供しています。

詳細は以下より↓

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

We are potentially weeks away from the first truly bipartisan U.S. crypto market structure framework… and digital assets are still trading under EXTREME selling pressure.

That disconnect matters.

On May 14 the Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act in a bipartisan 15–9 vote.

That is not a minor headline.

Today, roughly 1 in 5 Americans own some form of digital asset.

More than 12 million Americans entered crypto in the last year alone.

Markets rarely price transformational regulatory shifts efficiently in real time, especially when positioning, leverage, liquidity stress and macro fears dominate flows.

The CLARITY Act is not about meme speculation.

It is about formally recognizing digital assets as a new layer of financial infrastructure.

And despite years of progress in stablecoins, tokenization, institutional adoption and blockchain scalability…

ETH is trading around levels first seen nearly 5 years ago.

A lot has been built.
A lot still is not priced.

If bipartisan market structure legislation ultimately becomes reality, the conversation changes from:

“Will crypto survive?”

to:

“How large does this asset class become once regulatory uncertainty stops blocking institutional capital?”

That is a very different discussion.

The biggest opportunities often emerge when fundamentals improve while sentiment remains exhausted.

People like Tom Lee @fundstrat do not focus on weekly price action.

They focus on multi-year infrastructure shifts.

$ETH may ultimately be understood less as a “coin” and more as the financial engine quietly powering payments, tokenization, stablecoins and digital transactions behind the scenes.

Do your DD

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

“I think contrarianism is overrated.
But I love when I have extreme conviction and nobody else believes it.
It gives me even more conviction”

—Druckenmiller

That’s exactly how $ETH feels right now. At least to me.

We are going much higher

[David Hoffman @TrustlessState]

https://t.co/5EOn4y2pdx

[Jarl Finland @jalle51]

⚛️🇸🇪 Studsvik wants to build up to 1,400 MW of new nuclear power in Nyköping – “I have never seen Sweden in such a situation”
Nuclear power applications continue to come in at a record pace.
Now it is Studsvik that wants to build 2–4 small modular reactors (SMR) outside Nyköping — equivalent to up to 1,400 MW.

This is the company's second application in a short time.
The first was for 4–6 reactors at Valdemarsvik.

Climate and Environment Minister Johan Britz (L) notes that Sweden now has four parallel processes for new nuclear power:

“That says a lot about where Sweden is.”

🔧 Why Studsvik?

CEO Karl Thedéen says that Studsvik has three major advantages:

Existing nuclear expertise

Complete infrastructure

A power grid that can handle the load

Studsvik has handled nuclear technology for over 80 years, making the area one of Sweden's most experienced nuclear power environments.

⚡ How large are the reactors involved?

The application applies to:

2–4 reactors

300 MW per reactor

Total 600–1,400 MW

That is on par with a modern Swedish nuclear power plant if the maximum number is built.

🏗️ The schedule
Studsvik hopes for:

government support → 2027

construction start → 2029–2030

first SMR in operation → 2035–2036

It is therefore a long-term investment — but completely in line with Sweden's new energy policy.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 What do the residents think?
Thedéen says it is a democratic process, but that Studsvik has a unique position:

"Nyköping is in practice a nuclear power municipality. We believe there is acceptance."

He points out that the area already handles a lot of hazardous material under the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority's strict requirements.

🔋 And what about the batteries?

Studsvik is positive — but admits that battery storage is a challenge.

Order intake is "virtually zero", due to, among other things:

US tariffs

weak electric car sales

battery factories that now compete directly with the energy sector

But that is a small part of the business.

😅 Ironic finale
Sweden went from "nuclear power should be phased out" to "we have four parallel applications" faster than anyone could say SMR.

And now Nyköping is on its way to becoming the next major nuclear power node.

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Currently, the market, after the increase of up to 30% that ethereum:0x163f8c2467924be0ae7b5347228cabf260318753 recorded at a certain point today, is beginning to recognize that this might be the right direction.

What’s interesting is that Sam Altman and Alex Blania started thinking about @worldnetwork years before ChatGPT existed as per this old video.

Before the world fully realized how transformative AI would become, they were already asking a critical question:

How do we preserve trust and prove humanity in an internet increasingly dominated by AI-generated content and autonomous agents?

That’s the deeper long-term thesis behind $WLD

And one of the reasons I became long via $ORBS and $BMNR

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Finding the next 100x is never obvious
It usually looks crazy early

Maybe $BMNR didn’t invent proof-of-human

Maybe they did something better

Tom Lee saw the trade before Wall Street did

$ETH as settlement.
$WLD as proof-of-human.
$ORBS as the listed equity proxy.
Add OpenAI.
Add MrBeast users.
Add an internet drowning in bots.

Now ask yourself...
What happens when real humans become the scarce asset?

My only regret?
Maybe not owning enough $BMNR

Don’t sell your house
Do your DD

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

What are the chances Sam Altman doesn’t incorporate $WLD into OpenAI in some form?

When asking the question you know the answer

The listed proxy is $ORBS

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Finding the next 100x is never obvious
It usually looks crazy early

Maybe $BMNR didn’t invent proof-of-human

Maybe they did something better

Tom Lee saw the trade before Wall Street did

$ETH as settlement.
$WLD as proof-of-human.
$ORBS as the listed equity proxy.
Add OpenAI.
Add MrBeast users.
Add an internet drowning in bots.

Now ask yourself...
What happens when real humans become the scarce asset?

My only regret?
Maybe not owning enough $BMNR

Don’t sell your house
Do your DD

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

@MarioNawfal True

[Steffan Szumowski @UnoMasReactor]

https://t.co/HCamKNyzQb

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

Vitalik’s best post in years.
Not because it was bullish.

Because it finally explains what Ethereum actually wants to become.

[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.

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

@TheBTCTherapist One is full of debt
The other one, no