Divergence VC

Divergence Ventures is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. They specialize in investments in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sectors.

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

We’re actively hiring senior talent to join Divergence VC and our portfolio companies.

Open roles:
• Smart Contract Auditors
• Protocol Engineers
• Quant Researchers
• ZK-Proof Developers
• Security & Compliance specialists

Fully remote • Global

Careers page → https://t.co/WJhTZc3KXQ

[Kalshi Crypto @Kalshi_Crypto]

JUST IN: BlackRock sells $230M worth of Bitcoin and buys $17M worth of Ethereum

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

If it’s not going to zero, it’s going to a million. $BTC

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Top crypto companies send joint letter urging Congress to include legal protections for developers in crypto Clarity Act.

• a16z
• Aave
• 1inch
• Block
• BitGo
• Aptos
• Zcash
• Solana
• Galaxy
• Ledger
• Kraken
• Uniswap
• Coinbase
• Hyperliquid
• Many others

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

AI enterprise going mainstream might be the biggest stablecoin catalyst nobody's talking about. A $5T market needing seamless payments is a massive unlock. This feels inevitable to me. #stablecoins Who's paying attention?

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*.

We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial.

But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?

From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board".

See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability.

And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher!

Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with.

If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases.

Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other.

*Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.

And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi.

---

So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory.

I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher).

Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

You do not have to agree with me on which applications are and are not corposlop to use Ethereum.

You do not have to agree with me on what trust assumptions are acceptable in which situations to use Ethereum.

You do not have to agree with me on political topics to use Ethereum.

You do not have to agree with my views on defi, decentralized social or privacy-preserving payments to use Ethereum.

You do not have to agree with my views on AI to use Ethereum.

You do not have to agree with my view that Berlin has the best food in Europe, suits and ties should be expunged from our culture, and YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format to use Ethereum.

And you do not have to agree with me on any one of those above things to agree with me on any other.

I do not claim to represent the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol. The whole concept of "permissionlessness" and "censorship resistance" is that you are free to use Ethereum in whatever way you want, without caring about what I think, or even what anyone else in the Ethereum Foundation or even any Ethereum client developer thinks.

But on the flipside, if I say that your application is corposlop, I am not "censoring" you. This has always been the flip side of the grand bargain of free speech: I am not free to shut you down, but I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me.

In fact, it is *necessary* that we do this. The modern world does not call out for pretend neutrality, where a person puts on a suit and claims to be equally open to all perspectives from all of humanity and not have their own opinions. Neutrality is for protocols (like HTTP, like Bitcoin, like Ethereum), and neutrality within some scope is for some institutions. The modern world calls out for the courage to clearly state one's principles - including stating principles by pointing to negative examples, that is by criticizing the things in the world that are incompatible with one's principles - and work with those with aligned goals to build the metaverse within which those principles are taken as a baseline.

Such things inherently cannot be constrained to just the layer of the protocol: any principle you have will naturally lead to conclusions, not just about how the protocol should be built, but also what should be built upon it. Furthermore, any such principle will have consequences that go beyond technology, and reach into specific questions within the larger social world. This should not be avoided. Valuing something like "freedom", and then acting as though it has consequences on technology choices, but is completely separate from everything else about our lives, is not pragmatic - it is hollow.

The inevitable converse of this is that (i) a decentralized protocol must not be viewed as belonging to only one metaverse, and (ii) the borders of a metaverse are fuzzy: it is possible, and indeed it is the normal case, to align with any one on some axes and not on other axes.

Linux is a technology of user empowerment and freedom, Linux is also the base layer of a lot of the world's corposlop. It's almost certainly the base layer of many things that I think are good, and you think are bad, and vice versa. Hence, if you care about Linux because you care about user empowerment and freedom, it is not enough to just build the kernel, we must also build a full-stack ecosystem compatible with those values, and explicitly accept that this is not the only way that people will use Linux, but it is one way that must be built and must be available. Ethereum is similar.

Milady.

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

Curious what everyone's actually holding through this — anyone trimming or just watching the chaos unfold?

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

Messy day in crypto but honestly? Still not scared. Every dip like this shook out weak hands in 2020 too… and we know how that ended. Staying skeptical of hype but bullish on the bigger picture. #crypto Who's actually zooming out rn?

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

The halving cycle never lies. Patience = profits #Bitcoin

[Ripple @Ripple]

The demand for modern, always-on settlement infrastructure continues to grow.

@Mastercard’s support for $RLUSD and the XRP Ledger reflects growing demand for trusted digital assets and blockchain infrastructure that can power faster, more flexible settlement.

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

anyone else feel like the city looks completely different when you're in a good mood, or is that just me?

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

late night city walks just hit different when your portfolio is green lol. the lights, the quiet streets, feeling like you own the place a little bit 😂 this is the life fr

[Scamart @Scamart]

Drop your proof of ethereum address, All AL.

2 days.

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

only future crypto millionaires can ❤️ this post

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

$SOL ecosystem growing fast. Hard to ignore #Solana #Crypto

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

$BTC holding strong. Are you accumulating or waiting? #Bitcoin #Crypto

[Lucky @LLuciano_BTC]

I need your honest reply. If I send you 500K, what will you buy RIGHT NOW?

ETH at $1670

XRP at $1.13

SOL at $66

ADA at $0.16

SUI at $0.7

TAO at $198

LINK at $7.6

LTC at $44

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

The halving cycle never lies. Patience = profits #Bitcoin

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

Bear markets build champions. Bull markets reward them #BTC

[Divergence VC @DivergenceVC]

Another day bullish on crypto. DYOR and hold tight #Crypto #BTC