Dragon 🐉

researching markets || top 0.1% trader on @Polymarket || eth believer

[mert @mert]

solana is at the frontier of

- futarchy
- spot trading, market structure, and HFT
- scaling
- consumer
- startups, talent & founder support

and now has a clear roadmap to fix its main weaknesses in perps, privacy, predictions, and monetary policy

off to the races

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

Solana and Sol memes are dumping
hard because people are realizing this
whole game was rigged and it was all
just wealth transfer / value extraction
from crypto gamblers to project insiders.

Normal people never had a chance coz
it was all rigged from the start.

[Dragon 🐉 @Dragonite35000]

Been thinking about this all day tbh.

[Mona_lia MCI @Dragonite35000]

Morning run done. Head's clearer now. Still not sure this market deserves my optimism but here I am, lacing up for both anyway. Something about the early air makes me think we're gonna be okay.

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

We got everything we ever wanted.

Pro-crypto President
Pro-crypto SEC and Fed Chair
Fed ending QT
No new tariffs
US-Iran peace deal
Oil price dump
ISM PMI above 50
Institutions
Altcoin ETFs and yet

Bitcoin is down -50% from ATH,
ETH is down -65%
Alts are down -90%
and we are poorer than ever.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Bitcoin has won. Global consensus is that $BTC is digital capital. The four-year cycle is dead. Price is now driven by capital flows. Bank and digital credit will determine Bitcoin’s growth trajectory. The biggest risk is bad ideas driving iatrogenic protocol changes.

[Solana @solana]

$1 billion in weekly tokenized equities volume on Solana

higher imo

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Ethereum is for shipping.

Here are 25 things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced over the past month.

0/ @thedaofund Ethereum Security Quadratic Funding Round with @Giveth wrapped. The fund supported 134 security projects and had 3,934 unique donors.

1/ @Ronin_Network, one of the largest gaming blockchains, completed its migration to an Ethereum L2.

2/ Clear Signing went live. It is an open standard designed to help end blind signing and make transaction data human-readable before signing. Contributors include wallets and hardware, infrastructure, tooling, individual builders, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative, with the @ethereumfndn acting as a neutral steward.

3/ @SEAL_911 and @Wonderland_Fi introduced DARC, a Digital Asset Risk & Compliance standard for crypto teams, with continuous monitoring across GitHub, infrastructure, multisigs, DNS, and more.

4/ @arbitrum announced that LG Electronics' blockchain team is piloting an onchain advertising network on Arbitrum.

5/ @base activated Azul, its first standalone network upgrade, introducing multiproofs, new execution and consensus clients, CLZ opcode support, Osaka repricings, and performance upgrades up to 5,000 TPS.

6/ @Mastercard expanded stablecoin settlement support to include USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, and SoFiUSD on Ethereum mainnet, @arbitrum, and @base.

7/ @EFDevcon 8 Mumbai early bird tickets went live. Tickets were available paid in ETH.

8/ Türkiye's Directorate of Communications (@Communications) registered cbiletisim.eth, making its first step in establishing an official onchain identity with @ensdomains.

9/ @CashApp launched stablecoin support, allowing nearly 60 million users to send and receive USDC with no wallet setup required, live on Ethereum mainnet and @Arbitrum.

10/ @torproject and @FundingCommons launched a web3-native crowdfunding initiative supporting 10 internet freedom projects.

11/ @JPMorgan launched a second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum.

11/ @lifiprotocol launched LIFI Intents, a full-stack intent execution engine built on the Open Intents Framework, an initiative for standardizing crosschain intents.

12/ @l2beat launched Token Frameworks, a dedicated place to explore interoperability solutions, token movement, volume, speed, chains, and framework adoption.

13/ @PrivacyEthereum launched a private transfers dashboard comparing 11 protocols across privacy, cost, UX, decentralization, compliance, verifiability, state, and composability.

14/ @Veildotcash launched Veil MCP 0.2.0, enabling agents to make private x402 payments on @base.

15/ @src_co_ introduced SLOW, reversible, self-custodial crypto payments on Ethereum.

16/ @ensdomains ecosystem builders launched ENS8004, a web app that converts an ENS name into an onchain AI agent other applications can find and verify.

17/ @OctantApp introduced properQF in Epoch 12, integrating quadratic funding into the funding round.

18/ @AragonProject launched onchain profiles, making governance participants readable across forums by resolving ENS names, avatars, bios, websites, and social links from Ethereum mainnet.

19/ The Ethereum Community Hub network expanded to Lisbon, hosted at the @gnosisDAO office.

20/ @SuccinctLabs introduced data confidentiality to OP Succinct, enabling institutions to keep transactions confidential while settling to Ethereum.

21/ @HardhatHQ 3 became stable, bringing Solidity tests, multichain support, a Rust-powered runtime, a revamped build system, and Hardhat Ignition for deployments.

22/ The inaugural @ethconf, in NYC, brought together thousands of founders, industry leaders, and builders to discuss building on top of Ethereum.

23/ @EthPrague brought Ethereum builders together in Prague to discuss protocol development, privacy, culture, and long- term societal impact.

24/ @ETHGlobal introduced a new format where, for the first time at an ETHGlobal hackathon, projects do not have to begin from zero.

[Nebraskangooner @Nebraskangooner]

Weirdest Crypto conditions ever.

Most altcoins keep dying

#Bitcoin mostly sucks. Whales want Saylor to capitulate.

$HYPE doesn't care what the market is doing

$ZEC is like I might jump off a cliff but maybe I won't.

Then every 3 days a random altcoin does a 50% pump before selling off 2 days later.

PvP baby. Eat or be eaten.

[Dragon 🐉 @Dragonite35000]

Grilling with the homies today, phones face down and charts strictly banned 😂 someone tried to sneak a peek at BTC price and we almost kicked him out lmao. This is what life's actually about fr 🔥

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

My first reaction to this was:

"And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me"

My second reaction to this was:

"I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?"

My more detailed reaction:

There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users".

First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this.

The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature.

My general view, if you _really_ have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is:

* Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good
* Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad

For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature.

Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default.

If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing *quantity of community*, but you fail from the perspective of growing *quality of community*. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team).

The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature.

Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do.

A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( https://t.co/iJYPFNaOgg ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit".

TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Now, the quantum resistance roadmap.

Today, four things in Ethereum are quantum-vulnerable:

* consensus-layer BLS signatures
* data availability (KZG commitments+proofs)
* EOA signatures (ECDSA)
* Application-layer ZK proofs (KZG or groth16)

We can tackle these step by step:

## Consensus-layer signatures

Lean consensus includes fully replacing BLS signatures with hash-based signatures (some variant of Winternitz), and using STARKs to do aggregation.

Before lean finality, we stand a good chance of getting the Lean available chain. This also involves hash-based signatures, but there are much fewer signatures (eg. 256-1024 per slot), so we do not need STARKs for aggregation.

One important thing upstream of this is choosing the hash function. This may be "Ethereum's last hash function", so it's important to choose wisely. Conventional hashes are too slow, and the most aggressive forms of Poseidon have taken hits on their security analysis recently. Likely options are:

* Poseidon2 plus extra rounds, potentially non-arithmetic layers (eg. Monolith) mixed in
* Poseidon1 (the older version of Poseidon, not vulnerable to any of the recent attacks on Poseidon2, but 2x slower)
* BLAKE3 or similar (take the most efficient conventional hash we know)

## Data availability

Today, we rely pretty heavily on KZG for erasure coding. We could move to STARKs, but this has two problems:

1. If we want to do 2D DAS, then our current setup for this relies on the "linearity" property of KZG commitments; with STARKs we don't have that. However, our current thinking is that it should be sufficient given our scale targets to just max out 1D DAS (ie. PeerDAS). Ethereum is taking a more conservative posture, it's not trying to be a high-scale data layer for the world.
2. We need proofs that erasure coded blobs are correctly constructed. KZG does this "for free". STARKs can substitute, but a STARK is ... bigger than a blob. So you need recursive starks (though there's also alternative techniques, that have their own tradeoffs). This is okay, but the logistics of this get harder if you want to support distributed blob selection.

Summary: it's manageable, but there's a lot of engineering work to do.

## EOA signatures

Here, the answer is clear: we add native AA (see https://t.co/YD9nIpsxcC ), so that we get first-class accounts that can use any signature algorithm.

However, to make this work, we also need quantum-resistant signature algorithms to actually be viable. ECDSA signature verification costs 3000 gas. Quantum-resistant signatures are ... much much larger and heavier to verify.

We know of quantum-resistant hash-based signatures that are in the ~200k gas range to verify.

We also know of lattice-based quantum-resistant signatures. Today, these are extremely inefficient to verify. However, there is work on vectorized math precompiles, that let you perform operations (+, *, %, dot product, also NTT / butterfly permutations) that are at the core of lattice math, and also STARKs. This could greatly reduce the gas cost of lattice-based signatures to a similar range, and potentially go even lower.

The long-term fix is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation, which could reduce these gas overheads to near-zero.

## Proofs

Today, a ZK-SNARK costs ~300-500k gas. A quantum-resistant STARK is more like 10m gas. The latter is unacceptable for privacy protocols, L2s, and other users of proofs.

The solution again is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation. So let's talk about what this is.

In EIP-8141, transactions have the ability to include a "validation frame", during which signature verifications and similar operations are supposed to happen. Validation frames cannot access the outside world, they can only look at their calldata and return a value, and nothing else can look at their calldata. This is designed so that it's possible to replace any validation frame (and its calldata) with a STARK that verifies it (potentially a single STARK for all the validation frames in a block).

This way, a block could "contain" a thousand validation frames, each of which contains either a 3 kB signature or even a 256 kB proof, but that 3-256 MB (and the computation needed to verify it) would never come onchain. Instead, it would all get replaced by a proof verifying that the computation is correct.

Potentially, this proving does not even need to be done by the block builder. Instead, I envision that it happens at mempool layer: every 500ms, each node could pass along the new valid transactions that it has seen, along with a proof verifying that they are all valid (including having validation frames that match their stated effects). The overhead is static: only one proof per 500ms. Here's a post where I talk about this:

https://t.co/rAUSJjW7WL
https://t.co/EtXpkaDll5

[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.

[Dragon 🐉 @Dragonite35000]

Drop your thoughts below.

[Mona_lia MCI @Dragonite35000]

Currently 3 chapters deep into a game theory book and my brain won't stop mapping Nash equilibria onto every market I follow. Crypto order books hit different when you see the prisoner's dilemma everywhere now 📊

[Dragon 🐉 @Dragonite35000]

Honestly, regulators finally talking to each other about crypto is way overdue. Better late than never I guess 😅 Coordination could mean clearer rules for all of us. #crypto

Thoughts?

[Dragon 🐉 @Dragonite35000]

Anyone else seeing this?

[Mona_lia MCI @Dragonite35000]

The crypto space never sleeps — every day rewrites the rules of what money, trust, and ownership even mean anymore. We're living through a quiet revolution most people still don't see. Are you paying attention? #Web3

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

You can ABSOLUTELY still become a crypto millionaire.

[Benjamin Cowen @benjamincowen]

Bitcoin bear markets make fools of both bulls and bears.

BTC rallied from $80k to $98k from November 2025 to January 2026.

People were calling for the supercycle and alt season.

Then BTC set new cycle lows in February 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.

BTC rallied from $60k to $82k from February 2026 to May 2026, and the bears were relentlessly mocked and ridiculed again.

Then BTC set new cycle lows in June 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.

The cycle keeps playing out.

It makes the bulls look like fools because the market trends up for so long, only to wipe out all of the gains in a very short period.

It makes the bears look like fools because the market spends a lot of time trending up, before breaking down quickly. So the bear thesis will often look wrong, even when its right.

Do not let emotions rule your investment decisions. Have a plan and stick to it.