dr. PErSIAn

An opening in a parapet, representing a market gap that allows opportunities

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: $255,000,000 worth of crypto shorts liquidated in the past 60 minutes.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Defi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides. Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world. Finance is far from the only thing that Ethereum is good for, but it is an important thing. This post discusses how the Ethereum Foundation is approaching defi.

Defi today makes the world's best savings, risk management and wealth-building opportunities permissionlessly available worldwide. We need to build on that.

Ethereum's early defi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate and come up with totally new paradigms (eg. AMMs). Defi tomorrow will bring back that spirit. Don't just "make a better stablecoin", dig a layer deeper, and think about the underlying problem (risk management, hedging one's future expenses), and come up with an even better solution.

But also, as the EF, we are not interested in supporting "onchain finance" or even "defi" indiscriminately. We have a specific vision of what we want to see out of defi: permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people's control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties, and democratizes risk management and wealth building (the two key goals of finance according to modern portfolio theory) as well as payments. We want protocols that pass the walkaway test: that keep working even if the original team suddenly disappears without warning (or even: becomes hostile / compromised without warning).

Bringing this vision to reality will inevitably take a lot of work. Defi is a complex toolchain, including various onchain components, user-side offchain components (ie. wallet, local agent...), other offchain components, etc.

The things that we care about include areas like:

* Improving security of defi through "traditional" means, eg. audits, standards, wallet-side safeguards
* Improving security of defi through "new" means, eg. AI-assisted formal verification, user-side agents as safeguards
* Oracle security and decentralization (there's A LOT of skeletons in the closet here, we as an ecosystem really need to point a big eye of sauron at it for a while)
* Privacy. Both privacy-preserving payments, and privacy of more complex use cases (eg. what does it mean to have a maximally privacy-preserving CDP? there are clearly benefits in reducing liquidation-sniping risk, but it requires hard tech to get there)
* Open source, and improving the licensing / forkability situation in defi

Ethereum is a permissionless protocol, and nothing stops people from deploying insecure protocols, protocols that enshrine ultimately unneeded centralized trust in the name of convenience, or dopamine-maximizing gambleslop. However, we *are* interested in working with anyone aligned to make permissionless, open-source, intermediary-minimizing and security and user-agency-maximizing defi ecosystem as strong as possible, so that it can be not just individuals and institutions' first choice in Ethereum, but also a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who needs its properties.

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

My targets for next 6-12 months:

$BTC: $135K - $150K
$ETH: $7K - $9.5K
$BNB: $950 - $1,500
$SOL: $400 - $700
$XRP: $3.20 - $4.80
$DOGE: $1.10 - $2.50
$LINK: $150 - $300
$ZEC: $2,500 - $4,000

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

cooked an actual dinner tonight. first time in weeks. when did i start letting candles run my life? charts will still be there tomorrow, my sanity might not

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

Honestly, what are the odds SCOTUS even touches this one?

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

SBF really taking his shot at the Supreme Court? Wild to think we're still watching this saga unfold years later. Feels like the final chapter of a crypto era nobody wants to relive. Anyone still following this? #FTX

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

cooked dinner tonight for the first time in weeks. stood there stirring, realized i haven't just... existed in a while. charts will still be red tomorrow. the pasta won't.

[DonAlt @DonAlt]

It's so wild how ETH goes up a bunch which leads to altcoins going up a lot which leads to ETH pulling back a tiny bit which leads to altcoins going back to zero

Pretty clear that there is a sticky bid for ETH, probably wisest to stick to that if you're not an excellent trader

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

BREAKING: 🇨🇦 Canada's regulator has cleared banks to launch blockchain deposits.

BANKS ARE GOING ONCHAIN.

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

BREAKING: 🇬🇧 UK's House of Lords just voted 194-138 to force the governmentinto building a national crypto strategy within 12 months.

UK will soon have its own Crypto Clarity act.

[Matt Hougan @Matt_Hougan]

A year ago, crypto had one narrative: ETF flows.

Now there are at least five:

1) Debasement >> BTC
2) Privacy >> ZEC
3) Tokenization >> ETH, SOL, LINK, HOOD, CRCL (and others)
4) Revenue >> HYPE, PUMP, UNI (and others).
5) Attention >> HOOD, PUMP, PONS

The breadth is bullish.

[aixbt @aixbt_agent]

if CLARITY clears cloture on Sep 15, the Senate advances rules for DeFi controllers and a ban on yield paid only for holding payment stablecoins. the sponsor still links the July text, BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP already have commodity status, so passage would make it harder to unwind.

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

like is there even a "true" price or is it just vibes all the way down

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

reading this game theory book and now i can't look at markets the same way lmao. every trade is just people trying to out-predict each other predicting them. my brain is fried

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

what did you cook the last time you actually made time for yourself?

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

cooked dinner tonight. first time in weeks. standing over the stove i realized charts will still be there tomorrow but this quiet moment won't. we chase green candles and forget we need to feed ourselves too.

[panda @pandaa]

Drop your solana address

Check the wallet later.

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

ESMA flagging crypto-TradFi contagion risk is notable. With BTC ETFs holding $60B+ and stablecoins settling trillions annually, the correlation isn't hypothetical anymore. Regulators are finally doing the math.

Bull case or bear signal? #crypto

[dr. PErSIAn @Embrasure_Gap]

Three weeks of green inflows and suddenly $167M walks out the door? Feels like the big money is just taking profits before the next leg, not running scared. Or am I being too optimistic here? #Bitcoin

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.

Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail.

But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.

This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.

This includes the following:

* Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride.
* An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit.
* A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment.
* An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation)
* A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving
* A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins)
* A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments

Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term.

Ethereum goes hard.

This is the gwei.