illus.eth

Crypto Maxi, Anon, Decentralize all things.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@guil_lambert The UNI token will go down as the worst thing to happen to the Uniswap protocol. Incentives driving UNI holders and Uniswap LP's is completely misaligned.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@haydenzadams As somebody who has been LPing since v1, pretty sure turning on the fee switch is the beginning of the end for LP profitability. The risk is not worth the rewards anymore. I hope I am wrong.

[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.

[Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️ @rstormsf]

The gov't theory in my case isn't about me. It's a template.
Under US v. Storm, "money transmitting" no longer requires custody or control of funds. Publishing code that others use is enough.
Who's in danger:

→ Every maintainer of open-source privacy, messaging, or crypto tools that any bad actor ever touches
→ Every operator of a financial service — DeFi or not — who learns some % of users are illicit and keeps operating. Knowledge alone becomes the crime
→ Every dev of immutable, self-custodial software, held to a duty to "stop" what is technically unstoppable

It's already working as designed. Michael Lewellen finished lawful crowdfunding software and can't publish it. He asked DOJ if he'd be prosecuted. Their answer, in federal court: we "cannot disclaim an intent to prosecute."
Finished code, sitting on a shelf. You don't need to be charged to be silenced.

And SDNY isn't done with me. Prosecutors want to retry me regardless — regardless of the hung counts, regardless of Van Loon, regardless of FinCEN's own guidance.

I've been fighting this for 3+ years. Legal defense at this level costs millions, and I can't do it alone.
If you write code, use privacy tools, or believe publishing software isn't a crime — this is your fight too.
Donate: https://t.co/lx9E4ILDrn
Every retweet helps. Every dollar goes to the defense.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@yourfriendSOMMI Stablecoins cannot be secured on a PoS network when the native staking coin = $0. Bullish stablecoins/RWA and bearish ETH is a 🤡 take.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@lex_node @pmarca Good article

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@TrustlessState Until a trillion dollars worth of assets are "secured" by $1800 ETH.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@etheraider If you got into crypto to get rich, you are doing it wrong.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@Mardeni01 No liquidity on Base

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@haydenzadams Going on 4 years of LPing profitably using mostly passive strategies.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@DeFi_Dad Do you think buying aBasWETH for 5% discount is a good trade right now?

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

My Openclaw AI Agent. I am dying 😂

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness.

Some of what this practically means:

Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer.

Helios: actually verify the data you're receiving from RPCs instead of blindly trusting it.

ORAM, PIR: ask for data from RPCs without revealing which data you're asking, so you can access dapps without your access patterns being sold off to dozens of third parties all around the world.

Social recovery wallets and timelocks: wallets that don't make you lose all your money if you misplace your seedphrase, or if an online or offline attacker extracts your seedphrase, and *also* don't make all your money backdoored by Google.

Privacy UX: make private payments from your wallet, with the same user experience as making public payments.

Privacy censorship resistance: private payments with the ERC-4337 mempool, and soon native AA + FOCIL, without relying on the public broadcaster ecosystem.

Application UIs: use more dapps from an onchain UI with IPFS, without relying on trusted servers that would lock you our of practical recovery of your assets if they went offline, and would give you a hijacked UI that steals your funds if they get hacked for even a millisecond.

In many of these areas, over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding in Ethereum. Nodes went from easy to run to hard to run. Dapps went from static pages to complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen servers. Wallets went from routing everything through the RPC, which could be any node of your choice including on your own computer, to leaking your data to a dozen servers of their choice. Block building became more centralized, putting Ethereum transaction inclusion guarantees under the whims of a very small number of builders.

In 2026, no longer. Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point - every moment where you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption - we are making that compromise no longer.

It will be a long road. We will not get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the next hard fork, or the hard fork after that. But it will make Ethereum into an ecosystem that deserves not only its current place in the universe, but a much greater one.

In the world computer, there is no centralized overlord.
There is no single point of failure.
There is only love.
Milady.

[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.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

One metaphor for Ethereum is BitTorrent, and how that p2p network combines decentralization and mass scale. Ethereum's goal is to do the same thing but with consensus.

Another metaphor for Ethereum is Linux.

* Linux is free and open source software, and does not compromise on this
* Linux is quietly depended on by billions of people and enterprises worldwide. Governments regularly use it.
* There are many operating systems based on Linux that pursue mass adoption
* There are Linux distributions (eg. Arch) that are highly purist, minimalistic and technologically beautiful, and focus on making the user feel powerful, not comfortable

(Actually, BitTorrent is depended on by enterprises too: many businesses and even governments (!!) use it to distribute large files to their users https://t.co/DS3K6aF1KN )

We must make sure that Ethereum L1 works as the financial (and ultimately identity, social, governance...) home for individuals and organizations who want the higher level of autonomy, and give them access to the full power of the network without dependence on intermediaries. At the same time, what Linux shows is that this is fully compatible with providing value to very large numbers of people, and even being loved and trusted by enterprises worldwide. Many enterprises in fact desperately want to build on an open and resilient ecosystem - what we call trustlessness, they call prudent counterparty risk minimization.

This is the gwei.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”

This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/QAvZfiNxpe ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means.

“efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec.

These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience.

Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY.

Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms.

Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant.

Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign.

This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away.

This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need.

The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others.

Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@shanaka86 Fully decentralized block chains for the win. Ethereum. IYKYK.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@foogyla @token_works I need a girlfriend.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@lex_node Mental. Any stablecoin that has yield > Aave USDC yield has high risk. Full stop.

[illus.eth @General_Illus]

@stakewise_io Wow. Great job guys