five five

Minimalistic office, MacBook with USDT/USDC charts, espresso shot, clean fintech aesthetic

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

. @Sharplink just bought ETH for the first time in 8 months
They're sitting on a $1.79 billion unrealized loss
Average buy price $3,609, ETH is at $1,555
The decision to keep buying after that is either deep conviction
Or a strategy they can't walk away from

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@DeFiMidas is it legal?

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@lookonchain it's always worth watching where large capital is positioning

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@BullTheoryio the best news for today

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@CoinMarketCap long-term holders selling less has historically been one of the healthier on-chain signals

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@Vivek4real_ I hope you're right

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

. @ethereumfndn cut 20% of staff and 40% of budget this week
At the same time the network hit record usage
That's the uncomfortable part
More users, lower token price
$ETH has a monetization problem, not an adoption problem

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year.

Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world.

Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.

Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list):

* The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals.
* PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer
* Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate.
* Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds.
* EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale.

These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play.

In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin.

The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.
https://t.co/iZiOonRYzR

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@SimplyBitcoin if liquidity is really at record highs, the market eventually has to explain why bitcoin isn't reflecting it

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@Cointelegraph first the market chased AI. eventually it'll start looking for what's undervalued next

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@Cointelegraph every cycle feels unprecedented until you zoom out

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@Vivek4real_ the real question is whether this is structural or just another cycle

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@KobeissiLetter China seems determined not to miss the AI wave this time

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@cryptorover wen crypto bullmarket

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@PaulGoldEagle sounds too big to be true, but tomorrow will be interesting either way

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@WatcherGuru if BofA is right, a lot of rate-cut expectations are about to get repriced

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@BullTheoryio the drop is big, but after that IPO run-up a correction was almost inevitable

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

Six agencies have 26 days to finalize stablecoin rules
July 18 is the GENIUS Act statutory deadline
After that, $230B in stablecoins operates inside a live regulatory framework for the first time
The industry asked for clarity for years
Now it gets it all at once

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

Bitcoin ETFs just posted their worst outflow streak since launch
I keep seeing people call this a crash
It's not a crash, it's institutions repricing rate expectations
The Fed killed the 2026 cut narrative and crypto is just the most liquid place to express that pain first

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@DeFiTracer at this point every bullish trump quote feels like a warning sign

[five five @Ibrahim1978A]

@cryptorover sounds like the fed is trying to regain flexibility after getting burned before