Javi Gibbs

Collaboration at scale, positive-sum games, high agency and accountability.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.

Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later)

But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission:

To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.

We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.

These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord.

Ethereum is the rebellion against this.

To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more.

Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will.

Wishing everyone an exciting 2026.

Milady.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@frankdilo The brilliance is not in the txt file but in the process (and sticking to it for 9 years). Same process and discipline in @todoist would be unmatched.

[Brunbitty @brunbitty]

Tonight it finally clicked for me.

Neo asks her the classic question:
“If you already know what I’m going to do… do I really have a choice?”

And she hits him with the line:
“You’ve already made the choice. You’re just here to understand why.”

For years I thought this meant “there’s no free will.” But that’s not it.

Here’s the real insight:

Free will doesn’t exist in the moment.

It exists in the identity that leads to the moment.

The actions you take right now?
They’re mostly automatic - shaped by your conditioning, experiences, fears, habits, and past.

But the person you’re becoming?
That’s where your freedom actually lives.

You don’t choose the moment.
You choose the man who will meet the moment.

Or put in another way:

Determinism writes the past.

Identity writes the future.

Because when your life isn’t where you want it to be, the answer isn’t “make better choices.” The answer is: become the version of yourself who makes better choices automatically.

That’s the real red pill.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@VitalikButerin Agreed

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@JasonYanowitz Should validators pay a tiny commission to support EL/CL client teams that becomes meaningful when pooled together?

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@ninja_dev3 @VitalikButerin So in short, I don’t have any specific good ideas 🙂

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@ninja_dev3 @VitalikButerin Your suggestion makes sense. I think the best solutions will be ones that can somehow be validated by the layers of the stack that you trust.

Most regular users will opt for options that sacrifice autonomy (full and sole control of your keys) but provide safety guarantees.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@ninja_dev3 @VitalikButerin Agree 100%, and this is also the largest attack surface area. Do you have any ideas on how to address this?

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@VitalikButerin I think the L2 scaling model provides a layer of protection against centralization forces, but great lessons to learn here nonetheless.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@SMB_Attorney @grok @PrestonPysh It’s unfathomable to think that the U.S. could ever come close to an economic and political situation like that of Venezuela, just like 25 years ago us Venezuelans thought it unfathomable to become like Cuba. I’m not saying it will happen, but the probability is not zero.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@maxresnick Is speed the most important feature of a public blockchain?

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@buildonethcto @brian_armstrong @Airbnb You’re hired

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@TheDesertLynx Well, Bitcoin is literally digital gold, and like gold, it mostly sits in vaults (custodians) that will charge fees to protect it (mine it). The only plus side is that it would be easier for citizens to demand that custodians make the addresses public for audits.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@maxresnick If there are no penalties for misbehaving, then what’s the point of using a blockchain? Why not bypass the complexity and just be another cloud provider?

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@hubermanlab Because life is short

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@jchervinsky If centralization and speed are what matter most, why even use a blockchain in the first place?

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@binji_x I’m here for it, but I’ve yet to see a single post about someone rolling out next-gen tech using AA?

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@binji_x @TimBeiko @terencechain @dankrad @adietrichs @drakefjustin @vdWijden @mkalinin2 Seriously

[binji @binji_x]

the eth core devs don’t tweet a lot about just how hard the work that they do is so let’s talk about it:

1. every line of code they merge can move more money than most banks process in a quarter. there is no staging server for that.

2. they swap consensus logic for a 400B + dollar economy without scheduling downtime. ever.

3. they coordinate hundreds of researchers, auditors, and client teams across time zones, cultures, and philosophies, yet ship like a single mind.

4. they do it all in public, with every decision dissected by the loudest peanut gallery on the internet, and still keep the vibe collaborative.

5. they design for attackers who have nine figure incentives and infinite patience. then they sleep anyway.

6. they keep six independent clients in perfect sync so the same block lives at the same height for every node in the world.

7. they turn bleeding edge research into production code while preserving backwards compatibility for machines that went online before defi even had a name.

8. they debug issues that only happen once a year on a single archive node because someone somewhere will rely on that edge case.

9. they write cryptography that must stay unbroken for decades while the math itself evolves beneath their feet.

10.when the upgrade lands smooth the outside world shrugs. inside ethereum we know it was a minor miracle. every successful fork proves that decentralized coordination can outperform the world’s best hierarchies and shows that open internet capital markets are now the default.

thank you, truly.
we owe you everything.

[Javi Gibbs @Javi_Gibbs]

@pcaversaccio @VitalikButerin