LiberEther.eth

🏛️ Libertarian School of DeFi
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[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.

First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.

The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"

Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.

As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.

One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.

My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.

Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.

Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?

EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.

And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.

This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.

To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:

* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.

* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.

* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.

Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.

The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

[Neriel.eth @galasso_ralph]

Opportunities for new voices on Ethereum like @codephobic @leolanza @marilyn100x to rise, please follow them, and many others who do great video contents, without focus on fast money grabs, we deserve better.

[Arbitrum @arbitrum]

The Arbitrum Security Council has taken emergency action to freeze the 30,766 ETH being held in the address on Arbitrum One that is connected to the KelpDAO exploit. The Security Council acted with input from law enforcement as to the exploiter’s identity, and, at all times, weighed its commitment to the security and integrity of the Arbitrum community without impacting any Arbitrum users or applications.

After significant technical diligence and deliberation, the Security Council identified and executed a technical approach to move funds to safety without affecting any other chain state or Arbitrum users.

As of April 20 11:26pm ET the funds have been successfully transferred to an intermediary frozen wallet. They are no longer accessible to the address that originally held the funds, and can only be moved by further action by Arbitrum governance, which will be coordinated with relevant parties.

[MilliΞ @llamaonthebrink]

It’s looking increasingly likely that the root cause of the exploit is a compromised LayerZero “Validator”

Basically a single node was able to push through a tx to move $290M in assets. No time lock, nothing.

Unfortunate circumstance tbh.

But DeFi is not to blame here.

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

NERI is here!

Tomorrow Nerite will start a new Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool with our partner, @balancer, for 72 hours.

This is the last chance to earn Shell points too.

Go slow 🐌

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

Get ready for the NERI token fair launch.

Coming to a @Balancer LBP extremely soon.

[Neriel.eth @galasso_ralph]

Okay guys, I did the sacrifice now #Ethereum is ready ro pump lol @LiberEther

[LiberEther.eth @LiberEther]

Let's go!

[MilliΞ @llamaonthebrink]

New name.

Same project.

Greater aspirations.

Trueo 🔮⚖️

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

Join us on Thursday at 2pm UTC for Balancer Office Hours!

We'll share some information about the coming NERI token and our strategy for growing Balancer liquidity.

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

Thank you for participating in our Shells reward program. 🐚🐚🐚

Season 1 is officially over. An announcement on what's next will be released this week.

Go slow.

[LiberEther.eth @LiberEther]

@llamaonthebrink We will spread the word! And all this situation, just show to us even more the problems of centralization, you guys rock! 💪🏻

[MilliΞ @llamaonthebrink]

It’s been quite a stressful month for our team and community due to an ongoing trademark dispute.

At the end of the day, the name of our app is not the defining feature for the project.

A name change does not bother us.

The main source of stress, and what really opened our eyes, was how quickly and arbitrarily a project can be deplatformed on a guilty until proven innocent basis.

You are punished (deplatformed) indefinitely until you sort it out through legal proceedings.

Fighting that would require dragging this dispute along via legal channels, which is not just costly, but also a major distraction, and not to mention extremely slow.

More importantly, we would not have access to our X account while such a prolonged legal challenge were to play out.

That last fact alone makes the approach untenable. How can we expect to operate without such an essential marketing tool?

This ordeal unfolded at a terrible time for us since we had a major marketing campaign slated to kick off the new year, coinciding with several project upgrades.

But those plans were upended when our primary communication medium was arbitrarily suspended.

Anyway, I honestly hate victim playing, it’s not my style nor the philosophy of our project.

All this is to say that we chose to move decisively in the optimal direction for our immediate and long-term future.

Next week, we will complete a brand modification and begin operating under a new trademark/domain. All other aspects of the project will remain consistent.

But there’s something else.

These events sparked an idea within our team.

It all comes down to one question:

How do we fundamentally strengthen our product distribution strategy to improve user growth while reducing reliance on any single medium?

We believe we have the answer to that question, and it does not require much change from a development perspective.

The team is really excited about these new set of features and how they tie in to our prediction markets.

I cannot wait to share more.

For now 🫡

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

No shade to our brother and sister forks, but we think this is a great tier list.

"In one sentence, Nerite is S-tier because it goes way beyond what Liquity V2 can do with features that didn’t exist before, and the team does its utmost to engage with users."

[LiberEther.eth @LiberEther]

We stand with you guys ! 👊

[Neriel.eth @galasso_ralph]

@ethereum

[LiberEther.eth @LiberEther]

Merry Christmas!

[Neriel.eth @galasso_ralph]

Merry Christmas my Ethereum brothers !

[Neriel.eth @galasso_ralph]

That's the goal at @LiberEther, may take several years, but we'll get there !

[LiberEther.eth @LiberEther]

@VitalikButerin @scupytrooples 🫡

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

Nerite has teamed up with our friends at @flowstatecoop to offer 3 Million Shells for devs and users of farcaster mini apps on @arbitrum.

The Arbitrum Cracked Dev Rewards program is giving devs $40k USND per month, and we're adding even more rewards on top.

Learn more below👇

[LiberEther.eth @LiberEther]

The future it's bright! 🐌🚀

[Nerite @NeriteOrg]

Privacy is normal
Yield is normal

Have both for the first time with a decentralized stablecoin: USND