Rafael Oliveira Santos

growth & partnerships @CavePayWallet @MelonPodcasts | business, management | all thoughts are my own

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

what does it actually mean to co-own ai?

@veryBN sits down with @david_enim, core contributor to olas, on how you move from using ai to participating in it

with olas you can hold tokens, run agents, or operate them as a business. across defi, prediction markets, and other onchain use cases, agents generate value and operators share the upside

[Rafael Oliveira Santos @RafaelOS2001]

@MelonPodcasts @M4rcusHale @david_enim curious how Valory thinks about this tradeoff long term, is multi-chain even worth the friction, or does it eventually converge back to one execution layer?

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

our host @M4rcusHale connects with @david_enim, co-founder of valory, on what it actually takes to build autonomous agents across crypto

after years at https://t.co/3EWo1qaTPu one lesson landed hard: chains create focus, but they also create friction

instead of scaling agents, you end up selling blockspace, ecosystems, and infrastructure narratives

[Indie 505 @Indie5051]

Así se siente la vida cuando aceptas que no sabes nada y nunca vas a dejar de aprender

[Solithra ☀️ @Solithra]

Need

[Fishing Niche @FishingNiche]

I HOOKED the LAKE MONSTER!!! 👀👀👀

[TC @totalcristiano]

Jude, save football.

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

"honestly, i think we're just a few months away"

our host @mariawilliamsmp sits down with @david_enim on how close ai agents actually are to mainstream adoption. not just for builders, but for beginners and everyday defi users

after years buried in technical papers on agent systems, and now building in the space full time, david explains why the timeline keeps compressing

and why the hardest part may no longer be the tech. it's getting people aligned on how to actually use it

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

this week on melon: david minarsch (@david_enim), co-founder and ceo of valory

we get into david's path across crypto and ai, from his early work at https://t.co/3EWo1qaTPu to building valory and olas, and what "autonomy" actually means once agents leave the demo and start operating in live markets

we dig into what autonomous agents can already do, where they're genuinely useful, and what breaks the moment you drop them into permissionless adversarial environments like web3

and the hard problems underneath all of it: coordination, incentives, security, reliability, and why open-source infrastructure decides whether agents ever become first-class participants on the internet

[Baby Doge @BabyDoge]

1,009 lbs of dog food collected.
500 BabyDogers.

Brazilian shelters resupplied this week.

This is what a community looks like when it actually shows up.

Obrigado, Brasil 🐶

Full report dropping soon!

[OKX @okx]

On July 1st, some platforms in Europe will go dark.

OKX is fully MiCA-authorised, regulated, and trusted by millions.

Switch to The New Money App before you're forced to.

[BitMart @BitMartExchange]

Which ecosystem is about to have its moment? 🌱

[Dogecoin @dogecoin]

somebody needs to tell the charts to stop doing the downward dog

[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

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

Read my book, Freedom of Money. From my childhood to founding Binance, challenges we faced, wandering the Earth, stories (from my perspective) about Luna/UST, FTX/SBF, dealing with US DOJ, SEC, going through jail (as the only person in US history to ever go to jail for a single violation of BSA), then full and unconditional pardon, and more...

Audiobook: https://t.co/Ow76tim5G4

English: https://t.co/UxgYxYJ3NF
Chinese: https://t.co/ItFd8FEyuK

All proceeds go to Charity.

First IRL book signing event in Dubai soon. Due to limited physical books available, will make the first event a small one.

[CoinMarketCap @CoinMarketCap]

LATEST: ⚡ Ripple's Reece Merrick says crypto payments are in the same "slow, foundational phase" e-commerce was in before going mainstream, adding "you are not bullish enough."

[CoinMarketCap @CoinMarketCap]

CMC Market Pulse: The Mass Depeg

BTC -4.12%, ETH -7.83%. Market cap slides to $2.07T as msY, sUSD, and MIM all break pegs in the same week. Strategy overhang continues to weigh on crypto.

Let's break down this week's top crypto narratives

[Binance @binance]

grandma's setup

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH

Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.

The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but bounded. Finance is approaching a similar moment. As value, assets, and markets become digital, the world needs shared settlement infrastructure.

Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become that shared base layer, the neutral foundation on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation.

What we believe:

• We believe credible neutrality matters. Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person.

• We believe ETH matters. The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum.

• We believe DeFi matters. Markets, liquidity, credit, exchange, and coordination, open to anyone.

• We believe adoption matters. Principles do not change the world until people benefit from them.

We sit between two worlds: real usage from the builders at the frontier, and the protocol that has to support it. We work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core devs and researchers, then turn what they actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products.

Ethlabs is independent but Ethereum is a shared project. We are one node in a much larger network of stewards. This is the multi-node future.

We have spent the better part of the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development.

We are opinionated and transparent. We move with urgency, learn in public, and course-correct when we’re wrong.

We are building a lean, talent-dense team for people who want to do the most important work of their careers: [email protected]