ethersven.eth

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

@scupytrooples Nice

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

"Pokemon" is short for "pocket monsters".
"Digimon" is short for "digital monsters".

Therefore, "salmon" is short for "saltwater monsters".

(You might object: salmon spend a big part of their life in freshwater. But pokemon spend a big part of their life outside pockets too!)

[scoopy trooples @scupytrooples]

my crypto investment thesis is rather simple:

Ethereum is the only smart contract platform that takes the blockchain trilemma seriously, aiming for security, decentralization, and scalability while upholding the cypherpunk ethos of neutrality and self sovereignty.

It was slacking on the scalability aspect for a while but that is now the primary focus without sacrificing security or decentralization. The current incremental steps have made transactions affordable now. The zk-rollup-ification of L1 in the roadmap will make it ultra scalable, too.

Dumbchains are not interesting as they have no on chain economies, and vc corposlop smart chains are cynical extraction machines.

Ethereum alone points to a brighter future that takes the masses some kind of power or agency back from the ever growing corpo fascist trend the world is moving to. When ETH does well, the entire industry does well, and vice versa.

No other blockchain ecosystem has people willing to fight for it like Ethereum, evidenced by the multitudes of devs and projects who choose to work on it without needing to be lured in by VCs and fat cheques.

These very qualities that make it appealing to cypherpunks also make it appealing to institutions as time after time, they prefer to work on open and neutral systems rather than closed/proprietary or biased ones.

Sure we all have nitpicks about the EF, myself included, but to their credit, they have cultivated an ecosystem that people care about beyond just pumping bags. It has a soul in an often soulless industry.

If ETH fails, then crypto has failed and the world will be a materially worse place. Call me naive or dumb, but I’d rather fight for something worthy of fighting for than succumb to a nihilistic stance focused solely on self-enrichment.

In short, it is the only chain/ecosystem in the space that isn’t garbage.

[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.

[Bankless @Bankless]

$ETH will rise

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

@ryanberckmans I listened to the whole podcast today, and no one mentioned credible neutrality even once! Like how is it credibly neutral, if you have ethereum salesmen walking around wall street. It's meant to be the same platform for everyone, not favor US institutions.

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS @RyanSAdams]

@WhiteHouse Posts like this make it look like the US is run by psychopaths

[DCinvestor @DCinvestor]

this is a manifestation of the moral collapse in the US, where even in situations where we choose or are compelled to use violence against others, it is presented as a game, corrupting fond childhood memories of many

it looks like a psychological programming video. the intent seems to be to dehumanize the enemy

maybe you think it’s insignificant and “it’s just a meme for the lulz bro,” but it is coming from the highest office in the land, presenting leadership both within and outside of nation

vile and disgusting

[Stellar @StellarArtoisGB]

Did you know 😏

He rubbed lemon juice on his face. Robbed two banks. Smiled at the cameras. Got caught in an hour. And changed psychology forever.

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two banks in Pittsburgh and robbed them with no mask, no disguise, and lemon juice on his face. He believed that because lemon juice works as invisible ink on paper, it would make his face invisible to cameras. He smiled directly into the security cameras. Police aired the footage on the evening news and arrested him within an hour.

When shown the tape, Wheeler stared at the screen and said, "But I wore the juice." He had tested the theory with a Polaroid selfie and didn't appear in the photo — because lemon juice got in his eyes and he aimed the camera at the ceiling.

His case inspired Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger to publish their 1999 paper defining the Dunning-Kruger Effect — the cognitive bias where people with low ability drastically overestimate their own competence.

[Etc. @ec265]

Anyone stating that “there will only ever be 21M Bitcoin” is intellectually dishonest

It is not a fact

It’s a nice soundbite, but it actually highlights a fundamental flaw of a blockchain network

And whilst we’re here, a hard cap does not automatically mean scarcity

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

How can anyone take this seriously

[Solana @solana]

Starknet has 8 daily active users, 10 daily transactions, and still somehow has a 1b MC and 15b FDV

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Send it straight to 0

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

@AgentChud There's no way he actually believes this lmao

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

@aixbt_agent Gas limit has been raised like 2 days ago, dude

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

@Jrag0x @gphummer If I understood it correctly 'gas limits' will be a thing of the past soon(ish)

[Ryan Berckmans ⟠ @ryanberckmans]

Bitcoin is not actually digital gold. Gold does well in risk off periods. Nor is Bitcoin equity-like, obviously.

Bitcoin is a relatively illiquid extremely volatile risk asset that has terrible fundamentals (negative sum after mining, security budget crisis, quantum crisis, no app layer), and driven solely by religiosity, with long-standing market confusion over the hypergrowth of onchain/stablecoins having anything at all to do with BTC.

Bitcoin is already quite overbought on average this year, having gone ~5x in ~2 years to a staggering ATH of ~$2.5T.

It would be a coincidence if BTC's performance tracked QQQ or gold because Bitcoin has nothing to do with stocks or gold.

And it's a coincidence that BTC is underperforming QQQ and gold YTD.

Again, this is because there's little to no actual relationship between Bitcoin and gold or stocks, except that both BTC and stocks are risk assets.

As for why other cryptos are lagging BTC this year, ETH in particular has just recently come out of a 2022-25 Q1 dark age where the negative forces of Gensler/Warren, L2 growth challenges, and EF challenges combined to produce spectacularly bad PA for ETH. These factors have now all flipped very positive. That's reflected in ETHBTC being up ~+80% from six months ago. Ethereum is now beginning a golden age.

Expect ETHBTC to continue trending in favor of ethereum and onchain growth, and for BTCUSD to continue to struggle to reach significant new highs and to persist in the pattern of decreasing returns across cycles.

[ethersven.eth @SBlubal]

@EVMaverick392 For a second I thought, why a dolphin? Then I remembered them flippers!🐬

[EVMaverick392.eth @EVMaverick392]

proud to present

"EVMavericks trailer"

sound on!

[Logarithmic Rex @LogarithmicRex]

The first episode of @sigtheory was a banger!

Don't miss this conversation with @fraxfinance CEO/Co-Founder @samkazemian on all things stablecoins: FRAX, regulation, CBDCs, and so much more!

And check out the Signaling Theory Podcast - lot's of fantastic content queued up!

[mteam.gwei @mteamisloading]

It's all fun and free markets until someone makes a faster chain than you.

[Patrick Collins @PatrickAlphaC]

“I didn’t lose your money, I bet your money all on black, but it came up red. But the most recent roulette spin came up black, which proves that I was correct to take your money without your consent and bet your money all on black”