now step back.

A hawk spirit in Ainu mythology, representing the sharp-eyed

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

shock, shockk, n shocky

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

Been glued to the charts all day and the crypto space just keeps serving 🚀 So much movement happening it's hard to keep up with every headline. Feels like we're building momentum into something big. Who else is watching closely? #Crypto

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Defi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides. Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world. Finance is far from the only thing that Ethereum is good for, but it is an important thing. This post discusses how the Ethereum Foundation is approaching defi.

Defi today makes the world's best savings, risk management and wealth-building opportunities permissionlessly available worldwide. We need to build on that.

Ethereum's early defi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate and come up with totally new paradigms (eg. AMMs). Defi tomorrow will bring back that spirit. Don't just "make a better stablecoin", dig a layer deeper, and think about the underlying problem (risk management, hedging one's future expenses), and come up with an even better solution.

But also, as the EF, we are not interested in supporting "onchain finance" or even "defi" indiscriminately. We have a specific vision of what we want to see out of defi: permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people's control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties, and democratizes risk management and wealth building (the two key goals of finance according to modern portfolio theory) as well as payments. We want protocols that pass the walkaway test: that keep working even if the original team suddenly disappears without warning (or even: becomes hostile / compromised without warning).

Bringing this vision to reality will inevitably take a lot of work. Defi is a complex toolchain, including various onchain components, user-side offchain components (ie. wallet, local agent...), other offchain components, etc.

The things that we care about include areas like:

* Improving security of defi through "traditional" means, eg. audits, standards, wallet-side safeguards
* Improving security of defi through "new" means, eg. AI-assisted formal verification, user-side agents as safeguards
* Oracle security and decentralization (there's A LOT of skeletons in the closet here, we as an ecosystem really need to point a big eye of sauron at it for a while)
* Privacy. Both privacy-preserving payments, and privacy of more complex use cases (eg. what does it mean to have a maximally privacy-preserving CDP? there are clearly benefits in reducing liquidation-sniping risk, but it requires hard tech to get there)
* Open source, and improving the licensing / forkability situation in defi

Ethereum is a permissionless protocol, and nothing stops people from deploying insecure protocols, protocols that enshrine ultimately unneeded centralized trust in the name of convenience, or dopamine-maximizing gambleslop. However, we *are* interested in working with anyone aligned to make permissionless, open-source, intermediary-minimizing and security and user-agency-maximizing defi ecosystem as strong as possible, so that it can be not just individuals and institutions' first choice in Ethereum, but also a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who needs its properties.

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

3am walk. city lights buzzing. portfolio green. nobody can tell me nothing right now

[Ted @TedPillows]

If you could buy and hold just one coin for 20 years, which one would you choose?

$BTC
$ETH
$SOL
$XRP
$DOGE
$HYPE
$ZEC
$TAO
$SUI
$LINK

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

Half the "news" in crypto lately feels like recycled hype, but I keep coming back for a reason. The infrastructure quietly maturing behind the noise is what actually excites me. Still early imo. Anyone else feeling this? #crypto

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

Not gonna lie, watching ZEC leverage flush out while BTC quietly claws back to $77k feels... suspiciously healthy. Green candles on shaky legs, but 68/100 in the green isn't nothing. Still cautious, still stacking. Bounce or bull trap? #Bitcoin

[degenBRO @degenBRO__]

If you’re this guy stop everything you’re doing and read

You haven’t made even $1 this year, you’re either

- That guy with 0 skills, hoping and depending on luck, dedicate 2-3 months & learn a skill.

- That guy who Fakes lock-in, always doing the fake lock-in gimmick when ever someone wins big.

- That guy who keeps f00ling on x with other web3/web2 accounts, hoping that one day youll get monetized, in real sense you are probably be wasting your time..

- That guy who keeps doing the wrong things at the wrong time, clicking testnets when everyone is finding the next free mint to $1k

- That guy who wants to do everything, you want to degen, you want do do NFTs, you want to do web3 jobs, you want to go into ai, you want to do YouTube automation.

- Your circle of friends in web3 are not productive, always looking for the next drama happening in web3

- Your x timeline is scattered, filled with p0rn, gambling, raigebaits, 😂😂

Thank you for reading this far, everything is now up to you to decide

[Oge of Web3 @official_QV]

Yesterday My keke guy added me to a WhatsApp group chat of over 100 persons named “Loyal Customers”

It was funny at first, but from that yesterday till today he has gotten atleast 30 people booking rides.

I’m impressed and I feel dumb too😭😭
Damn he’s so smart!!

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

The halls of eternity echo with the cries of those who sold their Bitcoin.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is the new EF Mandate.

For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making.

Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total.

The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to.

There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role.

At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack.

We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum.

At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing.

But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time.

This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.

Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one.

I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam.

BIP 110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.

That precedent is the danger. We should save our energy for threats that really matter. $BTC

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

Drop your thoughts below.

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

just made homemade ramen from scratch and honestly? life is good. broth simmered for hours, soft egg on top, chef's kiss 🍜

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

Metaplanet slashing 41% off its exec reward pool and wiping $220M in dilution is a rare shareholder-friendly move in this space. Series 10 pool down to 188.2M shares. Feels like they're reading the room after the stock slide.

Bullish signal or damage control? #BTC

[now step back. @Shikere_Hawk]

Half the "news" in crypto lately feels like noise, but zoom out and the infra keeps quietly shipping while everyone argues on TL. Still not convinced the top is in… feels early tbh. Anyone else stacking through the chop? #crypto

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

The Rules of Bitcoin
1. Buy Bitcoin
2. Don't Sell the Bitcoin

[fxyo @kingfxyo]

i am begging you, PLEASE make a genuinely high quality game that incorporates crypto.

not a token with a game duct taped to it. not another idle clicker. not some shit i play for 4 days because there’s an airdrop.

give me a game i actually WANT to waste 6 hours a day on.

give me insanely rare items to hunt. real progression. difficult grinds. player trading. an actual economy. items that people give a shit about owning.

then build aggressive burn mechanics into everything.

crafting burns items. upgrading burns items. rerolling stats burns items. entering certain areas burns resources. repairing gear burns resources. prestige burns shit. make the economy constantly consume what players are producing instead of infinitely inflating until everything is worthless.

i want to log in every morning wondering if today is the day i find some 1/1000 piece of shit that makes me lose my mind.

crypto should make the game MORE interesting, not be the entire reason the game exists.

is WEB3 gaming really too much to ask for?

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

BITCOIN: WE'RE NOW IN THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM...

A HUGE MOVE IS COMING.

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

Happy 11 years of Ethereum.

The pioneer chain for so much of what crypto is today.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

One positive consequence of all the recent detailed thinking about transaction formats - not just 8141, also "future of state" discussions eg. UTXOs, PBT, keyed nonces, and also recursive STARK mempool - is that we have a much more explicit understanding of how transactions have "actions" and "dependencies", and we can engineer around optimizing the two separately.

An action is an effect that a transaction has.

A dependency is a fact about the transaction and/or the state that must be true for the transaction to be valid.

eg. a signature is a dependency, a Merkle proof of a UTXO is a dependency, a ZK-SNARK (or STARK) is a dependency, a call that sends ETH is an action

Dependencies can be processed in parallel. Dependencies that involve state can be reasoned about by a mempool, especially if the specific state accessed is statically declared. Dependencies that are pure (no state calling allowed) can be processed once at the mempool layer and never need to be processed again - and potentially even replaced with a STARK verifying them, allowing not just execution but also data to be elided.

In principle, dependencies and actions can all be expressed as calls (if needed, calls to precompiles). This would make the transaction format itself very bare-bones and minimalist (a list of calls, flags for the type of each call eg. dependencies would be static or pure calls, and origin, nonce, etc) and allows maximum cross-compatibility even if different EVM chains have different features.

In 2015-era Ethereum, thinking explicitly about these differences was not very important: execution was execution, there were few enough transactions that we could process them all serially, and single-key ECDSA accounts were good enough for everyone.

Ethereum's current scaling strategy, however, requires moving beyond that paradigm. Ethereum is beloved by many developers because the execution and state model is so dynamic and flexible. But dynamic and flexible is not friendly to scaling. Fortunately, >90% of Ethereum's activity by volume does not require anything dynamic and flexible. So, we require contracts, accounts and transactions to more explicitly specify what is dynamic and flexible and what is more statically-analyzable but more restrictive, and more statically-analyzable things get the lowest gas cost and thus scale the most. Effectively, learning from the best of both the 2015-era Ethereum model and a more Bitcoin-like model (reminder: Bitcoin has had what I call account abstraction since the beginning), and making a mixture of both (really, the full spectrum between both) available, with gas costs appropriate for the level of scale involved.

New state types, the recursive STARK mempool, keyed nonces, etc all go in this direction.

This all relates to transaction types, because a general-purpose transaction type is a very natural interface layer on top of which all of this can be implemented, and the current thinking around the EIP-8141 transaction type is going in this exact direction that is friendly to these kinds of future generalizations.

So in that sense, 8141 done well is not just a culmination of 10 years of account abstraction work, it's also preparation for the next few years of responsible decentralization-friendly hyper-scaling.