Portnoy diamond-handing BTC after buying the top is honestly the most bullish signal we've had in weeks lol. Retail capitulation usually marks bottoms, but a loud guy holding through pain? Different flavor.
Contrarian buy signal or nah? #Bitcoin
13 days.
So far no one has found it.
My only hint is that I would encourage people to somewhat broaden their search; I've seen quite a few searches and AI scripts that fail to include categories of documents that really should be included.
Every major blockchain is solving a different problem.
From payments and AI to infrastructure, storage, and scalability, each ecosystem has its own vision for the future of Web3.
Here's a quick snapshot of some of the biggest networks and what they stand for. 👇
➜ Solana — Fast. Scalable. Built for mass adoption.
➜ BNB Chain — Powering the world's largest crypto ecosystem.
➜ XRP — Connecting global payments in seconds.
➜ Cardano — Research-driven blockchain for the future.
➜ Sui — Designed for the next billion users.
➜ Avalanche — Launch anything. Scale everything.
➜ Chainlink — Bringing real-world data onchain.
➜ Polkadot — Connecting blockchains into one network.
➜ Cosmos — The Internet of Blockchains.
➜ Toncoin — Crypto built for billions through messaging.
➜ TRON — High-throughput blockchain for digital content.
➜ NEAR Protocol — Simple blockchain for builders and users.
➜ Hedera — Enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology.
➜ Aptos — Next-generation performance for Web3.
➜ Arbitrum — Scaling Ethereum without compromise.
➜ Optimism — Building a more accessible Ethereum.
➜ Render — Decentralized GPU power for creators and AI.
➜ Bittensor — A decentralized network for artificial intelligence.
➜ Filecoin — Decentralized storage for humanity's data.
➜ Uniswap — Permissionless trading for everyone.
Every ecosystem brings something unique to the table, whether it's payments, DeFi, AI, gaming, infrastructure, enterprise adoption, or decentralized storage.
The strongest networks will be the ones that continue to build, innovate, and create real value over time.
Which ecosystems are you using in your daily life ?
ok so basically AI hype ate BTC's lunch this cycle lol. but Schwab & Hashdex are saying bitcoin's just doing its usual post-halving thing and the gap w/ stocks won't hold. feels about right tbh 👀 who else thinks BTC catches up soon? #Bitcoin
Bitcoin has support at $58,000. I doubt it will hold. Once it gives way, Bitcoin could collapse below $50,000, testing the August 2024 low. If that support fails too, the next level is around $20,000. Strategy will have to sell a lot more Bitcoin to maintain its dollar reserve.
BTC punching through 60K again while everyone argues about the Fed... feels like we've seen this movie before. Is this the real leg up to 65K or just bulls getting baited into another rug? #Bitcoin
Who's actually buying here?
$BTC is sitting around $58-59k and the structure remains bearish.
Trading below every major moving average.
RSI around 30, approaching oversold.
June closed down ~19%, despite historically being one of BTC's strongest months.
The bigger story is ETF flows.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs posted roughly $4B in net outflows during June, the largest monthly outflow on record. That's institutional money leaving the market, not retail panic.
Capital also appears to be rotating into semiconductors. Bitcoin ETFs saw roughly $12B in outflows, while semiconductor ETFs attracted around $20B.
Key levels:
$55,298 = critical 0.5 Fib support.
Lose that, and $52k/$48k come into focus, with a measured move pointing toward ~$42k.
Bulls need to reclaim the 20D EMA at $62,450, followed by $64k resistance.
If $58k breaks, $55k is likely next. Above $62.5k is where the technical structure finally starts to improve.
We’ve had lots of questions from our investor community looking for thoughts on OUSD, and so I thought I’d share my direct views here for anyone.
Stablecoin networks are platform and network effect businesses that are established over a long period of time, tend towards winner-take-most market structures, and resemble other internet platform utility markets. There are several layers that drive this.
First, stablecoin networks effectively act as public protocols and software layers on the internet and their network strength is a matter of the number and range of applications and services that integrate to the network. Every time a developer or service provider integrates to the network, it brings more network effects. This attracts more developers and adds more utility and more network effects. This then drives demand for the digital currency itself, which then reinforces these network effects through liquidity network effects.
We have realized this at a massive scale with the USDC network today — thousands upon thousands of services integrate with our network, which in turn provides immense utility not just to each application, but to users as a whole who benefit massively from the reach and interoperability that exists. This drives user and developer preference further. We’ve invested in building that ecosystem over nearly a decade, and now it’s accelerating as mainstream institutions come onto the network, connecting their customers and users.
We add to that utility by building software stacks that further expand and strengthen the network — protocols like CCTP and Gateway, which promote interoperability, safety and liquidity around the world. This expands the target surface area for app builders and developers, making it easy for them to tap into the liquidity and network effects that already exist. We are now seeing that stack get pulled into all kinds of chains, permissioned L2s, networks being built by governments, and so much more.
The second layer is that of liquidity network effects. This is fundamental. Liquidity begets liquidity. For a stablecoin to achieve scale and utility, it needs to be highly liquid, both on a primary basis (e.g., through all the major financial market centers in the world, with world class direct banking liquidity) and on a secondary basis both by being available and tradeable for retail and institutional clients in every geography and against every fiat instrument in the world. People who want to access and move value need to be able to easily get in and out of that digital currency. Here, we’ve invested nearly a decade in building out that liquidity, and it is now entrenched in exchanges, DeFI venues, and with PSPs, payments firms, regional exchanges, and so many others. Establishing these liquidity network effects also involves building global regulatory infrastructure and ensuring that the stablecoin is available under various regimes around the world. Today, USDC is in the top 3 most liquid digital assets in the world, and it falls off sharply after that. BTC, USDT and USDC have extraordinary liquidity. The closest other dollar stables are like 10x smaller and that liquidity tends to be concentrated in promotional books in a single exchange, whereas USDC liquidity is dispersed widely across dozens and dozens of surfaces. Building this liquidity has been a nearly decade-long task that we continue.
A third layer of network strength comes from the deep integration with the policy and regulatory environment — in many cases, years of effort to build licensing (e.g., USDC is the only large global stablecoin currently available in all of Europe or Japan), and more regimes for stablecoins are coming online, with Circle leading the way in ensuring that USDC is officially recognized, registered, licensed and accepted in the most important markets in the world. On the back of this is the work of building global banking, reserve management and treasury and liquidity management that can operate this on a nearly 24/7 basis in markets and banking systems globally. This globalization effort is a massive investment that we have made over the years.
All of these investments by Circle and our global ecosystem of thousands of partners have delivered the net result of providing the world’s most trusted and available digital dollar infrastructure—a utility that any user, developer, or business can freely and easily tap into. And we do not intend to slow down.
All of this compounds and shows in the numbers. In Q1 2026, according to third-party analysts (Artemis) who track stablecoin adoption, USDC handled nearly $30T in onchain transactions, representing 80% of all dollar stablecoin transactions on blockchains. USDT handled the remaining 20% of transactions. All of the combined remaining dollar stablecoins handled a total of 0% of transactions (i.e., < 0.5%). While other stablecoins may have some circulation, most of that is through promotions and incentives, the actual usage is extremely limited—because of the extremely limited liquidity and network utility that exists for these coins.
But my thoughts on the competitive landscape are not just about the strength of our network—there are also considerations around any new initiative.
Several perspectives and positioning have been shared about how something like OUSD improves on something like USDC.
1) Free mint and burn. The argument suggests that existing stablecoins charge burn fees, and payments firms should not need to pay these (despite the fact that the entire payment industry is built on small bps fees on various ingress and egress points on their networks). There are structural market realities built around the fact that some stablecoins impose very large redemption fees and have limited redemption facilities – the impact of this is that stablecoins with strong redemption facilities, good liquidity and no fees become the offramp for their competitor stablecoins. It may seem easy to say one will offer unlimited and free redeems, however market reality likely forces other behavior. This can be addressed – and is addressed by Circle – through contractual mechanisms vs. a blanket fee exemption.
2) Everybody wins and shares. While this sounds good in principle, the reality of the market and market opportunity is quite different. Today, Circle shares the majority of its income with its distribution partners, and we continue to lean hard into expanding those partnerships with leading companies across every sector of the market. However, we also retain significant income that allows us to invest in the massive market infrastructure that makes this such a powerful and valuable utility for the world to build on. Giving away all the income is a recipe for starving an infrastructure, systematically underinvesting and ensuring that your platform will remain limited in scope.
Furthermore, Circle believes that the future stablecoin market is likely several orders of magnitude larger than it is today. We’re actively bringing partners into the USDC ecosystem through a diverse and growing set of partnership models that span our work with exchanges, custodians, payments firms, asset issuers and more. We are excited to continue to build with a “big tent mentality” where the entire ecosystem can grow value together.
3) A consortium where everybody has a voice. Perhaps I have a cynical view, but the track record of consortium products achieving scale, P/M Fit or even basic product agility is absolutely dismal, and while there are examples of financial consortia that operate utilities, they are predictably slow moving. Large groups of large companies coordinate poorly, have misaligned incentives, slow things down and rarely create the space for real durable innovation and competitiveness. They also typically, out of their own self-interest, starve the consortium itself on an operating basis. We actually tried this in the early days of USDC, and even with a very small group, ran into endless challenges and complexity. Smaller, tighter strategic collaborations and commercial partnership arrangements with product and platform builders that can drive forward independently will almost always outcompete large consortiums. But oftentimes when these get formed, everyone feels like they should put their logo on the list, kiss the ring, and make noise about openness. But typically those same firms will turn to their operating units and make the best decisions for their customers, which often means partnering with the market leader and building durable win-win partnerships.
There’s also been a bunch of commentary on Circle's partnership with Coinbase and what this all means. Our stablecoin partnership with Coinbase remains as strong as ever, and I think we both see that enormous opportunity ahead to expand the USDC network.
A final comment: Circle remains committed to supporting a wide range of different products and infrastructures, even when we might compete with different aspects of those partners’ products in other areas of our business. With OUSD, we work closely with many of the founding members, and we expect that those same members will remain large USDC partners and customers. At the same time, as Circle has diversified our product and platform stack, expanding across Arc, CCTP, CPN, StableFX, Agent Stack and many other areas, we continue to expand the partnerships and collaboration with many other stablecoin issuers — dozens of them — to help them launch on Arc, leverage our interoperability infrastructure, get supported in our Wallets and become settlement and FX options on CPN and StableFX.
We are huge believers in growth in the stablecoin ecosystem and welcome OUSD as a new member of the community!
In 2025, Ethereum solidified itself as the secure foundation for our growing digital civilization. From industry-leading adoption to new technology that reinforces protocol resilience, here are 12 themes that defined the past year:
1/ DeFi reinforced Ethereum's role as the financial base layer of the internet.
Transaction costs on Layer 1 (L1) reached 5-year lows and dropped below $0.01 on Layer 2 networks (L2s), making payments, remittances, and savings products an everyday reality. Maturing paymaster infrastructure allowed major apps to abstract (or remove) transaction fees entirely.
These developments paved the way for global adoption:
→ Ethereum’s $99B+ DeFi TVL is over 9x the next-largest L1 ecosystem (per @DefiLlama), the strongest platform for global liquidity.
→ A new wave of neobanks were accelerated by growing regulatory clarity, launching cards, reward programs, and reaching millions in daily spend volume.
→ @RobinhoodApp_EU, @Gemini, and @krakenfx all rolled out stock tokens on Ethereum rails this year (L1 + L2s), bringing extended-hours access to U.S. equities. Robinhood also announced it’s building its own L2 network on @arbitrum's Orbit tech stack.
→ Over $18.8 trillion in stablecoin volume settled on Ethereum in 2025 (per @RWA_xyz), solidifying the role of stablecoins as global digital dollars.
Smart wallets moved into production after the Pectra upgrade in May, improving security and making money programmable all the way to the account-based level. Prediction markets became a mainstream source of truth for macro events, moving $20B volume on L1 + L2s this year (per @tokenterminal).
From per-API-call micropayments to stablecoins improving remittances around the globe, Ethereum is the base layer for a new generation of digital financial infrastructure.
2/ Institutional adoption of Ethereum accelerated, driven by projects with clear utility.
The rise of ETH digital asset treasuries (DATs) brought an explosion of public companies actively managing balance sheets onchain, with $35B+ of ETH held by ETFs and strategic reserves (per @SERdotxyz). Leading institutions began using smart contracts to program their capital, diversifying yield strategies via DeFi allocation and distributing over $12B of real-world assets on Ethereum (per @RWA_xyz). The world’s largest banks, asset issuers, and payment processors are now using Ethereum L2s for verifiable settlement, composable scale, and programmable, 24/7 products.
3/ Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap was validated in 2025 by a rapidly-scaling L2 landscape and significant technical unlocks.
→ The ecosystem expanded as @Celo transitioned to become an Ethereum L2, while others like @Ronin_Network & @nillion announced plans to begin the process.
→ Transactions per second on all Ethereum rollups reached a combined 5600 TPS average for the first time.
→ December’s Fusaka upgrade introduced PeerDAS, driving L2 costs down by ramping up to 8x blob capacity.
→ L1 gas limit raised to 60M, expanding L1 settlement capacity by ~33% and setting the stage for further L2 expansion in 2026.
L2s have become leading execution layers for high-frequency economic activity, while upgrades to enhance their throughput have preserved L1 security and decentralization.
4/ Interoperability between Ethereum L1 and L2s also advanced in 2025, moving closer to a seamless, unified Ethereum.
Standards like ERC-7683 standardized order and settlement interfaces, enabling seamless cross-chain execution. The Open Intents Framework (OIF), announced by 30+ teams in February, delivered more secure, cheaper, and faster settlement of user interactions across chains. The Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL) launched on testnet in November, paving the way for unified rollups via trustless single-signature cross-chain transactions.
Seamless, secure, and permissionless experiences across the Ethereum ecosystem empowered individuals and institutions alike.
5/ Privacy became a core focus for the Ethereum ecosystem, driven by project growth and L2 development.
Privacy pools continued to build traction, with privacy protocols on Ethereum reaching new all-time highs for value locked, growing by over 60% in 2025 (per @DefiLlama). The privacy-preserving rollup landscape matured, bringing private execution to Ethereum-based settlement. At the end of 2025, there are 750+ projects in the web3 privacy ecosystem as mapped by @web3privacy, with initiatives impacting DeFi, wallets, apps, storage, and more.
From fully onchain identity solutions to a global ecosystem of privacy advocates, Ethereum continues to advance sovereignty and trustlessness across the tech stack.
6/ 2025 was the year AI agents became economic actors.
Agents don't have bank accounts or passports: they have Ethereum wallets and cryptographic proofs.
The x402 internet-native payment standard + attestation flows on Ethereum now allow agent-to-agent commerce for services, compute, and data, without human intervention. New smart account permissions enforced spending limits and permissions for agents at the wallet level, adding guardrails for trustless agents to manage real capital. And ERC-8004, which is now being finalized and deployed in production, emerged as a standard for trustless agent discovery, reputation, and validation, with 7,500+ agents already registered on testnets (per https://t.co/O9hrqXGe6w).
Ethereum is becoming the settlement layer powering the machine economy.
7/ Ethereum became a critical platform for global coordination, powered by sovereign digital identity.
Onchain finance fueled real-world action, from crypto donations supporting the Myanmar/Thailand earthquake relief to the World Food Program US launching support for ETH donations. Pop-up cities like ETH Enugu in Nigeria were funded, governed, and operated using Ethereum infrastructure, demonstrating real-world, decentralized coordination.
The Kingdom of Bhutan migrated its National Digital Identity system to Ethereum, anchoring 200K+ citizen IDs on a public blockchain for enhanced security and self-sovereignty. Proof-of-personhood tools matured, pushing forward the feasibility of sybil-resistant voting and funding at scale.
8/ Consumer apps, onchain social, and gaming on Ethereum attracted millions of users in 2025.
Decentralized applications on L1 reached a total of over 244M unique active wallets this year (per @DappRadar). Ethereum L1 led in NFT volume and royalties across 2025 (per https://t.co/ltRqn1xYy5), while millions of unique collections launched across Ethereum and L2 networks. "White Rabbit," the anime crowdfunded via Ethereum-based NFTs, won the 2025 Emmy for Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media Programming—a first for community-driven Hollywood production.
Ethereum provided the coordination layer for hundreds of thousands of participants across decentralized organizations (DAOs) spanning stablecoins, lending, staking, decentralized exchanges, art, infrastructure, social impact, and more. Increasingly sophisticated governance tooling and tokenomics structures helped DAOs manage billions in treasury assets and evolve ownership, while growing adoption of new DAO-friendly regulatory structures helped them scale impact.
Ethereum continues weaving into everyday culture, showing up in mainstream moments and enabling coordination across creators, communities, and builders.
9/ zkVMs saw significant advancements in 2025, changing how the network can continue to expand throughput and strengthen decentralization.
A boom in ZK-coprocessors allowed apps to offload complex compute offchain. The @eth_proofs community achieved live, real-time ZK proving of Ethereum blocks, demonstrating the potential for full ZK light clients to run on low-powered devices like smartphones.
Across the ecosystem, teams are advancing research into how verifiable, real-time proving can supercharge scaling and solidify Ethereum as global trust infrastructure.
10/ Ethereum shipped two major upgrades in 7 months, boosting transaction throughput, creating higher data availability for L2s, and ensuring resilient growth.
The Pectra and Fusaka upgrades made wallets smarter and more accessible for retail and institutional users, expanding account abstraction and making mobile-native app experiences possible without complex middleware. As we move into 2026, Fusaka’s improvements set the stage for Ethereum’s consumer apps to become phone-native, human-friendly, and ready for mass adoption.
Ethereum can improve at a rapid pace while preserving decentralization and resilience.
11/ 2025 showcased Ethereum’s vibrant global ecosystem.
@ETHGlobal hosted 7+ hackathons and 140+ events, from New Delhi to New York, Prague to Taipei. Hundreds of community-led Ethereum events and hackathons like @EthCC, @EthereumDenver, @ETHIndiaco, @EthSafari, @ethlatam, @Ethereum_JP, and many more happened across the world.
14k+ people from 130+ countries attended @EFDevcon in Buenos Aires, collaborating at over 500 community-led events and the first Ethereum World’s Fair. Beginning in April, Destino Devconnect supported over 100 events across 14 LATAM countries. @EFetheverywhere launched permanent Ethereum community hubs in Lagos, London, Berlin, and Dubai, creating space for coworking, meetups, workshops, and more.
Ethereum is more than a global network: it’s a global ecosystem of people from across backgrounds, disciplines, and communities.
12/ Ethereum celebrated 10 years live in July.
The anniversary prompted celebrations across the globe and ushered in a renewed focus on growth and resilience.
After 10 years, Ethereum:
→ Has over 88M total smart contracts deployed
→ Saw daily transactions onchain reach a new all-time high of 1.74M
→ Has the largest developer community of any blockchain, with 32K active developers fueling innovation in the ecosystem, and over 16K new developers welcomed between January and September alone
—
With 10 years of uninterrupted liveness, Ethereum represents trust that is earned over time. Ethereum is infrastructure that has persisted through market cycles and global stress to set the standard for resilience.
Ethereum is no longer just emerging technology. It is becoming the scaffolding of our digital civilization.
Here’s to welcoming in a new year for the Ethereum ecosystem.
empty streets, neon reflections, portfolio green. there's something about walking alone at 2am that makes you realize wealth isn't the point, it's the quiet permission to just exist without checking the time
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
A lot of the quality altcoins are sitting at a generational bottom.
This is exactly what happened with AI and memory stocks a few years ago.
And look at them today.
NVIDIA went up 20x in the last 3.5 years.
AMD pulled a 10x since the 2022 bottom.
Micron has pumped 20x since last year, while SanDisk has rallied almost 85x.
I think this is exactly what's going to happen with crypto projects that are focused on trending narratives like RWA and stablecoins.
Projects like $LINK , $HYPE and $SOL that are consistently leading in tokenized equities and payment rails while creating value will be the biggest winners.
A lot of large cap alts sitting on $30B or $50B MCap are going to be $500 Billion companies in the coming years.