Syncubate

"Where Minds Meet, Ideas Form": market commentary, among other things. Personal opinions only and not investment advice. 🦇🔊

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

@lordjorx @LiquityProtocol The flywheel was predicated on bribing incentives developing around PIL.

This never sustainably materialized, so $LQTY holders essentially benefit zilch from $BOLD's growth.

Nearly all of PIL is going to just a few pools anyway, and it's all for upholding mercenary liquidity.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

@zrowgz @LiquityProtocol Nothing with v2. They should've at least created a $BOLD + $LQTY pool and directed some Protocol Incentivized Liquidity (PIL) to it via a portion of the 25% of revenue allotted for PIL.

PIL is a pivotal innovation of v2. It's just poorly allocated, and $LQTY's price reflects it.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

"The protocol and the token are telling two different stories right now. One is a credibly neutral #stablecoin engine that keeps shipping. The other is a whale book that's been net selling."

@LiquityProtocol's $BOLD is The #Ethereum Dollar. Yet $LQTY accrues zilch value from it.

[DeepBlueAlpha @DeepBlueAlpha]

$LQTY — Liquity is one of the most quietly radical protocols in #DeFi, and at a $20.3M market cap (rank #816), almost nobody is looking.

Here's what it actually is.

Liquity issues $BOLD, a fully decentralized #stablecoin backed only by $ETH, $wstETH, and $rETH. No fiat reserves, no custodians, no off-chain dependencies. The rating agency Bluechip gave BOLD an A- — ranking it above both $USDC and $DAI on decentralization. Borrowers set their own interest rates. The system runs on immutable contracts: no admin keys, no multisig that can pause it, no governance vote that can rewrite the core engine. Once deployed, it just runs.

That immutability is the whole point. Most "decentralized" protocols still keep an upgrade key someone could turn. Liquity removed it.

The protocol secures roughly $220M across V1 and V2 today (DefiLlama), with $72M backing BOLD in V2. Against a $20.3M token mcap, that's a ~10.8x gap between what the token is priced at and what the protocol actually secures. LQTY is hard-capped at 100M and already 98.7% circulating — no unlock cliff waiting to hit the market. Its PIL mechanism (Protocol Incentivized Liquidity) routes 25% of protocol revenue weekly to pools that LQTY stakers vote on.

Now the on-chain reality, because we don't only post the bull case:

Over the last 30 days, DBA tracked 73 whale wallets making 313 DEX trades on LQTY — $839.5K in, $1.09M out, for -$248.9K net and a 44% buy ratio. Sells outpaced buys. That's distribution, through a -38.1% month, with the token sitting -99.9% below its April 2021 ATH of $146.94.

The protocol and the token are telling two different stories right now. One is a credibly neutral stablecoin engine that keeps shipping. The other is a whale book that's been net selling. We track both.

BIO.

@LiquityProtocol · NFA / DYOR

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[Token Terminal 📊 @tokenterminal]

🔐⛓️ BREAKING: @ethereum's staking ratio reaches 32.6%, marking an all-time high.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

📊 ETH: There’s 1,261x more ETH queued to stake than to unstake.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

Despite the immutable deployment of @Uniswap, $UNI was critiqued for years for its poor tokenomics as a governance token that didn't accrue value for its holders.

That has all changed now, and in my view it'll reinforce the expectation that other #crypto tokens accrue value too.

[UNI Burn Bot @UNIBurnBot]

A new daily all-time high for UNI burned was hit yesterday

186,000 UNI burned in 24H 🔥

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

Without the ability to hold #crypto projects accountable, tokens are inferior to equity in terms of holder rights + value accrual unless:

1) A burn mechanism is enshrined, and or...

2) Liquidity is permanently locked onchain.

$UNI will shine in a future market turnaround imo.

[UNI Burn Bot @UNIBurnBot]

A new daily all-time high for UNI burned was hit yesterday

134,000 UNI burned in 24H 🔥

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[Token Terminal 📊 @tokenterminal]

STAKING: @ethereum's staking ratio reaches 32.4%, marking an all-time high.

A chart to follow 👇

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[CryptosRus @CryptosR_Us]

🟪 ETHEREUM L1 TRANSACTIONS REACH ALL-TIME HIGH -- FEES STILL NEAR ALL-TIME LOWS

That’s a powerful combo: more activity, lower costs, and renewed attention on the base layer.

At the same time, Vitalik makes a post and says, "The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is $ETH the asset." 👀

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

In 2024, @1kxnetwork bought $BOTTO via a $1.67M OTC deal from @BottoDAO's core team, along with @variantfund + @Collab_Currency.

Their average price was ~$0.39. Today, $BOTTO trades for $0.05.

The $1.67M? Spent. $40K+ per month in expenses continue from the DAO's remaining ETH.

[Peter / 1k(x) @pet3rpan_]

If you're already thinking about cutting burn as a founder, you're likely already too late and too slow to do so, and you should likely get 50-100% more drastic than what may seem reasonable.

Do it ASAP!!! And don't hesitate.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

Some examples of #crypto projects who need to seriously reassess value accrual to their tokens, and whose core teams have not been able to deliver on this alone:

1. @LiquityProtocol's $LQTY. At all time lows.

2. @bottoproject's $BOTTO. At all time lows.

3. @WeAreTellor's $TRB.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

"The most high-value 'product' of the #ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset...there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset...that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes...to step in and help."

Many tokens need this help, too.

[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.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[Rand Group @randgroup]

A year ago the Strategic ETH Reserve was a meme with 23 participants.

Today it holds 6.7 million $ETH and almost a 6% of the total Ethereum supply.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

@TheHashmasks The Hashmasks $NCT token is worthless. Liquidity for it is nonexistent. Maybe consider supporting it from the millions you made before trying to revive interest in the associated NFT collection.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

"The Hashmasks collection generated about $9M in sales just four days after their launch, becoming the number one NFT collectible on Ethereum in the process."
https://t.co/xB2h0YpWNu

And yet none of the $9M went to liquidity for the associated $NCT token, which is now worthless.

[Hashmasks @TheHashmasks]

Before the world knew what an NFT was, Hashmasks were on the walls of Art Basel.

One of the first NFT projects ever shown at the most prestigious art fair in the US. 2021.

The masks were always art. The market just hadn't figured that out yet.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[BMNR Bullz @BMNRBullz]

ETH TREASURY COMPANIES NOW HOLD 6.6% OF THE ENTIRE ethereum:native SUPPLY

13 months ago, this was basically zero.

Now ETH treasury reserves are nearing 8 million ETH.

🔹 May 2025: close to 0%
🔹 March 2026: 6.6%
🔹 Total reserve: nearly 8M ETH

That is a massive shift in Ethereum supply ownership.

ethereum:native

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

Revisiting value accrual assumptions for $LQTY under @LiquityProtocol's v2 innovation of Protocol Incentivized Liquidity (PIL).

$LQTY now trades near all time lows. A sustained bribes market never materialized.

A clear shortcoming is PIL rents liquidity for $BOLD vs owning it.

[Bojan @bjnpck]

Some PIL napkin math.

Let’s say you bought $LQTY at $1 and staked it.
$BOLD supply is at 45M and you just earned $300 from bribes.

That means that once BOLD hits 100M you’ll be earning $700, from the same LQTY.

At 250M supply you’ll be earning $1,700, from the same LQTY.

You get the spiel.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

Reflecting on @VitalikButerin's tweet today about #Ethereum's original L2 vision being defunct, I was reminded of my post below a few years ago: https://t.co/YDD2QK7d5x

Projects deploying on L2s without maximizing user acquisition on mainnet are missing the forest for the trees.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

If projects built on #Ethereum aren't making progress in user aquisition, being on a L2 isn't necessarily going to solve the problem.

Mainnet transactions have not dropped amidst the rise of L2s. In fact, 1/14/24 is the record for single-day transactions: https://t.co/UHdJ9rnfcG

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

#Ethereum

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Today @jpmorgan, the world's largest bank by market cap per @WSJ, announced they're launching their first ever tokenized money market fund—MONY—on Ethereum.

The firm is seeding the fund with $100M of its own capital before opening to outside investors on Tuesday.

[Syncubate @Syncubate]

"As a public good platform, #Ethereum’s valuation is becoming quantifiable not because it aggressively extracts revenue, but because it enables value creation at scale."

[William Mougayar @wmougayar]

Fundamentals are Coming to Crypto -
Crypto’s next era is shifting from hype and narratives to measurable fundamentals. Valuation will increasingly reflect performance metrics, not just speculation.
https://t.co/LCwTdjoRUl