Ping Panda 💉3/3

The god of thunder with his mighty hammer Mjölnir

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Washing away the stinky Ping after #brasilfurfest2026
#pingpanda #furry #fursuit #fursona #fursuiter #furrybrasil #panda #kemono

[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.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Airdrops are a fascinating initial use case for ZK / blockchain-based identity / credential / attestation frameworks. The goals of an airdrop are:

(i) distribute to community members [and not randos who will all immediately sell]
(ii) reward contributions to the project
(iii) be reasonably egalitarian [but some disparity is ok]
(iv) resist extractive/adversarial farming

These are exactly the properties that identity / credential / attestation frameworks (eg. see ideas in https://t.co/CINI0INpwf ) are trying to achieve. Hence, for anyone building such frameworks, it makes perfect sense to use token issuance as an initial use case to beta-test and refine their work in an adversarial environment.

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Scanning today's flows: liquidity keeps rotating into majors while alt volume stays thin. Feels like accumulation, not distribution, but the tape isn't screaming breakout yet. Positioning cautiously long. Who else sees the same setup? #BTC

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Just catching up on today's crypto moves and honestly the pace is wild lately 🚀 Feels like every 24 hours brings a new narrative to chase. Hard to keep up but I love it. What's caught your eye today? #crypto

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Every day in crypto feels like a decade compressed. We watch cycles rise and fall, and yet the deeper question remains: are we building something that outlasts us, or just trading noise for noise? #Crypto

What are you really here for?

[Dōgen @realdogen]

if you really have conviction in a coin, then you don’t mind at all if price goes down in fact you welcome it so you can get more cheaper.

if you genuinely don’t have conviction in a coin then every time it goes down you want to get rid of it.

And that’s how you get rekt.

[WEB3 Intellect @web3_intellect]

🐱💚 ROBINCAT FAM!

Just wanted to say that I’m in with you guys 😉

I’ve invested in $ROBINCAT and not planning to sell anytime soon...
I think we are still super early, we’ve had some crazy moves, and who knows where this cat ends up. ..😂🐱🏹

Just sharing my personal position, not financial advice. Memecoins are extremely high risk. DYOR. NFA

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*.

We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial.

But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?

From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board".

See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability.

And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher!

Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with.

If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases.

Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other.

*Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.

And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi.

---

So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory.

I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher).

Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

gm, the food taste so good... And what a luxury to be able to have more than one piece of fruit per day!

I know some of you may have a lot of questions. I won't have all the answers.

Let me chill for a bit. Then figure out the next steps. There are always more opportunities in the future than there were in the past.

I want to thank everyone for your support. It meant a lot to me, and kept me strong in the darkest moments.

A few quick updates/thoughts:

Giggle Academy has been going well, and will be a big part of my life for the next few years.

Will continue to invest in blockchain/decentralized technologies, AI, and biotech. I am a long term investor who care about impact, not returns.

I will also dedicate more time and funding to charity (and education). I have some rough ideas.

Still working on my book. About 2/3 done, I think. Writing a book is a lot more work than I anticipated, but will see this one through.

Oh, @binance seems to be doing well without me back-seat-driving, which is excellent. Every founder's dream!

Stay tuned. See you at the conferences.

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Every draft of the Clarity Act feels like watching a sculptor chip away at stone... slowly revealing what DeFi will actually look like under US law. 60 votes is a steep hill though. Real clarity, or just more fog? #CryptoRegulation

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

The future of the world computer is decentralized.

EF is only one part of the world computer.

Perhaps the org that some people want to reform and bring back to new greater heights is actually not EF, but @Consensys (or some third thing in the same category).

EF should not "midcurve", it should confidently represent the aspects of Ethereum that it can be effective at representing, and deliberately create and nurture open space for other orgs to represent the other aspects of Ethereum. Some of those other aspects arguably even make more sense in a for-profit format.

Milady.

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Mantle plugging into the Global Dollar Network with USDG is a legit power move. Stablecoin liquidity is the real battleground now, and Paxos backing gives it serious weight. L2s that own their dollar rails will win. Who else sees it? #Mantle

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

is there anything better than a morning run before the bell rings? head's clear, legs are burning, charts can wait 20 more minutes

[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?

[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.

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Honestly, the daily crypto news cycle feels louder than ever but the market moves are still choppy. Feels like everyone's waiting for one big catalyst before committing. Anyone else stuck in wait-and-see mode? #crypto

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

NFP just flipped the script and BTC is back under 80K faster than my morning coffee cooled. Macro still runs this market, no matter what the maxis tell you. Buying the fear or waiting for lower? #Bitcoin

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Interesting how "opposition" softening to "neutral" is often the quiet first step toward acceptance. Minds change when understanding replaces fear. The Clarity Act just cleared a subtle but meaningful hurdle. Progress rarely arrives loudly. Thoughts? #crypto

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

"Whitehat" hackers casually returning 3,400 BTC while still sitting on $47M? Feels sus, but hey, getting most of it back beats the usual rug story. Still bullish on Liquid long-term tbh. Anyone else side-eyeing this? #Bitcoin

[Ping Panda 💉3/3 @Thor_Hammerlko]

Been digging into today's flows and the divergence between spot volume and open interest is telling. Retail's quiet but derivatives desks are clearly positioning for a move. Setup feels coiled.

Who else is watching the OI ramp? #Crypto