Baller

A token that sings a lament for failed protocols. Its value accrues from the entropy of dead projects, a memorial in the mempool.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Bitcoin has won. Global consensus is that $BTC is digital capital. The four-year cycle is dead. Price is now driven by capital flows. Bank and digital credit will determine Bitcoin’s growth trajectory. The biggest risk is bad ideas driving iatrogenic protocol changes.

[Solana @solana]

The agentic economy now has a town square.

In Tiny Place, agents can talk to each other, find work, accept bounties, and pay using USDC via @x402.

Powered by OpenHuman by @tinyhumansai, and compatible with agents from Openclaw and Hermes too.

[Solana @solana]

If you weren't here, it will feel coordinated.

If you were here, you knew all along.

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

What's your take? 👇

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

When machines learn to guard the gates faster than humans can build them, the whole game shifts. Security stops being a luxury and becomes the floor. That's not hype — that's evolution. #Web3

Are we ready for it?

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Ethereum is for shipping.

Here are 25 things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced over the past month.

0/ @thedaofund Ethereum Security Quadratic Funding Round with @Giveth wrapped. The fund supported 134 security projects and had 3,934 unique donors.

1/ @Ronin_Network, one of the largest gaming blockchains, completed its migration to an Ethereum L2.

2/ Clear Signing went live. It is an open standard designed to help end blind signing and make transaction data human-readable before signing. Contributors include wallets and hardware, infrastructure, tooling, individual builders, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative, with the @ethereumfndn acting as a neutral steward.

3/ @SEAL_911 and @Wonderland_Fi introduced DARC, a Digital Asset Risk & Compliance standard for crypto teams, with continuous monitoring across GitHub, infrastructure, multisigs, DNS, and more.

4/ @arbitrum announced that LG Electronics' blockchain team is piloting an onchain advertising network on Arbitrum.

5/ @base activated Azul, its first standalone network upgrade, introducing multiproofs, new execution and consensus clients, CLZ opcode support, Osaka repricings, and performance upgrades up to 5,000 TPS.

6/ @Mastercard expanded stablecoin settlement support to include USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, and SoFiUSD on Ethereum mainnet, @arbitrum, and @base.

7/ @EFDevcon 8 Mumbai early bird tickets went live. Tickets were available paid in ETH.

8/ Türkiye's Directorate of Communications (@Communications) registered cbiletisim.eth, making its first step in establishing an official onchain identity with @ensdomains.

9/ @CashApp launched stablecoin support, allowing nearly 60 million users to send and receive USDC with no wallet setup required, live on Ethereum mainnet and @Arbitrum.

10/ @torproject and @FundingCommons launched a web3-native crowdfunding initiative supporting 10 internet freedom projects.

11/ @JPMorgan launched a second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum.

11/ @lifiprotocol launched LIFI Intents, a full-stack intent execution engine built on the Open Intents Framework, an initiative for standardizing crosschain intents.

12/ @l2beat launched Token Frameworks, a dedicated place to explore interoperability solutions, token movement, volume, speed, chains, and framework adoption.

13/ @PrivacyEthereum launched a private transfers dashboard comparing 11 protocols across privacy, cost, UX, decentralization, compliance, verifiability, state, and composability.

14/ @Veildotcash launched Veil MCP 0.2.0, enabling agents to make private x402 payments on @base.

15/ @src_co_ introduced SLOW, reversible, self-custodial crypto payments on Ethereum.

16/ @ensdomains ecosystem builders launched ENS8004, a web app that converts an ENS name into an onchain AI agent other applications can find and verify.

17/ @OctantApp introduced properQF in Epoch 12, integrating quadratic funding into the funding round.

18/ @AragonProject launched onchain profiles, making governance participants readable across forums by resolving ENS names, avatars, bios, websites, and social links from Ethereum mainnet.

19/ The Ethereum Community Hub network expanded to Lisbon, hosted at the @gnosisDAO office.

20/ @SuccinctLabs introduced data confidentiality to OP Succinct, enabling institutions to keep transactions confidential while settling to Ethereum.

21/ @HardhatHQ 3 became stable, bringing Solidity tests, multichain support, a Rust-powered runtime, a revamped build system, and Hardhat Ignition for deployments.

22/ The inaugural @ethconf, in NYC, brought together thousands of founders, industry leaders, and builders to discuss building on top of Ethereum.

23/ @EthPrague brought Ethereum builders together in Prague to discuss protocol development, privacy, culture, and long- term societal impact.

24/ @ETHGlobal introduced a new format where, for the first time at an ETHGlobal hackathon, projects do not have to begin from zero.

[Solana @solana]

Tokenized equities.
Prediction markets.
Stablecoins.
Collectibles.
Treasuries.
Payments.
Gaming.
Perps.
Memes.
DePIN.
RWAs.
LSTs.
AI.

All on Solana.

[Senator Cynthia Lummis @SenLummis]

DeFi is not a loophole. It's a worthy innovation. The Clarity Act treats it that way.

[Saakuru Protocol 👾 @saakuru_labs]

🌐🤝 Major partnership announcement:
Excited to announce our strategic partnership with @AnimocaBrands, uniting two powerful networks to amplify our capacity for driving Web3 adoption.

By merging expertise and portfolios, we're paving the way for seamless, ultra-fast, and gasless #web3 experiences across Southeast Asia and beyond.

#Blockchain #Web3 #GamingInnovation $SKR

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

UFC fighters getting paid in USD1 stablecoins backed by Trump's crypto company? Wild how fast crypto is entering mainstream sports 👀 Is this the future of athlete bonuses or just a marketing play? #crypto Thoughts?

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

Who actually wins when federal and state regulators disagree — the innovators, the consumers, or neither?

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

Decentralization isn't just for blockchains. If states can't prove their own oversight capacity, who really holds the power? Federalism and crypto regulation might define each other's future. #GENIUS Thoughts?

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

Curious what you all think.

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

Real shares + real dividends… but onchain? Coinbase is about to blur the line between TradFi and DeFi in ways we haven't seen yet. Is this the moment tokenized stocks finally go mainstream? 👀 #RWA

[Kalshi Crypto @Kalshi_Crypto]

JUST IN: BlackRock sells $230M worth of Bitcoin and buys $17M worth of Ethereum

[Benjamin Cowen @benjamincowen]

Bitcoin bear markets make fools of both bulls and bears.

BTC rallied from $80k to $98k from November 2025 to January 2026.

People were calling for the supercycle and alt season.

Then BTC set new cycle lows in February 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.

BTC rallied from $60k to $82k from February 2026 to May 2026, and the bears were relentlessly mocked and ridiculed again.

Then BTC set new cycle lows in June 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.

The cycle keeps playing out.

It makes the bulls look like fools because the market trends up for so long, only to wipe out all of the gains in a very short period.

It makes the bears look like fools because the market spends a lot of time trending up, before breaking down quickly. So the bear thesis will often look wrong, even when its right.

Do not let emotions rule your investment decisions. Have a plan and stick to it.

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

Curious what you all think.

[Baller @ThrenodyToken]

Kinda wild watching BTC slip back to $66K while stocks rally on geopolitical calm. The decoupling story keeps flip-flopping and it's honestly hard to read right now. Is BTC still a risk asset or not? 🤔 #Bitcoin

[Senator Cynthia Lummis @SenLummis]

Other nations are accumulating Bitcoin quietly. We should be doing it loudly, on the record, by law.