$HILO app is live and it looks clean.
Prediction markets don’t have to be about gambling. At their core, they’re information markets. They aggregate opinions, expectations, and real-time sentiment.
When structured properly, they become data engines. They surface probabilities, highlight narrative shifts, and turn crowd conviction into something measurable. That’s powerful.
.@VitalikButerin is slowly going through the thought process we went through to build Hilo. Would be nice if he could see @hilomarket but there’s too much noise in this space. Anyway we’re going live next week. Stay tuned, we passed 5,000 users on the waiting list in a few days.
Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.
Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later)
But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission:
To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.
We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.
These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord.
Ethereum is the rebellion against this.
To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more.
Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will.
Wishing everyone an exciting 2026.
Milady.