Breaker

⚗️ Scientist, 💻 crypto enthusiast, 🪼 love nature

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

@l2beat @KelpDAO @LayerZero_Core @chainlink @ChainLinkGod
@SergeyNazarov
any thoughts?

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

@BitcoinMagazine Banks hate the competition. Banks like JPMorgan benefit from the current system and want new entrants to face the same costs. Users love the higher yields. Classic incumbent vs innovation fight

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

@Megatron_ron it's classic transactional geopolitics. Hit Iran hard, then offer Gulf-funded reconstruction tied to nuclear limits, Hormuz access & less terrorism. Leverage through money beats endless war. Smart if enforceable. Naive if weak oversight. Not 4D chess, just realism

[Wu Blockchain @WuBlockchain]

Vitalik Buterin: The crypto ecosystem must not go down the path of OpenAI（ARCHIVE FOOTAGE ）

On July 3, 2025, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in an EthCC speech video that the crypto industry must not repeat the mistakes of OpenAI, which first gave up openness for safety, and then sacrificed safety for rapid growth.

He believes that many projects in Web1, Web2, and the crypto space eventually move towards corporatization because they become driven by financial incentives and social connections once they form entities. Vitalik Buterin stated that the ecosystem should establish more diverse funding and reward models, ensuring that core principles like open source, privacy, and censorship resistance are strictly taken into account alongside commercial success.

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

Main signal from Vitalik's recent post: EF to reduce its ETH sales. Combined with his disclosure that 90% of his net worth is in ETH, the market is looking at a tightening supply and a deeply committed founder—an angle the broader market is currently distracted from.

[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.

[Chainlink @chainlink]

The Chainlink data standard:

Now available to millions of AWS developers ⚒️

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

@LinkBoi777 @chainlink On a $100 transaction:

Visa / Mastercard merchant cost: usually ~$1–$3
CCIP historical blended average from your figures: ~$0.0103
CCIP official percentage route (Lock & Unlock): ~$0.045–$0.05 + blockchain fee
CCIP official flat-fee routes: $0.225–$1.50 + blockchain fee.

[Josh Kale @JoshKale]

Andrej Karpathy just dropped a project scoring every job in America on how likely an AI will replace it from 0-10

> Scraped all 342 occupations from the Bureau of Labor
> Fed each one to an LLM with a detailed scoring rubric
> Built an interactive treemap where rectangle size = number of jobs and color = how exposed that job is to AI

The key signal in his scoring: if the work product is fundamentally digital and the job can be done entirely from a home office, exposure is inherently high.

The scale:
0-1: Roofers, janitors
4-5: Nurses, retail, physicians
8-9: Software devs, paralegals, data analysts
10: Medical transcriptionists

Average across all 342 occupations: 5.3/10.

The entire pipeline is open source. BLS scraping, LLM scoring, the visualization. All of it. Much respect for the sensei this is scary and awesome

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

@naval What if I don't believe in the man-made notion of countries?

[CME Group @CMEGroup]

Cardano, Chainlink and Stellar futures are now available to trade.

Expand your trading strategy with the capital efficiency and flexibility of these new contracts, available in both larger and micro sizes.

Start trading today. ➡️https://t.co/CMksnUfZpo

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

🇺🇸 LATEST: Bitwise Chainlink ETF is approved for listing and registration on NYSE Arca, with trading beginning tomorrow.

[Naval @naval]

The three forms of capital are knowledge, reputation, and capital.

[Joseph Chalom @joechalom]

If you believe Ethereum will be the settlement layer of global finance, now is the time to accumulate as much $ETH as possible

[Alex Mason 👁△ @AlexMasonCrypto]

Iranians can mine one Bitcoin for $1.3k and sell it for $107k (~82x).

[S&P Global @SPGlobal]

S&P Global is excited to announce a collaboration between S&P Global Ratings, the world’s leading provider of #CreditRatings, benchmarks and analytics, and Chainlink Labs, the industry-standard oracle platform bringing the capital markets on-chain, to deliver S&P Global Ratings’ Stablecoin Stability Assessments (SSAs) on-chain via DataLink—an institutional-grade data publishing service powered by the Chainlink data standard.

This initiative makes S&P Global Ratings' deep, independent stablecoin risk analysis directly accessible within decentralized finance (#DeFi) protocols and smart contracts for the first time. 

See the full press release here: https://t.co/XQnFbxEgjI

[Breaker @ZeCrypto]

@hmalviya9 This reminds me of the Japanese movie Perfect Days, give it a watch, you will understand more the meaning of a peaceful life, simplicity and daily tranquility: https://t.co/qrOShNHhFG

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Grayscale receives approval to enable staking for its spot Ethereum ETPs.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Visa, Stripe, and Fold partner to launch Bitcoin credit card.

[Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani]

.@naval: “The opportunities have never been more equal than now.

@elonmusk and @JeffBezos have the same iPhone you do. They don’t have some better version of an iPhone.

They’re eating food that might be marginally better than yours, but it’s basically the same.

You might even have a better diet than them. You probably have more time to go to the gym than them.

They’re not immortal, and they’re not going to be—most likely, not at this time scale.

So you have more youth than them. You have a lot of advantages over them.

The wealth gaps are actually much smaller than people think.

A lot of that is due to mass production, which comes from specialization, labor, and capitalism.

But it’s very easy to overlook that and agitate—because that gets you higher in the status hierarchy with other monkeys.

It makes you look like you’re fighting for noble causes and gives you status, which is really what people are craving these days.

They’re craving status, not money or wealth.

And status is a zero-sum game.

So it’s kind of an evil game to play because there have to be losers for every winner.

And the only way to win is by crushing somebody else down.”

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Amazing to see so many major L2s now at stage 1.

The next goal we should shoot for is, in my view, fast (<1h) withdrawal times, enabled by validity (aka ZK) proof systems.

I consider this even more important than stage 2.

Fast withdrawal times are important because waiting a week to withdraw is simply far too long for people, and even for intent-based bridging (eg. ERC-7683), the cost of capital becomes too high if the liquidity provider has to wait a week. This creates large incentives to instead use solutions with unacceptable trust assumptions (eg. multisigs/MPC) that undermine the whole point of having L2s instead of fully independent L1s.

If we can reduce native withdrawal times to under 1h short term, and 12s medium term, then we can further cement the Ethereum L1 as the default place to issue assets, and the economic center of the Ethereum ecosystem.

To do this, we need to move away from optimistic proof systems, which inherently require waiting multiple days to withdraw.

Historically, ZK proof tech has been immature and expensive, which made optimistic proofs the smart and safe choice. But recently, this is changing rapidly. https://t.co/MRqAcqiGre is an excellent place to track the progress of ZK-EVM proofs, which have been improving rapidly. Formal verification on ZK proofs is also advancing.

Earlier this year, I proposed a 2-of-3 ZK + OP + TEE proof system strategy that threads the needle between security, speed and maturity:

https://t.co/Z5N81HiiNi

* 2 of 3 systems (ZK, OP) are trustless, so no single actor (incl TEE manufacturer or side channel attacker) can break the proof system by violating a trust assumption
* 2 of 3 systems (ZK, TEE) are instant, so you get fast withdrawals in the normal case
* 2 of 3 systems (TEE, OP) have been in production in various contexts for years

This is one approach; perhaps people will opt to instead do ZK + ZK + OP tiebreak, or ZK + ZK + security council tiebreak. I have no strong opinions here, I care about the underlying goal, which is to be fast (in the normal case) and secure.

With such proof systems, the only remaining bottleneck to fast settlement becomes the gas cost of submitting proofs onchain. This is why short term I say once per hour: if you try to submit a 500k+ gas ZK proof (or a 5m gas STARK) much more often, it adds a high additional cost.

In the longer term, we can solve this with aggregation: N proofs from N rollups (plus txs from privacy-protocol users) can be replaced by a single proof that proves the validity of the N proofs. This becomes economical to submit once per slot, enabling the endgame: near-instant native cross-L2 asset movement through the L1.

Let's work together to make this happen.