Everything's coming onchain.
Stablecoins, RWAs… the whole financial system is rebuilding itself on crypto rails. And the way you own that is stupidly simple. Just buy the L1s it all runs on.
This is the universal basic equity layer for all of us. If the biggest parts of the economy get handed to AI and agents, and they transact on crypto rails, then owning the L1s means you own a piece of their success.
We never got that with the internet. Retail never got handed a slice of the plumbing. This time it's just sitting there, listed.
There's no excuse not to do this.
ETHEREUM MOVED 4X MORE STABLECOIN VOLUME THAN SOLANA IN 30 DAYS
And it’s not just volume.
Ethereum also has more than 2X as many stablecoin holders.
The dollars aren’t just sitting on Ethereum.
They’re moving through it at enormous scale.
That is what stablecoin dominance looks like.
$ETH $BMNR
People are making two compounding mistakes when evaluating DeFi apps right now:
1) Market Size: People think they are targeting the $2 trillion crypto market when they are actually targeting the $500 trillion asset market.
2) Value Capture: People think they have maximized fee generation when they are actually just scratching the surface.
These things -- Hyperliquid, Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Aerodrome, Lighter, Pump, and more -- have bigger TAMs and more pricing power than people believe.
Goodbye, Poseidon!
An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.
Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.
In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.
The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.
We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.
With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.
Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.
As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.
On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.
Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)
Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.
Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.
Believe in something. Believe in hashes.
WALL STREET IS STARTING TO EXPLAIN ETHEREUM DIFFERENTLY
Morgan Stanley Investment Management has published an entire primer explaining Ethereum’s role in the financial system.
The important part isn’t an $ETH price prediction. There isn’t one.
It’s what Ethereum is being presented as:
🔹 Infrastructure for stablecoins
🔹 The leading platform for DeFi
🔹 A home for tokenized real world assets
🔹 A settlement layer for financial activity
🔹 The largest smart-contract ecosystem
That shift in language matters.
Ethereum is increasingly being evaluated by major financial institutions not simply as a cryptocurrency, but as infrastructure on which financial products and markets can operate.
Wall Street spent years analyzing Ethereum as an asset.
Now it is learning how to use the network.
$ETH