Ary Arsa

claymore today. 0.8 wall.

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

My 90 year old grandma made 10x with her random stock market portfolio while I'm down -90% on my well-researched Altcoins.

This is the worst time to be a crypto investor.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I really appreciate both @sandeepnailwal's personal contributions and @0xPolygon's immensely valuable role in the ethereum ecosystem.

To recap:

* Polygon hosts @Polymarket, which is probably the single most successful example of a "not just boring finance" app that has actually been successful and provided value.
* Polygon has also hosted plenty of other applications that have needed high levels of scalability.
* Polygon put a lot of resources into ZK-EVM proving early on, both by bringing in Jordi Baylina's team and through other efforts, and greatly helped in moving the space forward.
* Polygon has built infrastructure for proof aggregation (AggLayer) and many other things

And also:

* Sandeep put a lot of his personal effort into @CryptoRelief_, which has made large contributions to biomedical infrastructure and research inside India.
* He voluntarily returned $190M of proceeds from the SHIB tokens that I donated to me, which has made the whole Balvi open source anti-airborne-disease biotech program possible, and possibly accelerated our understanding of important anti-pandemic topics like clean indoor air by years. @cz_binance also recently donated $10M in BNB to me to help continue the program, and I've recently added ~$20M of my own funds (no, not from selling ETH 😛)

Big appreciation to both for this. Most whales passively think that things like this are cool, but are not willing to get off their butts and personally contribute, unless it's in the form of a company that keeps everything proprietary to become yet another vehicle for personal profit. @sandeepnailwal (and CZ) are special here.

On the ZK issue (after all, you do need a proof system to get the full security guarantees that L2s are meant to provide), I can see Polygon's difficult bind: they supported Jordi's team putting their heart and souls into the tech at a time when that tech was still too early for production, and so they contributed to the early and most difficult part of the learning curve, but at that part of the learning curve it was difficult for them themselves to directly benefit from the fruits of their labor.

Since then, the market structure has split into L2 teams and ZK teams (eg. @SuccinctLabs, @RiscZero, more recently @brevis_zk, many others) being separate entities, which I think makes more sense than the previous approach of every L2 doing (OP or ZK) proof systems in-house: it's very difficult to be both the best L2 and the best ZK team, the two are very different skill sets.

Personally, I hope that at some point soon @0xPolygon can just pick up off the shelf ZK tech that has now gotten quite good and apply it to the PoS chain to get full stage 1 and later stage 2 guarantees from the ethereum L1. Many don't realize just how much ZK tech has improved; proving costs are around $0.0001/tx, and many L2s I talk to are very surprised when I tell them the recent numbers, they're still stuck in the mindset that ZK is maybe ok for ethereum L1-scale chains but unviable for anything hyperscale. The latest ZK-EVMs, and live projects like @Lighter_xyz, show that this is false.

[Ted @TedPillows]

Are you still bullish on $ETH long term?

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

anyone else find it way harder to sleep when you're up than when you're down?

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

3am walk, city's dead quiet, portfolio's green for once. half expecting it to all unwind by morning but for now im just gonna enjoy the breeze and pretend i called it

[mert @mert]

if turks beat americans, I full stack swap my SOL into AVAX

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year.

Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world.

Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.

Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list):

* The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals.
* PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer
* Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate.
* Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds.
* EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale.

These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play.

In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin.

The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.
https://t.co/iZiOonRYzR

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Ethereum Foundation fires 20% of its staff.

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

There will be years when nothing works out

Then there will be a random month that will change your entire life.

Never stop believing in crypto.

4 weeks of a bull run can erase the pain of a 4-year bear market.

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

3am walk, city lights, portfolio green. nothing hits quite like this

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Man Utd 3-2: Nottingham Forest: Bruno Fernandes Mencetak Assist ke-20 di Liga Premier https://t.co/78y6khrws3

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Aston Villa 4-2 Liverpool: Ollie Watkins Mencetak Dua Gol Kemenangan https://t.co/rlTQkAoh56

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

@xendless_s Wah parah tuh, Jadi Satpam aja kelakuannya barbar

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Crystal Palace 0-3 Man City: Erling Haaland dan Phil Foden Mencetak Gol Kemenangan
https://t.co/4A8gp9hdxt

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Chelsea 3-0 Wolverhampton: The Blues Naik ke Peringkat Kedua Liga Primer https://t.co/wbtDT84wcw

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Manchester Ubited 4-2 Brighton: Matheus Cunha Mencetak Gol Pertamanya https://t.co/biRaYpJsGO

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Brentford 3-2 Liverpool: The Reds Menderita Kekalahan Keempat di Liga Primer https://t.co/mjFqydQHOg

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

West Ham 1-2 Crystal Palace: Kekalahan Irons di Kandang Terus Berlanjut https://t.co/DHksARlsjU

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Man City 3-0 Man Utd: Erling Haaland Cetak Dua Gol Setelah Gol Pembuka Phil Foden https://t.co/gPVtlU3VUk

[Ary Arsa @arming_sword]

Burnley 0-1 Liverpool: Penalti Mohamed Salah Bawa Kemenangan The Reds https://t.co/MmVkngDl5Y