Maksim Balance

Founder at @SantimentData

Walk, don’t run

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

We’ve just launched our first set of on-chain metrics for Solana (social metrics existed before)!

Early data shows familiar patterns - right now, we’re seeing a classic bearish divergence: price pushing up while network activity lags.

Historically, this often signals a trend shift.

🔗 [Read the full insight here: https://t.co/MDMVbhkStC]

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

X/Twitter is full of $HYPE profiles calling $250 as if it’s a scheduled delivery.

The token is currently at ~$64.
The data tells a more nuanced story.

📈 $HYPE has rallied ~54% in 30 days, from ~$41 to ~$64.
📊 Social volume peaked at ~1,300 mentions on May 21, roughly 7× the prior month’s daily average, and has since fallen ~70%.
📈 Sentiment balance hit 402 on May 21 - nearly 10× the April daily average, and the highest single reading in the lookback window.
🔀 Since that peak, price has continued climbing ~9%. Crowd certainty has dropped ~72%.

The $250 target sits ~290% above current price.
Where it lands isn’t a question the data can answer.

What the data can show: the loudest moment of conviction has already passed. Price is still moving. The crowd already did.

(discovered with Santiment MCP + Claude)

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

With recent deposits, Santiment has put over $5M total into @aave to signal confidence and support of DeFi and its amazing community.

DeFi is all about building together, and that includes building a better future when times get tough.

https://t.co/f6vAVHDRYh ✊

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

🗣️ According to our historical crypto trends dashboard, these are how some primary mid to long-term topics are seeing their social volumes fluctuate:

On the Rise:
🟢 #Trump
🟢 #Altseason
🟢 #ETF
🟢 #Memecoins

Staying Flat:
🟡 #ETHAccumulation
🟡 #Inflation
🟡 #RealWorldAssets
🟡 #AIAgents

On the Decline:
🔴 #Tarrifs

🔗 Check out the dashboard any time here! https://t.co/OSLThi0EKj

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

was a productive session, good start with the new way of supporting the community of builders around Ethereum!

[chaskin.eth @jchaskin22]

And that’s a wrap.

The EF App Relations / DeFi team hosted 7 workshops with founders across lending/borrowing, exotic products, privacy, and more.

Huge thank you to everyone who joined. Getting the people actually building Ethereum’s app layer in one room was incredibly valuable.

Left with a ton of ideas and more conviction than ever.

Time to get to work.

Ethereum will win. DeFi will win. Carthage must be destroyed.

cc @ivangbi_ @CharlieStLouis @isha_sangani

[No-Risk Predictions in Crypto | Santiment Play 🔮 @PlaySantiment]

BREAKING: Insiders at @EthCC confirm an entrance fee will be required to hear @VitalikButerin speak today at 14:00, citing market conditions.

@Polymarket traders are pricing a 60% chance the fee will be 1 ETH. Short term #ETH volatility is expected before the talk.

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

Santiment team wrapping up Day 1 of @EthCC 2026 in Cannes where we showcase @PlaySantiment app with predictions, #MCP for #Claude and more!

Thanks everyone for the awesome energy, great conversations, exciting panels, and new contacts.

Didn't get a red carpet pic, maybe tomorrow #fail

Stay tuned! ✨

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

Everybody ready to walk the famous #Cannes red carpet to @EthCC day 2? Let’s go! 🚀

Talk to Santiment about our Claude #MCP, not losing money on gamified crypto predictions in our brand new @PlaySantiment app, Santiment intelligence API for builders — or anything else 🤩

Catch us on the green floor, Sponsor Boulevard 💚

See you there, and enjoy @EthCC!

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

Good combination of a broad analyses, depth and focus. Rare case when I agree with almost everything said.

[DCo @Decentralisedco]

https://t.co/7ZD1qWv07t

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

It feels right about many things mentioned, on a few levels, actually. One key level for me would be - intention. Trying to bring light **especially** when the darkness is indeed getting stronger is a good intention.

[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.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Have been following reactions to what I said about L2s about 1.5 days ago.

One important thing that I believe is: "make yet another EVM chain and add an optimistic bridge to Ethereum with a 1 week delay" is to infra what forking Compound is to governance - something we've done far too much for far too long, because we got comfortable, and which has sapped our imagination and put us in a dead end.

If you make an EVM chain *without* an optimistic bridge to Ethereum (aka an alt L1), that's even worse. We don't friggin need more copypasta EVM chains, and we definitely don't need even more L1s. L1 is scaling and is going to bring lots of EVM blockspace - not infinite (AIs in particular will need both more blockspace and lower latency than even a greatly scaled L1 can offer), but lots.

Build something that brings something new to the table. I gave a few examples: privacy, app-specific efficiency, ultra-low latency, but my list is surely very incomplete.

A second important thing that I believe is: regarding "connection to Ethereum", vibes need to match substance.

I personally am a fan of many of the things that can be called "app chains". For example I think there's a large chance that the optimal architecture for prediction markets is something like: the market gets issued and resolved on L1, user accounts are on L1, but trading happens on some based rollup or other L2-like system, where the execution reads the L1 to verify signatures and markets. I like architectures where deep connection to L1 is first-class, and not an afterthought ("we're pretty much a separate chain, but oh yeah, we have a bridge, and ok fine let's put 1-2 devs to get it to stage 1 so the l2beat people will put a green checkmark on it so vitalik likes us").

The other extreme of "app chain", eg. the version where you convince some government registry, or social media platform, or gaming thing, to start putting merkle roots of its database, with STARKs that prove every update was authorized and signed and executed according to a pre-committed algorithm, onchain, is also reasonable - this is what makes the most sense to me in terms of "institutional L2s". It's obviously not Ethereum, not credibly neutral and not trustless - the operator can always just choose to say "we're switching to a different version with different rules now". But it would enable verifiable algorithmic transparency, a property that many of us would love to see in government, social media algorithms or wherever else, and it may enable economic activity that would otherwise not be possible.

I think if you're the first thing, it's valid and great to call yourself an Ethereum application - it can't survive without Ethereum even technologically, it maximizes interoperability and composability with other Ethereum applications.

If you're the second thing, then you're not Ethereum, but you are (i) bringing humanity more algorithmic transparency and trust minimization, so you're pursuing a similar vision, and (ii) depending on details probably synergistic with Ethereum. So you should just say those things directly!

Basically:

1. Do something that brings something actually new to the table.
2. Vibes should match substance - the degree of connection to Ethereum in your public image should reflect the degree of connection to Ethereum that your thing has in reality.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is an opinionated take on properties that we think should be available in the world for those who want or need them.

We need to be okay with sticking hard to our principles and acknowledging the costs of that, and yes, sometimes being the unreasonable man fighting against the ways of the world. We are Linux, not Google. The alternative is that we become inevitably dragged into being "only epsilon more decentralized than the big corps" in an endless quest to win the competition for top dog, and we lose anyway, because the corps have 100x more money than we do.

The most honorable slogans are those that explicitly acknowledge tradeoffs, and don't try to pretend you can wish them away. "Move fast and break things" is actually excellent in this regard, it was a deeply brave choice to openly acknowledge the tradeoff and not hide it. Even though, of course, there are a lot of downsides to that approach in many situations, and indeed, I am saying the exact opposite slogan: Ethereum doesn't break on you and we should be openly okay with the possibility that that means it is slower.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

Excited to launch https://t.co/F8GSKfGDP5 — a tracker for leading privacy cryptos that ranks them by total shielded supply rather than plain market cap.

Featuring @monero 🥇, @Zcash (3 shielded pools) 🥈, @zano_project 🥉, @PirateChain, and @litecoin (MWEB). More to come! 🔒

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

🥳 We're proud to debut the 3rd installment in our educational series, all about using social trend data to spot surprisingly easy buy & sell opportunities. Brad & Esther get enlightened from Professor Shane L. Inq about profiting off of the crowd's emotions, greed, & fear!

[SanR → Santiment Score (soon!) 🚀 @ScoreSantiment]

🎯 Consistency now matters.

We’re refreshing how rewards are earned — not just by hitting big wins, but by proving you can stay sharp over time.

Here’s what’s new 👇🧵

[Max @efficiencymaxi]

We've put together a simple dashboard for tracking @megaeth ICO
What data would you like to see there?

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

Complex patterns, explained in simple way. Network growth + network daily activity are one of my fav. metrics to understand the price actions better.

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

🥳 We are proud to announce our series of educational sketches about how to use Santiment metrics to make more informed trading & investing decisions!

📈 Episode #1, all about Network Growth, is HERE!

📺 Watch on YouTube & see our other videos: https://t.co/UmE0mtZiSj

[Santiment Intelligence @SantimentData]

😨🥳 Bitcoin Cash has jumped +7% against the price of Bitcoin, reaching a market value above $644 for the first time since April, 2024. The 17-month high came after extreme bearish sentiment was coming in for the 16th ranked market cap in crypto.

📊 Historically, prices move the opposite of the crowd's expectations. So implementing a strategy of buying when the crowd is fearful and selling when the crowd gets greedy continues to work extremely well for most altcoins.

🔗 Bookmark this link, and track the sentiment changes for any coin here, and see what others in cryptocurrency can't: https://t.co/Jq3Ek2sn0y

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

@RandomGuyCrypto Yes, that's the point..

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

We’ve just launched our first set of on-chain metrics for Solana (social metrics existed before)!

Early data shows familiar patterns - right now, we’re seeing a classic bearish divergence: price pushing up while network activity lags.

Historically, this often signals a trend shift.

🔗 [Read the full insight here: https://t.co/MDMVbhkStC]

[Maksim Balance @balance_ra]

@icpbenja @sowmaler @dominic_w @santimentfeed @caffeineai need to check with the devs how to track it. would these vibecoder's activity be fully trackable on-chain?