praneeth_s 🦇🔊

Investing @etherealvc. Did venture investing ⟠ @Consensys and bits and bytes @microsoft 🦇🔊

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

There is a free lunch now; AI-images are breaking refund & dispute systems in food delivery.

A short read on synthetic evidence, media provenance, and how to reframe trust: https://t.co/JNsaUFbSPP

Curious how teams at @DoorDash @Instacart @zomato are thinking about this!

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

This was a fun fun conversation - thanks @rkbaggs and @Cointelegraph! Looking forward to more conversations with good people grappling with the problems of building new categories and new markets on internet-scale rails and backing them at @etherealvc

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

Where is the smart money going? [ft. Ethereal Ventures] #CHAINREACTION https://t.co/Lvt5IUfiK5

[Ethereal Ventures @etherealvc]

Every quarter, we step back to stress-test our conviction against what's actually measurable onchain.

Here's our data report on the digital asset landscape from earlier this year, and where we think founders should be building:

https://t.co/1asVNHh0aG

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

It was a pretty magical experience using @ZKPassport during the @aztecprotocol TGE - now I'm really excited to relive this across the universe of applications powered by Aztec privacy!

[Aztec Labs @AztecLabs_]

Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the team behind @ZKPassport.

The Obsidion team will continue to develop ZKPassport while also leading new consumer product developments.

The ZKPassport protocol will remain open source.

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@OndoFinance @hasufl Really sorry to hear this- hope he rests in peace

[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.

[Ethereal Ventures @etherealvc]

April was an important stress test for how we think about security in DeFi.

We believe DeFi’s application layer has matured faster than its control plane, and share our perspectives and recommendations on the topic here:

https://t.co/ZuTLBqlNGG

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

The @fere_ai team has been cooking for a while and bringing out some incredible products and harnesses for agentic trading. Glad to see them trending on @ProductHunt at the top of the table! Do give their product a spin and see how smooth it is.

[Fere AI♠️ @fere_ai]

Still #1 on Product Hunt with hours to go.

We're grateful for everyone who voted and left a review.

This final stretch matters the most. If you've used Fere, traded with it, loved it or even broken it, now's the time to let us know ↓

https://t.co/JX7V2lkcqV

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

Looking forward to speaking with and investing in founders working on these categories! Do reach out to us @etherealvc

[Ethereal Ventures @etherealvc]

We're happy to present our 2026 outlook.

This year is already taking shape, and the opportunity space for founders is even wider than anticipated.

If you're building in any of these areas, we would love to talk to you.

https://t.co/x3kKdUpvdz

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@Melt_Dem Likely not just an exchange, but something more - better tooling, capacity for physical settlement, governance, data (for processes, workflows, benchmarks) - and most importantly, some specific exposure that is painful, narrow enough to hedge and in the growth tailwinds.

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

Thanks for having me on @RealMissAI! It's rare to find someone taking the time to delve deep and bring up relevant topics to speak about - and this conversation has uncovered some pertinent thoughts, making it truly enjoyable.

[Keira | MH Ventures @RealMissAI]

"Choose the deepest learning curve you can find, do it with people you trust, and always leave a little room for serendipity."

I sat down with @bees_neeth, co-founder and Technical Investment Partner at @etherealvc, a $150 million fund born out of the ConsenSys ecosystem.

Praneeth went from writing code at Microsoft to co-founding one of the most respected Web3 funds in the world.

We talked about what it actually takes to build a category-defining company, how he identifies great founders before the rest of the market catches on, and where he thinks the next wave of Web3 innovation is coming from.

One of my favourite conversations on @dealflowpodcast so far. Thank you for your time and all the insights, Praneeth.

[Min Teo @_MinTeo]

Building @etherealvc with this dream team (@ethereumJoseph @sean_sacha @bees_neeth @obstropolos @christian_stlou @GNSPS) and our community of exceptional founders has been the biggest privilege of my life. We're doubling down on crypto and the evolution of money and value onto blockchains, during the most exciting transition of the internet.

h/t to @jeffjohnroberts for the feature and happy star wars day!

[Ethereal Ventures @etherealvc]

Ethereal Ventures was featured today in Fortune. Read to learn more about our seed and early-stage focus and what’s made us successful under our team and leadership:

https://t.co/R2YWg6aYWi

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@ryanconnor Check out @nunchi

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@danfinlay @josephdelong Thank you for all of your incredible work and thinking Dan! Enjoy your time with family

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@kellyjgreer That extent depends on denoising step efficiency and architectural details for diffusion; still somewhat memory-bound. I'd almost say that the JEPA family represents the cleanest break from token-by-token and could support the intuition of moving from memory-constraints to flops

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@krate27 @etherealvc has been deploying actively.

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@_Dave__White_ @toly @paradigm @matthuang @alanapalmedo @danrobinson @FEhrsam Many congrats Dave- and all the very best for what's ahead:)

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@kankanivishal @multicoin @tushar_jain Many congrats Vishal! All the very best for what's ahead :)

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@shiraeis Mind sharing a few papers/studies to get started on this? Want to try to figure out my own objective function in the interim, but I'm more so curious about the impact of speech/music cutting through a general sea of background noise

[praneeth_s 🦇🔊 @bees_neeth]

@reka_eth Would like to join if possible!