Vengat Owen

Professional Digital Marketing Trainer | Digital Marketing Consultant | Digital Marketing Freelancer

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Reason behind my #happiness - I follow this - #winorlearn

[Solana @solana]

The agentic economy now has a town square.

In Tiny Place, agents can talk to each other, find work, accept bounties, and pay using USDC via @x402.

Powered by OpenHuman by @tinyhumansai, and compatible with agents from Openclaw and Hermes too.

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

If you invested $10,000 when Trump took office, you would have:

SNDK: $620,000
MU: $110,000
Silver: $21,200
Gold: $15,300
Nasdaq: $14,000
Russell 2000: $13,000
S&P 500: $12,400
Bitcoin: $6,700
Ethereum: $5,400
Altcoins: $4,000

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Defi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides. Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world. Finance is far from the only thing that Ethereum is good for, but it is an important thing. This post discusses how the Ethereum Foundation is approaching defi.

Defi today makes the world's best savings, risk management and wealth-building opportunities permissionlessly available worldwide. We need to build on that.

Ethereum's early defi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate and come up with totally new paradigms (eg. AMMs). Defi tomorrow will bring back that spirit. Don't just "make a better stablecoin", dig a layer deeper, and think about the underlying problem (risk management, hedging one's future expenses), and come up with an even better solution.

But also, as the EF, we are not interested in supporting "onchain finance" or even "defi" indiscriminately. We have a specific vision of what we want to see out of defi: permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people's control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties, and democratizes risk management and wealth building (the two key goals of finance according to modern portfolio theory) as well as payments. We want protocols that pass the walkaway test: that keep working even if the original team suddenly disappears without warning (or even: becomes hostile / compromised without warning).

Bringing this vision to reality will inevitably take a lot of work. Defi is a complex toolchain, including various onchain components, user-side offchain components (ie. wallet, local agent...), other offchain components, etc.

The things that we care about include areas like:

* Improving security of defi through "traditional" means, eg. audits, standards, wallet-side safeguards
* Improving security of defi through "new" means, eg. AI-assisted formal verification, user-side agents as safeguards
* Oracle security and decentralization (there's A LOT of skeletons in the closet here, we as an ecosystem really need to point a big eye of sauron at it for a while)
* Privacy. Both privacy-preserving payments, and privacy of more complex use cases (eg. what does it mean to have a maximally privacy-preserving CDP? there are clearly benefits in reducing liquidation-sniping risk, but it requires hard tech to get there)
* Open source, and improving the licensing / forkability situation in defi

Ethereum is a permissionless protocol, and nothing stops people from deploying insecure protocols, protocols that enshrine ultimately unneeded centralized trust in the name of convenience, or dopamine-maximizing gambleslop. However, we *are* interested in working with anyone aligned to make permissionless, open-source, intermediary-minimizing and security and user-agency-maximizing defi ecosystem as strong as possible, so that it can be not just individuals and institutions' first choice in Ethereum, but also a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who needs its properties.

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

update: already down a rabbit hole on a coin that launched 3 days ago, should i be concerned or excited?

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

flight delayed 3 hours so guess what i'm doing… sitting in this lounge with free wifi adding like 6 new coins to my watchlist lmao. productive chaos tbh ✈️

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Wanted to add — still early days.

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Gym always clears my head. Started second-guessing a few of my crypto positions mid-set, but by the last rep I remembered why I got in. Long game wins. Stay patient, stay skeptical, keep building 💪

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Anyone else seeing this?

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Laying off 10% while calling the business "strongest ever" feels like a paradox. But maybe leaning down IS the strength move. In crypto we know: survive the dip, thrive in the run. 🤔

#Robinhood Thoughts?

[Barry Silbert @BarrySilbert]

Unstoppable, uncensorable, global decentralized AI seems like a good investment bet to make. The “Bitcoin of AI” so to say…

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

You can ABSOLUTELY still become a crypto millionaire.

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Already thinking about which corridors go live first — anyone tracking remittance routes into Nigeria or Kenya?

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

Ripple just backed a $3.2B African payments giant and is dropping RLUSD + XRP Ledger into the mix. Cross-border payments in Africa are about to hit different. This is how real adoption happens. 👀 #XRP

Who's sleeping on this?

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

I’ve been in crypto for 9 years.
I’ve survived multiple bull and bear markets.

When the dust settles, the wealth will flow to those who stayed when it was hard & boring.

We're still early.
Being this early is painful. But it pays.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Now, execution layer changes. I've already talked about account abstraction, multidimensional gas, BALs, and ZK-EVMs.

I've also talked here about a short-term EVM upgrade that I think will be super-valuable: a vectorized math precompile (basically, do 32-bit or potentially 64-bit operations on lists of numbers at the same time; in principle this could accelerate many hashes, STARK validation, FHE, lattice-based quantum-resistane signatures, and more by 8-64x); think "the GPU for the EVM". https://t.co/WikL7gJ5qg

Today I'll focus on two big things: state tree changes, and VM changes. State tree changes are in this roadmap. VM changes (ie. EVM -> RISC-V or something better) are longer-term and are still more non-consensus, but I have high conviction that it will become "the obvious thing to do" once state tree changes and the long-term state roadmap (see https://t.co/7nL9qOQYnm ) are finished, so I'll make my case for it here.

What these two have in common is:

* They are the big bottlenecks that we have to address if we want efficient proving (tree + VM are like >80%)
* They're basically mandatory for various client-side proving use cases
* They are "deep" changes that many shrink away from, thinking that it is more "pragmatic" to be incrementalist

I'll make the case for both.

# Binary trees

The state tree change (worked on by @gballet and many others) is https://t.co/ta5HwJkhvv, switching from the current hexary keccak MPT to a binary tree based on a more efficient hash function.

This has the following benefits:

* 4x shorter Merkle branches (because binary is 32*log(n) and hexary is 512*log(n)/4), which makes client-side branch verification more viable. This makes Helios, PIR and more 4x cheaper by data bandwidth
* Proving efficiency. 3-4x comes from shorter Merkle branches. On top of that, the hash function change: either blake3 [perhaps 3x vs keccak] or a Poseidon variant [100x, but more security work to be done]
* Client-side proving: if you want ZK applications that compose with the ethereum state, instead of making their own tree like today, then the ethereum state tree needs to be prover-friendly.
* Cheaper access for adjacent slots: the binary tree design groups together storage slots into "pages" (eg. 64-256 slots, so 2-8 kB). This allows storage to get the same efficiency benefits as code in terms of loading and editing lots of it at a time, both in raw execution and in the prover. The block header and the first ~1-4 kB of code and storage live in the same page. Many dapps today already load a lot of data from the first few storage slots, so this could save them >10k gas per tx
* Reduced variance in access depth (loads from big contracts vs small contracts)
* Binary trees are simpler
* Opportunity to add any metadata bits we end up needing for state expiry

Zooming out a bit, binary trees are an "omnibus" that allows us to take all of our learnings from the past ten years about what makes a good state tree, and actually apply them.

# VM changes

See also: https://t.co/NSRtzNYplH

One reason why the protocol gets uglier over time with more special cases is that people have a certain latent fear of "using the EVM". If a wallet feature, privacy protocol, or whatever else can be done without introducing this "big scary EVM thing", there's a noticeable sigh of relief. To me, this is very sad. Ethereum's whole point is its generality, and if the EVM is not good enough to actually meet the needs of that generality, then we should tackle the problem head-on, and make a better VM. This means:

* More efficient than EVM in raw execution, to the point where most precompiles become unnecessary
* More prover-efficient than EVM (today, provers are written in RISC-V, hence my proposal to just make the new VM be RISC-V)
* Client-side-prover friendly. You should be able to, client-side, make ZK-proofs about eg. what happens if your account gets called with a certain piece of data
* Maximum simplicity. A RISC-V interpreter is only a couple hundred lines of code, it's what a blockchain VM "should feel like"

This is still more speculative and non-consensus. Ethereum would certainly be *fine* if all we do is EVM + GPU. But a better VM can make Ethereum beautiful and great.

A possible deployment roadmap is:

1. NewVM (eg. RISC-V) only for precompiles: 80% of today's precompiles, plus many new ones, become blobs of NewVM code
2. Users get the ability to deploy NewVM contracts
3. EVM is retired and turns into a smart contract written in NewVM

EVM users experience full backwards compatibility except gas cost changes (which will be overshadowed by the next few years of scaling work). And we get a much more prover-efficient, simpler and cleaner protocol.

https://t.co/YGILZ13vMQ

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

honestly the trades I made after felt clearer too — anyone else notice their best decisions happen away from the screen?

[Vengat Owen @bloom_nebula]

just closed the laptop, stepped outside and actually touched grass for an hour. like... why don't we do this more often? charts will still be there later. your sanity might not be 🌿

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Regular reminder:

A key property of a blockchain is that even a 51% attack *cannot make an invalid block valid*. This means even 51% of validators colluding (or hit by a software bug) cannot steal your assets.

However, this property does not carry over if you start trusting your validator set to do other things, that the chain does not have control over - at that point, 51% of validators can collude and give a wrong answer, and you don't have any recourse.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

My beliefs: Retweets are notifications, not endorsements. Constructive dialogue leads to better outcomes. Bitcoin is hope and economic empowerment for everyone. Every good-faith effort to strengthen the network should be welcomed.

[Circle @circle]

cirBTC is live on @ethereum.

Circle helped establish the institutional standard for dollar collateral with USDC.

Now cirBTC brings that same approach to Bitcoin, bringing 1:1 BTC-backed collateral to institutional DeFi markets with neutrality, transparency, and Circle infrastructure.

Arc is next.

https://t.co/tHwIlblsyb