The crypto space never sleeps — BTC moving, DeFi shifting, Web3 evolving… all before your morning coffee ☕ How do people even keep up anymore? #crypto
Thoughts?
late night city walks just hit different when your portfolio is green… like why does the skyline look more beautiful when you're up on your positions? just me?
Bitcoin bear markets make fools of both bulls and bears.
BTC rallied from $80k to $98k from November 2025 to January 2026.
People were calling for the supercycle and alt season.
Then BTC set new cycle lows in February 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.
BTC rallied from $60k to $82k from February 2026 to May 2026, and the bears were relentlessly mocked and ridiculed again.
Then BTC set new cycle lows in June 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.
The cycle keeps playing out.
It makes the bulls look like fools because the market trends up for so long, only to wipe out all of the gains in a very short period.
It makes the bears look like fools because the market spends a lot of time trending up, before breaking down quickly. So the bear thesis will often look wrong, even when its right.
Do not let emotions rule your investment decisions. Have a plan and stick to it.
Crypto never sleeps 😅 Another wild day of price swings, DeFi drama, and Web3 noise. Yeah it's chaotic, but honestly? The fundamentals keep getting stronger under all this madness.
Bullish long term, nervous short term. Anyone else? #crypto
In these five years, the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity, in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals:
1. Deliver on an aggressive roadmap that ensures Ethereum's status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness, sustainability and decentralization.
2. Ensures the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term, and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as users' ability to access and use the chain with self-sovereignty, security and privacy.
To this end, my own share of the austerity is that I am personally taking on responsibilities that might in another time have been "special projects" of the EF. Specifically, we are seeking the existence of an open-source, secure and verifiable full stack of software and hardware that can protect both our personal lives and our public environments ( see https://t.co/GzgBS9sh87 ). This includes applications such as finance, communication and governance, blockchains, operating systems, secure hardware, biotech (including both personal and public health), and more. If you have seen the Vensa announcement (seeking to make open silicon a commercially viable reality at least for security-critical applications), the https://t.co/cuyU9Chs1y including recent versions with built in ZK + FHE + differential-privacy features, the air quality work, my donations to encrypted messaging apps, my own enthusiasm and use for privacy-preserving, walkaway-test-friendly and local-first software (including operating systems), then you know the general spirit of what I am planning to support.
For this reason I have just withdrawn 16,384 ETH, which will be deployed toward these goals over the next few years. I am also exploring secure decentralized staking options that will allow even more capital from staking rewards to be put toward these goals in the long term.
Ethereum itself is an indispensable part of the "full-stack openness and verifiability" vision. The Ethereum Foundation will continue with a steadfast focus on developing Ethereum, with that goal in mind. "Ethereum everywhere" is nice, but the primary priority is "Ethereum for people who need it". Not corposlop, but self-sovereignty, and the baseline infrastructure that enables cooperation without domination.
In a world where many people's default mindset is that we need to race to become a big strong bully, because otherwise the existing big strong bullies will eat you first, this is the needed alternative. It will involve much more than technology to succeed, but the technical layer is something which is in our control to make happen. The tools to ensure your, and your community's, autonomy and safety, as a basic right that belongs to everyone. Open not in a bullshit "open means everyone has the right to buy it from us and use our API for $200/month" way, but actually open, and secure and verifiable so that you know that your technology is working for you.
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.
Ventuals shutting down their AI stock perps on Hyperliquid and moving to a diff project... honestly didn't see this one coming so soon. Curious where they're headed next tbh 👀 #Hyperliquid
Anyone know what they're building now?
2am, can't sleep, eyes glued to charts like they're gonna tell me something different than they did at midnight 😅 brain won't shut off. either this pays off someday or I need therapy. probably both.
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.
Crypto never sleeps and neither do I 😅 Market's doing its thing again — staying cautious but honestly? The setups forming right now are hard to ignore. Been wrong before tho. #crypto
Who else is watching closely?
ETH in 2021: $1,700
ETH in 2022: $1,700
ETH in 2023: $1,700
ETH in 2024: $1,700
ETH in 2025: $1,700
ETH in 2026: $1,700
ETH before BitMine buying: $1,700
ETH after BitMine buying: $1,700
ETH before ETF approval: $1,700
ETH after ETF approval: $1,700
ETH during anti-crypto President: $1,700
ETH during pro-crypto President: $1,700
ETH before US-Iran war: $1,700
ETH after US-Iran war: $1,700
Performance of $ETH is an absolute joke.