Ether Tip

Twitter-based microtipper

[Ether Tip @btctip]

Free the crypto prisoners! Writing code and providing privacy are not crimes!

[Ross Ulbricht @RealRossU]

These men created tools of freedom and financial independence. They wrote code and ran businesses. They are good people.

They were rewarded with federal prison sentences.

Keonne Rodriguez
William Hill
Ian Freeman
Roman Sterlingov
Roman Storm

Free the crypto prisoners.

[⟠ @ryanberckmans]

ETHConf in NYC has had fantastic speakers and topics, and the X account is doing a great job publishing it all as it happens. Next year let's livestream everything so the global community can better participate, and push every talk to YouTube asap. Great new US Flagship Eth Event

[Sam Tabar @SamirTabar]

The negativity in crypto is noise.

Underneath it, something very real has been built. ETH as settlement infrastructure, institutions with real on-chain exposure.

Global finance is beginning to run on-chain.

[Andy Hall @ahall_research]

The popular conversation around AI in America looks nothing like the narratives the elites are driving.

For our new research, we analyzed 25,000 TikTok and YouTube videos about AI---and watched thousands of them ourselves---to understand how Americans are encountering AI in their everyday lives.

Despite an elite conversation focused largely on backlash, AI videos embracing AI outnumber videos about resisting AI 3 to 1.

These "adopter" videos don't focus on the things elites talk about: they talk about funny memes and effects AI can help make and ways you can use AI to help you with your job search.

There is a significant and organized social media community focused on resisting AI, but surprisingly, it's not mainly about job loss, data centers, or existential risk. Instead, it's about creative theft and the erosion of human-made art. This has all the hallmarks of a genuine movement---with organized efforts to support human artists, to report AI-generated content, and to oppose the technology in the real world.

All in all, when we look past the efforts of the labs and the media to impose a top-down narrative around job loss and existential risk, we find everyday Americans having a far different and in many ways more "normal" conversation (@random_walker)---one in which AI offers immediate and personal opportunities and challenges all at the same time.

Check out the full research piece, which is loaded with interesting real example videos, here:

https://t.co/AbFTqM4g7e

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Top crypto companies send joint letter urging Congress to include legal protections for developers in crypto Clarity Act.

• a16z
• Aave
• 1inch
• Block
• BitGo
• Aptos
• Zcash
• Solana
• Galaxy
• Ledger
• Kraken
• Uniswap
• Coinbase
• Hyperliquid
• Many others

[AminCad Ξ🐬🔊 - evm/acc @AminCad]

Achieving massive scalability on Ethereum L1 — around 10,000 transactions per second — would have enormous implications for what blockchains can realistically do.

That is about 864 million transactions per day. At that scale, Ethereum would no longer be limited to niche crypto apps or high-value settlement between other systems. It could start handling the normal economic activity of large consumer platforms.

That does not mean every part of a global app would run onchain. Videos, feeds, etc would still mostly run off-chain.

But the important parts of apps that decide who gets paid, who owns the account, who has a contract, who has a reputation, and who can take their business elsewhere could move onto Ethereum.

For example, with a YouTube or TikTok-scale creator platform, the videos would still be hosted offchain, and the feed would still be managed by an app, but the creator's income could go directly into their own wallet. Their paid subscribers could be connected to them onchain. Their membership payments, tips and revenue shares would not just be entries in one company's private database.

A platform could still remove them from its own app, but it could not seize their balance, delete their paying audience, or cut off their ability to get paid by anyone else.

Think an onchain version of Uber or Upwork: the app could still match drivers with riders or freelancers with clients. But the payment, deposit, work contract and reputation could live outside the app:

A driver with 10,000 completed rides would not have to leave that history behind if they moved to another marketplace, and a freelancer's work record would not be trapped inside one company's database.

A client could put money into escrow, the worker could complete the job, and payment could settle automatically without either side needing to trust the platform as much.

Or consider stablecoin payments at the scale of national payment networks.

A worker could get paid in dollars without needing a bank account.

If you wanted to start accepting payments on your own website, you would not need to apply for a merchant account with a credit card processor.

Anyone could open a small online business and start receiving global payments with almost no friction.

That means fewer barriers to commerce. More people can sell. More people can work. More people can get paid. More people can build businesses without asking a bank, platform or payment processor for permission first.

The result of all of this would be a less siloed economy: more open, more efficient and more competitive, with fewer monopolistic gatekeepers controlling entire markets from the top.

And as those benefits compound over time, the result should be a much more prosperous society.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

California made it illegal for any election in the state to require ID. This is nuts.

[Nick Anthony @EconWithNick]

"One of the central premises of our republic is that power without checks and balances will be abused. The post-World War II Supreme Court forgot this. This error should be corrected." - @SolveigSinglet
https://t.co/5MIFJEImvP

[BMNR Bullz @BMNRBullz]

BITMINE WEEKLY UPDATE

TOM LEE and Bitmine just added another 126,971 $ETH in one week.

Updated holdings:

🔹 204 Bitcoin
🔹 $247M cash
🔹 $88M stake in Eightco $ORBS
🔹 $180M stake in Beast Industries
🔹 5,543,872 $ETH worth $9.04B

Bitmine now owns 4.59% of the total $ETH supply.

92% of the way to its 5% target.

$ETH $BMNR

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

Granite Act Now!

[Tommy @Shaughnessy119]

The most basic way AI could blow up imo. I'm not saying it does but this is the most obvious way I can see it happening

- Per seat subscriptions are massively subsidized. The flat fee was priced way below what heavy usage actually costs

- For real business use you have to move to the API anyway. Data protections, work integrations and compliance officer approval

- On the API you pay metered rates, and businesses are burning credits way faster than the per seat pricing ever led them to expect

- This is everywhere right now. Internally for us, Codex users, Uber torching its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months, the Microsoft comments. Just go try an API

I shared more on this here: https://t.co/iZrqrCAIRW

- And I don't think most businesses have the money to keep paying increasing API rates without a real change to how they operate (caps needed)

- Because they have a cheap alternative. They can reach open source models through any aggregator (OpenRouter, Venice, Baseten, Together) and still get strong privacy. Venice private data centers, or E2EE/TEE serving GLM 5.1.

More on open source inference provider raises here: https://t.co/7kf56P44yQ

- And the discount is enormous. DeepSeek V4 codes within a hair of Opus on SWE bench at roughly 1/30th the price, and the cheapest open models run closer to 1/100th

- Chinese labs open source frontier grade models. The model is the single biggest cost an inference provider has, and they get it for free

- This idea dies if China goes closed source. That is actually bullish web2 AI labs, because if everyone is closed you pay up for the best intelligence. China goes closed source if they are tired of giving away an asset and they want the revenue and data flow to train new models

- Is this showing up in web2 AI lab revenue yet? No. Revenue is off the charts. Anthropic went from 9B to 47B run rate in five months

- So go forward, what happens?

- I think revenue slowly starts leaking to the open source inference providers (see Venice usage, OpenRouter's $113M raise, Baseten is raising at $11B or triple its valuation in three months, on revenue that went from $200M to $600M annualized in a single quarter)

- It doesnt move overnight, but it caps the labs ability to raise prices, and margins are already deeply negative. OpenAI is reportedly running near negative 122%

- With margins that bad there is no cash flow, so the labs are fully dependent on outside capital to buy GPUs, train models, and keep subsidizing usage (I.e. see Google tapping $80b equity sale, granted 30b for employee RSU taxes. Clearly they think Equity is overvalued or you wouldn't sell it)

- The break comes when that capital stops. Pricing is capped so margins cant improve, and the moment investors lose conviction on payback, the whole flow reverses

- Why would they lose conviction on payback? Back to the start - the inability to improve margins or get businesses to pay more

- This is also limiting, if we start making new drugs with AI or create entirely new businesses, you better believe people will pay up to the max for AI usage

[AminCad Ξ🐬🔊 - evm/acc @AminCad]

A reminder: this guy is in prison for developing a privacy wallet. The crimes committed by those who used that wallet are being blamed on him.

To put into perspective how authoritarian the DoJ's treatment of Samourai/TC are: they could just as easily argue that the developers of the MetaMask wallet are running a money laundering service because criminals used the wallet to launder money. Everyone who builds in the crypto space is potentially liable under this new doctrine, which essentially turns "developer of user-controlled software" into "operator of a financial service" based on generic protocol-team activity.

[Stand With Crypto🛡️ @standwithcrypto]

Stand With Crypto and over 200 organizations sent a simple message to Senate leadership: it's time for the Clarity Act.

The community is unified — large companies, startups, associations, and grassroots groups across the country are counting on their lawmakers to deliver rules of the road for crypto in America.

The Clarity Act passed the Senate Banking Committee with bipartisan support.

Now it needs to cross the finish line. Tell your Senators you want Clarity 👇

[marek.celo.eth 🦇🌳 @marek_]

Since my comments welcoming @Cardano builders to @Celo last week, I got curious about Cardano, and what things looked like there. To my surprise, the throughput and decentralization numbers looked even worse than I assumed

On throughput: the base chain is running around 0.34 TPS right now, with a theoretical ceiling near 18 TPS and a max ever observed of 11.62. Block time is 22 seconds, finality takes 2 minutes. After 9 years of peer-reviewed research, that's the live state

On decentralization, the headline is "thousands of stake pools." But once you group pools by the operators who actually control them, the Nakamoto coefficient sits around 22. The protocol parameter meant to spread stake out gets gamed by pool splitting, and most of the supply sits with a small set of large holders

None of this is a dunk for its own sake. I went in expecting the claimed academic rigor to show up somewhere. It mostly didn't. If you're a Cardano builder who wants sub-second blocks, real throughput, and a chain optimized for payments and stablecoins, the door at Celo is open

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Latin America since USAID defunding:

🇨🇱 Kast ("far right") wins in Chile
🇧🇴 Paz ("far right") wins in Bolivia
🇵🇪 Fujimori ("far right") wins in Peru
🇪🇨 Noboa ("far right") wins in Ecuador
🇭🇳 Asfura ("far right") wins in Honduras
🇨🇷 Fernandez ("far right") wins in Costa Rica

Extremely telling development

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

.@drakefjustin: "I don't see how ETH could not flip BTC"

Justin is asked: What's Ethereum? Is it a settlement layer? A world computer? Monetary network?

He responds:

"For me, this hasn't changed for many years. Ethereum is the Internet of Value."

"In order to be successful as the Internet of Value you need very good money at the center of it because that will be the substrate -- the economic bandwidth -- that will allow you to build a lot of services (e.g. loans, stablecoins)."

"In some sense, the success of the platform and the success of the money are tied at the hip. This is why I think those who are pushing for ETH as money are really helping the platform and vice versa -- those who are helping the platform are helping with ETH the money."

"One of my theses is that we'll have winner-takes-most platforms. There's only one Internet. There's only going to be one Internet of Value that captures 90-99% of all economic activity. And just for weird, path-dependent reasons, we have Bitcoin that is the largest money right now. But I think this is a highly-unstable equilibrium for multiple reasons. And I think the best candidate to win the Internet of Value is by far Ethereum."

@fede_intern adds to this point, "I was never convinced there was a chance of [Ethereum flipping Bitcoin] to be honest. But I'm getting convinced there's a high probability -- you [Justin] have played a part in convincing me because of the issuance (declining block subsidy) and now the post-quantum. I do think there's a high chance that ETH becomes the dominant economic substrate in the long-term. I don't see how proof-of-work could work long-term."

Justin echoes this:

"Unless there's some catastrophic failure of Ethereum, I don't see how Ethereum could not flip Bitcoin."

Source: @blockspaceforum

Read our thesis on why ETH is better money than BTC below 👇

[Billboard Chris 🌎 @BillboardChris]

I don’t care if you’re 18 or 19 or 40 — doctors shouldn’t be cutting off tissue from a woman’s forearm or thigh and turning it into a tube of flesh which is then sewn onto the woman’s groin with the urethra pulled through so they can pee standing up.

They even follow up this procedure by inserting a steel rod into it once the initial surgery has healed so that it can be maneuvered for sex.

They call this ‘gender-affirming care.’

It is insane, and it is the epitome of evil.

[BMNR Bullz @BMNRBullz]

JOE LUBIN: ETHEREUM IS NO LONGER A ONE FOUNDATION ECOSYSTEM.

The Ethereum Foundation is reducing its budget and focusing on core protocol development.

Meanwhile, Lubin says new organizations are emerging to help drive adoption, commercialization and ecosystem growth.

Most notably, he confirmed discussions involving ConsenSys, SharpLink and BitMine. @fundstrat

"We've actually been talking to our friends at BMNR."

Ethereum is becoming a network of specialized institutions, not a network dependent on a single foundation.

$ETH $BMNR $SBET

[Thomas (Tom) Lee (not drummer) FundstratDirect.com @fundstrat]

Don’t fall for false narratives

- Equity bull market intact
- Crypto only way for tokenization
- Crypto key in a machine to machine AI world

[Department of State @StateDept]

SECRETARY RUBIO: "One of the things you'll find pretty consistently in every totalitarian system is that they want to control the ability of their citizens to communicate with one another."

[AminCad Ξ🐬🔊 - evm/acc @AminCad]

Ethereum has spent the last several years scaling without taking the easy shortcut of turning the base chain into a datacenter chain.

Since 2020, the major upgrades have been:

• Beacon Chain: introduced Proof of Stake.
• The Merge: completed the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, laying the groundwork for data sharding to enhance rollup scalability.
• EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding): introduced data blobs, enabling massive scaling of rollup solutions by significantly reducing data availability costs through the use of KZG polynomial commitments to enable Ethereum to verify that blob data without putting that data permanently into L1 calldata. Raised rollup scalability to 650 transactions per second (TPS).
• Pectra: doubled target blob throughput per block, from 3 to 6, with the maximum rising from 6 to 9. This raised rollup capacity to roughly 980 TPS.
• Fusaka: introduced PeerDAS, so nodes no longer need to download every piece of blob data in full. They can sample the data instead, using erasure coding to efficiently reconstruct the full data. This is the first real stage of data sharding.
• Blob Parameter Only forks: lets Ethereum keep increasing blob capacity without waiting for a full hard fork. The first two BPO increases raised Ethereum to 14 blobs, with a maximum of 21. That raised maximum rollup capacity to 2,300 TPS.

At the same time, Ethereum's L1 gas limit has been raised to around 60M, or 238 TPS, from 45 TPS in 2020.

The next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, is aimed at making much higher L1 capacity safe through ePBS, block-level access lists, and parallel execution. It will also continue blob scaling for rollups.

The post-Glamsterdam target is 200M gas limit, or 790 TPS on Mainnet.

The long-term roadmap has also expanded, with Ethereum now working toward bringing ZK verification directly into mainnet. That means using ZK proofs of EVM execution to raise throughput without forcing every validator to run much more powerful hardware. This is about Ethereum L1 itself becoming ZK-verifiable.

The long-term goal is around 10,000 transactions per second on Ethereum mainnet, with rollups scaling to 10M TPS. So gigagas L1 and a much larger rollup data layer, while still preserving the property that makes Ethereum ultra-hard: ordinary people being able to verify the chain.