Bro

Don't take this account too seriously.

[Etc. @ec265]

What does @ethereumJoseph know?

He’s been very vocal on Twitter this last week, after not much activity for months, and now $SBET is accumulating ETH (whilst trading at an mNAV discount) for the first time in months

Maybe it’s nothing, but it’s probably something

[fabda.eth @fabdarice]

If you’re in AI, pivot to crypto.

[CBduck @CoinbaseDuck]

I continue to DCA on $ETH as I believe in $ETH becoming a store of value asset for onchain economy.

Plus I believe in @jessepollak executing on @base and onchain stats is indeed showing stickiness in Ethereum user base.

I believe @ethereumJoseph and @fundstrat on bringing institutional interest and adoption on Ethereum.

[Everstake @everstake_pool]

"@ethereum is losing users."

It's a narrative that refuses to disappear.

But, Ethereum has the highest user retention rate among major blockchains, with 26.2% of users returning a year later.

And that's what makes this metric so powerful.

Anyone can attract attention during a bull market. Anyone can benefit from a trend. But convincing users to come back months later is a completely different challenge.

Because retention isn't built on hype. It's built on products people use, developers who keep shipping, liquidity that keeps growing, and an ecosystem that continues to evolve through every market cycle.

Over the years, Ethereum has faced competition from every direction. New chains arrived promising to replace it, outperform it, or move faster than it.

Yet when it comes to keeping users engaged over the long term, Ethereum still stands at the top.

In crypto, it's easy to attract attention.

Earning long-term loyalty is much more difficult. Ethereum continues to do both.

[Bobby A @Bobby_1111888]

Ethereum trading at ~$1,500 while TVL remains strong, stablecoins continue to grow, staking remains robust, and institutions become more familiar with the product creates one of the largest disconnects I’ve ever seen between fundamentals and price. That gap will inevitably close in a powerful way. I’m positioned for that move. That is all.

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

The crowd wants a higher $ETH price.
We all do.

But when someone with as much skin in the game as $ETH co-founder spends his time talking about infrastructure, adoption and future demand, I pay attention

[Le Chiffre @LeChiffre]

Read this passage carefully

i have been talking about this for months: Ethereum is becoming the universal settlement layer. it is also a neutral foundation meaning an open environment where anyone can build their own financial infrastructure.

today, most of the institution's infrastructure are built on @Besu_eth which as been created by @Consensys.
and yes, Besu is also a neutral foundation under the Linux Foundation, as @LineaBuild

this follows Ethereum’s vision: offering institutions a trusted environment where the goal is not to build something for one year with vendor lock-in, but for the next 30 years with a neutral governance.

the next step is how Besu (or other L1 client) will be connected to each others. I have some hints which I cannot share right now, but it is very exciting! cc @florian_huc @goinfrexeth

I am also excited to see how AI will develop on Ethereum, with millions of onchain AI agents trading and interacting with each other without human intervention.

Ethereum is far from being dead

[Fernando Pertini @DecodeMarkets]

A $75M $SBET raise at a 41% premium

Now backing EthLabs alongside @ethereumJoseph + @fundstrat $BMNR

The signal isn’t the price. The signal is where the talent + capital are moving.

$ETH is evolving from a foundation-led ecosystem into a market-driven one.

That’s what the next phase of Ethereum looks like.

[dannyryan @dannyryan]

New node, killer team

Ethereum's success is derived on many fronts through diverse mindshare, diverging concerns, healthy competition, and a shared responsibility

Excited to collaborate with @ethlabs_org to ensure Ethereum becomes the settlement layer of the global economy

[bread.mega @bread_]

Very happy to be one of the supporters of this new Etheruem org.

My personal criticisms of the current Ethereum landscape has been that they've given away too much at the base layer, and that a strong Ethereum (and ETH the asset) leads to a greater whole.

This is a group of longtime core contributors banding together outside of the EF to address the thing everyone has clamored for of late: value accrual and acknowledging applied blockchain PMF (e.g. DeFi).

Ethlabs along with the EF can now represent 2 halves of a whole. Idealism and pragmatism working together to strengthen the network.

[DCinvestor @DCinvestor]

the largest ETH holders in the world forming their own heavyweight R&D org is frankly exactly what you want to see at this point if you are an ETH holder

[Leo Lanza | Lanza.eth @leolanza]

Big signal for ETH.

@ethlabs_org just launched as an independent nonprofit R&D lab founded by former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers and backed by Bitmine, SharpLink, Joe Lubin, Anchorage, Octant and SNZ.

The mission is simple:

Make Ethereum ready for institutions, AI agents, DeFi and the next wave of onchain finance.

This is what an institutional supercycle actually looks like.

Capital backing core protocol talent.

ETH becoming the neutral settlement layer for the global economy.

Ethereum is accelerating.

https://t.co/mMJg5iyGPI

[Bitmine (NYSE-BMNR) $ETH @BitMNR]

The team at Ethlabs @ethlabs_org is one the cores driving the future of @ethereum

Thus, Bitmine is delighted to be a key partner backing the efforts of this team

$ETH is money

[Uttam @uttam_singhk]

wake up babe new ethereum:native thesis just dropped:

"Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents"

[⟠ @ryanberckmans]

Must-read post by the new EF exec dir. imo one of the best eth pieces ever written. Future extremely bright for Ethereum and ETH.

[Aerugo @aerugoettinea]

1. Intro

Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution.

We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable.

The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about

2. What the EF is not for

We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats.

3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses

We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion.

We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage).

The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible?

The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer.

The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries.

If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space.

None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity.

In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen.

MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here.

Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second.

It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust.

Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points.

The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible.

Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide.

4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities

Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including:

* Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed.

* Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it.

* Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense.

* Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this.

* Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms.

* Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load.

We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum.

Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

5. Addressing departures

There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content.

Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle.

Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs.

6. Addressing EF spinouts

Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation.

The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work.

Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding:

“Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?”

EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency.

Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate.

EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not.

We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.

[pixel @spacepixel]

Even if BTC gives us one more dip.

You can feel the energy storing at the lows already.

A spring loading up for one hell of a cycle.

[⟠ @ryanberckmans]

Every so often, eth fud gets so egregious that the legions of eth ppl busy working on protocols, businesses, and labors of love take a moment to speak up. Contrast to other chains over-marketed 24/7. Lesson in there will become obvious at $20k

[DCinvestor @DCinvestor]

i don't have much to new add to the current discussions around the EF, so i'll just reiterate what i've said in the past:

1) R&D activities should be spun out of the EF and managed separately via something resembling an industry consortium process. having this function sit alongside ecosystem dev has created several instances of conflicts of interest at best and suboptimal protocol progress misaligned with market demands at worst
2) we increasingly have new organizations (like DATs) which hold a lot of ETH who could catalyze a new approach to a protocol development along these lines
3) any remaining ecosystem dev activities at the EF should ideally be dramatically reduced tightly scoped and focused on areas requiring coordination between market participants where it would not exist otherwise (i.e., coordination failures)
4) proposals for in-protocol funding from issuance or fees should be rejected as they will compromise neutrality and turn Ethereum into "just another blockchain"

that the current debates have been started again via staff departures isn't a surprise. nor is discussion of funding crises in a bear market

there are real issues which require long-term resolution. maybe this time that will happen. if not, the decentralized protocol remains on solid ground imo. frankly, everything else could mostly disappear and most people wouldn't care

i will say that historically, when these discussions reach fever pitch, it has often been the best time to buy ETH as it is often near the bear market bottom

[Joseph Lubin @ethereumJoseph]

Beautifully crafted piece on "Why Ethereum?" Very powerful. Some quotes:

“The original vision of consortium blockchains – the idea that you have 5 banks or major companies that come together and create their own chain – has been mostly a failure,” Vitalik Buterin explains . “It ends up inheriting most of the disadvantages of centralization and most of the disadvantages of decentralization at the same time.” The problem, as he describes it, is that the first few banks feel like equal founders, but bank number twenty is just joining something its competitors already control. You take on all the engineering cost of a distributed system and get none of the benefits of openness, composability, and credible neutrality that made blockchains worthwhile in the first place.

The single-most important blockchain property is sovereignty (Note: Another way to express "sovereignty" is: credible neutrality + censorship resistance + privacy + security). What made Bitcoin revolutionary was that it was the world’s first sovereign computer platform. Before Bitcoin, all computer platforms belonged to a person, a company, or a government, and they had to obey the will of their owners and the rules of the jurisdiction where they resided. But a sovereign only obeys its own rules, and no single entity could impose rules on Bitcoin. (Note: On Ethereum, builders and users also have far more personal sovereignty than possible on any other large public platform in the world.)

Much of Ethereum’s lead in sovereignty and credible neutrality comes from path dependence that no other blockchain can replicate. Ethereum launched with proof-of-work in 2015 and ran on it for seven years before transitioning to proof-of-stake in 2022. During that period, ownership of the network was distributed through an open 2014 crowdsale and GPU mining that was deliberately kept accessible to consumer hardware. The result was widespread token distribution with no single entity controlling a meaningful fraction of the network (an essential factor in the sovereignty of a proof-of-stake network).

According to Token Terminal’s Ethereum Q1 2026 Report, Ethereum holds 79% of active DeFi loans across the top five chains, 62% of stablecoins, 73% of tokenized funds, and 84% of tokenized commodities.

Erik Voorhees, the founder of https://t.co/q4WHRFuPw2 (the privacy-first AI inference platform with 3+ million users and tens of millions of dollars in ARR), articulated a similar rationale a few days ago "It wasn't even a question for us," Erik replies when asked why he built Venice on Coinbase's Ethereum L2 Base, "The Ethereum ecosystem is the far more authentic, resilient, and robust ecosystem of all smart contract platforms."