Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:
* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)
It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.
The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.
One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.
At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.
So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.
The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.
Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.
I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.
Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.
Airdrops are a fascinating initial use case for ZK / blockchain-based identity / credential / attestation frameworks. The goals of an airdrop are:
(i) distribute to community members [and not randos who will all immediately sell]
(ii) reward contributions to the project
(iii) be reasonably egalitarian [but some disparity is ok]
(iv) resist extractive/adversarial farming
These are exactly the properties that identity / credential / attestation frameworks (eg. see ideas in https://t.co/CINI0INpwf ) are trying to achieve. Hence, for anyone building such frameworks, it makes perfect sense to use token issuance as an initial use case to beta-test and refine their work in an adversarial environment.
I've been building DeFi for almost a decade and we went from zero to here:
- Over 300b stablecoins issued onchain
- Protocols that actually make revenue, all verifiable onchain
- Billions in stablecoins yielding interest directly onchain
- More safer ways to trade or lend (no ftx custody risk)
- Embedded wallets that bring more users and are easy to integrate (i.e. Privy)
- Fintechs and e-commerce platforms issuing stablecoins (PyUSD, SoFi, Western Union, Moneygram)
- Big fintech involvement (Stripe with Tempo)
- Fintechs integrating defi (i.e. Whop integrating Aave)
- Almost all relevant major banks and asset managers have digital asset teams and also working on tokenization, stablecoins and defi (Fidelity, BlackRock etc)
- Genious act regulating stable coins and removing uncertainty to enable fintechs and TradFi to participate
- Clarity act coming, creating more certainty for crypto and defi
- AI tools for defi security hardening and improved overall development process since early days
- EU has MiCA certainty and UK following up
- Banks banking crypto (Erebor etc) and better onramping
The industry progress has been real, and will take of course years to come to see full adoption. We are closer now than ever before, yet moving 8 billion people onchain will take time.
I think that we are in front of a moment where underlying tech is starting out-phases the crypto-native assets. It make sense for stablecoins to have bigger market caps that Bitcoin and Ethereum as world is moving onchain over time. Same thing will happen with trading and lending as more assets are tokenized and will grow directly onchain. This is net good for the ecosystem.
It seems that fintech and tradfi is doubling down on blockchain like never before.
The best way to progress is by building, and we have some of the smartest builders in the space, true believers that build with a real mission are still here.
At some point crypto, defi, stablecoins, rwas are doing to be just called finance. No tribalism, no drama just boring tech that works and scales.
I feel compelled to remind you :
If you buy one Bitcoin at $126,000
And it goes to $89,000
You can sell it
And buy it back 6 seconds later
You still have the same one Bitcoin
But you can realize a capital loss of $37,000 for tax purposes
The bad news : Crypto is the worst thing on earth right now.
The good news : If it ever comes back, any buys the past few months will print back breaking gains.
Darkest before the dawn or some shit like that.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Former President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, says "fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt."
"Decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future."
After selling $ETH, I immediately took ~50% of the capital to VVV, NEAR, ZEC, HYPE
I left the rest as capital to DCA into something not already up multiples (other than NEAR, which was ~1.40 at the time.
I've finished buying $LIT with that remaining 50%
$MSTR acquired 258,320 BTC for $22.07B (~$85,450/BTC) in 2024 and achieved a 74.3% BTC Yield, starting the year with 189,150 BTC and realizing a BTC Gain of 140,630 BTC (385/day). At $100K/BTC, this translates to shareholder value creation of $14.06B for the year or $38.5M/day.
AI will make you jobless.
Crypto will make you not need a job.
Buy and hold now, retire in a few years. 🙋♂️if crypto allowed you to retire already.
(Not financial advice)
The Ethereum not ETH stuff is the mental fallacy that triggered me into writing and podcasting in the first place.
There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions. Without ETH as a global store of value, Ethereum is a failed project. Full stop.
ETH is economic bandwidth for DeFi. It is the only asset maximized for CROPs, fail at high value ETH, fail at CROPs, fail at Ethereum.
Saying you’re bullish Ethereum not ETH is like saying you’re bullish America not the American economy. They are one and the same - economic engines.
Better to admit Ethereum is a failed project than “Ethereum not ETH”.
So spew that weak blockchain not crypto stuff out of your mouth, it doesn’t make sense for BTC, ZEC, ETH, or any truly crypto native project.
Midterm years always feel really bad for crypto.
This time even more so since we topped on apathy.
While many cryptocurrencies will die out, I think Bitcoin will survive
🚀 cPen 1.2.17 Update is Here! 🚀
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Why is crypto not going up while everything is?
Because a large majority of you cunts spent the last cycle promoting garbage negative sum meme coins to newcomers
Now those people hate crypto and your meme coin is worth zero regardless while some scamming cunt drives a new lambo