Chris Lema

@ethereumfndn @Scroll_ZKP

[Chris Lema @chrislemanade]

@austingriffith Congrats amigo! 🎉

[charles (csl) @CharlieStLouis]

1/ The EF App Relations team is putting out an open RFP for a neutral DeFi risk intelligence aggregator.

Public good, open source, no composite scoring. If you're the team to build this, applications close June 15.

Apply here: https://t.co/vvbZiEBH4h

Here's how we got here 👇

[Aya Miyaguchi @AyaMiyagotchi]

Vitalik shared his perspective on where @ethereumfndn is heading. Here is mine, another part of the same story.

The EF Mandate from the board was something I proposed late last year. Two main things prompted me. First, debates that were meant to be technical had started to become political and personal, and at times shaped by quieter incentives. Second, as EF grew, more and more versions of "what EF should be" began pulling at the core of the organization from every direction at once. I became convinced that trying to satisfy all of them would leave us achieving nothing at all. It was time for us to restate our role and underlying principles clearly, both the parts that have been clear from the start and those that have been informed by over a decade of experience.

We have said it many times: EF is one of many nodes in Ethereum. I know that is hard to hear for some, because EF was the first group, and in the early years it was essential for making things happen. But it was never meant to stay that way.

I have been in crypto since 2012, before it became an "industry." I joined Kraken in 2013, shortly before the implosion of Mt. Gox, which I helped to clean up. I am very aware of how real growth works, and also aware of the real risks of centralization. So when I became ED in 2018, I understood that Ethereum growing beyond EF would be essential to fulfill its real promise as a public blockchain. The goal I set for myself was to ensure that this happens.

The opposite path has always been untenable: Ethereum's future is too big for any single organization to bring about. So EF made deliberate choices to distribute power. We did incubate and release, like Uniswap and ENS. Support to seed a new norm, like ETHGlobal and the hackathons that are now everywhere. Funding the funders, like Gitcoin and Moloch. We always asked the same question: how does this stand on its own, without us?

Those experiments, alongside the work of countless others, contributed to where we are today. Ethereum is now far bigger than anything EF could coordinate alone. EF now holds less than 0.2% of all ETH, and the return on all of that shared work, together with extraordinary people across the ecosystem, has been beyond anything we could have built by ourselves.

That is exactly why a focused EF is possible now. The Mandate states simply the one thing EF must keep carrying: preserving and accelerating the properties and goals that keep Ethereum uniquely valuable, competitive, and worth building on. That is: CROPS - for the sake of inalienable user self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination. We cannot do it alone, and we do not intend to. But defining this as the north star for the mission, and coordinating with the allies who share it, is the responsibility we are keeping.

None of this means EF stops caring about adoption, for everyday users or for institutions. The opposite is true: everything we do is ultimately for the people who use Ethereum. Supporting adoption, including institutional adoption, remains part of our work, pursued in the ways that fit our mission. The value proposition of Ethereum for both everyday users and institutions rests heavily on this.

As EF becomes more focused and more opinionated, the team naturally becomes smaller and more concentrated. That is part of the choice. New leaders are already stepping into this mission and growing within it, and you will hear more from our management in the coming weeks, about what they are doing, and about the new structure and strategy taking shape.

The mission we carry is not a smaller one, but a clearer one. Special thanks to those who have stepped in to support, defend and advance it.

[Chris Lema @chrislemanade]

@naruto11eth @Polymarket Congrats amigo!

[Hayden Adams 🦄 @haydenzadams]

With David’s gone time for me to admit “Eth is money” is the correct thesis

Just not how most people think

All assets will be tokenized

People will hold whatever assets they most value (the most decentralized money is infinite forms of money competing)

No need for a single unit of account if you have a low cost, efficient way to exchange any asset 24/7

Uniswap on Ethereum is the best decentralized money system and it’s still the early days 🦄

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

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.

[Kartik Talwar @kartiktalwar]

https://t.co/BCivlyHXiR

[Chris Lema @chrislemanade]

@0xstark Enjoy the time off 🫡

[L2BEAT 💗 @l2beat]

We’re thrilled to unveil our new Interactive Interop page - a visual map of how value moves across the ecosystem.

The ecosystem is no longer a list of silos. Our interactive hub lets you visualize the connections between 15 chains and 33 supported protocols. 👇

[Designing DeFi @Designing_DeFi]

D² is dedicated to research on how protocols work, why they behave the way they do, and how they can be designed better

The schedule is now live, with talks spanning:

→ DeFi Microstructure
→ Perpetual Futures & Derivatives
→ Mechanism Design
→ Prediction Markets
→ AMMs

[BuidlGuidl.eth @buidlguidl]

Speedrun Ethereum challenges are now AI-ready ✨

Each one ships with AGENTS.md full context, so any AI can answer your questions and help you go deeper.

If you prefer a guided experience, use /start in Claude Code, Cursor, and most modern IDEs to activate AI Tutor Mode: concept explanations, knowledge checks, hints, and live code reviews

[The Ethereum Economic Zone @etheconomiczone]

Welcome to the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a framework for synchronously composable rollups.

What does that mean?

One deployment. Shared liquidity. Single transactions across L1 & L2. Identity verified anywhere. Smart wallets connected everywhere. No additional trust assumptions.

This means L2s that are as credibly neutral, economically aligned, and publicly governed as the base layer itself.

EEZ furthers Ethereum as the leading decentralized economy.

[Eugene Leventhal @bbeats1]

We hosted another gov/acc workshop examining Agentic Allocation methods for guiding capital allocation

Learn more in the 🧵👇

DM if you’re coming to @EthCC & want to join a live gov/acc workshop

Thanks to @metagov_project @OctantApp @ethereumfndn's Academic Secretariat

[nixo.eth 🦇🔊🥐 @nixorokish]

the @EFprotocol team published an EIP Champion's Handbook today:

Getting a feature into the protocol through a decentralized governance process can be fucking hard. These resources aim to help EIP champions give their features the best shot at getting included

INCLUDING - how to go about getting feedback from the rest of the ecosystem and make sure that the feature will get adoption

[Eugene Leventhal @bbeats1]

📣gov/acc kickoff Tue Jan 27 11a EST/UTC-5! Luma 👇

In this call:
- I'll go over some of the overall plans for gov/acc
- @harmonica_chat will show off the session they've developed to gather problems/solutions
- @crdntwrk will share some of the initial roadmapping schema and talk about the forthcoming leaderboard
- @clinamenic will show off the first steps with the website

The four of us will also chat a bit about what we're hoping to accomplish before and during the first gov/acc workshop at @EthCC.

Huge thank you to @metagov_project and @OctantApp for the initial support in getting this off the ground!!!

If there's enough interest, we can also hop into a twitter space following our initial presentation to have a wider convo!

Link below 👇

[Eugene Leventhal @bbeats1]

Inspired by @VitalikButerin's d/acc work & the general trend of 'gov is dead so why bother' this year, I want to introduce gov/acc

gov/acc is an open research program focused on outlining the problems we're facing in web3, as a starting point for accelerating gov R&D

🧵👇

[NEW YORK KNICKS @nyknicks]

for you, new york 💙🧡

[NEW YORK KNICKS @nyknicks]

THE CUP IS OURS❗️

[Chris Lema @chrislemanade]

@Ebunayo08 Congrats!

[Agora @AgoraGovernance]

Proud to help fund the future of ETH with an amazing team like PG.