SmoKING

Living life one block at a time

[Off The Grid @playoffthegrid]

One more day!

A patch this size reaches into how every fight feels. Weapon feel. Recoil. The way a gun answers when you pull the trigger. And how Teardrop runs while it all goes down! 🦾

Until then, hit the condensed Patch Notes below 👇
Know what's coming before you drop in!

See you tomorrow, Zeroes.

https://t.co/7bXoTcBTJU

[Off The Grid @playoffthegrid]

https://t.co/t3ZdG3jcKO

[SmoKING @de_Styx]

@MrBeast 499.841

[Off The Grid @playoffthegrid]

The Runner's been clocking speeds on Teardrop. So let's talk about what's catching up to her!

T-Minus 7 Days.

Three of the biggest swings OTG has taken, begin dropping into Teardrop 🪂

FPS Uplift++ We rebuilt how Teardrop runs on older hardware. The work went after average frames, to make matches playable on Full HD era cards. Testing has RTX 20-series (RTX 2060+) jumping from an unplayable 40 FPS to over 120.

This uplift allowing more rigs on the Grid, smoother than it's ever run (or never did...).

Weapon Balance & Deep Progression will follow with a real pass on the meta, TTK, recoil, stats, how a Weapon or Cyberlimb feels, all getting touched.

This is NOT a tweak. It's a recalibration. Locked, deep, and one week out.

Stay close.

The Grid's about to feel different.

[SmoKING @de_Styx]

@MadMaxx_eth Would break my heart

[(Zora) lost.aura @coltyyX]

Play Off the Grid. 150 player battle royale full release october this year :P

[Ondo Finance @OndoFinance]

https://t.co/TpTzzPYh5g

[Katie Wheeler @KatieAWheeler]

🤍 There are people who change the way you see the world. Nate was one of those people for me.

@nathanlallman founded @OndoFinance with a conviction that the financial system could be rebuilt — more open, more accessible, more fair. That vision became one of the most important companies in crypto and tokenized finance. But the numbers and milestones don't capture what it actually felt like to be in Nate's orbit.

Working with him meant being pushed in ways you didn't always see coming. There was no bullshitting Nate — which was both incredibly refreshing and, honestly, every bit as challenging as you'd expect as a "salesperson." He had this rare ability to cut through noise and force you to think more clearly. He saw things others missed. He asked the question you were hoping no one would ask — and it was always the right question.

But underneath the intensity was someone who genuinely cared. About the mission, yes — but also about the people. He wanted you to grow. He wanted Ondo to be something worth being proud of. That's what made him different.

Away from work, Nate was just as full of life. He was an avid sailor, deeply rooted in and proud of his home state of Hawaii, and above all, devoted to his family. Those who knew him well knew that his family was his anchor — the thing he was most proud of, and the place he was most himself.

His fingerprints are on everything we’ve built at @OndoFinance: our products, our culture, our ambition, and the incredible team he assembled. That doesn’t go away. It lives on in every decision we make and every milestone we achieve.

@iandebode has my full support to lead us into the next chapter — and I know Nate believed in him deeply too.

We'll miss his intensity, his humor, his curiosity, and most of all his unwavering belief that the financial system could be better. It's hard to put into words the hole he leaves.

Thank you, Nate — for everything you built, and for everything you brought out in the people lucky enough to work alongside you.

We will make you proud. ❤️

[Ian De Bode @iandebode]

It's been an incredibly sad day for Ondo Finance. Nate was not only an incredible founder and visionary, but also a very close personal friend. He will be missed dearly.

The mission of Ondo, Nate's mission, has not changed. If Nate were here, he would want to continue executing with excellence. We will make him proud.

[Ondo Finance @OndoFinance]

It is with profound sadness that we announce the unexpected passing of Nathan Allman, Ondo's founder. Our hearts are with his family and loved ones.

Nate’s brilliance, humility, and drive shaped every part of what Ondo is today. His belief in the power of technology to create a more open, accessible financial system lives on in everything we build. The impact he had on this industry, and on all of us personally, cannot be overstated.

Nate also helped us build a durable organization with experienced leaders across all facets of the business. Ian De Bode, Ondo Finance’s longtime President, will serve as CEO. Ian has been leading our strategy, product, and day-to-day operations for over two years and has the full confidence of the leadership team.

We will continue building what Nate started. That is the most meaningful way we know to honor him.

[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.

[SmoKING @de_Styx]

@ChainLinkGod The whole industry and the community has heard you and you made your point. Stop making this a personal vendetta and gloat on the matter. Mistakes were made, they will learn, grow and adapt accordingly. Each will serve their role and the industry is big enough for both to coexist

[SmoKING @de_Styx]

@ApollosMission @playoffthegrid

[Nathan Allman 🌊 @nathanlallman]

We've invested a lot of time into a very bespoke bridging setup built on top of LZ that we're comfortable with (that uses 4 DVNs, including our own), and we appreciate the flexibility that LZ allows. Recent events don't materially change our confidence in our own bridge security stack. That said we love chainlink (and the LINK marines) and are working with them in other very exciting areas!

[jfab @josefabregab]

The CEO of @OndoFinance explained why they built its bridge stack on top of LZ, and it makes sense.

By building on top of LZ, Ondo controls the trust assumptions instead of outsourcing them. Thus, trusting itself.

CCIP is ultra secure, but security is "managed" by @chainlink.

So, Ondo built on top of LZ because it allows Ondo to use 4 DVNs including their own. Some routes use 3/3, some 4/4, and all of them require Ondo's own DVN.

> For applications that don't want to deal with security configurations, CCIP is the obvious choice.
> For applications that want to configure their own bridging stack and trust themselves instead of anyone else, it makes sense to use LZ.

The former is more plug & play, and more constrained by design. The latter provides more flexibility, but misconfiguration risk is real on the app side (examples include the recent $300M Kelp exploit).

So, the design choice is not about Ondo trusting LZ more than Chainlink: it's about Ondo trusting itself, which is valid.

Personally, I think CCIP is the most secure third-party bridging solution, but I respect teams that want to be responsible for their own setup and security assumptions.

[Ankr @ankr]

$290M drained.

One DVN. One point of failure.

The KelpDAO exploit proved 1-of-1 DVN configs aren't enough.

A second DVN only protects you if it's truly independent.

Ours is; and we're live on @LayerZero_Core 👇

[zerolore @zerolore]

LayerZero is the golden standard for cross chain interoperability BECAUSE of its high level of customizability. Unfortunately, this means application owners need to invest serious resources to match the security standard that the capital moving through our rails demands.

At @USDT0_to this has been our main priority from day 1. Security IS the product.

From our very first conversation, the @LayerZero_Core team made extremely clear to us what it would take to hit the security bar our infrastructure required. We did not launch into production until each of those steps was achieved.

Our system pins libraries, runs our proprietary veto-powered DVN with invariance checks developed specifically for our threat vectors, and owns multiple other invaluable parts of the security stack to make sure we are ALWAYS owning our security stack from A to Z.

My Co-Founder and CTO @0xKeno put together an overview of how we approach security at USDT0.

You can find it below.

We are the largest asset on the LayerZero network. We were fully unaffected by this incident because we built on top of the protocol responsibly. We did our homework well before this attack was on everyone’s mouth. Since then, USDT0 moved $4B across chains.

We have been, and will keep on, safeguarding our user's funds to the highest security standards available in this industry.

We are standing strong next to @PrimordialAA, @ryanzarick and the rest of the LayerZero team. Interoperability is hard. It is dangerous. It is constantly under attack by nation-state actors, with virtually unlimited resources. It’s like open heart surgery, every time something is changed.

It is also absolutely needed in the future-economy we are all trying to build.

The only way to avoid the next exploit is to understand the system deeply, invest resources in understanding the technology and build on a platform that lets applications own the vast majority of their building blocks.

For us, this platform is LayerZero. We’ll keep building on top of LayerZero.

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

https://t.co/EjIy0dePj0

[Vlad Korolev @VladK133]

👀

[SmoKING @de_Styx]

@VladK133 Please fix the freezing up when being called back "too" fast