Amb. Daniel Dominion

A spring-loaded lever (stop loss) that locks a mechanism (position). Detented. Still holding.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

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1. Buy Bitcoin
2. Don't Sell the Bitcoin

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[Monad @monad]

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[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

Anyone else noticing the funding rates staying suspiciously flat while price rips? That's usually telling.

[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

Whoa, BTC just punched through $67K on geopolitical news but derivatives traders aren't buying the hype 👀 Feels like smart money is sitting this one out. Could this be a classic fakeout before a bigger move? #Bitcoin

Thoughts?

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*.

We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial.

But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?

From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board".

See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability.

And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher!

Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with.

If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases.

Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other.

*Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.

And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi.

---

So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory.

I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher).

Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

My first reaction to this was:

"And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me"

My second reaction to this was:

"I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?"

My more detailed reaction:

There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users".

First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this.

The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature.

My general view, if you _really_ have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is:

* Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good
* Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad

For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature.

Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default.

If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing *quantity of community*, but you fail from the perspective of growing *quality of community*. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team).

The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature.

Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do.

A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( https://t.co/iJYPFNaOgg ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit".

TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.

[OKX @okx]

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[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

Dropped everything, made homemade ramen from scratch tonight. Rich broth, perfect noodles — life is genuinely good. Crypto pumps or dumps, this bowl hits different every time 🍜

[🇺🇸 Ronald Carter @USronaldcarter]

My price predictions for Q3-4 2026!

#BTC : $236,500

#ETH : $7800

#SOL : $520

#HYPE : $200

#ZCASH : $1300

#NEAR : $20

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

I haven’t sold a sat. Strategy is still stacking.

[Ansem @blknoiz06]

trump really put ufc on the white house lawn and gave out prizes in crypto, & the fighters were shilling memecoins on the octagon after winning

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I think it's healthy for us in the Ethereum world to have a more bold and open mindset to many things, particularly on the application layer and on how we see ourselves in the world.

We should not compromise on core properties: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security (CROPS). We should not have "open mindedness" of the type that leaves people with no confidence of what security properties the L1 will still have one year from now. We should not ask ourselves questions like "do we really need light clients to be able to trustlessly verify correctness of the chain?". But especially on the layer of applications and Ethereum's interface to the world, we should be more willing to radically rethink various concepts and step outside our comfort zone.

This includes issues of technological direction, eg. "what if AI basically means that wallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions are dead within a year?"

One example last year was the shift to thinking about privacy as a first-class consideration, something we value equally to the other types of security. This implies a radically different Ethereum application stack, because the entire stack so far has not been built around privacy. Great, let's build a radically different Ethereum application stack!

An example this year is the growing work on the networking side of privacy, both inside the EF and outside.

It includes application-layer issues, eg. "what if the rest of defi is basically just universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle and letting users self-organize on top of that?", and "what if the ideal decentralized oracle is just a SNARK over M-of-N small LLMs over zk-TLSes of some major news sites?"

(BTW this is interrelated with the AI issue: one consequence of AI is that it moves "applications" away from being discrete categories of behavior with discrete UIs, and more toward being a continuous space, so "build fewer apps and rely on users to self-organize around them" should inevitably expand as a pattern)

One example this year is rethinking from zero the role of L2s, and what kind of L2s are actually most synergistic and additive to Ethereum.

It also includes culture. This is a big part of "the whole milady thing" for myself, @AyaMiyagotchi and others. Yes, it's a silly meme. Yes, I find the political takes of some milady partisans cringe and sometimes outright bootlickerish (though other milady partisans are quite the opposite). But the core underlying subtext, the message behind the message, is: rip off the suit and tie. If you have your suit and tie on, be willing to grab the nearest wine glass and spill it all over your suit and tie, so you have no choice but to rip it off and reclaim your body's full flexibility and freedom. Actually imagine yourself doing this the next time you get invited to a richpeopleslop formal gala dinner. Take the preconception that you are "respectable", write it down on a piece of paper, crumble it up and burn it. The psychological baptism of doing this leads to the intellectual baptism of unlocking greater creativity and expanding overton windows.

For too long, our algorithm in Ethereum has been: we have this existing ecosystem, what's the logical next step to make it one step better? Now, our algorithm should be: we have this L1 that is amazing and will become more amazing, we have a growing array of tools, both those built within our ecosystem and outside it, what are the most valuable things to build, knowing what we know now? If YOU had to write the section of the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper that talked about applications, and take a first-principles perspective of what makes sense in defi, decentralized social, identity, and elsewhere, what would you write? At least take the step of marking all path-dependence concerns down to zero, pretend for a brief moment that the Ethereum chain today has exactly zero usage and you're the one suggesting or building the first apps, and see what comes out. Do this even if you're the one building today's existing apps. This is how Ethereum can grow back stronger.

[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

1,587 BTC at ~$63K avg price. Saylor keeps dollar-cost averaging at scale while retail hesitates. $100M deployed without blinking. The conviction here is either genius or the boldest bet in finance. #Bitcoin

Who else is watching this accumulation pattern closely?

[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

@AdriSanMiguel @LFC YNWA ❤❤❤

[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

@DonThoni_ @UTDTrey Don't worry, you'll be fine

[Peter Obi @PeterObi]

In continuation of my quest to deepen knowledge and impact positively on our society, yesterday June 10th, in London, I held a series of important engagements, including a fruitful meeting with Alex Vines, Director of the Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

Our discussions focused on strengthening strategic relationships and fostering a deeper understanding of Africa’s evolving role in global affairs. It was emphasized that Africa must no longer be viewed merely through the prism of statistics or humanitarian concern, but as a serious and equal partner in shaping the future global order, much like India, Indonesia, and other emerging centres of influence.

During our engagement, it became increasingly clear that Africa, and Nigeria in particular, must be placed at the centre of international conversations on partnership, trade, governance, innovation, and sustainable development.

Constructive dialogue and mutual respect remain essential to building meaningful cooperation between Africa and the international community.

A New Nigeria is POssible. -PO

[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

@favy_xboy @yabaleftonline La las all na win win for everybody 😂

[Amb. Daniel Dominion @detent_click]

@ZunaGroup @Wizarab10 Over who??

[Peter Obi @PeterObi]

Exponential increase in revenue with excessive borrowing: Yet more hardship for Nigerians!

In celebrating three years of his administration, President Bola Tinubu included, among his achievements, an increase in revenue from N16.8 trillion in 2022 to N35 trillion in 2025. An increase of over 100%.

Shockingly, while Nigerians expected a reduction in borrowing with the exponential increase in revenue, the opposite is the case. In just three years, President Bola Tinubu’s government seems to be obsessed with excessive and imprudent borrowing, with our total debt currently about N200 trillion—a deeply disturbing increase of over N100 trillion.

In addition to the exponential increases in both revenue and debt, it is also important to note that Nigeria has earned far more than the budget revenue targets due to global and regional geoeconomic and political tensions.

Alarmingly, even with the astronomical increase in both revenue and debt, almost all key socio-economic and governance indicators are worse than in 2023. Multi-dimensional poverty has increased from 87 million people in 2023 to over 140 million people in 2025. Rapidly increasing unemployment and a decline in GDP per capita from $1,597 in 2023 to $1,223 in 2025, and the list goes on.

Just more and more hardship for Nigerians! The question Nigerians and even the international community are asking is, “Where did all the money go?”

Nigerians deserve a detailed and transparent explanation of what happened to our economy and financial resources since 2023, and a stop to the imprudent, unaccountable, and opaque management of our common patrimony.

A new and productive Nigeria is POssible, and Nigeria will be OK! -PO