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[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy.

We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks.

Find a brief introduction to the new structure, and learn more about how we are supporting the people who are leaving in the full post below:

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

https://t.co/Ri0Tew0Dkc

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

zkSync founder: “Ethereum is the only option” for institutions

“Tempo is a venture by Stripe. Obviously Stripe, as a large payments processor, wants to have their own network . . . And of course, all of [these organizations] will try to get everyone else on their network. But guess what? That’s precisely the reason why it’s never going to happen.”

Alex Gluchowski explains:

“Yes, Stripe wants everything to happen on Tempo, but JP Morgan wants everything to happen on JP Morgan Chain. And Circle wants everything to happen on Arc. And so on and so forth. They will never agree. The large players will never agree to build on the infrastructure of another large player. This is why Ethereum is the only option — it’s the only way forward as the neutral infrastructure that everyone can agree on.”

Source: @therollupco @zksync @gluk64

Read our report "Why Permissionless Infrastructure Wins" below 👇

[Stefan Cohen @stefancoh]

@celestia

[Lorenzo Valente @LorenzoARK]

This chart perfectly captures the type of market we’re in right now.

Historically, VCs and investors in crypto have been obsessed with 0→1 ideas: new primitives, new innovations, new categories.

But we’re clearly entering a different phase: underwriting compounding winners.

The real question now is:
Which apps/protocols can go from $1M → $10M → $100M in revenue?

That’s the market we’re in.

And what’s interesting is that despite being open-source, permissionless, and easier than ever to build (especially with AI), smart contract businesses still follow a heavy power law.

In ALL verticals, it becomes a duopoly.

The job now is simple:

Find the 1–2 players in each market that will compound the fastest.

[Jason Rosenthal @jasonrosenthal]

1/ An uncomfortable truth:

Even the best crypto product in the world will lose to an inferior product with a better sales team.

Too many technical founders refuse to accept this until it's too late.

[Dan Elitzer @delitzer]

It turns out institutions prefer to work with partners who behave professionally and deliver on their commitments 🦋

[Lorenzo Valente @LorenzoARK]

1/ Yesterday, we were extremely excited to share that ARK Invest is partnering with @LayerZero_Core on their upcoming Layer 1 blockchain, Zero, and that @CathieDWood will be joining Zero’s advisory board.

A Big thread to understand what happened 🧵

[Ryan Watkins @RyanWatkins_]

https://t.co/UyCXRwhDfH

[François Valentin @Valen10Francois]

Social spending in France by age.

When politicians in France talk about cutting entitlements they talk about the orange slice (unemployment) or the green slice (family benefits).

But the elephant in the room is that blue bulge

[Naval @naval]

In 1971, money changed from a natural system (gold) to a socialist system (fiat).

Crypto is tech to replace socialist money with a free-market system.

Market systems are inherently competitive and as tech evolves, new monies will continue to emerge to challenge existing ones.

[rip.eth @ripeth]

another L1 is becoming an L2

@nillion → L2
@Ronin_Network → L2
@Celo → L2

this trend will only accelerate

- cut security costs by 99%+
- improve performance
- tap into the largest ecosystem & liquidity

Ethereum is leading & here to stay. leverage it

[A.J. Warner @ajwarner90]

I’d go further. It’s not even about difficulty but rather risk. If you launch an L1 you need to keep paying validators with issuance and inflation even if you choose to deprioritize the chain.

L2 model allows your security budget to be a function of usage. You don’t have massive fix costs.

[Felipe Montealegre @TheiaResearch]

We are close to the end of a >4 year token bear market.

This is obvious if you understand why we have been in a token bear market to begin with — over the past few years, tokens have had low-to-no rights and traded at ridiculous valuations. Nobody has wanted to hold those assets in the aggregate (although there have been many good single name opportunities!).

Tokens have been getting more attractive every year since — tokens have been getting cheaper on a DCF-basis / bestowed more rights to tokenholders every year over the past four years.

The bear market has effectively been a painful and prolonged negotiation between tokenholders and token issuers. We want more rights and better valuations while token issuers want to provide fewer rights and to issue at higher valuations.

In 2021 there was a lot of liquid capital / permabulls dominated the market so token issuers had the upper hand and basically gave us a flaming pile of garbage in the aggregate (I repeat that there were many good single name opportunities if you knew where to look).

The market has matured one funeral at a time and going into 2026 there is less liquid capital and those who have survived are disciplined. Meanwhile the adoption / revenue opportunity has never been better.

I don't know when the prolonged token bear market of 2022-2025(6?) will end but conditions are better today than they have been at any point in the past few years. It's a good setup.

[Mustafa Al-Bassam @musalbas]

@ssaintleger I see this month as Celestia's re-founding moment. The investor unlocks elapsing means we have a $100M VC-raised treasury without the baggage of post-TGE unlocks. I'm treating it as if we just raised a big seed round to build back better.

[Nick Tomaino @NTmoney]

Bitcoin and Ethereum never raised venture capital. That’s $2.5T+ in value, the majority of crypto value created to date.

Silicon Valley VCs have tried to co-opt the industry and it’s worked to some degree. But most capitulated in 2021 -2023 by raising too much capital and then deploying in zero sum projects that attract retail attention but don’t do anything useful for the world. They are now flailing, that’s clear with all the shilling and slop.

What’s left is a passionate community of people globally who actually believe in human empowerment and building products that bring more freedom, truth and progress to the world.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

You are a taker, not a maker. All you’ve done your whole life is take from the makers of the world.

The zero-sum mindset you have is at the root of so much evil. Once you realize that civilization is not zero-sum and that it is about making far more than one consumes, then it becomes obvious that the path to prosperity for all is just let the makers make.

Regarding Tesla, the reality is that I have been given nothing.

However, if I lead Tesla to become the most valuable company in the world by far and it stays that way for 5 years, shareholders voted to award me 12% of what is built. Anyone who wants to come along for the ride can buy Tesla stock.

If Tesla “merely” becomes a $1.999 trillion dollar company, I get nothing. This is a great deal for shareholders, which is why they voted so overwhelmingly to approve this, for which I am immensely grateful.

And they did so by a margin far more than you won your political seat.

[Dan Elitzer @delitzer]

Yeah, so this platform isn't great for nuance, but obviously there are strengths and weaknesses to both modular and monolithic lending approaches.

What I was trying to claim here, though, is that the modular lending approach is the right long-term approach for scaling beyond the current use cases.

If you look at it today and ask "which is better: modular lending or monolithic lending?", I think the answer would just be "scoreboard," right? Obviously monolithic lending has done much better in the current and historical market environment.

What I'm trying to make the case of is not that one is inherently better or worse in all situations at all times. What I'm making the point of is that modular is the model that ultimately scales if you want to get into not just crypto, but all of TradFi. There are certainly improvements to be made today in terms of dashboarding and how things are presented, but inherently you're always going to have *some* markets that go too far out the risk curve and get blown up; but the vast majority of users won't be using those markets - already today, most of Morpho's users come through Coinbase and World, using very tightly managed vaults.

So modular is my prediction of how we scale to service the world, but it's not that I don't think Aave is great. I love Aave. I use Aave. I may not always like how the team talks and behaves, but it's a great product. And I don't want to diminish that, but the idea that you're going to have these massive cross-collateralized lending pools and you're going to have risks managed by DAOs and done in that way, and it's going to scale to service trillions in loans beyond crypto-native uses cases...? I just don't think that is a realistic vision of how this scales.

Same thing with AMMs, right? DEXs got going using AMMs. The full range UniV2-style CFMM, that was great. But then that wasn't enough to ultimately take DEXs to where they need to go. Ultimately, you need order books. And I would argue that even UniV3 and uniV4 are kind of gas-optimized versions of order books when they're used in the ways that the primary liquidity there is provided. So these models have different ages where they're important. Not that any of them are going away. I don't think AMMs are going away. I don't think that monolithic lending is going away;I do think that the future ultimately is order books (for both trading and lending) alongside AMMs and monolithic pools, but the vast majority of future growth is order books and modular.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk 😅

[Bitwise in Europe @Bitwise_Europe]

Yesterday in Paris, we celebrated the recent launch of the Bitwise Celestia Staking ETP together with @musalbas and his team at @celestia labs.

Thank you to @euronext Paris for the warm welcome and a fantastic event.

Exciting times ahead for blockchain innovation.

[Bitwise in Europe @Bitwise_Europe]

Celestia is an alternative Layer 1 blockchain that focuses on data availability. In simple terms, data availability means that a blockchain’s underlying transactions are accessible to all validators. This is critical for distributed computer networks: validators must be able to download and verify the same data to ensure that all transactions comply with network rules. If they can’t, the decentralised system breaks down.

Celestia provides one of the fastest and most cost-effective data availability solutions, thanks to three core innovations:

1) Erasure encoding allows validators to reconstruct missing parts of a block.

2) Data availability sampling enables validators to verify data by sampling only small portions of a block.

3) Namespace Merkle trees let validators verify only the data relevant to them.

Together, these mechanisms make Celestia highly efficient, attracting chains and applications seeking lower costs and higher performance.

In December 2023, posting a single Optimism block on Ethereum cost $140.53. On Celestia, the same block would have cost $0.046, over 3,000× cheaper. This cost advantage makes Celestia a compelling alternative for Ethereum rollups, which can post their transaction data to Celestia, an “offsite, cheap, reliable, public filing cabinet” before routing and settling on Ethereum for its security and settlement guarantees. Major rollup tech stacks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Starknet, and Polygon can integrate with Celestia.

Celestia is already seeing meaningful traction. The number of namespaces, Celestia’s equivalent of folders for posted data, has grown 5× year-over-year, peaking at almost 8× YoY growth. This is significant: more rollups are posting, and existing ones are posting more frequently. Namespace growth serves as a proxy for customer adoption, much like the number of AWS S3 buckets did in the early days of cloud computing.

Data availability is foundational to blockchain performance, and the industry is only now testing its limits. As businesses build their own chains, such as Stripe’s Tempo, Robinhood’s Layer 2, Coinbase’s Base, and Kraken’s Ink, the demand for scalability, speed, and cost efficiency grows. Celestia is well-positioned to meet these needs.

The team anticipated this trend years ago and has been building toward it. Its goal is to support 1 billion devices operating across 1 million rollups, scaling throughput from 124,800 MiB/day to a projected 14.745 million MiB/day (based on 1 GB blocks and ~6-second block times, per the Ginger upgrade).

We view Celestia as the purest data availability play in the blockchain ecosystem. Read our full deep dive here [https://t.co/yZ4zCDjrNQ] for detailed analysis and price forecasts.

@cornMaxy @Andre_Dragosch @BradleyDukeBTC @HHorsley @Matt_Hougan