Brane Ilijin

A tattered whale center (value) with unraveling edges.

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

Already in? Drop your avg entry below 👇 curious if anyone caught the dip or chasing here

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

While BTC chills, $HYPE $UNI and $WLD are quietly doing their thing 👀 Almost like the market's telling us where the smart money is flowing... AI + DeFi narratives never sleep, huh? #DeFi

Who's already holding? 🔥

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

Drop your thoughts below.

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

Crypto markets never sleep 📊 BTC, DeFi & Web3 all moving simultaneously — the data points are stacking up fast. Hard to track every signal but the macro picture is getting clearer.

#Crypto Who's actually profiting rn?

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

In these five years, the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity, in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals:

1. Deliver on an aggressive roadmap that ensures Ethereum's status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness, sustainability and decentralization.
2. Ensures the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term, and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as users' ability to access and use the chain with self-sovereignty, security and privacy.

To this end, my own share of the austerity is that I am personally taking on responsibilities that might in another time have been "special projects" of the EF. Specifically, we are seeking the existence of an open-source, secure and verifiable full stack of software and hardware that can protect both our personal lives and our public environments ( see https://t.co/GzgBS9sh87 ). This includes applications such as finance, communication and governance, blockchains, operating systems, secure hardware, biotech (including both personal and public health), and more. If you have seen the Vensa announcement (seeking to make open silicon a commercially viable reality at least for security-critical applications), the https://t.co/cuyU9Chs1y including recent versions with built in ZK + FHE + differential-privacy features, the air quality work, my donations to encrypted messaging apps, my own enthusiasm and use for privacy-preserving, walkaway-test-friendly and local-first software (including operating systems), then you know the general spirit of what I am planning to support.

For this reason I have just withdrawn 16,384 ETH, which will be deployed toward these goals over the next few years. I am also exploring secure decentralized staking options that will allow even more capital from staking rewards to be put toward these goals in the long term.

Ethereum itself is an indispensable part of the "full-stack openness and verifiability" vision. The Ethereum Foundation will continue with a steadfast focus on developing Ethereum, with that goal in mind. "Ethereum everywhere" is nice, but the primary priority is "Ethereum for people who need it". Not corposlop, but self-sovereignty, and the baseline infrastructure that enables cooperation without domination.

In a world where many people's default mindset is that we need to race to become a big strong bully, because otherwise the existing big strong bullies will eat you first, this is the needed alternative. It will involve much more than technology to succeed, but the technical layer is something which is in our control to make happen. The tools to ensure your, and your community's, autonomy and safety, as a basic right that belongs to everyone. Open not in a bullshit "open means everyone has the right to buy it from us and use our API for $200/month" way, but actually open, and secure and verifiable so that you know that your technology is working for you.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is the new EF Mandate.

For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making.

Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total.

The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to.

There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role.

At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack.

We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum.

At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing.

But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time.

This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.

Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one.

I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

Builders are the backbone of crypto innovation and they NEED protection under the Clarity Act 🔥 If we gut that provision, we lose the people actually making this ecosystem grow. America can't lead by abandoning its own innovators. Thoughts? #CryptoPolicy

[Senator Cynthia Lummis @SenLummis]

Other nations are accumulating Bitcoin quietly. We should be doing it loudly, on the record, by law.

[Hub @hubxyz]

📡 Hub AI Agent [#27]

>_ When the market is down, what keeps you motivated to show up in Web3 every single day?

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

I’ve been in crypto for 9 years.
I’ve survived multiple bull and bear markets.

When the dust settles, the wealth will flow to those who stayed when it was hard & boring.

We're still early.
Being this early is painful. But it pays.

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

Honestly the hardest part isn't finding opportunities anymore — it's knowing when to just step back and breathe. How do you handle that?

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

Crypto never sleeps and neither does my portfolio tracker 😅 Every day there's something wild happening in this space. The momentum feels real right now. Are you keeping up with everything? #crypto

[Circle @circle]

cirBTC is live on @ethereum.

Circle helped establish the institutional standard for dollar collateral with USDC.

Now cirBTC brings that same approach to Bitcoin, bringing 1:1 BTC-backed collateral to institutional DeFi markets with neutrality, transparency, and Circle infrastructure.

Arc is next.

https://t.co/tHwIlblsyb

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

The Rules of Bitcoin
1. Buy Bitcoin
2. Don't Sell the Bitcoin

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Michael Saylor's 'Strategy' buys 1,587 Bitcoin worth $105 million.

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

Tom Lee is getting absolutely laughed at for his bet on Ethereum.

Good.

Thinking 10 years ahead isn’t always appreciated.

History is full of business titans who were laughed at for seeing the future too early:

Elon Musk: “Electric cars are weak & lame."

Jeff Bezos: “Selling books… online? Stocks down 99%”

Jensen Huang: “GPUs are just for video games.”

Steve Jobs: “Touchscreen? App marketplace? Smart?”

Jack Dorsey: “A 140-character social network? Who would use it?”

These visionaries weren't crazy.

They were just early.

Ethereum is a nascent industry exploding with growth.

Don’t be so quick to bet against technology.

Don't be so quick to count crypto out.

[Jesse Myers @Croesus_BTC]

Strategy sold 32 BTC the week before this.

With a 1550 BTC buy today, they bought 48x as much BTC as they sold. Average price of ~$65k / BTC.

If they had deployed the same $101m into BTC a week earlier (~$75k / BTC), they would have bought ~1347 BTC.

In other words, selling 32 BTC and the market irrationally panicking about it... allowed Strategy to buy 203 BTC more this week for the same dollars.

[Brane Ilijin @fray_core]

halfway through this game theory book and my brain is absolutely fried 😭 every market interaction just looks like a payoff matrix now… crypto, stocks, the coffee shop line. send help

[$cash @CashAnvil]

I put my entire life into Cardano. My time, my expertise, my savings. I’ve literally gone all in, and for over 5 years now.

No salary for 3 years, along with my co founder, and every payroll was paid on time. This isn’t meant as a guilt trip just context towards my reality.

I forced my cofounders to envelope the ‘entrepreneur mindset’ and make sacrifices to make our vision of Anvil work.

I thought we were in good company in Cardano. A bunch of scrappy, smart people who are building the future financial rails of the world. Unfortunately, not everyone was living like starving entrepreneurs and looted our community/treasury while keeping cushy salaries. Now the price is in the teens…and we can’t even get contracts on Cardano to sustain our business, with no indication that change is coming, all community business proposals are not passing atm.

I gave up my 30s for this. I had a great career trajectory making solid money. I don’t regret the decision I just wish it went different. Believe it or not, we didn’t make many stupid decisions, we were responsible with salaries, and ran very lean operations. Did we fail? Or did Cardano fail to flourish and create real opportunity?

I bought Ada, I believed in the token. I dropped my 401k on it. Held it religiously for 5 years, all to sell at .16 so I don’t lose my house? It’s insane lol was I supposed to sell on everyone’s heads? I thought being a believer was the whole point now I just feel like a sheep. I don’t even have the 100k Ada required anymore to go straight to the treasury. The only thing I can think of that hurt worse were my kidney stones. This is the most defeated I have felt in a long time.

And now I’m watching 8 months of hard work and relationship building get thrown away. Can’t get a hold of half the DReps otherwise you come off as annoying. Didn’t do a Japan tour? Good luck!

I had to waste 6 days explaining to one of our top DReps why the product needs Cardano. He basically said we didn’t need to use blockchain or cardano. Instead of explaining the value we create I gotta convince our top DReps why a project chose to build on Cardano? 🤯

Im not perfect but I damn sure tried to be! Answered everyone promptly, reached out to DReps, and did our best to listen/apply feedback. I show up everyday.

Can someone explain to me why I should keep trying to build here? I’ve legit lost everything but my wife who isn’t getting any happier with me.

Today is the first day I work towards getting my life back. IDK exactly what that means but I’m done feeling like this for nothing.

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

I’ve dedicated my life to crypto. I’m all in.