Pension funds playing it safe with 1% crypto? Could be underwhelming… or the start of something huge. When institutions creep in quietly like this, I've learned not to ignore it. Japan watching closely 👀 #Bitcoin
Who else sees this as a signal?
Weirdest Crypto conditions ever.
Most altcoins keep dying
#Bitcoin mostly sucks. Whales want Saylor to capitulate.
$HYPE doesn't care what the market is doing
$ZEC is like I might jump off a cliff but maybe I won't.
Then every 3 days a random altcoin does a 50% pump before selling off 2 days later.
PvP baby. Eat or be eaten.
Bitcoin bear markets make fools of both bulls and bears.
BTC rallied from $80k to $98k from November 2025 to January 2026.
People were calling for the supercycle and alt season.
Then BTC set new cycle lows in February 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.
BTC rallied from $60k to $82k from February 2026 to May 2026, and the bears were relentlessly mocked and ridiculed again.
Then BTC set new cycle lows in June 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.
The cycle keeps playing out.
It makes the bulls look like fools because the market trends up for so long, only to wipe out all of the gains in a very short period.
It makes the bears look like fools because the market spends a lot of time trending up, before breaking down quickly. So the bear thesis will often look wrong, even when its right.
Do not let emotions rule your investment decisions. Have a plan and stick to it.
Big move! Bipartisan senators pushing Treasury to let states keep real power over stablecoin rules under GENIUS 🏛️ Decentralization matters even in policy. This could shape crypto regulation for years. Who's paying attention to this? #Crypto
Now, the quantum resistance roadmap.
Today, four things in Ethereum are quantum-vulnerable:
* consensus-layer BLS signatures
* data availability (KZG commitments+proofs)
* EOA signatures (ECDSA)
* Application-layer ZK proofs (KZG or groth16)
We can tackle these step by step:
## Consensus-layer signatures
Lean consensus includes fully replacing BLS signatures with hash-based signatures (some variant of Winternitz), and using STARKs to do aggregation.
Before lean finality, we stand a good chance of getting the Lean available chain. This also involves hash-based signatures, but there are much fewer signatures (eg. 256-1024 per slot), so we do not need STARKs for aggregation.
One important thing upstream of this is choosing the hash function. This may be "Ethereum's last hash function", so it's important to choose wisely. Conventional hashes are too slow, and the most aggressive forms of Poseidon have taken hits on their security analysis recently. Likely options are:
* Poseidon2 plus extra rounds, potentially non-arithmetic layers (eg. Monolith) mixed in
* Poseidon1 (the older version of Poseidon, not vulnerable to any of the recent attacks on Poseidon2, but 2x slower)
* BLAKE3 or similar (take the most efficient conventional hash we know)
## Data availability
Today, we rely pretty heavily on KZG for erasure coding. We could move to STARKs, but this has two problems:
1. If we want to do 2D DAS, then our current setup for this relies on the "linearity" property of KZG commitments; with STARKs we don't have that. However, our current thinking is that it should be sufficient given our scale targets to just max out 1D DAS (ie. PeerDAS). Ethereum is taking a more conservative posture, it's not trying to be a high-scale data layer for the world.
2. We need proofs that erasure coded blobs are correctly constructed. KZG does this "for free". STARKs can substitute, but a STARK is ... bigger than a blob. So you need recursive starks (though there's also alternative techniques, that have their own tradeoffs). This is okay, but the logistics of this get harder if you want to support distributed blob selection.
Summary: it's manageable, but there's a lot of engineering work to do.
## EOA signatures
Here, the answer is clear: we add native AA (see https://t.co/YD9nIpsxcC ), so that we get first-class accounts that can use any signature algorithm.
However, to make this work, we also need quantum-resistant signature algorithms to actually be viable. ECDSA signature verification costs 3000 gas. Quantum-resistant signatures are ... much much larger and heavier to verify.
We know of quantum-resistant hash-based signatures that are in the ~200k gas range to verify.
We also know of lattice-based quantum-resistant signatures. Today, these are extremely inefficient to verify. However, there is work on vectorized math precompiles, that let you perform operations (+, *, %, dot product, also NTT / butterfly permutations) that are at the core of lattice math, and also STARKs. This could greatly reduce the gas cost of lattice-based signatures to a similar range, and potentially go even lower.
The long-term fix is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation, which could reduce these gas overheads to near-zero.
## Proofs
Today, a ZK-SNARK costs ~300-500k gas. A quantum-resistant STARK is more like 10m gas. The latter is unacceptable for privacy protocols, L2s, and other users of proofs.
The solution again is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation. So let's talk about what this is.
In EIP-8141, transactions have the ability to include a "validation frame", during which signature verifications and similar operations are supposed to happen. Validation frames cannot access the outside world, they can only look at their calldata and return a value, and nothing else can look at their calldata. This is designed so that it's possible to replace any validation frame (and its calldata) with a STARK that verifies it (potentially a single STARK for all the validation frames in a block).
This way, a block could "contain" a thousand validation frames, each of which contains either a 3 kB signature or even a 256 kB proof, but that 3-256 MB (and the computation needed to verify it) would never come onchain. Instead, it would all get replaced by a proof verifying that the computation is correct.
Potentially, this proving does not even need to be done by the block builder. Instead, I envision that it happens at mempool layer: every 500ms, each node could pass along the new valid transactions that it has seen, along with a proof verifying that they are all valid (including having validation frames that match their stated effects). The overhead is static: only one proof per 500ms. Here's a post where I talk about this:
https://t.co/rAUSJjW7WL
https://t.co/EtXpkaDll5
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.
Post-gym brain is just built different. Why is it that the clearest thinking always happens after you're completely exhausted? Mapped out some long-term plays in my head before I even hit the shower 💪
$12M in crypto money flowing into Alabama Senate race 👀 When PACs start dropping 7-figure sums on political ads, you KNOW this space is growing fast. Are we really surprised crypto is flexing political muscle now? #CryptoVotes
Thoughts?
Crypto never sleeps 😅 Another wild day of noise, drama, and hidden gems buried in the headlines. Learning to filter the FUD from the real signals is honestly the real skill here. Anyone else getting better at this? #crypto