Natalia 🥰

20 ♡ | FL 🇺🇸

[CoinDesk @CoinDesk]

HISTORY: Seven years ago today, @chainlink launched on Ethereum mainnet with a single ETH/USD price feed and three oracle nodes.

[Crash @CrashiusClay69]

Drop a solana address

Sending money to good people that deserve a win in life

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

Mark Cuban sold
Michael Saylor sold
BlackRock sold
Willy Woo sold
David Hoffman sold

Who else is starting to get bullish? $BTC $ETH

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

$BTC holding strong. Are you accumulating or waiting? #Bitcoin #Crypto

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.

Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later)

But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission:

To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.

We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.

These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord.

Ethereum is the rebellion against this.

To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more.

Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will.

Wishing everyone an exciting 2026.

Milady.

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

Wanted to add — this is early stage thinking.

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

Another day bullish on crypto. DYOR and hold tight #Crypto #BTC

[Kalshi Crypto @Kalshi_Crypto]

JUST IN: Tom Lee's 'BitMine' buys $50M worth of Ethereum

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

Web3 is still early. Those who see it will win #Crypto #Web3

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

One last flush lower.

After that, $ETH runs the most hated rally of all time!

Bitcoin will run to $200,000!

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Binance to allow conversion of US stocks to tokenized stocks on BNB blockchain.

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

Altcoin holders waited 5 years for altseason.

Most altcoins are now down 90%.

Meanwhile every other asset on the planet is pumping.

RIP altcoin holders.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Finally, the block building pipeline.

In Glamsterdam, Ethereum is getting ePBS, which lets proposers outsource to a free permissionless market of block builders.

This ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization, but it leaves the question: what do we do about block builder centralization? And what are the _other_ problems in the block building pipeline that need to be addressed, and how? This has both in-protocol and extra-protocol components.

## FOCIL

FOCIL is the first step into in-protocol multi-participant block building. FOCIL lets 16 randomly-selected attesters each choose a few transactions, which *must* be included somewhere in the block (the block gets rejected otherwise). This means that even if 100% of block building is taken over by one hostile actor, they cannot prevent transactions from being included, because the FOCILers will push them in.

## "Big FOCIL"

This is more speculative, but has been discussed as a possible next step. The idea is to make the FOCILs bigger, so they can include all of the transactions in the block.

We avoid duplication by having the i'th FOCIL'er by default only include (i) txs whose sender address's first hex char is i, and (ii) txs that were around but not included in the previous slot. So at the cost of one slot delay, only censored txs risk duplication.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, the builder's role could become reduced to ONLY including "MEV-relevant" transactions (eg. DEX arbitrage), and computing the state transition.

## Encrypted mempools

Encrypted mempools are one solution being explored to solve "toxic MEV": attacks such as sandwiching and frontrunning, which are exploitative against users. If a transaction is encrypted until it's included, no one gets the opportunity to "wrap" it in a hostile way.

The technical challenge is: how to guarantee validity in a mempool-friendly and inclusion-friendly way that is efficient, and what technique to use to guarantee that the transaction will actually get decrypted once the block is made (and not before).

## The transaction ingress layer

One thing often ignored in discussions of MEV, privacy, and other issues is the network layer: what happens in between a user sending out a transaction, and that transaction making it into a block? There are many risks if a hostile actor sees a tx "in the clear" inflight:

* If it's a defi trade or otherwise MEV-relevant, they can sandwich it
* In many applications, they can prepend some other action which invalidates it, not stealing money, but "griefing" you, causing you to waste time and gas fees
* If you are sending a sensitive tx through a privacy protocol, even if it's all private onchain, if you send it through an RPC, the RPC can see what you did, if you send it through the public mempool, any analytics agency that runs many nodes will see what you did

There has recently been increasing work on network-layer anonymization for transactions: exploring using Tor for routing transactions, ideas around building a custom ethereum-focused mixnet, non-mixnet designs that are more latency-minimized (but bandwidth-heavier, which is ok for transactions as they are tiny) like Flashnet, etc. This is an open design space, I expect the kohaku initiative @ncsgy will be interested in integrating pluggable support for such protocols, like it is for onchain privacy protocols.

There is also room for doing (benign, pro-user) things to transactions before including them onchain; this is very relevant for defi. Basically, we want ideal order-matching, as a passive feature of the network layer without dependence on servers. Of course enabling good uses of this without enabling sandwiching involves cryptography or other security, some important challenges there.

## Long-term distributed block building

There is a dream, that we can make Ethereum truly like BitTorrent: able to process far more transactions than any single server needs to ever coalesce locally. The challenge with this vision is that Ethereum has (and indeed a core value proposition is) synchronous shared state, so any tx could in principle depend on any other tx. This centralizes block building.

"Big FOCIL" handles this partially, and it could be done extra-protocol too, but you still need one central actor to put everything in order and execute it.

We could come up with designs that address this. One idea is to do the same thing that we want to do for state: acknowledge that >95% of Ethereum's activity doesn't really _need_ full globalness, though the 5% that does is often high-value, and create new categories of txs that are less global, and so friendly to fully distributed building, and make them much cheaper, while leaving the current tx types in place but (relatively) more expensive.

This is also an open and exciting long-term future design space.
https://t.co/CdpE9ugFxE

[David Hoffman @TrustlessState]

I spent the weekend putting my thoughts about $ETH and Ethereum into this article

I built my career, community, and business on Ethereum, so the decision to sell deserves a deeper explanation

I hope this is sufficient

Thank you, all

[mert @mert]

we are going to reduce solana inflation

read the proposal if you want then get ready to vote yes

there will be no mercy this time

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

$MSTR - MICROSTRATEGY SELLS 32 BTC FOR $2.5M AT AVERAGE OF $77.135M: FILING

[cPen Network @cPenCoreTeam]

🚀 cPen 1.2.17 Update is Here! 🚀

We’ve just launched our latest cPen app update on Android (iOS coming soon)! 🎉

You can now enter your BSC wallet address for the upcoming token distribution in the first quarter of 2025 (exact date TBA). 📍🛠️

Please note that the address must be from a self-custodial wallet (such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or OKX Web3 Wallet) that you control. Do not use addresses from centralized exchanges (CEX).

Make sure you verify your wallet address carefully. If you provide an incorrect address or a CEX address, your tokens will be lost permanently and cannot be recovered.

If you haven’t installed the cPen mobile app yet, download it here: https://t.co/HB3sJFnF8S

Thank you for your continued support—together, we’ll make a difference!

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

@cherrytoesx that pose knew what it was doing.

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

@2amEditor this stopped me too fast.

[Natalia 🥰 @gall_counter]

@Ericaa133 this is unfairly distracting.