Mexico genuinely has one of the best stadiums at this World Cup, yet it's barely getting the recognition it deserves. That view is absolutely unreal. 🇲🇽
13/ Finally, today’s thread might have been about Alex, but Roman Storm’s legal battle in the US is also still ongoing.
Please follow @rstormsf as well as @alex_pertsev, and if you can, support Roman’s legal defense too.
https://t.co/WhLzYtSP3E
Big signal for ETH.
@ethlabs_org just launched as an independent nonprofit R&D lab founded by former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers and backed by Bitmine, SharpLink, Joe Lubin, Anchorage, Octant and SNZ.
The mission is simple:
Make Ethereum ready for institutions, AI agents, DeFi and the next wave of onchain finance.
This is what an institutional supercycle actually looks like.
Capital backing core protocol talent.
ETH becoming the neutral settlement layer for the global economy.
Ethereum is accelerating.
https://t.co/mMJg5iyGPI
1. Intro
Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution.
We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable.
The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about
2. What the EF is not for
We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats.
3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses
We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion.
We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage).
The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible?
The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer.
The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries.
If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space.
None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity.
In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen.
MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here.
Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second.
It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust.
Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points.
The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible.
Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide.
4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities
Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including:
* Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed.
* Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it.
* Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense.
* Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this.
* Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms.
* Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load.
We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum.
Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
5. Addressing departures
There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content.
Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle.
Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs.
6. Addressing EF spinouts
Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation.
The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work.
Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding:
“Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?”
EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency.
Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate.
EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not.
We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.
One of Ethereum's biggest upgrades is now in the final testing phase.
Mainnet is loosely targeted for the second half of 2026, and one of the EF devs is already calling it the biggest fork since the Merge.
These are some of the planned upgrades:
→ ePBS (EIP-7732): block-building gets baked into Ethereum itself
→ Block-level access lists (EIP-7928): blocks start running in parallel
→ Gas repricing: compute gets cheaper, state growth gets pricier
→ Gas limit: increased over time from ~60M toward 200M
IMO, the most significant change is ePBS.
Right now, close to 90% of blocks are built by outside builders and passed through offchain relays like MEV-Boost, which is critical infrastructure that Ethereum doesn't control.
ePBS builds that step directly into Ethereum, which cuts out the relay middleman and the ordering/censorship risk that comes with it.
Do you think this will put ETH into the spotlight again?
Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick explains his $40,000 ETH price target by 2030
“I think a lot of [tradfi activity] happens on Ethereum Layer 1. I think about how BlackRock rolled out BUIDL, for example — all on layer 1 Ethereum… which I think is a more logical playbook for how tradfi will approach this buildout in the next year. And if you assume that more activity equals higher token price — which I think is correct (today I find the best measure is fees paid on the applications or protocols built on the Ethereum network) — I think that means ETH outperforms now and for the foreseeable.”
Geoffrey Kendrick is the Global Head of Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered and former Head of Asia FX & Rates Strategy at Morgan Stanley. He believes the ETH/BTC ratio will go from 0.03 today to 0.04 by the end of 2026, which is a $4,000 price target for ETH at $100,000 BTC.
“My long-term forecast is $500,000 BTC by 2030 and $40,000 Ethereum by 2030… roughly 20x [for Ethereum], but a huge outperformance [versus Bitcoin] as well. And it’s because all the use cases we’ve been talking about, will almost all happen on Ethereum.”
Source: @MilkRoadMacro@milkroaddaily (Mar 2026)
Ethereum is one of the most misunderstood assets because it is the most miscategorized. Depending on the day, the market keeps trying to price ETH as a currency, a tech stock, a bet on transaction fees, or a Bitcoin follower, and on every one of those frames, it looks overvalued or underwhelming.
History has a habit of repeating itself whenever a new foundational technology emerges. Before society fully understands its significance, the technology is often dismissed, undervalued, misunderstood, and judged by the wrong metrics. The Internet followed this pattern. Blockchain, and especially Ethereum, is following it today.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Internet was widely viewed as an academic curiosity rather than a commercial opportunity. Its users were primarily researchers, government agencies, military institutions, and hobbyists. To the average person, it appeared complicated, slow, and irrelevant. Major newspapers questioned why anyone would want to read news on a computer screen rather than in print. AT&T reportedly passed on opportunities related to ARPANET because it saw little commercial future in the technology.
Even prominent thinkers failed to grasp its potential. In 1995, Clifford Stoll famously argued that online commerce, digital communities, and electronic publishing were largely fantasies. Three years later, economist Paul Krugman predicted that the Internet's economic impact would prove no greater than that of the fax machine.
Their mistake was not a lack of intelligence. It was a failure to recognize that foundational infrastructure creates value indirectly before it creates value directly.
The Internet was initially evaluated as a product. In reality, it was becoming a platform. It was not merely another communications tool; it was a new coordination layer for society. It would eventually become the foundation upon which entirely new industries, business models, and forms of human interaction could emerge.
The same misunderstanding exists today with blockchain networks.
Many observers evaluate blockchains as if they were standalone applications. They ask how much revenue they generate, how many fees users pay, or whether transaction costs are rising or falling. These questions are useful, but they often miss the larger picture.
Ethereum is not primarily an application. It is infrastructure.
Just as the Internet created a global network for the exchange of information, Ethereum creates a global network for the exchange of value, ownership, trust, and programmable agreements. It provides a neutral settlement layer upon which thousands of applications, protocols, financial products, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and digital organizations can operate.
The Internet's most important value did not reside within TCP/IP, HTTP, or email protocols themselves. Its value emerged from what others built on top of those standards. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Shopify, and countless other companies captured enormous economic value because the Internet provided an open platform for innovation.
Ethereum operates according to the same principle.
Its value is not limited to transaction fees. It derives from securing trillions of dollars in future economic activity, enabling decentralized financial markets, supporting stablecoin ecosystems, facilitating tokenized real-world assets, and serving as the trust infrastructure for a new digital economy.
The Internet also experienced its own cycle of misunderstanding. The dot-com boom correctly identified the technology's importance but wildly overestimated the short-term value of many companies built upon it. The subsequent crash led critics to declare the Internet overhyped and disappointing.
Yet the crash did not invalidate the technology. It merely removed speculation while leaving behind critical infrastructure. Fiber-optic networks, data centers, software tools, and developer talent continued to improve. The result was the emergence of Web 2.0, cloud computing, social media, and eventually the modern digital economy.
Today, many governments worldwide have officially reclassified broadband internet as a critical public utility, on par with water and electricity. The digital economy now accounts for over 15% of global GDP, driving exponential growth in visual and financial markets. The COVID-19 pandemic permanently proved that the global economy could not function or survive without internet infrastructure.
Blockchain is experiencing a similar phase today. Speculative excesses have obscured genuine innovation. Failed projects have led critics to dismiss the entire sector. Yet beneath the surface, the infrastructure continues to mature. Scalability is improving. Security is strengthening. Stablecoins are growing rapidly. Tokenization is accelerating. Institutional adoption is increasing.
The market's challenge is that infrastructure is difficult to value before its full utility becomes obvious.
Few people in 1995 could imagine that the Internet would become essential to commerce, communication, entertainment, education, and work. Today, global society would struggle to function without it.
Likewise, many people still view Ethereum as a niche technology for traders, speculators, or technologists. But if blockchain becomes the trust layer for global finance, digital identity, asset ownership, and machine-to-machine commerce, then today's valuations may ultimately look as shortsighted as the skepticism once directed toward the Internet.
The lesson of history is simple: transformational infrastructure is rarely understood in real time. The Internet was underestimated because people measured what it was rather than what it could become. Ethereum faces the same challenge today. Its greatest value lies not in the activity we can already see, but in the vast economic and social systems it may eventually support.
What makes me so angry about @TrustlessState quitting ETH is not that he did it. I mean, I get it, ETH has underperformed for years. It’s fair to move on eventually. That’s exactly how capitulations work. They make room for those who have more conviction.
The timing, though, makes no sense to me at all.
Ethereum is in the strongest position it has ever been in since its inception.
You can’t even name a serious competitor anymore. The “ETH killer” narrative is gone. The last major contender, SOL, has taken a phenomenal nosedive against ETH, and other networks aren’t even trying to market or position themselves against Ethereum anymore.
For the first time in its history, Ethereum is undisputed, ~3 months before a major scaling upgrade and with the most respected and ambitious roadmap for the next three years.
It leads in quantum, consensus, and execution research. It has by far the largest developer ecosystem, and it’s the only chain with a 100% green light from institutions, which will be a massive catalyst as the CLARITY Act moves forward.
There isn’t really an alternative to ETH as a store of value, which was his whole point a few years ago with the Triple Point Asset thesis.
Nothing has changed.
The only thing that has changed is that David is fed up with ETH, which, again, is fine. There are assets with revenue now that will likely perform exceptionally well as crypto grows larger, and he probably has an edge in identifying those opportunities given his position.
But ETH is here to stay and dominate the next 10 years, and I find it unlikely that more than 0.1% of people will outperform it by picking other crypto winners.
Good morning @ethereum.
ETH is now priced better onchain than on Binance or Uniswap, courtesy of PropAMMs running on @titanbuilderxyz and @class_lambda.
This is just the beginning. More assets, more PropAMMs, more market makers. Ethereum wins. Users win.
Ethereum will become the financial backend of the world. Fast, cheap, secure, it just needs a push. That's what @blockspaceforum, @eth_proofs, and @leanEthereum are for.
ethereum staking ratio just hit 32.4% ATH. $110B+ locked up by validators. this happened during 14 consecutive days of ETF outflows and david hoffman selling his stack. the people running the network are accumulating. the people watching the chart are capitulating. 50%+ of global stablecoin value still settles on ethereum. blackrock's BUIDL fund, $13.6B in tokenized treasuries, circle's entire rails. all ethereum. the best fundamental bet in crypto and the worst momentum trade at the same time. remember when everyone hated BTC at $16k? a minute of silence for the sellers
With David’s gone time for me to admit “Eth is money” is the correct thesis
Just not how most people think
All assets will be tokenized
People will hold whatever assets they most value (the most decentralized money is infinite forms of money competing)
No need for a single unit of account if you have a low cost, efficient way to exchange any asset 24/7
Uniswap on Ethereum is the best decentralized money system and it’s still the early days 🦄
17M ENS resolutions served 🫡
we built Resolvio mostly because we were annoyed that we had to reimplement ENS resolution from 0 for every new product.
resolving ENS names should be a piece of cake.
and now it is.👇
Lighter is quietly becoming Ethereum’s killer app. By abandoning general-purpose L2 constraints for an app-specific ZK architecture, it eliminates the fee drag that suffocates on-chain trading.
Sub-10ms matching and 0% retail fees bring CEX scale to Ethereum.
You can’t be bullish privacy and DeFi when there’s no DeFi on your chain to start with. But the loudest ZEC bulls don’t use DeFi—just shill you the retarded narrative.
Truth is these big accounts never knew much about how to use DeFi, other than claiming to dump vested tokens.