🔥 INSIGHT: Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says tokenized assets don’t need a single “trust commodity,”.
He says L1 coins, RWAs and memecoins can coordinate around the least contentious fork.
🚨 TODAY: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong argues agents need programmable, global, low-fee money to operate, declaring "crypto is the currency of AiFi (agentic finance)."
🇺🇸 JUST IN: The CFTC will discuss crypto regulation, AI agents and prediction markets at its inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee meeting on Aug. 20.
⚡️ LATEST: Grayscale says AI adoption could increase demand for public blockchains through agentic finance, verifiable records and decentralized AI alternatives.
🇺��� JUST IN: Fed Governor Kevin Warsh says he has completed all divestitures required under his ethics agreement.
He previously disclosed more than $100M in holdings, including crypto and AI investments.
🇺🇸🇮🇷 NEW: Iran says the Oman deal on the Strait of Hormuz is in its "final stages," but the waterway won't reopen until the US meets Tehran's conditions.
🔥 HUGE: Berkshire spent $39.4 billion buying stocks in six months while sitting on $359 billion in cash, and still wrote a $4.8 billion check to buy back its own.
We need more DAOs - but different and better DAOs.
The original drive to build Ethereum was heavily inspired by decentralized autonomous organizations: systems of code and rules that lived on decentralized networks that could manage resources and direct activity, more efficiently and more robustly than traditional governments and corporations could.
Since then, the concept of DAOs has migrated to essentially referring to a treasury controlled by token holder voting - a design which "works", hence why it got copied so much, but a design which is inefficient, vulnerable to capture, and fails utterly at the goal of mitigating the weaknesses of human politics. As a result, many have become cynical about DAOs.
But we need DAOs.
* We need DAOs to create better oracles. Today, decentralized stablecoins, prediction markets, and other basic building blocks of defi are built on oracle designs that we are not satisfied with. If the oracle is token based, whales can manipulate the answer on a subjective issue and it becomes difficult to counteract them. Fundamentally, a token-based oracle cannot have a cost of attack higher than its market cap, which in turn means it cannot secure assets without extracting rent higher than the discount rate. And if the oracle uses human curation, then it's not very decentralized. The problem here is not greed. The problem is that we have bad oracle designs, we need better ones, and bootstrapping them is not just a technical problem but also a social problem.
* We need DAOs for onchain dispute resolution, a necessary component of many types of more advanced smart contract use cases (eg. insurance). This is the same type of problem as price oracles, but even more subjective, and so even harder to get right.
* We need DAOs to maintain lists. This includes: lists of applications known to be secure or not scams, lists of canonical interfaces, lists of token contract addresses, and much more.
* We need DAOs to get projects off the ground quickly. If you have a group of people, who all want something done and are willing to contribute some funds (perhaps in exchange for benefits), then how do you manage this, especially if the task is too short-duration for legal entities to be worth it?
* We need DAOs to do long-term project maintenance. If the original team of a project disappears, how can a community keep going, and how can new people coming in get the funding they need?
One framework that I use to analyze this is "convex vs concave" from https://t.co/1BrMsUAKWK . If the DAO is solving a concave problem, then it is in an environment where, if faced with two possible courses of action, a compromise is better than a coin flip. Hence, you want systems that maximize robustness by averaging (or rather, medianing) in input from many sources, and protect against capture and financial attacks. If the DAO is solving a convex problem, then you want the ability to make decisive choices and follow through on them. In this case, leaders can be good, and the job of the decentralized process should be to keep the leaders in check.
For all of this to work, we need to solve two problems: privacy, and decision fatigue. Without privacy, governance becomes a social game (see https://t.co/uMXcuzQNjM ). And if people have to make decisions every week, for the first month you see excited participation, but over time willingness to participate, and even to stay informed, declines.
I see modern technology as opening the door to a renaissance here. Specifically:
* ZK (and in some cases MPC/FHE, though these should be used only when ZK along cannot solve the problem) for privacy
* AI to solve decision fatigue
* Consensus-finding communication tools (like https://t.co/Nzord32Ub1, but going further)
AI must be used carefully: we must *not* put full-size deepseek (or worse, GPT 5.2) in charge of a DAO and call it a day. Rather, AI must be put in thoughtfully, as something that scales and enhances human intention and judgement, rather than replacing it. This could be done at DAO level (eg. see how https://t.co/pCHI7Mlo2m works), or at individual level (user-controlled local LLMs that vote on their behalf).
It is important to think about the "DAO stack" as also including the communication layer, hence the need for forums and platforms specially designed for the purpose. A multisig plus well-designed consensus-finding tools can easily beat idealized collusion-resistant quadratic funding plus crypto twitter.
But in all cases, we need new designs. Projects that need new oracles and want to build their own should see that as 50% of their job, not 10%.
Projects working on new governance designs should build with ZK and AI in mind, and they should treat the communication layer as 50% of their job, not 10%.
This is how we can ensure the decentralization and robustness of the Ethereum base layer also applies to the world that gets built on top.
“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”
This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/QAvZfiNxpe ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means.
“efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec.
These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience.
Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY.
Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms.
Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant.
Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign.
This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away.
This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need.
The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others.
Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.