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I think it's healthy for us in the Ethereum world to have a more bold and open mindset to many things, particularly on the application layer and on how we see ourselves in the world.
We should not compromise on core properties: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security (CROPS). We should not have "open mindedness" of the type that leaves people with no confidence of what security properties the L1 will still have one year from now. We should not ask ourselves questions like "do we really need light clients to be able to trustlessly verify correctness of the chain?". But especially on the layer of applications and Ethereum's interface to the world, we should be more willing to radically rethink various concepts and step outside our comfort zone.
This includes issues of technological direction, eg. "what if AI basically means that wallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions are dead within a year?"
One example last year was the shift to thinking about privacy as a first-class consideration, something we value equally to the other types of security. This implies a radically different Ethereum application stack, because the entire stack so far has not been built around privacy. Great, let's build a radically different Ethereum application stack!
An example this year is the growing work on the networking side of privacy, both inside the EF and outside.
It includes application-layer issues, eg. "what if the rest of defi is basically just universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle and letting users self-organize on top of that?", and "what if the ideal decentralized oracle is just a SNARK over M-of-N small LLMs over zk-TLSes of some major news sites?"
(BTW this is interrelated with the AI issue: one consequence of AI is that it moves "applications" away from being discrete categories of behavior with discrete UIs, and more toward being a continuous space, so "build fewer apps and rely on users to self-organize around them" should inevitably expand as a pattern)
One example this year is rethinking from zero the role of L2s, and what kind of L2s are actually most synergistic and additive to Ethereum.
It also includes culture. This is a big part of "the whole milady thing" for myself, @AyaMiyagotchi and others. Yes, it's a silly meme. Yes, I find the political takes of some milady partisans cringe and sometimes outright bootlickerish (though other milady partisans are quite the opposite). But the core underlying subtext, the message behind the message, is: rip off the suit and tie. If you have your suit and tie on, be willing to grab the nearest wine glass and spill it all over your suit and tie, so you have no choice but to rip it off and reclaim your body's full flexibility and freedom. Actually imagine yourself doing this the next time you get invited to a richpeopleslop formal gala dinner. Take the preconception that you are "respectable", write it down on a piece of paper, crumble it up and burn it. The psychological baptism of doing this leads to the intellectual baptism of unlocking greater creativity and expanding overton windows.
For too long, our algorithm in Ethereum has been: we have this existing ecosystem, what's the logical next step to make it one step better? Now, our algorithm should be: we have this L1 that is amazing and will become more amazing, we have a growing array of tools, both those built within our ecosystem and outside it, what are the most valuable things to build, knowing what we know now? If YOU had to write the section of the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper that talked about applications, and take a first-principles perspective of what makes sense in defi, decentralized social, identity, and elsewhere, what would you write? At least take the step of marking all path-dependence concerns down to zero, pretend for a brief moment that the Ethereum chain today has exactly zero usage and you're the one suggesting or building the first apps, and see what comes out. Do this even if you're the one building today's existing apps. This is how Ethereum can grow back stronger.
Everyone in crypto needs to zoom out.
Unless you're a trader, as an investor, don't feel you need to focus on the week to week headlines. Don't feel you need to focus on the month to month price.
Rather, focus on (a) substance and (b) the year over year timeframe. Look at usage, onchain tech with product-market-fit, large corporates and institutions integrating/ building/ launching things in the space, the quality of teams and execution.
That's the substance. It won't be a straight line. But the substance is undeniably leaping forward from 2022 to 2026.
Recognize it's a long game. The score will take care of itself.
The obvious way to value ETH is using stock-to-flow on net issuance
More transactions means less issuance. No need to complicate it further
The base/bear case puts ETH at 8k as of right now
The math is simple, assume current net issuance of say 1% and ETH supply at 120m - that’s 1.2m new ETH
120m / 1.2m = 100 stock-to-flow
Plugging the numbers into the most conservative model, that puts eth at 8k
Even assuming a ghost chain (so a 2% net issuance) that’s a 50 stock-to-flow so 4K/ETH!!
If you give the curve any shape (stock to flow valuation curves are rarely linear), the numbers just get higher. At even modest curves, Tom Lee’s 250k price target sounds very reasonable
Tl;dr; buy ETH, it’s much higher from here
BITMINE’S PREFERRED STOCK HAS ONE MAJOR DIFFERENCE FROM STRC.
STRC is built around Bitcoin. Bitmine is built around Ethereum, and ETH produces staking income.
If fully issued, Bitmine’s 9.5% preferred costs about $28.5M a year, while projected staking revenue is around $258M-$296M, roughly 9x-10x higher than the preferred cost.
That changes the math.
🔹 $28.5M fixed cost
🔹 $258M-$296M staking revenue
🔹 ETH can fund its own yield
🔹 BTC has no native yield
If ETH rises, Bitmine’s treasury value and staking revenue can grow while the dividend obligation stays fixed.
That is the bullish part.
Tom Lee @fundstrat and Bitmine are applying the preferred stock playbook to a yield producing ETH treasury.
$BMNR $ETH
🔥 Tom Lee made a point about Ethereum that most people are not paying enough attention to.
The Ethereum Foundation used to hold 17% of the ETH supply.
Today, it holds only 100,000 ETH, or about 0.1% of supply.
That is a huge shift.
And according to Lee, it means the old funding model is no longer enough.
Under a traditional foundation model, he estimates the Ethereum Foundation could support only around $10 million in grants.
For a network trying to become the future of finance, that is tiny.
But this is where the story gets interesting.
BitMine, SharpLink, and other public Ethereum treasuries now own around 7% of the ETH supply.
And because that $ETH can generate staking yield, Lee says these treasuries are producing about $500 million a year in rewards.
That completely changes the game.
Ethereum no longer has to depend on one foundation to fund everything.
A wider network of public companies, treasury vehicles, staking rewards, ecosystem grants, L2 builders, and private-sector teams can now help support Ethereum’s growth.
This is why Lee believes Ethereum is entering a new phase.
Not a single foundation carrying the whole ecosystem.
But an entire capital network forming around ETH.
Tom Lee: Ethereum DATs can use ~$500 million in annual staking rewards to fund grants for Ethereum ecosystem
“The Ethereum Treasuries — Bitmine and Sharplink among others — now own 7% of the Ethereum supply… Treasury stock is essentially supply permanently taken out from the ecosystem, but we also own the yield. The yield is around 3% so today these public treasuries are generating ~$500 million in rewards, and that is what we can use to fund and grant the crypto ecosystem.”
Lee believes that the Ethereum Foundation narrowing its focus to CROPs (censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security) is the right decision.
“Ethereum is a $240 billion network value entity. It has been operating for 11 years without a single day of downtime. There’s 11,500 nodes in 89 different countries. And there’s 15,000 developers. I think this is too big to be coordinated by a single foundation.”
As Ethereum continues to scale, he believes the ecosystem will move beyond a foundation-centric model and points to private companies like Etherealize, Optimism, Consensys, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and Offchain Labs that represent the Ethereum ecosystem and are already doing enterprise engagement.
“This list doesn’t yet reflect the spinoffs coming from the Ethereum Foundation. There’s at least five, and I think Bitmine will play a role in granting and supporting any of those that come out.”
“I think Ethereum is in good hands because the foundation is going to be stronger by staying focused. We have a lot of private sector companies already building products and important L2s on Ethereum. And of course, the treasuries are here to help with funding and granting… If you’re bearish, you are selling at the bottom.”
Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.
First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.
The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"
Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.
As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.
One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.
My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.
Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.
This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.
Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?
EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.
This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.
And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.
This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)
EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).
At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.
To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.
I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:
* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.
* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.
* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.
Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.
The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.
EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.
Bullish on @zama!
Acquiring @TokenOps_xyz is a powerful strategic move: bringing confidential vesting + distribution (which has already handled over $2B) fully onchain with FHE.
This protects teams & investors from front-running and hacks, while creating real TVS and protocol revenue.
Long-term holder here 💎
#Zama #ConfidentialComputing #FHE
I am very excited to announce that @zama has acquired @TokenOps_xyz, a full-stack solution for token distribution and vesting that has been used to distribute over $2b so far. Here is why we made the deal and what it means for the Zama Protocol.
# The problem TokenOps is solving
When a company or foundation launches a token, they typically distribute a large portion to their team, early investors and treasury. The issue with doing this on public chains is that every allocation and wallet is visible to everyone. This is a lose-lose situation for everyone involved:
- long-term holders who believe in the project get penalized by bots who front-run token unlocks and push the price down
- team members become targets for hackers and criminals who use tools like Arkham to check how much they hold in their wallets. France alone had 60 kidnappings of crypto founders, employees and family members since the start of the year!
- early investors get flagged on social media and front-run by bots the instant they move tokens to exchanges, leading them to lose a lot of upside. And if investors don't make good returns, they'll imply stop investing and you won't anyone funding new projects in the future.
- treasuries and foundations cannot effectively manage their assets, and often have to split holdings across hundreds of wallets, creating massive operational overhead
TokenOps solves exactly this. By using the Zama Protocol, they enable token issuers to distribute, vest and manage allocations privately, while remaining fully onchain and self-custodial. Each team member and investor can have a single wallet receiving an encrypted amount of tokens. From the outside, you only see that the wallet received tokens and what the vesting terms are, but you no longer know the amount itself.
Beyond confidential distribution and vesting, we are also working on enabling confidential swaps directly within TokenOps, so that anyone receiving an allocation can buy and sell tokens seamlessly without anyone knowing the size or direction. This turns vesting from a static product into an active venue for OTC, treasury management and hedging on compliant rails.
And just like we used our own technology to run our token sale, we will of course use it to distribute allocations to our team and investors. In the coming months, we will shield the entire supply earmarked for team and investors, and distribute it through TokenOps' confidential onchain vesting contracts.
# How this benefits the Zama Protocol
1. it's a great use case of the technology, and it solves a real problem in the market that no transparent solution can address.
2. it creates extremely sticky TVS (Total Value Shielded) for the protocol. Whenever someone gets a vested allocation, they become a user of the Zama Protocol for the duration of their lockup, which is typically 2-4 years. That gives us 2-4 years to build utility for them so they never have to unshield their tokens and leave Zama.
3. it generates real revenue for the Zama Protocol. Every distribution, every claim, every confidential swap generates onchain fees, and all of these fees accrue directly to the protocol and are used to buy back and burn $ZAMA.
Over the next few months, we will turn TokenOps from a SaaS product into a fully onchain platform, owned entirely by the Zama Protocol. Anyone will be able to permissionlessly build on top of it and add confidential distribution and vesting features to their own apps.
If you plan to issue a token, take it for a spin at https://t.co/7MoSFYkRFS!
JUST IN
Zama acquires TokenOps to roll out confidential & fully compliant token distributions, airdrops, and vesting.
Public blockchains just became viable for institutional capital.
@zama When 50% of $ZAMA circulating supply is staked:
→ FHE Coprocessors & KMS nodes gain stronger economic security
→ Decentralization increases, collusion risk drops significantly
→ Confidential smart contracts on any L1/L2 become more trustworthy than ever
The privacy-first future is getting closer. 🔐
#Zama #FHE #ConfidentialComputing
TODAY: 50% of $ZAMA circulating supply is staked.
Over 1.1B $ZAMA is securing the network, across 18 independent operators.
All info: https://t.co/ha6RM4582R