0xOscar🏴‍☠️

A eco-lifelong practitioner & crypto explorer. Be water. 🏴‍☠️🚴‍♂️

[0xOscar🏴‍☠️ @luffythink]

🏴‍☠️Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. — Nicholas Taleb

[0xOscar🏴‍☠️ @luffythink]

@mon1y_ q 老师这分类管理👍🏻

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

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.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The goal of the 𝕏 algorithm is simple: show each user the content they are most likely to find interesting, limited only by the laws within a given jurisdiction. No thumb on the scale.

Doesn’t mean we achieve the goal, but that is what I tell the team.

[Colin Wu @colinwu]

哈耶克的《货币的非国家化》是 Crypto 行业的必读书，而比特币是这本书思想更激进的实验。

哈耶克提出，让私人机构自由发行货币，市场竞争决定谁的货币更可靠。

而比特币更进一步，不是公司发行， 不是银行发行， 也不是私人机构发行。

它是一套开源协议，一组数学规则，一个由全球节点共同维护的共识网络。

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Beautiful machines in space

[Rui_made @ruitongxue]

有没有人会突然很想去古诗词里的地方——
所以我vibecoding了这个应用, 带你领略领略“诗词山河”
#classicpoetry #chinesepoetry #literature #slowliving #getaway #poetrylovers

[OpenAI Developers @OpenAIDevs]

Subagents are now available in Codex.

You can accelerate your workflow by spinning up specialized agents to:
• Keep your main context window clean
• Tackle different parts of a task in parallel
• Steer individual agents as work unfolds

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*.

We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial.

But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?

From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board".

See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability.

And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher!

Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with.

If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases.

Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other.

*Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.

And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi.

---

So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory.

I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher).

Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

[Balaji @balajis]

Three kinds of DAOs

Autonomous DAO — a group that interacts with a truly self-running smart contract with no admin keys and no CEO

Bureaucratic DAO — a mess of politics

CEO DAO — a single clear leader

[Cos(余弦)😶‍🌫️ @evilcos]

🦞OpenClaw 极简安全实践指南 (Security Practice Guide) 是面向 OpenClaw 的黑手册。

我尝试了其他一些方式来试图加固 OpenClaw，包括 Skill 方式，但是发现还不如给 OpenClaw 植入一个安全“思想钢印”来的有意思，这个“思想钢印”形成一个 md 文档，包含安全事前、事中、事后需要做的策略，但这里有个前提：

尽量不影响 OpenClaw 的日常使用，安全不要干扰用户体验，需要给这只🦞足够的自由。但是吧，江湖险恶，一只有 Root 权限且诞生才一个多月的🦞，安全不让人放心…

于是，这份面向 OpenClaw 的极简安全实践指南诞生了，目前是 v2.7 版本，此前我们内测了许多版本，也踩了不少坑。现在公布出来，大家玩之前务必仔细看这份指南的 README⚠️：

https://t.co/azRxnskbBb

注意里面的说法。我相信你会很有收获。里面还推荐了我们实测在 OpenClaw 场景下聪明的模型，如果你有自己的感受，一定要和我们反馈。

一切都很新，一定有不完善的地方，请大家多指正！

⚠️最后，务必认真阅读 README，也务必肉眼扫描下你将喂给你🦞的“OpenClaw极简安全实践指南.md”，相信我，会非常有意思。

[偶像派作手 @oxpsats]

华尔街日报今天这篇文章不错。人工智能领域的高管如何向子女描述未来的职业前景。

一句话总结：AI领袖们普遍不建议孩子过度追求当下的技术技能，而是强调适应性、批判性思维、文科教育（通才能力）以及人类独有的情感与责任感。

观点一：当下的具体技术技能（Technical Skills）保质期极短（甚至不到两年），未来的核心竞争力在于应对变化的敏捷性（Agility）。

Caroline Hanke (SAP) 指出，与其纠结于现在的编程技术，不如培养批判性思维、适应性和伦理判断力。

教育的重点应从“掌握工具”转向“适应新工具”和“判断工具的使用”。

观点二：在AI时代，传统的文科教育（Liberal Arts）比以往任何时候都重要，因为通过自然语言与AI交互需要深厚的元认知能力。

Jaime Teevan (Microsoft) 强调，以前操作电脑是决定性的（按按钮->出结果），现在是基于自然语言的意图表达。这要求使用者具备批判性思维、提供语境和挑战AI结果的能力（即元认知）。

Ethan Mollick (Wharton) 认为通才（Generalist）将是赢家。AI可以填补技能短板，因此拥有广泛技能组合的人（如既懂医学又懂人际沟通）更有优势。

与其成为单一领域的专才，不如成为能够整合多种知识并在AI辅助下工作的“超级通才”。

观点三：AI无法承担责任，也无法替代真正的人际连接。

Daniela Amodei (Anthropic) 认为，随着AI接管工作，人类品质（同理心、善良、沟通能力）的溢价会越来越高。人类本质上渴望与其他人类共处。

Jaime Teevan 指出，AI可以给出建议，但不能承担责任（Accountability）。像法律、会计这种需要对决策后果负责的职业，依然需要人类来做最终判断（Passing Judgment）。

未来的工作重心将从“执行任务”转移到“承担后果”和“提供情感价值”。

观点四：避开纯数字化的内卷，转向原子世界（能源、医疗）和社会服务领域。

Manny Medina (https://t.co/igRRT4ZQLW) 看好能源（特别是核能）和医疗保健。无论是为了驱动AI本身（能源需求），还是解决人类疾病（癌症治疗），这些都是硬需求。
鉴于AI发展的不平衡，致力于解决社会不平等（帮助被AI抛下的人群）和环境问题（海洋污染）也将是有意义且有前景的职业路径。

最后：孩子拥有一张“白纸”，他们不需要像成年人那样去“重塑”旧观念，这是一种优势。家长们的焦虑往往源于自身的旧经验与新世界的冲突，而孩子们是AI原住民。

不要把上一代的恐惧投射给孩子，鼓励他们去玩、去实验，而不是仅仅作为使用者。

AI高管们给子女的建议揭示了一个反直觉的趋势：在一个高度技术化的未来，最不值钱的可能是纯粹的技术执行力，而最值钱的是最“复古”的人类特质——对他人的共情、对复杂概念的哲学思考（文科）、对物理世界的改造（能源/医疗）以及对决策后果的承担（责任）。教育策略应从“学习如何像机器一样高效工作”转变为“学习如何做在大机器时代中独一无二的人”。

[0xOscar🏴‍☠️ @luffythink]

智能和电力不一样。电是同质的，一度电和另一度电没区别。 但智能是非同质的，每个模型产生的内容都是独一无二的。所以做模型的过程，其实是在表达你认为一个好的AI三观应该是什么样💡

[Ray Wang @wangray]

https://t.co/1H6Jl2ue8X

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

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

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:

* L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
* L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026

Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.

First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.

This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.

We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.

What would I do today if I were an L2?

* Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features
* Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
* Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?)

From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.

The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).

This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://t.co/9jy6v1X6Fw and https://t.co/gZmu3YjebM ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add.

This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

[ladislaus.eth @ladislaus0x]

🧵Another EF Protocol research update, featuring:

* An explainer on state expiry
* Fusaka bandwidth estimations
* lean Ethereum post quantum workshops
* A paper on a new hash function optimized for ZK proving systems

…and more!

All posts🔗👇🏼

[Davide Crapis @DavideCrapis]

We’re starting a new AI Team at the Ethereum Foundation (the dAI Team).
Our mission: make Ethereum the preferred settlement and coordination layer for AIs and the machine economy.

The team will focus on two main areas:
- AI Economy on Ethereum = giving AI agents and robots ways to pay, coordinate, and follow rules without middlemen.
- Decentralized AI Stack = making sure the future of AI doesn’t rely only on a handful of entities but has open, verifiable censorship-resistant alternatives.

We believe Ethereum can be as useful for today’s AI developers as it will be for the sci-fi future. That’s why we’ll work closely with ecosystem projects to accelerate progress and push the boundaries of research and innovation at the intersection of AI and blockchains. Connecting two communities that have too often worked in parallel.

We’ll work side by side with both the Protocol and Ecosystem teams at the EF. Linking protocol improvements with the needs of AI builders, and funding innovative public goods that will make Ethereum the best home for AI.

Ethereum makes AI more trustworthy, and AI makes Ethereum more useful. The more intelligent agents transact, the more they need a neutral base layer for value and reputation. Ethereum benefits by becoming that layer and AI benefits by escaping lock-in to a few centralized platforms.

Acting with purpose and urgency, we’ll continue our recent work on ERC-8004—a standard for proving who an AI agent is and whether you can trust it— and continue to support new upgrades and standards. Inspired by the d/acc philosophy and Ethereum values, we’ll support projects that are leveraging Ethereum to build a more resilient and secure AI ecosystem where humans can flourish with AI.

Ethereum + AI is about making sure humans keep agency and AI can reach its potential. Neutral, verifiable, censorship-resistant infrastructure means AI works for the people, all of us.

The team starts with myself as lead, and we’re just getting started. Explore our job postings and resources below, and join us in building the future of decentralized AI on Ethereum.

[『華』「胡翌霖」 @epr510]

IP审查在根本上就是错误的，也许我们需要一个从TCP/IP协议就开始推倒重建的互联网2.0