citizen42.eth

Full Time Degen | Node Runner | Defi Advocate | Delegate | My home - @TheTNetwork (tBTC 🦾 ) and @VeloraDEX (VLR 🐆) 🔥 🚀 🕳️🐇

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

@peter_szilagyi @Kronflux 🤣

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

@MetaLeX_Labs @0xboo @ethereum @ethereumfndn @Nethermind @chainlinklabs 👏

[Marc Zeller @Marczeller]

Tbh gnosis has been a masterclass in crisis management.

Inform early, act fast, don’t sugarcoat, take ownership and care about the end users.

Kudos.

[_gabrielShapir0 @lex_node]

the first NVCA-standard tokenized securities stock sale launched on Ethereum this week on @MetaLeX_Labs

another step toward putting corporate finance on Ethereum, the right way!

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

Here for long run ..echoing “… not LARPs…” Imma very much here to 🤩 LFG 🚀

[Nomatic @Nomaticcap]

Btw, part of the motivation for this post is I felt the need to point out we're not LARPs (@DeFi_Dad is all-in too).

I'm balls long this industry.

If I was yakking on the pod all day without having skin in the game, then I couldn't live with myself. And why would anyone give a shit about what we say?

Not saying that this is essential for a podcaster in crypto, just saying I'd feel like a personal trainer who's also a fat ass. But also, I still just see asymmetric upside in this space (especially if you haven't outsourced your conviction).

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

@Marczeller 💯🦙

[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.

[_gabrielShapir0 @lex_node]

to the haters:

Ethereum is not for you

It's for every gamer who had their warlock's Siphon Life spell nerfed

It's for every $GME holder who got rugged by Robinhood

It's for people with a big chip and a dream of a life where they are not some big corporation's plaything

[tBTC @tBTC_project]

tBTC and @TheTNetwork maintain our own tss-lib implementation that is not vulnerable to the Verichain or TSSHOCK vulnerabilities: https://t.co/GYdYK2alaN

For several years, we've advised projects still using unpatched implementations to migrate to our patched version (or any reputable alternative): https://t.co/1ZzqnHZhqA

[JackSam @nftDEEDJACK]

3rd and 4th quarter of 2025

Multiple typhoon hit us in just a short period of time. Causing our livelihood ruined ,some of our stuffs also
Dec of 2025, grandma hospitalized on a private hospital (since more tools what she would need rathen than on public days there our bills already a thousands in USD)reason for us to be in debt so bad
Early January2026
Grandma died after a week Solen also passed away. We have nothing remaining .
Literally Zero
My animals supplies for food will be good for a less than a week now also some of med and vit

To anyone wanna help us , i will be forever grateful

Sol addy

EZ7iHM4PMmEbBMvFKi28MW6iY8WzyQGnxF1qPaCYp6DU

Eth/erc20/evm

0xa7105c78FfE576102E6a559Accc6E46045687841

Droppin this pic to make someone's day

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

The innovation set forth 17 years ago by DLT will rebalance things again! Finance is revolutionised and cultures will follow suit

Beautiful acknowledgement nonetheless ! 👏

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

La Vérité

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

@brivael 👏🤣

[sudo init vyper @big_tech_sux]

for all of these efforts i am very grateful. the only points of .. controversy, for lack of a better term, may be at the *amount* and *level* that the EF supports us. for example, it would be wonderful if they would publicly acknowledge our efforts on helping make the ecosystem more secure and user friendly, and for example for our efforts on formally verifying the compiler (first formally verified smart contract compiler!) and the @Verifereum's EVM (a current, and production-ready formal semantics for the EVM!) and perhaps put us in the spotlight or public discourse more.

it would also be wonderful if they funded us more sustainably than in the form of one-off grants, leaving us to wonder where we are going to get money from to keep the lights on in the next fiscal period. that is all! thanks again to the EF and thank you for reading.

[Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️ @rstormsf]

@AminCad I'm already behind on legal bills from the Rule 29 motions. A second trial would require significant resources again.

https://t.co/UBqTJdij8v or DM

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

@CarpathLabs @humansdotai 🔥

[0xngmi @0xngmi]

I see ppl calling for the death of defi

They're wrong

DeFi is gonna take a hit but it will not die, current situation is completely recoverable with protocol treasuries and loans

I believe in DeFi and I'm gonna keep working to make it succeed🦙

[Michael Egorov @newmichwill]

So let me start. DeFi is the future of the World Financial System. That's my belief, and this is why we are here.

This amount of absolutely preventable hacks we see in DeFi (with root causes attributable to CENTRALIZED points of failure) is enormous recently. This damages out industry, and I build for this industry. So I cannot remain silent.

Imagine an average grandma (mass adoption is here?) putting her life savings on Aave. And then BOOM, she cannot withdraw her funds on Monday. Aave (the biggest DeFi protocol btw) said it's operating as intended - just rsETH got exploited. rsETH said that all code is safu - just LayerZero bridge got hacked. LayerZero (the biggest bridge securing quarter of a trillion $) said that everything operating as intended. Yet, she cannot withdraw here funds. WTF? Are we industry of clowns?

But here's the thing. All issues like this should be prevented BEFORE they happen, not AFTER. Number of single points of failure should be reduced, not increased. When these points of failure are unavoidable - trust should be split. If there's a reliance on infrastructure - we should share best practices how to configure it. Not to mention that code should be very well checked - everyone gets that already.

We should probably come together and develop safety standards for DeFi. How to build safely, and how to verify safety. Probably everyone should bring their best practices, and the projects, auditors and risk assessment groups should know them. Maybe we need @ethereumfndn and @SolanaFndn bringing all the ecosystem projects to participate and come up with principles, rules and recommendations of safe building. And, perhaps, we can even learn something about protecting the few remaining centralized points of failure from traditional finance who have many more of those.

DeFi will win

[_gabrielShapir0 @lex_node]

this thread is a must-read from @MetaLeX_Labs 's CTO

we've built an end-to-end fully onchain corporate finance protocol...tokenization is just table-stakes

ACE might look simple, but there is a lot going on under the hood to make it trust-minimized and fully onchain

[citizen42.eth @mcitizen42]

@etheconomiczone where do I sign up🫡

[Michael Egorov @newmichwill]

@koeppelmann True DeFi has been tried and it is operating.

Making a true DeFi lending is harder than true DeFi DEX though. The most decentralized one is probably Ajna but who uses it?