tonius

[tonius @negotiuming]

The simplest edge is patience.

[tonius @negotiuming]

@CryptoPicsou Is there a particular reason you use the 12H and 2W timeframes?

[scoopy trooples @scupytrooples]

Whatever the narrative is, Ethereum has it covered.

Security: #1 by far
Decentralization: #1 by far, huge node and validator count
Scalability: Cheap transactions now and an aggressive roadmap to hyperscale + L2s
Neutrality: EIPs 7805 and 7457 make the network effectively uncensorable
Reliability: Never been down ever even through hardforks and the ETH2 network upgrade
On Chain Economy: Dwarfs all other chains in TVL and is always among the top in DEX volume
(d)Apps: The most ambitious teams choose Ethereum on which to develop their products. App innovation starts on Ethereum and is copied downstream.
Privacy: Tornado, Privacy Pools, and Railgun are all good options already, and Kohaku will improve privacy even more
Institutions: Overwhelmingly choose Ethereum
Dev Tooling: Great tooling and resources for solidity and vyper development, nothing comes close
Flexibility: App specific L2s, for example Lighter, host applications that are usually challenging to run on blockchain L1s while inheriting Ethereum security
AI: Base L2 is a leader in pioneering agentic finance with their innovations applicable to the L1 more and more as Ethereum scales
SOV: ETH the hardness properties of BTC, a multitude of ways to utilize ETH productively on and off chain, has an internet native bond, and very low inflation with it having periods of deflation.

The main issue here is that the narrative makers all galvanize around one narrative and then pick which projects to shill around it so they can be early and then dump on you, whereas with ETH, even though it fits whatever narrative is hot, they cannot pnd it and profit from you.

I'd rather just keep it simple and be patient, it's cleaner.

[tonius @negotiuming]

eth
🫴

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

"Don’t buy 'cheap' stocks just because they’re cheap. Buy them because the fundamentals are improving."

— Peter Lynch

[tonius @negotiuming]

"The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset."

[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.

[Leo Lanza | Lanza.eth @leolanza]

ETH is a Tier 1 asset in a league of it’s own

[tonius @negotiuming]

@krismatterz 🚀🚀🚀🚀

[tonius @negotiuming]

"We find doing nothing the most difficult task of all."
— Warren Buffett

[tonius @negotiuming]

"The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting."

- Charlie Munger

[tonius @negotiuming]

@krismatterz @v0 @vercel 🔥🔥

[tonius @negotiuming]

@krismatterz @cursor_ai @ycanerden 👏👏

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

In my teens and 20's I would spend way too much time playing Starcraft and Civilization. Harvesting resources, building things, and expanding was super addictive to my brain - to an almost unhealthy degree.

Later I realized that entrepreneurship and business is the ultimate game. It scratches the same itch for me (resources, building, expanding), but you're actually contributing to humanity at the end of the day, which can be much more fulfilling.

Business is also much more positive sum than video games. In Starcraft, the other player has to lose for you to win. In business, there is competition, but in a growing market there can be multiple winners. And gains compound long term (it's a infinite game) instead of starting over each time.

Now days I prefer to watch pros play video games to unwind, instead of playing video games myself. But a quick game can still be fun here and there to unwind. By contrast, the game of business is played over many decades.

[Raoul Pal @RaoulGMI]

If Metcalfe’s Law is the best way to value blockchains, which I believe it is, then the two variables that matter are value transacted per user and total users. They compound.

The key future drivers:

Value transacted per user will come from the financial system moving to blockchain rails, led by stablecoins and then the tokenization of everything else. TradFi value dwarfs everything else.

User growth will come from agents. Smaller transactions, but orders of magnitude more users than humans will ever produce.

Everything else will be a rounding error in 10 years.

[tonius @negotiuming]

@krismatterz amen

[Raoul Pal @RaoulGMI]

The reality is I've never seen anyone trade a secular rising asset making more money by trading it. The people who make the most money just hold it and add on weakness to compound returns over time.

Choose your fighter.

[tonius @negotiuming]

@krismatterz 🔥🔥

[Mippo 🟪 @MikeIppolito_]

Buybacks are a useful tool but they aren't everything.

If investors don't like your story and future prospects, buybacks won't do a thing.

Consider Pump, who has now bought back $300M of tokens, almost half their $630M market cap.

Token is still down 76%.

[tonius @negotiuming]

@inquoteapp 👀👀

[Emperor Osmo 🎯 @Flowslikeosmo]

I still believe $ETH is trading at basically "free" levels.

Fundamentally, the ecosystem has never looked better:

- ETH is trading at a $234B valuation
- Meanwhile, the ecosystem built on top of it is valued at $293.5B
- Most of this ecosystem is largely shifting to stablecoins (non volatile assets), funds, vaults, and sticky liquidity.
- 30% of the ETH supply is now staked

At a valuation of 0.8x vs. its TVL of $293.5, $ETH is trading at valuations not seen since 2022, when TVL growth shrank meaningfully.

Historically, $ETH has traded up to 2x its TVL; at the current valuation, it's basically trading like a dinosaur tech stock that's shrinking or paying hefty dividends.

Data: @tokenterminal

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

@RyanSAdams ETH is a store of value and one of the most important apps on ethereum.

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Today @jpmorgan, the world's largest bank by market cap per @WSJ, announced they're launching their first ever tokenized money market fund—MONY—on Ethereum.

The firm is seeding the fund with $100M of its own capital before opening to outside investors on Tuesday.

[tonius @negotiuming]

@krismatterz @waynesutton @convex 😂🔥