niklas.eth

Making digital ownership easier • building something new

[Chris Dixon @cdixon]

https://t.co/zAHyO5TJ0c

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.

These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network.

To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far:

BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus

Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated*

Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth

The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains.

This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: https://t.co/Fa0jKFgObW , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here.

Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out:

* In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node
* In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe
* In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network

A third piece of this is distributed block building.

A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that.

Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness.

Onward.

[BaseChain @BaseChain]

I will not mint off-chain pixel art no matter which influencer is minting or posting about it

Put it fully on-chain, the tools are there

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@Zeneca

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@pepe__wtf 3ac risk assessment

[noah ⛲️ @noah0x0]

In early 2021, I was working as a contemporary art specialist at Christie's. I agreed to feature an "NFT" as the first lot of my online auction, mostly because I thought it would be funny. That NFT wound up selling for 69 million dollars.

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@punk6529 as with grace

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Shopify will enable USDC (Stablecoins on @Base) in Checkout via Shopify Payments and Shop Pay. Early access starts today, roll out throughout the year.

We think that stablecoins are a natural way to transact on the Internet and worked with coinbase to develop the commerce payment protocol smart contract that powers this work

[Peter Todd @peterktodd]

tl;dr: news organizations are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, and the judge is giving those organizations access to all private ChatGPT chats to prove their case.

Good example of how you can't trust people. Only math.

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@0xQuit Context management most important. On the original point, prompting matters but not so much for use cases where you substitute Google

[Eric Wall @ercwl]

The ETHBTC ratio did not go down because of ”The Merge”

The ETHBTC ratio collapsed because:
- societal value rotation out of "feminized wef soyboys in unicorn t-shirts" into "bronze age mindset" broadly
- ethereum always occupied a vertical more prone to competition
- l2s confused the ETH asset value capture narrative and caused network fragmentation
- eth does not have a saylor buyer
- bitcoin and gold are maturing into wartime assets whereas the peacetime asset ETH struggles
- ETH also struggles to even look nerdy/smart/futuristic compared to AI which is the new hot ball of money for that investor type
- ethereum also stagnated into a depressingly small number of defi primitives relative to what past expectations were

*Not* the Merge.

[ZachXBT @zachxbt]

CRO is no different from a scam

Your team just reissued 70B CRO a week ago that was previously burned “forever” in 2021 (70% total supply) and went against the community wishes as you control majority of the supply.

Unsure why Truth would chose a partnership with your exchange over Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, etc after this move by your team.

h/t Unchained Crypto for the data

[Eric Wall @ercwl]

i know i'm not supposed to talk about it
i know i'm not supposed to talk about it

but it is too funny for me not to say anything at all

i need to recap the situation unfolding on pulsechain right now

> richard heart creates hex
> the only utility of hex is that you can stake it and print more hex
> people stake hex for many years
> the hex contract is written with inefficient code logic
> ETH L1 fees went up
> the SLOAD opcode cost changed with the Berlin fork in 2021
> it suddenly costs thousands of $ in gas to unstake HEX
> cost to unstake is more than some people's entire HEX value
> richard creates his own copy paste version of ethereum with all of the chain state so people can interact with a hex fork on this low-fee fork
> raises a billion dollars to launch this chain and it takes 2 years to ship, but eventually it happens
> richard tries to steer people to honor the version of HEX on his new chain (pHEX) the "real" one, calls the one on ethereum dead/says "the market has decided"
> this copy paste fork doesn't only have the state of the HEX contract but the state of ALL other ethereum contracts at the snapshot of the fork
> all contracts are broken of course but some contracts CAN be saved if you scoop up enough governance tokens and replace the contract dependencies/oracles
> for some reason the hex community becomes obsessed with the forked version of the makerdao contract
> some "midget" guy called maria who dresses in glitter comes along and says he's invented true randomness and worked with nasa and a bunch of bullshit
> he buys up a bunch of the worthless DAI tokens on pulsechain called "pDAI" for nothing and pairs it in AMMs with a bunch of other nonsense tokens in the pulsechain ecosystem
> hexicans think he's a genius because they don't understand what he's doing or why and because his shirt is glitter like richard's (tbh i don't understand what he's doing either)
> a myth starts to spread that this pDAI token is going to get pegged to $1 because hexicans believe maria and richard are going to fix the contract and save pulsechain
> the worthless pDAI token pumps a lot
> some hardcore pulsechain theorists calculate that the paper value of richard's holdings (he owns 95% of the supply of all of his coins) would be able to fully collateralize maker contract despite there being like 50 billion in pDAI supply (the math doesn't really math but whatever)
> half the pulsechain ecosystem buy into this pDAI narrative
> pDAI starts trading at $0.02-$0.03 and becomes one of the main religions in pulsechain in richard's absence (he can't really stream or talk because he's sued by the SEC/on the run from interpol)
> everything RH tweets becomes twisted/interpreted by the community that he's imminently going to peg pDAI
> pulsechain community starts praying for "the peggening"
> literally dozens of pulsechain influencer accounts screaming about "the peggening" every single day
> would be an instant 50x for the poor holders (their last hope basically as everything else on the chain has gone to shit)
> wait
> oh no
> something is fucked up with the maker contract on pulsechain
> some address has the ability to print as much DAI as he wants
> mints tens of millions and starts dumping it for other coins
> the midget maria glitter guy gets spooked because all his projects are tied to this massive liquidity pool he set up between pDAI and his own project coins (which are then paired to all other core coins in the ecosystem)
> maria starts a livestream and starts live dumping $300k worth of pDAI infront of everyone
> says pDAI is a counterfeit operation run out of vale, colorado that targets "crypto pioneers"
> says they stole his family rifles from his aunt's house in kentucky (???) and he needs protection or something
> says he doesn't understand makerDAO and that richard never had anything to do with it
> pDAI keeps collapsing due to the exploiter address minting more and more supply and dumping it for other coins and bridging out
> richard who had previously bragged about the pDAI price chart tweets that he dislikes how people make up fake narratives about how he's behind certain coins when he's not
> pDAI believers in full on crisis mode
> the narrative that prevails is that richard _must_ say that he's not behind pDAI because it's dangerous/bad to be the founder of a decentralized stablecoin
> prices keep collapsing
> all coins are rekt because pDAI just keeps minting and dumps through AMM pair after AMM pair
> pulsechain (PLS) hits an all-time low
> in two weeks hexican top influencers will have to pay me $132k worth of bets that pulsechain would have done a 10x by this time (it's down -75% from launch and never went anywhere during any of this)

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@hi_im_nico niklas.eth

[DCinvestor @DCinvestor]

ngl i had a bad day yesterday. just seeing too many things which irk me and reveal the space has lost almost all of the soul and purpose it had back in foundational 2013-2017 era. even many of the newer leaders really seem like they don't care at all about those values anymore

i've always been more philosophically-aligned to crypto than anything else. you kind of had to be at least a little bit back in those days. sure, making money is nice, but never at any cost

a lot of what's happening now is creating significant negative externalities for crypto. some are obvious now, but some will only be evident in the future, creating persistent harm we will have to live with and try to absolve ourselves of over the course of years

all of that aside, on net, i remain optimistic the broader value proposition of permissionless, censorship-resistant economic activity and digital assets you can actually own. i do believe it can and will drive tremendous good for society and create new forms of gainful economic activity and culture

BUT we are at an inflection point- do we lean into this unique moment of receptive governments to create regulation which will allow for that kind of activity to scale and be driven across the planet? while simultaneously scaling gainful, permissionless economic activity outside of state and intermediary control? OR do we compete to see who can create the best, most degenerate casino on earth where there are no rules and the game only stops once you are liquidated or dead?

i'm sincerely hoping the former wins. if it does, it won't be by chance, but because we actively fought for it because we thought it was important

and it's good to fight for that future

gm ☕️

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@HallidayHQ pls explain how your immutable guardrails work

[foobar/ @0xfoobar]

Gensler's Legacy - Rust Belt 2.0 🧵

Trump takes a billion, Millei a few hundred million, obscure African Republics doubling their GDP with a memecoin

Some say "bring back regulation", but Warren-Gensler mob boss tactics actually created the crime supercycle

With no framework for onshore tokenized protocol equity - and worse, explicit extralegal targeting of anyone who tried to do so - the industry was reduced to a couple outlaws and a lot of memecoins

Promising projects like Facebook's Libra stablecoin executed on sight, replaced with Peanut the Squirrel

The best cryptonative companies like Arbitrum were strongarmed into offshoring core execution to offshore governance bureaucracies, not unlike the recent hollowing out of US manufacturing

When China owns all manufacturing capabilities, private equity firms run the show. And when Caymans DAOs own all token launches, professional extractors run the show

---

Then November 5 2024, Election Day, Trump wins. Gensler gone, Warren neutered. Crypto councils, strategic reserves, stablecoin legislation, Ross freed. American crypto is legal again, or so they say.

The next three months were the griftiest period I've ever experienced, Solana's memecoin euthanasia rollercoaster, parallels to Ethereum's 2018 ICO boom that took years to recover from. Except this time there wasn't even the semblance of a whitepaper or EOS-esque promised product. Just tweet ticker, send CA, billions of inflows

Nikita Bier described dropping a memecoin as "a liquidation of your brand equity". How much brand equity is there in the world that demands buyside liquidity? In this sense, the instant liquidation of thousands of personal brands at whatever market clearing price they can is on par with the biggest red candle perps liquidations we've seen

---

Why did this happen? American crypto is legal* again! The memecoiners should've looked at election results and pivoted their focus to building onshore tokenized protocol equity for the glorious golden bullrun.

But that's not how muscle memory works. Like a bodybuilder in a boxing gym, both buyside and sellside have optimized for one thing only - style over substance. The functional boxers put on their gloves, stepped in the ring, and got shot dead by the alleged referee. The good guys are mostly gone

So increased legal risk tolerance didn't magically shift people's focus from the bad approach to the good approach. It only increased the magnitude, not the type. Saylor replaced with Trump, Sisyphus replaced with Milei. Just like you can't destroy American manufacturing for decades then hope to undo it all with one big semiconductor subsidy, you can't destroy legitimate projects for years then hope to undo it all with one big legislation.

The Gensler-Warren mob did to crypto what private equity did to Rust Belt manufacturing. Destruction is easier than creation. The memecoin rollercoaster is their doing, for they attacked and destroyed many good actors while giving the green light to coins that gave nothing and promised nothing. Death to Libra, Life to Peanut. Base's centralized revenue preferred to Arbitrum's crowdowned treasury.

Gensler-Warren created the memecoin obsession by executing other industry verticals at gunpoint. Extralegal "regulation" was the cause, not the cure. Now the wildfire has reached escape velocity. Supply always adjusts to meet demand, memecoins have infinite creation elasticity, and so we can only wait for the buy-side to either lose all its money or adapt different tastes. Hopefully the latter

[DFarmer @OGDfarmer]

You won’t like this, but Libra was exactly what we needed: a flawless execution of maximum extraction.

This game doesn’t end until every rotation rug is faster, more damaging and more efficient. Every buyer bled dry. No survivors, no relief rallies. Just pure, surgical devastation.

So many of you have said I sounded sad these days. Or mean. Or both. It’s because I’ve seen this shit before so many times goddamn it, I know exactly how it all ends. And you’re hurting the entire industry with this behaviour and set us back ages. This is billions and billions straight into pockets that will never roll any of it back into the ecosystem. This is all money that could have been going to projects that are at least trying. To artists. Or even just to your favourite crypto grifter for fuck’s sake, that will at least lose it all on hyperliquid or on some obscure defi app, or splurge on some expensive pfp to flex on the timeline. I swear even that is better than this shit.

This also regulatory attention that we REALLY don’t fucking need, not now after all the legitimizing that cost people blood sweat and tears.

This is a fuckton of bad press. It’s your uncle being able to point his fat stupid finger at you and waving his head in disapproval. It’s the vest bros saying I told you so.

So yeah, fuck you.

You’re part of the problem by participating in these games. And fuck all you complacent fucks not calling them out for what they are as well.

If we get another major launch, I hope it’s even uglier.

No profits.
No cope narratives.
Just a marketwide funeral procession.

That’s the only way this bullshit dies for good.

[niklas.eth @niklaseth]

@dcinvestor unreal

[Billy McSmithers (aka Bernardo Catsup) 💛✌️ @BillyMcSmithers]

man this bull is WAY better than say Apr 2021 just after Beeple sold a JPEG for $69M (!) to some rando MetaKovan and then ETH went from $1,500 to $4,500 in a few weeks and people were paying $1k daily for OEs (yes OEs) from whoever on Nifty Gateway just before apes minted and Pak sold a bazillion cubes at Christie’s/NG but then things went sorta quiet until JPEG summer with some huge XCOPY sales and Damien Hirst having his staff paint lotsa $2k dot boards while good people like such as Visa corporation bought Punks for many hundreds of thousands of dollars and every Art Blocks mint was the next Ecumenopolis Eternal Fidenza Elevated Ringer Pump bottleneck supply crunch incoming with paper thin floors and then someone actually bought a CryptoSerg lol and two Plasma Bears from me for a few ETH each wtf sooo crazy but the MetaHero NFT Inhabitant planet dwellers were 5E and rising and the Founders Dao and Punks Comic #1 (the FIRST ONE!) were like 10E but why would you sell because it’s all going so much higher and besides Beanie says Tezos is trash at almost $9 but KRO don’t care he drops $125k for a jjjjjohn x/25 and CyberKongz hit 100E+ with banana cash 4 lyfe but anyway yeah so sorry bro tell me more about that absolutely diabolical cook you found on SOL in February of this disgustingly abundant year of our lord