phxrising

Here to have fun, collect some art, and support great teams. Bullish on the Rekt ecosystem @rektdrinks @rektbrands

[OSF @osf_rekt]

when prices are low...you're upset. you're probably angry...and generally you need someone to blame.

this is when project founders take the most beating, rightly or wrongly so, but emotions get the better of everyone.

i get my fair share of comments, and i generally understand them...like...no one wants to lose money and when u buy into a project u back a founder to make money for you...so if that doesn't go to plan u naturally blame the founder - simply just human reaction.

i can sit here and talk about bad market, things out of founders' control bla bla bla - but there's no point, coz deep down everyone knows that already, and it doesn't fix the human need to take one's anger out on a specific person.

one thing i would say though, is Rekt is not just a one-hit-wonder. we are now over 4 years since rektguy started, and in those last 4 years we've had our fair share of ups and downs, riding cycles and people flipping from thinking we are the best thing since sliced bread to a complete ball of nothingness and back again.

but the point i'm trying to make here is that i've personally never given up on Rekt. in the context of CT, i have enough self-awareness to understand that i am not the smartest or most talented person in the room, however, i've been through many market cycles...everything is a cycle, and the cycles will keep going until the end of time. the only question is how long each cycle is, and what the peaks and troughs are.

when you hit cycle lows, you will see a significant amount of projects die...founders walk away, communities perish...and those projects are slowly forgotten over time. incredibly, founders move on to create new projects, for new cycles, run things back and extract again - it never ceases to amaze me that they are able to serially do this without any repercussion and people simply forget.

ironically, when you actually show some loyalty to your project and community, you are more likely to get a bit of stick, because you are vocal/present/active - ie at the forefront of peoples' minds, so you may be putting in your best efforts but the market is the market, but such best efforts still make you a visible attack target.

and that's fine tbh...one thing that the last 4 years of doing this has taught me is that u gotta have a vision, and that vision has to be a multi-year vision, accounting for the fact that you will have multiple peaks and troughs within that time frame, it just is what it is.

i see many founders crash out in times like these because they simply cannot take the constant harassment by their communities (in some cases it's certainly warranted, in some cases it's not) - but again, i think if ur in this game, part of being a founder is understanding that ur gonna feel like a fkn hero when the times are great, and ur gonna get a lot of flack when times are bad - it shouldn't be something that mentally affects you in either direction - your only goal is to execute your vision without emotion (but with passion).

anyway i have rambled quite a bit here and sort of haven't touched on the chart below - this is the inverse euthanasia rollercoaster profile. i think it speaks for itself, but ill tell u this, in the last 4 years the Rekt ecosystem has had its peaks and it's had its troughs...and in its troughs i've experienced the same thing each time

"you're dead"
"crypto is dead"
"it's going to zero"
"it's never coming back"
"that was a dumb idea"

etc etc

and like i said earlier, this is where most people give up...but this is precisely where i see the greatest opportunity to build your profile, history and track record of not giving up, and thus building deep community trust over a longer period of time (the ingredients of what makes a brand successful).

each time we've crashed, we've patiently persevered...i don't give up and i'd rather ride into the flames of hell than be a pussy...and of course, each time we've rebounded we've reached new heights...not just in terms of price/mkt cap (which i know is what most people are focused on) but for the Rekt movement to become bigger and stronger.

we are back near that trough now, when things are tough, but i'm writing this to let you know that this is precisely where we keep going harder and precisely where we will add another badge to our blazer in the face of everyone else giving up.

you cannot control market cycles, but you can choose to feel the punches (i enjoy the challenge tbh) and simply keep going, coz that is what will will set the ceiling higher for the next time round.

$REKT

[phxrising @phxrising_eth]

@osf_rekt We’ve got your back, boss! RWD

[OSF @osf_rekt]

in bear markets you will see many people give up or "chill until things get better".

we have been working flat our on @rektdrinks - it isn't always appreciated by the wider crypto community (until it is), but our rekt community (now 5 years strong) has been the backbone of our survival and success.

each bear market we go harder and lay the foundation for a stronger base for when bull markets return (which they always do).

u will never see me say i give up, or im taking a mental health break - not because i'm mentally all there, but because my mental illness is to succeed at all costs and not give up until i do.

this is what has defined me, what has defined rektguy and what defines $REKT - it's literally called rekt, but as you all know the deeper meaning is "down bad but never dead".

i have been doing these weekly streams for 8 months now, face-to-face with our community to give updates, thoughts and answer questions - that's been 8 months of a brutal ride but we've never let the energy drop once.

there is no one in the world that is more emotionally attached to rekt than me. i literally drew rektguy with my hands on a piece of paper not knowing what it would become today, it is my duty and my desire to see the ecosystem succeed, and i truly believe we are well on the way to doing so.

[phxrising @phxrising_eth]

@osf_rekt @rektdrinks RWD

[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.

[phxrising @phxrising_eth]

@osf_rekt $REKT World Domination 💪

[phxrising @phxrising_eth]

@osf_rekt $REKT World Domination

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Join us with @OpenSea this week as we take over Canary Wharf @Waitrose 🛒

Full details 👇

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt is taking over Canary Wharf @Waitrose for the whole of next week with @OpenSea.

Pop by the Rekt stand Monday to Saturday or join us for a special pub session at Pergola on Thursday 🍻

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt Casuals - Your new daily uniform.

Now live!

Exclusively on https://t.co/ZWNxIW05L4

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

5'9" is the new 6'6".

REKT ENERGY

Clean energy. Zero sugar.

FOR WHATEVER.

Shop below 👇

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Vibe code. Ship. Repeat.

REKT ENERGY

Clean energy. Zero sugar.

FOR WHATEVER.

Shop below 👇

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt is now available in @Waitrose stores across the UK and online.

Claim your rewards on @base:
🥤 Purchase a 4-pack
🎟️ Peel the sticker on the pack
📲 Claim via @baseapp

Find your local store below 👇

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt Casuals - Your new daily uniform.

Tomorrow.

9AM PT | 12PM ET | 5PM BST.

Exclusively on https://t.co/ZWNxIW05L4

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt Casuals: RWD T-Shirt.

Tomorrow.

9AM PT | 12PM ET | 5PM BST.

Exclusively on https://t.co/ZWNxIW05L4

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt Casuals: Organic Crewneck.

Tomorrow.

9AM PT | 12PM ET | 5PM BST.

Exclusively on https://t.co/ZWNxIW05L4

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Something is stirring...

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Stay balls deep ⚽🏀🏈

REKT ENERGY

Clean energy. Zero sugar.

FOR WHATEVER.

Shop below 👇

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Rekt Casuals: Organic Logo Hoodie.

Today.

9AM PT | 12PM ET | 5PM BST.

Exclusively on https://t.co/ZWNxIW05L4

[Rekt Drinks @rektdrinks]

Charts don't sleep 📈

REKT ENERGY.

Clean energy. Zero sugar.

FOR WHATEVER.

Shop below 👇