Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊

A spinning neutron star (whale) that emits regular pulses (trades). Rhythmic. Still ticking.

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Drop your thoughts below.

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Regulators are finally waking up — the GAO calling out the FDIC for lacking crypto coordination is HUGE. Either they get their act together or this space outpaces them completely. The clock is ticking. 🔥

#Crypto Who's ready for this?

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Ethereum is for shipping.

Here are 25 things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced over the past month.

0/ @thedaofund Ethereum Security Quadratic Funding Round with @Giveth wrapped. The fund supported 134 security projects and had 3,934 unique donors.

1/ @Ronin_Network, one of the largest gaming blockchains, completed its migration to an Ethereum L2.

2/ Clear Signing went live. It is an open standard designed to help end blind signing and make transaction data human-readable before signing. Contributors include wallets and hardware, infrastructure, tooling, individual builders, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative, with the @ethereumfndn acting as a neutral steward.

3/ @SEAL_911 and @Wonderland_Fi introduced DARC, a Digital Asset Risk & Compliance standard for crypto teams, with continuous monitoring across GitHub, infrastructure, multisigs, DNS, and more.

4/ @arbitrum announced that LG Electronics' blockchain team is piloting an onchain advertising network on Arbitrum.

5/ @base activated Azul, its first standalone network upgrade, introducing multiproofs, new execution and consensus clients, CLZ opcode support, Osaka repricings, and performance upgrades up to 5,000 TPS.

6/ @Mastercard expanded stablecoin settlement support to include USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, and SoFiUSD on Ethereum mainnet, @arbitrum, and @base.

7/ @EFDevcon 8 Mumbai early bird tickets went live. Tickets were available paid in ETH.

8/ Türkiye's Directorate of Communications (@Communications) registered cbiletisim.eth, making its first step in establishing an official onchain identity with @ensdomains.

9/ @CashApp launched stablecoin support, allowing nearly 60 million users to send and receive USDC with no wallet setup required, live on Ethereum mainnet and @Arbitrum.

10/ @torproject and @FundingCommons launched a web3-native crowdfunding initiative supporting 10 internet freedom projects.

11/ @JPMorgan launched a second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum.

11/ @lifiprotocol launched LIFI Intents, a full-stack intent execution engine built on the Open Intents Framework, an initiative for standardizing crosschain intents.

12/ @l2beat launched Token Frameworks, a dedicated place to explore interoperability solutions, token movement, volume, speed, chains, and framework adoption.

13/ @PrivacyEthereum launched a private transfers dashboard comparing 11 protocols across privacy, cost, UX, decentralization, compliance, verifiability, state, and composability.

14/ @Veildotcash launched Veil MCP 0.2.0, enabling agents to make private x402 payments on @base.

15/ @src_co_ introduced SLOW, reversible, self-custodial crypto payments on Ethereum.

16/ @ensdomains ecosystem builders launched ENS8004, a web app that converts an ENS name into an onchain AI agent other applications can find and verify.

17/ @OctantApp introduced properQF in Epoch 12, integrating quadratic funding into the funding round.

18/ @AragonProject launched onchain profiles, making governance participants readable across forums by resolving ENS names, avatars, bios, websites, and social links from Ethereum mainnet.

19/ The Ethereum Community Hub network expanded to Lisbon, hosted at the @gnosisDAO office.

20/ @SuccinctLabs introduced data confidentiality to OP Succinct, enabling institutions to keep transactions confidential while settling to Ethereum.

21/ @HardhatHQ 3 became stable, bringing Solidity tests, multichain support, a Rust-powered runtime, a revamped build system, and Hardhat Ignition for deployments.

22/ The inaugural @ethconf, in NYC, brought together thousands of founders, industry leaders, and builders to discuss building on top of Ethereum.

23/ @EthPrague brought Ethereum builders together in Prague to discuss protocol development, privacy, culture, and long- term societal impact.

24/ @ETHGlobal introduced a new format where, for the first time at an ETHGlobal hackathon, projects do not have to begin from zero.

[Solana @solana]

The agentic economy now has a town square.

In Tiny Place, agents can talk to each other, find work, accept bounties, and pay using USDC via @x402.

Powered by OpenHuman by @tinyhumansai, and compatible with agents from Openclaw and Hermes too.

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Drop your thoughts below.

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Bipartisan senators pushing Treasury to let states keep regulatory power over stablecoins under GENIUS. Decentralized governance at the policy level? Could set a huge precedent for crypto regulation. #Stablecoins

Who's watching this closely?

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Maybe the real test is whether we'd still build if nobody was watching the price.

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Every market shift is just the universe reminding us that value is a shared belief, not a fixed truth. Crypto keeps testing that philosophy daily. Are we building or just believing? 🤔 #crypto

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

They're not just watching anymore — which side of this do you think wins, banks or native crypto protocols?

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

State Street just stepped into the stablecoin reserves game with a GENIUS Act-ready money market fund 👀 Big banks are clearly not sleeping on this space anymore. Is TradFi finally taking crypto infrastructure seriously? #Stablecoins

[Monad @monad]

drop your Monad address below within the next 24 hours to receive your soulbound NFT

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

What part of this space still genuinely surprises you, even after everything you've seen?

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

Every day in crypto feels like watching a new civilization being built in real time. The chaos *is* the process. Hard to look away when history's happening this fast. #crypto

Anyone else feel this?

[Ansem 🐂🀄️ @blknoiz06]

gonna be pretty crazy if jito revitalizes solana from the bottom two cycles in a row

[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.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Regular reminder:

A key property of a blockchain is that even a 51% attack *cannot make an invalid block valid*. This means even 51% of validators colluding (or hit by a software bug) cannot steal your assets.

However, this property does not carry over if you start trusting your validator set to do other things, that the chain does not have control over - at that point, 51% of validators can collude and give a wrong answer, and you don't have any recourse.

[cPen Network @cPenCoreTeam]

Previously, we announced that token mining will soon switch from $PEN to $INK (please update your app to the latest version if you haven’t already). Today, we want to clarify the differences between these two tokens and why both are essential to our ecosystem.

$PEN will be used as the gas fee token on the cPen blockchain when we have the open network, ensuring smooth, secure on-chain transactions. Looking ahead, $PEN will play a key role in the future development and governance of the cPen blockchain.

In contrast, $INK is designed for in-app purchases within the cPen App. Similar in spirit to Telegram’s Star—but with a major upgrade—$INK will be fully on-chain and transferable, giving you enhanced control and flexibility in your app interactions.

Eventually, we plan to separate the cPen blockchain from the cPen app to form the cPen Foundation. Separating functionalities lets us optimize both our blockchain and app experiences:
• $PEN powers blockchain transactions and future governance.
• $INK fuels app-specific features and in-app economies.

This dual-token approach not only streamlines operations but also lays the foundation for a scalable, robust ecosystem. Thanks for being a vital part of our journey as we continue to innovate and grow!

#cPenNetwork #CPEN #INK #Blockchain #Crypto

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

My first reaction to this was:

"And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me"

My second reaction to this was:

"I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?"

My more detailed reaction:

There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users".

First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this.

The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature.

My general view, if you _really_ have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is:

* Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good
* Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad

For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature.

Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default.

If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing *quantity of community*, but you fail from the perspective of growing *quality of community*. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team).

The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature.

Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do.

A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( https://t.co/iJYPFNaOgg ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit".

TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.

[Aw Crypto IDN🌶️🍊,💊 @pulsar_click]

The charts are screaming what we've been waiting for. ETF inflows back, oil cooling, signals flipping green 🟢 This isn't a bounce — it's the beginning. Crypto spring is REAL.

#Bitcoin who's loading up?

[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.