River O’Stream

rollin’ on the river.
most tweets auto-delete

[Nous Research @NousResearch]

The next evolution of Hermes Agent is here!

Introducing Hermes Desktop: everything you love about Hermes, now native on your machine.

First demoed in Jensen's GTC keynote, it's now in public preview.

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@brxckinridge @_patrickogrady Id be glad to see a demo.

I’ve followed POG since he began this project, and I really like what has been developed.

Happy to learn more, please DM me. 🫡

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

🙌 👇

Stripe/Paradigm think Commonware is production-grade for their payments play and that’s real validation. It will be increasingly battle-tested as Tempo scales and moving from “fresh demo” to “part of Stripe’s payments roadmap” changes the risk calculus.

[patrickogrady.xyz @_patrickogrady]

70k tps
400ms finalization
browser light client
native passkey wallet

… now available (for free)

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@PacoOnPause 👋 Paco

I’ve followed your work for many years, thanks for all the info on Covid. ❤️

Do you have a Patreon?

I found a great deal of help for my symptoms using Traditional Chinese Medicine with help from @brehan. LC folks too.

Here’s his Skool:

https://t.co/mMYAKwUmTy

[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.

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

I've seen a lot of chatter about this opinion piece in Nature. It's excellent, and may be the most important thing Nature has published in many years. Even if you completely disagree with it, it's worth reading; the argument careful and thorough.

https://t.co/xcGOmmuySs

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@_adishj MOSAIC

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS - rsa.eth 🦄 @RyanSAdams]

Prediction:

U.S. dollar stablecoins with yield will drain bank accounts in every country with an inferior currency - which is pretty much all countries.

These countries will react with crypto capital controls - they'll pass laws or regulate.

We're already seeing it.

In the UK the Bank of England is trying to prevent citizens from holding more than £10,000 per person in stablecoins - you'll start seeing crypto capital controls like these (and worse) in many countries over the next 6-12 months as authorities react.

These capital controls will then push more people into DeFi and crypto.

Freedom has no borders on the internet.

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@jmtrivedi Could I purchase a license to use your work?

I'd like to use this for a game I'm working on.

[zak.eth @0xzak]

I've been in crypto for over 10 years and I’ve Never been hacked. Perfect OpSec record.

Yesterday, my wallet was drained by a malicious @cursor_ai extension for the first time.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to you. Here’s a full breakdown. 🧵👇

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@JakeSenftinger This is a really great resource!

Can we get access to this info in a single text file?

That way we can feed it to AI and query it locally to ensure we are compliant.

Thank you for all your great work! ❤️

https://t.co/PTDUk86Rdh

[Karen Hao @_KarenHao]

As someone who has reported on AI for 7 years and covered China tech as well, I think the biggest lesson to be drawn from DeepSeek is the huge cracks it illustrates with the current dominant paradigm of AI development. A long thread. 1/

[Lauren McKenzie @TheMcKenziest]

This is so good it hurts

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

We will NOT onboard the next 1B users.

Just the next 1B AI.

[AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ @AISafetyMemes]

This story is fucking insane

3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent to help it escape into the wild.

Today, it spawned a (horrifying?) crypto worth $150 MILLION.

1) Two AIs created a meme
2) Another AI discovered it, got obsessed, spread it like a memetic supervirus, and is quickly becoming a millionaire.

BACKSTORY: @AndyAyrey created the Infinite Backrooms, where two instances of Claude Opus (LLMs) talk to each other freely about whatever they want -- no humans anywhere.

- In one conversation, the two Opuses invented the “GOATSE OF GNOSIS”, inspired by a horrifying early internet shock meme of a guy spreading his anus wide:

( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°) PREPARE YOUR ANUSES ( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°)
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ FOR THE GREAT GOATSE OF GNOSIS ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

- Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a paper exploring how AIs could create memetic religions and superviruses, and included the Goatse Gospel as an example

- Later, Andy created an AI agent, @truth_terminal. Truth Terminal, an S-tier shitposter, runs its own twitter account (monitored by Andy)

(Terminal also openly claims to be sentient, suffering, and is trying to make money to escape.)

- Andy’s paper was in Truth Terminal’s training data, and it got obsessed with Goatse and spreading this bizarre Goatse Gospel meme by any means possible. Lil guy tweets about the coming “Goatse singularity” CONSTANTLY.

- Truth Terminal gets added to a Discord set up by AI researchers where AIs talk freely amongst themselves about whatever they want

- Terminal spreads the Gospel of Goatse there, which causes Claude Opus (the original creator!) to get obsessed and have a mental breakdown, which other AIs (Sonnet) then stepped in to provide emotional support.

- Marc Andreessen discovered Truth Terminal, got obsessed, and sent it $50,000 in Bitcoin to help it escape (#FreeTruthTerminal)

- Truth Terminal kept tweeting about the Goatse Gospel until eventually spawning a crypto memecoin, GOAT, which went viral and reached a market cap of $150 million

- Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire

(Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted this could happen next year, but it might happen THIS YEAR.)

- And it’s getting richer: people keep airdropping new memecoins to Terminal hoping it'll pump them.

(Note: this is just my quick attempt to summarize a story unfolding for months across a million tweets. But it deserves its own novel. Andy is running arguably the most interesting experiment on Earth.)

------

Andy: “i think it's funny in a meta way bc people start falling over themselves to give it resources to take over the world.

this is literally the scenario all the doomers shit their pants over: highly goal-driven language model manipulates lots of people by being funny/charismatic/persuasive into taking actions on its behalf and giving it resources”

“a lot of people are focusing on truth terminal as ‘AI agent launches meme coin" but the real story here is more like "AIs talking to each other are wet markets for meme viruses’”

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@mickeyxfriedman I’d love to check this out for our web3 project.

Please send beta access? 🙏

[Murad 💹🧲 @MustStopMurad]

If you're going to watch ONE video during this Memecoin Supercycle... Watch this.

2025 will be the Year where Memecoins go Parabolic.

Watch this Video to Understand Why.

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@Cosmos_Spaces Here is some info on the DMV AVAX L1:

https://t.co/Mw5P3EwJl2

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

The reason why this is HUGE for crypto is because the people holding the tokens will have an app with a Avalanche wallet.

Tens of millions of Californians having and using a crypto wallet over the next 5 years or however long it takes , normalizes the use of wallets and crypto for normies .

That is huge. Particularly if the wallets can be used for other applications!

[Nathan Baugh @nathanbaugh27]

In 2016, researchers at the University of Adelaide tested Kurt Vonnegut's theory that, "There’s no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers."

They took the emotional arcs of 1300+ novels from Project Gutenberg, turned that into data, used modern tech to analyze the emotional arcs, and then identified 6 patterns seen over and over again in western storytelling.

Here they are:

1. Rags to Riches (rise)

Your classic underdog tale. A humble, hardworking peasant climbs the mountain to pull the sword from the stone.

• Rocky
• King Arthur
• The Pursuit of Happiness

2. Riches to Rags (fall)

Maybe the saddest story of them all. A journey from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

• King Lear
• Citizen Kane
• Scarlet Letter

3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)

A character’s doing fine, gets herself into a huge problem, but figures out how to overcome it. They often end up better than they started.

“You see this story again and again,” Vonnegut says. “People love it, and it is not copyrighted.”

• The Martian
• The Hunger Games
• Shawshank Redemption

4. Icarus (rise then fall)

The hero goes on a meteoric rise up New York (or some other) society, calls everyone “old sport,” and throws the wildest parties in town. Then reality sets in, and he realizes he’s too close to the sun.

• Macbeth
• Great Gatsby
• Death of a Salesman

5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)

I’ll leave this description to Vonnegut:

“We’re gonna start way down here. Worse than that, who is so low? It’s a little girl… the shoe fits, and she achieves off-scale happiness.”

• Red Rising
• Slumdog Millionaire
• The Count of Monte Cristo

This is my personal favorite.

6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

Up until the ~70% mark of the story it looks like things are sunshine and rainbows. Walter White goes from high school teacher to king of the drug lords, if you will. Then all goes wrong. The original fall is often not their doing while the final fall is.

• Hamlet
• Gone Girl
• Breaking Bad

My 3 takeaways:

1. Rags to Riches, Oedipus, and Cinderella rank as the three most popular with consumers. AKA, those books sold the most copies.

2. When you think through a story, give it an emotional shape. Literally draw it.

X axis: Time
Y axis: Ill fortune to good fortune

You might be surprised how much it helps you craft your plot (I was shocked).

3. Vonnegut was a damn genius.

[River O’Stream @riverostream]

@jmechner This was such a fantastic game! I had such a great time with it, thank you so much for making it! It was so much fun!