I've been building DeFi for almost a decade and we went from zero to here:
- Over 300b stablecoins issued onchain
- Protocols that actually make revenue, all verifiable onchain
- Billions in stablecoins yielding interest directly onchain
- More safer ways to trade or lend (no ftx custody risk)
- Embedded wallets that bring more users and are easy to integrate (i.e. Privy)
- Fintechs and e-commerce platforms issuing stablecoins (PyUSD, SoFi, Western Union, Moneygram)
- Big fintech involvement (Stripe with Tempo)
- Fintechs integrating defi (i.e. Whop integrating Aave)
- Almost all relevant major banks and asset managers have digital asset teams and also working on tokenization, stablecoins and defi (Fidelity, BlackRock etc)
- Genious act regulating stable coins and removing uncertainty to enable fintechs and TradFi to participate
- Clarity act coming, creating more certainty for crypto and defi
- AI tools for defi security hardening and improved overall development process since early days
- EU has MiCA certainty and UK following up
- Banks banking crypto (Erebor etc) and better onramping
The industry progress has been real, and will take of course years to come to see full adoption. We are closer now than ever before, yet moving 8 billion people onchain will take time.
I think that we are in front of a moment where underlying tech is starting out-phases the crypto-native assets. It make sense for stablecoins to have bigger market caps that Bitcoin and Ethereum as world is moving onchain over time. Same thing will happen with trading and lending as more assets are tokenized and will grow directly onchain. This is net good for the ecosystem.
It seems that fintech and tradfi is doubling down on blockchain like never before.
The best way to progress is by building, and we have some of the smartest builders in the space, true believers that build with a real mission are still here.
At some point crypto, defi, stablecoins, rwas are doing to be just called finance. No tribalism, no drama just boring tech that works and scales.
Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail.
But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.
This includes the following:
* Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride.
* An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit.
* A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment.
* An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation)
* A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving
* A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins)
* A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments
Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term.
Ethereum goes hard.
This is the gwei.
some confused folks think I left SOL because I talk about not one but *two* coins now
reminder: we run the no 1. validator, no 1. trading infra, no 1. dev platform, RPCs, & soon the no. 1 privacy protocol - on Solana
the *only* Solana exclusive leading provider
pls. trillions.
A new kind of onchain asset live on Solana via @sunrisedefi, $SV151 is the first Dynamic Asset by @MeteoraAG.
Tokenized shares of sealed Pokémon packs, backed by real packs in audited custody by @BedrockFndn.
The Ethereum not ETH stuff is the mental fallacy that triggered me into writing and podcasting in the first place.
There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions. Without ETH as a global store of value, Ethereum is a failed project. Full stop.
ETH is economic bandwidth for DeFi. It is the only asset maximized for CROPs, fail at high value ETH, fail at CROPs, fail at Ethereum.
Saying you’re bullish Ethereum not ETH is like saying you’re bullish America not the American economy. They are one and the same - economic engines.
Better to admit Ethereum is a failed project than “Ethereum not ETH”.
So spew that weak blockchain not crypto stuff out of your mouth, it doesn’t make sense for BTC, ZEC, ETH, or any truly crypto native project.
I need your honest reply. If I send you 500K, what will you buy RIGHT NOW?
ETH at $1670
XRP at $1.13
SOL at $66
ADA at $0.16
SUI at $0.7
TAO at $198
LINK at $7.6
LTC at $44
Big month @Coinbase:
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For developers and institutions building onchain, that expands access to compliant, USD-backed liquidity across supported networks.
Capital markets are funding the AI buildout at historic scale: ~$400B over 6 months. Bitcoin ETFs have seen ~$4B of outflows since May 14, pressuring $BTC. This is a capital rotation, not a Bitcoin impairment. Volatility creates opportunity.
Lots of chatter around Clarity Act being voted in potentially as early as next week.
4th July signing by POTUS will be amazing.
The current dump is your typical BTC whale dumps.
Let me refresh your memory hoe they make money.
There is a BTC whale Telegram or similar group. They wait for some event or news to coordinate a controlled sellof.
Prior to the sellof, they open large leveraged short positions on major alts like RYH, XRP, SOL, XLM, etc
Then, each contributes say $20M or more BTC sell off to cause a cascading market dump.
Then they close the shorts in alts, rake in the millions, then buy back BTC at discount, open BTC leveraged longs at the same time.
The coordinated buying sends BTC up dramatically, they sell their BTC Longs.
This whole cycle, each whale makes Bout $2 to $4m.
That's how it works. Ps @cz_binance is one of them, so is @brian_armstrong , to name just two.
Enjoy the ride.. we coming back up shortly.
DYOR, this is my free speech and not financial advice.
Trying to predict short-term price action is hard, as I generally consider the short-term moves akin to a random walk, or geometric brownian motion.
..but..
if i had to guess, I would guess that BTC tags $70k soon, then gets a small bounce.
But after the bounce is over (likely a few days to a week or so), I do think BTC will head back to the lows from February 2026.
If I'm wrong about BTC revisiting the lows from February, I will quote tweet this and simply say "I was wrong."
And then I will let every bull dunk away.
I invested $5000 in Aster seed round and at ATH it was $500k. There is no industry that is giving you these kind of opportunities.
Only Possible In Web3❤️🦅