There'll come a day when you'll wake up to a +15% Bitcoin candle.
ETH and alts will be up +20%-30%, and most people will rush to short.
But the markets will continue to climb, liquidating all shorts back to back.
You'll see your portfolio at new highs, and your family will start asking about crypto.
You'll wake up to a coin in your portfolio randomly pumping 2x-3x and then doing the same again for a few more times.
You'll be back to life-changing gains and will thank yourself for not giving up.
We got everything we ever wanted.
Pro-crypto President
Pro-crypto SEC and Fed Chair
Fed ending QT
No new tariffs
US-Iran peace deal
Oil price dump
ISM PMI above 50
Institutions
Altcoin ETFs and yet
Bitcoin is down -50% from ATH,
ETH is down -65%
Alts are down -90%
and we are poorer than ever.
flight delayed 3 hours. could be worse — free coffee and finally going through my watchlist properly. half these projects probably won't make it but a few… yeah. cautiously excited about what's coming.
Bitcoin bear markets make fools of both bulls and bears.
BTC rallied from $80k to $98k from November 2025 to January 2026.
People were calling for the supercycle and alt season.
Then BTC set new cycle lows in February 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.
BTC rallied from $60k to $82k from February 2026 to May 2026, and the bears were relentlessly mocked and ridiculed again.
Then BTC set new cycle lows in June 2026, just like it usually does in midterm years.
The cycle keeps playing out.
It makes the bulls look like fools because the market trends up for so long, only to wipe out all of the gains in a very short period.
It makes the bears look like fools because the market spends a lot of time trending up, before breaking down quickly. So the bear thesis will often look wrong, even when its right.
Do not let emotions rule your investment decisions. Have a plan and stick to it.
bro Pudgy Penguins trading cards are literally hitting Target shelves now 😭 from NFTs to the checkout line at a major retailer is actually insane growth. the normie pipeline is real #PudgyPenguins
you picking any up?
When preferred stock loses its anchor, it reveals how fragile the layers beneath a bitcoin strategy can be. Cash erodes, markets shift, and par becomes a memory. Nothing is guaranteed in this game. #crypto
Watching this unfold, are you?
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.
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.
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.
Why do I always check my portfolio at 3am? The more green I see, the less I sleep. The more red I see… also the less I sleep. There's no winning here 😭
Coinbase isn't just a crypto exchange anymore — AI advisors, stock options, pre-IPO markets… they're going full beast mode on traditional finance. The old banks should be nervous. 👀 #Coinbase
Who's switching over?
The crypto world never sleeps 🌐 Every single day there's something reshaping the game — new moves in BTC, DeFi, Web3… how are you even supposed to keep up?
Drop what YOU'RE watching today 👇 #crypto