shawman🦇🔊

[shawman🦇🔊 @shawmaneth]

@BitMNR @fundstrat Support increasing the Ethereum accumulation target from 5% to 10% of total ETH supply, and subordinate that headline figure to a single, public, binding governance constraint: BitMine's validating stake will never exceed 15% of all staked ETH on the network.

[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.

[James Seyffart @JSeyff]

NEW: BlackRock is launching their Ethereum Staking ETF today -- $ETHB. It will have the same fee as $ETHA at 0.25% bps but has a fee waiver down to 0.12% for the first year or first $2.5 billion in assets.

[Eric Balchunas @EricBalchunas]

The spot bitcoin ETFs are coming into 2026 like a lion, +$1.2 in flows in first two days of year w/ everyone eating. That's a $150b/yr pace. Told ya'll if they can take in $22b when it's raining, imagine when the sun is shining.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”

This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/QAvZfiNxpe ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means.

“efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec.

These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience.

Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY.

Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms.

Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant.

Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign.

This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away.

This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need.

The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others.

Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

[TokenWorks™ @token_works]

The NounStrategy proposal ends in 10 hours and is in the green, but has yet to hit Quorum.

Rally your fellow Nouns!

[Simon Kim @simonkim_nft]

Unpopular take: ETH has way more long-term upside than BTC.

One of the reasons I created https://t.co/CanopzxSz5.

Don't get me wrong, I love Bitcoin too – digital gold and all that. But Ethereum's building the actual internet of value with Stablecoin, RWA, DeFi, NFTs, L2s blowing up, and real utility driving demand.

Bullish on both tho.

[shawman🦇🔊 @shawmaneth]

@token_works Voting YES on this proposal. Net good for the Nouns ecosystem to have a perpetual buyer at the price floor.

[TokenWorks™ @token_works]

If you have a Noun, consider voting YES on the NounStrategy proposal.

All fees generated would flow back into the Nouns Treasury, and would help bring life back into the Nouns ecosystem.

If passed, we also plan to upgrade the contract to allow for delegation of the Nouns held by the Strategy (ex: to the top holder of the Strategy token)

[shawman🦇🔊 @shawmaneth]

Regular Noun Animal

[shawman🦇🔊 @shawmaneth]

@sassal0x What Larry wants Larry gets

[mike good @mikegoodwtf]

⌐◨-◨

[Jarrod Watts @jarrodwatts]

Ethereum is getting another upgrade in 2 days.

From 6 -> 10 blobs per block (a 67% increase).

This makes more space for L2s to post data on Ethereum cost efficiently.

[shawman🦇🔊 @shawmaneth]

New Nouns hodler here. Excited to see what we build in 2026! Does Noun follow Noun work @nounsdao?

[Hunter Horsley @HHorsley]

An old Steve Jobs quote that comes to mind:

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use... That's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it. I think that's very important."

Be the change you want to see in the world. Never surrender.

Apathy is not the way.

[Art Basel @ArtBasel]

‘Things are about to get weird’—@beeple

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

The exhibit at Art Basel Miami Beach is called “Regular Animals.” Created by digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, it features robot dog versions of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, according to Storyful.

[ZKsync @zksync]

Skip the cold start.

Launching a new chain usually means starting with zero liquidity. That ends today.

With ZKsync Interop enabled by our Atlas upgade, all ZK Chains can interact natively with @Ethereum DeFi.

This means Enterprises leveraging Prividiums to tap into Ethereum liquidity for the first time, while maintaining their own private environment.

[Jrag.eth @Jrag0x]

Dear Leading Staking Entities,

You don't like losing money.
Your customers don't like it either.

You'd be very upset to bring down the network that earns you money.

Please move more of your validators from Lighthouse to other CL clients.

Here's a map so you don't get lost.

[sassal.eth/acc 🦇🔊 @sassal0x]

Friendly reminder:

Fusaka isn't the final upgrade going live for Ethereum this year - on Dec 9th, a BPO fork will activate & the blob target will increase from 6 to 10.

Then, on January 7th, another BPO fork will activate and the blob target will go from 10 to 14.

Accelerate!