"World Game will become increasingly effective in its prognoses and programming when the world-around, satellite-interrelayed computer system and its omniUniverse-operative (time-energy) accounting system are established."
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, 1981
Today on the blog, we discuss a pathway for the second life of phones through the exploration of “phone cluster computing”, which can directly reduce the environmental footprint of computing by avoiding the need for further raw material extraction. More →https://t.co/FFUNjfaEm5
Introducing our new agentic RAG framework. A collab with Google Cloud, our multi-agent workflow goes beyond standard RAG by breaking down complex enterprise queries & iteratively searching for sufficient context before generating dependable responses.
📜→https://t.co/A8l499bLrj
Uniswap is built into Base MCP from day one
Agents connected to Base MCP can natively swap and manage LP positions for users with a Base Account
No extra integrations required. It just works.
Automate your Agent Development Life Cycle using Antigravity 2.0 and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
Build, Evaluate and Deploy AI Agents without even leaving Antigravity.
This is the WAY.
We just dropped Gemma 4 Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) checkpoints on Hugging Face!
All Gemma 4 model sizes and their drafters are now optimized with QAT to cut memory requirements and maximize on-device performance!
Yesterday, we ran what may be the first DeFi borrowing transaction ever conducted on Capitol Hill.
Senate staffers watched it settle onchain in real time without an intermediary. This is the kind of transparent system the CLARITY Act envisions.
We put on the demo alongside @uniswap and @base, organized by the @BlockchainAssn and sponsored by the @fund_defi . The point was to show policymakers what the technology already does, and why the certainty the CLARITY Act provides matters for building digital finance responsibly.
We're grateful to every partner involved, and for the Congress' engagement on what comes next. @DeFiSpartan
We're teaming up with Intersect to build the Meitner Energy Center in Texas, which includes a new data center co-located with new energy generation in Gray and Roberts Counties. This new data center will come online alongside dedicated power that will help meet its demand while reducing the need for new power supply on the local grid.
Announcing the open-source release of our hydrology modeling framework. Through this release, we’re empowering agencies worldwide to integrate advanced flood forecasting into their local workflows. Read the blog to learn more: https://t.co/Fn6b04VGYq
@Google is tackling the AI energy crunch head-on.
Google has signed a 15-year deal to buy 200 MW of solar power from the Solstice Solar project in Oklahoma, developed by Enlight Renewable Energy.
The project will help fuel Google's expanding data center footprint in the region. $GOOG $ENLT
Today, Google and Voltus, a clean energy technology platform, announced a three-year agreement to transform up to 100 megawatts of smart, flexible grid assets each year into reliable electricity capacity in the PJM grid region, which spans the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions and serves 67 million people.
Meet Gemma 4 12B!
A unified, encoder-free multimodal model designed to bring high-performance intelligence directly to your laptop, and released under an Apache 2.0 license.
Bridging the gap between edge efficiency and advanced reasoning. Here is what’s new with Gemma 4 12B: 👇
The world is entering what could be the greatest period of construction in human history, needing as much as $85 trillion in new infrastructure over the next 15 years. Skilled trades like welding are not just jobs. They are the foundation of how we build what comes next. Through Future Builders, The BlackRock Foundation is investing in the skilled trades workforce needed to power this next generation of infrastructure.
New research: UK insurers and fleet managers handled over 10 million tonnes of Russian #LNG in the six months between the UK's announcement of its plan for a maritime LNG services ban and its implementation.
https://t.co/s8a9AM51lx
Japan announced that it will contribute personnel to #NATO’s Security Assistance & Training for Ukraine - NSATU - in Germany
This is another valuable demonstration of Japan's long-standing partnership with NATO & our joint work in support of 🇺🇦
Security challenges in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific areas deeply interconnected and we’ll continue working together to address them
https://t.co/PQsm56xVM0
"Open-sourcing https://t.co/GxKTlYRnFm's mission-driven approach to organization-wide AI education, offering helpful tips and templates to other foundations on their AI journey.": AI Readiness Playbook for Funders
https://t.co/m62nXDcYdW
Today, we’re announcing the winners of the MedGemma Impact Challenge, launched in collaboration with @Kaggle. 850+ participating teams showed us how AI can help bridge global healthcare gaps. Check out the winning innovations →https://t.co/oHd56zx28D
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.