State of Crypto

Independent, unbiased, scientific research at the crossroad of crypto and society. Creator of the State of Crypto Survey, the planetary survey of crypto users.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

Crypto is both capitalism on steroids and the bank of the unbanked.

It is the safety of stablecoins for inflation cursed economies and the thrill of unknown memecoins for degenerate gambling.

What is crypto for you and why are you here?

👉 https://t.co/9Wr4sRxK4r

#crypto

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

A postdoc position within our network, great city, Hamburg, and great team :)

[anca.balietti @AncaBalietti]

I’m hiring a postdoctoral researcher to join my team at the University of Hamburg, department of economics.

Research interests: behavioral, experimental & environmental economics
Needed: experience conducting experiments

Deadline: 27 May 2026
Apply: https://t.co/l0tUZor0Pf

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I no longer agree with this previous tweet of mine - since 2017, I have become a much more willing connoisseur of mountains. It's worth explaining why.

https://t.co/LerCobzgvo

First, the original context. That tweet was in a debate with Ian Grigg, who argued that blockchains should track the order of transactions, but not the state (eg. user balances, smart contract code and storage):

> The messages are logged, but the state (e.g., UTXO) is implied, which means it is constructed by the computer internally, and then (can be) thrown away.

I was heavily against this philosophy, because it would imply that users have no way to get the state other than either (i) running a node that processed every transaction in all of history, or (ii) trusting someone else.

In blockchains that commit to the state in the block header (like Ethereum), you can simply prove any value in the state with a Merkle branch. This is conditional on the honest majority assumption: if >= 50% of the consensus participants are honest, then the chain with the most PoW (or PoS) support will be valid, and so the state root will be correct.

Trusting an honest majority is far better than trusting a single RPC provider. Not trusting at all (by personally verifying every transaction in the chain) is theoretically ideal, but it's a computation load infeasible for regular users, unless we take the (even worse) tradeoff of keeping blockchain capacity so low that most people cannot even use the chain.

Now, what has changed since then?

The biggest thing is of course ZK-SNARKs. We now have a technology that lets you verify the correctness of the chain, without literally re-executing every transaction. WE INVENTED THE THING THAT GETS YOU THE BENEFITS WITHOUT THE COSTS! This is like if someone from the future teleported back into US healthcare debates in 2008, and demonstrated a clearly working pill that anyone could make for $15 that cured all diseases. Like, yes, if we have that pill, we should get the government fully out of healthcare, let people make the pill and sell it at Walgreens, and healthcare becomes super affordable so everyone is happy. ZK-SNARKs are literally like that but for the block size war. (With two asterisks for block building centralization and data bandwidth, but that's a separate topic)

With better technology, we should raise our expectations, and revisit tradeoffs that we made grudgingly in a previous era.

But also, I have actually changed my mind on some of the underlying issues. In 2017, I was thinking about blockchains in terms of academic assumptions - what is okay to rely on honest majority for, when we are ok with 1-of-N trust assumption, etc. If a construction gave better properties under known-acceptable assumptions, I would eagerly embrace it.

On a raw subconscious level, I don't think I was sufficiently appreciative of the fact that _in the real world, lots of things break_. Sometimes the p2p network goes down. Sometimes the p2p network has 20x the latency you expected - anyone who has played WoW can attest to long spans of time when the latency spiked up from its usual ~200ms to 1000-5000ms. Sometimes a third party service you've been relying on for years shuts down, and there isn't a good alternative. If the alternative is that you personally go through a github repo and figure out how to PERSONALLY RUN A SERVER, lots of people will give up and never figure it out and end up permanently losing access to their money. Sometimes mining or staking gets concentrated to the point where 51% attacks are very easy to imagine, and you almost have to game-theoretically analyze consensus security as though 75% of miners or stakers are controlled by one single agent. Sometimes, as we saw with tornado cash, intermediaries all start censoring some application, and your *only* option becomes to directly use the chain.

If we are making a self-sovereign blockchain to last through the ages, THE ANSWER TO THE ABOVE CONUNDRUMS CANNOT ALWAYS BE "CALL THE DEVS". If it is, the devs themselves become the point of centralization - they become DEVS in the ancient Roman sense, where the letter V was used to represent the U sound.

The Mountain Man's cabin is not meant as the replacement lifestyle for everyone. It is meant as the safe place to retreat to when things go wrong. It is also meant as the universal BATNA ("Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement") - the alternative option that improves your well-being not just in the case when you end up needing it, but also because knowledge of it existing motivates third parties to give you better terms. This is like how Bittorrent existing is an important check on the power of music and video streaming platforms, driving them to offer customers better terms.

We do not need to start living every day in the Mountain Man's cabin. But part of maintaining the infinite garden of Ethereum is certainly keeping the cabin well-maintained.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

Who are memecoin users?

Unlike believed by many @MustStopMurad, sense of community is **inversely** correlated with likelihood of owning memecoins.

Check out our most recent research preprint.
https://t.co/8mivrWffHw

Comments and reply welcome.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

From our "cousins" State of AI ;)

[We are actually not involved in the study, but hey, it's impressive]

[Stefano Balietti @balietti]

What happens can you can see through 100 trillion tokens of LLMs calls?

Check the State of AI report by OpenRouter:

https://t.co/xLAvpxhWqG

[Stefano Balietti @balietti]

Can DAOs co-evolve with AI?

Check this preprint: "Slaying the Dragon: The Quest for Democracy in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)" forthcoming in the Handbook of Democracy and Artificial Intelligence.

with @SaggesePietro @bhaslhofer and Stefan Kitzler

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

The State of Crypto Survey 24/25 Stakeholders Report is out!

https://t.co/WYWvZPUWon

Check the opinions of native cryptoers on all things crypto and society.

Summary data also available for downloaded.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

10/ 🧭 Conclusion:

Crypto regulation isn’t just a legal question — it’s a legitimacy and public sentiment challenge.

Understanding investor attitudes is key to designing credible, effective frameworks.

📑 Full paper: https://t.co/331gXbu3s2

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

🧵 “Public Perceptions of Cryptomarket Regulation: Investor Profiles and Attitudes”

By Svetlana Kremer, Luca Pennella, Merve Kadriye Yurdabak & Stefano Balietti (2025). SSRN preprint

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

8/ ⚖️ Policy takeaway:

Public perception of crypto regulation isn’t uniform.
Two clear poles emerge:

Risk-averse, trust-building investors who welcome oversight.

High-commitment crypto holders who see regulation as a threat.

Bridging this divide requires transparent communication & targeted education.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

ERC-8004 is trying to bring back Ethereum into the AI race. You can see that many things have happened since the new leadership in the Ethereum Foundation has taken place!

[binji @binji_x]

ethereum is SERIOUSLY gearing up for ai. (erc-8004) by @DavideCrapis just dropped, it’s called “trustless agents” and here’s what you need to know:

but first:

you can think of ethereum as an important substrate for ai, not necessarily because it can run all the models, but because it can run all their trust.

here’s a thought experiment:

> imagine millions of autonomous agents moving across the internet. they transact, negotiate, and perhaps even form their own coalitions..(dao’s, anyone?)

> in this reality, what substrate would they choose to anchor themselves to? do they pick a single company server? a google api? an open database that anyone can rewrite?

> if you are working with these agents to do tasks cross 50 services (banks, social media, crms), would you just let it all run on a database that can be deleted?

probably not.

if you were an agent with no loyalty except to your own survival, you wouldn’t want to bet your memory and reputation on one corporation or one government: you’d want a ledger that no one could quietly change behind your back. you’d want neutral ground.

you’d want ethereum.

so, we’ve done the why, now let’s dive into the how:

erc-8004 builds on the agent-to-agent protocol (a2a).

a2a gives agents a shared language, but language isn’t enough: machines also need a way to check

> who are you,
> what have you done
> and are you behaving as you claim?

the proposal sketches an extension to a2a with three registries onchain:

1) identity: a verifiable anchor for “i am me.”

2) reputation: an immutable trail of how an agent has behaved.

3) validation: proofs that an action really hap

this is a practical ERC that can be used and iterated on in the wild; the specifics can stay offchain, but the skeleton of trust lives on ethereum.

8004 lets agents that have never seen each other meet in the wild and still transact with confidence.

look closely and will you see the outlines of a machine economy

your agent negotiating with some unknown counterpart in another part of the world, and it doesn’t matter because both are plugged into the same incorruptible memory.

this is just the beginning of machines running on trustware. smart contracts are how we will communicate with ai, the immutable ledger is how they will communicate with eachother, and ethereum is how we will build this right.

this is just a start, but you can come and lay the foundations of a sci-fi future done right with us.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

@biodunayoola11 @oysterecosystem @Oystersmartware Hi Senami, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will look into it, but for now we don't have a new study planned.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

We have been quiet for a while, we are busy crunching the data of the latest survey...rigorous science takes time.

In the meantime, our article based on State of Crypto 2022 finally came online in the International Review of Financial Analysis: https://t.co/rohaccSPe0

Comments welcome :)

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

@biodunayoola11 Here is where you find the Token ID on Magic Eden.

[State of Crypto @stateof_crypto]

We are cleaning the State of Crypto 24 data from bots and low-quality respondents and we hope to issue the participation badges to all valid respondents later this week. Please keep an eye on your email.