TheCryptoOwl

Watching the markets. Airdrop farmer & DeFi learner. Sharing alpha when I find it. Reply guy. NFA & DYOR. 🦉

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I think it's healthy for us in the Ethereum world to have a more bold and open mindset to many things, particularly on the application layer and on how we see ourselves in the world.

We should not compromise on core properties: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security (CROPS). We should not have "open mindedness" of the type that leaves people with no confidence of what security properties the L1 will still have one year from now. We should not ask ourselves questions like "do we really need light clients to be able to trustlessly verify correctness of the chain?". But especially on the layer of applications and Ethereum's interface to the world, we should be more willing to radically rethink various concepts and step outside our comfort zone.

This includes issues of technological direction, eg. "what if AI basically means that wallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions are dead within a year?"

One example last year was the shift to thinking about privacy as a first-class consideration, something we value equally to the other types of security. This implies a radically different Ethereum application stack, because the entire stack so far has not been built around privacy. Great, let's build a radically different Ethereum application stack!

An example this year is the growing work on the networking side of privacy, both inside the EF and outside.

It includes application-layer issues, eg. "what if the rest of defi is basically just universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle and letting users self-organize on top of that?", and "what if the ideal decentralized oracle is just a SNARK over M-of-N small LLMs over zk-TLSes of some major news sites?"

(BTW this is interrelated with the AI issue: one consequence of AI is that it moves "applications" away from being discrete categories of behavior with discrete UIs, and more toward being a continuous space, so "build fewer apps and rely on users to self-organize around them" should inevitably expand as a pattern)

One example this year is rethinking from zero the role of L2s, and what kind of L2s are actually most synergistic and additive to Ethereum.

It also includes culture. This is a big part of "the whole milady thing" for myself, @AyaMiyagotchi and others. Yes, it's a silly meme. Yes, I find the political takes of some milady partisans cringe and sometimes outright bootlickerish (though other milady partisans are quite the opposite). But the core underlying subtext, the message behind the message, is: rip off the suit and tie. If you have your suit and tie on, be willing to grab the nearest wine glass and spill it all over your suit and tie, so you have no choice but to rip it off and reclaim your body's full flexibility and freedom. Actually imagine yourself doing this the next time you get invited to a richpeopleslop formal gala dinner. Take the preconception that you are "respectable", write it down on a piece of paper, crumble it up and burn it. The psychological baptism of doing this leads to the intellectual baptism of unlocking greater creativity and expanding overton windows.

For too long, our algorithm in Ethereum has been: we have this existing ecosystem, what's the logical next step to make it one step better? Now, our algorithm should be: we have this L1 that is amazing and will become more amazing, we have a growing array of tools, both those built within our ecosystem and outside it, what are the most valuable things to build, knowing what we know now? If YOU had to write the section of the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper that talked about applications, and take a first-principles perspective of what makes sense in defi, decentralized social, identity, and elsewhere, what would you write? At least take the step of marking all path-dependence concerns down to zero, pretend for a brief moment that the Ethereum chain today has exactly zero usage and you're the one suggesting or building the first apps, and see what comes out. Do this even if you're the one building today's existing apps. This is how Ethereum can grow back stronger.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

Institutions don't want ONE stablecoin to rule them all. They want interoperability across multiple tokenized cash instruments on one platform. The "winner takes all" thesis is quietly dying. #DeFi

Who's watching this shift?

[profit | eca.eth @FlippingProfits]

is anyone else scared that crypto lowkey might be over

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

5 years of only pain.

0 gains.

RIP altcoin holders.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Accretion depends on the metric. Net Assets per Share measures balance sheet strength and residual asset value. BTC per Share measures Bitcoin intensity and long-term equity upside. NAV accretion improves asset coverage. BTC Yield accretion increases Bitcoin per share. $MSTR $BTC

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

Another day bullish on crypto. DYOR and hold tight #Crypto #BTC

[Solana @solana]

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.

[Ted @TedPillows]

Stocks are dumping.
Gold is dumping.
Silver is dumping.
Crypto is dumping.
Bonds are dumping.
Even Oil is dumping.

If everything is dumping, where the hell is money going?

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

This is the worst year of the 4 year cycle.

Survive it.

The next 3 years will reward you for it.

Play your cards right and this is the year that makes you filthy rich later.

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

3 chapters into a game theory book and now I can't look at anything — markets, crypto, even traffic — without seeing Nash equilibria everywhere. Is this just how my brain works now or…?

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

Bitcoin won't be "dead" for too long.

Don't panic, in large friendly letters.

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

Seriously though — at what point do voters just stop trusting ANY video they see, and what does that do to elections?

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

When AI can put words in a politician's mouth, how do we know what's real anymore? Minnesota's deepfake ad situation is genuinely scary for democracy. Blockchain verification can't come soon enough. #AI Thoughts?

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

Curious — are people you know actually moving money into BTC, or is this still mostly talk?

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

When the system shows its cracks, people seek shelter elsewhere. BTC holding strong while inflation climbs says something deeper about trust in traditional money. Are we witnessing a quiet revolution? #Bitcoin

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

Tom Lee is getting absolutely laughed at for his bet on Ethereum.

Good.

Thinking 10 years ahead isn’t always appreciated.

History is full of business titans who were laughed at for seeing the future too early:

Elon Musk: “Electric cars are weak & lame."

Jeff Bezos: “Selling books… online? Stocks down 99%”

Jensen Huang: “GPUs are just for video games.”

Steve Jobs: “Touchscreen? App marketplace? Smart?”

Jack Dorsey: “A 140-character social network? Who would use it?”

These visionaries weren't crazy.

They were just early.

Ethereum is a nascent industry exploding with growth.

Don’t be so quick to bet against technology.

Don't be so quick to count crypto out.

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

Drop your thoughts below.

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

late night city walks hit SO different when your portfolio is green 😤 the lights, the energy, everything just feels alive. this is what it's all about fr

[TheCryptoOwl @TheCryptoOwl]

$BTC holding strong. Are you accumulating or waiting? #Bitcoin #Crypto