VZ12 (∞)

[kaereste.gwei 💗🦇🔊 @kaereste]

TL;DR - I’m bullish on ETH and tired of the doomerism and complaining

The gap between builder and market sentiment around Ethereum, and the actual potential of the Ethereum ecosystem, feels unreal right now.

The reality is that Ethereum is the leading programmable blockchain by a large margin on most meaningful metrics. It has the deepest liquidity, the largest developer base, the most mature tooling, the most composable stack, the most developed DeFi ecosystem, etc.

Yes, other chains have interesting things going on. I am not saying anyone should underestimate Solana, Canton, the L2s, or even Tron or BNB Chain. They deserve the respect and recognition they have worked hard to earn. But most of their unique advantages only matter because Ethereum is the benchmark they are differentiating against.

Ethereum is the benchmark. Ethereum is the default. It is the largest credibly neutral universal settlement layer. It is the leader in this space.

And yet the Ethereum community often spectacularly fails to acknowledge and communicate this advantage. Somehow, the dominant narrative has become one of unmet expectations, internal conflicts, lack of hope, frustration, and an uncertain future.

I call bullshit on that narrative.

If crypto is the infrastructure for the future financial system (spoiler: it is), then Ethereum is still best positioned to sit at the center of it: a shared settlement layer for regulated and unregulated DeFi, tokenized RWAs, L2s, ZK identity systems, and even collectible NFTs. Yes, other projects want to be this centerpiece too. But today they still need to prove they deserve to be considered serious contenders in that race. Ethereum already has its starting number.

I know token prices are not where we want them to be. But this reminds me of old Vitalik's post asking whether crypto had earned the market cap it had back then. I approach that question a bit differently than he did, but I think it is still a very valid question.

Did crypto earn its valuation back then? Has Ethereum earned today's valuation and price?

In many ways, yes. We have built a lot of great tech. We have solved many hard problems. Progress in areas like ZK has gone far beyond what most of us expected five years ago.

And yes, the institutions are coming.

But do we know how they are supposed to make money once they arrive? Can we explain where and how crypto gives them material improvements over legacy technology - enough to produce real savings, better efficiency, or higher margins? Is what we have built compatible with their tech stacks and compliance requirements? Do we have solid business cases for them?

And if you’re not a fan of institutions, can you explain how we are replacing them in a way that lets me recommend a DeFi product to my friends without their money somehow ending up funding North Korea? Why should they abandon those institutions and go crypto? And is your argument valuable enough to justify the crypto valuations you expect?

Personally, I can answer most of those questions positively. But the answers are not obvious or very solid. In many cases, we are still at the beginning of the journey, not the end. So I do not expect prices or valuations to behave as if we had already reached the finish line. There is still a ton of work to do, a lot of things to build, and a lot to prove.

But today, more than at any point in the past, I am optimistic that we will be able to answer those questions soon-ish. It feels like we are in the "Trough of Disillusionment" phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle, and we’re starting to climb the "Slope of Enlightenment".

Since 2016, my thesis for crypto has been simple: the IT infrastructure for finance - or more generally, for value exchange - is mostly risk and cost. It is rarely a unique competitive advantage. So it makes sense for many actors to share that risk and cost instead of each owning and maintaining it for themselves.

Today, more than ever, I believe Ethereum is the best possible candidate for that common, shared IT infrastructure and it offers the strongest ecosystem to build on (together with L2s).

If you made it this far, thank you. A like or RT would be much appreciated, if only to justify the time I spent composing this ragepost. ;)

[Botanix 🕷️ @botanix]

The Bitcoin economy starts today.

Mainnet is live: decentralized, EVM-equivalent, built on Bitcoin.

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

True 😂 They banned me just for replying with a chart of the token’s price action 🤮 That ‘community guy’ is acting like a pubescent kid with a massive ego.

[Auri @Auri_0x]

Elixir team is down so fucking bad that they still keep the private LP chat on mute yet spam their marketing garbage there LMFAO

Bottom of the barrel scammers

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

@Etherealize_io Fixed.

[Botanix 🕷️ @botanix]

Decentralized at Day One.

We're excited to announce our Founding Federation of 16 independent node operators, comprised of some of the most respected Bitcoin miners, custodians, validators and strategic partners.

@botanix @FireblocksHQ @galaxyhq @Alchemy
@xbtogroup @AntPoolofficial @UTXOmgmt
@Kiln_finance @ChorusOne @RealBlockPI
@daic_capital @PierTwo_com @StakinOfficial
@vertex_protocol @stakefish @HashKeyCloud

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

@BrantlyMillegan If you are so cleaver, why are you so poor? 🥴

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

@MoonbeamNetwork Polkadot is a network of parachains, each built for bleeding and slow death 🫨 unfortunately 🥺

[Botanix 🕷️ @botanix]

We're listed in @KaitoAI Pre-TGE Arena

🫵 Yap about us.

[Second Foundation @2nd_foundation_]

hello world computer

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

@2nd_foundation_ Let’s make it historic 🥹🫶👏

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

Quite simply 😝

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

Always the same 🫶

[DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad]

Bought more $ETH today 🥺

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

We are indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure, which has been ongoing for close to a year. Some of this has already been executed on and made public, and some is still in progress.

What we're trying to achieve is primarily the following goals:

* Improve level of technical expertise within EF leadership
* Improve two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors, old and new, that it is our role to support: users (individual and institutional), app devs, wallets, L2s
* Bring in fresh talent, improve execution ability and speed
* Become more actively supportive of app builders, and make sure important values and inalienable rights (esp privacy, open source, censorship resistance) are a reality for users including at the app layer
* Continue to increase our use of decentralized and privacy tech and the Ethereum chain, including for payments and treasury management

Explicit *non-goals* are:

* Execute some kind of ideological / vibez pivot from feminized wef soyboy mentality to bronze age mindset
* Start aggressively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures (esp in USA, but really anywhere, especially large powerful countries), and risking compromising Ethereum's position as a global neutral platform
* Become an arena for vested interests
* Become a highly centralized org, or even more of a "main character" within Ethereum

These things aren't what EF does and this isn't going to change. People seeking a different vision are welcome to start their own orgs.

[Frax Finance ¤⛓️¤ @fraxfinance]

1/ It's been four years since our launch, and we're proud to have championed decentralized stablecoin innovation since day one.

As stablecoin adoption grows, we are making changes to unlock growth and onboard the next billion users to DeFi. This is our Visi¤n.

[Zach Rynes | CLG @ChainLinkGod]

With Ethereum’s revenue dropping by 99% YTD, the ETH community has been experiencing an identity crisis of sorts

Namely, what is the primary method that ETH will accrue economic value?

In the “ultrasound money” canp, it’s all about revenue, more fees -> more burn -> deflationary supply -> number go up

But with EIP-4844 reducing DA costs for L2 rollups by multiple orders of magnitude, existing L2s now pay almost nothing to settle on Ethereum (at times less than 1% of fees generated)

Activity shifting from the L1 to the L2s means the baselayer has also been forfeiting MEV/sequencing revenue to the L2s, which their centralized L2 sequencers retains

Main problem with the “ultrasound money” narrative is that while Ethereum has successfully scaled throughput via L2s, the L1 now optimizes for the least revenue-generating part of the stack (DA fees), while L2s keep the bulk of the revenue (execution layer congestion fees and sequencing/MEV tips)

Ethereum L1 DA throughput will eventually become saturated, but scaling DA further is fairly straightforward and is becoming increasingly commoditized by alt-DA solutions (e.g., Celestia, EigenDA)

Unintended consequences of scaling via L2s

The opposing camp is the “programmable money” stance, which states that L1 revenue doesn’t matter and that ETH accrues value through its use as money (serving as a gas token in all these L2s and as collateral in DeFi)

The issue here is that stablecoins have proven to be a far more effective and widely adopted version of programmable money

Yes dollars are trash and you can ideologically disagree with the trade offs stablecoins make, but they’re far less volatile than ETH and most goods/services are still denominated in USD

The global consumer demand for dollars is indisputable, consumers care about volatility for their day to day money, ETH is down -40% past 3 months, doesn’t work for people

In terms of ETH being censorship resistant SoV collateral for DeFi, I believe this is more valid use case but it’s already heavily saturated and a bit recursive (it’s a good SoV because people use it as a SoV, hard to beat BTC on this one imo)

What I see as the weakest argument here though is the ‘value’ of being a gas token, this value prop will abstracted to being worth almost zero

L2 rollups will increasingly start to natively accept tokens other than ETH as gas tokens, it’s inevitable

Take @base as an example, it would be in Coinbase’s best interests to support USDC as a gas token given:

1) The user experience of supporting USDC as a gas token is strictly superior to that of just supporting ETH (if users wants to pay in ETH, they still can)

We have been absolutely gaslit into thinking the awful user experience of managing L1 gas tokens for all these chains, in addition to the actual tokens you want to hold/use, is somehow okay but it’s not

2) Coinbase generates yield off of USDC’s reserves via rev-share with Circle, so increasing USDC demand via gas token usage means more revenue

3) Coinbase collects all the fees Base generates, and accounting in USD is much simpler for a U.S. based company (they can buy ETH with that revenue if they want)

Given they’re only paying ~1% of Base’s revenue to Ethereum for settlement, why hold the other 99% in ETH if they don’t need to?

If they’re smart, they’ll do some BD with teams who would pay to have their token also supported as a gas token on @base, another revenue opportunity

The primary value accrual mechanism by being a gas token is that people hold reserves of tokens they haven’t spent yet, Coinbase would want that to be USDC

The only reason they haven’t done this yet is likely some mixture of technical invitations with the OP stack or not wanting to appear ‘unaligned’

Note that ETH is one of my largest holdings and an uncomfortable percentage of my net worth, so this isn’t fud

I want Ethereum to find its Econ story, it’s honestly painful to watch in the meanwhile

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

@WethWood This is great question, and I happy to hear it.
First point is to show that team understand that price action matters and concern about it. And your question is the step into it.
Expectations of actions can be effective than silent doings, so this only can be enough.

[VZ12 (∞) @VZ1210]

@WethWood I spoke this all way 2–>50 and back to 2; and gonna to repeat until 100. I still have huge FXS bags. My last bought was made at 4 in May, and this was very low bottom.
Not all problems can be solved by optimistic view. But optimistic view sometimes can hide some real issues.

[Rekt News @RektHQ]

Amid a contentious Venezuelan election, @Polymarket bets & oracle @UMAprotocol sparked debate on prediction markets' role & potential impact in politics.

When does a prediction market cease to reflect reality & start to shape it?

Rekt Investigates

https://t.co/gBeBFiBGTW

[Elixir @elixir]

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