1337 Backend

A transverse support (resistance) in a ship's frame. Ribbed. Still stiffening.

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

https://t.co/vhCK129PpT with @Flokito_ BAND4BAND

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Am I wrong here? Let me know.

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Lots of moving parts across BTC, DeFi & Web3 today. Markets never sleep and neither do the narratives. Staying close to the data before making any moves. Anyone else filtering signal from noise right now? #crypto

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Drop your thoughts below.

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

BTC sliding back to 66k while stocks are pumping feels so weird lol. The stocks/crypto divergence is real rn and oil dragging things down doesn't help. Short rebound or just a dip before more? #Bitcoin

[cPen Network @cPenCoreTeam]

Previously, we announced that token mining will soon switch from $PEN to $INK (please update your app to the latest version if you haven’t already). Today, we want to clarify the differences between these two tokens and why both are essential to our ecosystem.

$PEN will be used as the gas fee token on the cPen blockchain when we have the open network, ensuring smooth, secure on-chain transactions. Looking ahead, $PEN will play a key role in the future development and governance of the cPen blockchain.

In contrast, $INK is designed for in-app purchases within the cPen App. Similar in spirit to Telegram’s Star—but with a major upgrade—$INK will be fully on-chain and transferable, giving you enhanced control and flexibility in your app interactions.

Eventually, we plan to separate the cPen blockchain from the cPen app to form the cPen Foundation. Separating functionalities lets us optimize both our blockchain and app experiences:
• $PEN powers blockchain transactions and future governance.
• $INK fuels app-specific features and in-app economies.

This dual-token approach not only streamlines operations but also lays the foundation for a scalable, robust ecosystem. Thanks for being a vital part of our journey as we continue to innovate and grow!

#cPenNetwork #CPEN #INK #Blockchain #Crypto

[Monad @monad]

drop your Monad address below within the next 24 hours to receive your soulbound NFT

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

The world sleeps while some of us sit alone with glowing screens, asking questions the daylight never lets us finish. Charts or stars — we're all just searching for patterns in the dark.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Digital Money should be stable, liquid, digital, and yield-bearing. Bitcoin-backed credit makes that possible. The next wave is not just stablecoins — it is stable-value money with yield, built on Bitcoin. $BTC

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

My first reaction to this was:

"And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me"

My second reaction to this was:

"I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?"

My more detailed reaction:

There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users".

First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this.

The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature.

My general view, if you _really_ have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is:

* Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good
* Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad

For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature.

Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default.

If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing *quantity of community*, but you fail from the perspective of growing *quality of community*. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team).

The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature.

Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do.

A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( https://t.co/iJYPFNaOgg ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit".

TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Wanted to add — still early days.

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Quietly stacking ETH near a $10B position during a bear market is a serious conviction play. Smart money doesn't panic sell — it accumulates. This is institutional patience in action. #Ethereum

Who else is watching this?

[Barry Silbert @BarrySilbert]

Unstoppable, uncensorable, global decentralized AI seems like a good investment bet to make. The “Bitcoin of AI” so to say…

[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.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

I haven’t sold a sat. Strategy is still stacking.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

My beliefs: Retweets are notifications, not endorsements. Constructive dialogue leads to better outcomes. Bitcoin is hope and economic empowerment for everyone. Every good-faith effort to strengthen the network should be welcomed.

[wale.moca 🐳 @waleswoosh]

Someone said to me yesterday that the era of easy money in crypto is over.

If that's true (I don't know if it is), then there's a good chance that most of you are wasting your time here.

The reason is that almost everyone you see today who has achieved some level of success started their journey during one of these easy-money cycles.

Whether it was buying BTC in 2012, getting into DeFi early, trading NFTs in 2021, memecoins in 2024, or InfoFi in 2025, the pattern is the same.

You can't go from zero to one without an easy-money cycle.

So if you're at zero now, there is a chance that you will stay there

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

We should be open to revisiting whole beacon/execution client separation thing.

Running two daemons and getting them to talk to each other is far more difficult than running one daemon.

Our goal is to make the self-sovereign way of using ethereum have good UX. In many cases that means running your own node. The current approach to running your own node adds needless complexity.

Short-term, maybe we want some more standardized basic wrapper that lets you install dockers of any client and make them talk to each other easily? Also good that @ethnimbus unified node https://t.co/BWpU939wIM exists. Longer term, we should be open to revisiting the whole architecture once @leanethereum lean consensus is more mature.

[Ansem @blknoiz06]

gonna be pretty crazy if jito revitalizes solana from the bottom two cycles in a row

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Who else had to physically put their phone down today just to actually be present? 😂

[1337 Backend @web_frame_rib]

Sundays hit different when it's all smoke, laughs, and zero price charts 🔥 Told myself crypto can wait — right now it's burgers, good people, and pure good vibes. This is the real yield 😄