westgates

Bitcoin class of 2017/Trader/Avalanche investor/DEX maxi/🌪️/On-chain Observer/NFA

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

Banks issue stablecoins. Nobody issues freedom money--it has to be built, and it has to be private.

[硅谷王川 Chuan @Svwang1]

一个没有垄断性，单季度亏损一百二十亿美元还能腆着脸对投资者画大饼的企业，已经到了粗暴侮辱投资者智商，和电信诈骗没啥区别的地步了。

当然，真诚相信这种话术并投钱的人，最终会收获和其认知匹配的下场。

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

@IntelProMUltra Is the 90% yield for standard EMIB or EMIB-T?

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

https://t.co/bFvnOU3sbp

[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.

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

@cb_doge lier

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

@NikkiHaley Your neighbor just doesn’t want to be the 51st state of America.

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

@FirstLadyOffice @FLOTUS Which language did she say?

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

@maddenifico

[Eric Balchunas @EricBalchunas]

Just checked and yeah $IBIT is now Harvard's largest position in its 13F and its biggest position increase in Q3. It's super rare/difficult to get an endowment to bite on an ETF- esp a Harvard or Yale, it's as good a validation as an ETF can get. That said, half a billion is a mere 1% of total endowment. Big enough to rank 16th among IBIT holders tho.

[Vlados @Vlados45fgds]

How could we have overslept an important date for Tornado Cash? Over the past few days, the total number of deposits in Tornado Cash has reached 5 million eth (4.1%).
https://t.co/anMfWmq2HQ

#ZKTech #Tornadocash #PrivacyMatters #ZEC #Ethereum

[TornadoCashBot @TornadoCashBot]

👉Move your fingers.

After the sanctions were lifted, most DEXs allowed trading of $TORN, such as: Binance Wallet, https://t.co/3pGAkuxRg3, 1inch, Sushi, Kyberswap, OpenOcean, etc.
@Uniswap so why aren't you?

#TornadoCash $ZEC #Zcash #privacy #PrivacyMatters

[Eco Nomad ( beware scammers ) @KEmmra]

HEY @Uniswap Why aren't we allowed to trade $TORN Tornardo cash? I thought the Case was dropped in 2025

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

@slowhandeth Use https://t.co/A7cKHHOiaV or binance wallet to buy $torn

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

@rstormsf @alex_pertsev You created Tornado in significant part because of my suggestion that it is something worth building.

It would violate basic honor for me to do that, and then fail to support you in your hour of need.

In Ethereum we protect our own, and uphold our honor.

Milady

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

Bro, you’re comparing wrong. Tornado Cash has shielded more than 4 million ETH, about $13.2 billion today.

[AJC @AvgJoesCrypto]

Ethereum is no longer the leader in private crypto.

On January 1, 2024, there was $34.7m shielded $ZEC. Comparatively, private TVL on Ethereum was $357.2m:

- $343.6m in @TornadoCash
- $13.7m in @RAILGUN_Project

Now, after the recent ZEC rally, Zcash has flipped Ethereum in private TVL.

There is $2.6b shielded ZEC, and only $1.2b in TVL on privacy protocols on Ethereum.

[Timothy Dexter @Earl_Of_Chester]

🚀 Privacy season is back. #TornadoCash TVL just hit a new all-time high, surpassing even the Ethereum Foundation’s holdings.
The question isn’t if but which exchange will be first to relist.
#TORN $TORN $ZEC #Zcash #privacy

[westgates @westgatescrypto]

Tornado Cash is no longer just a protocol. It is a historical milestone in crypto privacy.

[Lookonchain @lookonchain]

Richard Heart(@RichardHeartWin, founder of HEX, PulseChain, and PulseX) has deposited 112,978 $ETH($366.4M) into https://t.co/11PfRBP2j2 in the past 8 hours.
https://t.co/yNy0qqamD5