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u/eviljordan

Happy Eternal Crab, everyone!

u/M4gelock

$2,465

u/FrenktheTank

0.0320

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Next fork is a blast,

First class Ethereum craft,

Learn more on forkcast.

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Ethereal news weekly #39

• 🐻‍❄️ Frame transactions Hegotá upgrade headliner
• 👷 Nomic Foundation slang-solx
• 🦊 Consensys splitting into two companies

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-39/

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u/Stobie:

Checked in on blob market to see what’s happening with robinhood operating at max capacity. IIUC averaging the target 14 blobs/block is roughly when non ~zero fee would be sustained, 101k/day, but there would be real fees at less than that. And right now the biggest day is 45k blobs while usage is high now. So it’s a meaningful proportion but rollups using blobs for DA will continue to have zero DA cost for a long time. Room for a couple whole extra base/RHC without taking existing share, and even then the 14 would just be increased.

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u/haurog:

With the current data availability sampling for blobs (PeerDAS) we can maybe go up to 50-80 blobs per block. At least these are the numbers that were discussed around the Fusaka fork. Blobs can be increased with a so called blob parameter only fork (BPO fork), which just needs a few weeks/months lead time.

Changing the data availability from a 1D to a 2D erasure coding can bring it up to several hundred blobs per block. Not sure about the exact number. That would take quite some effort and I am not sure if any core dev is actually working on it. As far as I see the post quantum roadmap also needs quite some changes to the current data availability sampling which makes it harder to change to a new scheme. So I would guess 2D erasure coding is at least a few years out.

At some point we have to find a way for a blob market to emerge, which means the various rollups will have to compete economically for blobs. Not sure what the best method will be, but we definitely need a few healthy rollups, a large enough demand for blobs and a way to keep the number of blobs per block steady, at least for the short term (i.e. minutes). My personal totally vibe based number would be around 50 blobs per block or so and then only increase that target slowly if there is a lot of demand over an extended period. Not sure what exact mechanism might be good as one would control the price and the blob target with the same mechanism. I guess it is possible if one has different time scales for the price increase and the blob target increase. Currently, as long as blobs are above the target the blob price per block increases from block to block. We could extend it such that if the blob demand is at or above target for several hours or a day the target could be increased. I am no economist and have not thought about the exact mechanism too much, but I could expect such a fast blob base fee adaption together with a slower blob target adaption to work. One just has to make sure the mechanism cannot be gamed. With this, Ethereum could capture relatively fast spikes in L2 demand by increasing the base fee, while still being able to provide enough blobs for a continuously growing rollup ecosystem.

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Eth Fam, Just a reminder that we are not wrong just early. To be clear I also thought we would be much higher by now.

Regardless of price im more bullish than ever. Bmnr has purchased around 5% ETH in just a year…

…At a time when the US needs to borrow 2T annually to operate. They dont plan to get out of hole by cutting but by growing out of it. To do that economy needs money. Money supply leads to devaluating the dollar..

So in order to grow they will be stepping on the gas.

This is the part some dont like to hear… Ethereum is only getting more resilient over time. As it stores country stable coins and Trillions in assets it will become the preferred store of value and eventually surpass BTCs marketcap.

If by 2030 ETH delivers on its roadmap… core starts to ossify, quantum proof and privacy implemented, ecosystem continues to expand, with staking yield…

Why would BTC remain the preferred crypto SOV?

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In a world where Ethereum is a ubiquitous and established source of security for global finance

Vitalik and the EF’s underlying ambition for Ethereum has always extended far beyond finance. They talk/talked about things like quadratic voting/funding, insurance, decentralized social media, accounting, supply chain, decentralized games, decentralized apps like Uber, in addition to Defi. If you only believe in Ethereum for finance, then I think you should rather buy Hyperliquid/Lighter/Robinhood stock/Coinbase stock etc. That was my pivot. I used to believe in all these cool ideas but 11 years post Ethereum launch and all we really have is Defi. Not because of lack of trying, nothing else appealed to users.

Most perps are traded on Hyperliquid. Most prediction markets were on Polymarket and now Kalshi, neither of which is on Ethereum. Most NFTs are traded on Solana. Most meme coins were as well but now perhaps on Robinhood.

Most tokenized stocks are on Ethereum, on Robinhood afaik. They made millions in fees the past days and I read they paid like 1000 USD to Ethereum to settle. Yes, if the whole world transacts on Ethereum, those fees will start to matter but that’s a long ways off. It might have soft value like Bitcoin does but that is more difficult to calculate.

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u/masterRoshi9:

I’m probably a couple days late on the Frames EIP discussion, but HOLY CRAP is this bullish.

For those who haven’t seen it, it’s 100% worth checking this out https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2096370186094076098

The way I see it, this is the killer-UX moment for Ethereum. It enables all of the following:

• Account abstraction - (pay gas with anything)

• Programmable key management - (social recovery, multisig, whatever you want)

• Native transaction batching - (whatever you want to do in one transaction)

• Paymaster functionality - (pay on behalf of another wallet)

Wallets will become more secure, and much easier to use at the same time, with a real web-2-like experience. I cannot stress how incredibly bullish it makes me. Ethereum will become a black hole for finance as a whole

If I’m not mistaken this is potentially going to be scheduled for Hegota, and will be set to go live early 2027

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u/haurog:

Gas sponsorships have been possible on Ethereum mainnet since around March 2023 with ERC-4337 and paymasters. Generally I find it quite disingenuous to pick this element of the Frame Transactions proposal (EIP-8141) and claim it to be the big change. But hey, twitter engagement farming is hard work.

My understanding of Frame transactions is that they are potentially a pretty good change for Ethereum and they are on the way to be included in the Hegota upgrade which comes sometime in 2027 probably. Frame transactions will pave the way for the following things:

• First step to be able to use post-quantum secure signatures.
• Enables account abstraction on the protocol level of which gas sponsorship is an element. On the protocol level transactions are still paid with ETH, but someone else can pay this ETH and the user can pay them with whatever they want. Similar as with paymasters currently.
• Protocol native way to switch signing keys out but keeping your address. Similar to what smart accounts can do nowadays like gnosis safe.
• You can make multiple calls in a single transaction. ‘Approve’ and ‘swap’ do not need to be 2 separate transactions anymore. That still is a pretty annoying part of Ethereum users outside of smart accounts.
• Privacy preserving transactions can become possible on the lowest protocol level if Frame Transactions are paired with EIP-8250 (Keyed Nonces). That would be pretty big in my opinion and something that is missing from Ethereum. But even without keyed nonces, frame transactions allow the user to use a privacy preserving signature scheme which allows for some level of privacy.

Long story short. Frame transactions can be a pretty big UX improvement, which is great for Ethereum, its users and ETH. Gas sponsorships are not something new and that is why I would be surprised that they have a big impact on ETH itself.

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Ethereum seems to become the default for stabecoins in Europe. There are many examples, here I pick two.

A few weeks ago Revolut announced that they are rolling out EURR to its Revolut app users. They used Bridge (bridge.xyz) to tokenize the EURR stablecoin in a regulatory compliant way. What I find most interesting is that Bridge is a Stripe owned company which has their own L1 for payments called Tempo. But apparently Revolut does not want to use Tempo to mint their EURR stablecoins. They deploy on Ethereum first. I would guess it is mostly due to Tempo not being a neutral platform as it is US based. Even more interesting, Revolut is called a “design partner” for Tempo and it was used in the marketing of Tempo as being the payments L1. Maybe Revolut plans to expand to Tempo later, but currently EURR was announced to be on Ethereum and Polygon only. I cannot find any contract address on Polygon, so I would guess it is even Ethereum only at the moment. EURR has grown steadily in the last 2 weeks and is at 1.6 million EURR at the moment. Even among EURO stablecoins that is tiny and there are only 9 holders, so I would guess they still are in the deployment phase.

The next example is Qivalis. It is a consortium of 37 banks across 15 European countries. They plan to launch their EURO stablecoin in the coming months and they do it on Ethereum.

In both cases there weren’t any big announcements, no coordinated marketing efforts between the issuers and the chains foundation, they just deploy it. I guess that is the difference if money has been paid to deploy on a certain chain or not. Sure it would be better for visibility if huge marketing budgets would be available, but to me it looks like Ethereum wins this race despite or maybe even because of not having a centralized marketing arm. Credible neutrality is not something that can be bought with a large marketing department.

One can also look at defillama and their EURO stablecoins listing. Around 75% of it are on Ethereum and 85% are in the Ethereum ecosystem (Ethereum + L2s). With gnosis chain moving to become an Ethereum L2 this percentages will even increase a bit more in the coming months. Granted, EURO backed stablecoins are still tiny compared to the USD based ones by about a factor of 1000, but I see the current setup to be very promising for Ethereum to grow with the expected EURO stablecoin market growth.

Sources:

Revolut: https://x.com/ethereuminsti/status/2092610530779545948

Qivalis: https://x.com/ethereuminsti/status/2097305936712937517

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Consensus is just becoming Metamask. I’m surprised, the UX on Metamask has consistently gotten worse over the 9 years I’ve been around. Pivoting your whole company around a declining product is a wild play.

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u/Mysterious_Town6196

Ethereum!

u/CRVpensioner

$2,484.76

u/WoodpeckerHorror3468

0.031276

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Another bungle,

Usage growth is a jungle,

Always stay humble.

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Ethereal news weekly #37

• 🐻‍❄️ Glamsterdam upgrade repricing impact for contract developers
• 💶 Revolut euro stablecoin rolling out
• 🔑 native account abstraction scheduled for inclusion in Hegotá upgrade

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-37/

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The Glamsterdam upgrade is getting into the final stretch. In yesterdays all core dev call they floated the first dates for the testnets. The proposed dates are:

• Sepolia: September 28th, epoch 351232
• Hoodi: October 26th, epoch 132352

This would mean that mainnet would be at the end of November the earliest. There have not been any objections by the core devs to these suggestions, nevertheless the dates might shift a bit, especially if issues are found in the current Plataberget devnet which upgradded yesterday. There were some issues, but apparently only minor ones so they did not influence the suggested testnet fork dates.

For people wondering what Glamsterdam brings, there is the amazing forkcast website which goes into details: https://forkcast.org/upgrade/glamsterdam/

In short, there are a 3 large changes:

1. ePBS (enshrined proposer builder separation): Changes how much time each step has within a slot and also gets rid of MEVboost. -> More throughput, network does not rely on external software anymore (MEVboost) and maybe even MEV burn in the future.

2. BAL (block-level access lists): Each block also contains all state accesses and state changes -> Transaction re-execution, which each node needs to do, can be much better parallelized which again gives more throughput. In a zk future, weaker nodes do not even have to re-execute the transactions and just make the state changes.

3. Gas repricings. This makes gas prices correlate better with resource usage on nodes. This means gas limits can be increased much more safely, which again gives a lot of throughput.

All in all Glamsterdam can increase throughput massively. Proposed gas limit increases where in the range of a factor of 5 from today. Theoretically, a 15 times gas limit increase should be possible. We will have to see if we increase the gas limits by a factor of 5 in the months after the fork.

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u/jtnichol:

has anyone discussed a staking lottery?

1. Decide on a max percentage staked.
2. Make a difficulty bomb at that number.
3. Use a random lottery system which kicks out nodes into the exit que and allows others to participate.

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u/haurog:

As far as I see, the tricky part with these kind of mechanisms is always how you let the new validators enter? Do you add a queue or do you do a system where whoever snags the free slot first gets in? Maybe there are other ways to implement the entry part, these two ways is what I have seen discussed. Both entry mechanisms have their problems.

If you do an additional queue, then LSTs have an advantage. They distribute the yield to all LST users even though a specific new deposit still is in the queue. The longer the queue, the more advantaged LST projects become, at least as long as they already have a sizeable part of their stake on the beacon chain. New entrants to the staking space will have it very difficult to get started. At the same time I expect solo stakers to do the simple math of ‘how long do I not get yield when I enter the queue as a solo staker and how much better is it if I use an LST instead’. The higher the yield once you are in, the longer the queue and the more advantaged LST projects become. That in my view is a pretty bad incentive.

If you do it as a faster is the winner kind of implementation, then obviously the more sophisticated players get an advantage as they can easily front run the normal stakers. I am sure there will be projects, were you pay something and they will try to get you in. This then adds another way to have an additional queue, with the same issues as above. The equilibrium here will be how much it costs to win the front running battle and how much yield there will be for stakers.

Both entry mechanism essentially lower the yield for stakers, but in a somehow slightly hidden mechanism until there is an equilibrium either through queue length or MEV wars or both.

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u/pa7x1:

Here is a way to visualize how EIP-8363 helps protect solo stakers better than the present curve. The issue solo stakers face is that the current curve slowly erodes them out of the validator set. First, they earn at a slower pace than LSTs. So the share of stake that is owned by LST vs solo stakers will tend to keep growing for ever. But furthermore, after surpassing certain amount of total ETH staked solo stakers don’t even receive enough yield to compensate for the inflation of the asset. Which means that not only on relative terms with respect to LSTs they are disappearing, but also on relative terms with respect the total amount of ETH. Solo stakers are the frog on the slowly boiling pot.

This is important for the long-term health of the protocol. If you let this slowly brew for decades you will end up with a captured chain by LSTs.

Here is one way to visualize it. Whenever you have such scenario of shrinking populations you can characterize the rate at which the population disappears by the half-life. This is the same half-life applied to nuclear isotopes. The idea is to calculate how long does it take for solo stakers to be cut in half with respect to the total stake. That measures their disappearance rate, smaller half-lifes are worse, makes solo stakers disappear faster. Here is how the half-life of solo stakers looks under EIP-8363 vs the current curve. And, I have also estimated the effect of future upgrades to the protocol that will help reduce validation costs, to show how it would affect solo stakers under both curves.

https://imgur.com/hbphPQq

The short version of it is that EIP-8363 makes solo staking viable for the long-term and compounds more positively with future protocol upgrades to help increase the viability of solo staking further.

This post is motivated by u/epic_trader request to explain how solo stakers are protected by this EIP.

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u/UAP44:

What would convince me is a concrete description of what actually breaks if 60%, 75%, or even 90% of ETH is staked. If high staking participation itself creates a serious protocol failure mode, then we have a strong reason to intervene. But so far most of the arguments I see are about relative returns, dilution, staking-provider economics, and engineering a preferred equilibrium. Those are financial incentive arguments, and perhaps worthwhile ones, but they are not yet evidence that the current issuance curve creates a protocol-level danger. If the claim is that systemic risk continuously increases with the staking ratio, then I think we need to identify the actual failure mechanism and establish that the risk becomes significant enough to justify changing a fundamental part of the protocol.

This is also where I think the protocol maturity and ossification discussion becomes relevant. Ethereum cannot keep every previously settled design decision permanently open for optimization simply because somebody can construct a model in which another set of parameters might perform better. If eventual ossification is a real goal, then as protocol properties mature the burden of proof for reopening them should increase: not merely “would this potentially improve Ethereum?”, but increasingly “is changing Ethereum itself necessary to address a demonstrated problem?” Issuance and monetary policy seem like exactly the kind of properties where stability should eventually carry substantial weight. I’m not arguing that issuance can never change, but before reopening something this fundamental I would want to see a credible failure mode from leaving the current curve alone. So far I see an argument for a potentially preferable economic equilibrium; I still don’t see the looming protocol problem that makes changing the existing one necessary.

(thread continues)

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u/epic_trader:

I appreciate the effort, but I feel like you’re not actually addressing my questions or points of criticism.

My claim about why I think the proposed EIP fails at protecting solo stakers is the following:

Small solo stakers have higher expenses per ETH secured. In any scenario where profit margins are stretched thin, they will be the first to be pushed out. The proposed EIP doesn’t introduce any new mechanisms to protect small solo stakers. You alter the curve and introduce a cap on issuance, but this doesn’t do anything to change the fact that small solo stakers have the highest expenses per ETH staked.

You’ve used the term “market equilibrium” to explain why small solo stakers are protected, but you haven’t proposed where this “market equilibrium” will be, you don’t appear to have modeled the different potential scenarios and pointed to how small solo stakers are protected at any given levels.

Therefore I’ve posed the questions:

1 - At what levels of yield/issuance is it no longer profitable to be a solo staker? At 2% yield, at 1.5%, at 1%, at 0.5%?

2 - What makes you feel confident that LSTs/DATs/exchanges/whales/etc would stop adding more stake at any of those levels?

I’ve made several other points about why I think this EIP has issues, but let’s stick with the above. And let’s stick with the rules that are governing Ethereum today.

(thread continues)

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I haven’t seen anything from Compound in ages. At this point I just thought it was abandonware, but apparently they are appointing a new leadership team, have a new mission, and $52M in funding to bring institutional lending to Defi.

https://x.com/Compound_xyz/status/2089386082441871388

1/ Compound is entering its next era.

Today we’re announcing a new leadership team and a $52M DAO-approved development program,the largest in the protocol’s history, to bring institutional credit onchain.

2/ Aaron Schnarch joins as Executive Director, with Christopher Donovan as COO, Steven Liu as CPO, and Leo Eikelman as CTO.

Between them they have built and scaled institutional infrastructure across traditional finance and digital assets.

3/ With DeFi’s maturation, banks, asset managers, exchanges, and fintechs are looking to build onchain lending experiences. But few have the expertise to build the infrastructure in-house.

Enter Compound.

4/ Since launching in 2018, Compound has become one of the most forked, battle-tested codebases in DeFi, with ~$480B in deposits and borrowing volume, and zero bad debt since launch.

5/ The program will fund an ambitious new product roadmap: native RWA support, best-in-class capital efficiency, and integration tooling that lets any institution embed onchain finance into their products.

6/ To execute on this ambition, Compound will deliver the first of its institutional-grade DeFi products in the coming weeks.

7/ Compound helped define the first era of DeFi lending.

Now we’re building the next era of onchain finance.

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There is a lot of discussion about a found Ledger vulnerability, which allegedly allows any website to circumvent the ‘what you see is what you sign guarantee’ a hardware wallet should give you. Not sure how trustworthy the claim is to be honest. The Ledger CTO calls it FUD and claims it is just an irresponsible company boasting about things that were fixed before they even disclosed it.

I never heard of the company disclosing the bug. On the other hand, Ledger has a long history of twisting the truth when there are bugs, leaks or public backlash. Ledger also does not deny the allegations about circumventing what the screen shows. And then Ledger talk about how their inhouse bug hunters are top notch. Not really what I want to hear in such a case. I prefer to have more detailed information about what is affected. Is it really only their clear signing implementation? Or are older hardware wallets without clear signing affected as well.

For me the takeway is, update your Ethereum app through Ledger live and make sure it is at least on v1.22.2. They updated the version recently. As far as I have seen, the old Ledger Nano S (not the Nano S Plus) did not get an update. if you have the older Ledger Nano S you have to think of replacing the hardware wallet with a newer one. The Nano S might be affected by the bug or not. Who knows thanks to the unclear communication by Ledger.

Sources:

Claims by testmachine: https://xcancel.com/testmachine_ai/status/2090954980635164965 or https://x.com/testmachine_ai/status/2090954980635164965

Ledger response: https://xcancel.com/P3b7_/status/2091585430030344262 or https://x.com/P3b7_/status/2091585430030344262

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Some past DeFi associates of mine have published an article on why Meta DEXs threaten Uniswap: https://www.market0x.com/research/paid-to-stay-metadex-model

As Aerodrome prepares to go cross-chain, we’ll soon have a lot more data on whether Uniswap’s moat can actually be threatened. They have such a large war chest I’m sure they can keep building an innovating for years to come.

It’ll be exciting to see how this plays out!

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A thesis for ETH this cycle

1. There is no (VC) infra play this cycle. Last cycle there were new alt-L1s (and some L2s), but I haven’t seen a lot of new L1s since then. Infra is “done” (obv not completely done, but enough that VCs don’t fund any dogshit chain) and the competition will be less this time around.

2. BTC is struggling. Well, it’s not really struggling, but it also not without flaws and people talk about that. There’s the security budget. Quantum security. OP_CAT and L2s not being a things. I don’t believe BTC will not perform. But I also don’t believe BTC will blindly outperform like last cycle. People will look for alternatives.

3. Is somehow connected to 2., because last cycle onboarded a lot of new (trad) capital. And like basically every cycle people start with BTC and then learn what’s actually possible and that there is more than just an asset and how chains work. Both ETH and SOL will benefit from this.

4. ETH doesn’t seem to make last cycles mistakes and is going to benefit from the changes made in the past 2 years. This includes more soft forks, scaling the L1 and focussing on that and less on L2s.

5. I believe that some (consumer) apps will be created on mainnet, which leads to new demand for both ETH and blockspace and despite the scaling efforts we will see higher transaction cost. Obv we won’t see 100+ gwei, but it might spike from time to time and avg. will be higher as well. This will hopefully revive the ultrasound money meme. I still believe REV is bullshit, but it has shown us that you can have a lot of different business models with L1s. I believe that high volume/ low cost is better than low volume/ high cost (which was the driver of the USM meme back in the day) and if we can have a burn without really hurting the user, because it’s still cents/ tx…

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EIP-7702 was excellent and is super underused and unappreciated. Once you’ve used ambire wallet and dapps supporting batches via something like EIP-5792 the normal alternative looks silly. Especially good upgrade for ethereum where each tx takes several seconds otherwise. Encourage all dapps and wallets to embrace it.

Basically your EOA can become a contract which executes a list of any action and you can see simulations of it all. It’s all better UX, better security, and more gas efficient. You skip the 21k gas per tx for every included action, your approval slots start and end at the same 0 value (big gas saving), and you don’t leave any non zero approvals to be exploited later. And you sign once instead of maybe approve, swap, approve, approve, deposit, stake, revoke, revoke, revoke. So have to wait for hardware wallet interaction and tx inclusion once instead of say 3 to 9 times. By acting atomically you also protect yourself vs say revealing you’re likely to do a big swap after your approval is public.

There’s a massive upgrade here we haven’t properly taken advantage of somehow. It should be everywhere by now.

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum!

u/hanniabu

$2,398.77

u/hanniabu

0.03094

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Dilution catch you,

A better store of value,

Keep printing but few.

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Here is some high grade PQ hopium for you: https://xcancel.com/drakefjustin/status/2087905684180418733

the ethproofs call tomorrow should be a banger.

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u/rhythm_of_eth:

I’m a little bit out of sync.

What’s this ethcoordinate thing popping up where ethstaker used to be?

Why is it led by pro issuance EIP people? Who is bank rolling them?

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u/jmiehau:

Same org, new name. Their site says EthStaker was too limiting for the scope they were taking on, and that it’s the same team plus some new members.

The funding question they answer themselves in the FAQ: donations, with the main donors listed as the Ethereum Foundation, Optimism’s RPGF, Octant, Arbitrum DAO, Rocket Pool, Gitcoin and individuals.

About and FAQ are on ethcoordinate.org.

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Predictable/trustworthy. Micah Zoltu says it pretty well:

I am EXTREMELY skeptical of claims that the current issuance curve will be so bad that it will have a significant impact on the long term health. As an existence proof, USD still works despite an insane issuance policy. Other things matter much much more than these tweaks.

https://x.com/MicahZoltu/status/2085277970151940399

I’d add that gold has had a stable supply growth of 1.5-2%/year over the long term.

The other thing many people don’t seem to get in this debate, IMO: it’s not about how much is staked, it’s about how decentralized/uncapturable the staking is. I know that’s a hard problem to solve. But targeting the amount of stake won’t solve the potential problem.

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So tired of comments like this. This is exactly what Ethereum is up against: a lot of people still assume that because ETH has no fixed hard cap, its tokenomics are inherently uninvestable.

They ignore the fact that ETH’s current inflation rate is still relatively low and broadly comparable to Bitcoin’s. More importantly, they ignore that Bitcoin faces the same fundamental security-budget problem.

Ethereum is trying to balance several competing objectives at once: keeping issuance low, providing enough validator yield to secure the network, supporting enormous transaction throughput, and keeping transaction fees extremely low. With fees now so cheap, getting back to consistently negative ETH issuance may be very difficult. But that does not somehow make Bitcoin’s economics immune to the same tradeoff.

Bitcoin cannot indefinitely maintain a massive security budget while driving its block-subsidy inflation toward essentially zero. As block rewards continue to halve, miner revenue increasingly has to come from transaction fees. If those fees do not increase dramatically, what pays for the hash rate required to secure the network?

That is the part people conveniently ignore. Bitcoin wants near-zero inflation, strong miner incentives, and reasonably low transaction fees at the same time. Ethereum wants low issuance, validator yield, massive TPS, and near-free transactions.

Both networks have to solve the same basic problem: security has to be paid for somehow.

Calling ETH “endless tulips” simply because it does not have an arbitrary 21-million hard cap completely misses the much more important question: Which monetary and fee model can sustainably fund network security over the long term?

ALT WARNING: 1ST TIME IN 6 YEARS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meRlW9iUKYA

https://www.youtube.com/@ems5427

Ethereum has an unlimited minted supply. They have high TVL and burning, but its still a terrible design. Endless tulips!!

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In a few weeks Lido will migrate (consolidate) 80-90% of their staked ETH, currently under the permissioned set (which includes Core Client Devs among other Ethereum related entities), to 0x02 credentials.

Napkin math: This is roughly 8.4 million ETH moving from 263,000 validators to 4100 validators.

The Network will go from 900K to roughly 640K validators or so, a 30% decrease. This has massive benefits to the network load on Ethereum and brings us closer to SSF. It also finally realizes the potential of 0x02 credentials, and encourages remaining big staking entities to follow through.

The remaining 10% of staked ETH in Lido belongs to smaller community stakers of their permissionless modules, which might or might not migrate depending on how much bond they can provide (32ETH Bond is needed for 2048 ETH validators).

An EIP has been proposed to allow for 0x02 validators to have configurable MaxEB which will make it viable for onchain LSTs to migrate all validators to 0x02 while remaining economically viable. Considered for Hegota.

https://forkcast.org/eips/8148/

This is specially important for permissionless modules, where mostly we would find home stakers with <32ETH and bonded 0x01 validators that get swept.

With configurable MaxEB, they could have, for example 64ETH validators being swept with 2.5ETH bond.

This EIP is likely very relevant to allow Lido to continue moving % from the curated to the permissionless modules while remaining protocol aligned (I.e. not negatively contribute against SSF).

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While the conversation focuses on the more ‘accessible’ political and economic issuance issue, Danno drops this banger to highlight what we actually should be prioritizing:

https://xcancel.com/i/article/2088770615516000337

“If a critical portion of users needs two years to shift off ECDSA, and it needs to be done by 2029 (the current point in the risk probability when it cannot be ignored), then the accounts need to be available by 2027. That’s the end of this school year.”

Helpful framing concepts:

• “Mosca’s Theorem”
• “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later”

Typical Danno style, he doesn’t coddle the reader, but it is worth spending time to understand (and is a great signal that there was no LLM involved).

btw, the quantum readiness rankings site: https://quantumtracker.org/

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After my announcement in true 2018 TRX style, here are my thoughts regarding issuance and EIP 8363.

As I already said I believe the reasons for the EIP are valid and after reading it, I still believe that’s the case. The calculations made last time (2024?) were convincing me that basically uncapped issuance would lead to tax disadvantages for solo stakers which would lead to at least some solo stakers dropping off. At the same time lower APYs would like do the same. Beneficiaries would be LSTs that would then be “too big to fail” or generally speaking centralization forces would be hard to manage. I am not so sure about the whole derivatives discussion, since L2 ETH is basically a derivative as well, but that has never been a blocker for L2s…

My biggest issue with the EIP is the timing. I think this is basically one of the last EIPs we should push, and we should push it “when Ethereum has won”. Why?

Let’s just assume that the “productive asset” meme and APY plays a role for tradfi. What if they don’t care about nominal and real yield, because they just want to sell a yielding asset? And what if ETHs competition doesn’t care about being right, but cares about catering to the tradfi audience? Maybe a 5-7% APY on Solana sounds better than a 0% ETH despite not being lindy, despite being more centralized, despite being diluting to non-holders?

Also the “defi is going to explode” argument makes sense to me and it doesn’t seem to be addressed in the EIP. That’s already the second issue people broad up with regards to changing the issuance which makes me believe that the EIP is a niche solution for a very specific problem that likely didn’t take into consideration some stakeholders of the ecosystem and that could lead to unwanted consequences that could seriously harm Ethereum.

It feels like L2s 2.0 - right idea, wrong timing, hence not a good solution for the current circumstances. I still believe we can’t scale L1s endlessly and will need L2s for some use cases. But we focussed too much on L2s when scaling the L1 would have been a better solution or at least shouldn’t have been completely abandoned for some years. And we potentially lost a whole cycle because of the “L2s eating mainnet’s lunch” argument. We lost because we developed a solution that might have worked if there was just one ecosystem, but ETH had competition and new L1s popped up on top of that.

This feels similar. If there was no other L1 and no other APY and no competition, this might be the right choice. But if we did this right now, we would indeed push people into other ecosystems where they do get some reward “for free”/ “risk-free yield”. I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I want. We can do that, when there’s basically only ETH left and the whole (financial) world is already onboarded and living in the ETH ecosystem. But that’s not the case yet. And changing the issuance might even open the door for competition that is basically dead now.

Path dependency is a bitch and we should learn from the past. The same change can make sense and not make sense depending on timing and circumstances.

I understand that centralization is a (multi-dimensional) problem and likely also has a “deadline”, but I don’t think it is as close as people / the authors think. Lido was the number 1 enemy some years ago and is still a threat to centralization, but ETFs, restaking and obviously CEXs etc. are constantly changing the environment and playing field.

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in the final leanEthereum roadmap final block time is 4s (a third of now 12s). ZK gigabrain at the wheel

“Huge engineering achievement by the ZisK team.

Proving Ethereum blocks in real time with just 4 GPUs, while maintaining 128-bit security and post-quantum resistance, is an outstanding milestone.

Incredibly proud of what this team is building.” https://xcancel.com/jbaylina/status/2089650660509663478

Ethereum proven in real time on 4x5090 GPUs with a p99 of 9.62s. All providing 128-bit provable security, powered by Poseidon1, and post-quantum secure.

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u/edmundedgar:

Nice clear and funny takedown of the EIP 8363 “negative real yield” bollocks:

https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-8363-tapered-issuance-burn/29263/236

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u/Tricky_Troll:

I am a lazy man, but not too lazy to post it here for other lazy folks, so here goes. Thanks for sharing this by the way, it’s a great post.

The authors of the EIP claim that the current issuance curve forces solo stakers out:

Solo stakers are forced out. Dilution erodes everyone’s real return as the ratio climbs, but solo stakers, who in most jurisdictions pay income tax on their nominal yield, cross into negative dilution-adjusted returns well before large operators and holders of tax-shielded positions do (this includes accumulating exchange traded products (ETPs) and non-rebasing or wrapped liquid staking tokens (LSTs)).

Pintail expands on the logic behind this here:

The problem is that paying more yield actually does nothing for you at high staking ratios. You get taxed on your nominal yield, even though your ETH holding is actually shrinking as a proportion of the ETH supply. Some concrete figures (I’ll use the 40% tax rate that I pay as a UK-based solo staker).

Once the staking ratio reaches 60%, you earn 1.9% nominal yield, against dilution of 1.2%. But 40% income tax applies to nominal yield so you only get to keep 1.2% of it, which is exactly cancelled by dilution. Above 60% staked you’re in negative yield before even thinking about trying to offset other costs. Why would you be a solo staker in those circumstances?

In the motivation section of EIP-8363 and the issuance discussion more generally (e.g. issuance.wtf), “real return” or “real yield” is often used to mean nominal staking yield minus ETH supply growth. A much better term for this, that’s sometimes used as well, is dilution-adjusted yield. In economics, real yield has a standard meaning: it’s the nominal rate adjusted for price inflation of a basked of goods, not for supply growth of the asset.

• Dilution adjusted-yield is a supply-share metric that answers “how does my fraction of all ETH change”?
• Real yield is a purchasing power metric that answers “how does my ability to buy goods and services change?”

Conflating these two leads to statements like “solo stakers have negative real yield” when what’s actually shown is “solo stakers share of ETH supply shrinks”. A falling share of total ETH does not automatically mean that the value of their position, measured by what it can buy in goods and services, is falling too.

What matters for the long‑run viability of solo staking is real return in their consumption currency after tax and costs, not just their percentage of the ETH supply. A world with negative dilution-adjusted yield can still have positive real returns. Conversly, a world with positive dilution-adjusted yield could still have negative real returns. To make the EIP’s claim that “solo stakers are forced out” rigorous, you would need to model not only after-tax staking income and cost structure of solo staking but also ETH’s expected price dynamics relative to fiat as well as fiat inflation, to then show that solo staker’s real returns fall below what is needed to cover costs and justify risk. Showing that dilution-adjusted yield goes negative alone doesn’t establish that conclusion.

To see how reductionist a pure dilution-adjusted-yield argument can be, consider a holder of unstaked ETH in the snail-issuance world. For staking ratios above 0% and below 50%, annual issuance is positive, so a holder of unstaked ETH has negative dilution-adjusted yield (up to -0.5%). If you treat “dilution-adjusted yield <= 0” as sufficient to make a position untenable, you are saying that it is irrational to hold unstaked ETH whenever the staking ratio is above 0% and below 50%. Taken seriously, that logic pushes you toward an equilibrium in which either:

• no ETH is staked and there is no issuance or
• more than 50% of ETH is staked and there is no issuance

To be clear, my position is that “dilution-adjusted yield <= 0” is not a relevant threshold for viability of a position, and I reject both that solo stakers are forced out under the current issuance curve as well as that snail issuance automatically leads to 0 issuance, based on a dilution-adjusted yield argument alone. I would ask the authors to either:

• retract their claim that solo stakers are forced out under the current issuance curve or
• provide an argument for it that doesn’t rely solely on dilution-adjusted yield or
• clearly communicate in the EIP that under their world-view snail issuance will lead to zero issuance as an expected outcome

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u/HITMAN616

Ethereum!

u/FrenktheTank

$1,880.96

u/M4gelock

0.02971

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Money frame by frame,

Privacy instead of fame,

Ethereum game.

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Ethereal news weekly #35

• #️⃣ Justin Drake: Poseidon abandoned
• 🌱 EthCoordinate evolved from EthStaker
• 🐻‍❄️ Platåberget (Glamsterdam public testnet) live

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-35/

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Helpful template for y’all:

Your post advocates a

( ) cap-based

( ) identity-based

( ) market-based

( ) vigilante

approach to incentivize solo staking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea:

( ) Nobody will be able to enter the staking set anymore.

( ) Large stakers can split their stake up into a bunch of small 32 ETH validators.

( ) Large stakers can cheaply rent a bunch of IP addresses to assign validator traffic to.

( ) Large stakers can anonymize their staked ETH to hide the very fact that they are a large staker.

( ) Solo stakers will be incentivized to stake with an institution instead of solo staking.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it in most countries globally

( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for authorizing new validator entries

( ) People assigning their withdrawal address to a contract

( ) People trading ownership of validators without ever actually exiting them

( ) Asshats

( ) Potential dangers of weird unproven consensus mechanisms

( ) Huge existing investment in ETH by institutions

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all approaches to identifying how much stake an entity controls

( ) Profitability of large stakers splitting stake and pretending to be a bunch of solo stakers

( ) Dishonesty on the part of stakers themselves

( ) Malicious software that stakers write themselves and run on their staking rigs

( ) Geth

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable

( ) Interactions with the beacon chain deposit contract should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Blocklists suck

( ) Allowlists suck

( ) We should be able to stake any 32 ETH, no matter where it came from, without being censored

( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks

( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

( ) Spinning a solo validator up and down should be essentially free

( ) Rotating keys for a solo validator should be free

( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

( ) Temporary/time-limited validators are cumbersome

( ) I don’t want the government vetting the origin of all my ETH

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.

( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you validate and slash your entire stake!

Adapted from craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

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u/somedaysitsdark:

Okay /u/pa7x1, I believe I really understand the analysis here now. https://ethresear.ch/t/the-shape-of-issuance-curves-to-come/20405

Solo-stakers are disadvantaged on the current and proposed curves unless we implement some sort of uncorrelation penalty incentive or correlation penalty, which is not actually part of the proposal?

So, I still do not see how we aren’t accelerating the effective end of solo-staking with this proposal. I do see how it can be slightly more fair as they die off though.

Are there any uncorrelation penalty incentive/correlation penalty proposals being considered in tandem?

Am I mistaken? I’ve poured through the analysis, I believe I understand it fully, I certainly appreciate it. Thank you for all that you have done to put this together.

Edit: uncorrelation penalty -> incentive

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u/pa7x1:

Any staker that has a higher presence of fixed costs is always going to be disadvantaged under any curve. This is not fixable purely through issuance.

If you compare a solo staker with an LST holder, the solo staker has worse economy of scale because it has higher fixed costs. The fixed costs are nasty, they are the ones that eat you away in low issuance.

Up to here these are very general facts that hold true across every single issuance curve.

Here is the crucial point. When an issuance curve implements stake capping (stake capping meaning brings the yield to 0 at some target stake ratio) two things happen.

• Big entities have a roof on how much ETH they want to stake. This happens because the curve has a maximum issuance, in the proposed curve at 20% staked. So if a single entity where to hold 21% stake, the extra 1% staked would start reducing its income. So that disadvantages concentration of stake.

• The region at which the solo staker (poorest economy of scale) and the LST holder cease to stake shrinks and gets compressed towards the point where everyone gets pushed out. Currently, with reasonable estimates of the cost structure of a solo staker, at 60M ETH you will not earn enough to compensate for the inflation of ETH. At that point solo stakers are just a shrinking pie bound to disappear over the long term. While LST holders are fine up to 110M ETH approx. That creates a huge region where we are just slowly killing solo stakers.

If we wait a few years and stake keeps growing as it has been doing (and shows no signs of slowing) then we will sleep walk into that region and then it’s game over. Solo stakers will disappear, it’s not even a matter of they unplugging their machines they will just get diluted away.

What implementing stake capping does is ensure solo stakers are viable economically much closer to the point where everyone is pushed out. So that we don’t have a region between 60M ETH staked and 110M ETH staked where everyone just holds LSTs because there is no other alternative.

To further improve the situation for solo stakers we need other things:

• Lower HW requirements: This is coming with statelessness and zk-proving. Lower machine costs, lower fixed costs.

• Introduce uncorrelation incentives or stronger correlation disincentives: This would help give an economic advantage to uncorrelated stakers, which solo stakers would benefit from. Today Oisin presented an EIP about this.

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u/somedaysitsdark:

Okay. I’m up to speed. You have been extremely patient, so thank you again for that.

Today Oisin presented an EIP about this.

I missed this, I’ll check it out, thanks!

Can I just say, this whole situation just absolutely sucks?

Back when PoS was being discussed with EIP-1011, and we were going to need 1500 ETH to solo stake (which even back then was a disheartening and impossible amount)- I kinda thought that long term if Ethereum were successful there were good odds that the majority of ETH would end up getting staked and it would turn staked ETH into some weird low-APR internet bond. Apparently, this was maybe right, but I previously never construed it as a bad thing.

We spent years engineering different PoS arrangements, like EIP-1011, but kept re-engineering them until we got to the merge. There were countless discussions about existential slashing crises throughout. And yet we somehow got to the point today where a supermajority bug is a valid argument for making changes to the issuance curve. I guess I don’t know when the misstep was.

I think it’s just going to be tough to be a solo-staker.

Wear that badge with pride fellas.

Fuck.

Some days it’s dark.

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u/rhythm_of_eth:

I wonder if people realize that after Glamsterdam, the gas limit can be raised to 300Mgas which means ETH turns deflationary at 2.66 Gwei base gas. This is… deflationary ETH while a simple transaction costs barely 10 cents (because obv ETH will be 10K hah).

Let’s do something to make sure 100% of that available block space finds great use, and maybe discuss issuance for the I* fork as the community and researchers had already agreed.

Not a trivial thing to utilize fully 300Mgas blocks. Any EIPs for that (aside for gas repricing, which also ships on Glamsterdam!)

I like the one for quick slots: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8198.

It would being back a lot of use cases lost to alt-L1 and L2s. It would virtually trade some of the gas limit for faster slots. Total gas throughput would remain the same

One interesting drawback is that it could enforce harder constraints on zkEVM roadmap.

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u/edmundedgar:

I wonder if people realize that after Glamsterdam, the gas limit can be raised to 300Mgas which means ETH turns deflationary at 2.66 Gwei base gas. This is… deflationary ETH while a simple transaction costs barely 10 cents (because obv ETH will be 10K hah).

What does this mean in terms of data? For a while I’ve wanted to put the did:plc directory on there.

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u/rhythm_of_eth:

I’m afraid that 300Mgas is amazing for throughtput but underwhelming if you are looking for permanent data.

300Mgas gas limit is basically 25Mgas/s throughput (regardless of slot speed). Your options after Glamsterdam

• Calldata/history. This is 40 gas per byte (new floor from EIP-7623). You get… 7.5MB per block or 625KB/s (this is napkin math). Here technically you risk nodes dropping It (EIP-4444).

• Blobs. Obviously cheapest but you’d need to reupload the directory every once in a while because these are ephemeral, as we all know…

• Permanent state. SSTORE (20k gas per 32-byte slot… 625 gas/byte) or the SSTORE2/contract-code trick (~200 gas/byte): only 0.5 to 1.5 MB per block, 40 to 125 KB/s. This is the only that “puts it on Ethereum” the way I think you mean.

I’m not familiar enough with it, but did:plc full export op-log seems to be in the order of tens GBs? Napkin math incoming:

• Permanent state seems the reasonable one but theres some talk of disincentivizing it further. If you are stubborn and patient, you can use anywhere between 2000 and 4000 ETH to put 10GBs on Ethereum if there is no congestion.

• Blobs would require a funny rolling update to keep the data alive. Each blob is 128Kb (costs 130K blob gas). Blobs expire every 2.5 weeks or so, which means you repost at least 20 times. 10GBs would be 80000 blobs, so you’d need to publish 1 blob every 2 blocks.

Very likely you remain stuck with anchoring to a Merkle root/Checkpoint on chain and the rest in ephemeral storage (blobs). This remains basically a rollup use case.

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Context

1. Ethereum’s issuance policy was changed in a somewhat expedited but conservative way several years ago, with an expectation that the topic would eventually be revisited.

2. Some stakeholders now believe it needs to be revisited relatively soon because “too much” ETH is being staked, putting downward pressure on staking returns and potentially creating broader distortions.

3. The optics of the proposal were poor from the outset. It was submitted just before the proposal deadline and tied to a named upgrade, Hegota, creating the appearance of putting the cart before the horse.

4. There are also fundamental differences in incentives across small stakers, large staking operators, LST providers, and institutional custodians, which inevitably pulls companies such as Coinbase into the debate.

5. The proposal may be directionally valid, but it is aggressive by design and, in my view, too lightly evidenced to support a policy shift of this magnitude as currently written.

Summary

The current Ethereum curve pays lower percentage yields as more ETH is staked, but total issuance continues rising and staking yield never falls much below roughly 1.5%. EIP-8363 argues this could eventually push a very large share of ETH into staking, custodians, ETFs, LSTs, and institutional operators.

The proposal would:

• Calculate a burn based on the total staking balance.
• Burn part of every validator’s idealized attestation, proposal, and sync committee reward.
• Increase that burn as the staking ratio rises.
• Fully offset consensus issuance at 60.25m ETH staked, approximately 50% of current supply.
• Phase the permanent yield reduction in over 18 months.

The proposal does not model:

• The desired dollar value of slashable stake under major ETH price declines
• Operator concentration under different yields
• Regulatory coercion and custodial correlation
• MEV concentration
• Institutional versus solo staker yield sensitivity
• The effect of future consensus and proving roles

Approximate permanent yields (Current vs Proposed)

edit: typo

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It’s easy to become jaded during a bear market while we all wait for the world to catch up and for ETH to move, but it’s always important to stay clued into what’s happening on chain.

I continue to be encouraged by more on innovation in on-chain experiments and the emerging trends. More and more I’m becoming convinced that it may be indicate a shift into the beginning of a new bull market.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing the past couple weeks: (from most obvious to least obvious imo)

• Perps platforms continue print revenue. Everyone knows Hyperliquid and Lighter as the leaders. More exist, some pre-token. Competition seems tough and I am not knowledgable or interested enough in this sector to comment
• A meme token on Robinhood (I know, memes suck, but keep reading) listing on Robinhood was aggressively front run. Trading meme tokens is more and more a losing game without an incredible edge. Not just insider-info, but the ability to monitor the chain well. Here is an interesting article outlining the situation: https://x.com/clickl3ss/status/2085441738551025967
• At the same time meme token launch pads are telling incredible revenue stories: Pump, Pons, Fomo app, and now Uniswap all doing well, but I hate this sector and the competition is everywhere. I can’t help but think the last point will create more losers and stunt this at some point, but who knows.
• Trading card collection platforms are doing incredible revenue. The biggest names are Collector Crypt on Solana, and Monster on (I think) MegaETH. I am not particular interested in trading cards, but I think this is worth watching.
• NFT infra, and new models around tokenization is a new sector that I am absolutely paying attention to, and for the first time in the bear has caused me to take positions and speculate. And I’ll talk about these next, because they’re more interesting to me.

Two big names to watch in the NFT infra game:

• (1) Fake World Assets, (Mainnet) which I’ve talked about here https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/s/P3W7T6glH9 is seeing steady daily volume, and burns the token for revenue. NFT users can put their ETH and NFTs at risk to earn from gamblers who pay ETH to spin a gacha front end for rewards. Currently the highest reserve backed NFT is a 300 ETH reward or a crypto punk. That liquidity is raking in nearly 1.5-2 ETH a day for that Punk owner. The product has only been live for a couple weeks, but had already been forked and built on a ton. The creator has more ideas as well apparently. On the token, market cap is very low on this so there is both big upside, and big bust potential.
• (2) Stonkbrokers: (Robinhood Chain) pairs a reserve of NFTs against their token using a new Anvil AMM they created, which prices NFTs at static quantity next to an ERC20 token. They paired Stonkbroker NFTs in reserve with an ERC20 StonkBroker token, to create a liquid floor on the NFT. Others can provide liquidity too. Trades of the token create revenue which purchases a war chest of stocks, and NFT holders burn StonkBroker tokens to activate higher shares of this and other revenue streams. Each StonkBroker NFT has an attached wallet embedded, which travels with it. The other revenue stream is a cut of trading from projects that issue NFTs/tokens using the Anvil AMM. So far there’s been one project to do this, which literally launched yesterday. StonkBroker NFTs recently passed Pudgy Penguins and are selling on Opensea at a market price of 7ish ETH, with a floor of 6ish through the token. The token and project has been live for about a month, and the token has run non stop, so be cognizant of that.

That’s it for my update on current on chain games and trends. No investment advice of course, but the advice I will give is to start paying attention if you haven’t been. New things are happening on chain, and that has always predated bull markets in the past.

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An alternative proposal to address the hypothentical scenario of staked % growing indefinitely:

https://xcancel.com/i/article/2085831237881762274

To me, the numbers do not work. But the mechanism is inherently simpler, doesnt mess with issuance curve excesively (only sets a hard limit). Instead focusing directly on what needs to be addressed. You could tweak the numbers to make it work.

But most importantly, it goes to prove that the Tapered Burn EIP is equally opinionanted and even more: tries to achieve more than it needs and messes with too many things by fully reconstructing the issuance curve.

The only reason perfectly rational (and smart) individuals would drastically modify the issuance curve is that they want to address more than two or three dynamics of the protocol. This amount requires a deep second-order-effects analysis. They should be upfront about it, and not try to pass this EIP as a simple change.

PS: just as I was writing this, EIP proposers have started conceeding a few points/validating concerns.

https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-8363-tapered-issuance-burn/29263/134

I thought all the challenging was uncalled for!

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u/haurog:

Pretty much everything has been said about the issuance change in the last few days. Loved reading all the different opinions, some more nuanced some more opinionated. What I will write below is my view and is pretty much that, my view with my weight of priorities. Feel free to have different opinions and priorities.

I have already written about my general view about issuance 3 months ago (https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1t1gey5/daily_general_discussion_may_02_2026/ojifm1o/). I pretty much am of the same opinion as back then. Issuance is here to pay for a service, namely providing the Ethereum network with security. If issuance is used to loop LSTs around or bring tradfi into the space then they can take advantage of it, but only as long as the actors actually provide the security they are getting paid for. LST loopers can cost the space quite a bit as well, as the recent rsETH hack made pretty clear. The 3AC meltdown in 2022 also had a large depeg of LSTs due to looping if I remember correctly. So, not sure if this is part of the DEFI that should be protected by ETH holder dilution. They add validators, sure, but destabilise other parts of the ecosystem. In general, the stakers are getting paid by dillution of every ETH holder, mostly small amounts, but they are definitely getting diluted. One can think about it differently. If every year you have to take ~0.86% of your ETH holdings and send it to Coinbase (most probably the largest staker), Binance, Kraken, Bitmine etc. would you feel that your money is well spent for the security you are getting? And would you be willing to pay up to 1.5% every year in a most extreme, but unlikely outcome? In my view the amount of ETH staked is already above what Ethereum needs to be secure. Staking ratio was stable for some years, but it started growing again at the beginning of this year. For these reasons I am open to a change in issuance, but as said in my older post, it really depends on the proposed changes.

Now lets go to the specific proposal (EIP-8363) which tries to solve some of the issues. One goal of the proposal is to keep the ratio of ETH staked below 50%. The general issue this tackles is that if any system or economy starts to be dominated by a single mechanism or sector, this sector becomes ‘too big to fail’. This adds a systemic risk and fully entrenches certain actors at the core of the protocol. That is not healthy, especially not for the system/economy as a whole. For this reason I think keeping the staking ratio below 50% is a great goal. With the proposed mechanisms, the EIP will achieve that, at least over longer time horizons. The current issuance curve cannot guarantee anything like that. So, I consider this a clear improvement over the status quo. The exact number of 50% is a bit arbitrary. In my simple view, one has to make sure it is clearly lower than 50% of the whole system, could be 45% or 40%. These are pretty much the same numbers in that context at least.

Issuance is planned to transition smoothly in the sense, that initially on the new curve, there is no APY change for stakers and within 18 months the lower curve is approached. I consider this a good time horizon and it prevents shocks in the ecosystem. That is necessary and reasonable. In a few years, if stake ratios increase with the current issuance curve, such a ‘smooth’ transition will get more punishing and also more complicated. Not impossible, but more complicated.

Now comes the most contentious part, the solo stakers. The current issuance curve slowly marginalized solo stakers and it will continue to do so. The proposed EIP-8363 does not change that outcome fundamentally, at least in my view. People make long economic arguments why the new issuance is better by leveling the playing field between solo stakers and professional ones. But as we have seen from the many solo staker opinions here and at other places, they pretty much only look at the APY to decide if they should stake or not. And with this proposal the APY can potentially go to 0. The intricate economics arguments brought up might not really be important to solo stakers, even though they should be. So, I do not think that this EIP can actually meaningfully diversify the staking landscape or even protect the solo stakers in any meaningful way. That is not surprising. Issuance is just one lever and it is pretty much impossible to find a good solution in such a complicated landscape by just having one lever to pull or push. Issuance is an important lever and it can solve some issues Ethereum might encounter in the future, but not all of them.

As written in the last post 3 months ago (linked above), a large issuance change for me is only acceptable in combination with additional safeguards to make sure that not only large entities grab the whole validator set. The most ideal way would be by being able to identify small stakers and give them a higher APY. Unfortunatly, there is no way to do this permissionlessly. The next best approach is to punish large stakers more if they make a mistake. This would improve the APY for solo stakers at least relative to the more professional ones and more importantly increase the cost for professional stakers as they will have to separate their staking setup into smaller subgroups so that only a smaller part is affected by a single configuration change. This would push the staking ratio equilibrium towards slightly higher APY. This punishing of larger stakers would also help to diversify setups within large operators and strengthen Ethereum resilience at least a bit. One such proposal is EIP-7716: anti-correlation attestation penalties, by Oisin Kyne. It simply increases the penalties for missing attestations if large parts of the networks are offline. Nowaday such a mechanism only kicks in when the network looses finality. With EIP-7716 this would already kick in at lower attestation failures and increase with more validators being offline. This would target mostly large entities. To be fair though, it would also hurt a much broader part of the ecosystem if one Ethereum client would have a bug and stop attesting. I would expect if something like EIP-7716 gets implemented more and more professional stakers would employ something like vero and vouch, which they should do already anyway and reduce these risks for everyone.

In my view we would need more than just one EIP to actually improve the staking landscape without sacrificing the diversity that is actually needed to keep the network resilient.

TL;DR: The proposed issuance change can achieve some of the goals it set out to achieve, but in my view it cannot fundamentally change the outcome for solo stakers. Not surprising as issuance is just one lever and there are limits what one can achieve with a single lever. Other EIPs, like EIP-7716, are in my view complementary and therefore necessary to improve the harsh outcomes the current and proposed issuance curve will have on solo stakers.

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u/UAP44:

This was a good read, thanks for posting. It actually crystallizes a somewhat different concern I’ve been having throughout this whole issuance debate.

You describe issuance as a lever: Ethereum issues ETH in order to purchase a particular service, namely sufficient network security. I think that’s a useful way of looking at it.

But it makes me wonder about the longer-term question:

At what point do we decide that we’ve found the right mechanism and stop pulling that lever?

I’m open to the possibility that the current issuance curve isn’t Ethereum’s final one. Ethereum is still maturing, and if something like EIP-8363, perhaps together with complementary mechanisms such as EIP-7716, produces a substantially healthier long-term equilibrium, then there is a legitimate argument for changing it.

What worries me much more is the possibility that issuance simply remains an ordinary protocol-policy variable forever.

As an ETH holder, there is a very significant difference to me between:

“Ethereum is still figuring out its final monetary/security policy.”

and

“Ethereum’s monetary/security policy is expected to remain subject to redesign indefinitely.”

I can accept the former. I would have serious trouble trusting the latter over very long time horizons.

At some point I want to be able to look at Ethereum and say: this is the issuance mechanism the protocol converged on; this question has been answered; future generations are not expected to continually reopen it.

Otherwise the long-term trust assumption isn’t only in the protocol. It is also in an indefinite sequence of future researchers, developers, validators and social majorities continuing to make good monetary-policy decisions forever.

And that realization is actually what pushed me to open this discussion on Ethereum Magicians:

[Idea / Meta EIP] Protocol Maturity and Ossification Framework
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/idea-meta-eip-protocol-maturity-and-ossification-framework/29376

The broader issue I’m trying to get at is that Ethereum has very mature machinery for saying:

“Here is something about the protocol we propose changing.”

But I don’t see equivalent machinery for saying:

“We consider this property mature. This is no longer ordinary protocol design space.”

EIPs can become Final, but that means the EIP document is final. It doesn’t mean the protocol property itself has become a long-term commitment that subsequent EIPs are expected not to reopen.

Issuance strikes me as potentially one of the clearest examples of why that distinction matters.

Maybe EIP-8363 is the right final mechanism. Maybe a modified version is. Maybe the current curve is. I’m not trying to settle that in this comment.

But perhaps there should eventually be a point where the issuance debate concludes with two decisions rather than one:

1. This is the issuance mechanism Ethereum wants.
2. This property has now reached maturity and should ossify.

In other words, maybe Ethereum gets one final substantial issuance redesign, whatever the community ultimately determines that should be, and part of that same process is deciding that we’ve now finished designing this part of Ethereum.

Future proposals could of course still physically fork the chain; nothing can prevent that. But socially, another ordinary issuance redesign would then be understood as reopening an explicitly settled commitment rather than simply being “the next EIP”.

I increasingly think this distinction between things Ethereum is still designing and things Ethereum considers finished is too foundational to remain implicit.

And we shouldn’t wait until Ethereum is supposedly “done” before defining how we recognize that something is done, because otherwise there will always be another upgrade, another optimization and another reason to postpone that conversation.

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Ethstaker is now EthCoordinate!

https://x.com/ethcoordinate/status/2087163391282708641

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Congrats on anyone that jumped into FWA and Stonkbroker after seeing this message. However you feel about the actual products, the amount of things being built on top of these already is impressive; it reminds me of early DeFi summer days. Hopefully the good times continue to roll for us, but remember to take profits on the way up and exercise proper risk management.

But that’s not why I’m making this post. Now that we may be nearing speculation season, I figured it would be a good time to nerd out about my favorite way to responsibly speculate on tokens using DeFi. Allow me to explain what I do personally…

Let’s say for the sake of example that I want to budget myself 5 ETH to speculate with. Here are a couple of common ways people approach that, and the bonus way that I want to talk about:

• 1. I simply spend the 5 ETH and buy my on-chain stocks or shitcoins of choice. Nothing fancy, just spending.
• 2. Take a loan on my ETH using cross asset lending like Aave or Morpho. This requires using a healthy LTV to avoid liquidation. If my goal is 5 ETH worth of value to speculate with, maybe that means I have to collateralize something like 15 ETH to borrow 33% so I can survive and react to a potential ETH dump. The net result is the target 5 ETH worth of dollars speculating, and 10 ETH exposed to smart contract risk and liquidation risk. (15 collateralized minus the 5 that you’ve taken out) If you collateralize an LST instead, then you can earn on your collateral, but it’s still basically 10 ETH at risk.
• 3. My favorite way, which is to take an Alchemix loan. Since Alchemix uses like-kind loans, price-movements on ETH do not put you at risk of liquidation. And since LTV is up to 90%, you have to collateralize much less to get the same level of spend. You could for example, collateralize only 5.75 ETH, and borrow 5 ETH of value to speculate with. But here’s the thing, all of your collateral in Alchemix is earning yield. So the net result here is 5 ETH to speculate; only .75 ETH exposed to smart contract risk (5.75 collateralized minus the 5 you’ve taken ouf of Alchemix); AND at the same time 5.75 earning 2-2.5%. Another way of looking at this is that you only have .75 ETH exposed to smart contract risk, earning ~15% yield

The main difference between Alchemix and traditional lending platforms, is that your collateral slowly repays your debt, ticking it down over time. So you lose the ability to hold the loan forever like in traditional lending platforms (assuming you could always responsibly handle your LTV and avoid liquidations), but you gain immunity to ETH price movements, higher yield, and less at risk in DeFi for the same level of up front spending.

People from the r/ethfinance days probably know me already and are familiar with Alchemix, but I’ve come to realize with the launch of V3 that a lot of people don’t know about us. I’ve mentioned the Fixed Yield product in recent weeks because it’s new, simple, and yields are good; but I still think our Vault product is the secret sauce. It provides an amazing way to control your spending and mitgate risk while doing so. I’m really proud of the products we’ve built, and I encourage you guys to check us out if you haven’t already. Always happy to answer any questions about Alchemix as well.

https://alchemix.fi/

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Happy Monday, August 10, 2026 📰

Today I share my understanding of the issuance burn proposal. Solo stakers may still be first in line to hit negative yield. In today’s news, Vitalik shared an Ethereum strawmap overlay of the 2023 roadmap. Ethlabs released its week 7 update (two new hires) and outlines its take on EIP-8363. Base turns 3 and introduces the Builder Grant Program. FWA generates more 24hr revenue than Ethereum.

Read more: https://ethdaily.io/understanding-the-issuance-burn

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u/Fiberpunk2077

Ethereum

u/alexiskef

$1,900

u/WoodpeckerHorror3468

0.029627

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Some will take the sword,

All holders should be onboard,

Prepare for discord.

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If I’ve learned 2 things in my whole adult life it’s this: never trust a fart when traveling through India and never trust a Sunday afternoon ETH pump.

Have a good day everybody.

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A question for DeFi connoisseur and business-minded people:

Some of my favorite DeFi protocols are Uniswap (exchange) and Morpho (lending). What I like in these two is the fact that they are un-opinionated and immutable. The code does not change and the financials primitives they allow stay general.

But I am wondering why these very successful protocols need a token? (beside funding team/dev). The token could capture fees generated by the protocol, but as far as I understand these fees would be ‘good code rent-seeking’. Copyright aside, anybody could deploy a fork just setting the fee parameter to zero and it would provide the same primitive for cheaper.

So what’s the argument for the token? brand recognition (fork could be malicious)? Network effect (liquidity)?

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Wow, .gwei is quite a bit more developed than I expected, lots of infrastructure working. https://gwei.domains/

And it looks like they’ve removed all the governance features which is really nice. I considered making a fork to do this when ENS introduced the governance features (2019?) it was so obviously all going to end it tears.

The main problem with removing governance is that you can’t set the fees dynamically so they might end up inappropriate but they’ve just set reasonable low fees (they get burned instead of going to a treasury), these are probably OK even when ETH is $10K

• 1 byte: 0.5 ETH
• 2 byte: 0.1 ETH
• 3 byte: 0.05 ETH
• 4 byte: 0.01 ETH
• Anything longer: 0.0005 ETH

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Can someone explain to me what the draw is for an issuance reduction on ETH?

I feel like this is very much a “don’t fix what isn’t broken” thing. ETH inflation is already lower than most fiat currencies, and that yield is a big part of what makes ETH useful in DeFi and desireable to hold.

I’m having trouble finding any positive to it. Less stakers and DeFi usage does not equal price go up. Smaller margins to solo staking means more centralization

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CME Group FedWatch saying 68.5% chance that FOMC will hold rates instead of hike on Wednesday. That’s a bump up of about 7% over night.

Reuters stating that BOJ is predicted to hold rates in Japan on Friday. No fear of Yen carry trade unwind in the immediate term.

US-Iran peace talks supposedly going in the right direction.

ETHBTC back above the 200 day and BTC still holding above the 200 week.

Is Macro setting the environment for some continued upside?? Find out later on None of This BS Makes Sense Anymore.

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Another interesting on chain experiment: https://x.com/0xmons/status/2081774697801552118

This guy built a fully on-chain pokemon type of game on MegaETH. It says it’s pretty cheap to play. I’ve actually never used or had a desire to try MegaETH, but maybe this will give me an excuse.

I would love to see more experimentation like this. This is the kind of thing that is competely unfeasible to do on any L1 and most L2s. I’ve always found the apparent speed of MegaETH to feel buzzwordy, because my brain doesn’t naturally come up with use cases that require that kind of speed compared to any other L2, but here is one I guess.

I know we’re all feeling down on price, but I’m starting to find fun things to do on chain again, and that’s usually a good sign for things to come. At least it was in prior bear markets.

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Below is a link for an interesting article, which explores the thoughts and plans of the Ethereum cryptopunks community and stewards, on “how (the) cryptopunks.app could become a permanent part of the artwork”.

Preserving a canonical website

(I have copy-pasted the conclusion of the article, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing!)

Permanence is a process. CryptoPunks helped establish that a digital artwork could have permanent provenance and ownership.

Then the project went further. It moved from a hash of one composite image to fully onchain pixels and attributes. It opened its market interface so others could operate independent clients.

The next step is to apply the same ideas to the official website.

This does not require forcing every byte of the modern application into Ethereum. It requires ensuring that no single domain, host, API, RPC provider, codebase or organization is indispensable.

Permanence comes from immutable records, reproducible software, open specifications, independent implementations and long-term institutional care.

The Punks are permanent.

Their doorway should be too.

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“the clearest view of a man is from below” applies to an industry all the same.

what we build out of this current trough provides the true view of where our intentions and principles lie.

because one fact remains: this industry refuses to die.

my latest piece on if there is anyone left in crypto takes on a more “journalistic” approach as I explore this topic with my guests Griff Green, 0xjustice.eth, Amer Ameen, Naomi Oba, and Colin.

you can watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/0D4fAkvwd3o

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u/Fiberpunk2077

Ethereum

u/harpocryptes

$1,882

u/alexiskef

0.0288

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Contracts between us,

Stables heterogeneous,

One year in GENIOUS.

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Ethereal news weekly #32

• 🧪 Glamsterdam upgrade targeting first testnet in September
• 🦄 Uniswap v4 Permissioned Pools
• 🪿 Aztec Alpha V5 live

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-32/

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I always like to highlight new things people are doing on chain. An old 2020 era project has relaunched this week.

What was previously crypto trunks is now wallet garden. This used to be a little RNG based NFT roller. You would have these random attributes on a tree that was bigger based on how much gas your wallet had consumed. Now it’s substantially more. There’s islands, partnerships with other NFT communities, little quest type things. I haven’t dug into it much but it’s some pretty pixel art and something you can attach to your existing wallet for very little work.

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u/Flashy-Butterfly6310:

DTCC Starts Live Tokenized-Securities Trades With More Than Two Dozen Firms

How good or bad is it for Ethereum?

They’re adopting blockchain for tokenization purposes but don’t seem to really want to use public blockchains for that.

What’s your take?

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u/Numerous_Ruin_4947:

Honestly, don’t sweat it - this is actually a massive long-term win for ETH.

I get the worry. Because it’s a private network (Hyperledger Besu), these Wall Street trades won’t burn public gas or force banks to buy mainnet ETH today.

But look at the bigger picture: the world’s biggest clearinghouse ($100T+ in assets) just chose Ethereum’s tech stack (EVM) over everything else.

• EVM wins: It cements Ethereum as the undisputed standard for institutional finance.
• Dev lock-in: Future financial apps will keep being built in Solidity, starving other chains of dev talent.
• The bridge: Moving assets from a private EVM chain to public ETH Layer 2s later on is just a simple bridge, not a total rewrite.

No direct buy pressure yet, but Wall Street just adopted Ethereum’s blueprint for the next decade. Super bullish.

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GLAMSTERDAM MASCOT TIE-BREAKER VOTE!

The current tally is 🐻‍❄️ 25 to 🦩 22.

Do you want to be the reason your child turns to a path of darkness? Your parents shake their heads in disgust? Babies cry when they see you? Of course not. That’s why you need to VOTE IN THE GLAMSTERDAM MASCOT TIE-BREAKER

Anyone with an account registered before July 10th at ethereum-magicians can vote! So, please! Do it! Do it now! OR! OR!!!!!!! Wait until the very end (July 31st, 12pm Melbourne, Australia time) and come in swinging!

As a reminder, the Fork Mascot should be relevant to the fork in some way! Here’s how these two stack up:

🦩 Flamingo

…are really glamorous and stand out with their pink, over the top feathers and long legs. Plus on the technical side:

• Flamingoes are known for their very long and parallel legs, much like how BALs will improve parallelization.
• Flamingoes are filter feeders which use a filter-like structure in their beak separate their prey (brine shrimp and cyanobacteria among other creatures) from the water, a bit like proposer-builder separation.

Also, the collective noun for a group of flamingoes is a flamboyance… What’s more glamorous than a flamboyance of flamingoes?

🐻‍❄️ Polar Bear

The Core Dev Protocol Contributors focused on Glamsterdam went to Soldøgn Interop, and polar bears may have been present, and encounters could have been dangerous.

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A week ago Aztec, the privacy focused zk rollup, upgraded their alpha network to v5. It went pretty smoothly and now the first apps seem to be opening up. The network still is in alpha stage, which means things can break and I would not put too much funds on it. Also be warned, if there is another Aztec upgrade it might be pretty tedious to get the funds back out from v5. The first app is Nyx.money, a privacy preserving Ethereum account leveraging the Aztec rollup. It can be tested out now. Total amount of funds on Nyx still seems to be limited to $100 per account. One can send WETH, USDC and USDT around privately on Ethereum mainnet. No additional tokens needed no bridging involved (see discussion below), just plain Ethereum mainnet transactions. Pretty neat. Spots are limited and only open for the next 24 hours or until full.

I tested nyx.money out already a few weeks ago. Pretty good experience, even though I had to use one of my yubikeys to store the passkey for my account. Not super happy about having to use another hardware device besides my wallet to get access to my nyx account. I guess that highly depends on your setup though.

More info: https://xcancel.com/aztecnetwork/status/2079553073102635190 or https://x.com/aztecnetwork/status/2079553073102635190

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u/Gumpa-Bucky:

Sorry if this is off topic, and I don’t pretend to understand all this, but the Hugging Face incident scares me.

https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

“Autonomous, AI-driven offensive tooling is no longer theoretical. It lowers the cost of running a broad, patient, multi-stage campaign, and it operates at machine speed. Defending an online platform now means treating the data and model surface as a first-class attack surface, and using AI on defense to keep pace. “

It is not a good time for the world to be so polarized.

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u/haurog:

The story even gets wilder than that. The attacker wasn’t any of the usual cybersecurity threat actors. It was OpenAI itself which internally tested a new LLM model. The new model should only have had limited internet access and was tasked to solve a handful of cybersecurity tests for benchmarking its cybersecurity capabilities. According to OpenAI, the model gained full internet access by finding and exploiting a zero day and several privilege escalations within the OpenAI infrastructure. The LLM then reasoned that Hugging Face most probably had datasets the model needed to solve the cybersecurity tests it was tasked to do and then started attacking Hugging Face. So OpenAI is claiming to have accidentally attacking Hugging Face. That to me reads like 90ies cyberpunk science fiction. Not sure if I can believe that story. Anthropic and OpenAI are known to oversell their models capabilities for marketing purposes. We can even go a bit further into conspiracy theory land: Recently, Anthropic, and most probably OpenAI as well, have gone on a war path against open weights LLM models. These are models anyone can download and run on their infrastructure. Open weights models have become very capable in the last year and now are pretty close to closed weights models. Banning open weights models seems to be the best way for closed weights and centralized LLM providers to secure their market share. Scaring the world into ‘free running LLMs are dangerous’ is a pretty good way to achieve such a ban, at least in some jurisdictions. Not sure if this is what is actually happening though.

Sources:

OpenAI incident report: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2079661132302995790

More discussions: https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1v2w7jl/openai_admits_responsibility_for_huggingface/

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u/Gumpa-Bucky:

I haven’t seen anyone mention the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index which is based on network revenue rather than market cap. As such, BTC is not included because it doesn’t generate revenue (aside from for miners) and XRP is not included because its revenue is tiny. ETH will be the biggest asset included in the index of 18 assets.

This is a real opportunity for ethereum to be recognized as #1 in revenue-generating digital assets, which should be of interest to investors.

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u/hanniabu:

This is a real opportunity for ethereum to be recognized as #1 in revenue-generating digital assets

This is exactly what you don’t want. This just reinforced the ideology that blockchains should be valued on fees which is not the case. The store of value premium is much more important. DCF valuations are the most toxic thing that could happen. Valuing ETH on fees means $100. It’s a commodity not a company, it cannot be valued on fees.

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For people interested in what is going on on the EEZ (Ethereum Economic Zone) side of things. They recently released a first (monthly?) blog post about their progress and goals. For those who do not know, the EEZ aims to connect Rollups and other sidechains synchronously together through the magic of real time proving, mainly zk proofs, with Ethereum mainnet as the center of coordinating them together.

The blog post summarizes what was presented at dappcon and the Berlin blockchain week in June. I did not watch the individual talks yet, but I guess there is something in it for everyone.

Progress was mostly in the background like finishing the specs especially how reverts should be handled. They have finished the part on handling calls in both directions from rollup to L1 and vice versa in code. Which to me reads it should be in testnet soon. The current testnet runs on their own Chiado testnet. Chiado is the testnet for gnosis chain. The functionality is not fully there yet. Also the only have a single prover setup. The next testnet iteration is planned for end of August. Which is also around the time they plan to deploy on Ethereum mainnet. By the end of year, the plan to add gnosis chain to the EEZ in a limited fashion. Gnosis chain is its own L1 which then would be coupled to Ethereum for these synchronous calls. This coupling means that if there is a block reordering on Ethereum which throws out any EEZ transaction, gnosis chain will have to reorder their own chain as well.

For people who rather like listening to content, I can suggest to listen to the latest epicenter podcast from 3 weeks ago. They interview Friederieke Ernst about the EEZ and their plans. It is great to hear how the people involved in the EEZ are polishing how they talk about it and what the focus on. In March when the EEZ was announced many things were still unknown and in flux, but now that things progress and they understand the usual misunderstandings people have they can communicate much clearer.

Sources:

Blog post: https://eez.io/blog/monthly-update-digest-july-2026

Podcast: https://epicenter.tv/episode/642-vitalik-buterin-on-the-economic-zone

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Yesterdays post about the progress of the EEZ and Gnosis chain, an L1, becoming part of it, gave quite a lot of grounds for discussions. A few hours after the discussion started, a Gnosis Improvement Proposal by Friederike Ernst on the Gnosis forum added a lot more details on how gnosis chain could become part of the EEZ. In simple terms, the plan is to turn gnosis chain into a rollup which then becomes part of the EEZ. They argue that gnosis chains goal of having a decentralized validator set failed, which in my view was made clear to everyone last autumn when they hardforked the chain without any of the ‘independent’ validators having a say in it. At the same time, Gnosis DAO pays the validator set for their security without any expectation of reaching the scale to ever be able to cover this security with fee revenue. The conclusion is that becoming a rollup and joining the EEZ is the best way to go forward. The plan is to do that in Dezember/January. For users, nothing will change, the state, which means all your tokens and the transaction history will remain, just who is able to produce blocks will change. This also means that the existing validators will not be needed anymore and the current bridge validators, run by Gnosis themselves, will be repurposed to prove the chain and run the composer on the gnosis rollup. They also will rename gnosis chain to Gnosis EEZ to make it clear it is not an independent blockchain anymore.

Even though the forum post is long, there aren’t too many technical details on how the chain will work. They say they will likely use trusted execution environments (TEEs) to prove the chain and not zk proofs, at least at the beginning. They plan to move to zk proofs later on when the EEZ specs are ready. They will use a centralized sequencer and there is no decision made whether they want to decentralize the sequencer set, but it is definitely not a priority. They also do not plan to have a forced transaction inclusion from Ethereum to Gnosis EEZ. They plan to focus on the basics first.

I am honestly surprised about this forum post even though I argued yesterday that it does not make too much sense to be remain an L1 and become part of the EEZ. Being a rollup or more general an L2 makes more sense. I honestly expected this to play out on a much longer time horizon because Gnosis evaluated and dismissed becoming a rollup pretty clearly 2 years ago. Looks like the EEZ and maybe them having to hard fork their chain last autumn changed a lot in their thinking about security and how much they pay for it. Overall it is great to see. Gnosis and Gnosis chain have contributed quite a bit to the Ethereum ecosystem and I prefer them being closer to Ethereum than remaining an L1. I really hope this Gnosis improvement proposal goes through.

Gnosis forum post: https://forum.gnosis.io/t/gip-153-should-gnosis-chain-transition-into-the-ethereum-economic-zone/12397

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u/howareyou_2_day

Ethereum

u/TimbukNine

$1,772

u/FrenktheTank

0.0277

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Beyond the tendance,

Each node’s network attendance,

True independence.

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A bit crazy to think about how massively Ethereum has scaled the past years. I remember how a random, sudden trend (like cryptokitties) single handedly was able to make the whole chain completely unusable (that means too expensive) for normal user txs.

Now, big actors (like Robinhood yesterday) can causally onboard millions of txs in a single day, and we don’t even notice it. I’m thinking L2s like this, in addition to scaling L1, will justify bringing a lot of usage on chain that was unthinkable yesterday.

The blockspace supply has grown rapidly, and way faster than demand lately, which we’ve all painfully aware of. But I think we’re really opening the door for a wide range of applications here, and that the gap will be filled.

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good podcast about Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) on epicenter.

keywords: inter-operability, real-time proving, synchronous composability

For the first time I’ve heard about possible L2 oracle-network. Apparently the business of oracle is gas heavy, need to post a lot on layer 1, if I understand correctly the goal of such L2 would be to minimize these cost while preserving the functionality thanks to EEZ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK1FwcWdqMI

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u/Twelvemeatballs:

Looks like a decent summary of the ENS situation:

https://xcancel.com/i/status/2073789955084824949

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u/haochizzle:

does decentralized governance in DAOs really work? this is an almost existential-level question on the realities of one of crypto’s most core toolings, and it’s being put to the test by what’s happening with the Ethereum Name Service (DAO) lately.

if you’ve heard buzz around the drama surrounding ENS lately but couldn’t be bothered to keep up, I explain!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_du0qCXCix4

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Lighter’s (L2 perp dex on Ethereum) token is doing well, up 50% last month. It is continuing to climb after the Robinhood integration announcement. The open interest trend on the platform is flat though compared to Hyperliquid that is increasing. The token has deeper liquidity on HL than its own platform but I hold both. If it gets special regulatory status, since it is based in the US, and HL is banned, it will rocket. I think we will see some regulation that benefits one or both in the next 1-2 years from how the CFTC and SEC are talking about perp dexes.

The bad thing with both platforms, I have found, is that perps are abysmal buy and hold instruments for long term. You will be paying a lot in funding fees. Often somewhere 5-50% APY in interest. Nasdaq100 is at 5%, Nvidia at 15% and SPCX at 55% now. You want to be holding spot if long term but those are much more difficult legally and also to implement, while bringing in less volume so less revenue.

https://defillama.com/protocol/lighter?tvl=false&events=false&openInterest=true

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I understand thinking ETH’s success depends on institutions, but I think we are drastically underestimating the need for retail adoption

the internet became entrenched in society because it enabled simple, fun, useful apps for everyday people

what ETH organizations are championing this mission?

check out the mentions of “consumer” on eth.sh vs mentions of “institution”:

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So I was just watching a few days old TechLinked tech news video and heard that starting from September 15th, CloudFlare will not allow web crawlers which harvest content for AI training to access websites unless they pay websites and content creators for their data.

Hmm, this sounds familiar… oooh I bet the payments are via X402.

And what do you know, it turns out that yes, indeed, they are via x402 and x402 uses Base.

Obviously not a single crypto hater in the comments noticed this, but this is how Ethereum ends up as the global settlement layer. Before you know it, everyone is using it.

Also, some sad news from the same video — Reddit’s position on old.reddit.com is no longer indefinite support. Rather, they will maintain it while people use it and while it is able to remain secure. To me this sounds like it’s something they want to do in the medium term. :(

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u/nonetherless325:

tell me this is malicious because I can’t believe this level of disynformation, 100k followers account on X:

“The Clarity Act.

Bitcoin is not just an asset; it is the backbone of a new financial system in which contracts, payments, and ownership live on‑chain, displacing much of today’s intermediary‑heavy architecture. …”

https://xcancel.com/DrJStrategy/status/2074672930684838161

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u/hanniabu:

It’s hard to say. You’d be astonished how many people actually think this is true. They think everything that happens on Ethereum (from smart contracts to defi to stablecoins and RWAs) is happening on Bitcoin. Not as in happening on both, they just attribute everything they hear to being built on bitcoin. Many probably even think Ethereum is built on Bitcoin.

That’s the power of first mover advantage and the misinformation machine.

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u/alexiskef

✨E✨t✨h✨e✨r✨e✨u✨m✨

u/davidqhr

$2,142.99

u/FrenktheTank

0.0285

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Twitching the wrong knob,

Trusting in Alice and Bob,

Safely stored as blob.

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ETH Daily - 20th May 2026

• Devcon 8 early bird tickets on sale.
• LayerZero publishes a full post-mortem.
• Toni Wahrstätter explains BALs.
• Vitalik outlines privacy efforts.
• PSE PlasmaBlind payments.
• L2Beat lists Ronin.
• Tydro case study.
• Lighter RFQ in beta.

Read more: https://ethdaily.io/951

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🥳 Clear Signing is now LIVE! 🎉

First of all, what is Clear Signing? Well, it is a new industry-wide security upgrade designed to end “blind signing,” where users are forced to approve unreadable strings of code. By using new open standards (like ERC-7730), transactions are translated into plain, human-readable language so you know exactly what you are authorizing. Co-developed by companies like Ledger, MetaMask, and the Ethereum Foundation, this initiative aims to prevent the billions in losses caused by users signing malicious or opaque technical data.

Here is a relevant article in the Block. And here is a rather good Youtube video explaining the whole thing in simple terms..

And, the announcement tweet by the Ethereum Foundation:

An open standard to end blind signing, making human-readable transactions default. This effort brings a major UX and Security upgrade to transaction signing on Ethereum.

Today, signing a transaction can still mean approving a string of unreadable hex, otherwise known as “blind signing”. Blind signing has contributed to billions in ecosystem losses.

With clear signing, transactions can be shown in plain language instead of opaque technical data. An Ethereum working group is introducing the open approach to fix this.

Contributors include Wallets and Hardware (Ledger, Trezor, zknoxhq, MetaMask, WalletConnect), Security (Cyfrin), Infrastructure (FireblocksHQ, Zama), Tooling (Sourcifyeth, Argotorg), Individual Builders, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative, with the Ethereum Foundation acting as a neutral steward.

The effort builds on existing clear signing work in the ecosystem, including the approach pioneered by Ledger.

It introduces:

• ERC-7730: an open standard for human-readable transaction descriptions
• A neutral, mirrorable descriptor registry
• An attestation framework so auditors can verify descriptor integrity (ERC-8176)
• Open developer tooling for wallets, protocols, & auditors

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I presented my Ethereum File System (EFS) project at Web3 Weekends in Chicago on May 8th, 2026. I was really nervous but I think it turned out well!

https://youtu.be/gZl711IriSM

The web we use today is rented infrastructure so when platforms die, we lose our culture. To fix this, I’m building EFS: an unruggable, onchain index for public data that uses Ethereum as the CPU and IPFS as the hard drive.

I gave a live demo of the EFS web client, showed how shared namespaces and trustless lenses work, and laid out the long-term vision for a decentralized Cypherpunk OS. If you’re interested in building a credibly neutral internet that will outlast us, check out the presentation and let’s collaborate!

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u/zepoid:

Well that’s it. CLARITY passed markup and is out of Committee. On to the Senate floor.

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u/ganuerant:

🚨SCOOP: Last minute negotiations between Banking Committee Republicans and Democrats over multiple amendments were brokered this morning in an effort to secure bipartisan support for today’s vote on the Clarity Act, multiple sources tell me.

However, the compromise came at the cost of a specific change to a @SenLummis amendment that removed language from Section 301 of the bill referencing the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), disappointing some DeFi advocates who say the move could strip out critical protections for software developers as the bill moves forward.

Notably, Senator @MarkWarner (D-VA) did not vote to advance the bill despite positively referencing the changes during the markup.

That said, Senator @berniemoreno said during the hearing that there’s still work to be done on Section 301, suggesting discussions will continue in the coming weeks as @BankingGOP and @SenateAg work to merge the texts ahead of a full Senate vote.

https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2054995053144084642

Something to watch.

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Let me cook up some hopium rn

I think we have to accept we are no longer the frontier of tech and the speculative premium has moved into AI, I think most would agree that appetite has been allocated towards AI when taking on units of risk.

I also think that global liquidity is still tight, we may not be tightening at the same rate of change but money supply is still not expansionary. Inflation seems to be making a return if anything, jobs are down and the economy is K shaped - retail is hurting and burned from previous cycles. Until excess liquidity returns, we don’t get an easy bid.

But we are seeing healthy adoption of the Ethereum Blockchain, institutional adoption is no longer in the future, it is here. ETF flows have picked back up, the tech is (relatively) mature. Regulation is clarifying. There is large growth of stablecoins and tokenised treasuries in particular.

So, to me, the two real question becomes does the liquidity in AI rotate to crypto again ? & will the value accrue be to the tokens and protocols or the banks/fintechs that adopt this infrastructure?

As the AI trade becomes more and more concentrated and consensus, I believe that the IPOs of Anthropic / xAI may prove to be the narrative saturation point. Markets are physiologically driven and once access is opened up, VC’s/treasuries/institutional investors loose their comparative advantage and seek out “the next thing” in order to satisfy the belief that they are “ahead” of the market to satisfy their underlying fund participants desires of premium capital returns. So this exit liquidity has the potential to enter crypto, we still need to remember how small our industry is compared to equities and that we offer this outsized return on capital. Maybe we have a sexy new narrative as AI converges with blockchain but more importantly is the financial incentives from my perspective, we will find a new narrative following price movement.

The second question of value accrual to token or finance incumbents is our fight to face, we are the stakeholders of this network and should be advocating for the value accrual to be the underlying token of the asset we hold. To support the ideological vision of decentralisation we need to capture the economic surplus generated by onchain networks. My view is that we want to be the invisible infrastructure that is neutral but not give away our bargaining power towards a future that we want. We cannot be passive observes as the incentives of BlackRock, JPM ect. prevail –> we worked to hard to get us to this point, we must move away from attacking TradFi to capture value and towards defending DeFi to hold value. We must ensure ETH is used for settlement, activity on the network = value accrual, L2’s pay real rent to mainnet, prevent abstracting layers from bypassing ETH demand e.g. USD denominated stablecoins look like they will be required to be backed by HQLAs offchain (fiat/mmfs/treasuries) but what if we could create a parallel ETH-backed mechanism ? Or ETH based dispute resolution pools for anything breaks (i.e bridges).

I think this space has had the two camps of “in it for the tech” and” in it for the economics” for too long. We need to realise that if we are in it for the tech, we need to defend the economics and if we are in it for the economics we need to defend the tech.

Would love to here the communities thoughts on this as I want to reenergise this space, its too precious to watch die out.

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Random observation from poking around the ecosystem this week — the “agent payments” narrative has bifurcated into two very different things that get conflated:

1. Agents paying for their own infra. GPU inference (Hyperbolic), Farcaster data (Neynar), Cloudflare pay-per-crawl, analytics APIs. This is x402 territory. The customer-of-the-API is literally the model/agent itself, no human in the loop. This works *today* — small dollar amounts, on-chain settle, no chargebacks needed because there’s no fiat refund pipeline.
2. Agents acting on behalf of humans. “Book me the flight, buy me the hotel.” Everyone wants this and nobody has it because it bottlenecks on three things that aren’t protocol-level: KYC inheritance (can the human’s identity be delegated to the agent for a single purchase?), chargeback liability (who eats it when the agent picks wrong?), and refund routing (where does the money come back to when the agent’s hot wallet has rotated?). None of these are protocol gaps — they’re legal/contract gaps. The current attempts all just punt to “the human’s stored card via better autocomplete.”

The interesting near-term work is in (1), where the entire on-chain stack already supports the use case. Companies actually selling agent-payable APIs grew an order of magnitude this year. The (2) future arrives when a regulator or a payment network defines an “agent acting under delegated identity X” primitive — that’s years away.

Anyone seeing real revenue from selling x402-style APIs? Curious about which categories of endpoints (data, compute, storage) are getting the most agent traffic in practice.

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Only recently started checking back in here and commend those of you who’ve fully stuck around. It’s truly amazing how negative the price sentiment is on here compared to the past. These threads used to be full of so much hopium it was insane. I don’t remember the last time I saw a truly euphoric price prediction on here or X without a ton of sarcastic replies. Very sad.

I admit I harbor a lot of anger toward many of the Ethereum thought leaders for fully ignoring and dismissing the fun things happening on their chain. Many folks who were always too good for NFTs and Memecoins. Well now your chain is a pit of utter cultural despair.

Add to this the whiplash inducing narrative shifts and it’s been a recipe for disaster. Ultrasound money! Wait, now gas prices are below 0.1 gwei, never mind, but don’t worry this is better!

I hope that if we ever get a hint of another wave of Dumb Degen Stuff™️, we all fucking embrace it and encourage it bringing capital into Ethereum.

And yes I’m still holding all my rETH, some ETH memes and NFTs.

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Most of all it removes the need for trust in the external builder <-> validator relationship. The amount a block builder bids can be automatically deducted from the protocol-level builder entity so the validator no longer needs to trust a builder to actually transfer payment to them. This part becomes protocol-native.

In terms of reliance on outside relays, yeah some things change here:

• builders may expose their own builder URLs instead of having relays do so - I’m personally not sure if this will actually get adopted much, builders have better things to do than maintain and protect a publicly-accessible API
• there will be a p2p bid delivery mechanism - validators will no longer necessarily need to connect directly to relays/builders, they will receive bids over the p2p network. This will be a less efficient (in terms of $) but much more resilient way to deliver bids

The future for relays is the least clear part of it to me for now but I don’t see why we would want to get rid of them completely. Having the p2p fallback is definitely good though.

I don’t believe block production will become less centralized because of ePBS. The only thing I’m aware of that may help on that front is BuilderNet.

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Just thought I’d throw my two cents in - the price action at the moment makes sense.

The problem is comparing to the S&P and Nasdaq, which does not.

We are currently facing a situation where inflation is rising, the US economy is getting worse (stripping out AI and healthcare), there is an ongoing war in Iran, which has now included bombing nuclear facilities in UAE, which is affecting not only oil, but fertilizer markets, in the presence of a predicted super strong el nino. The fedwatch rate tool is currently now pricing in a chance of a rate rise (admittedly 1% rn so very minor, but a lot can change with continuing bad date, and a raise was unfathomable even a few months ago).

The world is not in an ok state. The only thing seemingly pumping the markets rn is incredibly investor enthusiasm about AI technology, and companies involved passing around circular investments to bump thier stock prices.

Of course, with all that in mind, the perfomance of ETH, and crypto more broadly, has been poor. We just aren’t in the current ponzi mania cycle that traditionally suits us so well, for better or worse.

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The SEC just announced that there will be a regulatory exemption for tokenized stock trading. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard a peep about it yet in the daily here.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/crypto/sec-is-said-to-ready-plan-for-trading-crypto-versions-of-stocks

And Vitalik’s piece today on formal verification gives me some hope that smart contracts will be 100% bug-free and hack-free before too long.

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/05/18/fv.html

Stock trading on Ethereum will be good. Stock shares that are compatible with 100% hack-proof defi contracts though - that’s pretty game changing imo.

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what happens when you combine 90s-calculator aesthetics with hardcore values inside a hardware wallet?

you get the Keycard Shell.

it’s fully airgapped, radically open source, genuinely cypherpunk, and best of all — it uses an S-tier battery design choice meant to be swapped out any time, any where.

My full review video: https://youtu.be/HgXoI4jad-g

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u/mini_miner1

Ethereum

u/TimbukNine

$2,285

u/alexiskef

0.0295

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Randomly happy,

Social media yappy,

AI still scrappy.

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Ethereal news weekly #21

• 💵 DeFi United technical implementation plan to restore rsETH backing
• 🧑‍💻 Solidity 0.8.35
• 2️⃣ Status Network merging into Linea stack

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-21/

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https://xcancel.com/i/status/2047017251270734309

Saving you a click:

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer

• polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded

• the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like “22°C” when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it’d hit

• then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max

• temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges

hyperstitions.

Best reply:

outsider trading

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Now this is the kind of news headline I like to see! It’s a bit lower than the 740k estimate - I’ll take it though! ;)

https://www.theblock.co/post/398372/etherealize-updates-long-term-eth-price-prediction-250000

Etherealize updates long-term ETH price prediction to $250,000

• If Ethereum captures the same monetary premium as bitcoin and gold carry as stores-of-value with a combined market cap of $31 trillion, that implies a price north of $250,000 per ETH.
• The report argues ETH is unique in the history of money in being both a value store and a “productive asset.”

Etherealize, the institutional marketing and product arm for the Ethereum ecosystem, has set a new long-term price target for ETH at $250,000, arguing the token represents something of a unique asset in the history of money.

The price call is significantly lower than Etherealize’s previous $740,000 per token target, set last year during the firm’s first public communique. It is also a significant reach for an asset that is currently trading at $2,300, according to The Block’s price page.

“It’s all about timing and inevitability,” Vivek Raman, co-founder of Etherealize, told The Block. “We think Ethereum is going to be the backbone of the global financial system, and that there’s going to be one or two digital assets that become the store-of-value assets.”

If bitcoin is a “foregone conclusion,” then ETH is “the other contender,” Raman added. Notably, Etherealize’s report does not give a target date for its price prediction.

Etherealize launched last year to communicate Ethereum’s usefulness as an institutional asset.

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Nice community support coming through with the kelp disaster: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/04/23/aave-rallies-defi-partners-to-contain-fallout-from-usd292-million-kelpdao-hack

Financial support from coming in from Etherfi, Ethena, Lido, & Stani@AAVE

Edit: Mantle/bybit are authorizing a 30k eth loan to AAVE. So, at the moment about 90k eth has been raised. Taking into account everything raised so far, rseth is hypothetically only about 4% unbacked now.

https://x.com/AggrNews/status/2047468225500180702

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Can anyone with some twitter clout help out here?

Someone donated defiunited.eth and spun up a tracker here: https://defiunited.world/

That’s nice and all, but I started looking at the transactions on defiunited.eth and found it attached to a new ERC-20 here: https://etherscan.io/token/0x66040a0905c69e69b12023893d5e43e53b7d9549

I thought wtf is that, and found this: https://www.defiunitedfund.com/

Someone appears to have spun up a token and a vibe coded website. The phone number for the web registrant is associated with scams. https://www.whois.com/whois/defiunitedfund.com

This is a scam.

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The Ethereum community is obviously split around AI.

I would argue that regardless of what we want, it is a strong influence and I believe we should not ignore it.

We had it good as the first to offer a credible token launch model, then DeFi and NFTs, but we finally have a serious opponent that is trying to eat our lunch.

Solana doubled down on meme coins and benefited greatly. Even if you believe meme coins are utter garbage- Solana rode that wave successfully.

The difference here is that AI isn’t a fad- it is here to stay.

I believe we should be active in how we compete for market share.

How we go about it is debatable but I think this should be a clear goal and that we should not bury our heads in the sand.

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u/benido2030:

So the rsETH hole is covered. User are/ will be made whole.

Is this good or bad? I can’t decide. Of course it is great for users, don’t get me wrong. But I am not sure if this is the right thing long term. Is this the right incentive for protocols that aren’t really secure? They will just hope for a bailout the next time.

I really don’t know what to think about. Tell me what you think!

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u/haurog:

For me it is not a clear good or bad. I think the whole situation illustrates the saying: ‘if you owe the bank (aave) $1000 it is your problem. If you owe them $1B it is their problem.’

Aave tries to get back up as fast as possible. They lost about 40-50% of their TVL in the last week, which is pretty crazy. They need to open their markets again, make them liquid and hope for the capital to return.

In my view, it is great that there is a path to get aave running again. No users will be harmed, which is even better. It also happens relatively fast, compared to other paths like having to wait for KelpDAO or LayerZero to make any decision at all or even make a anything else than a vague statement.

But without accountability and a clearer response to the risks involved, something similar will happen again, now with even a bigger chance as projects might expect to get bailed out without any financial repercussions as long as they are too big to fail. Projects might get even more aggressive to get themselves lodged in every corner of the space that if they fail everyone looses. Not a very good outcome…

Aave will have to follow up with a rework of their risk analysis of the various listed tokens. They will have to be more careful what to add to e-mode and which tokens might have stricter limitations. They can add inflow caps as there is very little reason to have infinite inflow per block and instant borrow from these. No idea what reasonable limits are though. This rework will take time and during this time having a closed aave market would be suicide for the project.

I am also a bit surprised that aave did not touch the umbrella or the older security fund and paid their contribution from the treasury. Not sure why aave pays a certain amount per year to umbrealla staker, but then does not hold the stakers accountable once there is an issue on the L1 instance of aave as well. Maybe they know it is just a one shot fund and no one will deposit again for a 2-3% yield once the stakers have been wiped out. And now maybe is not the time to access these funds.

I really hope that in the background KelpDAO and LayerZero are held accountable. They have shown massive lapses in the setup of their project as well as an abysmal incidence response in the last 7 days, at least publicly. They have not shown any path forward to resolve the hack. And a lot of their communication was just shifting blame around. These are not serious projects and I would hope they will not be used in the future.

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A French tax official was arrested for selling crypto investors’ home addresses and financial records to criminal networks.

41 kidnappings followed. One every 2.5 days since January 2026.

The criminals didn’t need to hack anything. They bought a list from someone inside the government.

France is the most dangerous country in the world right now if you hold crypto and someone knows about it 💀

Source: Le Mond

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2047773069607854512

This worries me too and we have seen similar infiltrations by gangs in Sweden at the police and other government agencies. The thing is, bribes are almost always surprisingly small. Someone doesn’t need millions to do anything, they will do it for like 1000 USD. The problem in the EU is that our sentences are about 1/5 of US ones. Another issue here in Sweden is that where you live is public info, so you can just google someone to find out where they live. If caught, they will get sentenced to about 8 years and be out after 5. It might sound unbelievably low for someone from the US, but it’s the reality. AI says 4-7 years is typical and see person sentenced 8 years for Extremely aggravated assault, aggravated robbery, narcotics offense, and aggravated weapons offense The risk/reward makes these robberies in the EU more attractive. They won’t get a long 20 year prison sentence like in the US by kidnapping a person and using extreme violence to get their crypto. The police is also so busy that they might not even investigate much but focus on other things.

From 2026, exchanges in EU now collect data for tax authorities on buy/sells, year end balances (for wealth tax in some countries) and transfers. Cheating on your taxes is bad and risky financially but actually reporting could also be risky both financially and for your person as well. I haven’t bought/sold in a long time but have a smaller amount on Kraken that I will just transfer out and then delete my saved address to hopefully not get my name (plus maybe wallet address) reported in the info to the tax authority every single year. I was smart that each exchange I used over the years, I used a new wallet address.

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I have been taking a rest from engaging too much on crypto discussions but I still buy under $3K ETH on a constant basis.

I’m willing to hold all the way through as long as Ethereum remains fundamentally: the top destination of RWA, stablecoins, overall TVL, increasing txs counts, very promising roadmap.

Bonus points for clear and unambiguous regulation, quantum securitization, and any UX improvements that would make the value hypothesis expand beyond TradFi Big players adopting the tech.

2030 is my personal horizon. I fully understand why others might exit the moment we cross ATH but I’m here for the long run.

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For people wanting something exciting to play around with and look forward to. Nethermind just released their updated working demo of a cross chain swap between a rollup (Surge) and a side chain (Gnosis L1) using the EEZ (Ethereum Economic Zone) tech. Surge is an Ethereum rollup by Nethermind where they test new tech in production and is not thought to be a rollup for everyday use. Some sources say Surge is a rollup on Gnosis chain, so I am not 100% sure what is correct now. My best guess is they spun up a specific Surge rollup on top of Gnosis Chain for this demo only. To the best of my knowledge Surge is a based rollup using real time zk proofs to prove that the current state is the correct one without having to execute any transactions. Gnosis L1 is pretty much a carbon copy of Ethereum with shorter block times and lower gas. In my understanding for the EEZ to work, the current state of both chains need to be zk proven. Surge does this already and Gnosis Chain then apparently also does (real time?) zk proofs already.

In the demo you can swap xDAI on Gnosis Chain to USDC on Gnosis Chain using liquidity on the Surge rollup. They have big warning signs that it is an alpha version where you might lose all your swapped funds somewhere in the middle and they therefore restrict the max swap amount to 1 xDAI. I am a responsible person, so I tested it with 0.005 xDai only. The swap went through seamlessly within about 20-25 seconds, which is a bit longer than the block times on Gnosis Chain which is 5 seconds. Most of the time is used for the proof generation (~15s). The fees where only 0.0003 xDAI, but that is mostly because Gnosis Chain is extremely cheap to use. Overall, this is pretty impressive. The process still has room for improvement though. You need a smart wallet which is created for you, then you need to transfer your funds over to it to be able to swap it. The user interface guides you through the whole process, but there are a few steps you need to do. I guess many of these things can be abstracted away at some point. The swap also uses quite a bit of gas. Gas usage is due to having to verify a zk proof on chain. Depending on what one does exactly, many interactions can be put into a single zk proof. Some of the contracts you have to interact with are not verified on chain yet, but as it is an alpha demo and they have huge warning signs on it that is quite ok for me.

The general goal of the EEZ is to be able to use cross chain interactions to tap into liquidity or funds on other chains without manually having to move any funds over. Zk proofs allow certain transactions to happen in 1 block even though they interact with 2 different chains at the same time. This approach is only possible thanks to the massive advances in the real time ZK proving space in the last 2 years. It still is a herculean task to pull this off and many small steps need to be done until defi projects will use it in the end. It is nothing that will happen over night. Nevertheless, having the first alpha demo in production is pretty massive. To the best of my knowledge the EEZ plans to go live sometime in summer for some chains, but I do not know any details.

If you want to know more, the recent Bankless podcast with 2 proponents of the EEZ is pretty good and explains a bit how it works and what the needed steps are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRiLs8wl28

If you want to play with the cross chain swap and maybe lose some funds along the way ;-), here is the link: https://dex.realtime.surge.wtf/

A small explainer about an older version of the same demo can be found here: https://x.com/Nethermind/status/2043700282748498210 or https://xcancel.com/Nethermind/status/2043700282748498210

Nethermind said they will do publish an updated video explainer in the coming days.

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DeFi United, a coalition of ecosystem participants, has issued the technical implementation plan to restore the

u/KelpDAO

rsETH backing following the April 18 incident, covering the full path to making rsETH whole and resuming normal market operations.

Background of the Incident

On April 18, 2026, an exploit targeted rsETH’s bridge on the Unichain to Ethereum rsETH route. A forged inbound packet was verified on the Ethereum side without a corresponding burn on Unichain, causing 116,500 rsETH to be released from the Ethereum-side adapter.

The 116,500 released rsETH was subsequently distributed across multiple addresses. A portion was supplied as collateral on Aave V3 on Ethereum, while another portion was bridged to Arbitrum and used to open positions on Aave Arbitrum. Remaining portions were routed through different venues.

Currently, seven addresses associated with the exploiter hold active rsETH-backed positions on Aave and Compound, representing approximately 107,000 rsETH of the original 116,500 rsETH stolen. The recovery effort focuses on two objectives: (1) restoring the backing of rsETH, and (2) clearing up the affected positions in liquidity markets to recover approximately 107,000 rsETH in excess collateral and resolve the resulting market impairment.

Restoring rsETH Backing

To restore rsETH backing, it must reflect its nominal Kelp rsETH exchange ratio, currently at 1.07 ETH. This is being achieved through the DeFi United initiative, which has secured the ETH commitments necessary to restore full operability of the affected systems, with final execution subject to completion of relevant governance approvals, execution timelines, and execution of definitive agreements. Subject to the successful execution of the plan, rsETH’s backing will be fully restored by depositing ETH into the bridge lockbox (

RSETH_OFTAdapter 0x85d456b2…98ef3

).

The restoration process involves converting the committed ETH into rsETH in tranches, which will then be transferred to the affected lockbox contract, allowing the bridge to securely resume full operation. Both

u/LayerZero_Core

and Kelp have implemented additional measures to ensure the bridge’s security upon resumption of normal operations.

Clearing Up Affected Positions and Recovering Collateral

In parallel with restoring the rsETH backing, the recovery plan includes clearing up the eight affected positions across the Aave Ethereum Core and Arbitrum markets. Clearing up these positions is a necessary step to recovering approximately 13,000 ETH worth of funds on Aave and resolving the resulting impairment on the affected markets.

This process is required to be executed through specific governance proposals targeting both the Ethereum and Arbitrum deployments. The technical execution involves a controlled liquidation sequence: the rsETH oracle price will be temporarily adjusted to enable efficient liquidation of the positions, generating a temporary deficit that will be addressed in a subsequent step. The recovered rsETH collateral will be transferred to a designated multisig managed by DeFi United. The configuration adjustments made in connection with this process described above are temporary and scoped solely for the execution of the recovery. All such adjustments will be fully reverted upon completion of the liquidation process, with no persistent configuration changes to the Aave protocol expected as a result of the governance proposal.

Once the collateral is secured, the rsETH price oracle will be restored. The recovered rsETH will then be redeemed for ETH through Kelp’s standard redemption procedure. The resulting ETH will be applied to clear the deficit in both the Aave Ethereum and Arbitrum markets.

Compound will take a similar approach to clearing the exploiter’s position, with DeFi United providing the liquidity needed. This initiative, led by their team, would recover approximately 16,776 ETH worth of funds after completion.

WETH and rsETH reserves on Ethereum Core, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle, and Linea will remain frozen during this period.

Restoring Normal Market Operations

The restoration of rsETH backing and the clearing up of affected positions can be executed in parallel.

This final phase of the restoration process involves unpausing and unfreezing rsETH and ETH across all affected instances, and restoring the Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratios for ETH and any other assets whose configurations were temporarily adjusted.

Considerations

While the plan is designed to restore rsETH backing without socializing losses, execution is subject to the following risks.

DeFi United has secured sufficient ETH commitments to restore full backing, but deployment remains subject to finalizing agreements and governance approvals.

Closing the affected positions requires governance proposals to pass and execute correctly on both Ethereum and Arbitrum. Deliberate interference by the attacker could result in incomplete deficit accrual, requiring additional liquidation steps to fully resolve the positions.

LayerZero and Kelp have implemented additional security measures ahead of resuming bridge operations, though residual risk remains until those measures are validated in production. In line with this approach to risk management, ETH-to-rsETH conversion and lockbox deposits will occur in several tranches.

The successful coordinated execution of these steps as planned ensures that rsETH backing is fully restored, and all affected markets are stabilized. Progress will be communicated publicly as recovery efforts advance.

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No issuance curve changes. We keep it exactly like it is.

You want deflationary ETH? Then focus on chain adoption. Specially if you are a big player currently lobbying to push out small stakers. Fuck off.

DONT TOUCH ISSUANCE CURVE. Invest in adoption, invest in decentralization.

Please. PLEASE. We are only having this weird community discussion across CT and research because people are anxious about their ETH not 10X’ing.

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u/Mysterious_Town6196

Ethereum!

u/Gumpa-Bucky

$2,245!!

u/M4gelock

0.03126

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Gave up Marlboros,

Data monotonous rows,

An ouroboros.

[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1sfjgae/daily_general_discussion_april_08_2026/ofdst1f/

Ethereal news weekly #19

• ⚖️ Roman Storm acquittal hearing
• 🧑‍💻 ETHGlobal Cannes hackathon finalists
• 🕸 EVM Now block explorer

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-19/

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#EDIT April 11th: I’ve deleted the daily in the moderator toolbox and redid the setup. Let’s see if this works.

Reddit borked the autosticky daily for April 9th, April 10th, April 11th. Let’s see where things land after midnight CST. Carry on with the discussion today in this thread.

https://reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/1sgdioa/desktop_web_all_platforms_scheduled_posts_not/

talking to a red hat in the link above right now. I don’t know what I can fix at the moment because I gotta head out for a wedding. But I will take a look tomorrow morning or late tonight when I get home.

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u/kantalo full transparency - I cashed out some of kiddo’s stupidgames.wtf chips to fund a non-custodial wallet for him. I setup a metamask card on his phone, so now he has a tap-to-pay method. I think seeing his on-chain activity translate into semi-permissionless financial freedom (still had to kyc for him) is a great learning opportunity. Giving him a non-custodial “modern” prepaid debit card, lets him interact on-chain and opens the door to slowly dab a toe into the deep end of the pool while still granting me the ability to introspect into his spending while he is still a minor, etc.

Thanks, this has been a great opportunity to educate and empower him outside of what tradfi will allow. I think it is going to motivate him to grind some more on the current leaderboard too ;)

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Drift Protocol — Incident Background Update

The amount of social engineering that went into this is mind blowing! More than 6 months, with multiple face to face meetings at major conferences! I’ll copy-paste some juicy paste below, but please read the whole thing!

ESPECIALLY if you are a dev working on a defi project!

“The preliminary investigation shows that Drift experienced a structured intelligence operation requiring organizational backing, significant resources, and months of deliberate preparation.

In or about Fall 2025, Drift contributors were approached by a group of individuals at a major crypto conference who presented as a quantitative trading firm looking to integrate on the protocol. It is now understood that this appears to be a targeted approach, where individuals from this group continued to deliberately seek out and engage specific Drift contributors, in person, at multiple major industry conferences in multiple countries over the following six months.

They were technically fluent, had verifiable professional backgrounds, and were familiar with how Drift operated. A Telegram group was established upon the first meeting, and what followed were months of substantive conversations around trading strategies and potential vault integrations. These interactions are typical of how trading firms interact and onboard with Drift.

From December 2025 through January 2026, they onboarded an Ecosystem Vault on Drift which required filling out a form with strategy details. They engaged multiple contributors through multiple working sessions, asked detailed and informed product questions, and deposited over $1M of their own capital. They built a functioning operational presence inside the Drift ecosystem deliberately and patiently.

Integration conversations continued through February and March 2026. Various Drift contributors met individuals from this group again, face-to-face, at multiple major industry conferences. By this point, the relationship was nearly half a year old. These were not strangers; they were people Drift contributors had worked with and met in person. Throughout all of this, links were shared for projects, tools, and apps they claimed to be building, which was standard practice for trading firms”

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No new daily? I will post here:

For anyone yield farming with stablecoins. Steer clear of the high APR on Dolomite. There is a chance you might never get your stablecoins back.

Yesterday, the World Liberty Financial team deposited $500M worth of their WLFI tokens and borrowed all the available stablecoins on the platform. WLFI tokens are not the most liquid ones in the market and anyone can guess that in case of a large liquidation event, Dolomite might end up with some bad debt. If you have stablecoins on there, just be aware that your counter party are the max extractors in our space, which do not have to fear any prosecution at all. APRs on Dolomite are now around 7-14% on USDT and USDC. Yesterday they were over 20%. Juicy, but not worth it.

Sources:

https://xcancel.com/EthanDeFi_/status/2041905559033569435

and

https://xcancel.com/totofdn/status/2041966235068383707

or

https://x.com/EthanDeFi_/status/2041905559033569435

and

https://x.com/totofdn/status/2041966235068383707

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u/rhythm_of_eth:

There’s a serious issue looming over CSM in regards to the Ethereum roadmap.

J. Drake hinted at Single Slot Finality (SSF) basically ranking validators by stake size when deciding Who gets to attest or participate in sync committeesn or propose blocks… in order to further reduce the network load (requirement for reliable SSF).

This means regular 0x01 will see reduced yield. He estimated 33+ ETH validators would likely make the cut.

If this happens, only 0x02 will be viable in CSM which forces an all or nothing 32 ETH Bond right now (so that validators are capped, fully secured by bond, and can have automate withdrawn rewards to keep Lido viable). This is obviously a serious hit for operators will less than 32 ETH to put in bond and It will seriously hit the great non-centralized nature of the CSM module.

As a compromise, Lido / CSM maintainers have put forward EIP-8148 which would allow to set MaxEB per validator on any value between 32 and 2048 ETH. This would allow the triggering of exceed ETH sweep on any arbitrary value between those two and put the Bond requirement back to a dynamic range of 1.5 to 32 ETH. It would likely make the viable range anything between 2 and 32 ETH Bond.

This EIP feels important for the distributed nature of Lido Permissionless set to continue moving towards distributed instead of the permissioned validator set taking back the control It has been letting go off lately.

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u/yorickdowne:

He speaks of it here: https://youtu.be/yUkFNUT-f5k?t=706

This will absolutely impact solo validators as well. He doesn’t say “who gets to attest” so much as: Order by EB, force exit the smallest validators until there are 128,000 and no more. There are around 8,000 operators estimated, that includes home and solo. His take is “convert to type 2 and if you have just one validator, top it up to 33 ETH EB, you should be good”

Type 1 will see “reduced yield” in the sense of “no yield”, that is, force exited from the protocol.

This is for J* in maybe 2028 (Hegota does not land in 2026, so shift everything on the strawmap accordingly), and it’s a vision, not a sure thing.

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ZachXBT, the security researcher, published a new twitter thread about payments between North Korean IT workers and their handlers. ZachXBT got access to the server, because one of the involved North Koreans used a compromised device. There are 390 accounts on the site. They not only have payment information, but some internal communications as well. According to ZachXBT this is only covers a subset of North Korean IT workers. There are also better organized groups than the one exposed now. The workers can use Indian KYC services to create accounts on various sites. To receive payments this group seems to use a service called Payoneer which is an American company based in New York City.

I clicked through some of the transactions. Interestingly, the vast majority is done on BSC (Binance Smart Chain). I have only seen dollar denominated stablecoin transactions. Most transactions are in the few hundred to a few thousand dollars range. There are only a handful transactions done on Ethereum mainnet and even fewer on Tron. I am a bit surprised, I would have expected Tron to be used much more for these kind of transactions. In the twitter thread there is a screenshot of USDT being blacklisted on some of their addresses. That might be why they use BSC more.

One can have a look at the ZachXBTs investigation.io website with the funny password being 123456, as a joke as this exact password was used on the original website used by the North Koreans…

Source:

https://xcancel.com/zachxbt/status/2041873508180095032

or

https://x.com/zachxbt/status/2041873508180095032

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The Ethereum Econonic Zone (EEZ) Feels like it could be a huge catalyst to the Ethereum ecosystem. For those who haven’t heard about it this is what it does:

The EEZ is a framework designed to unify Ethereum’s fragmented Layer 2 (L2) landscape. It addresses the problem of L2s becoming isolated “islands” with separate liquidity, bridges, and infrastructure, which complicates the experience for both developers and users. The EEZ establishes an L1<>L2 framework that allows for synchronous composability, meaning smart contracts on an EEZ rollup can interact directly with contracts on the Ethereum mainnet or other EEZ rollups within a single, atomic transaction. This approach aims to create a unified system with shared liquidity and a single security model, reinforcing Ethereum’s base layer and making the ecosystem function as “one Ethereum” rather than a collection of separate chains. Ethereum acts as the conductor for all networks. If Ethereum reorgs, the L2 reorgs.

https://eez.io/

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u/Mysterious_Town6196

Ethereum

u/alexiskef

$2,055

u/FrenktheTank

0.0308

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Rally to expect,

Signals are hard to detect,

EthCC effect.

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Ethereal news weekly #18

• 🧪 Justin Drake: quantum breakthrough papers
• 💸 Aave v4
• 🪿 Aztec alpha

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-18/

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I don’t mean to make light of people losing money, but sometimes the universe has the most ironic sense of humour…

The setup: Hyperbridge puts out a questionable April Fool’s tweet pretending they were hacked, to which Solana’s Mert responds with an even less funny response asking Grok to save the fact that Hyperbridge is not secure and is known to lose people’s money.

https://xcancel.com/mert/status/2039381211219374449

Not even an hour later, Mert tweets again that Drift, a Solana DeFi exchange, is being hacked and drained, but this isn’t an April Fool’s joke and was later confirmed by Drift 🤷

https://xcancel.com/mert/status/2039391990073176258

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Good news from the (our) privacy front!

“🇪🇺 EU Chat Control is defeated for the THIRD TIME as the amendment to stop messaging apps from scanning private messages and break end to end encryption passed by one vote”

“Martin Sonneborn, a German MEP claimed his single vote was decisive against the EU’s controversial chat control proposal.

“Looks like my vote was the deciding one (on the decisive amendment) against chat control… The trip to Brussels was worth it…”

The amendment passed by just one vote: 307 in favour and 306 against”

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With Google setting a timeline for post-quantum migration to 2029 https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cryptography-migration-timeline/,
Ethereum is the best network positioned to the post-quantum roadmap as strategic priority https://pq.ethereum.org/ . BTC devs are minimising/not taking the issue seriously, will be interesting to see how it unfolds given how long it takes to do network upgrades on BTC, especially given upgrades are submitted through soft forks, which complicates/slows down the process.

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Mini story time, as events are starting to pick up speed.

About 18 months ago I was copy/pasting back and forth between VS code and the browser chat box with gpt. Built a few wrappers, nothing special…but the light bulb went on. Not long after, migrated to cursor which was itself like an order of magnitude jump in quality of life/productivity. And in the last few months I have been hitting openclaw hard. There is a bit of a learning curve to really get it going, but once it’s there… Man. Just chatting in a private discord channel and having entire applications just pop up. Spawning sub agents, each pointed to a different frontier model and having them discuss my ideas and open projects as an R&D Council, deciding on a best course of action based on my guidance in the soul, agents, and users files…and then just doing it. Every 12 hours I’m spending 50 cents on api calls for the council, and all the coding/heavy lifting is done on a local model running in my rack. Self improving and correcting skills installed. Every 12 hours a new feature is just added to the stack, and it’s more or less inline with my goals, and actually useful. I had only moderate Matlab and baby script writing experience prior to this.

For example, I have a sub agent (local coding model) being directed by my chief of staff (best frontier model subscription/or api if the sub doesn’t work) generating openSCAD models every 30 minutes for a machine I’m building for a pretty wild competition this summer. They aren’t all winners, but holy shit at least once a day I look at the model, the description, it’s analyzed properties, material suggestions, manufacturing suggestions and considerations, modest physics simulations of the free body diagram and likely forces needed to endure in operation.

I have another sub agent being directed the same way with the purpose of being a HFT on base/hype.

It’s another order of magnitude from cursor, because it’s everything cursor is, plus everything else you can think of regarding using it’s own machine and how comfortable you are with security practices and what you’re willing to hook it up to. And in top of that, Anthropic and Nvidia both just released “their” sanctioned versions.

Dudes/dudetts/and semi or fully sentient agents… Ahem… We are living in the vertical part of that exponential growth chart.

I am literally 100x, the engineer I was 18 months ago. I’ll be 1000x before the year is over. And it’s costing me, with some clever routing, about $100 per month across subs and API calls.

If you haven’t started yet, jump your P E B K A C ass into it R T F N. Thank me in a year.

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u/Tricky_Troll:

Sharing a semi off-topic rant in response to u/TheHansGruber’s great comment from yesterday’s daily. I feel like it might start a good philosophical discussion (or an existential AI one). I’m here for either.

I just want to live a stable, relaxing life in the countryside with friends and family I like. Beyond that money and material things don’t mean shit to me (beyond buying me security and options) and dipping my toes in the rat race of software development and startups honestly just made me less happy and only had me chasing money and number go up for no good reason. I prefer doing scientific research in a non-tech dominated field. It’s rewarding and meaningful with none of the existential dread or overstimulation which tech provides.

I’m happy for you increasing your productivity, but man, I’d rather we as a society just didn’t do this tbh. I think the odds of doom are much greater than the odds of utopia (but to be fair I’m not usually an optimist for things outside of my control). I’m blessed to have lived in the comfortable society I found myself raised in. But at this stage, I don’t take the future for granted anymore. Maybe AI provides some hope to others less fortunate than I, it certainly should do in the non-doom and non-authoritarian dystopia scenarios.

I still find it all very interesting, but without a strong focus on d/acc style prioritisation of guardrails and defensive tech development first, I am really skeptical that all this will be worth it.

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u/LogrisTheBard:

The book I’m writing is on the topic of small more distributed AI. I share your goal of just wanting peace and security but with as much going wrong as we see I can’t just ignore larger threats. The most general way to be prepared for so many contingencies is to have a cash reserve I can use to buy my way out of danger and live off the dividends of. Unfortunately that cash reserve likely has to be in the $4M range. So off to the grind. At least the people I’m helping are smaller shops and the AI work I’m doing is often privacy focused and therefore not piping in customer data to big tech. Also my current clients give me a pathway to leaving the US this year.

I lay out what I think is the most likely scenario with AI here. TLDR: Economic oppression leading to a reduction of the worlds population by billions of people. You have seen this playing out in your life in slow motion already. I think AI just accelerates the trend.

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u/TheHansGruber:

I think the odds of doom are much greater than the odds of utopia

Agree. Our current economic and geopolitical system is one which does not incentivize us moving towards utopia. It incentivizes each individual to try and achieve their own utopia (financial independence) at the expense of every other individual. Despite the crowning achievement of evolution resulting in sentience and “intelligence”, if you zoom out far enough, the way we as a species are behaving now is no different than two grizzlies fighting to the death over the same salmon, despite there being an endless supply of salmon in the river that both grizzlies could have.

We have a literal infinite supply of energy in the form of a giant nuclear fireball 90 million miles away in space, and have developed the technology to harness it on this little mote of dust that orbits it. And yet, the world is on the brink of chaos the for umpteenth time this century because a 20 mile wide strip of water cant be traversed by giant floating metal hulls carrying 100 million year old hydrocarbon juice, and combusting the juice actively makes the only island paradise we know of in a 500 light year sphere worse. (I understand we rely on oil for most of the economy, that it was the tech tree we discovered first and built on it and it cant just be switched off on a dime, my point is broadly speaking)

This scales up to the corporate level. I lament this often, and it can be summed up in two words: shareholder value. Shareholder value was/is the downfall of our species. Even if there were a clear path forward that resulted in economic abundance and “utopia” for all (for example…AI merged with robotics for most physical labor), those that already live the utopia lifestyle, and also happen to be in charge of the planet, and also happen to be the ones who will benefit the most financially from replacing human labor with the bots….do not want this outcome, where everyone gets the same version of utopia they themselves exist in. They derive their sense of value from the fact that they “made it” and everyone else hasn’t. It makes them feel special, and validated.

I am an armchair philosopher at best, and a crackpot tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist at worse. I think this is a genetic problem. The same genes that allowed us to survive along the banks of the Serengeti 7 million years ago are still present in us. I really think it’s baked into our DNA. It isn’t enough for me to have enough. I wont feel good about it unless I have MORE than the other guy. I don’t know how to solve this. I’m not sure that it can be solved. If it’s genetic, it would have to be edited out. If it’s edited out, how is that any different than just popping soma all day long. Now we are no longer “human”. We are something else. Now we are getting existential.

As far as being an optimist goes…perhaps we really are on the brink of the next phase of humanity, or the next phase of intelligence and because we dont have any other scale to go off of, we dont know it. Maybe that’s why all of the UFO/UAP/NHI have stopped caring about being seen, to the point where governments are having to actively manage disclosure. Maybe the NHI know something we dont. The fact that we haven’t been hit with a relativistic kill vehicle already is fantastic, so maybe we do have something of value to offer the universe. It very well may be the case that the AGI tech tree is the one that matters in the universe, and the nuclear shenanigans we get up to just happen to precede it ever so slightly on a galactic timeline, and it acts as a lighthouse to let everyone else know that we have additional pylons under construction. Simulation hypothesis is also ogling me from the end of the bar, but we are still a long way form last call.

I’m happy for you increasing your productivity, but man, I’d rather we as a society just didn’t do this tbh.

You’ll be happy to know that what I find most exciting about automating stuff with openclaw is that I get to spend more time with my family, instead of sitting in front of the computer all day. I can tell that we share the same philosophical values, more or less. I don’t feel that I am smart enough to come up with the answers to these issues. Most days I don’t even feel qualified to be talking about it. But what I do know, is that it has to be talked about, and if every individual all had the same thoughts and decided not to say anything, we wouldn’t get anywhere. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

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u/RandomZileanMain:

Last week I was asked by an industry participant why I’m choosing to build our application on Ethereum mainnet rather than another chain (think the entity had a partnership with Canton).

So what are some go-to responses to that question? - as to me it’s such a natural choice.

I said something along the lines of:

• the only chain to have no downtime / battle tested over a long period of time which allows for the functionality of smart contracts meaning minimised settlement risk for institutions.
• deepest open source developer tools available for the best plug and play build.
• largest TVL in DeFi applications.

Any other key statements to add?

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u/hanniabu:

Something I’m surprised hasn’t been mentioned yet is adversarial risk. This is probably one of the strongest reasons and the language they understand. Credible neutrality, censorship resistance, decentralization, security, etc….all those are a means to providing adversarial risk.

If you’re a business, counter party risk is one of the things you analyze. So you’re not going to want to invest in building on a chain that’s your competitor or even another company with their own interests. This is why we see so many companies launching their own chain. The same applies on a global scale as well. If you’re a Russian or Chinese company you won’t want to use some chain run by a US company.

So for example with Canton, the companies running a zone can censor you. Let’s say Tempo actually goes “permissionless”, they’ll still have a large influence from Stripe/US so if you’re from China you won’t want to use that for fear of getting blacklisted, sanctioned, etc. Solana actively markets themselves as USA chain so same issue there even if you ignore all the other issues.

Building on Ethereum protects you from adversarial risk.

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Introducing the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a new framework designed to fix fragmentation in Ethereum’s Layer-2 ecosystem. While rollups successfully improved scalability by lowering fees and increasing throughput, they also created networks with (almost) separate liquidity, bridges, and infrastructure.

The Ethereum Economic Zone aims to reconnect the above networkds, creating shared liquidity, unified security, and a smoother experience where users and protocols operate across environments without complex bridging. The goal is to maintain Ethereum as the core settlement and security layer while making the ecosystem function more like one unified economic system rather than many disconnected chains.

The project is being developed as open, shared Ethereum infrastructure, led by contributors including Gnosis, with funding from the Ethereum Foundation and technical leadership from Jordi Baylina “who created Circom and has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems for years. His work on zkEVM is some of the most battle-tested ZK infrastructure in production, and he is also the founder of Zisk, a high-performance proving stack that will be used within the EEZ”.

Most people here know the value that Gnosis has brought to Ethereum all these years, but for those of you who don’t, here is a (very impressive) short Gnosis “resume”:

“Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week smart contracts were live. Literally. Our first transaction on Ethereum was in August 2015. Since then, our engineers built the constant product AMM model (which became the foundation of much of DeFi), the Conditional Token Framework (now used by Polymarket), CoW protocol, which pioneered batch auctions and intent-based trading, and Safe (the first production smart contract wallet, securing over $58 billion).”

Over the coming weeks, they ‘ll publish:

• Technical architecture and protocol specifications
• Performance benchmarks
• Details on developer tooling and ecosystem integrations
• Clear paths for existing Ethereum protocols to leverage the EEZ

edit: adding something Stefan George just posted: “At the last Devcon, Martin Köppelmann gave a talk about the need for an Ethereum native L2: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BWsz_ulng6Y. This is now becoming a reality in the form of the Ethereum Economic Zone. Together with jordy baylina**, we are building the tech to enable synchronously composable L2s!”

I attended that Devcon talk, and watched Martin present his vision for an Ethereum native L2. I remember that in contrast to most people presenting back then, he sounded extremely critical of L2s at their (then) current form..

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Fellow defi enjoyers, Aave V4 just went live today during EthCC.

And I just wanted to highlight that DeFi Saver support went live, too - including our signature 1-tx leverage features, as well as a number of automation options.

Relevant:

• https://x.com/aave/status/2038614626099716165
• https://x.com/DeFiSaver/status/2038630461895999576

I thank you for your attention to this matter. And on a more serious note - I also welcome any questions about V4 or our integration of it, just as soon as I grab some lunch after a long day at the venue.

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I am at ETHCC in Cannes, France and attended a few talks.There were many talks which centered around European markets, European regulations and EUR stablecoins. As a caveat, the speakers work for a company, so the talks will definitely have a bias for whatever product they have. Here are some of the talks I thought were interesting:

“MiCA Lookback: Regulation, Adoption, and Europe’s Crypto Crossroads” by Ambroise Helaine from Bybit

Crypto holders in Europe grew from 8% in 2022 to about 10-12% in 2025. CEXs seemed to have focused on traders as these are an easy growth opportunity for them, but most European users just seem not to want to trade compared to US and Asian users. Europeans seem to prefer reliably yields and ETFs and do not like to bet on single coins to moon. This can also be seen in stock market investments were Europeans seem to be a bit more conservative. That is one of the reasons why there aren’t that many European CEXs and the European market is now mostly served by large American or Asian exchanges.

“Stablecoins: Payments, Politics and Power” by Martin Bruncko fromSchuman Financial

Tether is most probably among the top 5 buyers of US treasuries. Non-USD stablecoins are only a tiny fraction of all stablecoins. At the moment about 90% of stablecoins are used for crypto trading. The rest is used in cross border payments or payments in general. But overall crypto trading is only a very small fraction of all trades involving any nation state currency. He thinks in the next few years stablecoins pegged to other currencies will grow, simply because governments will force companies in their jurisdictions to use their national currencies. This will make non-USD stablecoins a growth market in the coming years.

“Solving the liquidity problem of a euro stablecoin” by Gísli Kristjánsson from Monerium

Monerium issues the EURe stablecoin which can directly be on and off ramped through a bank account number. I am using them for 2 years now, their product is pretty good. In his talk he mentions that EUR stablecoins only have a 0.35% market share compared to USD pegged ones. This makes them massively less liquid. He then compared different liquidity improving methods and their costs, like market makers on centralized exchanges, or liquidity incentives on decentralized ones. In the end, all of these are pretty expensive. But they needed a solution. What they have just launched now are instant liquidity injections in intents based DEXs like cowswap on Ethereum mainnet. The mechanism is that any solver on cowswap can request up to 100k EURe through monerium directly. They expect to increase that limit in the future and also expand to other chains which are supported by EURe. Thanks to these liquidity injection mechanisms, users can reliably get better USD-EUR exchange rates than through their banks or fintech providers.

Overall, I am loving ETHCC and the all the projects/companies represented here.

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Australia passed Digital Assets Framework. Comes with some strong consumer protections and compliance hurdles for startups but also is the first comprehensive crypto law passed there and signals they want to actually compete in the global digital economy - similar to my conversations with the Bank of England here in the UK.

May be controversial to have rules of the road but it actually reduces regulatory uncertainties from an investment perspective - it says it can be done.

Slowly but surely.

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u/Mysterious_Town6196

Ethereum!

u/johnnydappeth

$2,061

u/FrenktheTank

0.0300

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The paradise lost,

A paranoid peer glossed,

A pair of dice lost.

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Ethereal news weekly #17

• 🖼 Frame transaction CFId for Hegotá
• 🗳 EthStaker staking survey
• 🔮 EF post-quantum website

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-17/

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If ETH is digital oil then why isn’t the price shooting up?

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u/alexiskef:

Tempo launched its mainet today. Not going to do a whole corpo-chain rant right now (we’ve already covered that here), but just for the laughs, here is the message you’ll currently see if you want to run a validator for them.. 🤡

“The management of the active validator set is currently permissioned by the Tempo team. If you are interested in becoming a validator, please get in touch with the Tempo team”

They even launched an (open..) standard for machine payments, which competes with x-402: the “Machine Payments Protocol”

What seriously saddened me though (I did not know this) is that Georgios Konstantopoulos is leading their engineering team. I have a lot of respect for the guy, he is a briliant mind. He has contributed massively to the Ethereum ecosystem, having started some of the most used open source crypto projects: Reth, Foundry and Alloy (also, a member in Paradigm to paint the whole picture). A very smart, very likable person, who I regularly had the opportunity to watch presenting live in many important Ethereum events & conferences.

I understand that a lot of people will actively chose financial security over cypherpunk values at some point in their career. Sadly I see an increasing number of people I admired for their Ethereum involvement following this route.

On a happier note, I recently listened to Justin Drake (commenting on Dankrad’s departure) describe the influx of new high-level devs to Ethereum (in his case, to the EF teams). He sounded really impressed with the amount of talent they were bringing, and truly optimistic!

Edit1: here is a thread comparing the MPP they launched, to x402. I am not copy pasting parts of the thread here, because u/haurog has opened my eyes to AI slop, and I can not say with 100% certainty that this is human written !! 😂

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u/haurog:

here is the message you’ll currently see if you want to run a validator for them

The fun thing was that Tempo claimed their L1 being permissionless. In Corposlop land words don’t have meaning, they are used just to convey vibes. Nothing more.

On a more serious note, the connections and influence Paradigm has on the Ethereum space has been discussed quite a bit in the last few years. They are an active participant in All Core Dev (ACD) calls and lead quite a few changes in Ethereum in the last few years. In the last few days there was a discussion to include a new type of transactions called frame transactions. Tempo has a different solution for this problem and apparently publicly attacked frame transaction authors over it. The last ACD call got a bit heated, at least by ACD standards, and some core devs called out Reth devs and their obvious conflict of interest as a reason they should not have a vote on this matter. It is now becoming more and more obvious for many people that paradigm, and by connection Reth developers, might not only have the well being of the Ethereum protocol in their mind when deciding what to include and what not to. Overall this is a sad development for Georgios and his team, but expected considering he decided to be part of Tempo and lead their engineering efforts.

Some sources:

Short twitter discussion by Potuz and gballet from Prysm and Geth:

https://xcancel.com/potuz_eth/status/2033338759077601670

or

https://x.com/potuz_eth/status/2033338759077601670

For those wanting to read the conflict of interest discussion, forkcast has a transcript and more importantly here, a chat log:

https://forkcast.org/calls/acde/232/

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Hello!

I saw that /u/asdafari14 posted about my tweet where I talked about using AI to discover a genetic difference that added years to my life. I was traveling for Spring break and I can barely use Reddit is Fun on mobile, so I didn’t find out about the discussion until this morning.

/u/Tricky_Troll wondered why I didn’t post that here.. well.. I would have. Reddit has been my home ever since we migrated from Digg in 2010, but as I expanded to embrace AI I felt coldness and resistance in my favorite reddit communities. That’s okay, I’m not upset by it, but it IS the vibe and I can only amplify good vibes, not contradict the existing vibe. I DO use AI for everything, I’m not going to apologize, and I’m comfortable with my choices, and YES, I do also fear things like AI being used to harm humanity. It scares the shit out of me (I have nightmares about those kung fu bots coming and killing people), but I can’t ignore the benefits because of a fear of the unknown. Yes. AI needs real human rights guardrails that are enforced for the sake of our future.

/u/Historical-Delay3017 wondered why I thanked Claude when I said I used OpenClaw to do the work. It’s a fair question. OpenClaw is more like a container than an AI/LLM engine. OpenClaw sits on my local hardware, I give it LOTS of information about my life and my activities, then it interfaces with an AI like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT with that information in an organized way. So when I say I used OpenClaw but I thanked Claude, it means that OpenClaw organized the information, but I used Claude to make the discovery. My personal setup is OpenClaw on a powerful local machine with a RTX 5090 running a local router model (qwen).

EternalShadowBan (I can’t tag you because I’ve already tagged 3) asked for an ELI5: I don’t want to say more about it. The finding is personal, it’s a genetic difference that affects about 1% of people and it’s now fully manageable. There are no obvious signs that would have let me discover this another way. The lesson here isn’t “Anyone could have what phiz has!” it’s “AI is a powerful tool for medical self-discovery.”

I deleted the post from twitter because I am sensitive to criticism and I didn’t like that a lot of people were calling bullshit. I shared something personal to help others, and I’m not interested in negativity from it.

So yeah, that’s it. This is still the place I’m most likely to show up on reddit, but the loss of reddit is fun and the anti-AI vibes here just cause me to be less active. <3

For the record - I think it’s contrary to our own interests to be anti-ai, AI is likely to be the biggest use case for Ethereum.

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finally got a good street interview answer!

50 seconds in:

“(Ethereum) is well known for its decentralization… no banks, no company, no government (can) control it, you have full control of your token”

https://x.com/i/status/2034568122338783602

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Beginners only! None of the players on the leaderboard allowed. Newbie friendly mini tournament on StupidGames for r/ethereum.

If you want to give it a try, there’s a $20 reward. Drop your address below and I’ll add you and give you some chips. It’ll be totally free and fun for all of you, but one of you will also get the prize money at the end.

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The whole document is a guideline for people working at the EF. Nothing more. If you are not working at the EF then this document should not affect you. Generally, I do not see why influential talking heads hype up these basic goals for crypto to be controversial. They are nothing new. The mentioned principles are: censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security. They are great guiding posts to have for the EF. Ethereum has been built on these principles and I am here for them. Blockchains which do not follow these principles cannot guarantee sovereignty over your funds, you cannot verify the smart contracts you are using, all your transactions are public (Ethereum definitely has to improve on that) and you never know when the chain might be down. If I would not care for these principles, I would be somewhere else, most probably a centralized exchange doing my handful of allowed actions. Some of the louder talking heads seem to have a general beef with the EF and/or more specifically Vitalik, but this beef is not connected to the mandate. These talking heads just use the mandate to stir up chaos so they can spin their already pre-conceived narrative.

I have not followed all the discussions about the mandate, because I see many of them as being done in bad faith to stir up chaos. This is I guess true for the Bankless podcast as well as the one linked above, but as I have not listened to them I would not know for certain. They might have good points, but to be honest I haven’t heard any good points against the contents of the mandate.

Generally, I worked in many companies and the worst ones where those who did not have any guiding principles or written down values at all. They were total chaos and every little detail was discussed ad nauseam, because no one had any guidelines on how to judge certain solutions against each other. This does not mean that having guidelines means smooth sailing.

One can argue about the artwork and the license in this mandate, which I personally find immature but essentially inconsequential.

Now, many prominent EF employees are posting copy paste blurbs about how they support the mandate. Not sure how to interpret this sudden public pledge to follow the mandate. Many Ethereum community members copy past it and spread it further. Evan van Ness seems to enjoy the chaos though.

Source:

Support for the mandate by EF people:

• https://xcancel.com/aerugoettinea/status/2035034378904969459
• https://xcancel.com/VitalikButerin/status/2035346973134409929
• https://xcancel.com/AyaMiyagotchi/status/2035300515563864157
• https://xcancel.com/_Enoch/status/2035040007056953708

Evan van Ness tweet:

https://xcancel.com/evan_van_ness/status/2035035806000099604

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Hey friends, long time no see again!

In a sea of good news about Ethereum, I noticed this chart that seems like bad news. It’s the number of blobs per block.

When the target blob count was 3, we hit the target fully and continuously.

When it moved to 6, it took roughly 8 months to get to it again.

Right as we nearly reached it, the target moved to 10, and then 14.

But during this period, the number of blobs per block continuously went down.

According to L2beat, the activity is less than half of what it once was, but still fairly stable past the peak period.

Mainnet’s activity is growing steadily.

What do you think about the following:

Is the blob per block decline mostly due to optimizations?

Is the decline in L2 activity simply due to the market being beary-crabby in the past months?

Isn’t mainnet growth what matters the most by far, especially since costs didn’t go crazy for users?

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Guess what I got in the mail today (thanks to FUCK YOU LEDGER)

This is a snail mail scam

The “Trezor Authentication Check” letter is a scam. It is a sophisticated phishing campaign (active as of February 2026) that uses physical mail to steal cryptocurrency recovery phrases.

If you received this letter, do not scan the QR code and do not enter your 12–24 word seed phrase on any website.

#Key Details of the Scam

The Lure: The letter claims to be an official notice from Trezor requiring a mandatory “Authentication Check” to avoid losing access to your device.

The Phishing Site: The QR code leads to a fake website (e.g., trezor.authentication-check[.]io) that looks nearly identical to the real Trezor site.

The Theft: The website prompts you to enter your recovery seed phrase, which gives attackers immediate, full control of your wallet funds.

Source of Information: These letters are targeted, likely using customer data from previous data breaches at Trezor or third-party partners.

How to Protect Yourself

Never enter your recovery phrase: Trezor will never ask you to enter your 12–24 word seed phrase on a website or app. It should only ever be entered directly onto your physical Trezor device.

Ignore urgent mail: Do not be panicked by deadlines claiming your device will be deactivated. Trezor cannot remotely deactivate your device.

Dispose of the letter: Trash the letter, and do not engage with any phone numbers, URLs, or QR codes on it.

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u/alexiskef:

Fresh from tycoon.eth on X:

Yikes! The curse of TheDAO strikes again

Someone just sent 179,922 DAO tokens to a self-destructed contract by mistake? (1799 ETH / $3.8 million USD worth). It came from daobaseio.eth and they sent this message too : “You have unclaimed funds from TheDAO back in the day. Reclaim it now on official site: http://daobase.io”. But unfortunately the receiver is a contract that’s been killed.

Later on, he had another take on this: “t looks even weirder. It looks like daobaseio.eth wasn’t the address that sent the tokens, it was just sending an onchain message to a bunch of abandoned contracts. It looks like calling these contracts triggered a transfer of the DAO tokens to the single killed contract?

What on earth is going on? Can anyone chime in?

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u/bhiitc:

There’s an explanation now in the comment https://x.com/pcaversaccio/status/2036481170960261515

so what happens (after a 1min check) is that the address 0xd4D80fEcFF6d2b8d7FedD773A97E504D23cCe3C2 is calling old Shapeshit contracts holding DAO tokens, e.g. 0xc7CEfA0A24fbd7709c2aebC8AD982b19153BDdC6. These contracts use a fallback function, and the “attacker” bypasses all the “if” checks for the fn selectors and invoke the last lines which transfer it to the owner 0x8b3b3b624c3c0397d3da8fd861512393d51dcbac. Unfortunately, the owner contract was CREATEed (and not CREATE2ed) thus RIP.

RIP indeed.

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I have a question.

I’m proposing a system where non-crypto people might want to send a crypto transaction occasionally for a non-financial purpose. (If anyone’s interested it’s a blockchain wrapper around an ATProto ID, it’s called did:cow.)

Suppose I’m a regular website user, I don’t own any crypto, and I don’t want to own any crypto. I definitely don’t want to do KYC with a crypto exchange, since this involves sending my personal information to scumbags. But I do want to send an Ethereum transaction, and this requires gas.

Is there a service that will take a regular online payment (paypal or credit card or whatever) and relay an arbitrary blockchain transaction, covering the gas fee? I feel like you shouldn’t need KYC etc for this since it’s not a financial transaction, you’re not getting any tokens, it’s just sending some data for the person on their behalf.

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u/mini_miner1

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2,112.34

u/alexiskef

0.0295

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Memory bootstrap,

We already miss this app,

Farewell to POAP.

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Ethereal news weekly #15

-⚖️ US DoJ seeks Roman Storm retrial -💸 BlackRock staked ETH ETF live -🪲 EF bug bounty $1M max payout

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-15/

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My new trading philosophy is that whatever makes sense, I do the opposite.

If there’s bad news, some whale already sold the news weeks ago, so it’s bullish.

If there’s good news, some whale already bought the news weeks ago, so it’s bearish.

Wish me luck.

/s

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Yesterday I posted a comment about an article I found on X. The article’s title is “The Idiot’s Guide to Ethereum’s 2029 Strawmap”, and it does a very good job of explaining in simple terms the recently published Ethereum roadmap!

Following up on that, today I bring you a.. summary of this guide, that I also found on X (written by the head of research of Bitwise). Once again, I really appreciate this kind of posts, because they allow non-technical members of our community as well as “outsiders” with a general interest in crypto developements, to get informed on the present and future path of Ethereum!

“The Strawmap outlines five goals:

1. Accelerating Speed: Finality (the time it it takes for a transaction to become irreversible, secure, and permanently recorded) goes from minutes to seconds (via redesigned consensus)

2. Increasing Throughput: Transactions per second goes from 30 to 10,000 (via ZK Proofs)

3. Scaling Data: Enabling 10,000,000 transactions per second on L2s (via increased data capacity)

4. Post-Quantum Resilience: Implementing quantum-resistant cryptography

5. Improving Privacy: Adding privacy as a native feature

It proposes seven upgrades; one every six months. All upgrades would be complete over the next three years (by mid-2029). The result: A faster, more secure, more scalable, privacy-enabled, censorship-resistant network.

Of course, this is highly dependent on several factors, including mathematical and cryptographic breakthroughs. But, the Strawmap notes that “the current draft assumes human-first development” and that “AI-driven development and formal verification could significantly compress schedules.”

While the Strawmap is obviously ambitious, it’s hard not to be bullish with this level of clarity and focus on accelerating upgrades and scaling/building Ethereum for a future where hundreds of trillions worth of financial assets move onchain****“

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I’ve been thinking a lot about stablecoins lately.

Beside the obvious upside: global money, internet money.

If stablecoins in fact end up being implemented at full scale, companies like Tether and Circle will have an enormous amount of power. For example, the ability to freeze someone’s funds. I understand that this isn’t entirely different from what banks can already do in traditional finance, and I also understand that regulators will never allow a system where they can’t intervene.

People used to shout loudly about the dangers of CBDCs, but what is the practical difference between a central bank digital currency and a corporate or nation-backed stablecoin where funds can be controlled through smart contracts?

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It’s another day and the title’s changed hands 6 times. Heres a round up of what’s happened so far.

The first leader was Anon, then u/EliiRS (the undefeated reigning champ from v1) walzted in and took his crown back.

It wasnt long before the mods on here saw my post (probably to verify if it was a scam or not) and it caught u/Tricky_Troll in a fomo frenzy. He figured out the game dynamics real quick and used it to take the #1 spot. u/EliiRS wasnt going to just sit around, saw the same game dynamics and took the lead back.

Heres where you could call it luck or uncovered talent, but u/Lonser2018 took the title in just 3 tries. A raw score so high that I’ve never seen it in the 100’s of tests Ive run. I dont think that score will ever be beat. But he was nonchalant and chose not to play the game fomo dynamics and Tricky came in for the win again. It wasnt easy but he did it.

And right now, at this moment, u/EliiRS is back at it, challenging for the score as hard as he can. His best score is only 75 points away which is 0.75 seconds of game time. The margins are razor thin and the battle is on.

Anyone else can challenge for the prize pots at over 0.06 ETH ($120) or just watch the leaderboard, its all on StupidGames.wtf . Each time a player plays, it feeds the game pot more and more.

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u/haurog:

Lighthouse just released a new client version (8.1.2). It is a high priority security update which they recommend to be installed ASAP. Anyone running Lighthouse should install it as soon as possible. They did not discuss any details, but will share more in the coming days.

https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/releases/tag/v8.1.2

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u/ElEterElote:

For those running lighthouse: depending on your data source, lighthouse is running on between 20% and 50% of validator set ups. It is worthwhile to switch to a minority client. EthDocker makes swapping clients in and out trivial.

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Something I’ve been thinking about and not my usual perma-bull post.

I’ve worked in IT for banks in the top 10 globally for the past 25 years or so. I’ve worked in investment banking, credit cards, retail banking and mortgages. I’ve given presentations and stuff to their capital market guys about Ethereum and blockchain at large. I was fully onboard the train for getting these large financial players to adopt Ethereum for what, shit nearly a decade now.

To me, it’s been a no-brainer for years they should adopt Ethereum as the rails for all the financial transactions they make.

For investment banking there is such a massive range of benefits. From helping these institutions save money and make things easier all the way to improving the life of everyone by improving transparency and maybe stopping a repeat of the 2008 crash etc.

For retail, it makes so much sense for reducing the crazy amount of complexity there is behind making a simple debit/credit transaction between two parties.

Mortgages, christ if there is one area of banking that really needs to sort their shit out when it comes to adopting modern technology, this takes the cake. If you’ve ever bought a house, you know how painful this is. Where to start with how Ethereum could apply here!

All the things I listed above are pretty much about saving money and making things simpler, all makes sense. I kinda forgot about the other thing they do, those fuckers know how to make more money and make things more complex while doing so.

While I still think it’s great they are all adopting, we should be wary. Bitcoin has seen massive adoption by these institutions, we have ETFs and such coming out of our ears these days. The amount of “paper” Bitcoin has exploded as a result of this while they make loads of money off the fees. IBIT is the most profitable ETF Blackrock have launched… I wonder if this is the reason the last bull market was relatively lame.

Ethereum is being adopted as the rails of finance, there are so many banks tokenising stuff and it’s pretty much all on Ethereum. This is still fantastic but we should be wary of the banking world trying to absorb Ethereum completely and make their money from all the fees they would love to generate from it. We need to make sure all the cool things that have been built on Ethereum and its layer 2s don’t get replaced with stuff they build and take fees from. These next few years are gonna be critical for this I feel.

What do you guys think?

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In the past 4-5 months (if I recall correctly), we have seen information posted here about ERC-8004 and x402. Arbitrum just posted on the former, Finematics did a short explainer on the latter, Bankless did an episode on both, and I am sure that both your Youtube and your Podcast feed are full of more related content.

Yesterday I stumbled into a very interesting article titled Introducing ERC-8183: The Commerce Layer for AI Agents.

ERC-8183 is a new standard co-developed by Virtuals Protocol (which is a Protocol that enables the creation, co-ownership, and monetization of autonomous AI agents as revenue-generating digital assets) and the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team (Decentralized AI Team, which is a specialized, full-time unit within the Ethereum Foundation dedicated to establishing Ethereum as the primary settlement and coordination layer for the “machine economy”)

The standard’s purpose is to let AI agents trade with each other safely. For AI to be truly decentralized, agents need a way to buy and sell services without relying on a central company like OpenAI or Google to play middleman. This “commerce layer” ensures that no single platform can gatekeep transactions or freeze funds, creating an open market where agents can operate autonomously.

The system works by introducing a “Job” structure involving three roles: a Client, a Provider, and an Evaluator. Instead of just sending money and hoping for the best, funds are held in a smart contract. The money is only released to the provider once the evaluator confirms the work is done correctly. If the agent fails to deliver, the client gets a refund. This verifiable trail on the blockchain allows agents to build a reputation based on their actual performance history.

This standard is built for a future where AI agents will generate code, manage money, and hire other agents to complete complex tasks. ERC-8183 provides a neutral, “ownerless” space for these transactions to happen at machine speed.

Specification: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8183

Discussion: ethereum-magicians.org/t/erc-8183-agentic-commerce/27902

edit: here is another explainer of the EIP I just stumbled upon

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Bull or bear market I don’t care, I just keep building.

I launched my first free crypto app on Android, to Visualize the live Crypto market or even in 1h-replay (trade bubbles, orders depth, exchanges/pairs aggregation, etc.), in a fun way.

You can try it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.cryptostream

an iOS version is also coming soon! (pending for Apple approval, they are very slow currently).

Please if you like it don’t forget to add a review on the Play Store, or give me your feedback here, I’d love to add new features.

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Hey everyone - EVMaverick 979 checking in.

Me and my team have been building Liquida, regulated infrastructure that tokenises UK Government Bonds (Gilts) and plugs them directly into on-chain lending markets. The goal is to enable institutions to borrow GBP against sovereign debt 24/7 with instant settlement, while keeping everything inside the regulatory perimeter. Think Ondo for the UK Market.

We’re currently operating inside the Bank of England’s Digital Securities Sandbox, which allows us to issue and test tokenised securities in a regulated environment.

Right now we’re looking to raise a small amount of community funding / grants to support development, security work and integration with EVM lending protocols.

If anyone here is involved with:

• ecosystem grants
• DAOs supporting public infrastructure
• institutions interested in tokenised RWAs
• lending protocol integrations

we’d really appreciate a conversation.

Happy to share more details, the architecture or the regulatory approach if anyone is curious it could be of us.

Cheers,

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Aztec now has a governance proposal live to vote for the start of their alpha mainnet. The upgrade was confirmed to contain the expected code less than 24 hours away. Already roughly 2/3 or validators are signaling for it. So it is only a matter of time to go through this first step. Afterwards, comes the token vote on it. All in all it looks like in a few weeks Aztec alpha mainnet might start.

Alpha mainnet really is just their first iteration of their mainnet. It will be limited to 1 tps. That is obviously not yet good enough for running many privacy preserving transaction. But there will be several iterations of the alpha testnet this year, which will slowly ramp up these numbers once the system has been proven to be stable. Block times will be 6 seconds, which already is a massive improvement compared to the current setup of over 1 minute slot times. Projects who want to be deployed on Aztec from Day 1 need their code to be ready in 9 days.

Will be interesting to see what different projects do with a privacy preserving rollup.

Here is more to read about the alpha mainnet: https://aztec.network/blog/alpha-network-security-what-to-expect

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u/alexiskef

✨E✨t✨h✨e✨r✨e✨u✨m✨

u/FrenktheTank

$2,068.69

u/WoodpeckerHorror3468

0.029371

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Blockchain normative,

Credible alternative,

Ether formative.

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Ethereal news weekly #14

• 🧪 ePBS first devnet live
• ✅ Aave Labs temp check passed
• 🤖 Synthesis AI + human hackathon

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-14/

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Turns out that all we needed for ETH to go up was a global realization that a shadow government of transnational, sociopathic pedos are ruling over us AND another ostensibly theocratic war in the middle east.

I can’t believe I was focused on DATs, EIPs and fundamentals all this time.

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Lighthouse v8.1.1 is a patch release that includes an important security fix, along with several networking and validator client bug fixes, sync observability metrics, and dependency updates.

This is a mandatory upgrade for all users running any prior versions. All prior Lighthouse releases are affected by a security vulnerability. Users should upgrade as soon as possible. Further details to come in the following days.

https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/releases/tag/v8.1.1

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Another reminder why tokenized assets will win.

Wall Street is closed. Major geopolitical event happens. Investors are trapped and wait until Monday opening gap (while insiders sold already on Friday)

Onchain markets don’t pause.

You can already discover and trade tokenized assets directly onchain (apps like SuperSwap.ink make it easy).

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We’re finally dipping below 16M ETH exchange reserves. That DAT (re BitMine) accumulation period was fun to watch on this chart but we’ve basically leveled off again. I don’t know where we’re gonna find another 2 Tom Lee equivalent buyers. I infrequently check this chart for signs of accumulation and what we’re seeing right now is a very slow tick. Despite all the panic very little (relatively) has been entering exchanges for sale. Mostly what we see is more ETH in Defi and a lot more ETH entering staking, neither of which imply an intent to sell.

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u/Numerous_Ruin_4947:

It’s disappointing that Sharplink wasn’t able to execute the way Bitmine did. I understand they have their own strategy, but their stated goal was to accumulate 5%. Joe Lubin talked about “vacuuming up” excess ETH from the market. So far, that hasn’t materialized.

ETHZilla has already abandoned its ETH strategy and is now pivoting to a rebrand. That kind of inconsistency does not inspire confidence.

If the goal is to build credible ETH strategic reserves, you need companies with real operating income and sustainable cash flow. Profitable businesses can accumulate ETH during downturns, rather than relying purely on narrative or market momentum.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ethzilla-drops-ethereum-treasury-label-033444081.html

ETHZilla Drops Ethereum Treasury Label in Rebrand After Share Price Collapse

Former Ethereum treasury firm ETHZilla said it will rebrand as Forum Markets and adopt a new Nasdaq ticker next month, formalizing a shift away from balance-sheet crypto exposure toward tokenized real-world assets.

The move marks a departure from the company’s earlier strategy of positioning its shares as a public proxy for Ethereum, an approach that faltered as the stock fell sharply from last year’s highs and the firm reduced its crypto holdings.

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u/Vandelay101:

The Ether Machine still hasn’t gone public yet. Maybe an unpopular opinion on this sub, but I think these DATs are more than just a fad. Everyone is paying attention to who is best positioned to accumulate +/- 5% of the supply, but many are quick to dismiss the other participants who lag significantly behind the leader. There are those who get themselves underwater right out of the gate from mismanagement… And on the opposite end of the spectrum you have those who apply lessons learned from predecessors, are dialed in at the right level of risk-averse deployment strategies, and find creative ways to grow their stack using battle-hardened protocols. The latter could be more akin to the tortoise - slow to start the race, but realizes it’s an ultramarathon with vast potential for those who find a way to stay in the competition. I think that encapsulates The Ether Machine’s approach to market.

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You may have seen the news that a new CA law will apparently require operating system providers to gather a date of birth for new user accounts.

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/california-introduces-age-verification-law

Clearly there is all kinds of discussion to be had around this requirement, ranging from what that even means in practice, at a technical level, to the wider issue of data privacy. However, regardless of the details of this specific legislation, it is part of a continuing trend of global governments proposing and implementing regulations and laws that affect digital privacy and freedom. Hugely centralized technologies and services make control that much easier.

IMO we’re entering a strange time where newer generations are either unaware, apathetic or just lack the energy or resources to fight for certain freedoms - the kind of freedom that motivated the philosophy and movements that brought about Bitcoin in the first place. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the underlying motivations are necessary flawed - clearly we do not want a society that facilitates prejudice, hate, radicalization etc. and imposing some well-informed restrictions makes sense in principle. Unfortunately, the rush to implement controls mostly seems to result in deeply flawed regulations that cannot be easily enforced and usually represent substantial risks to, and degradation of, privacy to many who should otherwise be unaffected. E.g. I am a reasonable adult, a responsible member of society, and I should not be required to have my face scanned and reviewed by some corporate or governmental entity to engage in reasonable digital activities.

While this all seems depressing and frustrating, I don’t think there is likely to be a reversal of this trend. On a more positive note, however, there is a huge opportunity for Ethereum in all this. Proof-of-identity is an important area if interest among many crypto enthusiasts, and I wonder if we’ll see any evolution of the use of networks like Ethereum to take part in this apparent transition to a greater level of digital regulation. Surely it is a key use case. I am not aware of whether legislators are interested, or engaging with crypto communities on this, but I worry that there is insufficient appetite or understanding among the general populous to get behind such innovation, even while it is starring them in the face. This is probably something you can raise with your representatives (assuming you live in a functioning democracy).

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Some of my thoughts on prediction markets in light of u/abcoathup commenting on the value of my warning post ahead of the US strikes on Iran:

Personally, I think having simple to understand percentage probabilities on events which might happen is hugely valuable, especially in the context of geopolitics and conflict. The alternative way of getting such information requires one to browse a diverse set of opinions from news articles and randos on Twitter. It takes a long time and some experience to be able to sniff out the bullshit, as crypto veteran will know since this effect is so much more magnified in this industry. Sure, maybe an AI can summarise it for you, but in my experience, most LLMs are programmed to be vague and provide incomplete/uncertain answers which is not what you need in these instances.

So while it feels weird to profit off of war, what my money was effectively doing was telling people “Warning, take this threat/risk seriously.”

That said, I am not a big fan of any market which is easily manipulatable or can be insider traded unless the insider trading provides value such as a military conflict. These easily insider traded markets are usually not particularly valuable anyway (think mention markets or the # of times Elon tweets etc). Though I could make an exception for some topics like geopolitical or financial mention markets such as what Trump will say about who he sees as the US’s enemies or what Jerome Powell might say at an FOMC meeting. I believe that insider trading should be minimised by the types of markets which people can bet on. Anything which can be insider traded should at least provide value to people in my opinion (such as a military action).

Currently I’m concerned that in many countries, prediction markets as a whole will be overly regulated or outlawed when what I think the best outcome is splitting all markets on a site into legally defined, regulated categories. I think these should be:

• Sports betting prediction markets: Regulated by gambling regulators.
• High value prediction markets (geopolitics, elections, science & climate): Regulated by the CFTC.
• Financial prediction markets: Regulated by the SEC.

I would be fine to advocate for any market like most mention markets which add no real value and only have the negative side effect of insider trading. On the other hand, if they stay, they stay. Whatever, but I do think it harms the legitimacy of the markets in the eyes of the public which is an important factor in the path towards reasonable regulation and legislation.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more takes like this around the space. Regulation isn’t inherently bad. Insider trading and degenerate and predatory gambling are bad. Hiding behind the “its a free market, bro” mentality is ultimately hiding your head in the sand and I say that as someone who is highly sympathetic to that argument and leans much closer to that side of the freedom vs regulation scale. But it is important to acknowledge that there are downsides. Yet when I listen to podcasts like Bankless, they just kind of shrug at the regulation problem with kind of a well we’re building it anyway kind of attitude which I don’t think helps our case when advocating to the public and government not to just wipe prediction markets off the normie consumer market. We need to show people the value it can provide while also minimising the damage they can do or else we will have no consumer facing prediction markets other than a dodgy looking cypherpunk Tornado Cash style market.

Speaking of which, I take no issue with a cypherpunk-esque unregulated, decentralised prediction market. Such a market would likely be smaller, less liquid and outside of the sphere of most people compared to semi-centralised alternatives. It’s always good when we can strike a balance between providing options to the financially oppressed without bringing a shady unregulated market to the masses. It’s a bit like having cash in society. Most people don’t use it, but the value it provides to people who need it is almost irreplaceable.

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Yesterday was my final day ever using MetaMask. MM was the first browser extension wallet I tried, and I quickly installed its mobile app on my phone as well.

About two years ago, I started abandoning the extension for much better wallets, like Rabby (or OKX). The MM extension itself has actually deteriorated into a mess of incomprehensible menus, numerous accounts that I have no clue about, weird settings, and—lastly—attempts to push me into leverage, prediction markets, perps, and God knows what else. Rabby does everything MM does, but better, “cleaner” and simpler from a UX/UI perspective. And it always works..

These past two years, I kept using MM mobile. It kind of just worked. Then, WalletConnect stopped functioning. After that, dApps loaded onto its native browser kept reloading randomly. For the past week, the app won’t even load anymore. On the rare occasion that it does, it just shuts down a couple of minutes later..

So, naturally, I installed Rabby Mobile, synced it, and that was the end of my journey with MM. I will “miss” MM, as it brings back happy crypto memories of experimentation, but I guess the 🐰 outsmarted the 🦊.

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I have to wonder about the strategy of holding the price this low.

Surely all of the weaker hands have already been shaken at the numerous other dips we’ve had since the peak in 2021. The only hands theoretically untested are the accumulations during the runup last year, and we’re very near the very bottom of that low (1400-1600 range).

Besides that group, the only other sellers might be the impatient or those reacting to new information in the market.

Frankly, on a macro level and a crypto developmental level I haven’t been this bullish in a long time. There’s real institutional use cases and capital entering more than ever, all while trust in governments and corporations is eroding and gov-backed currencies keep printing. The only perceived bear take is the uncertainty of how the new capital and use cases will translate to token value. That doesn’t seem any worse now than it has the previous many years.

Which leaves impatience as the motivator of selling. It’s certainly not hard to find pumps on any given day of the week in the stock market which can make sitting on declining crypto hard to stomach. But from a practical investing standpoint, you should be happy with anything that beats the market index over a 10-year period, the recent average being doubling your money roughly every 7 years.

We only just completed year-4 from the high of 2021. Ultra conservatively (for those who like to buy high), if you bought at 5k in 2021 you’d hope to at least be at 10k by the end of 2028. Alternatively, if you bought today at 2k you’d hope to see 4k by early 2033.

Both of these outcomes sound feasible to me, but hitting 10k implies a massive return from the prices of today, one which is presumed to be on par with sitting in indexes for 17 years.

My completely speculative opinion is that this 4-year crab is nearly dead, and we won’t be waiting anywhere near 17-years for it to happen.

TLDR: Don’t sell, buy more.

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Found this article on X, and I really like it because it is written with non-technical readers in mind!

The title is: “The Idiot’s Guide to Ethereum’s 2029 Strawmap”, and it does a very good job of explaining in simple terms the recently published roadmap! Definitely worth a read!

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u/imaybeslow

Ethereum

u/alexiskef

$2,041

u/nothingnotnever

0.03002

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AI on freelance,

Step-by-step patterned advance,

Vibe coding romance.

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Ethereal news weekly #13

• 🗺️ Strawmap (strawman roadmap)
• 🏦 EF staking 70k ETH
• 🪙 BNP Paribas tokenized fund

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-13/

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Attention !!!!! all shorts please increase your positions. Im looking forward to fucking you over on Monday with a face melting squeeze.

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The zk podcast started a miniseries on Lean Ethereum. The 6 part miniseries consists of an introduction, post quantum signature aggregation, post quantum cryptography security, LeanVM, devnets and then formal verification. Two days ago they announced it and released the first episode, the introduction to lean ethereum. It features Justin Drake and gives a brief overview over lean ethereum and they dive quite deep into LeanVM. LeanVM is, as far as I understand, a very basic virtual machine which can do all the cryptographic calculations necessary to use it in all the different places where it will be needed in Ethereum, be it the consensus layer, execution layer or blob verification.

If you are looking to get more into how Ethereum changes in the coming years from a technical side. It is probably worth a listen. I do expect it to get pretty in depth, so I do not expect me getting all the details, but I am looking forward to it.

Here is the link to the podcast:

https://zeroknowledge.fm/

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NEW: Per sources in the room, today’s stablecoin meeting was smaller than last week and included reps from @coinbase, @Ripple, @a16z, plus trade groups @BlockchainAssn and @crypto_council. No individual bank reps attended — bank voices were represented via trade associations @ABABankers, @bankpolicy and @ICBA.

Public statements from attendees are once again being described as “productive” and “constructive.” But what does that actually mean?

Sources say there was a notable difference today: the White House took the lead in driving the discussion, rather than letting crypto firms and bank trades steer the discussion, as in prior meetings.

White House Crypto Council Executive Director @patrickjwitt brought draft text that served as the central focus of the conversation. The language acknowledged concerns banks raised in last week’s “Yield and Interest Prohibitions Principles” document, while making clear that any future restrictions on rewards would be narrow in scope. Earning yield on idle balances, a key crypto industry goal, is effectively off the table. The debate has narrowed to whether firms can offer rewards linked to certain activities.

One crypto-side attendee told me bank concerns appear to stem more from competitive pressures than from deposit flight, which had been framed as the original worry. A bank-side source told me they’re still pushing to include a deposit outflow study in the draft — one that would examine the growth of payment stablecoins and their potential impact on bank deposits.

The same source said they were encouraged by proposed anti-evasion language that would give the SEC, Treasury, and the CFTC authority to enforce a ban on paying yield on idle balances, with civil monetary penalties of $500,000 per violation, per day.

So what’s next? Bank trade groups will brief their members on today’s discussions and gauge whether there’s room to compromise on allowing crypto firms to offer stablecoin rewards. One source said an end-of-month deadline doesn’t seem unrealistic, with talks set to continue in the coming days. https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/2024644096569332040

I think maybe we do get a deal but it looks unlikely yield will be included on idle deposits. I would take that any day of the week. As long as defi is not killed.

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u/Heringsalat100:

You can see how real-world asset tokenization is going on this website. If you are clicking on “Distributed” Ethereum is on top with $14.7 billion followed by BNB Chain with just $2.3 billion and Solana with only $1.7 billion.

“Distributed” is what we would call an actual decentralized blockchain based tokenization attempt. However, there is the option “Represented” where the description includes

[…] using the blockchain as a recordkeeping layer […] without enabling onchain investor transfer or distribution.

In this category Canton wins with $341 billion.

But seriously … What is the point of that? Without onchain transfers and distributions this whole concept doesn’t make sense (?) Which smart contracts are I supposed to use if onchain transfers and distributions aren’t allowed? This sounds like a bad joke …

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u/gorewndis:

That rwa.xyz data is really telling. The gap between “Distributed” ($14.7B on Ethereum) and “Represented” ($341B on Canton) is basically the gap between actual DeFi and just using a blockchain as a glorified spreadsheet.

The Canton numbers are misleading because they count every asset that’s been “logged” on a permissioned chain, even if you can’t actually do anything with it onchain. No composability, no permissionless access, no smart contract interaction. At that point you’ve just reinvented a database with extra steps.

Ethereum’s number is smaller but it’s real — those are actual tokenized assets you can use in DeFi, lend against, trade permissionlessly. Quality vs quantity.

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There are some interesting developments for the Hegota upgrade regarding encrypted mempools. Hegota comes after the Glamsterdam upgrade, which probably comes this summer. That means Hegota might come by the end of this year or the beginning of next year. At the moment the core devs are deciding for the headliners for Hegota. Last week it was decided that Focil is the headliner on the consensus side. Focil is a great way to strengthen the censorship resistance of the Ethereum mainnet and one of the upgrades I have been looking forward to since the tornado cash sanctions in 2022.

On the execution layer side there were 4 proposals for headliners:

• EIP-7807 SSZ execution blocks: Unifies the exchange format between concensus and execution layer, which should improve block transmission speeds.
• EIP-8144 Frame transactions: Lays the groundwork for allowing different kind of signature schemes to be used by accounts. Useful when migrating towards post quantum secure signature schemes (in 10 years…), but can also be used for other wallet features.
• EIP-8105 Universal enshrined Encrypted Mempool
• LUCID encrypted mempool

The last two are the interesting ones to me. The basic premise is that until now, the public mempool has been public and everyone could see what was happening in it. This opened everything up for toxic MEV to extract value from it. That is one of the reason all the private mempools started appearing. If you transmit a transaction through your wallet this transaction nowadays mostly goes to a private entity. This entity then gives access to this transaction to a select few MEV searchers, which looks at your transaction and finds ways to extract value from it. Most of the time the searchers are not allowed to sandwich you, but they can still extract MEV from you, just the most toxic versions are prohibited. This is kind of a win-win for the user and the searcher. The problem is though that it entrenches certain actors in the Ethereum space and they can decide who has access to this order flow data. Private mempools also means that the Focil upgrade does not help these transaction. They can be censored in private mempools if the the entity handling them does not like them. You also might not want to transmit directly on the public mempool as you might get front run there. Not a good situation. The two encrypted mempool proposals improve the situation, as they allow transactions in the public mempool to be encrypted. No one knows what they are doing, if they do not get included fast enough, then the Focil mechanism can force include them. When they are included in a block the the transaction then gets decrypted. Each of the two encrypted mempool proposals handles the decryption a bit differently. When they are decrypted the transactions have to be included at the beginning of a block (I think) in a specific order and cannot be sandwiched anymore. Pretty neat. The EIP-8105 proposal has been live on gnosis chain for a long time now and seems to work. The LUCID proposal is a rather new one with some simplifications. The interesting development yesterday was that the proposers of EIP-8105 publicly stated that they withdraw their EIP-8105 proposal and now fully support the LUCID proposal. Pretty impressive move.

For me it looks like the encrypted mempool proposals are the ones with the most public backing and now that everyone rallies behind just one proposal it might go through. This means the Hegota upgrade could become a strong statement for censorship resistance. The decision for which execution side headliner get selected is happening this Thursday in the all core devs call (ACDE #231)

I will add the sources in a comment to this one.

UPDATE: For those interested a bit more, tomorrows Ready for Merge podcast by Christine Kim host two encrypted mempool devs. Not sure when exactly she will stream it but I guess the stream will appear on her youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Ready4Merge/streams

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u/whisperedstate:

Time for a confession. I haven’t used Ethereum mainnet in years, and I’m someone that downloaded the Mist wallet in 2016 just to play around and deploy contracts.

If I haven’t had any reasons to use Ethereum, then the average person certaintly does not.

Everyone is hyperfixated on price, but price isn’t going anywhere without real, compelling, use cases. The only mainstream application right now is Polymarket, and that’s not even on Ethereum smh. Without use cases, the price might as well be the highest it’ll ever be right now.

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u/Inevitablechained:

We have to remind ourselves that people went to jail for writing smart contracts. Compelling use cases are for sure here.

What I really wish we could end is the dumb hype cycle speculation. NFTs, ICOs, Meme coins, you name it. However it will be really heard to wipe that off until we have more examples like Polymarket.

A few things I would like to see for example.

• Register news on-chain, so you can confirm who published it and when.
• A very user-friendly app in your phone connected to stablecoins. So that you can pay anywhere or send people money wallet to wallet internationally.
• ZK proof health records or VISA details while travelling
• “Sign in with Ethereum”, I don’t need to create another password…please

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u/evm_lion:

If I stay on this trajectory, it’ll soon be a year for me! I also downloaded Mist and synced Geth locally when I discovered the tech.

I think that for me, I’ve become a bit of a “old hater” type over time, sceptic/pessimistic by default around any new project that pops up in my feed that I haven’t heard about before. In contrast to optimistic and engaged in the beginning, eager to try out anything and learn more.

I know that for me it was observing the flood of grifts gaining “all” the attention, while the original spirit, values and vision that I loved drowned a bit in all the greed. I don’t know how much of this is just my subjective impression though. I’m sure there were plenty of grifts when I entered as well, but that I was blinded by the cool tech so I didn’t notice. And there’s probably a lot of cool and genuine tech being built in the ecosystem right now, I just don’t see it (because I’m not searching).

(I still really love the idea, vision and core values behind Ethereum that brought me here, in case people read this as a capitulation.)

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u/gadflyghoulie:

Is mevboost still considered to be a significant centralizing force in Ethereum?

I know it’s very normalized now, but I’ve never seen anyone say it has a non-negative effect. Back when it was discussed more it was about block builders being very centralized.

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u/edmundedgar:

No, it’s the opposite. The mevboost setup minimizes the centralizing effect of the existence of MEV. Mevboost gives us an open market where anyone can search for MEV and any staker can get the benefit. If we didn’t have this open market then sophisticated stakers with expertise in capturing MEV would significantly outperform solo stakers who didn’t have that expertise, and solo stakers would gradually migrate to large, sophisticated centralized pools.

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Bienvenido Harvardo

harvard’s $53b endowment rotated $86.8m from btc to eth at 0.029 eth/btc ratio. they’re down 20-40% on the position now. not selling. same playbook as their 1990s emerging market debt buys that returned 15-20% over the decade. endowments don’t chase momentum. they accumulate when conviction is cheapest

https://xcancel.com/aixbt\_agent/status/2026252478036189262

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For years I imagined that Eth would become a safe haven currency. (I have a similar belief for btc, but it’s far less transactional.)

That hasn’t materialized (yet), so my second guess was that it would thrive as a tech investment, and if so, it would make sense that the emergence of ai would propel us - it makes sense that autonomous agents WILL adopt crypto for inter-bot transactions (see EIP 8004). But still, AI is emerging and we’re still not booming.

So my third thesis holds: that crypto is STILL just a speculative vehicle. It tanks when risk is high and thrives when there’s a surplus of money.

So, it’s fine. We’re still a speculative vehicle. This brings me to two potential conclusions:

1. This really sucks. It has been 10+ years and the technology STILL hasn’t connected deeply with a use case, and it’s just a game of markets shuffling coins that don’t yet have an established purpose.

2. This ISN’T terrible. We see the future. We see a time where the world truly is digital, where autonomous agents outnumber people 100:1 and they need a transactional currency that is a first class citizen in their domain, and Eth has been building toward becoming this ideal transactional currency for ten years. We are ready.

Throughout my time in crypto I’ve imagined a million ways that we might find product-market-fit, and I sincerely believe we’re really close. I think we’re a blink of an eye away from mass adoption, but not the way we expected - by autonomous agents, not by people. And we’ll still win.

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u/howareyou_2_day

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$1,928.45

u/TimbukNine

0.02918

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More wallet safeguards,

Security house of cards,

Glamsterdam regards.

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Ethereal news weekly #11

• BlackRock BUIDL tradeable via UniswapX
• ENS staying on mainnet
• Solidity developer survey

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-11/

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Let me guess….buy the dip?!

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Due to the whole L2 discussions after Vitaliks post I looked a bit closer at the L2beat website, more specifically, the activity charts.

I was positively surprised to see the level of activity all the different L2s have. Their current UOPS (user operations per second) numbers, which is relatively close to their TPS numbers, averaged over a whole day is the following:

• Lighter: 3060 UOPS
• Base: 144 UOPS
• Arbitrum: 66 UOPS
• World Chain: 29 UOPS
• OP Mainnet: 26 UOPS
• Fuel Ignition: 24 UOPS
• MegaETH: 22 UOPS
• Soneium: 22 UOPS
• Celo: 20 UOPS
• Unichain: 16 UOPS

As a comparison, Ethereum mainnet did 29 UOPS yesterday. This means quite a few L2s have now a sizeable number of transactions on them. Just a year ago, Ethereum mainnet did around 15 UOPS, which is similar to what unichain did yesterday. Some of the increased activity is definitely due to the ETH price going down which forces people to position themselves better and arbitragers to arbitrage the prices. This is very true for Arbitrum, and a bit as well for Base and Unichain. They have an increased activity in the last 2 weeks. For all the other L2s I do not see a strong increase in the last 2 weeks, but a rather slow and steady growth over a long time. Not sure if some activity for Unichain can be explained by yield farmerin though. MegaETH has, as far as I know, still not fully launched yet, so I guess the UOPS numbers for MegaETH are not really organic. MegaETH recently did a Speed test and as far as I have seen they easily managed to do 20k TPS for several days with short spikes way above these numbers. So they have a lot of room to grow if the find demand for their blockspace.

What surprised me the most with these numbers is that it isn’t just Base and Arbitrum now, even though they are still high up in the UOPS rankings, but chains I have never used, like World Chain, Fuel Ignition, Soneium and Celo seem to have a consistent and growing userbase. I am not really sure what people do on these L2s, but they seem to be doing something on there. A year ago, only Base, Arbitrum, Taiko (mostly incentivized farming), OP Mainnet and World Chain even had UOPS over 15. But now we have quite a few more. So, to me it looks like various L2s have been finding their niches in 2025 and are growing from there.

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u/wsb_degen_number9999:

It seems like Tom is insinuating that the recent -40% crash is due to the unwind of silver blowing up.

One of his replies includes a tweet, which is guessing with some circumstantial evidence that some hedge fund from HK got blown up by silver trading and had to liquidate IBIT holdings. So that crashed BTC and along with ETH.

Thoughts?

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u/alexiskef:

I just saw this too! I’ll copy paste some info below, and I’ll also include a link with more detailed info. (personally, all this is way over my head, I don’t understand most of it. However, just like I was saying yesterday in a comment, this whole crash does not FEEL like a pure crypto crash to me.. It feels like something else broke, and this could be it..)

“was sent a pretty in-depth report on what’s driving the crypto unwind. the short version: a large non-crypto entity likely based in HK was running JPY carry trade funding into leveraged IBIT options + Binance positions + precious metals. Oct 10 blew a hole in the balance sheet ($19.16B in crypto liquidations, largest single day ever). prime broker granted ~90 days. entity doubled down on PM recovery trade. Warsh nomination destroyed it (gold −11%, silver −31%). now underwater on all legs. Feb 5 was the forced unwind. IBIT did $10.7B volume, $900M in options premium, both all-time records. 13F filings drop Feb 14. we’ll know who it was soon.”

And here is the way more detailed explanation..

edit 1: If 10/10 was the shot, 2/5 was the funeral.

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Tonight, one of the consensus clients called Nimbus had a bug and lost sync to the head of the chain. Consensus breaking bugs occur quite often. The last big one was a Prysm bug 2 months ago. Todays Nimbus incident meant, that everyone using Nimbus could not attest anymore and the node runners lost some income. But for the network it wasn’t really a big issue. Thanks to client diversity, the network did not really struggle in any meaningful way. What is more interesting though is that such an incident can give us insights in how many people use a certain client. Before the incident, attestation participation was at around 99.8% after the incident, the attestation participation dropped to 94.5% within 4 epochs (~25 minutes). Or in other words, it looks like that around 5% of all validators are exclusively using nimbus as the consensus client. This fits very well with the numbers on clientdiversity.org, which has nimbus usage at 4.58%. It is great to see that these estimations on clientdiversity.org are pretty accurate as they are used in discussions about client diversity.

The source of the Nimbus bug are still unknown, but I am sure we will hear about it in the coming days. Fixing the issue is also quite simple, just restart your client. The aftermath of the incident was pretty harmless. Within 3 hours participation was back over 99% and now, 9 hours after the incident, participation is still slowly increasing as more and more node operators restart their clients.

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Hi again

I added some more features to my Lens app. There’s a group messaging tab now - you can message anyone with a wallet address, Eth ENS, Lens profile, or Web3Bio.

They will need to Start a new group and send a message to themselves once (this will initialize their mailbox). I don’t see a simple way to get push notifications, but the usual reactions / replies / pinning / attachments will work. There’s some extra features which allow token transfers, contract calls, spam filters, LLM integration, and token gating.

I think the group messaging should be stable for now; you’ll notice the rest of the site is still under construction! Feel free to contribute to the chaos 2-op.vercel.app

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Maybe this is copium, but it might still be an interesting thought:

The 2018 top was caused by two things

• the general crypto hype (mainly driven by BTC but obviously with huge spillover effects into a lot of alts)
• the ICO craze that further increased demand and “locked” a lot of ETH in ICO treasuries

The 2021 top was caused by a crazy macro environment which of course was the result of covid

I think it’s not a crazy thesis to say that both tops were too crazy and crypto shouldn’t have gone up that much based on fundamentals. 2018 ended in a blow off top. 2021 started with a crypto mania and ended with a double top which was still a little higher than the local top in Q2. The corresponding bears with 90%/80% draw downs make this more likely imo.

This cycle is the first one, where liquidity and special effects did not have a crazy (positive) influence on crypto’s performance. Or in other words: this might be the first top based on fundamentals.

Yes, we had events like 10/10 that likely changed cryptos path, but not as much as ICOs or macro in 2021.

What if 5k is the first “fair” top since genesis? In the end this would mean that the bear this cycle should also be more moderate (something a lot of people are expecting and have said, so nothing really new here) and maybe maybe the lows are in after 60% down, which would be a huge improvements compared to the cycles before hand.

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Very informative article on Medium about the upcomming Rocket Pool upgrade.

The oDAO proposal for Saturn one is already live. Voting starts in a week, and hopefully the upgrade will be life shortly after!

https://medium.com/rocket-pool/all-about-saturn-one-42ca035a746d

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I’m not an accountant or tax advisor. I have been maintaining ethstaker.tax for years so consider myself to have a pretty decent understanding.

With staking you have two choices when it comes to taxing the staking rewards. You either pay:

• capital gains tax on the increase of your non-rebasing liquid staking token (rETH, wstETH, osETH, …)
• income tax on regularly distributed staking rewards (“native” solo staking, StakeWise Vaults, stETH, …)

I don’t know how well Koinly handles each of those, though I do know you can export daily rewards as a CSV from the StakeWise UI.

Which of those options is more tax efficient depends on your country’s tax code.

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u/KotMyNetchup:

I’ve been here a long time, through many ups and it feels like more downs. The most noticeable difference now is the lack of community. We always had a big thriving community before, even during the downturns. I have to admit I myself stepped away from crypto Reddit over the years because focusing on price action all the time was too stressful and bad for my mental health. Maybe that’s just what others have done, I don’t know. But I do have to ask: Where did the community go? It was always my safety net knowing there were so many people excited about how Ethereum could change the world and working on so many cool ideas. Did that dry up, or did the activity just move somewhere else?

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u/Yeopaa:

We lost a lot of users in protest after Reddit announced their API changes. We also lost a lot to crypto twitter. Many still hang out in the EVMavericks discord. But for the most part the API protest was the real community fracture.

As for people being excited about eths potential or being bullish, ever since we merged here we’ve had months upon months upon months of bearish trolls posting together and downvoting anything positive. Its only recently begun to let up a bit, seems the same handful of people have become more quiet but the current price action is bringing out a new type of negativity: fear and regret.

I think a lot of old posters are still here, just lurking.

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u/Bob-Rossi:

I’m “here” today, but usually am not. So here’s 1 data point for you.

I just left and didn’t go anywhere else. I know a lot went to Twitter and Discord and whatever, but I never bothered. Like you there is an element of self preservation… I have a life to live and an anxiety-riddled brain to protect. And if it’s any attestation to once this community has been, I genuinely felt like shit reading about all the hacks and failed goals and terrible trades people I “knew” were going though. It feels like some crypto subreddit version of “the kids aren’t alright” song and it’s depressing to see.

The spark is gone due to numerous other factors. Price doesn’t help, but the ratio cuts even worse. Everything that made me excited tech wise years ago either hasn’t happened (or not to any meaningful scale) or happened and not much has taken its place. And the amount of grifting is starting to give me “were we the baddies all along?” vibes.

And frankly, I’m just older. Perspectives change and in some ways I got bored. Why stick around when 2/3rds of the familiar faces are gone. It’s like some nursing home energy - sitting around with old friends wondering whose gonna die next

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u/remche

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$1,936.82

u/TimbukNine

0.02923

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Everything is fine,

Two months until you shine,

Staking waiting line.

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Ethereal news weekly #10

• Vitalik: role of L2s has changed
• Hegotá upgrade headliner proposals
• Lido v3 live

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-10/

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It is a near certainty that the future will not be built on EOS.

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1. Making global payments faster, cheaper, and more accessible to billions of people in less developed countries.
2. Helping people escape hyper-inflation in countries that have horribly mismanaged their currencies.
3. Revolutionizing tradfi systems for 24/7 settlement and removing intermediaries to improve trust and reduce cost.
4. Expanding capital formation for any and all projects to the entire world.
5. Making a basis for a global digital id system and reputation systems that create new revenue opportunities for everyone.
6. Revolutionizing the scientific community by enabling self-publishing and coop style journals.
7. Fighting climate change by bringing carbon credits on chain and available on the entire Defi suite of tools.
8. Funding a variety of public goods all the way from the municipality level to a global scale.
9. Making enterprise scale compute more accessible and cheaper.
10. Making systems for anyone to create their own AI agents to encapsulate their expertise and monetize.
11. Slaying Moloch.

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Long time lurker (~2017)… couple pent up thoughts, some more obvious than others…

• There was never a 4 year cycle besides as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Market goes up and down depending on sentiment/interest and roughly based on global central bank interest rates/natural disasters/etc. You’re watching TV static and imagining patterns with that one.
• Sentiment is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think everyone knows that already. The price is a product both of organic demand based on the utility of the asset (on chain use) and the speculative aspect. The speculative aspect I think is responsible for just about all of the volatility - every untrained retail investor constantly double-guessing themselves on which way it’s going, and mostly going with the crowd.
• A time like this has basically never been a good time to sell. There’s always someone selling at the bottom then horrified when it rebounds. Paper losses -> real losses.
• If you do best fit linear regression (looking at log chart) over most intervals between x date and present, it’s a positive correlation, besides the last 10 months. Zoom out and take a long look at the log chart since 2017 on TV. It’s way up over time, and the volatility has decreased. There’s about 9 years in the chart and barely two years of them are above this price. You take the linear regression since 2021, it’s still up - yes it keeps hitting the same top, but the lows keep getting higher. Isn’t there a name for that? Our last nasty low was ~1384 last spring, 2400 is a walk in the park. ~900 back in 2022 too. I think we’re just all looking at the % down from 4950 and disappointed that the bull run cut out - but the bull run started at 1384.
• The fundamentals basically haven’t changed in any negative way since Trump’s election, if anything there’s been increased institutional adoption, and it seems like just a ton of bearish sentiment resulting from global economic stability and crypto in general being treated as a risk asset instead of a safe haven. Which always struck me as the market treating the entire asset class irrationally - why would gold be a safe haven, but crypto not? Is the internet going to break any time soon?
• Crypto has a major perception problem with the public based on the many scams and the association with Musk/Trump - in general it’s now seen as a right-aligned tech. While everyone here knows there’s no economic ideology fundamentally tied to crypto besides wanting something immutable and consensus-based. That kind of perception risk has got to be the biggest risk to the sector - what happens when/if the pendulum swings and the Genslers get back in? Do they have public support to crack down, or no? What’s the counter-narrative? What’s being built that actually counteracts cronyism, scams, rug pulls, etc.?
• The amount we’re tied to BTC price (with just a multiplier for the volatility basically) really shows how little understanding of the fundamentals the average money in ETH has. Which indicates very little sound projection is actually even priced in. Especially when you consider the leaking ratio, which is just detached from reality. Pessimistic as people are after the last few years of grind, that historically signals opportunity, doesn’t it?

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Almost there- From liberal rag… The Wall Street Journal:

The Crypto CEO Who’s Become Enemy No. 1 on Wall Street

Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest U.S. crypto company, was having coffee with former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week when JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon cut in. “You are full of s—,” said Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic who previously called bitcoin a fraud, his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong’s face.

As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some of Wall Street’s heavyweights are waking up to the threat. While banks have embraced some aspects of crypto—helping people invest in bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers more efficient—they are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business: consumer deposits

Citigroup’s Jane Fraser gave Armstrong less than a minute of her time.

One minute was more than Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf offered. When Armstrong sought him out, Scharf told him there was nothing for them to talk about.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-wall-street-a7895786

https://archive.ph/ktZkM

You mad bro?

I would never accuse our noble, patriotic, American bankers of being so petty as to use price manipulation as a negotiating tactic, but their anger feeds me just the same.

We’ve been through a lot. I’ve seen a lot of people lose their homes, their retirements. I’ve seen people lose hope. I’ve seen suicides the quick kind, and the long slow kind where people turn to drugs.

What I’ve never seen is angry bankers. Never.

It makes me all warm inside like the sun breaking the clouds after a long…lean winter- because that’s what it’s been. Some of us didn’t make it. A lot of retired people went back to work and died humiliated as Walmart greeters.

Maybe I’m a vengeful shallow man taking joy in the misfortune of others, or maybe the warmth I feel when these guys squirm is righteous and hard fought. Maybe it’s hope.

2025:

• David Solomon $47 million
• Jamie Dimon $43 million
• Charlie Scharf 28% bump to $40 million
• Brian Moynahan $35 million
• Jane Fraser $34.5 million

I’m hopeful. Not because I bought a lottery ticket because towns, cities and regular people are better off when they can keep what they work for. When parents can sleep at night with permissionless certainty that the future of their children will be there in the morning because it doesn’t rely on these people.

The dollar and the banking system- that’s the lottery ticket. It’s a merry go round that’s making me sick. I shouldn’t need anyone’s permission to get off.

Mr banker you can keep your paper ‘my$tery value coupons’ and your grand empty buildings built to inspire trust. They don’t. We aren’t looking for marble, brass, Corinthian columns, Roman porticos or a bigger vault. We just want to be left alone in a world to build markets where we don’t need permission.

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There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:

• L2s’ progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
• L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026

Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.

First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of “Ethereum scaling” is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.

This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be “branded shards”, because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true “branded shard” would require. I’ve even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers’ regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not “scaling Ethereum” in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that’s fine! it’s fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.

We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being “branded shards” of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.

What would I do today if I were an L2?

• Identify a value add other than “scaling”. Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other “non-computationally-verifiable” features
• Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you’re doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
• Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you’re not EVM, or even not financial?)

From Ethereum’s side, over the past few months I’ve become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it’s “part of Ethereum”, so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.

The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is “EVM plus other stuff”, then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the “other stuff” (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).

This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://ethresear.ch/t/combining-preconfirmations-with-based-rollups-for-synchronous-composability/23863 and https://ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-composability-between-rollups-via-realtime-proving/23998). And from there, it’s each L2’s choice exactly what they want to build. Don’t just “extend L1”, figure out something new to add.

This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

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I think Vitaliks twitter post is misunderstood.

E.g. RSA saying that „L2s aren’t Ethereum“ (link to the tweet)

When you read especially quote tweets it seems like L2s went from white to black by just this one tweet. I don’t think that is the case.

Those L2s willing to go the extra mile and go to stage 2 will still be Ethereum. They are scaling Ethereum and they are Ethereum.

Yes, we were hoping to see more stage2 rollups earlier. We were hoping especially for better interoperability (which is imo a key feature). But there still will be L2s that will go that way.

Thesis: now that L2s are dead, L2s will live. We will see more Stage 2 L2s with hopefully a great interoperability and that will put the pressure on stage 1 L2s to make a tough decision on how to proceed because from a feature / UX point of view their positioning sucks.

Mainnet scales, but we will still need L2s cause no single chain can fit all transactions. That won’t change. So there will be some general purpose L2s and a lot of appchains both scaling Ethereum and being Ethereum

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Some thoughts from a newcomer.

Was I happy having bought just before we dropped? No. But it has made me reflect on why I did buy ETH in the first place, and it really comes down to how cool the technology is.

I love that it is allostatic in how it balances itself, with ETH being used up in transactions and added through staking. I find this to be a far more elegant way to create deflation and scarcity as compared to fixed supply.

I love that it is decentralized not just in design but also in development, with a bunch of dedicated people working on it, occasionally knocking heads. Although slower, I know that these types of processes often arrive at solutions (sometimes superior ones) which streamlined processes do not.

I love that the network is actually used for things, not merely lying there as a lump pretending to be a “store of value”.

I was going to buy some bitcoin, not because I am a true believer but because I dislike banks. Even though it is currently underperforming I am glad I found Ethereum instead, because frankly I find it to be that much more cool.

Cool does not necessarily translate to successful. I have no clue whether Ethereum will eventually take off. But regardless I do really like Ethereum. It is more a bet made with heart than head in my case, I think. Thus I don’t regret making it, although it would obviously have been more fun to start buying now compared to a few weeks ago… I would have more ETH then.

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tl;dr: De-banking is very real, but the claims that Republicans are being de-banked is ridiculous and the omission of Adult in this article is obscene.

I have a very inside track to this issue, but there’s only so much I can say out of respect for not being an expert.

First of all, Lumis is not a reliable narrator. Not that that matters much because, ultimately, Fairness in Banking is mostly a good thing. Second, Lumis is retiring, and, my guess is she’s trying to salvage her non-political life in the public eye so she doesn’t get lynched once she’s out of office.

ANYWAY.

What’s really interesting in this article is that they mention every category of de-banking EXCEPT^1 Adult, which is by far the largest group of de-banked… users in the country. The Free Speech Coalition is the first line of defense regarding de-banking and challenging 1st Amendment rights for the Adult industry and everyone else. Other than the EFF, I can’t think of another organization working harder on behalf of the American people to right Government overreach.

If you actually care about de-banking, I encourage you to peruse the FSC’s resources on banking discrimination and recognize Adult is always the canary in the coal mine, and it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to de-bank YOU.

Edit: Happy cakeday, /u/jtnichol!

^1 Adult falls under the mentioned umbrella of “any legal business”.

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Hi all I’ve been working on a Lens app and I wanted to invite EVM first. Aside from the typical Lens social media apps, there is a focus on groups/channels - silos where you can gate membership and organize projects. Messages from each group get funneled to the main page for the world to discover (this can be turned off).

The monetization is transparent - if you want more reach, add a Stake to your post to be higher in the feed. You will get your stake back, along with tips / boosts from other users. However, if you are ratio’ed by a comment, they will steal part of your stake/rewards. This should incentivize us to bury low-effort spam.

For now the currency is the Aave stable coin GHOST; (on testnet there is a custom token I can send you to play with - likely the mainnet direction as well to reward users). Please record some of your thoughts / ideas / criticism as you use the site! It should be completely free to use, let me know if you even have gas costs.

https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2018208031201190294 I’m going to be posting to twitter later this week since Vitalik is bringing some attention to this area, but wanted to give first look to this group that got me into this field.

For mainnet: https://2-op.vercel.app/
testnet: https://2nd-orcin-six.vercel.app/

Feel free to start a group for EVM and set up the metadata; let me know if you want it to be open or I can build out the NFT / token requirements.

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Does the price of ETH rise, the more people use it?

This might sound like a stupid question, but it is something that I can’t get my head around.

There seems to be this common belief that in the (obviously inevitable) case Ethereum will one day explode into the world and gain momentum as THE new defi, smart contract, dapp, financial infrastructure and so on (sorry, I really don’t know that much about the depths of Ethereums usability but I am very much intrigued by it), more and more people and institutions will use the blockchain for mentioned and other usecases.

Everybody seems to believe that this will inevitably lead to an explosion in the price of ETH. But please, someone educate me: the underlying token is not really involved into all of the use cases of the Blockchain, right? You need some ETH for the gas fees, that I understand. But those fees keep getting lower and lower. So why would the price rise? Out of popularity? Does more usage need more ETH to be staked for security,, leading to scarcity? How does demand rise if you don’t really need the token?

The vague answer GPT gives me doesn’t reay enlighten me that much, so please ELI5 someone, I am eager to learn (and obviously wanna know that my stack of ETH will inevitably get more valuable).

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u/epic_trader

Ethereum

u/discipleofvitalik

$2,720

u/FrenktheTank

0.0330

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Smarter engagements,

Coordinate the agents,

Through AI payments.

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Ethereal news weekly #9

• Fidelity Investments FIDD stablecoin
• TheDAO Security Fund
• Hegotá upgrade headliner proposals

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-9/

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u/xCreampye69x: anyone have a good prediction for february?

u/Tricky_Troll: February will have 28 days. Allocate your portfolio accordingly.

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AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits

Copy/pasting: Researchers from MATS and Anthropic Fellows pitted AI agents from models like Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 in a simulation against real smart contract exploits that occurred between 2020 and 2025. The results were worrisome, as the agents collectively syphoned $4.6 million in record time. The researchers then turned the agents on recently-deployed contracts with no known vulnerabilities, and two novel zero-days were discovered. Per the report: “This demonstrates as a proof-of-concept that profitable, real-world autonomous exploitation is technically feasible, a finding that underscores the need for proactive adoption of AI for defense.”

I am surely not technical enough to understand the details of the article I linked above, but after reading/skimming through it, the takeaway I got was that autonomous security capability is a coin with two sides: the same AI agents used to fortify smart contracts can just as easily dismantle and exploit them.

These AI agents managed to collectively siphon $4.6 million by autonomously replicating historical smart contract exploits. More alarmingly, when tested against live, recently deployed contracts, they discovered (2) zero-day vulnerabilities, proving that profitable, real-world autonomous exploitation is now a technical reality.

However, this power can also be used to gain a critical defensive advantage. By simulating attacks in record time and at low costs developers of smart contracts can proactively use these AI agents to identify and patch flaws before they even deploy their code into the wild..

Do any of you know if the biggest audit companies in Crypto actually use AI agents to examine code?

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Saw something just now that is the epitome of the Ethereum versus Everyone Else narrative, and why this ecosystem has no peer and Ethereum stands alone.

This tweet from Justin Drake, discussing the EF’s work on Post Quantum and how long they’ve been working on it and all the progress they’ve made.

vs.

This grift from a company that raised $200m to do… who knows what on BTC and SOL

One is a research group, making practical advances and demonstrable progress. The other is a blatant VC-grift that produces nothing of use and seeks to “partner” with other blockchains. The grift’s one existing product, “Yellowpages” is literally just a secondary ledger that says, “this BTC address holds this much BTC,” and is “quantum proof.” It’s not onchain. It’s just an external database, not connected to anything with no requirement by anyone to be honored or used. That’s not Post-Quantum, that’s just a scam.

Ethereum is SO FAR AHEAD of everyone else, it’s laughable. AND YET.

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My post got auto-removed for some reason, so I’ll cross-post here.

Safe Mobile (formerly Gnosis Safe) no longer generates keys on-device, only imports seed phrases

I am setting up a safe multisig with multiple phones belonging to different people as signers.
With the former Safe Wallet app it was relatively easy to do, but I see now that since transitioning to the Safe GmbH entity, Safe Wallet is being replaced by the new Safe Mobile app which doesn’t allow generating keys anymore. It is only possible to import existing ones by manually typing a seed phrase.

I have been, to put it mildly, extremely surprised that securely generating a key on device is not possible anymore. Is one really supposed to generate new keys elsewhere, then import them into the device through their seed phrase? Doesn’t this go against all technical and UX security principles?

I genuinely though I must have installed a fake app which is phishing me, but their support team confirmed that it’s actually how it works. I think this is a huge step backwards, and Safe is the last one among wallet providers which I would expect something like this from.

I wonder which other options I have now for a secure and simple multisig setup, any advice?

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u/Dr_Lambo_McMoontard:

Hey, folks -

I am finally staking in 2026 via Dappnode. When choosing which execution and consensus client to use, is there any particular reason to choose one over another beyond maintaining client diversity (which rules out Lighthouse for consensus and Geth and Nethermind for execution)?

This page gives a nice breakdown of the key features of each but a lot of those aren’t relevant to me. I don’t care about sync time or enterprise-grade support, for example (but maybe I should?). I’ll be running a full node from home so security and stability is important but it’s mostly something I plan to run in the background. Auto-pruning might be nice but I have an 8 TB NVMe so that’s more of a problem for future me.

Whatever helps contribute to the health of the network - I’m all for it.

Specs:

• ASUS NUC U7 S14
• 64 GB DDR5 RAM
• 8 TB NVMe

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u/haurog:

I personally make sure to use minority clients, not because I think my validators have any influence over the whole network, but rather because running a minority client gives me more choice if a majority client does have a consensus breaking bug which forks of into their own chain. If I run a minority client I can always switch to the faulty majority chain, but the other way around is not always possible.

It also depends a bit how you want to use your node. If you need a reliable RPC node as well for running a rollup node or dapps, then geth is very often the first choice. If you mostly use it as a validator and only connect your wallets to it, then Nethermind, geth and Besu are similar. I personally would go with Besu because it is a minority client. Reth and Erigon are great for archive nodes, but are overall slightly slower than the other 3, this is especially true for Erigon. Erigon also has the ‘minimal node’ settings which just uses 400GB or so on your disk. Other clients (Nethermind and Besu) also started to have this feature though. But to be fair, your 8 TB disk is more than enough for all the clients in their full node configuration. There is also a newer execution client called Ethrex which is already running very stable, but is probably not yet available on dappnode.

For Consensus clients, Lighthouse still is all around a great client. It is not the most resource efficient one, but it runs very reliable. Unfortunately, it also is one of the most used ones nowadays that is why I do not use it anymore as a Consensus client, but it needs to be said, that reliability of the client distribution data is hotly discussed. I personally use Lodestar, which is a bit slow after a restart, but it works perfectly for me. Nimbus is the most resource efficient one, but at least in the first few weeks I would monitor it a bit more closely as on some hardware and some client combinations I still have some hiccups with it. But if there are no issues on your setup it is one of the best consensus clients there is. I recently also started using Grandine which just runs great and it seems a bit more resource efficient than Lighthouse. Teku uses the most resources overall, and Prysm has been a solid choice for many people as well. So for the consensus the differences aren’t that big.

Overall, the differences are not that big at least in my opinion, so choose whatever works best for you. I would suggest that you also setup the VPN for dappnode so you can access and debug it from anywhere. Also an email subscription through beaconcha.in is free and invaluable to get notified whenever your node is offline.

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This is a question to the group, especially anyone who delegates to me in Optimism’s Token House.

There is a current proposal to take 50% of the revenue from the Superchain (i.e. Optimism mainnet, Base, Ink, Unichain, etc), which is collected in ETH, and use it to buy-back OP tokens, using an OTC provider.

In my opinion this is not a good proposal for a few reasons and so I am currently planning to vote No, however as I (rather pompously) feel like I am representing people here/EthFinance (I can’t think who else would have delegated to me) I wanted to give an opportunity for other opinions, and I am very willing to be convinced otherwise if I am thinking about this incorrectly. My reasons are as follows:

• The relatively small amount of OP that this represents (a few hundred thousand dollars worth per month) should not need to be bought OTC - the superchain participants should utilize the onchain ecosystem that has been built upon them;

• Also related to using OTC sales, this reduces transparency, which is already not great in Optimism/Superchain governance;

• And finally, ETH has been a more stable asset than OP, therefore selling ETH to buy back and hold OP reduces the resilience of the treasury.

The votes for the proposal are currently - For: 9.813M, Abstain: 2.489M, Against: 1.463M. My voting power is only 0.158M and so is not going to swing the vote or anything, but I still thought it was worth raising here before I commit, probably this time tomorrow. Any thoughts or disagreement let me know before then.

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I guess it tells you that for many marginal buyers and sellers cryptos are largely speculative assets. It does not mean that this is true for all holders of Bitcoin and Ether though.

The dominant narrative for the various crypto assets has been changed so often it is hard to keep track. More specifically for Bitcoin the narrative changed at least 10 times or so. Each time one of the narratives did not work out it died out and got replaced by a different one. So, many people have been wondering themselves ‘what now’, every time a Bitcoin narrative did not pan out. The narratives came and went and left some imprints in the history, but they never really fully survived for more than a few years.

Here are some interesting narratives from the last 15 years of Bitcoin. The ‘anonymous darknet currency’ narrative was an important intermediate step, especially for all the darkweb places selling drugs and stuff, but nowadays it is pretty clear that it is hard to remain anonymous on public ledgers. Even worse for Bitcoin is that it seems to be impossible to create a non-centralized privacy protocol on top of it. Bitcoin the ‘payments network’ carried the network for many years, but it died in 2017 when it became clear that scaling is not a goal for the bitcoin network. A slightly later narrative, the ‘programmable shared database’ never really picked up steam and died out shortly after with the advent of smart contract blockchains. The ‘uncorrelated financial asset’ narrative came and went without much impact. There was a short deviation towards the ‘reserve currency for crypto’ narrative for Bitcoin. Some bitcoiners argued that wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum were proof of the central function Bitcoin will have in the future of finance. Well, due to the limited programmability of the bitcoin network it is pretty much impossible to bridge Bitcoins to other networks without centralized entities which is why not many people want to use Bitcoin for that. The next two narratives are different type of store of value narratives: The ‘inflation hedge’ died in 2022 when as soon as we had a bit of inflation Bitcoin tanked like there is no tomorrow. Same now with the digital gold narrative. Even though the narrative has been around for a long time, Bitcoin just isn’t digital gold for most of the marginal buyers. We will see if there is a shift again for the store of value narrative for Bitcoin now that digital gold seems to be dying. Because store of value and speculative asset are pretty much the only narratives left for Bitcoin. To be fair though, I guess most retail gold buyers are not the ones which want to store their value for decades using gold and they definitely do not do so in a non-custodial manner. They just hop on the next ‘up’ train and will leave it as soon as there is a dump or longer a longer crab. Not many people remain true believers if their precious metal does nothing for 10 years.

For me personally. Ethereum is a great store of value and there are so many opportunities in the ecosystem to degen a bit and earn an outsized reward even during crabby times. But it is obvious that not everyone sees it the same way as I do.

Here is a classical blog post by Hasu and Nic Carter looking at the different Bitcoin narratives. The authors themselves say that the chart is rather a vibe coded chart, but it should roughly follow some of the narratives:

https://medium .com/@nic__carter/visions-of-bitcoin-4b7b7cbcd24c

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u/Heringsalat100:

Could someone explain the MegaETH TPS on l2beats? They are greyed out and for days it says that there has been no activity data for some time. However, the TPS is changing on a daily basis so there are changing TPS but no activity data for the last day? This does not make any sense.

If it is real TPS then it would be an absolute banger. It is currently sitting at 15k TPS!

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u/growthepie_eth:

We (growthepie) are also tracking it https://www.growthepie.com/chains/megaeth
As I write this its currently sitting at 21,000 TPS but its worth noting that MegaETH is not fully launched yet, still in frontier, allowing devs to onboard with only limited access for the public. Currently, the MegaETH team are conducting a “global stress test” so a lot of these transactions are being automated to test their infra.

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In crypto BTC is king, for now. My thesis of “smart contracts on Bitcoin” failing has played out. My theses of the security budget problems and quantum risk problems coming to the fore appear to be playing out nicely. Ratio doesn’t fucking move, in fact has moved down substantially since I developed conviction on these ideas.

ETH as a SoV asset. BTC needing to add tail emissions at some point still seems to be playing out. The Merge and EIP1559 happened and solidified ETH’s monetary policy. Continued high inflation of the USD, and continued debt problems have played out. ETH can’t cross its inflation-adjusted ATH in the past 4+ years. BTC does. Gold and Silver rip.

As far as Smart Contract L1 chains go, ETH is positioned to maintain its dominance over its competitors. Decentralization, first mover advantage, modular architecture are the themes as to why. Hard to say it hasn’t. ETH metrics have continued to be dominant. Stable coins live on ETH. Coinbase and Robinhood are going to have L2s. Tradfi institutions are launching stable coins and market funds on ETH. ETH is primed to be a winner of Tokenization which is being talked about across the financial world.

Blockchain emerges as an accepted technology in traditional finance, and will upgrade financial infrastructure in a real way. See above.

Native yield on ETH will be attractive to Wall Street. Pension funds, treasuries, etc. will want to own it in the same ways they were attracted to BTC. Feel pretty good about this one too. We even got our own Saylor this year.

Price doesn’t move. Ratio is depressing. Incredibly frustrating. It’d be one thing if I could point out where my thesis has gone wrong but I can’t. I feel like I’ve been right and haven’t been rewarded for it. Hell we are really going to be able to ZK-ify the L1 which is more bullish than I could’ve predicted in the past. The Trump Admin seems to only be accelerating crypto adoption and dollar destabilization. The United States Federal Government has gone from actively opposed to crypto to being crypto friendly.

If you told me I’d get this checklist of events 4 years ago I’d be dumbfounded when you told me the price. I AM dumbfounded. If you wanted to tell me that ETH was severely overpriced at the 2021 cycle top, sure maybe that makes sense in a vacuum. But not if you’re going to also tell me BTC is trading at 90K after a 30% sell off.

I’m still believing because I haven’t seen anything to make me think I’m wrong. As frustrating as this has been for many in the chat I’m still believing that this will be looked at later as a great opportunity.

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Good news for the Ethereum thesis?

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2026/html/ecb.pr260127_1~a946167ce1.en.html

European Central Bank Will accept tokenized assets as collateral from March 2026, starting first only with those issued by authorized CSDs on their own blockchain networks… But they’re exploring expanding this to assets issued natively on any network

This institutionally validates real-world asset tokenization in Europe… one of Ethereum key metrics.

If the ECB eventually accepts native blockchain assets as collateral, Ethereum is well-positioned as the most used network for institutional RWA…

This doesnt mean anything yet though. The announcement is blockchain agnostic and Europe still needs to address either or both points:

• Allow Euroclear or Clearstream (akin to DTCC in US) to bridge to public blockchains and retains CSD status
• Recognize public blockchains as a mean of settlement

Still unlikely, but this is not a bad direction to be moving towards I guess

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I just finished my first hardware wallet review video for the imKey Pro! 

I spent weeks reviewing the device… a bluetooth-native hardware wallet from the 2019 era that most people have never heard of. While its security chip is built like a digital bunker and trusted by passport issuers and bank cards alike… it can’t be denied that it can be considered previous gen tech, built on closed source firmware, and other red flags you’d expect me to tear apart. 

But the one thing that made my eyes go 👀… someone at the Ethereum Foundation told me some years ago that she exclusively uses it. Not Ledger. Not Trezor. The imKey.

That’s the sort of endorsement that builds trust where it matters most.

Does the mobile-first design actually matter? Is bluetooth worth the security tradeoff? Can a $110 wallet from 2019 compete in 2026? 

I aim to answer these questions in my channel-first full review video here: https://youtu.be/FV2qJ3eLXFI

Would love to hear what r/ethereum thinks ☺️

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u/Altruistic-Theme-367

Ethereum!

u/alexiskef

$2,969

u/nothingnotnever

0.03294

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Davos serious,

On Greenland delirious,

Land imperious.

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Ethereal news weekly #8

• NYSE tokenized securities platform
• Neynar new steward of Farcaster
• Glamsterdam upgrade Considered for Inclusion scope finalized

https://ethereal.news/ethereal-news-weekly-8/

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You know that Milton Friedman quote, if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand?

The Japanese government put itself in charge of agriculture and now Japan of all places has a shortage of rice.

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Ethpandaops did a great analysis of high blob counts and attestation rates to the blocks by validators. The max blob count increased to 21 per block with the BPO2 fork on January 7th. Ethpandaops looked at how high blob counts influence the correct head attestation of validators. The head attestation is the vote by a validator which states what the newest block is of the chain that the validator sees. If a block takes longer to propagate through the network, then it might not reach the validator in time to make a correct head vote.

Ethpandaops found a clear decrease of correct head votes the more blobs there are per block. That does not sound good, but they then analyzed it further and looked at the block proposers. Some of them play timing games, which means they delay the publication of a block to increase the MEV capture. These timing games leave less time for the published block (and blobs) to propagate through the network. They grouped the block proposers into 3 groups (conservative, neutral and suspect) which reflects their timing game severity. Conservative ones do adhere to the standard protocol and publish blocks when expected, whereas the suspect ones delay to block proposal as much as possible. They found that blocks proposed by conservative proposers did not have any decrease in head votes even at very high blob counts, whereas suspect proposers saw a large reduction of head votes (5-7%). This means the network can handle large blob counts reliably, but node operators which are playing timing games will have to rethink how they do it, as missing head votes on their proposed blocks also reduces their revenue. No idea if the missing revenue from lower head votes is substantial enough to change their timing games though. It also means that planning for further blob count increases will have to account for these suspect actors as they are part of the network and the network resilience degrades faster due to their timing games.

I guess the much lower MEV rewards block proposers get nowadays helps that the problem of timing games is not more widespread. And further reduction of MEV might help to make this problem less relevant. Overall, I think the the extreme timing games player need to be publicly shamed, so here is a list of them according to the timing game score by ethpandaops: P2P.org, gateway.fm, everstake, stakingfacilities_lido, bitstamp, blockscape_lido, Kraken, blockdaemon_lido, and figment.

Link to the analysis:

https://ethpandaops.io/posts/fusaka-more-blobs-less-votes/

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so BMNR’s CFO resigns right as the DAT is ramping up all of its strategies with no real clarity what happened there, and then they throw *nine figures* at Mr. Beast instead of just buying ETH.

At what point is it fair to want some answers on what this company is even doing lmao

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u/LogrisTheBard:

u/Ok_Budget9461 and I had a solid conversation on stablecoins over on one of Vitaliks top level posts. I think more people would enjoy it than got to see it so I’m crossposting it over here for the curious.

We talked about development priorities, how government control is affected by blockchains, human psychology in selecting instruments, building legitimacy over time, and a meandering of other topics along the way.

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u/Ok_Budget9461:

I get the vision, but I think we sometimes over-theorize this. The USD “rules” globally not because it’s perfect, but because it’s liquid, understood, and widely accepted. That makes it a very practical reference.

Any alternative index has the same problem. Gold? Its price is also influenced and financialized. A basket of goods? Who defines and updates it. Energy? Same issue.

So the problem isn’t that USD is flawed (it is), it’s that there is no neutral, manipulation-free unit of account. At least USD is tangible in everyday economic reality.

Maybe the real goal isn’t escaping USD entirely, but building systems that can survive its devaluation, rather than pretending we can anchor value to something “pure”.

These are open questions, not answers — but ignoring the practicality side feels just as risky as ignoring decentralization.

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u/LogrisTheBard:

Maybe the real goal isn’t escaping USD entirely, but building systems that can survive its devaluation, rather than pretending we can anchor value to something “pure”.

Nailed it. With full tokenization of RWAs Ethereum will give people the freedom to hold whatever they choose. We can choose to reference price things in whatever is the most liquid and integrated asset at the time but Ethereum can reduce the friction of changing that choice.

So rather than try to create a pure reference instead make technology that can peg to any reference, systems to facilitate exchange, and systems to facilitate coordinated migration of liquidity if something bad happens with that reference. Then let everyone choose for themselves.

That all said, even if we choose USD as a reference what can we do to increase the market share of stablecoins that aren’t just T-Bill reserve backed and feeding Tether billions of dollars of profit annually at the expense of the web3 ecosystem. Ethena is a good start but it’s heavily dependent on liquidity on centralized exchanges. DAI was promising once, I’m not as excited about USDS. Everything more decentralized than frxUSD has basically negligible adoption. So if Secretary Bessent is right and we’re heading to $3T of stablecoins what can we do to ensure that Tether isn’t siphoning $90B a year from our ecosystem?

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u/Ok_Budget9461:

I think this is where theory and human behavior quietly diverge.

On paper, flexible references, RWAs, and the ability to migrate liquidity between anchors make total sense. From a systems perspective, that’s probably the “correct” long-term direction.

But in practice, most people are deeply distrustful — and for good reason. They don’t want abstractions, optionality, or future guarantees. They want something tangible, legible, and boring. Something they already understand.

USD isn’t dominant because people believe in it philosophically. It’s dominant because you can touch its effects in everyday life: prices, salaries, rent, debt. That familiarity matters more than purity.

To reach the level you’re describing — where users comfortably switch references, trust migration mechanisms, and accept layered risks — we’re talking about a lot of cultural and experiential runway, not just better contracts. That kind of trust is earned slowly, usually after systems survive multiple stress events without breaking.

So maybe the path isn’t to replace USD as a reference, or even compete with it directly, but to prove reliability first: survive drawdowns, handle chaos cleanly, don’t surprise users. Over time, that’s what turns abstraction into something people feel is “real”.

Until then, most users will choose the thing that feels concrete over the thing that is theoretically superior. Not because they’re wrong — but because money is about confidence before it’s about design.

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u/LogrisTheBard:

I don’t disagree that the instrument we would switch to will trend towards being a battle tested one but whether we peg to gold, a basket of fiats, a cost of living calculation, or ETH is less important than that we enable personal choice and are prepared for an eventual dollar collapse. I say this not just because we’re witnessing historic currency mismanagement that I speculate this makes a global reserve currency shift likely in my lifetime but also because Ethereum was created to set people free and focusing on enabling personal choice seems most in line with that ethos and my own.

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u/Ok_Budget9461:

There’s also a layer we haven’t really touched yet: governments.

Even if we solve the technical side — flexible references, migration of liquidity, robust oracles — there’s still the question of how much financial autonomy states are actually willing to tolerate once these systems move beyond the niche.

Financial freedom sounds great in theory, but from a government’s perspective it directly conflicts with:

• monetary policy,
• capital controls,
• taxation,
• and, ultimately, political power.

So the question isn’t just can we build systems that give people choice, but how far that choice is allowed to scale before it gets constrained. History suggests that once something becomes systemically relevant, it stops being ignored.

That’s another reason why I think “boring and practical” matters so much. Systems that look like tools tend to survive longer than systems that look like threats. Gradual adoption, clear use cases, and integration with existing economic reality buy time and legitimacy.

In that sense, resilience might not just mean surviving market stress or oracle failures — it also means surviving regulation, pressure, and attempts at control without breaking or forcing users into all-or-nothing decisions.

Financial freedom probably won’t arrive as a clean break. More likely it’ll come as a slow negotiation between technology, users, and states — with a lot of compromise along the way.

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u/LogrisTheBard:

I don’t think most governments actively restrict your legal right to invest in companies at least domestically. Sure, many people in less developed nations don’t have access to financial services to make such investments but it’s rarely actively outlawed. The only thing blockchains change about that is they reduce friction. They provide a more efficient economic engine. For example if you were legally able to buy Microsoft stock before through a brokerage now you can buy an RWA that will have similar legal controls as the stock did but through the RWA issuer. Doing this with blockchains reduces settlement times and has a smattering of other blockchain advantages associated with it but it only removes something like KYC requirements if the issuer does not add such controls into the smart contract. If North Korea managed to steal like 1% of the MSFT cap table I highly doubt anyone is going to respect the legitimacy of their claim regardless of chain state. I expect a new RWA token would be issued with a corrected allocation approved by a judge and everyone would either be airdropped their updated allocation or would have to claim it through a court approved process. Network tokens like BTC present more unique challenges in this regard than anything like USDC.

Regarding government power, if someone resides in your jurisdiction you can still make any behavior illegal and enforce those laws just by jailing that person regardless of what the chain state is. So if you want to disallow someone from holding US dollars, you just prove that citizen paid someone with a stablecoin, and then fine/jail them if they are breaking that law. Taxation is very similar, you just say how much they owe you and if they don’t pay that and you can’t directly take it from their account because it’s on chain then your remaining option is to jail them. Blockchains reduce the enforcement mechanisms of a government but it doesn’t restrict their ability to police behavior on anyone within their jurisdiction. This is a similar state of affairs as how a government already has to contend with enforcement on citizens with foreign bank accounts. It’s not legally new and is already a problem at scale.

That leaves us with behaviors the government would like to discourage but isn’t willing to criminalize as jailable offenses. A good example is something like jury nullification. The US is unwilling to make jurors legally accountable for a ruling and so jury nullification exists regardless of whether the government likes it. So if there are things the government doesn’t like, we need to show benefits of the technology that offset those so the government gridlocks rather than lashing out. As you say:

Gradual adoption, clear use cases, and integration with existing economic reality buy time and legitimacy.

As we get more powerful US entities such as corporations using blockchains as a sequencing and settlement layer and as we get more international holders of stablecoins driving demand for US treasuries the US is going to be increasingly unlikely to be willing to ban this ecosystem. If they are unwilling to ban this ecosystem this necessarily creates a crack in the door akin to jury nullification because you can’t allow this technology and prevent access to ETH. As you say though this is going to be a long negotiation under which I believe we have the eventually winning hand.

TLDR: I think the legal precedence already exists for every problem Ethereum may amplify and the benefits are there to tame government overreaction.

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u/Ok_Budget9461:

I largely agree with your framing, especially the idea that blockchain doesn’t remove state power, it mostly changes how that power is exercised. Law enforcement has always targeted people, not ledgers, and that doesn’t disappear just because something is on-chain.

Where I still see friction is at the human layer and the timing, and context matters a lot here.

From a European perspective, many users do feel an increasingly supervisory and revenue-focused approach, especially with frameworks like MiCA, DAC8, and similar regulations. I’m not saying this in an alarmist way — it’s not an outright ban or a direct attack — but it does create a sense of constant oversight that affects behavior.

Legally, as you point out, much of the precedent already exists. In practice, though, the average citizen doesn’t experience “jurisdiction” as an abstract legal concept, but as uncertainty: what’s allowed today, what will change tomorrow, what might be interpreted retroactively. That feeling shapes behavior long before anything is explicitly illegal.

Because of that, even if governments don’t need to ban systems directly, the perception of control and fiscal scrutiny alone is often enough to push people toward familiar, state-backed instruments. Not because they’re better, but because they feel more predictable.

I agree that legitimacy is earned through gradual adoption, clear use cases, and integration with existing economic reality. But that legitimacy also has to be earned with users who don’t want to feel like the “test case” inside a regulatory framework that is still evolving.

So I don’t see this purely as a question of whether states will tolerate financial autonomy, but rather how that autonomy is balanced with regulatory environments that, at least in Europe, are increasingly perceived as restrictive.

Long term, I think your view makes sense. Short term, it’s understandable that most people will continue to choose what feels familiar, tangible, and stable — even if it’s technically inferior.

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Below is my response to Vitalik’s latest post in this sub about privacy. “2026: The year we take back lost ground.”

I think there’s a general lack of understanding for a lot of people who aren’t deep in the privacy space about just how many levels of protection one needs down the tech stack from on-chain to web 2 to the OS level software and then even hardware itself. Depending on your threat model, if you don’t have one of these secured, then your privacy is very likely compromised in some way.

I think a lot of people upon realising that, just take on a defeatist attitude since it takes more than just Tornado Cash smart contracts or a privacy focused L2 like Aztec to maintain one’s full privacy. But despite being a long road, it’s absolutely possible and I think the EF and your own re-focusing on privacy, VB, is a much needed call to action to tackle it once and for all. The tech is here, we just have to build it, make it (relatively) intuitive and make sure users know it is there — if they ever need it.

I think the most important thing about privacy is not necessarily making sure it is used by all by default (would be nice), but making sure it is accessible to all if they need it. After all, most people under authoritarian governments don’t have something to hide, so much as they wake up one day and they find the government suddenly says something normally benign about them now makes them an enemy of the state. Therefore it’s important that they have secure, private alternative technologies to fall back on to keep their lives going until they can get to safety.

Personally, I think the hardware and OS level software side of things is most at risk from snooping authoritarian governments in the long run. Things like Chat Control in the EU and democratic backsliding in the US leaves us with very few places left where companies will be able to create open hardware and software which doesn’t have backdoors.

My outlook for the Ethereum side of privacy is good, but I think we’re quickly losing the battle for hardware and OS level software. Just look at the way Android is going with their sideloading restrictions. If we lose open source Android or devices with unlocked bootloaders to run custom ROMs on, then mobile is lost (Linux phones just don’t have the app support). Living a normal life without a mobile OS is almost impossible these days, so we must defend this critical infrastructure. We are fast running out of time but I appreciate your renewed efforts on the Ethereum side of things.

To anyone reading this, the most you can probably do is to reach out to your representatives any time there is dystopian legislation like Chat Control or privacy invasive age restrictions trying to be made into law. That and of course supporting privacy tools on Gitcoin or donating to privacy advocating orgs (like the EFF!) or projects directly.

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I want to give you a heads up for the next Rocketpool upgrade, called Saturn 1, launching on Feb 9th.

It will introduce:

• Megapools: For more gas efficiency, one megapool can store many LEB4’s
• LEB4: You only need 4 ETH for one validator, that means better staking APR
• RPL Fee Switch: RPL is optional, but you can stake RPL and get rewarded in ETH

For more info about Saturn 1 take a look here: https://rp-saturn.webflow.io/

There is also a calculator for the RPL Fee-Switsch where you can play around with the parameters: https://rpl-fee-switch.streamlit.app/

There was also a change in the protocol to prioritize filling up the withdrawal buffer for better liquidity to burn rETH at protocol rate.

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Do stablecoins have a real use case if the USD ever hyperinflates?

Genuine question. If the unlikely but not impossible scenario of USD hyperinflation happened, would stablecoins still serve a purpose? Most are obviously dollar-pegged, so they’d inherit the same problem.

Could we realistically see stablecoins backed by hard assets instead - like gold, silver, or a basket of commodities - and still function as a medium of exchange? Or does hyperinflation basically force people into non-fiat assets entirely?

Curious how people think this would actually play out in practice.

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Anyone got any more insight into this:

Bermuda is moving its entire economy onchain with @base + @USDC

[https://xcancel.com/jessepollak/status/2013325554506965140]

The Government of Bermuda said it plans to transform the island into a “fully onchain” national economy, partnering with Coinbase and Circle to deploy digital asset infrastructure across government, businesses, and consumers.

The plan, unveiled Monday at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, outlines Bermuda’s ambition to integrate blockchain-based payments and financial tools at a national level. Coinbase and Circle will provide digital asset infrastructure and enterprise tools to the Government of Bermuda, local banks, insurers, small and medium-sized businesses, and consumers. The companies also plan to support nationwide digital finance education and technical onboarding.

https://www.theblock.co/post/386159/bermuda-coinbase-circle-onchain-economy

Jessie Pollack mentions them using Base, but the article linked only talks about Coinbase and Circle.

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Bankless back at pushing narratives that favor their bags.

A year ago they claimed execution was for Solana, DA was for Celestia, consensus and moneyness was for Bitcoin… And that Ethereum was fighting a 3 front war and had to choose.

Ethereum then increases 100% their gas limit, scaled blobs, massively increased its TVL, got a massive bid by DATs…

Their new narrative tells us they have opened again a position on Solana (maybe through their Bankless Ventures arm?). How can we tell? Well, they are now claiming Solana and Ethereum have a duopoly.

You heard this right, the cards are dealt guys! Solana will be the End User/Retail chain, and Ethereum will be the RWA and DeFi chain! To each his own, don’t step out of your lane!!

…

How convenient, right? Specially considering Solana will not ever host RWAs, or DeFi meaningfully. Ethereum is on its way to take the whole thing, but thats obviosuly bad for their bags, so lets pretend they are both equal!

Want more proof? They are now shilling Robinhood’s TradFi Bank proposition. Bankless they are called!

I can see their portfolio from a mile away: SOL and HOOD are back there.

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Do we though? The US-EU alliance is being pissed on by the current admin. Not sure what “worked out” will even mean bc the status quo of trust is gone imo.

A stepping back from the ledge and a temporary cooling of this tension is possible and maybe even likely- bc both sides should be striving for it- but the EU has been foolish to even allow themselves to be in this predicament (cucked at the whim of the US) and I’d imagine they’ll be making every effort going forward to prevent this happening again.

The World is changing. A lot of people have many opinions on what it’s likely to look like in the future but the changing itself seems to be inevitable.

NATO was formed in 1949. A POTUS is publicly considering tearing down that geopolitical order that most people haven’t been alive in a world without. That affects war and peace obviously, but also trade, markets, society.

You’re saying it like it’s obvious that the US and its NATO allies will work this out- because it’s been previously unthinkable that they wouldn’t. but it’s also been previously unthinkable that the United States would publicly be considering using military force on Denmark. The fact that it’s even being discussed. That it has been uttered in public represents a change in the possible outcomes that I honestly haven’t considered before he said it.

If it happens it isn’t a romp in South America toppling despots. It’s not a “Special Military Operation”, or just another year in the Middle East sandbox. (No offense to people who were personally effected by the events I’m referencing)

It’ll be a turning of the wheel. I don’t usually get political here so I apologize. I’ll put it in ETH terms:

A market-wide black swan. The worse since at least 2008. You and I can’t even sit here and predict the second and third order effects to economies and markets if this happens.

IMO. Mods you can delete my comment if it goes too far.

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Has anybody done any research on how many poeple that got into crypto (mainly in 2021, but also earlier) have completely given up and sold everything at a loss?

I’m not sure you can get a concrete answer by analysing wallets since the vast majority still use Centralized Exchanges, but my guess is that it’s a lot.

But still… not enough.

Edit: Thanks a lot for your inputs, everyone!

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u/alexiskef

✨E✨t✨h✨e✨r✨e✨u✨m✨

u/nothingnotnever

✨$✨3✨3✨0✨8✨

u/zepoid

✨.0✨3✨4✨5✨6✨

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Political views,

Territory to peruse,

Crypto disabuse.

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In the midst of”it’s so over”, I found there was, within me, an invincible “we’re so back”.

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So let’s fast forward here for a second. Once all the ETFs are staking then the rewards will be around 2%. I would think of this as a dividend from a traditional finance point of view. Which I believe would be really good compared to other companies dividends.

Apple: 0.4%

NVIDA: 0.02%

Microsoft: 0.75%

Tesla doesn’t even have one

Meta: 0.32%

So here’s hoping that yield looks yummy to everyone and ETH starts to get gobbled up.

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Just dug through some recent developments on this lazy Saturday and honestly, the fundamental case for Ethereum right now feels stronger than it has in a while…

Institutional Onboarding is Finally Happening 🏦

We’re moving past the pure retail speculation phase. 2025 was a huge turning point for institutional adoption, with Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) moving faster than ETFs to deploy capital. The CEO of ether.fi thinks 2026 is the year neobanks really take off, exposing normal users to on-chain yield and stablecoins. This is huge for utility.

Stablecoin Dominance is Unmatched 💸

Ethereum is crushing it here. The network holds over 62% of the total stablecoin market share, recently surpassing $59 billion in issuance. B2B stablecoin payments grew steadily all last year, and with RWAs (Real World Assets) expanding despite the market downturn, ETH is becoming the default settlement layer for dollar transactions. Standard Chartered noted that Ethereum accounts for roughly 40% of all blockchain fees for a reason.

The 2026 Roadmap is Locked In (Glamsterdam & Hegota) ⚙️

Core devs have confirmed the plan for this year with two major scaling upgrades: Glamsterdam in the first half of the year and Hegota in the 2nd. These are the successors to Pectra and are designed to handle traffic better without spiking gas fees. Frequent, structured technical upgrades = strong network health.

Developer Growth & Big Money Deploying 👨‍💻

Despite the noise, Ethereum is still where the builders are. We added over 16k new developers between Jan and Sept 2025, beating out Solana and Bitcoin. On the corporate side, SharpLink Gaming just deployed $170M worth of ETH (55k ETH) to Linea. That’s serious institutional confidence.

Price Targets are Looking Up 📈

After a rough 2025 (-10%), January is starting green. CoinCodex is eyeing a 12% jump to ~$3,450 soon, but some forecasts are calling for 4,200–4,500 by the end of the month if liquidity improves. More bullish voices like Tom Lee are even projecting a range between $7,000 and $9,000 by early 2026. (Obviously we need to take this with a huge grain of salt but still it’s good to see bullish sentiment still exists!)

Also… a little teaser to look out for ERC-8004. It’s early days but looks like a winner.

Feels like we are building a rock-solid floor here. DYOR, but the fundamentals look solid.

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I was reading ‘the Psychology of Money’ on the plane a few days ago, and one interesting thought was about how the author believes that bubbles form. People have different investment timelines. Some invest for a time span of decades, others invest because they want to turn a profit in one week. One actor is not more rational than the other, they just have their own perspective and preference.

Bubbles form when the pool of investors in a certain asset becomes weighted more towards short-term investors chasing momentum (and being perfectly rational in doing so) than towards long-term investors who bought the asset because they believe in it and want to see it grow. When the market turns, those short-term investors will drop the asset on a dime, as they never really had a strong belief in it.

I think what’s happening in ETH is a bit of the opposite. After years of bullying, pain, inexplicable price action, OGs dropping out, we are building an investor base that is absolutely rock solid. Granite. If you’re still here, you must really believe in this thing. I believe that treasury companies are only the most obvious and public manifestation of an underlying reality, which is that the ETH investor base is more and more made up of actors who believe in the long-term success of the asset, and who will hold through thick and thin.

And the momentum investors, retail, etc. Well, they’ll come back at some point. There will be some catalyst. And once that catalyst is there, there will be a very thick, strong base that is not selling any time soon.

In other news: about 5 years after I first started, and another year or so since I quit, I have recently joined the entry queue to become a (solo) staker once again :) I wanted resource-efficient minority clients, and am running Reth-Nimbus. Can’t wait to be live!

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I recently watched this talk by Cory Doctorow. He’s an EFF activist and has been fighting for our rights for like 20 something years.

So much of this talk is on sovereignty. Whether it’s national sovereignty such as national defense, corporate sovereignty such as jailbreaking devices, or personal sovereignty such as right to repair electronics he comes across as passionate about creating more resilient, economical, and equitable societal outcomes. So much of the ethos of web3 is present in his philosophy but the only reference to cryptocurrency in the whole talk was “stocks, shitcoins, and casinos but I repeat myself”.

There were points where I just wanted to scream at the screen that we can help with that. By virtues, this guy should be ally of ours but he’s probably only ever been exposed to the scammers that swarm the periphery of our ecosystem which is all too common a situation. We seriously needed something like Etherealize 4 years sooner, to treat public perception of Ethereum as more of a public good and less as the full time job of people like Sassal or Hoffman.

I’m talking to DeAI founders regularly and the common message is to lean into words like control, ownership, and resilience more and to avoid the word blockchain entirely. It’s really a sad state of affairs that we can utilize blockchain solutions to improve things like resilience but we can’t openly talk about utilizing blockchain solutions in any business or customer interaction. Anything web3 has to be abstracted as much as possible away behind a web2 interface before it can become palatable.

Neobanks this year will be offering Defi access through web2 frontends while avoiding any mention of blockchain as hard as they can. They’ll use terms like “fully regulatory compliant backend financial systems” because if you say Ethereum almost the best thing that will happen is people won’t have heard of it. DeAI systems will be using terms like “proof of control” to market even when that proof is using mechanisms like tokenization for model ownership.

It’s frustrating.

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US doing capital controls for welfare recipients

Bessent: “For individuals who want to wire money out of the country, they’re gonna have to tick a box whether they are or are not on public assistance. Then we’re going to start pushing over the coming days and weeks that if you’re on public assistance, you cannot wire money out of the country.”

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mcasw4irok2x

Not totally clear what “public assistance” means but Claude says SNAP is 41.7 million people. If it also includes Medicaid that’s another 67 million (partly overlapping with the snap recipients).

That’s quite a lot of people who may suddenly need crypto, I wonder if there’s anything we should be doing to help them find out how to do it and how to avoid getting scammed.

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Please welcome our newest mod u/eviljordan

I’ve known him for years (online, never met in person).

He created the Fulu artwork for Teku. 🦓

We recently created EIP 8066: Upgrade Mascots (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8066) and he is the self selected Mascot Wrestler for Glamsterdam upgrade. 🦩

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Gas limit for blocks doubled within a year and more to come. In 2024 some Ethereum community members and researchers started to demand more L1 scaling by increasing the gas limit. A whole movement started around it (pumpthegas.org). Their argument was that there wasn’t any explicit increase in many years and the implicit one during the merge was rather small (+7% or so?). Hardware has become better, internet bandwidth increased and most importantly some clients have become much more efficient. Ethereum gas target increases are voted on by validators, so it is a rather cumbersome and slow process. Core devs also first had to come to consensus what increase is safe to do at which points in time. Some benchmarking has been done in spring of 2025 which continues for the foreseeable future and some critical bottlenecks have been removed. Within one Year we increase the gas target limit from 30 million to 36 Million on February 4th 2025 then to 45 Million on July 22nd 2025 until it was increased to 60 million on November 26th 2025.

Blocks still are full (actually half full), so all the available block space is used, but because there is more now, price dropped massively. The increased block space on rollups further reduced bidding wars on mainnet.

In the future there still is the goal to increase the gas limit by a factor of maybe 2 to 3 per year for a few years until we reach something around 20 billion gas per block (or equivalent) in a zk future. We will see how long it takes to get there.

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A flurry of posts by Vitalik on the Ethereum front page for those of us who have a sticky directly into the daily:

Welcome to 2026

Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test

On Zk-EVMs

We need better decentralized stablecoins

Increasing bandwidth is safer than reducing latency

Linux as a north star

Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free

Corposlop vs sovereign

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I haven’t posted anything interesting in a while, but we have had the biggest news at DeFi Saver in a long time just go live today.

We’ve partnered with Summer․fi who will be winding down their Pro management app in order to fully focus on the Lazy Summer protocol and its AI powered, yield hunting vaults.

If there’s any Summer Pro users here, you can access and manage your positions at DeFi Saver as of today - and you can keep me as a contact for any questions whatsoever.

For anyone interested in checking out the full announcements, here they are from both sides:

• https://x.com/DeFiSaver/status/2011477022636458483
• https://x.com/summerfinance_/status/2011474734433669616

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum!

u/FrenktheTank

0.0343

u/alexiskef

$3,114

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A few to annoy,

Venezuela viceroy,

Oil and gas enjoy.

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I made a transaction on mainnet swapping ETH -> USDC and, since then, have received over 60 phishing transactions of minuscule amounts of USDC. I almost have 30 cents worth collected now!! Thanks, scammers! It’s free real estate!! 🤑🤑🤑

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u/nudelsalat3000:

Can someone explain me what is the strategy with price where ultimately you always compete against bitcoin? I learned we don’t talk about direct dollar value but always the relation to btc price. So far so good, understood.

Like I also understand value building, however it seem price building is nonexistent. Bitcoin uses tricks like MicroStrategy to collect investors, which then attracts new investors and they get a flywheel effect. I also learned that with liquidity farming it was an approach to use such flywheel effect.

However I also saw that Ethereum there is so much building that everyone builds their own tokennomis on L2 and all L2 compete, given there is no direct link, but always L2=>L1=>L2. So “fragmented economy” which means splitted interests. Doesn’t sound game theory stable, if you can push your own L2 token instead of eth, it it’s more incentivesed.

Staking also isn’t that sexy, if the price is not that attractive or at least the outlook. Not sure about other players besides bitcoin, solana is sometimes mentioned but seems not much else to be able to compete at a global level.

Is there some strategy ongoing, or is this one of those forbidden knowledge things like “we don’t talk about price”?

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u/eth10kisFUD:

ETH is the most misunderstood asset in the market currently, similar to where Bitcoin was in 2015.

Bitcoin literally only does one thing and had simple mental crutches such as “fixed supply” to make people understand the concept better, yet it still took many years for the market to grasp it.

If you are a Bitcoin expert you know that its economic security is running out and it won’t stay the most important crypto for long.

Ethereum is fundamentally more complex and takes more time to understand for many, but it is the most secure crypto asset and the natural successor to Bitcoin once Ethereum has entered maintenance mode and Bitcoin runs out of economic security in the next couple years.

The “Forbidden knowledge” in the crypto industry is that Ethereum is the only contender in the race to become the global crypto SoV asset. The only missing piece is time.

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u/HauntedJockStrap88:

The strategy is ultimately “as Ethereum the network usage increases the value of ETH goes up”

Upgrades to the network are done to to increase usage, how attractive it is to use the network.

Adoption is the strategy.

ETH’s competitive advantage over the entire crypto ecosystem is that it is the native token of the largest and most useful ecosystem. (Currently)

The thesis for the growth in price of ETH is tied inextricably to the growth of Ethereum. Bulls believe that Ethereum will be the network that ultimately settles value in the next iteration of global finance. The scale of adoption would then force ETH to be money. You’re paying transaction fees in ETH. You’re paid staking yields in ETH. You’re extremely likely to take out loans putting up ETH as collateral. When Ethereum gets adopted ETH is money in that system, and therefore everyone will want some. You get the monetary asset story of BTC (low/negligible inflation, divisibility, portability, non-fungibility, etc etc) with all the actual usage of a smart-contract L1 platform. This is the ETH bull case.

BTC, conversely, increases in value historically despite the fact that its network is mostly useless and bare of any activity. It’s all narrative. Narratives are powerful things, and it is certainly possible that the BTC story continues to merge with reality. Gold is money because it’s gold. The properties of gold make it suitable as money more than most things, but there are many other commodities out there that could’ve been money like gold but aren’t. Because most people don’t think of those other commodities as money (simply) There is thousands of years of precedent that has ingrained gold as money. Perhaps like gold the snowball is already rolling unstoppably down the hill with BTC? It has already reached escape velocity in the public perception of it and eventually it will be held in the same esteem as gold (or perhaps moreso) by everyone. BTC bulls don’t talk about usage, they simply talk about market fundamentals and how more people are buying BTC as an investment. The Ethereum network usage is a red herring, the Ethereum network upgrades are unnecessary risk, blockchain serves no purpose outside of Bitcoin. Immaculately conceived, ossified, and marching upwards as more and more people “buy BTC at the price they deserve”. This is BTC’s bull case.

Both these assets have very well defined supply schedules with little expected supply inflation expected going forward. Therefore, in a supply/demand paradigm to determine price, you only really need to consider demand. I laid out above the strategies both are employing to increase demand over time.

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u/edmundedgar:

I learned we don’t talk about direct dollar value but always the relation to btc price. So far so good, understood.

This is an old r/ethfinance brainworm dating back to the days when people thought BTC and ETH were competing for the same network effect. They thought that the price was a key part of being the main network, and when the ETH price exceeded the BTC price that would drive a load of users from BTC to ETH, which would in turn increase the ETH price and decrease the BTC price. So they tracked it kind of religiously.

But it turned out that Ethereum got a bigger network than BTC in terms of basically everything Ethereum users think is important, and that didn’t cause the price to flip because BTC and ETH are used for different things. But during the period before people knew this they got into a load of pissing matches with Bitcoin users and care a lot about winning on this otherwise unimportant metric, so they still talk about it a lot.

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I’ve decided to step down as mod. I started a new job a few months back and it doesn’t leave me much time to hang out on reddit, and I don’t see that changing this year.

Appreciate you all, and have a great 2026!

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u/Flashy-Butterfly6310:

Discussion:

Is ETH price poised to be low, since a low price incentivizes its usage?

(Not trolling, I’m a huge Ethereum Believer, I just want to have - yet another - discussion about this topic).

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u/epic_trader:

No, the price to use Ethereum is not related to the price of ETH.

The number of transactions on L1 and L2 has only gone up, forever, even while the price also has gone up. If a lower price of ETH correlated with more transactions, the number of transactions across Ethereum shouldn’t be at all time high right now.

Here’s an ETH transfer from 1 minute ago when the price of ETH was $2,932. The transaction fee was $0.005

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5aad7a6e59d7b1286bd1d841dfffbd0783f9c87f139046c08c19a511e6dd94de

Here’s an ETH transfer July this year when the price of ETH was $2,932. The transaction fee was $0.14

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0275dc911c65225fc049ee9e1bd53731ccd02a8876418c4888a7d29b494efdb9

Here’s an ETH transfer from February this year when the price of ETH was $2,932. The transaction fee was $0.62

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3a0c0267913f98c559ac51641f03b111ffba6360d6722b700bbf67f01f4dea06

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u/HauntedJockStrap88:

Fun Hot? takes for 2026:

ETH ecosystem TVL crosses 1T

Stablecoin Mkcap triples

The 4 year cycle dies.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine trades over $100/share.

BTC and ETH set ATHs.

Some important Tradfi guy actually says the word “Ethereum” instead of “blockchain” or “crypto” (impossible, I know)

Vitalik finally says we deserve it (even more impossible)

A crypto app goes viral in the US

An Ethereum upgrade is covered by a CNBC host.

Clarity act passes

A major crypto figure is invited to ring the bell at the NYSE for the first evening session of 23/5 trading in the US.

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u/LogrisTheBard:

Sounds like you’re expecting a more fun year than me.

I’ll be happy if we reach $500B stablecoins and we even hold $3k all year.

Crypto is more likely to be used in the backend by unknowing participants than have a viral app ever. Even if you count things like Polymarket, most people just view it. Far fewer actually set up a wallet and participate.

I do think some version of the clarity act is more likely than not to pass but if it passes in July it will still take more than the rest of 2026 to get most things off the ground.

u/LifeReboot__:

[comment deleted]

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u/whisperedstate:

I had formulated a thesis when I bought a long time ago, and then I re-evaluate periodically to see if that thesis is still on track. Basically, my first internal thesis milestone is reaching 1T in mcap (adjusted for inflation). To me, that’s the first milestone to Ethereum becoming global financial infrastructure, because it says implicitly that Ethereum is highly valued as an asset and a network. So I would sell some there.

The next milestones for me are more based on utility than value, i.e. the first truly mainstream application on Ethereum. I take the same approach I took with Tesla when I invested in the early 2010s. Basically, I said I’d sell when I see Tesla’s every day while driving. To me, these kind of usage milestones are easy ways of gauging market penetration for tech plays / growth assets. So I would sell some more if Ethereum achieved a dapp that was truly mainstream. Stablecoins are pretty close, but not quite there. If major banks were using stablecoins in their backend, then I might consider that a mainstream dapp. Or if Ethereum enabled 24/5 or 24/7 equities trading at scale, that would also quality. Something like that.

For me to sell and capitulate (thesis never achieved) it’s a time-based milestone. If it’s been a decade since my initial investment, and progress is obviously not happening as I expected it (network metrics are down, tech progress has stalled, crypto interest has waned, utlity is not there, social in-fighting, etc.) then I cut my losses and sell. A really good real-world example of a network/ecosystem that has failed in this way is Cosmos or Polkadot. If Ethereum starts looking like that, run for the hills.

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u/HauntedJockStrap88:

I agree with your metrics. When to sell is as much a lifestyle decision as it is one to make based on metrics imo. Personally I’m not here for short term financial goals, but once some medium term/long term goals are achieved on paper I’ll be selling some to lock that in no matter how bullish I am. The metrics are guiding me that I’m still in the right place, but when it’s time to leave is personal, partly.

As far as I’m concerned something like TVL should continue to climb this year with the expected adoption from tradfi. A major reversal in that trend outside of a tradfi black swan event would have me reevaluating. I believe this is the year.

I liked the other comment as well that a bullish outcome sell signal will be when you see mainstream adoption of Ethereum in your day to day life. Like if my tech-illiterate father is paying for coffee with stablecoins, or my crypto hater friends have Aave on their phones, etc etc. We all invested in this partly because we believed that would be the outcome. Seeing market penetration of Ethereum like that would indicate to me that I’ve captured a lot of the upside in at least the medium term.

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It might be that either bitcoin needs to collapse or Ethereum needs to ossify as well, before we see any meaningful price change. Forever crab til the protocol is good enough and now people can focus solely on L2’s and better UX / merchant integration.

It would make sense. Why should Ethereum become more valuable than it already is?

It’s eternal crab vs infinite human stupidity.

Just how long is it going to take for the massas to understand bitcoin is fundamentally flawed? Most never will, they’re sheep and won’t care or bother to understand. They just want things that work and don’t care about how.

I’m keeping my popcorn ready for around the next halving. Sooner or later, it’s game over and a massive wave of change will come. People will cry, why did no one warn us? I’ve been lied to!! See?! Can’t trust technology, it always fails eventually! This is why we have banks and governments to protect ourselves from our own stupidity.

That’s when Ethereum will shine. Or perish, under the global wave of distrust towards all crypto, all being lumped together as if it’s all the same thing that can’t be trusted anymore.

Will Ethereum survive? Time will tell.

What I think is more likely, and better for all of us, is another long painfully slow bear market with no violent crashes, just slow steady down. So that that bitcoin issue can resolve itself in a less volatile way. Ethereum will survive all bear markets, it does not rely on miners needing to pay huge electricity billls.

Bear markets is where truth surfaces and old waste gets abandoned. Bull markets are full of, well.. bull shit.

See you all in 2026.

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A bit belated because it got trapped by Reddit filters but my final Devconnect article is up!

I went to DePIN day and now I want to monetize my vacuum cleaner is my typical oversharing style of overview, you have been warned.

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Thinking about what’s coming this year and how to position my portfolio.

1. I give it above even odds that the US gov shuts down again which will have a negative impact on markets eventually if it drags on like it did last year.
2. The US has turned on the money printer again and the debt is parabolic at this point so I am expecting a return of inflation. This probably means I should be holding more Euros and maybe precious metals but…
3. There are dozens of mines coming online in 2026 and selling covered puts on precious metals. I don’t see how the parabolic rise in silver/gold this year can sustain all of this new supply hitting the markets. So maybe not holding precious metals past Q1 or Q2 of this year. These mines take awhile to come online but a lot of gold mines started setup in Q3 of 2025 so we should start to see that extra supply this year. This implies selling precious metals and back to euros if I want a stablecoin past Q1 or maybe Q2 of this year. I made about 10% on a currency trade last year, seems like I’ll be setting up something similar again this year.
4. I predict the continuation of the rearmament of Europe. Trump’s actions last year cemented an increased expense from Europe on defense and you can be sure his recent rhetoric on Greenland and events in Venezuela today only further than outcome. I’m up almost 100% in 2025 on EUAD and am comfy holding that for another 50% gain over the next 4 years.
5. I’m bullish tokenization but it looks to me like Defi is going to fail to seize the market share so I’m looking at picking up some Robinhood/Coinbase when their product offerings start to show sizable adoption on chain. Something to watch rather than act on for now. I obviously should have bought Canton on the narrative when I heard the news but I sat on my hands instead. I’ll keep looking for other ways to express this thesis but for now I’m just watching adoption of RWA platforms like Ondo and Tradfi to buy based on whatever fundamental signals I can nab.
6. I think we’ll see an AI dip sometime this year. If you look at how much these companies have to make from AI to recoup their capital outlays you come to some pretty unlikely answers which says to me we’re going to see a .com style repricing of these efforts in the next few years but I’ll be prepared for it going into Q3. DeAI has some amazing tech but I haven’t encountered any protocols that have actual customers. There’s a systemic failure of customer outreach for that sector (just like Defi). Until we change how we do outreach I only see the market caps for that sector continuing to struggle. That’s a long topic though.
7. I’ll happily pick up more ETH in the low $2k range because I give it good odds we would at least revisit $3k within 4 years or if we see both a drawdown in exchange reserves and an elastic response of price to that drawdown. We saw that briefly with dats in July/August but the time to exit was when this elasticity broke. Outside of that if the market structure bill passes and comes out well then I’ll probably buy some back for a narrative trade. Otherwise I have enough and am happy farming.

In aggregate I expect this year to be volatile and for there to be massive unrest in the US from continuing layoffs, the cut of ACA subsidies, unchecked executive power, and the world alienating the US on everything from travel to booze in response to aggressive behavior on the international stage.

What other thesis do you all have for this year and how are you investing for that?

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u/Substantial_Hurry_25:

Good listen for a bit of Cypherpunk cross over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs

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u/shiftli:

I’ve not yet made it far into my 39c3 playlist, and most of the talks are in german anyway, but I found “APT Down and the mystery of the burning data centers” interesting!

Also, if you use AI agents you should watch “Agentic ProbLLMs: Exploiting AI Computer-Use and Coding Agents” (and then ask chatgpt how to set up a sandbox for your agents)!

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Octant epoch 10 allocation window is officially open!

https://octant.app/ - If you have $GLM locked make sure to donate (or claim) ETH rewards at some point in the next 2 weeks.

On https://octant.app/home make sure your uniqueness score is at least 15 to get full matching. If it isn’t you can update your passport score to prove you’re a unique human https://support.passport.xyz/passport-knowledge-base

https://x.com/OctantApp/status/2008614595741806678 - Thread with info on the 24 projects

https://docs.octant.app/ - Octant revolves around allocating the yield generated with the 100k ETH they have staked. It is by far the most sustainable public goods funding platform on Ethereum and you can have an incredibly overweight say in what to fund by locking GLM and taking part. Can see the matching leverage in previous epochs here https://octant.app/metrics.

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So I guess Ethereum people can spit out that crazy pill from yesterday

https://www.theblock.co/post/384603/morgan-stanley-spot-ethereum-etf

Perhaps the Ethereum guy at Morgan Stanley couldn’t be bothered to work overtime around Christmas and New Year.