Weekly Roundups - 2024

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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.