Ethereum

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

gm, im the intern tasked with checking DMs and forwarding nudes or insider info to G and im only allowed 1 tweet 2 smol updates - the ENS squatter has moved their entire NW of 1 whole ETH - ive some invite codes to give out and senpai said to "pick the ones that made you lmwo" https://t.co/aVs6LC21bH

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Time to say something out loud. The first era of Bankless has concluded. A six year collaboration between David and myself exploring crypto, defi, and maximizing Ethereum. We're in the second era now. In this second era I'm planning to take more of a backseat role supporting @TrustlessState as he explores new frontiers in crypto and beyond. I'll still be the pod every week (would never miss a rollup) but less in the role of content direction and guest interviews. David has the helm. He has my full support. For my part, I'm still bullish ETH. And bullish Bankless.

Updates since then: * Deepseek v4 is out. There *is* a 2-bit quant that can run within 90 GB ( https://t.co/yM1HMZXkXn ), and it works, however it's only fast on Apple hardware (I've head ~35 tok/s). On AMD, it's ~7 tok/s. IMO actually taking the effort to properly support more than one hardware manufacturer is a great example of the difference between mere "decentralized AI" and genuine "CROPS AI". I hope we can become better at this. * https://t.co/CFYF1smBH3 also has alpha telegram support now. However, the path to adding your account is quite janky * https://t.co/za4h233eYz looks promising as a way to run "dense" models (eg. Qwen 27B) more efficiently. It's janky, but on my 5090 laptop it seems to be ~2x more tok/s than llama.cpp * VoxTerm (local AI recording, no third-party servers) continues to be developed https://t.co/GSdKzkD9Ql And there's a lot more projects coming on the horizon. One other thing that has been on my mind is that there's actually a lot of intersection between "CROPS ethereum access layer" and "CROPS AI". For example, we want a ZK way to make (paid) calls to remote LLMs. But if we have this, then it's just as useful for solving another problem: private RPC reads in Ethereum. Another example: application-specific finetuned LLMs. Leanstral ( https://t.co/ilfww8ekJu ; I get ~38 tok/s on AMD) fits into < 70 GB, but can hold its own against 1T models on writing Lean code. Things like this are a huge boon for writing more secure code ( https://t.co/6YPWgVSzCg ). We should have models finetuned for Ethereum-related use cases as well.

A fact I feel like almost nobody knows: Ethereum's gas limit will be increased to ~200M after Glamsterdam, a huge increase from the 60M we have today. That’s a 3x+ of L1 execution capacity, with expectation of further doubling soons after that. Assuming no similar increase in demand, fees could stay near zero for years. This is the result of several innovations coming together at the right time: ePBS gives payloads more time, BALs let clients prefetch/parallelize execution work, and gas repricings make higher limits safe.

.@kassandraETH @ncsgy and others have been working hard for nearly a year on Kohaku. Kohaku's goal is to make two twin properties: * Security (and trustlessness) * Privacy (read and write) a reality on the access layer. Security and privacy on Ethereum must be normal.

More people should know about the Interfold. It's basically what I've been yelling at people to build with the MACI ideas ( https://t.co/mlDy84zXQo ) for almost a decade, and now it exists, in a generalized form. The idea is: a privacy protocol optimized for things like voting (and other use cases eg. secret-ballot auctions). The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, and people send in their votes onchain, using a ZKP to prove eligibility. An arbitrary computation on the votes gets run inside FHE, and then threshold-decrypted. From what I can tell (the docs are good https://t.co/adzwK6ezMN ), it gets pretty optimal security guarantees: * Voter anonymity can be made unconditional if eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs * Censorship resistance is guaranteed by ethereum (votes can be posted directly onchain, and there's a proof that all posted votes are taking into account) * The correctness of the outputted result can be ensured via ZK over FHE * Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty; unavoidable given present-day technology The main limitation is that today "ZK over FHE" is only properly available for additive vote tallying, as it's too expensive for computations that involve multiplication or other more complicated manipulation at the moment. There's work in progress on slashing-based / optimistic computation for such situations. (And of course ideally in the long term we'd figure out obfuscation so you can get rid of the M-of-N committees😃)