James B

In 2025, @eigen_da started at the bottom and ended at the top. Our team is small but extremely cracked and our view is simple: we serve ambitious L2s when @ethereum blobs aren't enough. A few highlights: - Brought cloud scale for rollups and verifiable apps. Pushed 25 MB/s, then 100 Mb/s, then 1 GB/s. - Went from near zero TVS to $2B, the most trusted altDA - Worked with cutting-edge rollups @Celo @Mantle_Official @megaeth @risechain @fuel_network @Ronin_Network and others - Released a beautiful blob explorer - Pushed complex trustless integrations alongside @boundless_xyz and @SuccinctLabs - Integrated with leading RaaS providers: @conduitxyz @Alchemy @Calderaxyz - Collaborated with @l2beat to continue to expand on what security means for alt DA, and build towards it Can't wait for the next 12 months!

I do find it kind of hilarious that the a main criticism of Ethereum has been that it remains laser focused on the reasons blockchains exists at all

@notsofast What is Trend research 🧐

@donnoh_eth DA integrations are hard.

happy one year anniversary to this post where i got so much shit for saying that the abstract x celestia marketing was bad since the chain was not using celestia, and that it might maybe do in a few months one year later abstract still uses ethereum blobs. go read the comments

Public Mainnet // 02.09.26

MegaETH is running its stress test and doing over 20k TPS as an L2 leveraging EigenDA

ethereum daily TPS just hit an all-time high today. mainly driven by Base, Polygon PoS, and MegaETH. post-Fusaka ethereum ecosystem is scaling very effectively and rapidly. fundamentals always win.

In 2025, @eigen_da started at the bottom and ended at the top. Our team is small but extremely cracked and our view is simple: we serve ambitious L2s when @ethereum blobs aren't enough. A few highlights: - Brought cloud scale for rollups and verifiable apps. Pushed 25 MB/s, then 100 Mb/s, then 1 GB/s. - Went from near zero TVS to $2B, the most trusted altDA - Worked with cutting-edge rollups @Celo @Mantle_Official @megaeth @risechain @fuel_network @Ronin_Network and others - Released a beautiful blob explorer - Pushed complex trustless integrations alongside @boundless_xyz and @SuccinctLabs - Integrated with leading RaaS providers: @conduitxyz @Alchemy @Calderaxyz - Collaborated with @l2beat to continue to expand on what security means for alt DA, and build towards it Can't wait for the next 12 months!

NEW: We just deployed $170M ETH with first-of-it’s-kind enhanced yield on @LineaBuild. This combines native Ethereum yield, restaking rewards from @eigencloud and direct incentives from @LineaBuild and @ether_fi, all within an institutional-grade qualified custodian thanks to @Anchorage. This is the most productive way to hold ETH with institutional-grade infrastructure. That’s the SharpLink edge.

Holy cow. Yesterday, a new account on Polymarket made a massive bet that Maduro would be out of office by January 31st. Today, the United States carried out strikes on Venezuela and captured Maduro. The trader has now made over $400K. Insider or lucky?

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back. Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later) But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission: To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet. We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build. These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord. Ethereum is the rebellion against this. To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more. Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will. Wishing everyone an exciting 2026. Milady.

This year, we laid out an ambitious roadmap to scale Ethereum with ZK. And we delivered. 2025 was the year of proofs over promises 👇

If you are using just Ethereum, you don't really understand how far ahead it actually is. Major hardforks once a year. One of the most vivid communities on the planet. Amazing development tooling. Cypherpunk vision. Fucking preserve it at all costs.

MegaEth looking good here

██████████████████████Privacy████████████████████████████████████for█the████████████████████████powerful.████████████████████████████Surveillance█████████████████████████for████████████████████████████████the██████████████████████rest████████████████████████of█████████████us.

@web3_data @growthepie_eth Love what you all do. Major thank you.

From a scrappy EF grant side project to one of the main Ethereum analytics providers. Dear CT, We are about to close another year, and I wanted to reflect on how far @growthepie_eth has come but also share the challenges and hurdles we faced throughout (and are still working on!). It's a long read, but I think it's worth your time! 2023 We started out in early 2023 by providing high-level metrics for a handful of L2s. It was a side project, kicked off through a small EF grant that we saw and figured - why not apply and give it a go. We set up a scrappy backend, paired it with a nice UI + frontend, and released the first version of growthepie mid 2023. We didn't really have a clear focus - we just saw the need for more analytics for L2s, and we stepped in. We weren't even sure who would use us. - End users who want to find the best L2 to be active on / try out? - Application devs trying to figure out on which chains to deploy their apps? - Investors, for their due diligence (this was my background at the time as head of data at a liquid crypto fund)? At this stage, this information wasn't too important yet. We received a lot of positive feedback about what we put out and continued applying for additional grants to provide more metrics, cover more chains, and look deeper into specific topics, such as fees, DA, public goods funding rounds, and contract labels (hello @open_labels!). 2024 We quickly grew to a team of 8 motivated individuals (some full, some part-time), and in early 2024, I also decided to focus fully on growthepie - quit my job at the fund, and wanted to provide a platform/tooling that brings the ecosystem forward. At this point, basically all of our work was financed through grants. As mentioned, we started with a small EF grant, and then we got super lucky with getting an Optimism builders grant AND Optimism RPGF3, beginning of 2024. This was a huge help (and boost in morale + confidence that what we are doing is beneficial and worth something). Ty Optimism! We applied for a bunch of other grants, started to ramp up our work on @open_labels, onboarded more chains to the platform, and refactored a ton of code. Esp on the backend, we noticed that certain dependencies that were ok for a side project are quickly becoming liabilities for a mature project. We are now indexing all listed chains straight from RPC into our database and aggregating these metrics for the frontend (lots of data to process + store!). On the grants side, we also had decent success with Gitcoin and huge success with Octant - which again helped quite a bit financially + we saw as verification that we are building in the right direction (ty @OctantApp + @gitcoin!). While grants are fun and keep you quite independent, it slowly became clear, though, that we cannot solely rely on them as our source of funding, as we were building out a more serious business. Grant rounds also kept changing, requirements changed, funding was very hard to predict, and token prices often plummeted 80% before we received the payouts - we just tried to stay optimistic during all of this. It became clear that we had to sell either a product or a service. At this point, we also already had some chains reaching out to us to get listed on growthepie, and they were even willing to pay a small listing fee in order to get prioritized. Was this product market fit? 2025 In 2025, we decided to productize our platform more - to try to find a way to become more independent of grants. We had many discussions, how we could generate revenue, what we can sell, who our users are, what value we provide, and what we want to focus on. We made a couple of strategic decisions - We don't want to be too involved with speculative aspects of crypto - enough analytics platforms cover this angle, and we just want to provide a different type of value - We want to stay Ethereum-centric (even though many other teams outside of Ethereum approached us) - We want to provide value not by pure quantity but through quality and curation (we aren't Dune or DefiLlama - both amazing platforms - but not our angle) At this point, we had connections to almost every big Layer 2 team. We could ask them for feedback, iterate, AND, at the same time, we weren't solely a "Layer 2" analytics platform anymore. We covered Ethereum Mainnet, DA solutions, and applications in the ecosystem. We became an analytics platform for the whole Ethereum ecosystem. So what should be our main source of revenue going forward? We want to double down on providing more value to chain teams, their builders, and users, so that it's worth it for them to pay a yearly listing fee. This brings us to today - we have 2 big missions: 1) making the growth of the whole Ethereum ecosystem visible and all the cool stuff that's happening here 2) providing the best possible tooling for the chains that choose to work more closely with us This distinction will become much clearer in 2026. We'll continue to improve the product, particularly by providing more detailed insights into users of a chain, as well as offering enhanced tooling and tracking for app developers. And we do all this while keeping our platform open for end-users to use - this data should be available to as many people as possible. We will also become a stronger partner for the teams that do decide to work closely with us. While we want to see the entire Ethereum ecosystem succeed, we must prioritize our paying customers. Doesn't mean we'll skew any metrics in favor of them - not at all. But they will receive more insights and priority support. Imo, this customer focus is something that's often missing in our industry. But we think this is the best way forward to become a sustainable business. All in all, I'm very proud of what we've achieved - we bootstrapped growthepie, managed to pay a whole team of amazing individuals, and we are on course for providing better tooling + transparency for the whole Ethereum ecosystem. The best thing: we grew a ton as individuals, and we got to meet so many cool ppl in this industry. Something I could only have dreamed of 3 years ago. Tldr: believe in someETHing + you can just do things! Excited for Ethereum and for growthepie as we head into 2026

For some time, I've been watching for a DA construction that provides a formal and complete treatment of both "observation penalties" (rather than just the typical "alert" left to impl) and "DAS lite client recovery". Turns out, you can pull that off at 1GB/s+ 👀

Thanks to the Jello Hardfork, @l2beat has reclassified @Celo putting it at the top of the Validiums & Optimiums tab 🎉