James S

@StarPlatinum_ Empathy, honesty and integrity will take you wherever you want to go with a healthy conscience.

I will turn 26 tomorrow Men who are more than 30 Any advice to men who are in their 20s? The topic can be anything

@andyyy Looking for their next extraction opportunity....the number of $ ripped out of this industry by the promise of "institutional partnerships" is probably 10 figures at this point.

LinkedIn is one of the most active channels for our brand right now and if that doesn't tell you where this industry is at right now then idk what will

@bsturisky Nah bro...Bridgewater and Citadel are just around the corner. They're just waiting on cross collateral 🫠

Hyperliquid revenue is consistently trending lower since September.

....no

Strongly agree

I have many criticisms of the Ethereum Foundation. But "no more manifestos, more shipping" from @hosseeb, a VC, is not feedback I'll take seriously. The ship faster intuition makes sense in one world: startups. You're burning runway, competitors are moving, every week debating is a week someone else is taking your market. I run many companies, we deliver, we grow fast, billions flow through what we've built and millions use our products. I know this logic from the inside. It's correct there. Ethereum is not a startup. It never was. It's a protocol. The mistake that keeps getting made by smart people with product backgrounds or VCs is applying the rules of one game to a completely different one. What makes Ethereum worth anything as infrastructure is credible neutrality. The belief that no single entity controls it. Not @VitalikButerin, not the @ethereumfndn. Theguarantee isn't in the code, it lives in thousands of independent people who are constantly watching, arguing, and who have shown repeatedly they will reject changes they consider illegitimate. The picture I'm posting captures perfectly the aesthetic of crypto taken over by performative believers: people who lost billions, kept the faith, and now demand to be taken seriously in fashion shoots. This is one of the two forces squeezing out the people actually building. Impatient capital that wants product velocity, and a performative culture that turned a technical movement into a costume party. Both are corrosive, both misunderstand what Ethereum is. Ethereum's premium over every other L1, despite being slower and more expensive, comes from one thing: people believe it won't be captured. The reason why it's also more expensive and slower is exactly because of this. All the research and technical work we're doing is difficult because we want to be the most decentralized L1 with Bitcoin. We want to become fast without losing our guarantees. Funds like Dragonfly have a structural incentive pointing in one direction. Criticize Ethereum's velocity, create urgency, justify backing cheaper copycats. This produces a genuine blind spot around the things that don't look like shipping but are actually holding everything together. The moment Ethereum optimizes only for shipping cadence over legitimacy it starts looking like every other foundation controlled chain. There are dozens of those. They're worth a fraction of the value. This doesn't mean Ethereum should be slow. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to become better. I've been one of the strongest critics of Ethereum. I'm burning a big part of my capital to push the boundaries of Ethereum. I'm building multiple companies on top and trying to make it faster and I'm trying to bring users to it. Believing that writing a manifesto is blocking the development of a protocol is ridiculous. The EF has real problems. Opaque communication, poor prioritization, bad recruiting, organizational dysfunction with real costs. These deserve serious criticism from people who understand what they're maintaining. But the solution is not startup logic applied to a protocol commons. It's better institutional design that preserves legitimacy while improving coordination. Those are different problems with different solutions. To the "just ship" crowd, from someone who has spent years building on these systems and not writing checks at them: the thing you want to optimize away is the thing you're invested in. The slow, pluralistic, nobody wins unilaterally process is not the cost of Ethereum. It's the product. The alternative is this Vanity Fair picture. A worse, cheaper version of TradFi dressed up in velvet and leopard print, demanding to be taken seriously.

Starknet is already generating $62M in annual app revenue. I repeat: 62,000,000 Trump dollarinos. At peak, $146,000,000. So Starknet is: - (1) building the endgame layer, bringing together everything crypto needs: privacy for all assets, post-quantum security, decentralization, massive compute, decentralization, and Web2-grade UX and DevX - (2) becoming one of the best places to build and scale an onchain business (1) strengthens (2) by allowing developers to fully focus on their business while StarkWare keeps shipping infrastructure-level innovation. (2) makes (1) viable by creating the economic foundation that gives the stack real long-term relevance. And with the Starkzap SDK, you can easily and quickly join these builders and businesses by turning any app idea you have in mind into an onchain business with blockchain complexity fully abstracted away. Just build on Starknet.

I started interacting with the Bitcoin community (mostly protocol devs) as early as 2013. I fell in love with Bitcoin at the San Jose conference. It has changed a lot since then. For one, Bitcoin used to be this very contrarian, anti-establishment thing, where "In Math We Trust" meant openness for math and cryptography as the main way to advance Bitcoin's mission. And it was all about getting people to believe in Bitcoin and hold and use it. As many of us as there can be. It was all about getting Retail to use Bitcoin. Today, the most influential voices I hear shy away from any form of change and instead seem to lay their hopes on existing Powerful Entities -- POTUS, Heads of State, Nation States, Large Banks and Tradfi, to adopt and HODL Bitcoin. Retail is interesting only for buying ETFs and shares of Strategy. And certainly no one is working to allow actual people, as many of them as possible, to use Bitcoin directly, on the Bitcoin protocol. This change is bad. Bitcoin development should focus ONLY on people using it, not the Rich and Powerful HODLING it for us.

World class computer scientists agree: blockchains are for decentralization.

@mert Interesting. Why be annoyed as a builder? Why does the EF providing transparency affect anything? Criticized for being slow, for not being present enough, for being too present, for not doing BD, for doing bad BD. Feels like its more an issue of inflated expectations

seems like a good direction dont agree with most of the criticism but if I were a builder on ETH, I'd be annoyed by the attention the EF gets all the time (certainly feels like they seek it out but I could be wrong) it's not about you, the point of a foundation is to not exist

This

I guess my point is that "stop optimizing for cypherpunks" is a weird criticism of an org that is simply reiterating its commitment to principles that define the technology. The EF isnt beyond criticism, they are slow to enable tech that will make their vision a reality (AA, privacy, L1 scaling etc). But to criticize them for not pandering to short termist "institutional" use cases (that are largely pay-to-play deals with no need for a blockchain) is a large part of why this industry is suffering from an identity crisis right now.

@strjd87 imo the push point is more this: (but maybe you mean that by "doing BD") x.com/awasunyin/stat…

"It is important to keep delivering censorship-resistant, privacy-oriented, secure, open-source solutions." Hopefully this will put a stop to those who want to speak for Tomasz as a way to attack the values that this industry should stand for.

Yes agreed. If things like native account abstraction and privacy arent going to be part of Ethereum's future for years, then this is a problem (and one that others can execute on faster). But people are largely attacking them for caring about properties that define web3 and not "doing BD".

@strjd87 i like also this section: "The only part I am unhappy about is where the EF believes that it can move slowly. The world is not moving slowly. Defense is not about staying in place but about hectic preparation without losing a single second when the threat is imminent."

This makes absolute sense for a foundational platform. It’s the right mindset and value system. This doesn’t mean EF is regressing, as many people are speculating. Many systems and products will be built on top of this platform to address gaps and opportunities. They don’t need to be 1:1 aligned with this mandate, and that’s OK. But as a foundational platform, these values are great!

I disagree. TradFi already has controlled and censored and reversible systems. The issuers and users who want those feature can stay there. Being as predictable (and ruthless) as gravity is the only unique value prop of real crypto. Without it, there’s no point. Use a database.

I am liking @VitalikButerin’s cypherpunk warrior arc, and I think it is very good for the world.

Users do not use blockchains. They use products. The EF is not building a product. They are building a blockchain. A platform. That allows anyone to permissionlessly build whatever the fuck they want. I know it's confusing bc there are a lot of shallow, single-purpose blockchains out there. Shallow, single-purpose blockchains are products. The EF is not building a product.

Blockchains are needed only if you want decentralization. If you're operating on a blockchain and leaving the decentralization part out, then you're just using a very complex technology for no good reason. Whatever it is you want to achieve, it can be done with simpler tech.

@franklyteddy Tell me more...

@strjd87 Hold up. I have a crazy idea for inspection maxxing.

Prediction markets face a version of the "inspection paradox". They are most useful for events where the outcome is genuinely uncertain, but those are precisely the events where the market has the least informational edge. For events where a clear informational edge exists, the edge is usually held by insiders, and the market becomes a vehicle for them rather than a tool for the crowd. The markets are most accurate where they are least needed and least reliable where they would be most valuable