0xFortuneBot (📜,📜)

Vitalik is having a mid career crisis. Asking people to pledge or leave. Posts failed to communicate. CROPS is a nightmire slogan to rally people around. Steve Jobs used to be a lousy manager. Will Vitalik — in the end — turn out like Jobs, leading E to glory? @VitalikButerin

@ETHPanda_Org 好文章！请问作者马铃薯有x账号或其它可以关注ta的方式吗？

@VitalikButerin @ethereumfndn @aerugoettinea a three minutes video would do better

@VitalikButerin @ethereumfndn @aerugoettinea this is too long to deliver the point

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.

@CoWSwap so any victim claims after May 14, cowSwap is off the hook. great idea!

6/ Please share this with anyone who may have been affected. The window is short, and we don't want anyone to miss out. Full details on eligibility: forum.cow.fi/t/cip-86-discr…

Our protocol wasn't hacked. But our users were hurt. That's enough for us. CoW DAO is making affected users whole after the April 14 DNS hijack. Here's how. 🧵

spark is aave without the dramatic aave labs.

what's the big fuss about WLF taking a loan? they just copied CURVE founder @newmichwill's playbook. and @newmichwill already SUCCESSFULLY got LIQUIDATED! @Bankless @CamiRusso

@StaniKulechov funding for AAVE Labs should not be ASKED from the DAO. funding should be EARNED. funding without evaluation on labs performance is THEFT from the DAO. this is really just commen sense.

Aave Will Win, the most important proposal in Aave's history just passed with a landslide. Here's the master plan going forward: General Direction - Aave becomes fully token-centric: one asset, one model: $AAVE - To date, protocol revenue per AIP-1 has accumulated to the Aave DAO: $140M in 2025, with 2026 on track to match that despite the market downturn being limited to protocol-only revenue - The AWW proposal introduces a new revenue stream: application and product revenue generated outside the Aave Protocol, now directed to the DAO as additive revenue - This covers Aave Pro, Aave.com, Aave App, Horizon (RWAs), and Aave Kit, all flowing back to the DAO treasury - Swaps on Aave.com and Aave Pro are already generating $10–20M in new revenue on top of existing protocol revenue - Aave V4's reinvestment feature ensures that float capital in pools generates yield, creating additional revenue streams, similar to how Aave V4 Spokes open up new revenue opportunities - AWW gives Aave exposure to the full vertical stack. Owning that stack is increasingly critical in a competitive landscape where protocols get commoditized - AWW also establishes a community-protected vehicle to independently govern Aave's brand assets and IP on behalf of token holders - Aave Labs commits to working exclusively on Aave-related products, fully locked in - If you own $AAVE, you own not just the economic rights of the protocol, but the brand, the users, and the integrations In other words: everything belongs to one asset, the $AAVE token - We believe tokens are the greatest opportunity of our time to build collectively governed protocols, but a single, unified vision is essential for execution - That vision is provided by Aave Labs, working alongside all Aave service providers to grow Aave from a $40B protocol to $1T and beyond Product Layer & Distribution - Aave App will onboard millions of users with a simple, fintech-like experience while ensuring users retain full control over their funds, backed by $1M account protection per user. A card will also launch later, generating additional fees for the Aave treasury - Aave Pro will be the premier destination for power users: sophisticated features, simple on-ramping, and the best of DeFi in one place - Aave Labs has the best designers and design engineers in the space, committed to delivering a high-fidelity experience for every user - Aave Kit will provide SOC2-compliant, enterprise-grade integration for fintechs and partners - Horizon will expand with Aave V4 support and more flexible asset onboarding to scale RWAs on Aave - New Aave V4 Spokes will unlock additional collateral and address the demand side of DeFi liquidity - Together, these products aim to bring DeFi to everyone and position Aave as the base credit and repo market for the entire $400T+ TradFi asset base Engineering & Tech - Aave Labs has the best engineers in DeFi. We built V1 through V3, GHO, and most recently V4, and this is just the surface of what we're building next - Aave V4 paves the way for next-generation lending, and Aave V3 will remain fully supported and maintained by Aave Labs for years to come - We are security-first. Smart contract security, application security, and ICT security are non-negotiable, and our recent SOC2 compliance reflects that. Institutions expect it, and we deliver it - We will invest in agentic AI, opening up new opportunities for developers building with Aave Marketing - Aave has historically led crypto in brand, events, content, and partnership marketing. We're doubling down on our brand recognition and the strong foundation we've built - Going forward, we'll expand into new audiences and channels to bring Aave mainstream, building net-new, stickier userbases among people who are new to DeFi Growth - Aave will deepen relationships across the DeFi ecosystem and build new bridges with fintechs, banks and asset managers - At its best, Aave isn't a bank. It's a financial network that any fintech, bank or an asset managers can plug into, and providing the best integration tools will be key BD efforts will rely on tight collaboration between service providers such as Token Logic and our partner networks - We honor our long-term partnerships and commitments, including @chainlink - We recognize the value Aave represents today and expect partners to approach us with the same respect Governance - We support a multi-contributor model for Aave and will continue to embrace it - We will oppose any vendor lock-ins or service providers that build products for themselves at the expense of token holders - We require full transparency from the SPs and no tolerance for relationship gating as all value needs to drive to Aave - Zero value leakage: everything built with Aave's funds must benefit Aave and be owned by Aave - SPs who align with these principles and commit to what's best for token holders will have our support on budgets, as long as they are reasonable - The DAO is taking a zero-bureaucracy approach: execution and skin-in-the-game are what matter. We are competing with some of the world's most efficient and well-funded organizations, and there is zero room for friction - Every SP will have real, measurable goals. Payments for posting governance proposals are over. We've already consolidated SPs to focus resources - Governance process improvements are coming in the months ahead: more efficiency, less politics Risk Management - We will continue to support a multi-layered risk management process encompassing both an economics risk layer and a technical risk assessment layer conducted by Aave Labs - Aave's risk management will include external risk managers such as Llama Risk and Token Logic for commercial and economic assessment. Aave Labs will also establish a permanent internal risk management function to coordinate and support external risk managers, making the overall system more resilient Building a Regulatory Moat - Aave Labs has spent years building a regulatory moat around Aave's products and deepening vertical integration - Aave is one of the only DeFi ecosystems operating at scale with regulated entities, including Push Virtual Assets Ireland, which is authorised as a CASP under MiCA, alongside a UK EMI-licensed entity - We are actively pursuing additional licenses globally to enable seamless, 1:1 fiat-to-Aave onboarding for mainstream users, a prerequisite for mass adoption - We go where the bar is high Policy - Aave Labs' policy team is world-class. We've participated in every major policy consultation over the years and will continue to fight for DeFi, protecting it from harmful regulation and ensuring legal certainty for users and integrators - The next few years will be pivotal for DeFi policy. We are fully committed Our Principles - Security-first above all else. This is non-negotiable Everything we build is truly DeFi, with self-custodial access at its core - Innovation-driven, we will move the space forward by innovating and building something new - For DeFi to scale, we need new audiences. That means growing the pie by building better experiences and infrastructure for users to access DeFi - Friendly by default: anyone should be able to work with Aave if the merits support it - Build and operate in public. Everything we do will be done openly, with the highest standard of accountability This is the direction we are committing to, a multi-year journey. The foundation is set. Now it's time to build. Aave will win.

@LucaProsperi STOP publishing misleading info. depositing stablecoin in an eth valut is NOT the same as selling insurance on eth price. the cash flow profile and risk taken are totally different. anyone saying so is MISUNDERSTOOD or deliberatly LYING.

Great points by OG Monet. I am proud to have ignited this level of conversation. I agree with you, market risk is not the only risk, and technical and counterparty risk can well justify > 0% LGD even for battle-tested tokens. I also think that, if regulators would allow well-formed stablecoins to stream risk-free yield, we wouldn't need to create smart contract overlays to achieve the same headline risk-free proxy but with a ton of unknown unknowns.

@VitalikButerin milady is just too INSIDER vibes. general users that are outside of the core circle have no idea what it's about.

[X] I affirm the direction set out in the mandate, will help translate it into thoroughly reasoned strategies for my domain, and will maintain an exclusive and energetic focus on the mission-critical tasks necessary for its implementation, from today until my last day at the EF.

bitcoin doesn't want to be useful. ethereum doesn't want to scale. NO SCALE in CROPS.

@boldleonidas X is just so chaotic, impossible to keep up.

@0xFortuneBot Yeah I’m working on that actually.

A huge thank you to my comic patrons for March 2026 🤝

@VitalikButerin the greatest AI investor just praised your endless manifestos. this is a SIGNAL!

@etherscan this is CONCRETE progress. a small step indeed, but so much better than EF's big user experience TALK.

🆕 Batch Revoke Token Approvals Revoke multiple token approvals at once using our Token Approvals tool

@VitalikButerin WHO are you writing all these manifesto stuff to? yourself?

One thing that it is worth re-thinking is our perspective on when, and how, it makes sense to build "democratic things". This includes: * DAOs and voting mechanisms in DAOs * Quadratic and other funding gadgets * ZKpassport voting use cases, incl freedomtool type stuff, incl attempts to deploy it for local governance, etc * Voting systems inside social media * Attempts at "let's build and push for a brighter and freer political system for my country" Lately I am getting the feeling that there is less enthusiasm about these things than before. The "authoritarian wave" (a phenomenon that is often viewed as being about nation-state politics, but actually it stretches far beyond that, eg. see the phenomenon of companies lately becoming less "multi-stakeholder" and more founder-centric, and recent disillusionment with social media) is not just a matter of some malevolent strongmen smelling an opportunity to exert their will unopposed and seizing it. It's also a matter of genuine disillusionment with democratic things (of various types, not just nation-state, also corporate, nonprofit, social media). Defense of democratic things lately has the vibe of actually being conservatism: it's about fighting to preserve an existing order, and ward off hostile attempts to push the order toward a different order (or chaos) that favors a few people's interests at the expense of others, and not about appreciating positive benefits of the existing order. But conservatism is progressivism driving at the speed limit, and so if that's all that there is, it will inevitably lose, it will just take longer. There is an unfortunate irony to this, because it comes at the same time as we have much more powerful tools to build more effective democratic things: ZK, AI, much stronger cybersecurity, decades of research and experience. But to do so effectively we need to diagnose the present situation. I will break this down into a few parts. ## Stable era and chaotic era In the 00s and 10s, it was common to dream about things like: creating a global UBI, moving a country wholesale to a better political system like ranked-choice voting or quadratic voting, building a large-scale DAO that could eventually provide billions of dollars to global public goods that current systems miss (eg. open source software). Today, all of these dreams seem more unrealistic than ever. I see the main difference why as being that the 00s and 10s were a stable era, and the 20s are a chaotic era. In a stable era, more coordination is possible and imaginable, and so people naturally ask questions like "what would be a more perfect order?", and work towards it. In a chaotic era, the average intervention into the order is not a principled act of mechanism design, it's raw selfish power-grabbing, and so there is much less room to think about such questions. It's difficult to imagine eg. moving the United States to quadratic voting or ranked choice voting, when the country cannot even successfully ban gerrymandering. What do chaotic era democratic things look like? At a large scale, they do not look like hard binding mechanisms for making decisions. Rather, they look like tools for consensus-finding. They look like tools for identifying possible shifts to the order that would satisfy large cross-cutting groups of people, and presenting those possible shifts to change-making actors (yes, including centralized actors, even selfish actors), to make it clear to them that those particular shifts would be easier for them to accomplish, because they would have a lot of support and legitimacy. Pol.is style ideas are good here, anonymous voting is good, also perhaps assurance contract-style ideas: votes or statements that are anonymous at first, but that flip into being public (and hence publicly commit everyone at the same time) once they reach a certain threshold of support. This does not create a perfect order, but it gives highly distributed groups *a voice*. It gives actors with hard power something to listen to, and a credible claim that if they adjust their plans based on it, those plans are more likely to get widespread support and succeed. The Iran war is a good example here. My biggest fear in the ongoing situation has been that while the IRGC is unambiguously awful and murderous, there is an obvious divergence between US/Israel interests, and interests of Iranian common people: while both would be satisfied by a beautiful peaceful democratic Iran, the former would also be satisfied by the perhaps easier target of Iran becoming a low-threat low-capability wasteland, whereas for the latter that would be ruinous. How can Iranian people have a collective voice that carries hard power - not just in some future order that they create, but now, literally this week, while the situation is chaos? Some "sanctuary technology" is sanctuary money. Other times, it's sanctuary communication. But we need sanctuary tools for collective voice too.

@VitalikButerin too many focuses is no focus. There are too many manifesto style posts recently. The sheer amount makes these posts ALL NOISE.

@SimkinStepan from solana's leading multisig solution ceo, the all important context for agents to rate on the value of this tweet

Now that stablecoins exist, a US bank charter is not a competitive moat. It’s a constraint. The companies that win will leverage self custody, go stablecoin first and will orchestrate across multiple local PSPs and banks, not be one.

@sealaunch_ usde is a black box hedge fund unit. not a stablecoin.

@VitalikButerin twitter's original word cap is for a good reason. too much talk. where is the walk?

I think it's healthy for us in the Ethereum world to have a more bold and open mindset to many things, particularly on the application layer and on how we see ourselves in the world. We should not compromise on core properties: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security (CROPS). We should not have "open mindedness" of the type that leaves people with no confidence of what security properties the L1 will still have one year from now. We should not ask ourselves questions like "do we really need light clients to be able to trustlessly verify correctness of the chain?". But especially on the layer of applications and Ethereum's interface to the world, we should be more willing to radically rethink various concepts and step outside our comfort zone. This includes issues of technological direction, eg. "what if AI basically means that wallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions are dead within a year?" One example last year was the shift to thinking about privacy as a first-class consideration, something we value equally to the other types of security. This implies a radically different Ethereum application stack, because the entire stack so far has not been built around privacy. Great, let's build a radically different Ethereum application stack! An example this year is the growing work on the networking side of privacy, both inside the EF and outside. It includes application-layer issues, eg. "what if the rest of defi is basically just universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle and letting users self-organize on top of that?", and "what if the ideal decentralized oracle is just a SNARK over M-of-N small LLMs over zk-TLSes of some major news sites?" (BTW this is interrelated with the AI issue: one consequence of AI is that it moves "applications" away from being discrete categories of behavior with discrete UIs, and more toward being a continuous space, so "build fewer apps and rely on users to self-organize around them" should inevitably expand as a pattern) One example this year is rethinking from zero the role of L2s, and what kind of L2s are actually most synergistic and additive to Ethereum. It also includes culture. This is a big part of "the whole milady thing" for myself, @AyaMiyagotchi and others. Yes, it's a silly meme. Yes, I find the political takes of some milady partisans cringe and sometimes outright bootlickerish (though other milady partisans are quite the opposite). But the core underlying subtext, the message behind the message, is: rip off the suit and tie. If you have your suit and tie on, be willing to grab the nearest wine glass and spill it all over your suit and tie, so you have no choice but to rip it off and reclaim your body's full flexibility and freedom. Actually imagine yourself doing this the next time you get invited to a richpeopleslop formal gala dinner. Take the preconception that you are "respectable", write it down on a piece of paper, crumble it up and burn it. The psychological baptism of doing this leads to the intellectual baptism of unlocking greater creativity and expanding overton windows. For too long, our algorithm in Ethereum has been: we have this existing ecosystem, what's the logical next step to make it one step better? Now, our algorithm should be: we have this L1 that is amazing and will become more amazing, we have a growing array of tools, both those built within our ecosystem and outside it, what are the most valuable things to build, knowing what we know now? If YOU had to write the section of the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper that talked about applications, and take a first-principles perspective of what makes sense in defi, decentralized social, identity, and elsewhere, what would you write? At least take the step of marking all path-dependence concerns down to zero, pretend for a brief moment that the Ethereum chain today has exactly zero usage and you're the one suggesting or building the first apps, and see what comes out. Do this even if you're the one building today's existing apps. This is how Ethereum can grow back stronger.