John Vincent

We're now Otus 🦉 A new name and a new brand for the mission we've been building toward all along: wealth management that's personal, protective, and available to everyone. A smarter home for your money. More coming this week.

@LayerZero_Core If 1/1 DVN is unsafe enough to refuse signing now, it was unsafe enough to reject at setConfig. Docs warnings don't survive teams optimizing fees at scale. The knob is the issue, not Kelp turning it.

Welcome to the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a framework for synchronously composable rollups. What does that mean? One deployment. Shared liquidity. Single transactions across L1 & L2. Identity verified anywhere. Smart wallets connected everywhere. No additional trust assumptions. This means L2s that are as credibly neutral, economically aligned, and publicly governed as the base layer itself. EEZ furthers Ethereum as the leading decentralized economy.

George Polya’s "How to Solve It" is a timeless classic, and even more relevant in the AI era. Before, it was a book about solving problems. Now, it feels just as much like a guide to spotting non-problems before you reflexively throw AI at them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_So…

Today, the Foundation’s Board released the EF Mandate. This document, which was first intended for EF members, reaffirms the promise of Ethereum, and the role of EF within this ecosystem.

Nice Article! TL;DR: AI is an amplifier, not the inventor. Building is cheap now - judgment + taste are scarce. AI will 100x your existing patterns - the good and the bad. Early stage: sprint with AI to learn fast. Post-PMF: judgment must steer execution. Be an agent master, not just an AI user - or you’ll end up paperclip-maximising at monkey-with-a-machine-gun speed.

Your savings account is losing you money every day. We built an agent that actually fixes that. Introducing Smart Savings Account 👇

Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name” emerges through craft: iterating a structure until the whole fits its context and feels alive. Vibe coding can support that - let AI do the heavy lifting while we keep steering for context, coherence, and aliveness. But today’s "vibe coding" loop is often just prompt -> glance -> ship: judging by surface output, not the system’s inner coherence - so you ship something impressive that never quite solves the thing that matters.

The Bitter Lesson isn’t just for training models - it applies to agentic apps too! Stop micromanaging agents with brittle step-by-step prompts. Instead, give it high-level goals + clear success criteria. Focus your attention on feeding high-quality data to your agents for in-context learning. And invest in a solid infrastructure to schedule goals, monitor the agent’s progress, and build reliable verification methods.

This is refreshing. It feels like the Ethereum community is consciously returning to first principles - decentralization, censorship resistance, and explicit security guarantees. Over the last few years, those lines have blurred, with highly centralized systems (including some L2s) gaining significant traction largely on the basis of throughput alone. This post is a timely reminder of what actually matters. Hopefully the EF keeps pushing in this direction, and L2s align more clearly around this vision.

"Centralized tokens with admin privileges undermine the practical experience of censorship resistance for users of those tokens." That’s a valid critique of stablecoins, not of Ethereum’s base protocol. Saying “Ethereum isn’t censorship-resistant because some token issuers can freeze funds” is a category error - it conflates application-level governance (USDT) with protocol-level properties (Ethereum).

@nextalphaa @Bankless @CantonNetwork “Censorship resistance”

“Everybody talks about how this technology is going to free us from intermediaries." "That's not an honest statement." "All that this technology is doing is creating new intermediaries” @YuvalRooz, founder of @CantonNetwork, lays out why the real upside of crypto is competition, not fairy tails: “The reason why I really like this technology is that it removes the barriers and the moats around competing with the old intermediaries.”

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum. These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network. To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far: BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated* Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains. This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: github.com/ethereum/resea… , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here. Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out: * In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node * In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe * In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network A third piece of this is distributed block building. A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that. Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness. Onward.

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask: "What do you think about xyz"? There is no "you". Next time try: "What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?" The LLM can channel/simulate many perspectives but it hasn't "thought about" xyz for a while and over time and formed its own opinions in the way we're used to. If you force it via the use of "you", it will give you something by adopting a personality embedding vector implied by the statistics of its finetuning data and then simulate that. It's fine to do, but there is a lot less mystique to it than I find people naively attribute to "asking an AI".

1/ At Blueprint, your safety and security are a top priority. We know that we have to earn your trust, especially when it comes to new tech at the cutting edge of AI x Crypto. We’re building a platform where AI agents can safely automate onchain workflows. Here's how 🧵

Upgrading the world computer without disruption is no small feat - yet Ethereum has done it time and again. A testament to great engineering and planning!

The Fusaka upgrade is today. Ethereum is securely scaling.

One point I made that didn’t come across: - Scaling the current thing will keep leading to improvements. In particular, it won’t stall. - But something important will continue to be missing.

As predicted by @ESYudkowsky

Cloud marketing convinced a generation of programmers that the scariest thing in the world was to connect their own server to the internet. All so they could be sold and resold the same centralized dependencies at huge markups. youtube.com/watch?v=-cEn_8…