Rickety Cricket

@MaxResnick @chamath When the difficulty adjustment comes down it means it becomes less difficult to attack. Quite literally it means bitcoin becomes less secure. You are wondering why that’s a problem?

@chamath How is 2 even a problem? The difficulty adjustment will take care of it. Speculate in equity markets yes. I don’t think the marginal dollar punted in a prediction market is coming out of bitcoin demand.

There are two problems rn for crypto and, specifically, bitcoin bulls: 1) marginal liquidity would rather speculate in prediction markets and equity markets 2) marginal energy to mine BTC is worth 10-20x if reallocated to serving AI tokens These changes feel structural but I could be wrong…

Today we're launching EthSystems. We build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. Institutions want to use Ethereum, but one of the biggest problems is the lack of built-in, modular privacy tools. We were the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) for the past year. We had hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers, shipping open source work the whole time. Wall Street has found crypto as an asset class, but not yet as commercial infrastructure. Institutions want to run real flows on Ethereum: stablecoins, tokenized assets, settlement. These are businesses with billions of dollars on the line, and no bank will operate in full public view. On a public ledger, confidentiality is the hard part: each party to a transaction should see what it has a right to see, and nothing more. We have a year of proof of work: private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private settlement across chains, the Ethereum Privacy Map, and more. All with protocol specs and security properties, at our website. We've spent a decade working on privacy in crypto. We know there's no silver bullet. Different use cases need different systems, each designed, specified, and hardened properly, and someone has to do that work. That's why EthSystems exists. We're an independent, for-profit company, backed by long-term Ethereum-aligned investors. This is a decade-long transition, and we aren't going anywhere. If you're an institution that wants to build on Ethereum, talk to us. We're hiring: BD in New York, protocol engineers, ops: join@ethsystems.org

Last cycle no one really owned any Bitcoin because they didn't think it could get to $100K and they wanted more upside - so they bought $ETH as beta - then BTC out performed because everyone owned ETH already, there were only sellers waiting. No one chasing, no new capital. ETH underperformed. Solana was written off last bear market because of being SBF and FTX adjacent. As such, no one held $SOL, so Solana out performed. This cycle no one owns $ETH because they believe in memecoins more for rapid returns - and that's SOL territory historically. So if ETH is underowned, will everyone eventually chase and it becomes the outperformer? Don't know but: > ETH/BTC looks nice across the 3M > Tom Lee is ETH's Saylor (without the ponzi's) > Underowned by CT (first time almost ever) > Still got ETF's (+staked ETF's) > Robinhood launched own L2 > Seemingly constant institutional deployments on ETH (OUSD) I'm cautiously optimistic given that everyone's bags are BTC, HYPE and SOL.

Last cycle, Solana did well because it was where all the memes were, and the trading pairs were mostly in SOL. This drove huge demand for the token. If Robinhood Chain captures that kind of attention this cycle, and the pairs are denominated in $ETH… well, you get the picture.

The @RobinhoodApp Chain quickly turned into a massive breakout product garnering more volume than many established crypto DEX... - uses $ETH as the native gas token - transaction fees denominated in ETH - finality on @ethereum L1 ETH is money... see it clearly now? @BitMNR @arbitrum @ajwarner90 $BMNR

last cycle sort of sucked for ETH. i can't reasonably argue it didn't but the difference from almost every other asset in the space is that Ethereum and ETH didn't die, and nor will they die. in fact, Ethereum is emerging to be in a position where it is stronger than ever between the rise of EthLabs, catalyzed by DAT funding and what it means for shifting balances of power in the ecosystem and continued efforts to scale the base chain, now moving faster than ever and the emergence of Robinhood onchain and what it portends for the rest of tradFi coming onchain it's becoming clear that these are real structural shifts in crypto infrastructure and adoption which will eventually manifest in the market and that the vast majority of people here are and will remain offsides on ETH because they've been burned by it in the past you have somewhere between ~1-6 months to accumulate ⏰

@diapsalmata_0x $LIT has barely begun its move. Don’t over complicate it. Buy LIT.

okay, time to find another $lit like play. research mode on.

I’m telling you. $ETH is going to outperform $BTC (and mostly everything else) this cycle. All of the signs are there. You just have to cut through all of the noise on X. It is so obvious but CT is clouded with low IQ takes about Ethereum daily.

1/ JPMorgan launched JLTXX, the OnChain Liquidity Token Money Market Fund, on May 13. @jpmorgan seeded the fund with $100m of its own capital. Other launch investors brought day-one TVL to $200m. Seven weeks later, TVL has grown 248% to $695m as of July 3. @ethereum is currently the only blockchain available for use by investors in the fund.

@gavinmchughh It’s called soccer.

Maybe the greatest American video ever filmed

Lighter repricing is starting now anon. $LIT

We are proud to support the launch of @ethereuminsti alongside @BitMNR and @ethereumjoseph. This nonprofit is the dedicated front door for the world's largest institutions entering Ethereum, built by former Ethereum Foundation leaders and the team behind 500+ institutional relationships. Following @ethlabs_org, this is the second independent steward organization for Ethereum's next chapter. globenewswire.com/news-release/2…

$BTC outperformed last cycle because one moron meme’d it to $126k using chat GPT and too much leverage, and now he has to sell it. It’s time to start buying an asset that actually provides real value: $ETH. It’s time for the BTC religion and the Saylor god complex to end.

@WatcherGuru You know who doesn’t ever have to sell? Tom Lee.

JUST IN: Michael Saylor's 'Strategy' launches a Bitcoin Monetization Program that allows the company to sell $BTC to fund operations.

@redhairshanks86 This is more like reading between your own ass cheeks. Anyone can just say “reading between the lines” and then pull BS out of their own ass.

read between the lines: - ethlabs was formed bc leading voices in crypto are unhappy with the leadership of the EF - make no mistake, this is a hostile takeover. they won’t cannibalise EF, but the message is clear: we don’t like how you ran the foundation and we are doing it differently now and most industry leaders agree - many ex EF people were invited to join ethlabs, not vitalik and aya though, they are the main reason why the ef is not doing well - vitalik is a great innovator and thinker but it requires a different skillset to lead and scale a company than to invent something. he chose people based on personal likeability as opposed to competence personally, i love this. i am neutral towards the EF, but they definitely did not do a great job so it’s refreshing to see a new team attempt to make ethereum great again

1. Intro Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution. We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable. The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about 2. What the EF is not for We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats. 3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion. We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage). The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible? The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer. The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries. If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space. None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity. In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen. MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here. Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second. It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust. Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points. The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible. Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide. 4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including: * Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed. * Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it. * Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense. * Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this. * Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms. * Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load. We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum. Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry. 5. Addressing departures There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content. Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle. Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs. 6. Addressing EF spinouts Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation. The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work. Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding: “Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?” EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency. Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate. EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not. We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.

@AdrianoFeria Not to mention that the AI build out and increased energy demands for AI will only make bitcoin mining more untenable. Using scarce energy for AI is much more valuable than for mining bitcoin. Literally wasting energy that is much more needed elsewhere.

This is how brain-dead the crypto industry still is: It costs roughly $30M per year to keep developing Ethereum L1, which is effectively becoming the settlement layer for the internet of finance. Bitcoin’s PoW burns through roughly the same amount of money every single day. One funds open-source global financial infrastructure backed by the most sound digital store of value in the world. The other pays for an energy-intensive security model attached to an asset that is structurally and economically inferior as a store of value, not useful for real-world finance, and increasingly hard to justify based on Bitcoin’s own fee and security-budget metrics. This is the quiet part said out loud, the thing talking heads in this space will not dare to say, but should, because it is the truth.

@dankrad Competing corpo slop chain guy criticizes the Ethereum foundation. More on this at 6.

The people who are leaving the Ethereum Foundation are CROPS believers. The problem isn't with the strategy, it's with management. And this exodus of talent is truly bearish for Ethereum, sadly.

In my opinion, zero chance of this ‘crisis’ happening for $ETH zero “Funding secured”