Eyal Daskal

Crypto did not eliminate banks. It exposed their architecture. The next phase is not DeFi. It is financial infrastructure rebuilt for blockchain execution. Core banking will not disappear. It will be redesigned. Identity will not be optional. It will be embedded at execution. At CRYMBO, we are building the operating system for institutional crypto.

What if tokens could block unauthorized transactions before they finalize? 🛑 At @CrymboTech , our automated KYC queries our oracle to approve or block activity in real-time. This is proactive, on-chain risk management for digital asset issuers and institutions. Watch the clip! 🎥👇 #Crypto #Blockchain #KYC #AI #Agent #Web3Finance @EyDa1510

@StaniKulechov $100M confirms tokenization is now a capital allocation decision, not a pilot. The next constraint isn't liquidity or demand - it's the identity and compliance layer that sits between institutional capital and onchain execution. That's where the real bottleneck is.

$100M capital injection into Horizon. 🔥

@VitalikButerin Finality that means final is exactly what core banking requires. Every legacy system still runs on probabilistic settlement. The moment you can guarantee irreversibility at the protocol layer, you unlock a completely different class of financial products on top.

One important technical item that I forgot to mention is the proposed switch from Casper FFG to Minimmit as the finality gadget. To summarize, Casper FFG provides two-round finality: it requires each attester to sign once to "justify" the block, and then again to "finalize" it. Minimmit only requires one round. In exchange, Minimmit's fault tolerance (in our parametrization) drops to 17%, compared to Casper FFG's 33%. Within Ethereum consensus discussions, I have always been the security assumptions hawk: I've insisted on getting to the theoretical bound of 49% fault tolerance under synchrony, kept pushing for 51% attack recovery gadgets, came up with DAS to make data availability checks dishonest-majority-resistant, etc. But I am fine with Minimmit's properties, in fact even enthusiastic in some respects. In this post, I will explain why. Let's lay out the exact security properties of both 3SF (not the current beacon chain, which is needlessly weak in many ways, but the ideal 3SF) and Minimmit. "Synchronous network" means "network latency less than 1/4 slot or so", "asynchronous network" means "potentially very high latency, even some nodes go offline for hours at a time". The percentages ("attacker has <33%") refer to percentages of active staked ETH. ## Properties of 3SF Synchronous network case: * Attacker has p < 33%: nothing bad happens * 33% < p < 50%: attacker can stop finality (at the cost of losing massive funds via inactivity leak), but the chain keeps progressing normally * 50% < p < 67%: attacker can censor or revert the chain, but cannot revert finality. If an attacker censors, good guys can self-organize, they can stop contributing to a censoring chain, and do a "minority soft fork" * p > 67%: attacker can finalize things at will, much harder for good guys to do minority soft fork Asynchronous network case: * Attacker has p < 33%: cannot revert finality * p > 33%: can revert finality, at the cost of losing massive funds via slashing ## Properties of Minimmit Synchronous network case: * Attacker has p < 17%: nothing bad happens * 17% < p < 50%: attacker can stop finality (at the cost of losing massive funds via inactivity leak), but the chain keeps progressing normally * 50% < p < 83%: attacker can censor or revert the chain, but cannot revert finality. If an attacker censors, good guys can self-organize, they can stop contributing to a censoring chain, and do a "minority soft fork" * p > 83%: attacker can finalize things at will, much harder for good guys to do minority soft fork Asynchronous network case: * Attacker has p < 17%: cannot revert finality * p > 17%: can revert finality, at the cost of losing massive funds via slashing I actually think that the latter is a better tradeoff. Here's my reasoning why: * The worst kind of attack is actually not finality reversion, it's censorship. The reason is that finality reversion creates massive publicly available evidence that can be used to immediately cost the attacker millions of ETH (ie. billions of dollars), whereas censorship requires social coordination to get around * In both of the above, a censorship attack requires 50% * A censorship attack becomes *much harder* to coordinate around when the censoring attacker can unilaterally finalize (ie. >67% in 3SF, >83% in Minimmit). If they can't, then if the good guys counter-coordinate, you get two non-finalizing chains dueling for a few days, and users can pick on. If they can, then there's no natural schelling point to coordinate soft-forking * In the case of a client bug, the worst thing that can happen is finalizing something bugged. In 3SF, you only need 67% of clients to share a bug for it to finalize, in Minimmit, you need 83%. Basicallly, Minimmit maximizes the set of situations that "default to two chains dueling each other", and that is actually a much healthier and much more recoverable outcome than "the wrong thing finalizing". We want finality to mean final. So in situations of uncertainty (whether attacks or software bugs), we should be more okay with having periods of hours or days where the chain does not finalize, and instead progresses based on the fork choice rule. This gives us time to think and make sure which chain is correct. Also, I think the "33% slashed to revert finality" of 3SF is overkill. If there is even eg. 15 million ETH staking, then that's 5M ($10B) slashed to revert the chain once. If you had $10B, and you are willing to commit mayhem of a type that violates many countries' computer hacking laws, there are FAR BETTER ways to spend it than to attack a chain. Even if your goal is breaking Ethereum, there are far better attack vectors. And so if we have the baseline guarantee of >= 17% slashed to revert finality (which Minimmit provides), we should judge the two systems from there based on their other properties - where, for the reasons I described above, I think Minimmit performs better.

@paoloardoino Dollars moving outside traditional rails isn't a crypto story - it's a financial architecture story. The institutions that capture it won't be the ones holding USDT. They'll be the ones running the infrastructure that issues, settles, and accounts for it natively.

Tether just released its quarterly attestation for Q4 2025. Tether had a great year, surpassing 10B in profits. USDT expanded throughout the year by 50 billion, because global demand for dollars is increasingly moving outside traditional banking rails, particularly in regions where financial systems are slow, fragmented, or inaccessible. USDT, with its network effect and parabolic growth, has become the most widely adopted monetary social network in the history of humanity. Highlights as of 31 December 2025: * 186.5B total issued USDT, end of Q4 2025. * 192.8B total assets/reserves, end of Q4 2025. * 6.3B+ excess reserves, on top of the 100% reserves in liquid assets that back all issued tokens, end of Q4 2025. * 141B+ in US treasuries (direct + indirect exposure), end of Q4 2025. * 50B USDT supply increase in 2025 Tether proprietary investment portfolio exceeds $20 billion. Thank you very much for the continued support ❤️

@paoloardoino Dollars moving outside traditional rails isn't a crypto story - it's a financial architecture story. The institutions that capture it won't be the ones holding USDT. They'll be the ones running the infrastructure that issues, settles, and accounts for it natively.

@SteakhouseFi @block_stories The shift from "should we?" to "how do we deploy?" is where the infrastructure gap gets expensive. Most institutions find the missing piece isn't the vault - it's the core banking layer connecting it to their compliance, treasury, and reporting stack.

The conversation has shifted from "should we?" to "how do we deploy?" Last week Steakhouse featured at @block_stories Horizon Frankfurt, walking the room through how DeFi vaults enable financial institutions to capture onchain yield.

@arc @USDC AI agents don't need new financial products. They need rails that are programmable, instant, and identity-aware. Stablecoin settlement is layer one. Identity at the transaction level is the layer most builders haven't touched yet.

AI agents are learning what markets have always required: a reliable, low-cost, trusted medium of exchange. Increasingly, that infrastructure is being built on blockchains. And it’s happening with @USDC.

ask "how do we deploy?" - the missing piece isn't the vault. It's the core banking layer connecting it to their compliance, treasury, and reporting stack. That's where most deployments stall.

The infrastructure question is the right one. AI agents don't need new financial products - they need rails that are programmable, instant, and identity-aware. Stablecoin settlement is the first layer. Identity verification at the transaction level is the next one most builders haven't solved yet.

Core banking was designed for a world with one type of money. That world is ending. The institutions moving fastest right now are the ones rebuilding their financial architecture - not patching it.

@MilkRoad @Bitwise The market missed it because stablecoins at scale still hit the same wall. Who holds the account? Who verifies the identity? Who manages the off-ramp? 3 billion wallets is a distribution problem solved. The banking layer beneath it is not.

Matt Hougan @bitwise: This should have been MASSIVE. But no one cared. "Meta announced it was rolling out stablecoins across 3B people... 3B people who are going to have crypto wallets in a year! ... and the price is like, meh."

@BlackRock Tokenization is the headline. The real work is one layer down. Identity, accounts, compliance logic - still off-chain, still closed. Until that changes, you have not moved the system. You have rebranded it.

Tokenization has the potential to transform how securities are issued, traded and settled, creating a more efficient financial system. #QuestionOfTheWeek: Near-term, tokenization will grow most 👇

@brian_armstrong Updating financial services is the application layer. The infrastructure layer - core banking, identity, account architecture - still needs to be rebuilt natively for crypto. That is where the next phase of institutional adoption will be won or lost.

It’s earnings day. 2025 was a strong year for Coinbase, and we built a solid foundation for continued growth in 2026. Our thesis is actually very simple: crypto is updating all financial services, and we're the best positioned company to capitalize on this transformation. Some highlights: - Total trading volume grew 156% Y/Y and our crypto trading market share doubled in 2025 - Assets on Coinbase increased 3x over the last 3 years - We now have 12 products generating >$100M of revenue on an annualized basis - New all time highs in USDC and Coinbase One Onwards

The long game is infrastructure, not applications. The institutions building on-chain today are discovering that execution rails exist but the banking layer beneath them does not. Identity, accounts, compliance logic - these are the primitives that will determine who wins the long game.

@solana @solanapayments $2 trillion in stablecoin transfers proves the settlement layer works. The next question is what sits above it - account architecture, identity, compliance logic. Payments scale. Banking infrastructure for crypto is still being built.

We just launched payments.org and @solanapayments One place to see why Solana is the best blockchain for payments x.com/solanapayments…

@SuperstateInc @FT @TheBanker @FWDind @rleshner @solana US equities as DeFi collateral is the proof of concept. The harder problem is the identity and account infrastructure underneath - who holds, who clears, who is accountable. RWA execution is solved faster than the compliance architecture that should sit beneath it.

1/ NEW: @FT @TheBanker just published a piece on @FWDind making history, featuring interviews with Forward and @rleshner. Quick summary: Forward became the first US public company to have its equity used directly in DeFi on @Solana, enabled by Superstate.

Banks are not afraid of crypto. They are afraid of rebuilding their core infrastructure to support it. That fear is justified. The architecture question is real. Most are still looking for a shortcut that does not exist.

Finance is entering its own Year of the Horse. Capital is moving differently. Institutions are stepping forward. Digital assets are no longer experimental, they’re infrastructural. But movement without structure collapses. Speed without trust breaks. The next era of blockchain won’t be defined by speculation. It will be defined by certainty. When value moves on-chain, identity must move with it.

May this year bring clarity, courage, and decisive progress. Happy Lunar New Year. 马年大吉 🧧 from The @CrymboTech Team crymbo.com #ChineseNewYear #LunarNewYear #GongXiFaCai