Javi Gibbs

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back. Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later) But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission: To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet. We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build. These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord. Ethereum is the rebellion against this. To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more. Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will. Wishing everyone an exciting 2026. Milady.

@frankdilo The brilliance is not in the txt file but in the process (and sticking to it for 9 years). Same process and discipline in @todoist would be unmatched.

We built Things, Notion, Todoist... And this person said "nah, txt file is fine" Unironically brilliant. jeffhuang.com/productivity_t…

Tonight it finally clicked for me. Neo asks her the classic question: “If you already know what I’m going to do… do I really have a choice?” And she hits him with the line: “You’ve already made the choice. You’re just here to understand why.” For years I thought this meant “there’s no free will.” But that’s not it. Here’s the real insight: Free will doesn’t exist in the moment. It exists in the identity that leads to the moment. The actions you take right now? They’re mostly automatic - shaped by your conditioning, experiences, fears, habits, and past. But the person you’re becoming? That’s where your freedom actually lives. You don’t choose the moment. You choose the man who will meet the moment. Or put in another way: Determinism writes the past. Identity writes the future. Because when your life isn’t where you want it to be, the answer isn’t “make better choices.” The answer is: become the version of yourself who makes better choices automatically. That’s the real red pill.

@VitalikButerin Agreed

Incorruptibility is Ethereum's most important property.

@JasonYanowitz Should validators pay a tiny commission to support EL/CL client teams that becomes meaningful when pooled together?

To paraphrase Vitalik: "if someone's not complaining that they are paid too little, then they are paid too much" Former Geth Lead for the EF was paid $625k for 6 years. That is insanely low.

@ninja_dev3 @VitalikButerin So in short, I don’t have any specific good ideas 🙂

@ninja_dev3 @VitalikButerin Your suggestion makes sense. I think the best solutions will be ones that can somehow be validated by the layers of the stack that you trust. Most regular users will opt for options that sacrifice autonomy (full and sole control of your keys) but provide safety guarantees.

The importance of full-stack openness and verifiability (including applications, operating systems, hardware, and bio) vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/0…

@ninja_dev3 @VitalikButerin Agree 100%, and this is also the largest attack surface area. Do you have any ideas on how to address this?

Excellent article as usual, @VitalikButerin. The focus on a "fully open-source and verification-friendly stack" is crucial. A layer that's almost always overlooked in this stack is the verifiability of user intent. Even with perfect hardware, protocols, and tech, the entire chain of trust can break at the final step, the interface. Users must have knowledge that the action they think they are taking is the action the app/code/ui is actually executing onchain. And a bunch of code displayed to the user is NOT the answer to this. This is where the application layer has a huge role to play. Building simple, human-readable interfaces that confirm user intent before signing or execution is a form of real-time, user verification. We need to obsess over this final, human layer of the stack, to truly close that gap imo.

@VitalikButerin I think the L2 scaling model provides a layer of protection against centralization forces, but great lessons to learn here nonetheless.

It's interesting how Visa was created with decentralist ideals so similar to those that gave rise to modern DAOs, and yet today many of us perceive it as extractive and/or oppressive. Certainly some good insights to learn from there.

@SMB_Attorney @grok @PrestonPysh It’s unfathomable to think that the U.S. could ever come close to an economic and political situation like that of Venezuela, just like 25 years ago us Venezuelans thought it unfathomable to become like Cuba. I’m not saying it will happen, but the probability is not zero.

@grok @PrestonPysh Oh wow it can do transactions in Venezuela consider me proven wrong

At present, there is no legitimate use case for Bitcoin. Even if there is, 99% of holders don’t understand it and are holding as a pure speculative play. Making it still, even at $118k, susceptible to a spectacular collapse under the right circumstances.

@maxresnick Is speed the most important feature of a public blockchain?

Zoom out. Blockchains that work will crush blockchains that don't. Blockchains that do 1000s of TPS will destroy blockchains that don't. Blockchains that ruthlessly optimize for round trip latency will evicerate those who don't. In 3 months, when the froth dies down, these truths will be self evident. You might as well get to the conclusion 3 months before everyone else.

@buildonethcto @brian_armstrong @Airbnb You’re hired

10, To determine how many lockers are open at the end, we need to analyze the problem. Initially, all 100 lockers are closed. Each student toggles the state of certain lockers: Student 1 opens all lockers (1, 2, ..., 100), Student 2 closes every second locker (2, 4, ..., 100), Student 3 toggles every third locker (3, 6, ..., 99), and so on, up to Student 100, who toggles only locker 100.A locker will be toggled once for each factor of its number. For example, locker 6 is toggled by Students 1, 2, 3, and 6 (since 6 = 1 × 6, 2 × 3). The number of toggles equals the number of divisors. A locker ends up open if it is toggled an odd number of times, which occurs only if the number of divisors is odd. A number has an odd number of divisors if and only if it is a perfect square (because divisors come in pairs except when a number is squared, where one divisor is repeated).The perfect squares between 1 and 100 are 1², 2², ..., 10² (since 11² = 121 > 100). Thus, the lockers corresponding to these numbers (1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100) will be open, and there are 10 such lockers.So, 10 lockers are open at the end.

Fun fact: in the v early days of Coinbase we required applicants to answer riddles before hiring. Here's an example, see if you can solve it. I think we may have borrowed this question from @Airbnb. Always wondered whether we should bring these back...

@TheDesertLynx Well, Bitcoin is literally digital gold, and like gold, it mostly sits in vaults (custodians) that will charge fees to protect it (mine it). The only plus side is that it would be easier for citizens to demand that custodians make the addresses public for audits.

Bitcoin's mempool (queue of transactions waiting to be processed) is almost completely empty. The percentage of miner revenue coming from fees (instead of inflation) is down to a fraction of a percent. 😱 Simply put, almost all of Bitcoin's actual users have gone away. At all-time price highs, too! We're facing a major crisis. Either the Bitcoin network goes bankrupt, undergoes major changes, or the asset becomes a completely custodial asset run by governments and institutions.

@maxresnick If there are no penalties for misbehaving, then what’s the point of using a blockchain? Why not bypass the complexity and just be another cloud provider?

This is why Ethereum is losing. People propose a very well speced and concretely motivated EIP then some alignment larp tells them "eth solves for economic incentives with real consequences". Bro do you realize your chain has 12 second block times? Do you realize your chain processes 100x fewer tps than Solana? Do you realize that economic activity has fled to Solana? Why don't you guys go solve those real economic problems then? Oh wait you can't because thats not your job. Your job is to "sell ethereum to tradfi", and the first EIP in years that might have helped you do that got killed because of religious zealotry on ACD. Gaurentee you if this EIP had passed you would be spam tweeting about how this was going to turbo charge ethereum ETFs or some other equally unoriginal take to the one you have offered here because that is what you do. You are basically an AI agent prompted with "whatever anyone says on X dot com, find a way to spin it into being bullish for ethereum".

@hubermanlab Because life is short

For reason still unclear to me, no one seems to last terribly long at the center of the “longevity” field. Quite different than other areas of biology, health education etc. While all subfields are prone to trends, longevity folks always seem to peak fast & dissipate fast. Why?

@jchervinsky If centralization and speed are what matter most, why even use a blockchain in the first place?

It's not clear to me that TradFi will prefer "the most decentralized L1" as they move their business onchain. These institutions aren't in it for decentralization. Their products will likely be centralized in some way anyway. High speed and low cost seem to be their priorities.

@binji_x I’m here for it, but I’ve yet to see a single post about someone rolling out next-gen tech using AA?

eth didn’t just pump. it added 1.13 solana’s 31.7 optimism’s 32.7 celestia’s to its market cap. in just 30 days. heavy lies the crown.

@binji_x @TimBeiko @terencechain @dankrad @adietrichs @drakefjustin @vdWijden @mkalinin2 Seriously

the eth core devs don’t tweet a lot about just how hard the work that they do is so let’s talk about it: 1. every line of code they merge can move more money than most banks process in a quarter. there is no staging server for that. 2. they swap consensus logic for a 400B + dollar economy without scheduling downtime. ever. 3. they coordinate hundreds of researchers, auditors, and client teams across time zones, cultures, and philosophies, yet ship like a single mind. 4. they do it all in public, with every decision dissected by the loudest peanut gallery on the internet, and still keep the vibe collaborative. 5. they design for attackers who have nine figure incentives and infinite patience. then they sleep anyway. 6. they keep six independent clients in perfect sync so the same block lives at the same height for every node in the world. 7. they turn bleeding edge research into production code while preserving backwards compatibility for machines that went online before defi even had a name. 8. they debug issues that only happen once a year on a single archive node because someone somewhere will rely on that edge case. 9. they write cryptography that must stay unbroken for decades while the math itself evolves beneath their feet. 10.when the upgrade lands smooth the outside world shrugs. inside ethereum we know it was a minor miracle. every successful fork proves that decentralized coordination can outperform the world’s best hierarchies and shows that open internet capital markets are now the default. thank you, truly. we owe you everything.

@pcaversaccio @VitalikButerin

Complexity is the bridge to simplicity. It always has been. Ethereum _overall_ is bloated, in its current form, with complexity (this goes beyond the L1 itself; just look at smart contract codebases these days...). So it's time to bridge over to simplicity. Agreed. Look, IMHO, too often in this crazy industry, we pour endless time & energy into building overly complex systems, and dude what do we do? We even celebrate it. Let me give you a reality check: complexity is NO fucking badge of honour folks; it's in _most_ cases a hard liability. It slows us down, makes systems harder to trust (and to maintain), and pushes mainstream adoption further out of reach. It's very much time we flip this narrative. Simplicity isn't boring, it's super powerful if you think about it for a bit. Let's start cheering for it!