Trust Net (🫖𝑻🅴🅴)

Ethereum needs an Encrypted Mempool and it needs it fast. It's not just about stopping sandwiching. Encrypted mempools are how Ethereum matures its onchain markets. I just published a post on why Ethereum needs encrypted mempools. Here are the core arguments:

MEV bots pulled ~$24M from Ethereum users in 30 days. Vitalik's response? A lot of new acronyms for a very old problem — encrypted mempools, FOCIL, ePBS. All designed to decentralize MEV, not eliminate it. validators still extract value from users, just by a more distributed set of bots. But what if there wasn't any MEV at all? On Stellar, validators earn no fees and transaction ordering is randomized, eliminating most MEV you see on Ethereum. And if someone did try frontrunning? the network can remove them - no fork, no staked capital required.

Hey everyone — we’re aware of the large swap transaction circulating on X. Based on what we’ve seen so far, there’s no indication of a protocol exploit or otherwise malicious behavior. The transaction executed according to the parameters of the signed order. Our interface shows clear price impact warnings for swaps of this magnitude, as does Aave’s. We’re continuing to review the details and will share updates as we learn more.

Earlier today, a user attempted to buy AAVE using $50M USDT through the Aave interface. Given the unusually large size of the single order, the Aave interface, like most trading interfaces, warned the user about extraordinary slippage and required confirmation via a checkbox. The user confirmed the warning on their mobile device and proceeded with the swap, accepting the high slippage, which ultimately resulted in receiving only 324 AAVE in return. The transaction could not be moved forward without the user explicitly accepting the risk through the confirmation checkbox. The CoW Swap routers functioned as intended, and the integration followed standard industry practices. However, while the user was able to proceed with the swap, the final outcome was clearly far from optimal. Events like this do occur in DeFi, but the scale of this transaction was significantly larger than what is typically seen in the space. We sympathize with the user and will try to make a contact with the user and we will return $600K in fees collected from the transaction. The key takeaway is that while DeFi should remain open and permissionless, allowing users to perform transactions freely, there are additional guardrails the industry can build to better protect users. Our team will be investigating ways to improve these safeguards going forward.

AI agents will make 1 million times more payments than humans, and they will use crypto.

Solana's goal is to become the new Nasdaq. But this can’t happen in today’s block-building environment, where the nash equilibrium of profit-driven validators creates orderflow leakage, front-running, and unpredictable execution. BAM fixes this by introducing an alternative block-building architecture that brings verifiability, privacy, and programmability to Solana’s transaction pipeline. This is key to onboarding more sophisticated players onchain and also enable developers to build CLOBs, perpetual exchanges, dark pools, and other financial primitives that require sequencing control, determinism, and privacy guarantees. Without this, Solana cannot fully realize its long-term vision. WE NEED BAM.

₿uilt For This

Yesterday, we released our 17 Big Ideas for 2026. Here they are in case you missed it.

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