Anshuman

This is what we're building at SurgeDAO. Why I'm all in on this direction. Check it out. Ping me with any questions.

The physics of a business are determined by the market it enters and the technology it harnesses. Markets exert different gravitational forces. Smaller markets are often lighter, and larger ones are often weighed down by regulation, large incumbents, switching costs, etc. Technologies provide different amounts of propulsion; the more differentiated the technology, the more thrust a company has to overcome those forces. A great business is built when the available propulsion is strong enough to overcome the market’s gravity.

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. The updated strawmap is at strawmap.org, and I attached a picture of it to this post. My own high-level takeaways: * "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced: - Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol - Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives - Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today - Multidimensional gas - State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available - Changes to client architecture ... At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again. * H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another. * Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?" * Formal verification of everything for security. * FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM. * Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months) * Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount. eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state) Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees. Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration. * In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area. * Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V. My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away. * Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes. Ethereum is CROPS. Ethereum is scaling. Ethereum is reinventing itself. Onward.

Tether alone did $5.2B in revenue in 2025, 41.9% of all protocol revenue across 168 protocols. The revenue is real and concentrated in projects that actually capture it. Stablecoin issuers took 65.7%.

@vedantutage03 Great going bro! Cheers to the amazing journey ahead too🍻🍻

@TheAnmolBilla On it!

@bitstaked Bring back productive DAOs!

This is what we're building at SurgeDAO. Why I'm all in on this direction. Check it out. Ping me with any questions.

@an_david 🤝

@bitstaked really cool !!

🧵 The Talent Exodus Crypto doesn't have a hiring problem. It has a keeping problem. The best operators leave after 2-3 years. Not because they lost conviction. Because the compensation structure broke its promise and nobody will say it out loud.

Everyone thinks there's a hackpocalypse going on in crypto right now. But if you dig into the data, the story is not that simple. Narrative violation: total dollars hacked in 2026 actually looks pretty normal so far. Check the chart below for raw data. What's grown is not the amount hacked, but rather the NUMBER of incidents. Case in point: April was a brutal month for $$ hacked, but May was actually way below average in terms of $$ hacked (1/10th hacked compared to April). And yet by number of incidents, May was actually the highest in crypto history. So what could explain the number of hacks going crazy, but the amount stolen staying flat? Here's what I think is going on: for large protocols, using AI for cybersecurity is balanced between offense/defense. If you're Uniswap, AI makes it easier to harden your protocol, just as much as it makes it easier for randos to attack you. But for the tens of $10M TVL DeFi protocols, there's no one running AI hardening at all. So attackers are looting unattended stores. Over time that will push TVL toward the larger protocols that can actually afford to defend their gates (and eventually, formally verify their code). Analogy: In a high crime city, the Wal-Mart stays open, but the family owned corner store that can't afford security shuts down. Over time, the equilibrium is that more and more people will end up doing their shopping at Wal-Mart.

TLDR: - Seed valuations now sit at $20M-$50M. These are Series A numbers wearing a seed label. The celebration at close becomes the constraint at A. - Average seed-to-Series A has stretched to 616 days. That's 18 months to prove 3x growth in a market where Series A volume dropped 18%. - Down rounds aren't just dilutive. They're narrative poison. The signal damage lasts longer than the dilution. - The best seed rounds aren't the biggest. They're the ones that set up a Series A the company can actually close.

An individual with exceptional depth in understanding how a system works has no incentive to discuss it with a peer until the person can sharpen their understanding. By extension, it means all the secrets that build things remain hidden.

Europe is missing on Hyperliquid. No EURO STOXX, no DAX, no FTSE - while US indices dominate flow. Just proposed EURO STOXX 50 (FESX). Deep liquidity. Pure macro exposure. This is the next obvious index perp.

The next billion-dollar market is $EURO50 on @novadotmarkets. Support it now and get a lifetime revenue share from the fees! app.nova.markets/thesis/135

what would need to happen for trillions in traditional assets to move onchain? a quick checklist: stablecoin legislation ✓ GENIUS Act is law market structure legislation ✓ CLARITY Act has a bipartisan deal, heading to a vote world's largest asset manager tokenizes core products ✓ BlackRock now has a $2.6B treasury fund, a $2.2B corporate bond portfolio, and an infrastructure debt fund onchain transfer agent for 58% of the S&P 500 enables tokenized shares ✓ Computershare × Securitize FINRA approves a full-stack onchain IPO underwriter ✓ AND first ever atomic settlement of securities and stablecoins in a regulated broker-dealer ✓ Securitize again world's largest clearinghouse builds tokenized securities infrastructure ✓ DTCC, launching October institutional market makers providing liquidity for tokenized equities onchain ✓ Jump × Securitize × Jupiter, live today this all went from 'wish list' to 'reality' real quick so what's left? biggest things are that market structure legislation needs to pass (it's heading to a vote) and secondary markets need real depth (Jump started making markets on tokenized equities today). Even the remaining boxes are being checked in real time

state of crypto 2026

🧵 The 18-Month Wall: Most Crypto Projects Don't Fail at Launch. They Fail Right Here. The narrative has faded. The capital is deployed. The early community has churned. And the team has to prove the system works without any of the tailwinds that got them funded.

DeFi today is basically CeFi except instead of trusting a board of old men that fear jail and are regulated and insured to the tits you trust some risk-seeking 20-30 year olds with a multisig and a prayer.

🧵 The KOL Credibility Lifecycle: Why the Business Model Eats Itself Every crypto KOL follows the same arc. The ones who stay credible resist it. The ones who don't become the most expensive way to reach an audience that stopped listening.

I don't think people realize how dire the situation is for tokens right now. A quick six part story about how bad things are told with charts🧵

@guywuolletjr @a16zcrypto Glad to explore working together and enable strong value adds with @surge_dao. DM sent :)

Come work with me @a16zcrypto! We are hiring an investment partner for our crypto team. We’re a small high trust group that focuses on investing in everything related to blockchains including DeFi, onchain finance, decentralized AI, and the infrastructure to support those applications. If you are an onchain degenerate arbitraging between vaults, love working with founders at an early stage, and/or feel passionate about decentralized AI, please talk to us or refer a friend. Our investment partners help identify and select the companies we invest in, thinking critically about new technologies and market trends. They also serve as mentors for the companies they invest in, helping them make progress across product, GTM, fundraising, etc We’re looking for: - Strong DeFi expertise either as a builder directly, a power user, or an investor - Interest in working with protocols and start ups at every stage - A strong network of onchain frens, especially those starting new projects If you’re interested, please send me a DM or refer a friend!