Cosmonaut⚛️

I agree with Vitalik here. Europe will never outcompete the U.S. or China by trying to build another centralized empire with more bureaucracy and regulation. The real opportunity is becoming the home of open source coordination, credible neutrality and decentralized infrastructure. That’s what Ethereum already represents. Not just a blockchain, but a global coordination layer for value, trust, identity and eventually communities themselves. That will be the true solution. Ethereum as a public good and a new digital economy, not something that should be valued like a traditional company. The value comes from the network effects, the applications, the culture and the people building on top of it together. Technology alone is not enough. Open networks only become unstoppable when culture, memes, education and community give people a reason to participate in them. Ethereum provides the infrastructure. The community gives it life. This is how we can do it and it will be very impressive 🙏📖

The most important metric in crypto will shift from TPS to uptime

@MsMelChen The solution is to rally around open source. That's the only way to compete with a superpower technology network effect if you are not a superpower yourself. And it's the only way to bring the rest of the world along on the same team as you. Open source.

Speed attracts traders. Security attracts capital

Gold has been used as a store of value for over 3,000 years. It earned its monetary premium through historical lineage. Bitcoin has only existed for 17 years. Its claim to monetary premium is not historical, it is structural. Ethereum arrived later, but it now has even stronger monetary premium properties. For much of its existence, Bitcoin advocates dismissed Ethereum as a rival by claiming that ETH was an unregistered security and that it could, and inevitably would, be debased by its founders. Both claims have proven false. What remains is this: ETH is economically and structurally more sound and sustainable as a digital store of value than BTC. BTC is still more widely accepted as the superior store of value, but that perception rests on false premises that went unchecked in mainstream media for years because it was too risky to talk about ETH's monetary properties due to regulatory uncertainty and political pressure that no longer exist. People are inclined to dismiss the bull thesis for ETH as a digital store of value because they have been conditioned to, not because there is merit to it. As an investor, you should draw your own conclusion after studying each side of the argument carefully.

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

@sadsadstory1984 @afterthefilter Already to late for the mint? Unfortunately not eligible, but hold ATF and Year Two Survivor. What could be wrong?

Check out @afterthefilter Year 3 Survivor if you're a holder! And, check out a few in-process shots below. 🧵 stargaze.zone/l/cosmos1xhhqm…

I thought for a long time about whether I should say anything, but it is time to appeal to reason and truth. We are friends. And on this app, misinformation gets pushed in waves. MAGA hears a line from the top dictator, repeats it, and suddenly ignorance gets dressed up as analysis. The fact is that the tweet below is right in a major way. Europe has not been freeloading off the United States. Europe and Canada spent a combined $486 billion on defence in 2024 alone. European NATO states now buy a huge share of their major weapons from the U.S. In 2020 to 2024, 64% of their major arms imports came from the United States. For the 2021 to 2025 period, Europe accounted for 38% of total U.S. arms exports, the largest regional share. NATO allies also represented around $20 billion in U.S. foreign military sales in fiscal 2022 and $24 billion in fiscal 2023. That is not charity from Washington, oh boy no. That is a revenue stream for Washington. The U.S. presence in Europe is not some selfless protective act. It is also about projection, logistics, reach, and cost savings. In early 2025, the U.S. had nearly 84,000 servicemembers in Europe, and NATO common funding continues to pay for infrastructure upgrades at bases used by U.S. forces there. NATO has even committed $385 million for upgrades tied to AND FOR U.S. special weapons storage and related facilities in Europe. Those bases put American forces closer to the regions where Washington wants to operate, and they reduce the strategic cost of doing so. And the most important point is this: if the U.S. loses Europe as a customer, staging ground, and political-military platform, it loses tens of billions of dollars in arms business, plus strategic positioning it has benefited from for decades. The only time NATO Article 5 has ever been invoked was after the 11 September attacks on the United States. So the myth that America endlessly subsidises everyone else while getting nothing back is propaganda. In reality, Europe has been helping finance the system, buying the weapons, hosting the bases, and sustaining the architecture from which the U.S. itself profits. I still believe a united Western world is worth striving for. I am not falling for the division pushed by this cult, and neither should you. Trumpism will hopefully not be around for long. What is important to note, though, is that Europe has at most benefited from NATO indirectly, while the United States has benefited directly over and over again. So do not let MAGA propaganda lull you into believing otherwise. Peace.

Don’t be exit liquidity for Trump’s cartel: They deposited $484M of $WLFI tokens to borrow USDC. Those loans will likely never be repaid. Instead, when Trump leaves office, or even after the midterms if Republicans lose, $WLFI will dump, and Dolomite will be stuck with BAD DEBT. As a result, USDC lending rates are at 13.5%. But even that APY isn’t worth the risk of not being able to withdraw your deposit. Everyone knows this. No surprise Dolomite's $DOLO trades at just $15M market cap because it's a turkey getting ready for Thanksgiving.

Update: $230M+ USDC bridged via CCTP from Solana to Ethereum across 100+ txns. 6 hours is how long Circle had to freeze stolen funds from the $280M+ Drift hack. Circle is a centralized stablecoin issuer headquartered in New York and the attack began around 12 pm ET. Why does our industry allow them to stay silent? @jerallaire @circle @usdc

Founders who walk away at ATLs are scammers. Plain and simple. They dumped on their community, pocketed the profits, and left supporters holding the bag. Remember their names and never trust them again.

JPMorgan is already processing $2,000,000,000 a day on-chain. 🏦 Major banks like Citi and HSBC are moving from testing to real production. The biggest problem? "The Island Effect." 🏝️ Most banks are building on separate networks that don't talk to each other. A deposit at Citi can’t easily be moved to HSBC. It's like having a phone but only being able to call people who use the same operator. This is why the Cosmos SDK and IBC matter. ⚛️ Banks want to own their own systems, not just rent space on someone else's network. IBC is the bridge that finally lets these giant bank networks talk to each other instantly. The tech is ready.🫡

@MastrXYZ @brucefenton 🎯

@brucefenton They call themselves cypherpunk and vote for an autocrat. You people are completely insane.

I’m a Republican. I supported Trump. I raised money for him, I voted for him. I donated $60,000 to his campaign. Trump lied. He rugpulled us all. I didn’t vote for Lindsey Graham / America Second policies. You can disagree with me if you want. It’s your right to be fooled. But if you say I have “TDS” or am a “liberal” you need a new argument. There are millions of conservatives and members of the now torched “broad coalition” just like me. The only ones left supporting him are MAGA always Trumpers who place the man above the policies and our country.

Bank of Japan choosing the Cosmos stack? ⚛️ The BOJ is officially testing blockchain for bank reserves, and it looks like Cosmos might be the pick. Major Japanese players like @progmat_en and @datachain_jp are already building for the big banks (MUFG/SMBC) using Cosmos SDK and IBC. Combine that with @0xMagmar’s recent trips to Japan, and the connection is hard to ignore. 👀

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

I’m done watching crypto influencers flee to #Dubai for zero taxes, light-touch regulation and maximum legal insulation, stack their wealth in a system fuelled by oil rents, extreme inequality and a migrant-labour model that human-rights organisations have criticised for years, and then jump online to lecture everyone else about transparency, freedom, peace, democracy and global politics as if they stand on moral high ground. Almost all of them are tied to big crypto scams and are openly MAGA-aligned, pushing talking points without any real understanding. You built your brand on decentralisation and accountability, then deliberately chose the jurisdiction designed to minimise both, monetised opacity, called it “strategy”, and now try to sell it as values.

Team shipped a big upgrade to the core stack that makes Cosmos more enterprise-ready for regulated institutions. In particular, Cosmos chains can now have decentralized validator sets without a token and staking. Introducing PoA. More soon!

Wow, this is quite unnerving. On top of getting hold of leaked e-mail addresses and phone numbers, scammers can sometimes even find physical mailing addresses. Remember that there will NEVER be a reason to type your hardware wallet seed phrase anywhere online.

You don’t hate these people enough. Absolute scum of the earth. My stomach is churning so hard today, made me physically sick. People killed themselves over this shit. It’s beyond greed. All I have is hate. No 10 am slam today huh you pieces of shit? Go figure…

Idk guys I’m starting to think that when Trump says he wants to take over elections, monopolize media, control the free market, impose mass surveillance, and punish all who oppose him, maybe we should believe him