CodePhobic

Why so many sh*t ppl in crypto and how to fix it.

@Kalshi 87m sold in eth but harvard endowment is ~50b. thats rounding error. anyone find the actual entry % in the filing

JUST IN: Harvard sells $87 million position in Ethereum

@galasso_ralph @leolanza @marilyn100x thanks ser, lets improve this onchain world!

Opportunities for new voices on Ethereum like @codephobic @leolanza @marilyn100x to rise, please follow them, and many others who do great video contents, without focus on fast money grabs, we deserve better.

Free banking had fewer panics than the textbooks let on. Worth asking who wrote the textbooks.

@Thebitcoinbarb1 @TheBlockRunner @0xBillyBitcoins Glad I saved u my friend :) sorry about blockRunner tho

@codephobic @TheBlockRunner @0xBillyBitcoins Oh my goodness thank God I just saw this cuz he's literally in my DMs right now trying to convince me to download some s*** on my computer Here I thought I was about to get on the block runner podcast God damn.

Reminder @0xBillyBitcoins is a scammer, impersonating @TheBlockRunner. Do not engage

@DefiIgnas argued this exact angle in a video x.com/codephobic/sta…

@DefiIgnas self-inflicted feels right but the deeper miss is nobody named what eth defends. roadmap was tech not purpose. what thesis still holds

$ETH went from a consensus hold to a contrarian bet in 2-3 years. Some of this was market driven, some was self-inflicted: 1) The EF pushed the L2 scaling roadmap after failing to scale the L1. It doesn't matter whether that came from lack of motivation, skills, or available tech and research at the time. Now the EF is scaling the L1, but even with gas limit increases, Ethereum will never be faster or cheaper than most competitors. And that's okay, because maximizing decentralization and censorship resistance requires tradeoffs. The problem is that market participants are giving it lower valuation multiple than in the past. And it's dead annoying though that full ERC-20 deposits to CEXs still take ~13 minutes (no 1-slot confirmation) and that approve + action still requires two txs across DeFi, despite years of 'account abstraction' upgrades. Watching EF members leave one by one isn't helping the sentiment either. 2) Ethereum can be slower and pricier than other chains, but the market now wants revenue to back valuations. $HYPE is generating 2x-3x the fees of Ethereum despite trading at ~5% of its market cap. Even more humiliating is $TRX, up 5x while ETH is down 40% over 5 years. Ethereans mocked TRX as a copy/paste vaporware scam, but Tron dominates retail stablecoin payments... The sector EF pushed for years and failed to capture, because Ethereum was simply too expensive and slow for adoption. Ouch. I believe Ethereum had it good with the ultrasound money narrative. Quickly deflating supply is the sexiest narrative that even BTC bulls would love. But it needs a massive pick up in txs numbers to generate the fees that burn ETH. And Glamsterdam just cut fees by ~78% (gas limit will go from 60M to 200M per block), which means transactions need to pump by 4.6x just to keep the burn flat. If onchain activity doesn't pick up to compensate, Ethereum's revenue drops further. Sure, Ethereum still dominates TVL but the ratio dropped from 96% in Jan 2021 to 52% today. And even with that, TVL monetization mostly flows to protocols and stablecoin issuers, not the L1. L2s aren't taxes either. ---- So what's the bullish case for Ethereum here? EF has partly got the message. The cypherpunk manifesto is personally very appealing to me, with its mission to promote privacy, self-sovereignty, and independence in an increasingly unstable world. I hope that recent departures from the EF is simply a realignment period. Pivoting to L1 scaling is the also right move, but UX needs to drastically improve, especially as more corpo-slop chains and institutions enter the market. EF is taking the quantum threat seriously, unlike the mixed reaction from Bitcoin core devs. But that all takes time, and if the market's demand for revenue doesn't subside, Ethereum simply needs to bring more users and transactions to the chain. The real ultrasound money narrative, while being the most decentralized chain, would do the trick. But we're far from ETH being deflationary again.

@laurashin ranted on the recovery-layer gap a while back x.com/codephobic/sta…

@laurashin tokenomics was a symptom tho. the actual sin was never picking what eth is for. whats the one job it would lose its identity by giving up

I think Ethereum’s original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made from Dencun on. The ultrasound money thesis was a good one and with Dencun (or the L2 roadmap generally) they should have stopped to say that this was going to hurt the ultrasound money thesis and consider how to preserve it. Most people, like David, don’t want to believe in something that isn’t also putting up points on the scoreboard. When the main offering becomes ideology/communism and money/tokenomics/capitalism are overlooked, the peasants are going to revolt — as they’ve been doing for two years now. Look at the public reaction to Tomasz: broad praise, a sense of hope, excitement, the price pumping … only for him to be gone a year later with the new ED being someone who cannot even be found online except for a Wayback Machine url with his name that has some really questionable statements on it (and I should say the EF denied that this website, which was taken down a few weeks after he was appointed to the board, is his). They’re going to be really mad at me for even mentioning that but in the place of a void, these are the kinds of things people will glom onto. Then there was the manifesto — I mean, mandate, which they backtracked on forcing people to sign. (Btw, this is the second bit of news that seems to relate to Bastian. And now the third would be all these departures. There’s nothing else for us to point at and say about him — when I searched for his name on Google News just now only 14 links came up. He seems to be some kind of invisible hand behind the scenes.) I don’t think ideology and capitalism/tokenomics/number go up are mutually exclusive. I think you can have CROPS values and also consider how each step of the roadmap affects the tokenomics and even have teams for BD/ecosystem growth. It feels like the EF doesn’t realize the moment that crypto is in. The competition is only just starting. We are in the phase of real world adoption. The Ethereum Foundation’s CROPS principles are great ones, and they are worth fighting for. But the EF seems to want to sit back on its laurels and act above it all when all its competitors are all getting down and dirty on the field to gain market share. Maybe it is the right approach. I don’t know. I’m just saying that more competitive people won’t align with it. And so they will leave … and community members will as well. I personally don’t think it’s good for Ethereum if its most competitive people depart. Ethereum’s unwillingness to stop the brain drain will only benefit its competitors — or spawn new ones. Giving a shit about price and tokenomics and BD doesn’t hurt CROPS. It just helps ensure that these principles get spread to more people and that other chains that don’t have these principles don’t get a leg up. All the commentary may be pointless. It seems Vitalik tried what everyone wanted and it didn’t align with his vision, so he brought in a new person he felt more comfortable with. It makes me sad to see people become so disaffected with Ethereum, but maybe this is V’s Brian Armstrong/no politics at Coinbase moment where he lays down what the EF will work on and asks everyone else to leave. That was the right move for Coinbase, but I view them as fundamentally different issues. We’ll see whether Ethereum maintains its lead with a foundation that isn’t willing to fight for it.

@newmichwill @dankrad every dao endowment ive seen hit this. no hard metric and the org becomes the mission. would u bake in a sunset if the metric is met

@dankrad What's the main objective of such an organization? What is the main precisely defined metric?

The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it. The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it. If we want to get Ethereum back to winning: - create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap - find a leader who is competent and wants to fight - make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it - fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability). Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).

@galasso_ralph It looks serious. Also ppl are leaving the bankless team

@codephobic Is he trolling?

This is concerning …

What is going on at @Bankless …

@bigwil @0xBillyBitcoins @TheBlockRunner @pantheonvaults glad this is helpful.

He's hard at work but thanks to this sort of post you've put out, it makes it easy to spot a scammer. Thank being said if Will & Iman from the @TheBlockRunner are down to talk AI Agents, Virtuals, Base, Robotics and the new creator markets primitive in @pantheonvaults, I'd love to have a good chat and be on the other side of the microphone for a change!

@Icebergy wrote a 12m thing on this exact gap → x.com/codephobic/sta…

@Icebergy this is the philosophical debt nobody priced. mission never survives a real drawdown w/o structure. its been vibes the whole time

gainzy crash out over eth, garrett depositing +$1b after buying +$4,500, and bankless sold all of their eth?

@0x_Lucas ranted on the people problem here → x.com/codephobic/sta…

@0x_Lucas evangelism-to-silent-exit pipeline is the thing nobody names. crypto runs this same arc on repeat. who's even left holding the mission tho

Guess I’ll say the quiet part out loud Bankless apparently laid off a majority of the team yesterday No thank you or public announcement to help team find new homes Just David tweeting about how he’s selling ETH and Ryan talking about himself Come on guys

@keoneHD winning AS what is the real q tho. cypherpunk asset and compliance rail are two different crowns. those crowds dont even overlap

Eyes on the prize: a borderless, permissionless financial system. Ethereum is winning; who will ultimately take the crown?

@potuz_eth the capture angle is the part nobody wants to name. when senior ppl exit together it usually means they tried something internal and lost. who do u think they lost to

Since it seems to be bad form not to have an opinion on the situation at the EF, here are my unsolicited 2 cents. There are two main reasons why I find this exodus alarming and while I suspect many think like me, I do not see this voiced up. I have very little to no insight of what goes on inside so this is all pure speculation. 1) People are stressed out, some people have left taking grants to continue working on the same topics but without having to deal with the drama inside. Others are taking longer or more often leaves to clear their mind. Some are clearly scaling down on work/comms. For the last year or two you could *feel* that many within the EF were under high pressure from different sources. Talking to many there, it does not seem to be a healthy working environment, and this leads to burnout. The EF not being a comfortable place to work affects us all in the Ethereum ecosystem. 2) Yes, new blood is coming and will come. Rotation is natural, it's expected and is healthy. However, replacing large parts of a critical system (and by no means the number of people leaving is small, neither they are junior positions) is dangerous. The biggest risk to Ethereum is not the gas price, or the price of ETH or the 12 seconds between blocks or scammers on Defi. The biggest risk is capture. Having the some of most knowledgeable and respected people in the field, leaving at the same time is a textbook case of how to capture an organization. The impact of these departures is making non-trivial steps for a brittle governance. @peter_szilagyi already warned of the impacts to governance of phasing out entire teams with Lean Ethereum, this is just another aspects of the same movement. Now I definitely support the EF's philosophy of substraction. I am on record saying that I believe most of Ethereum's research could and should be absorbed by mainstream academia. I believe critical neutral teams like @ethPandaOps or positions like ACD moderators should be community supported. I believe a smaller EF is better for Ethereum. Perhaps it's unavoidable to cause general discomfort when winding down. But the feeling we get from outside while listening to people inside is that there's more than just discomfort and it touches into disrespect and animosity. I do hope that either I'm entirely wrong in the reading above or if I am partly right, that the upper layers of EF's direction do listen to at least what we, outside, perceive of all this. I hope being part of the EF becomes once again a job that everyone would want to have and that the people that stay working in it do so in a healthy and productive environment.