jefflau.eth

Thread of my threads distilling the complicated into the simple. Previous topics include: - Zero Knowledge Proofs - EIP-1559 - Rollups - ETH2 and the merge I’ll add new threads here for easy referencing for myself and others.

Updates since then: * Deepseek v4 is out. There *is* a 2-bit quant that can run within 90 GB ( huggingface.co/antirez/deepse… ), and it works, however it's only fast on Apple hardware (I've head ~35 tok/s). On AMD, it's ~7 tok/s. IMO actually taking the effort to properly support more than one hardware manufacturer is a great example of the difference between mere "decentralized AI" and genuine "CROPS AI". I hope we can become better at this. * github.com/vbuterin/messa… also has alpha telegram support now. However, the path to adding your account is quite janky * github.com/Luce-Org/luceb… looks promising as a way to run "dense" models (eg. Qwen 27B) more efficiently. It's janky, but on my 5090 laptop it seems to be ~2x more tok/s than llama.cpp * VoxTerm (local AI recording, no third-party servers) continues to be developed github.com/dmarzzz/VoxTerm And there's a lot more projects coming on the horizon. One other thing that has been on my mind is that there's actually a lot of intersection between "CROPS ethereum access layer" and "CROPS AI". For example, we want a ZK way to make (paid) calls to remote LLMs. But if we have this, then it's just as useful for solving another problem: private RPC reads in Ethereum. Another example: application-specific finetuned LLMs. Leanstral ( mistral.ai/news/leanstral ; I get ~38 tok/s on AMD) fits into < 70 GB, but can hold its own against 1T models on writing Lean code. Things like this are a huge boon for writing more secure code ( vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0… ). We should have models finetuned for Ethereum-related use cases as well.

@OndoFinance @galenlawkun RIP

It is with profound sadness that we announce the unexpected passing of Nathan Allman, Ondo's founder. Our hearts are with his family and loved ones. Nate’s brilliance, humility, and drive shaped every part of what Ondo is today. His belief in the power of technology to create a more open, accessible financial system lives on in everything we build. The impact he had on this industry, and on all of us personally, cannot be overstated. Nate also helped us build a durable organization with experienced leaders across all facets of the business. Ian De Bode, Ondo Finance’s longtime President, will serve as CEO. Ian has been leading our strategy, product, and day-to-day operations for over two years and has the full confidence of the leadership team. We will continue building what Nate started. That is the most meaningful way we know to honor him.

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.

@LJFriarETH Take care of your health and family!

🙏 LIFE UPDATE 🙏: 😢😊 After this week, you’re not likely going to hear as much from me, going forward and for a while. Let me make it clear, I’m not abandoning #ENS, crypto or web3 and even its grand return (because it WILL be back) won’t suddenly make me super active. I believe in #ENS But as people who follow me, it’s best to clarify. It’s bittersweet. I’ll start with the sweet. You know that my wife is expecting. And we found out that we’re having a girl. That’s great and I hope she takes after her mother in life and common sense. I will hopefully be the best dad I can be. The bitter, very bitter, is that some health issues from about 8 years ago have resurfaced, and not wishing to bore you with the details, means I can’t focus on anything other than my health and what’s in front of me. Being around for my wife and my daughter. The little I have in finances will need to go back into my family. For my sins, I still believe in ENS and am not actively looking to get out. I guess I can hold. But if anyone wants to take their chances on any of the few I have left, I’ll hear you out. Otherwise, thanks for reading and I’ll hopefully see you down the road back at 100%…

@AlexSlobodnik This is just for speed?

For a small well defined task a local model will absolutely destroy a frontier model open.substack.com/pub/aiobservat…

[Social Proposal] ENSv2 Pricing: 5+ Character Name Adjustment, Multi-Year Discounts, Grace Period Change ... Now live on snapshot discuss.ens.domains/t/social-ens-v…

@tomhschmidt Just wear a very large coat with huge pockets with all your extras. As long as you wear it, it counts as clothing!

why do no airlines let you bring on an additional carry-ons for a fee? they already sell basic economy with no carry-on, so there’s clearly an established price for an overhead bag.

It’s our birthday 🎉 9 years of ENS on Ethereum, naming the internet one .eth at a time. May the 4th be with you ✨

Because names have more meaning than 0x0fCa5194baA59a362a835031d9C4A25970effE68 A human movement needs a human meaningful name

ENSv2 is coming. A new foundation for names, built for integrations and subnames at scale. What will you build?

This is a totally fair comment. We built the registry and registrar to be totally immutable (.eth became immutable a few years back - ownership could not be revoked by anyone, on the rules of pricing/registration/renewal). The only way we're able to do this is entirely fork the protocol and migrate users over to the new protocol, which is exactly how things like the DAO fork work. It's not that it was a code change in the middle of working contract, rather a social agreement move to a better system. We can't promise this won't ever happen again, but we believe ENSv2 is the foundation for the forever ENS as the architecture allows more flexibility and wouldn't require a migration/fork for things we haven't thought of. We're all fallible and things we knew about ENS back then were way less than we know now.

I don't care about the fee, the problem is protocol rules as a moving target that can't be trustlessly relied on. I don't want practically forever, I want actually forever. The solution is allowing users of my smart contract a thousand years from now to permissionlessly pay the ENS renewal fee on the smart contract's behalf, but I can't make that trustless in face of ENS mutability.

Built on what works and already has an active community — ENS. Please don't try to reinvent the wheel again with naming services, it's just a distraction from getting this technology in the hands of users. This is more important than duplicating protocol effort.

Security notice: please avoid visiting any eth(dot)limo links for now. The ethlimo team is currently investigating an incident affecting their DNS registrar. Until they confirm everything is back to normal, users should not use any eth(dot)limo links. This does not apply to eth(dot)link and does not affect ENS names themselves. We are sharing this out of caution and will provide updates if needed.

our domaim appears to have been compromised and the eth.limo domain has been hijacked. We're actively working with all parties involved to assess the situation and remediate the problem.

@jalilwahdat @evmnow One of my favourite contracts

ETHRegistrarController.sol One of the finest views of Ethereum

incredible seeing the SEC cite @ensdomains as a premiere example of a legitimate digital tool using blockchain technology 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

@minimalisam It’a coming

@Jefflau Gotta build in better renewal reminder tooling my guy

Just use ENS

@Marczeller Good luck with your next chapter Marc!

A new chapter is starting today. Yet for Aave, nothing will change in the short term; there's a lot of inertia, and liquidity is sticky, so there's no reason to be concerned. We had quite a few good things in the pipeline, and we will deliver them during the transition period. You already know this, I'm too hungry to retire, so it's the end of a chapter but not of the journey.

If you recently bought a [name].crypto or [name].agent domain name from a third party naming service, this is important to know: These domain extensions (and many others that sound fun/cool) are not anchored to the global DNS root- meaning no one actually controls or guarantees them! ICANN (the body that governs real internet domains) could assign .agent to a completely different registry tomorrow. This means that now two systems claim to have the same domain string, and your wallet and a browser would resolve it differently. Ironically, this actually makes things MORE dangerous since someone could lose funds sending to a name that resolves to two different places depending on context. This is called 'name collision', and avoiding name collision is how the internet can operate functionally in the first place. Always check the IANA's root zone database (link in second tweet) before you purchase a domain name. If the TLD isn't listed there, it's not anchored to the global DNS root, meaning that you don't actually own what you think you own since its not 'real' internet infrastructure.

ENS has always been an Ethereum aligned application, and that was true even if we went to Namechain. Now that L1 is becoming the most attractive place to stay, there’s no reason to lose all the benefits of directly being on Ethereum.