kaereste.eth 💗🦇🔊

Listening to David’s explanation of why he sold was pretty mind numbing lol… I recently shared that I was a toxic Bitcoin maximalist for roughly 8 years, from 2017 to late 2024. Stablecoins are what initially made me revisit my thesis on Ethereum, and on ether as Ethereum’s native asset. That, combined with the rapid approach of the agentic economy - a world with an infinite number of autonomous economic actors sending value through stablecoins across a small handful of networks that society has deemed valuable - made me reevaluate further. So I went back and revisited my priors on Ethereum. Were my early concerns around centralization, monetary policy, and network effects still valid after all these years? Surely, yes. I set out to prove myself right. I found out I was wrong. The centralization concerns I had entirely faded. While I was 100% encapsulated in my Bitcoin bubble, Ethereum had slowly, quietly, and relentlessly built the only other WWIII-proof, global, credibly neutral, decentralized protocol. And in some areas, Ethereum had actually become more decentralized than Bitcoin: client diversity, validator distribution, and a secure long-term scaling/security model through proof of stake. Ethereum had matured. It had grown out of its early “shitcoin” association. It had become the only truly permissionless, censorship resistant, credibly neutral, and valuable protocol outside of Bitcoin. It grew up. That matters because the only reason I was ever Bitcoin-only was that, at the time, there were no other networks with the protocol traits that could plausibly make all of global finance, and eventually much of humanity, value them at the deepest level. Back then, it was only Bitcoin. So the irony here is incredible. Just as Ethereum and ether have finally matured, just as Ethereum has distanced itself from the decentralized-in-name-only, venture-backed, fake startup, “we’re hiding behind a blockchain” mentality, now a small group of influencers have decided to become negative on Ethereum. When Bitcoiners use the term “shitcoiner,” this is what they are usually talking about. Bag chasers. People who want their chain to act like a company. Permissioned. Hyper-structured. Marketing team. CEO. Quarterly reports. Revenue. Earnings. Some polished growth narrative for VCs. Basically, a bunch of stupid shit that already exists in the fiat world. The same world Bitcoin, and now Ethereum, were created to help us escape from. To suddenly be disappointed that Ethereum has a broader mandate than “pump my bag,” and is instead focused on hardening the traits that make the network valuable over decades, tells you a lot about how these people misunderstand it. CROPS is the value proposition. Censorship resistance. Resilience. Openness. Permissionlessness. Security. That is why society values Bitcoin. That is why society now values Ethereum. And that is why the Laura Shins, Ansems, and David Hoffmans of the world jumping ship now is so revealing. They are not leaving because the thesis broke. They are leaving because they never had the thesis in the first place. They do not and never have seen the value in decentralized, global, open systems - sanctuary technologies or neutral rails that can materially improve people’s lives. What they have always chased is a high-growth stock equivalent with a smaller market cap. A shiny new object that appears once or twice per cycle; violent upward momentum, narrative, and upside without the patience required to actually understand what is being built. They need to chase because they do not have the time horizon to hold a thesis and let conviction compound over time. CROPS is the entire value proposition. Do not let startup-brain influencers, who never understood why this ecosystem was created in the first place, gaslight you out of conviction.

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.

Has there been a huge vibe shift in CT over the last 2 weeks, or was that just me selling the last of my ETH

Chatted with the main regulators across Asia. The CLARITY Act is even more critical than I thought. Everyone is drawing a lot of inspiration from US regulations. The second the CLARITY Act passes, all Asia will fast follow within months.

ANTHROPIC: KPMG INTEGRATES CLAUDE ACROSS ITS CORE BUSINESS AND WORKFORCE OF MORE THAN 276,000 IN STRATEGIC ALLIANCE