Marius Smith

Life update: I’ve joined @ethereumfndn to lead enterprise efforts across MENA. Excited to help institutions across the region build on Ethereum, and to work more closely with @Snapcrackle & @davwals, the enterprise team, the EF org, and the broader @ethereum community. Onwards!

Today, we dive into crypto ownership in Denmark during Nordic Crypto Adoption Week 2026 🇩🇰 Join us live at 11:00 CET for the latest data and insights, such as: - More than half a million Danes now own crypto. - 1 in 4 Danes expect to own crypto in 2036. - Among adults under 40 in Denmark, more own crypto than stocks. In honor of tomorrow’s Parliament Election, we are also joined by - Mohammad Rona (@mohammad_rona) (MP @moderaterne_dk) - Steffen W. Frølund (@SteffenFrolund) (MP @LiberalAlliance) - Marcus Danielsson (@Marcusdaniels94) (PC @venstredk) ... for an election debate, discussing the urgent need for fair crypto taxation in Denmark as well as what can - or should - be done for the Danish blockchain and crypto companies to ensure growth, innovation, and the advancement of critical digital infrastructure in Denmark? You’ll also hear perspectives from leading voices in the industry: - Marius Smith (@mariuslsmith) (Enterprise Lead MENA, @ethereumfndn) - Karina Rothoff Brix (@RothoffBrix) (Country Manager Denmark, @firiapp) - Vetle Andreas Gusgaard Lunde (@VetleLunde) (Head of Research, @K33Research) - Jakob Mikkel Hansen (@Jayks7) (CEO, Nordic Blockchain Association) - Magnus Jones (@themagnusjones) (Board Member, Nordic Blockchain Association) - Morten Myrstad (@myrstad) (Founder & Editor, @kaupr_io) …discussing the latest data and trajectory of crypto in Denmark. Streaming live at 11:00 CET - see you then: linkedin.com/events/7438962… Nordic Crypto Adoption Week 2026 is brought to you by Nordic Blockchain Association, @K33Research, and @kaupr_io in partnership with @firiapp, @blockpit_io, @bravaxyz, d-fine, and @KvarnX

On Monday in NYC: Etherealize will join 150+ executives from major US institutions at the Institutional Ethereum Forum, hosted by @ethereumfndn. $250+ trillion in assets represented in one room to discuss Ethereum's role as infrastructure for the future of finance.

Ethereum is getting faster. Deposit time from L1 to L2s and exchanges goes down to 13 seconds. This is the new industry standard. Rolling out in the next few months x.com/_julianma/stat…

Now, the quantum resistance roadmap. Today, four things in Ethereum are quantum-vulnerable: * consensus-layer BLS signatures * data availability (KZG commitments+proofs) * EOA signatures (ECDSA) * Application-layer ZK proofs (KZG or groth16) We can tackle these step by step: ## Consensus-layer signatures Lean consensus includes fully replacing BLS signatures with hash-based signatures (some variant of Winternitz), and using STARKs to do aggregation. Before lean finality, we stand a good chance of getting the Lean available chain. This also involves hash-based signatures, but there are much fewer signatures (eg. 256-1024 per slot), so we do not need STARKs for aggregation. One important thing upstream of this is choosing the hash function. This may be "Ethereum's last hash function", so it's important to choose wisely. Conventional hashes are too slow, and the most aggressive forms of Poseidon have taken hits on their security analysis recently. Likely options are: * Poseidon2 plus extra rounds, potentially non-arithmetic layers (eg. Monolith) mixed in * Poseidon1 (the older version of Poseidon, not vulnerable to any of the recent attacks on Poseidon2, but 2x slower) * BLAKE3 or similar (take the most efficient conventional hash we know) ## Data availability Today, we rely pretty heavily on KZG for erasure coding. We could move to STARKs, but this has two problems: 1. If we want to do 2D DAS, then our current setup for this relies on the "linearity" property of KZG commitments; with STARKs we don't have that. However, our current thinking is that it should be sufficient given our scale targets to just max out 1D DAS (ie. PeerDAS). Ethereum is taking a more conservative posture, it's not trying to be a high-scale data layer for the world. 2. We need proofs that erasure coded blobs are correctly constructed. KZG does this "for free". STARKs can substitute, but a STARK is ... bigger than a blob. So you need recursive starks (though there's also alternative techniques, that have their own tradeoffs). This is okay, but the logistics of this get harder if you want to support distributed blob selection. Summary: it's manageable, but there's a lot of engineering work to do. ## EOA signatures Here, the answer is clear: we add native AA (see eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8141 ), so that we get first-class accounts that can use any signature algorithm. However, to make this work, we also need quantum-resistant signature algorithms to actually be viable. ECDSA signature verification costs 3000 gas. Quantum-resistant signatures are ... much much larger and heavier to verify. We know of quantum-resistant hash-based signatures that are in the ~200k gas range to verify. We also know of lattice-based quantum-resistant signatures. Today, these are extremely inefficient to verify. However, there is work on vectorized math precompiles, that let you perform operations (+, *, %, dot product, also NTT / butterfly permutations) that are at the core of lattice math, and also STARKs. This could greatly reduce the gas cost of lattice-based signatures to a similar range, and potentially go even lower. The long-term fix is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation, which could reduce these gas overheads to near-zero. ## Proofs Today, a ZK-SNARK costs ~300-500k gas. A quantum-resistant STARK is more like 10m gas. The latter is unacceptable for privacy protocols, L2s, and other users of proofs. The solution again is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation. So let's talk about what this is. In EIP-8141, transactions have the ability to include a "validation frame", during which signature verifications and similar operations are supposed to happen. Validation frames cannot access the outside world, they can only look at their calldata and return a value, and nothing else can look at their calldata. This is designed so that it's possible to replace any validation frame (and its calldata) with a STARK that verifies it (potentially a single STARK for all the validation frames in a block). This way, a block could "contain" a thousand validation frames, each of which contains either a 3 kB signature or even a 256 kB proof, but that 3-256 MB (and the computation needed to verify it) would never come onchain. Instead, it would all get replaced by a proof verifying that the computation is correct. Potentially, this proving does not even need to be done by the block builder. Instead, I envision that it happens at mempool layer: every 500ms, each node could pass along the new valid transactions that it has seen, along with a proof verifying that they are all valid (including having validation frames that match their stated effects). The overhead is static: only one proof per 500ms. Here's a post where I talk about this: ethresear.ch/t/recursive-st… firefly.social/post/farcaster…

This week in Enterprise Onchain 👇 🏦 Harvard opens $87M ETH position. First ever Ethereum allocation from their $56.9B endowment. 💶 BNP Paribas tokenizes euro MMF on Ethereum. Natively issued (not wrapped) fund shares with on-chain instant settlement. One of the first from a major European bank moving from pilot to production ⚫ BlackRock reveals staked ETH ETF economics. 82% of staking rewards flow to shareholders, BlackRock + Coinbase split 18%. 📊 Aave hits $1B in tokenized RWAs. first DeFi lending protocol to reach this. Dam good. 🔵 Base moves off the OP Stack. Building its own unified codebase, targeting 6 hard forks/year. Still settling on Ethereum. ⚖️ CFTC Chair says crypto market structure bill is "on the cusp" would clarify CFTC vs SEC jurisdiction. 🛡️ Ethereum Foundation publishes 2026 priorities. Gas limit beyond 100M, native account abstraction, cross-L2 interop, and a new post-quantum security team ⛏️ Bitmine now holds 3.62% of all ETH. Bought ~$90M in ETH last week. 📈 RWA market cap on Ethereum tops $15B. Up ~200% YoY

One more notable update: 🔹 Jozo issues Saudi Arabia's first tokenized property deed through REGA's regulatory sandbox - a Kingdom first.

Kicking off a weekly roundup of blockchain developments across MENA - here are some of the key updates I'm tracking: 🔹 @getstake closes a $31M Series B, led by @EmiratesNBD (with Mubadala and MEVP) to scale tokenized real estate and expand into Saudi Arabia. 🔹 @BeyonMoney × @bitoasis debut a regulated fiat-to-crypto wallet across the GCC. 🔹 @CVVC merges with Abu Dhabi’s @Elixir_Capital for cross-border blockchain ventures. 🔹 UAE Royal Group disclosed holdings of 6,782 BTC (~$454M) through Citadel Mining. 🔹 @Land_Department launches Phase 2 of its real estate tokenization initiative with @Ripple Custody on the XRP Ledger - projecting $16B by 2033. More next Sunday. If I missed anything, please feel free to drop it below.

@xnxswe @EmiratesNBD Good catch on ENBD, @xnxswe! I didn’t see anything for ZKSync from my side, but please let me know if I missed anything

@mariuslsmith @GetStake @EmiratesNBD @beyonmoney @EmiratesNBD_AE probably, since account you link is suspended. Now mention of @zksync ?

BNP Paribas launches Euro money market fund on Ethereum ⚡ Ethereum remains the default chain for institutions to launch onchain products due to its superior security, liquidity and resilience Link below 👇

Our team just shipped the interactive Institutional Privacy Map, seeing how the privacy paths are interconnected and visualised is pretty eye opening.

The EF expansion into MENA continues. In less than 3 months, we have launched an EF hub in Dubai with @Hadronfc and now an enterprise lead in MENA A lot more to come.

We surveyed 4,658 stablecoin holders and prospective users across 15 countries to understand how people use stablecoins, with @YouGov @coinbase @artemis What emerged: willingness to use stablecoins is ahead of real-world spendability. The next growth unlock is acceptance and integration. #StablecoinUtility 🔗 Get the full findings: bvnk.com/utility

Ethereum is for DeFi.

We’ve partnered with @Uniswap to enable on-chain trading of (BUIDL) BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund through UniswapX.

@ditto_ @eigencloud All the best @ditto_ !

Today is my last day at @EigenCloud. It has been a true pleasure serving on the Business / GTM team, driving initiatives powered by Verifiable Cloud. Verifiability is the essence of this industry. It is the single factor that differentiates crypto from every other sector. We often forget why we are here, but without this core value, nothing else matters. Eigen is one of the few teams that truly embodies this—building products to pursue it, starting with crypto and expanding to AI. My journey went full circle: from building a unique AVS for 2 years to joining the team to discover new use cases and support other builders with that experience. The best part of Eigen was the density of talent, integrity, and kindness. It was a huge privilege to work with you all! @sreeramkannan @dabit3 @0xpratik @jt_rose @jamvb_ @mattmurrs @nima_vaziri @0xkydo @mariuslsmith @DeFiYeti @cointrainer @Mustafaxyz9 @aashat and more :) As for what’s next? TBD. But one thing is sure: I’m heading back to the trenches to do more of the deep research and writing that I genuinely love 🫡.

The Frontier is Open MegaETH mainnet has been live for weeks to infra teams like @LayerZero_Core, @eigen_da, @chainlink, @redstone_defi, @Alchemy and @safe. Today is day 1 for builders. Apps will deploy and test while users track progress through explorers and dashboards.

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