Mario Laul
978 posts
@mlphresearch
https://t.co/5pGMkdYF65 https://t.co/i4OIpFpEnM
Today, the Foundation’s Board released the EF Mandate. This document, which was first intended for EF members, reaffirms the promise of Ethereum, and the role of EF within this ecosystem.
This is a major development for stablecoins and thus onchain finance more broadly.
The SEC just handed crypto its most important win of the year so far, but nobody’s really talking about it. Here’s what actually happened today, and what comes next.
There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.
For anyone who would like to hear Mark Carney’s outstanding Davos speech in full here it is. This is what true global leadership looks like. Canada should be immensely proud today, because they are leading the fight back when others dare not. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRBDT4mB/
Announcing ZKsync Managed Services from Matter Labs. Dedicated, production‑grade ZK Stack chains, plus RPC, block explorer, indexers, and event delivery. Operated 24/7 by the team behind the protocol. Blog: zksync.io/blog/zksync-ma… Website: zksync.io/managed-servic…
Institutions want to build on Ethereum and leverage its incorruptibility, hard finality, and global liquidity. But many financial use-cases can’t be run on a chain where everything is public by default. Here’s how Prividium extends Ethereum for enterprises:
i've read hundreds of comments over the last two days. and had 1-1 conversations with many of you. we're always listening, and we deeply care about what we're building and the impact it has on our space. i shared a few days ago that we have an ambitious vision for opensea. the world is changing. we're going to see a new economy emerge where people trade nearly everything digitally, onchain. major crypto, memecoins, collectibles, tokenized real-world assets, perps, prediction markets, whatever people are valuing online - it will all be tradable on opensea. all of your assets. all of your wallets. all of your chains. all in one place. you can already buy anything on opensea with virtually any currency. you can purchase an ETH mainnet NFT with SOL. or with USDC on Base. or with your memecoins across 24 chains. and the ability to purchase directly in fiat will be expanding dramatically with our new mobile app. we have deep conviction that abstracting away complexity will yield a magical experience for users. one that will help us make a significant dent in mainstream adoption of crypto. this includes asking hard questions, including reevaluating whether denominating everything in a single coin is the best user experience. or even makes sense given where we're headed. now, we made a mistake this week. it was actually unintentional. we never meant to overwrite people's defaulted settings and start showing USD to the majority of our existing users. that was our bad - and it's been fixed. that aside, we also heard a lot of reasonable concerns from the community. and we recognize that opensea’s marketplace today is being used primarily by those who are more crypto native. we're going to make some adjustments. • opensea on desktop will be defaulted back to crypto vs. USD. however, we will be placing the USD value underneath the crypto price on NFT listings. for those that want to see only USD, that toggle will remain available, as it always has. • we understand that some of you want to see specific crypto values in the top right corner where we show your full wallet balance, e.g. ETH, WETH. and not a USD consolidated value. while it is quite standard to sum the currencies that are in your wallet in USD, the team has some ideas here and we'll hopefully have something to show you in the coming days. we're in a unique position to serve both crypto natives and grow our space by welcoming millions of new users onchain. we appreciate the feedback of this community as we build for that vision. onward and upward.
