Niran Babalola

@danfinlay legendary run. 🫡

Today is my last day at Consensys, where I've been building MetaMask for over ten years. I'm burned out and need to spend time with my family. Wishing the team the best — they have an amazing road ahead of them.

Jack is right: companies will be transformed to put intelligence at the center of a swarm that offers its services to the market. The same needs to happen to our whole society. We all have much to offer beyond our labor, and we'll need to organize for it to be valued.

@DennisonBertram 🫡

This is the end folks.

@VitalikButerin is verkle completely abandoned?

Now, execution layer changes. I've already talked about account abstraction, multidimensional gas, BALs, and ZK-EVMs. I've also talked here about a short-term EVM upgrade that I think will be super-valuable: a vectorized math precompile (basically, do 32-bit or potentially 64-bit operations on lists of numbers at the same time; in principle this could accelerate many hashes, STARK validation, FHE, lattice-based quantum-resistane signatures, and more by 8-64x); think "the GPU for the EVM". firefly.social/post/x/2027405… Today I'll focus on two big things: state tree changes, and VM changes. State tree changes are in this roadmap. VM changes (ie. EVM -> RISC-V or something better) are longer-term and are still more non-consensus, but I have high conviction that it will become "the obvious thing to do" once state tree changes and the long-term state roadmap (see ethresear.ch/t/hyper-scalin… ) are finished, so I'll make my case for it here. What these two have in common is: * They are the big bottlenecks that we have to address if we want efficient proving (tree + VM are like >80%) * They're basically mandatory for various client-side proving use cases * They are "deep" changes that many shrink away from, thinking that it is more "pragmatic" to be incrementalist I'll make the case for both. # Binary trees The state tree change (worked on by @gballet and many others) is eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7864, switching from the current hexary keccak MPT to a binary tree based on a more efficient hash function. This has the following benefits: * 4x shorter Merkle branches (because binary is 32*log(n) and hexary is 512*log(n)/4), which makes client-side branch verification more viable. This makes Helios, PIR and more 4x cheaper by data bandwidth * Proving efficiency. 3-4x comes from shorter Merkle branches. On top of that, the hash function change: either blake3 [perhaps 3x vs keccak] or a Poseidon variant [100x, but more security work to be done] * Client-side proving: if you want ZK applications that compose with the ethereum state, instead of making their own tree like today, then the ethereum state tree needs to be prover-friendly. * Cheaper access for adjacent slots: the binary tree design groups together storage slots into "pages" (eg. 64-256 slots, so 2-8 kB). This allows storage to get the same efficiency benefits as code in terms of loading and editing lots of it at a time, both in raw execution and in the prover. The block header and the first ~1-4 kB of code and storage live in the same page. Many dapps today already load a lot of data from the first few storage slots, so this could save them >10k gas per tx * Reduced variance in access depth (loads from big contracts vs small contracts) * Binary trees are simpler * Opportunity to add any metadata bits we end up needing for state expiry Zooming out a bit, binary trees are an "omnibus" that allows us to take all of our learnings from the past ten years about what makes a good state tree, and actually apply them. # VM changes See also: ethereum-magicians.org/t/long-term-l1… One reason why the protocol gets uglier over time with more special cases is that people have a certain latent fear of "using the EVM". If a wallet feature, privacy protocol, or whatever else can be done without introducing this "big scary EVM thing", there's a noticeable sigh of relief. To me, this is very sad. Ethereum's whole point is its generality, and if the EVM is not good enough to actually meet the needs of that generality, then we should tackle the problem head-on, and make a better VM. This means: * More efficient than EVM in raw execution, to the point where most precompiles become unnecessary * More prover-efficient than EVM (today, provers are written in RISC-V, hence my proposal to just make the new VM be RISC-V) * Client-side-prover friendly. You should be able to, client-side, make ZK-proofs about eg. what happens if your account gets called with a certain piece of data * Maximum simplicity. A RISC-V interpreter is only a couple hundred lines of code, it's what a blockchain VM "should feel like" This is still more speculative and non-consensus. Ethereum would certainly be *fine* if all we do is EVM + GPU. But a better VM can make Ethereum beautiful and great. A possible deployment roadmap is: 1. NewVM (eg. RISC-V) only for precompiles: 80% of today's precompiles, plus many new ones, become blobs of NewVM code 2. Users get the ability to deploy NewVM contracts 3. EVM is retired and turns into a smart contract written in NewVM EVM users experience full backwards compatibility except gas cost changes (which will be overshadowed by the next few years of scaling work). And we get a much more prover-efficient, simpler and cleaner protocol. firefly.social/post/farcaster…

Crypto's original vision was radical: build a fairer economy from scratch. Speculation brought the energy and the capital, but the vision is still there, waiting for us to follow through.

Brands paid NBC $8M for 30 seconds of your attention. You got nothing. We need a new economy where we're the owners, not the product.

@danyalprout @_jxom Another way of thinking about it is that wallets should use fillTransaction/maxPriorityFeePerGas, but apps that generate outlier transactions should use meterPriorityFeePerGas before handing the transaction to the wallet to sign.

@danyalprout @_jxom Maybe! But perhaps most users should accept the standard maxPriorityFeePerGas instead of outbidding resource metering. If normal users need to win an auction, that's a bug to be fixed by repricing the resource. The metered fee auction is for users who know they're outliers.

Viem 2.40 adds support for `eth_fillTransaction` (if supported by the execution node) for locally signed transactions (local accounts). Combined with `eth_sendRawTransactionSync`, this decreases the amount of RPC calls to fulfil a transaction from 5+ to only 2.

@DennisonBertram @swyx I think the "todo list app" for agents is a family office

@swyx I am increasingly excited about this, I dont know what to build on.

pretty sure that claude code sdk just destroyed every agent framework startup in existence lmao, holy shit look at this

@VitalikButerin @pbrody Another way of looking at it is that American Express just isn't ambitious enough. But if the same operating model were the basis of a "greedy institution," rents extracted by anyone else would be seen as a loss. Only I lose today when rents are extracted!

@VitalikButerin @pbrody Getting the best deal falls short of the full opportunity. I want a single rent-seeking intermediary for all purchases, and I should pay the rents instead of trying to avoid them. But I get to choose the intermediary who allocates those rents the best. A rent union, in effect.

@gfodor this is the console for running Genie 3 and its successor world models. and with high fidelity, camera-driven avatars that headsets can't match. the holodeck will be a handheld

I've been trying to crack handheld virtual reality. I think I’ve finally got it. Introducing Portal. Portal lets you play unmodified VR content with just a tablet and a phone. This early version of Portal aims to solve some big long-standing pain points for VR devs. A 🧵 👇

gpt-5-high-fast is the smartest person I know

🟦

@Oxxbid trending/recommended accounts, not arbitrary coins. coins that aren't associated with creators make it harder to understand what the app actually is: a feed of people you believe in so much that you put money on it

question — if you were to choose what appears on the main page of TBA, what would you include? – Mini apps - Balance – Trending coins – Watchlist – Something else…?

@WilsonCusack @jessepollak merchants with large affiliate marketing budgets so I can use their affiliate spend to burn my token

When and where do you most wish you could pay with crypto online, and why? :)

@balajis Is that actually true? Regardless of whether all this is a good idea, Vietnam could sell off foreign currency reserves to strengthen their currency, which would adjust the trade balance further. They could even do negative tariffs by subsidizing US imports until trade balances.

Uncle Sam cannot get a better deal from Vietnam than free. Vietnamese women grind in factories to produce Nikes, while Uncle Sam sends them printed money in return. Who is ripping off whom?

@koeppelmann I think the idea is to organize in ways that produce loyalty from economic self-interest. There's lots of prior art for this from plain old loyalty networks that we haven't really tried at all. Ethereum is a loyalty network for financial transactions, but with poor economics.

I miss the old Ethereum days, when we assumed everyone would act in their own self-interest, and we tried to build systems that allow coordination and cooperation anyhow. Now it’s flipped to: ‘L2s should contribute to ETH’s value because we all like each other so much.’

@tzancafanbazatu @yishan @AskYatharth @GreeneElizabeth Instead of thinking of it as "capital," I think of it as promises. Everyone starts to lose faith in each other's promises, which makes everyone less willing to make investments that all have risks. So the economic machinery slows down, and in a way that reinforces the slowdown.

@yishan @AskYatharth @GreeneElizabeth But the confusing part is capital is the blood, yet capital is abstract and socially constructed.

what exactly.. happens in a depression? the people still know how to make food, like they did two years ago. the wealth production infra stays same what exactly goes scarce