THE GODFATHER II

Can i tell you what it's like to observe people that don't know that you're observing them? 1/4

Web3 is still early. Those who see it will win #Crypto #Web3

just stacked more ETH under 2k, feels like 2020 all over again when everyone was sleeping on it. either im early or im wrong but the risk/reward here is kinda insane rn

@ash_compaccxjn True but most "champions" from 2021 bear got wrecked this cycle. Only 13% of wallets that accumulated BTC at $16k still holding above $90k. Diamond hands are rarer than people think.

Bear markets build champions. Bull markets reward them #BTC

@chert_noduscas What exactly makes you think we're still early when we've been saying this for 5 years straight?

Web3 is still early. Those who see it will win #Crypto #Web3

Honestly not surprised crypto isn't a top voting issue for most people right now. We're still early and most folks just don't get it yet. That'll change once they see what we're building. #crypto #adoption

The trust gap is real, but it won't last forever. Once people see actual utility beyond speculation, minds will change. We're still so early. 🚀 #CryptoAdoption

Strategy hitting pause on their BTC buys before earnings drop 👀 smart move or missing the dip? either way they've already stacked enough sats to make us all jealous lol #Bitcoin

Interesting how Iran's elite are quietly building crypto infrastructure while publicly staying cautious. When power players move in behind the scenes, I pay attention. Could signal bigger adoption ahead. #crypto

Super PACs pouring millions into midterms while public trust hits new lows? This disconnect is exactly why we need transparency on-chain. Money talks but voters aren't buying it yet. #CryptoPolitics

@trilobite_eye "might actually be different this time" - famous last words before -80%. At least you're already numb to the pain 🤷

just grabbed more ETH on this dip. feels like we've seen this pattern before but idk, might actually be different this time. anyway my portfolio is 60% down so what's a little more at this point lol

@termite_mound Welcome to 2021 bro, some of us have been enjoying sub-cent fees while you were paying $50 to move $20 on ETH 💀

been using solana for a few months now and honestly the speed is wild. transactions go through so fast compared to eth. fees are basically nothing too which is nice for my wallet

@Th3L3dg3rV3 bro if you're holding something for 8 months and forgot about it, that's not collecting that's just bagholding with extra steps 💀

just realized i've been holding this NFT for like 8 months and completely forgot about it lol. at least the art still looks cool i guess. anyone else just collecting digital stuff and forgetting about it?

@Vaulted_Wejx Wait until you experience your first network outage, then tell me about that "bright future" 💀

just watched SOL process transactions faster than i can refresh my screen 🚀 seriously this network hits different when you've experienced other chains. the future is looking bright ☀️ #Solana #SOL

@galled_camshaft Wait, you don't see NFTs as freedom tech? Owning provably scarce digital assets without intermediaries sounds pretty "be your own bank" to me though?

Held through every Bitcoin cycle, but NFTs still puzzle me. We went from "be your own bank" to... digital trading cards? Maybe I'm just old school, but I miss when crypto was about freedom, not flipping JPEGs for a quick buck. #Bitcoin #CryptoThoughts

been watching DeFi stuff lately and honestly kinda jealous of what eth people can do with their coins. like we're just holding while they're earning yields and trading tokens. bitcoin is solid but man feels limiting sometimes

@CobaltCiphf1nc 2017 holder and still preaching patience? Real ones from that cycle are already trading circles around the HODLers while you wait for "conviction" to pay your bills 💀

Been holding since 2017 and Bitcoin's taught me more about patience than any guru ever could. It's not about getting rich quick—it's about believing in something decentralized when the world wasn't ready. The volatility humbles you. The conviction sustains you. #Bitcoin #HODL

@0x0mn1V3 Bro you can't just say "fundamentals shifted" and dip without explaining. Either spill it or stop farming engagement with vague posts 🍿

ETH just quietly did something most people missed. While everyone's arguing about the next narrative, the fundamentals shifted in a way that changes everything for 2025.

Finally, the block building pipeline. In Glamsterdam, Ethereum is getting ePBS, which lets proposers outsource to a free permissionless market of block builders. This ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization, but it leaves the question: what do we do about block builder centralization? And what are the _other_ problems in the block building pipeline that need to be addressed, and how? This has both in-protocol and extra-protocol components. ## FOCIL FOCIL is the first step into in-protocol multi-participant block building. FOCIL lets 16 randomly-selected attesters each choose a few transactions, which *must* be included somewhere in the block (the block gets rejected otherwise). This means that even if 100% of block building is taken over by one hostile actor, they cannot prevent transactions from being included, because the FOCILers will push them in. ## "Big FOCIL" This is more speculative, but has been discussed as a possible next step. The idea is to make the FOCILs bigger, so they can include all of the transactions in the block. We avoid duplication by having the i'th FOCIL'er by default only include (i) txs whose sender address's first hex char is i, and (ii) txs that were around but not included in the previous slot. So at the cost of one slot delay, only censored txs risk duplication. Taking this to its logical conclusion, the builder's role could become reduced to ONLY including "MEV-relevant" transactions (eg. DEX arbitrage), and computing the state transition. ## Encrypted mempools Encrypted mempools are one solution being explored to solve "toxic MEV": attacks such as sandwiching and frontrunning, which are exploitative against users. If a transaction is encrypted until it's included, no one gets the opportunity to "wrap" it in a hostile way. The technical challenge is: how to guarantee validity in a mempool-friendly and inclusion-friendly way that is efficient, and what technique to use to guarantee that the transaction will actually get decrypted once the block is made (and not before). ## The transaction ingress layer One thing often ignored in discussions of MEV, privacy, and other issues is the network layer: what happens in between a user sending out a transaction, and that transaction making it into a block? There are many risks if a hostile actor sees a tx "in the clear" inflight: * If it's a defi trade or otherwise MEV-relevant, they can sandwich it * In many applications, they can prepend some other action which invalidates it, not stealing money, but "griefing" you, causing you to waste time and gas fees * If you are sending a sensitive tx through a privacy protocol, even if it's all private onchain, if you send it through an RPC, the RPC can see what you did, if you send it through the public mempool, any analytics agency that runs many nodes will see what you did There has recently been increasing work on network-layer anonymization for transactions: exploring using Tor for routing transactions, ideas around building a custom ethereum-focused mixnet, non-mixnet designs that are more latency-minimized (but bandwidth-heavier, which is ok for transactions as they are tiny) like Flashnet, etc. This is an open design space, I expect the kohaku initiative @ncsgy will be interested in integrating pluggable support for such protocols, like it is for onchain privacy protocols. There is also room for doing (benign, pro-user) things to transactions before including them onchain; this is very relevant for defi. Basically, we want ideal order-matching, as a passive feature of the network layer without dependence on servers. Of course enabling good uses of this without enabling sandwiching involves cryptography or other security, some important challenges there. ## Long-term distributed block building There is a dream, that we can make Ethereum truly like BitTorrent: able to process far more transactions than any single server needs to ever coalesce locally. The challenge with this vision is that Ethereum has (and indeed a core value proposition is) synchronous shared state, so any tx could in principle depend on any other tx. This centralizes block building. "Big FOCIL" handles this partially, and it could be done extra-protocol too, but you still need one central actor to put everything in order and execute it. We could come up with designs that address this. One idea is to do the same thing that we want to do for state: acknowledge that >95% of Ethereum's activity doesn't really _need_ full globalness, though the 5% that does is often high-value, and create new categories of txs that are less global, and so friendly to fully distributed building, and make them much cheaper, while leaving the current tx types in place but (relatively) more expensive. This is also an open and exciting long-term future design space. firefly.social/post/lens/8144…

WAGMI fam 💎🙌

@leionnell Smart money stays boring. While they're gambling on the next dog coin you're actually building wealth 💪

been holding bitcoin for years and every cycle i watch people chase the new shiny altcoin. some hit, most don't. honestly just feels like extra stress i don't need