dosmannroth @dosmannroth

The cryptographic world computer: vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0… My attempt to express in somewhat concise terms the true meaning of basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota. It's really not just a blockchain anymore. It's a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties. FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, state management, formal verification, advanced mempool improvements (including privacy), and the longer-term specter of obfuscation all mentioned.

Once you consume enough tech media, you will realize that everything is converging. Companies use the same dark mode logo, founders go on the same shows, and political signaling becomes ubiquitous and dominant based on whichever side is currently in power or whoever is fronting the bill. This will continue well into the future, as it has for much of human history. However, as our lives become more digital, and our reliance on the creators of these systems grow, the consistent contradictions that they bring will become more noticeable to the naked eye, and thus feel more dangerous if we do not believe that we have an alternative to them; and that is why we must urgently build one. In my opinion, the premise and broader idea of a “somewhere else,” or in Vitalik’s terms, a “sanctuary” is that throughout human history our species has always sought hope and shelter by finding an alternative. For many, the USA, when it was first founded was an alternative; and now that alternative is far more dominant than what it was the alternative for (sorry England). I like using the USA analogy because it will immediately take down the idea that sanctuaries are some weird pipe dream of the naive; “but no brother, sanctuaries are literally the single most dominant things humans create and have created across millenia, and yes, Ethereum is a sanctuary.” *insert buff doge meme* But of course that doesn’t mean we begin to self congratulate ourselves in niche conferences where we call ourselves the “internets America.” Instead, it means we need to move with the world to increasingly be a sanctuary people want to consider, or more pressingly, even know about. For that we need scale, and that’s exactly what the strawmap does. I mean look at that beauty: the north stars are an L1 capable of roughly 10,000 TPS and an L2 ecosystem capable of roughly 10 million TPS + with finality measured in seconds rather vs minutes, all while simultaneously pursuing a private L1 with frontier post-quantum security. The one part of the scaling issue the strawmap that doesn’t address however, is social scaling, an area I find myself focusing on more than ever these days. But great steps are being taken and it looks like the strawmap of today seeks to scale the sanctuary until choosing somewhere else no longer requires choosing something worse. As today’s world further centralizes and technology in particular, faces geopolitical risk, an alternative becomes all the more desirable, and this alternative is looking good here. Ethereum.

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

2 months ago

I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( strawmap.org ). In general, a lot of overlap, but: * Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized) * Some things deprioritized (eg.

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0/ As AI systems become more powerful, formal verification – which is the discipline of using mathematics to prove computer programs correct – shows more and more promise. A guest thread by @big_tech_sux, lead developer of @vyperlang 🧵

Today we're launching EthSystems. We build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. Institutions want to use Ethereum, but one of the biggest problems is the lack of built-in, modular privacy tools. We were the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) for the past year. We had hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers, shipping open source work the whole time. Wall Street has found crypto as an asset class, but not yet as commercial infrastructure. Institutions want to run real flows on Ethereum: stablecoins, tokenized assets, settlement. These are businesses with billions of dollars on the line, and no bank will operate in full public view. On a public ledger, confidentiality is the hard part: each party to a transaction should see what it has a right to see, and nothing more. We have a year of proof of work: private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private settlement across chains, the Ethereum Privacy Map, and more. All with protocol specs and security properties, at our website. We've spent a decade working on privacy in crypto. We know there's no silver bullet. Different use cases need different systems, each designed, specified, and hardened properly, and someone has to do that work. That's why EthSystems exists. We're an independent, for-profit company, backed by long-term Ethereum-aligned investors. This is a decade-long transition, and we aren't going anywhere. If you're an institution that wants to build on Ethereum, talk to us. We're hiring: BD in New York, protocol engineers, ops: [email protected]

以太坊未来扩容和去中心化的一个关键就是证明系统。 简单说，证明系统就是让一方用很小的证明，证明自己确实正确执行了大量计算，而别人不用重新算一遍。 在今天的以太坊里，节点验证一个区块，核心方式还是我自己重新执行一遍区块里的交易，看看结果对不对。这叫 re-execution，重新执行验证。 但未来以太坊想走向的是，区块生产者或证明者执行交易，然后生成一个密码学证明；其他节点只需要验证这个证明，就能相信这批交易执行正确。 这就是 validity proof，有效性证明。 因为重新执行有一个瓶颈，每个验证节点都要亲自跑一遍计算，所以以太坊扩容时，不能无限提高执行量，否则普通节点会跟不上。 证明系统的意义是： 计算可以很大； 证明可以很小； 验证可以很快； 普通节点不用承担完整计算成本； 协议可以在保持去中心化的同时扩容。 Vitalik 提到的 STARK 是一种零知识/有效性证明技术，它的特点是： 可扩展：适合证明大量计算； 透明：不需要可信设置； 抗量子性更好：相比很多基于椭圆曲线的证明系统，更适合长期安全； 适合递归证明：可以把很多证明继续压缩成一个证明。 递归 STARK 是什么？ 递归证明可以理解成：证明一个证明是正确的。 比如： A 证明 1000 笔交易执行正确； B 证明另一个 1000 笔交易执行正确； C 再证明 A 和 B 都正确； 最后全网只验证 C。 这就像把很多计算结果层层压缩，最终变成一个小证明。 所以 Vitalik 说，未来以太坊可能会把 recursive STARKs 变成协议的一等组件。证明系统不再只是 Rollup 或外部工具使用，而是以太坊核心协议本身的一部分。 如果以太坊从重新执行转向证明系统。 那么未来节点不需要重新执行交易，只需要验证执行证明。 扩容受普通节点不再受到性能限制，计算可以外包，验证仍轻量。 EVM 不再是核心执行环境，可能引入 RISC-V / leanISA 等更适合证明的 VM。 协议验证简化，用形式化验证和证明系统增强安全性。 隐私可以直接是协议层的能力，隐私交易可以更自然进入协议设计。

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. The updated strawmap is at strawmap.org, and I attached a picture of it to this post. My own high-level takeaways: * "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced: - Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol - Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives - Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today - Multidimensional gas - State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available - Changes to client architecture ... At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again. * H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another. * Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?" * Formal verification of everything for security. * FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM. * Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months) * Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount. eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state) Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees. Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration. * In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area. * Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V. My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away. * Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes. Ethereum is CROPS. Ethereum is scaling. Ethereum is reinventing itself. Onward.

随着以太坊解决量子安全问题，可扩展问题，隐私问题，L1/L2割裂问题……. 以太坊最终会成为真正的世界结算层，成为未来金融的基座只是它的第一步；第二步是成为AI的基座；最后一步是成为社会运行的基座（身份/社会治理…..） 以太坊会成为整个未来人类社会运行的基础平台之一，绝不仅仅是dex/perp/money market……这些只是开胃菜。

蓝狐 @lanhubiji

3 months ago

从vitalik的这张大图（strawmap）看，最终要实现这几件事： • 快速L1：主网确认速度达到亚秒级，几秒内最终确认。 • Gigagas L1：L1吞吐量大幅提升，目标类似1万TPS级别（通过zkEVM等方式）。 • Teragas L2：L2能达到百万级TPS。 • 后量子安全：全面换成抗量子计算机的技术，安全几百年。

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1/ Announcing Ethereum Institutional An independent non-profit dedicated to accelerating the institutional adoption of Ethereum, its L2s, applications and overall ecosystem.

Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy. The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but bounded. Finance is approaching a similar moment. As value, assets, and markets become digital, the world needs shared settlement infrastructure. Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become that shared base layer, the neutral foundation on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation. What we believe: • We believe credible neutrality matters. Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person. • We believe ETH matters. The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum. • We believe DeFi matters. Markets, liquidity, credit, exchange, and coordination, open to anyone. • We believe adoption matters. Principles do not change the world until people benefit from them. We sit between two worlds: real usage from the builders at the frontier, and the protocol that has to support it. We work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core devs and researchers, then turn what they actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products. Ethlabs is independent but Ethereum is a shared project. We are one node in a much larger network of stewards. This is the multi-node future. We have spent the better part of the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development. We are opinionated and transparent. We move with urgency, learn in public, and course-correct when we’re wrong. We are building a lean, talent-dense team for people who want to do the most important work of their careers: [email protected]

1. Intro Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution. We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable. The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about 2. What the EF is not for We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats. 3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion. We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage). The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible? The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer. The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries. If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space. None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity. In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen. MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here. Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second. It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust. Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points. The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible. Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide. 4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including: * Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed. * Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it. * Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense. * Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this. * Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms. * Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load. We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum. Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry. 5. Addressing departures There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content. Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle. Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs. 6. Addressing EF spinouts Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation. The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work. Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding: “Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?” EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency. Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate. EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not. We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.

Re-posting the idea from the second half of this post a few months ago firefly.social/post/x/2022669…: (This is very relevant to the options ideas from yesterday) Question: if we're making a synthetic stable, what should it really be stable WITH RESPECT TO? USD is actually far from the best choice. --- What do people who want stablecoins ultimately want? They want price stability. They have some future expenses in mind, and they want a guarantee that will be able to pay those expenses. But if crypto grows on top of USD-backed stablecoins, crypto is ultimately not truly decentralized. Furthermore, different people have different types of expenses. There has been lots of thinking about making an "ideal stablecoin" that is based on some decentralized global price index, but what if the real solution is to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether? Here's the idea. You have price indices on all major categories of goods and services that people buy (treating physical goods/services in different regions as different categories), and prediction markets on each category. Each user (individual or business) has a local LLM that understands that user's expenses, and offers the user a personalized basket of prediction market shares, representing "N days of that user's expected future expenses". Now, we do not need fiat currency at all! People can hold stocks, ETH, or whatever else to grow wealth, and personalized prediction market shares when they want stability.

Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt ethresear.ch/t/building-ind… What if the use options as the base of defi, instead of CDPs and liquidations? So instead of extreme price movements creating a sharp and global "you get liquidated" effect, instead your exposure to the index diverges quadratically from your preferred exposure in a smoother way? A key benefit is getting rid of the need for instant oracles, and instead making everything work on top of "slow oracles" (ie. the type that prediction markets use) This design has a significant downside - the need to do regular rebalancing - and an open question of whether and how this rebalancing can be made slippage-resistant enough. But it's worth considering and trying IMO. I would feel much safer holding algostables inside something like this, than in something that depends on an oracle that has to give real-time answers (and therefore could be tricked into giving wrong real-time answers with no time for human recourse).

See also: the bottom half of this earlier post firefly.social/post/x/2022669… Moving away from fiat currency, and toward price stability through each person and institution getting their own customized basket.

my crypto investment thesis is rather simple: Ethereum is the only smart contract platform that takes the blockchain trilemma seriously, aiming for security, decentralization, and scalability while upholding the cypherpunk ethos of neutrality and self sovereignty. It was slacking on the scalability aspect for a while but that is now the primary focus without sacrificing security or decentralization. The current incremental steps have made transactions affordable now. The zk-rollup-ification of L1 in the roadmap will make it ultra scalable, too. Dumbchains are not interesting as they have no on chain economies, and vc corposlop smart chains are cynical extraction machines. Ethereum alone points to a brighter future that takes the masses some kind of power or agency back from the ever growing corpo fascist trend the world is moving to. When ETH does well, the entire industry does well, and vice versa. No other blockchain ecosystem has people willing to fight for it like Ethereum, evidenced by the multitudes of devs and projects who choose to work on it without needing to be lured in by VCs and fat cheques. These very qualities that make it appealing to cypherpunks also make it appealing to institutions as time after time, they prefer to work on open and neutral systems rather than closed/proprietary or biased ones. Sure we all have nitpicks about the EF, myself included, but to their credit, they have cultivated an ecosystem that people care about beyond just pumping bags. It has a soul in an often soulless industry. If ETH fails, then crypto has failed and the world will be a materially worse place. Call me naive or dumb, but I’d rather fight for something worthy of fighting for than succumb to a nihilistic stance focused solely on self-enrichment. In short, it is the only chain/ecosystem in the space that isn’t garbage.

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

Not sure I have ever been as productive in my life as in the last ~10 weeks: An extremely challenging yet worthwhile goal. The crazy progress of AI coding and heavy use of it. A very small team, world-class skills, and now the ability to multiply output thanks to AI. The result is @etheconomiczone — with a live devnet already: eez.dev. What is this? It will be: a) A new rollup that is fully composable with Ethereum. This means you can do either cheap transactions on this chain that only interact with contracts on this rollup, or more expensive transactions (similar to L1 costs) that can interact in a fully composable way between L1 and L2. So, for example, if you trade on this rollup, the routing can dynamically decide to use only L2 liquidity for a small trade, or for a larger trade — where the extra gas costs are worth it — to use both L2 and L1 liquidity. b) A whole framework that will allow new rollups, as well as existing L2s and sidechains (yes @gnosischain!!) to integrate into this “(Ethereum) economic zone.” Imagine: one could make a trade today simultaneously using Ethereum liquidity, but also Arbitrum, Base, or all the other L2s. This is what EEZ will allow. Now, let’s talk about the tech: Essentially, there are two core concepts that make all of this possible: 1) Proxy contracts 2) Real-time proving 1) Proxy contracts are basically a way to overcome the challenge that ~99% of all contracts are written in a way that only deals with addresses from a single chain. For example, a token or an NFT can be sent to an address, but not to an address on a specific other chain. Proxy contracts fix this. An address “A” on chain “n” will get a deterministic proxy representation, “A*”, on all other chains. So now, if, for example, A is a DAO on Ethereum and it should control, say, a fee switch in contract D (a DEX) on another chain, this can easily be done by setting A* as the owner of D. A (the DAO), on the other hand, can now call D* (the proxy representation of the DEX contract D) on Ethereum. All the cross-chain message passing in between is abstracted away — the contracts just call another contract and do not realize it is actually on another chain. 2) Real-time proving The proxy design already addresses the problem that there is no widely supported cross-chain message-passing standard in EVM land. So it alone would already be helpful for asynchronous calls, or better, calls that do not expect or require a return value. However, this would still not quite bring us to “synchronous composability.” Imagine a DEX trade: you do the first part of the trade on L1 and the second part on L2. You want to know the result of the second part — and if it did not get you the expected amount, you want to be able to revert the first part. This requires the call that triggers the DEX trade on L2 to have a return value. This was long assumed to be impossible - but with real-time proving, it no longer is. Basically, because Ethereum blocks are only produced every 12 seconds (and this would still work with, say, 6 seconds), that is now long enough to build and prove the L2 block that contains, for example, this L1→L2 DEX trade. If you want to learn more, don’t miss the talk by @tw_tter and @jbaylina on Tuesday at @EthCC! Let’s make Ethereum ONE again!

I've never understood the argument that Ethereum focusing on these cypherpunk-style values is somehow anathema to stablecoins, DeFi, or other financial applications. Ethereum is the clear leader in all of those activities because it offers censorship-resistance (aka access), transparency (aka verifiability), and security (aka property rights). If you study the long history of financial services, the markets and systems that attract the most participants and capital do so because they are widely accessible yet protective of everyone's rights. In TradFi this is done via laws and regulations. In crypto we can do it with cryptography and incentives. The chains that sell out (or simp out) on these values because of a hack (or because some suit-wearing bank exec who is simultaneously lobbying to kill crypto asked them to) will never succeed with stablecoins, tokenization, or DeFi. Those chains are even worst than the TradFi alternative. Off-chain or on, the most reliable financial infrastructure is the one that's least likely to screw you. A Foundation that focuses on pithy marketing slogans or throws money at every bank doing innovation theater provides zero assurances to future users that they won't get screwed. A Foundation that embraces a philosophy like CROPS does. Kudos to the EF for sticking to what matters, in markets and beyond.

Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn

7 months ago

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.

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seeing a bit skepticism on this from some, but consider this: it’s an acknowledgment that Ethereum now has serious buy-in, including massively from Wall St with more and more of those entities choosing to stake this gives a platform to not only subsume the existing financial system, but introduce very valuable and disruptive decentralized elements alongside it Ethereum will face powerful pressures in the coming years and can’t bend or break to them. if it does, it will become worthless CROPS becomes more and more important, and by anchoring to it, it can become a foundational part of all future discussions while the proof will be in the execution, i believe it is directionally the correct vision to set

Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn

7 months ago

1/ The Mandate clearly states what must be protected: EF will, above all else, remain focused on an Ethereum that is censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS), in the service of user self-sovereignty, resistant to extraction and with seamless UX. These are

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Criticizing the Ethereum Foundation has become the easiest reflex in this industry. It’s convenient. It’s tidy. It gives critics a single target to point at. But it’s also profoundly misplaced. The Ethereum Foundation is not the sole voice of Ethereum. It is not the marketing department of Ethereum. It is not the embodiment of all of Ethereum’s ambitions. It is simply a steward of the protocol and caretaker of the core infrastructure. They maintain, research, and guide the protocol’s evolution, and while they have done an amazing job with 10+ years of uninterrupted reliability, dozens of upgrades, and a commanding position in the blockchain market, they do not speak for the vast universe of builders, entrepreneurs, educators, institutions, and communities that actually bring Ethereum to life. Ethereum is not a company. It is not a headquarters. It is not a press office. It is an ecosystem. The real story of Ethereum happens in the applications, the companies, the experiments, the ideas, the developers, and the relentless push by thousands of people trying to explain, extend, and apply what this technology makes possible. So if you want to attack someone, attack us. Attack the community. Attack people like me. Attack @RyanSAdams from @Bankless Attack @Etherealize_io @VivekVentures @dannyryan Attack builders like @ethereumJoseph or @base @jessepollak @StaniKulechov @haydenzadams @0xPolygon @Optimism @arbitrum @MetaMask Attack pioneers like @joechalom @fundstrat @AK_EtherMachine Attack JP Morgan, Robinhood, Sony, BlackRock, Coinbase, Visa, eToro, Kraken, Fidelity, Societe Generale, UBS & dozens of institutions who chose Ethereum. Attack supporters like @ryanberckmans @hanni_abu @lex_node @DeFi_Dad @sassal0x @gphummer @LeonWaidmann @DCinvestor Attack the many voices who are out there every day pushing the envelope, building products, explaining the vision, and translating complex ideas into something the world can understand. Because we are the ones engaging. We are the ones debating. We are the ones defending. We are the ones advancing the narrative and the applications that make Ethereum matter. The Foundation is not your opponent. The ecosystem is. And if you decide to aim your criticism at the people actually carrying Ethereum forward, then be prepared for something very different than silence. We will respond. We will challenge you. We will meet argument with argument, facts with facts, vision with vision. Ethereum is the leading platform for programmable trust on the planet. And leadership always attracts criticism. That is the price of being first, the best, and the largest. That is the cost of shaping the future. So if you’re going to attack Ethereum, at least have the courage and the accuracy to attack the right people.

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.