FollowTheChain 💎⛓️ @FollowTheChain

🚨 THE SPEECH THAT CHANGED CRYPTO SEC Chair Atkins introducing token taxonomy. Clarity is here 🔥

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( trustlessness.eth.limo ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means. “efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec. These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience. Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY. Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms. Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant. Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign. This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need. The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others. Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

I think ETH is starting to look really uniquely positioned from a macro perspective. A few thoughts: 1) Store-of-valueness + quantum: Quantum is a real long-term threat. Maybe not “next 10 years,” but markets are forward-looking. If you want an asset you can set-and-forget for 20+ years, you want quantum on the roadmap. The Ethereum Foundation making it a priority matters a lot for ETH’s SOV credibility. 2) AI makes “immutable forever” a tougher sell: With LLMs cranking out code (and finding bugs) at insane speed, the idea that any complex system can be perfectly safe and never need upgrades is getting harder to believe. Better tooling will mean better software, but also faster vulnerability discovery. 3) ETH has the cleanest monetary policy in crypto: No obvious long-term security budget problem, and it’s not running ~5% annual inflation like SOL (or most L1s). Net inflation has been ~0.8% over the last 30 days and ~0.21% since the Merge. Gold’s historical supply growth is ~1.5%/yr. 4) From an energy & infrastructure perspective: ETH also doesn’t compete with AI data centers for power or capital, it’s not exposed to the same security-budget pressure that will come as AI spend intensifies. That structural separation matters and will only become more important over time. 5) Upside optionality: ETH’s economics look sustainable even with historically low fees and without “native/based rollups” yet. If stablecoins + tokenized assets + agentic payments really scale, fee burn could ramp and ETH could go deflationary again. That’s a pretty unique macro setup.

One metaphor for Ethereum is BitTorrent, and how that p2p network combines decentralization and mass scale. Ethereum's goal is to do the same thing but with consensus. Another metaphor for Ethereum is Linux. * Linux is free and open source software, and does not compromise on this * Linux is quietly depended on by billions of people and enterprises worldwide. Governments regularly use it. * There are many operating systems based on Linux that pursue mass adoption * There are Linux distributions (eg. Arch) that are highly purist, minimalistic and technologically beautiful, and focus on making the user feel powerful, not comfortable (Actually, BitTorrent is depended on by enterprises too: many businesses and even governments (!!) use it to distribute large files to their users makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-us… ) We must make sure that Ethereum L1 works as the financial (and ultimately identity, social, governance...) home for individuals and organizations who want the higher level of autonomy, and give them access to the full power of the network without dependence on intermediaries. At the same time, what Linux shows is that this is fully compatible with providing value to very large numbers of people, and even being loved and trusted by enterprises worldwide. Many enterprises in fact desperately want to build on an open and resilient ecosystem - what we call trustlessness, they call prudent counterparty risk minimization. This is the gwei.

repeat after me: Ethereum and $ETH are nation-state resistant that’s incredibly important in this day and age they’re special

DCinvestor @DCinvestor

7 months ago

ETH’s use as pristine censorship-resistant collateral is much more important than its consistent use as a medium of exchange like an order of magnitude more important

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The Digital Euro puts your money and your assets under state control. It hard-codes surveillance into your daily life. Your money becomes permission-based — usable only if you comply. Christine Lagarde wants you to believe this is about efficiency, inclusion, and safety. It isn’t. It’s a massive power shift upward. But the big question is - did you vote for this?

European Central Bank @ecb

7 months ago

The digital euro is the next step for our money – and it is integral to strengthening our strategic autonomy in the digital age. Executive Board member Piero Cipollone and EU Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis explain why Europe needs a digital euro link.europa.eu/V97hmQ

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@cryptaxpt Good to know there was some recent clarification, thanks. But I think you misinterpreted it. It seems after a 1yr hold of a single coin, long-term investors can sell crypto tax-free even when a stablecoin swap is required, as long as it is immediate, technical, and documented.

@cryptaxpt Theory 3 is unnecessarily conservative. Theory 2 is correct, not “discussable” as you said. The acquisition cost of the original token is transferred to the next, therefore so is the potential capital gain that will later be exempt (although with a reset clock at the last trade)

@cryptaxpt Theory 1 is incorrect. The asset being sold isn’t “a black box of crypto being held since the first purchase using fiat”. It’s a specific coin/token, that needs to have been held for a year. There’s ambiguity only when the swap is for the same asset, but wrapped (ETH vs WETH).

dear marketing team at @coinbase if you have $$$ for a podcast reboot, maybe you have something for 190 eth core devs @ProtocolGuild? we can't deliver an 8 ep. season, but would direct any funding to the incredible humans actively scaling our shared infra & the EVM dms open!

Aggr News @AggrNews

8 months ago

COINBASE.ETH ACQUIRES UPONLY NFT FROM COBIE FOR 25M USDC: ONCHAIN

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staking is first and foremost a security mechanism, not a capital generation mechanism the network must be protected, even if a bunch of stakers all decide to exit at the same time for whatever reasons they deem necessary the queue achieves this design decisions like this, which prioritize security over staker convenience, are precisely why global finance chooses Ethereum and will continue to do so

Blockchains are the world's first fully formalized political systems, where rules are expressed as unambiguous, machine-executable code. This has two profound consequences: 1. This formalization turns governance enforcement from a costly, subjective human task into deterministic computation. The resulting collapse in cost opens participation to anyone who can run the software, creating a vast, global enforcement body with unprecedented fidelity and transparency. 2. The sheer scale of this decentralized base forges the system’s credible neutrality. First, it creates immense social inertia, making the core protocol extraordinarily hard to change. Second, it structurally compels the rules to remain simple and permissionless, as coordinating bespoke permissions across millions of potential enforcers is infeasible. Only neutral, general rules can function at this scale. Ethereum's EVM, by virtue of being Turing Complete, extended these benefits of full formalization to every conceivable application. Now, it's not just who can participate that's permissionless, but what can be built. This creates an open platform for rapid iteration on institutional design, which encompasses the basic foundation of civilization — rules, enforcement, coordination. The implication is that Ethereum is nothing less than a macro-evolutionary phenomenon for human civilization.

The next challenge isn't just mainstream adoption of crypto, but preservation of true decentralization. Some will settle for "fintech 2.0" — walled gardens on permissioned chains that juice TradFi margins but do little to change the system. No thanks. Permissionless or bust!

@iheartmindy @OprahDaily You get in the car And you get in the car Eeeeeverybody get in the car

Holy shit. SEC letting DeFi be, recognizing it shouldn't "interpose intermediaries for the sake of forcing intermediation where the markets can function without them". 😍 We've been waiting for over a decade. An amazing onchain future is about to start. 🚀

10 years of Ethereum.

@fabienpenso @cryptaxpt Beware it’s not automatic. Make sure you check the box “Exemption method” on Annex L item 6-C2 to enjoy your tax free dividends (and interests) from foreign sources.

DAT summer

fabda.eth @fabdarice

12 months ago

No - you’re not bullish enough on $ETH acquisition treasury vehicles. Yes - this is coming from a serious player (yet to be announced) 👇

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