hjulorius.eth ⟠ @hjulorius

x.com/i/article/2076…

idk if it's gonna be Robinhood, but one of these days, we'll just hit a tipping point where crypto loses the speculative zero-sum financial games branding and suddenly become basic financial infrastructure where everyone must accept settlement practically overnight and when that day happens, Ethereum and ETH are best positioned

I think David's missing the forest for the trees here on ETH and Robinhood. - "by now..." GENIUS is one year old. The modern era of building real businesses for real people onchain is just hitting S curve ramp now. We're early. - "L2s are independent chains" except for using L1 for settlement/DA/interop to all other L2s, and typically, heavy use of ETH. - "economics not captured by ETH". ETH is a SoV and nondebt money, it wins by building a monetary network and global confidence. It's not a cash business. ETH bears like David look at today's landscape, conjugate it negatively, and assume the future will look like the past. They are pessimists. The optimistic view and bull case is: what if JPMorgan's L1 money market fund- that grew to $700M in 7 weeks- is followed by ten thousand more? What if Robinhood is followed by a thousand more institutions building new eth L2 rollups to power their real businesses for real people? Pessimists sound wise. Optimists get rich.

last cycle sort of sucked for ETH. i can't reasonably argue it didn't but the difference from almost every other asset in the space is that Ethereum and ETH didn't die, and nor will they die. in fact, Ethereum is emerging to be in a position where it is stronger than ever between the rise of EthLabs, catalyzed by DAT funding and what it means for shifting balances of power in the ecosystem and continued efforts to scale the base chain, now moving faster than ever and the emergence of Robinhood onchain and what it portends for the rest of tradFi coming onchain it's becoming clear that these are real structural shifts in crypto infrastructure and adoption which will eventually manifest in the market and that the vast majority of people here are and will remain offsides on ETH because they've been burned by it in the past you have somewhere between ~1-6 months to accumulate ⏰

@BitcoinJesusETH @Nomaticcap @milkroaddaily so something by Christmas then?

Best time to buy a $15,000 asset below $1,800 The ticker is ethereum:native

Robinhood CEO: In the future there will be no distinction between crypto and traditional finance “I think that crypto technology has so many advantages over the traditional way we’re doing things that in the future there will be no distinction. It’s kind of how technology itself was viewed as a sector of the economy for a very long time… I think crypto will go through the same transition where we’re still thinking about it in its own bucket but eventually everything will be on-chain in some form or another and the distinction will disappear.” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev explains why this transition is taking so long: “I think the challenge with traditional finance — particularly on the infrastructure layer — is they have a lot of stakeholders, and if you think about where they generate the bulk of their revenue, it’s not from crypto-related initiatives. And a lot of these stakeholders, because they’re quite big, are going to be resistant and slower to adopt technologies. They’re going to be late adopters. They’re going to wait until it’s proven before adopting it, and that’s why we [Robinhood] have had to do greater vertical integration than we would normally want to do in TradFi. We acquired Bitstamp. We have our own exchange. And we have our own chain because I don’t think — to be at the frontier of crypto — you can rely on traditional infrastructure providers. I think they’ll get there eventually but it will take a very long time.” Ethereum will be the global settlement layer for this new financial system, and ETH will be its money. ETH is the base pair for trading on The Robinhood Chain, the highest volume asset, and the gas token to pay for blockspace. Source: @token2049 (Oct 2025)

x.com/i/article/2075…

@matthew_sigel @matty_ice_BTC alright, I’ll do it

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.

@Jrag0x LS clickbait engagement farming as always

1/ Today, the Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team is publishing Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions, a non-technical primer to equip the leaders making policy and deployment decisions with an understanding of how Ethereum works, how it's governed, and how it compares with perceived alternatives.

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

🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️ 🙏 I'm Roman Storm. To @ethereum, and to everyone who has stood with me through this - thank you. Truly. When you're a developer facing decades in prison for writing open-source code, the nights get very long. And then this community shows up. Again and again. And I remember I'm not alone. That's everything. 💚 Let me be clear about what this case actually is. I didn't rob anyone. I didn't steal, didn't touch a single user's funds, never took custody of a single coin. I wrote software. Privacy software - the kind of thing that, in any sane world, belongs on a résumé. Not in an indictment. 🧑‍💻 So I want to tell you why, even now, I have every reason to keep fighting. Because this isn't blind hope. The courts have already started to speak - and what they said has a name. Van Loon. 📜 In November 2024, a federal appeals court - the Fifth Circuit - looked at what the government did to Tornado Cash and said it plainly: government broke the law. OFAC overstepped its authority when it sanctioned the protocol. Those immutable smart contracts aren't "property" that belongs to anyone. ⚖️ Sit with the court's own words, because they're extraordinary. The judges described Tornado Cash's contracts as "unownable, uncontrollable, and unchangeable — even by [their] creators." 🤯 Uncontrollable. Even by their creators. A federal court, after studying the actual technology, found that I literally cannot control the code I helped write. It runs on its own. It always will. No one can stop it - not me, not OFAC, not anyone. That's not a loophole. That's just how it works. And the government's own position has since crumbled. After Van Loon, OFAC removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list entirely in March 2025. The protocol they once branded a national-security threat - delisted, out in the open. ❌ And yet they're still prosecuting me. So look closely at what they're actually holding against me - because the harder you look, the thinner it gets. 🔍 My team integrated Chainalysis's official OFAC sanctions screening directly into the Tornado Cash interface - a real-time compliance measure to block sanctioned addresses. The government's response to that? They called it "window dressing." Compliance, dismissed as decoration. 🙃 Then there are my own words, from my own chats, reacting to hackers getting traced: "I'm glad those fuckers are detected." That's the person they're branding a criminal conspirator. The story and the evidence don't match - because the story isn't true. 💔 And once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere. A court says the protocol is uncontrollable even by its creator - yet they want to jail me for "controlling" it. That's the kind of case this is. It gets worse. ⬇️ The indictment's most-quoted line - a dramatic "how do you go about laundering $600 million?" - was pitched as a co-founder's words. It wasn't. It was written by a CoinDesk reporter asking the team how mixers work. A forwarded message got mislabeled in the data extraction. A journalist's question became Exhibit A. 📰 Then the most damning of all: on the very day I was indicted, FinCEN officials privately told these SDNY prosecutors that non-custodial tools like this are NOT money services businesses. The prosecutors walked into court and argued the opposite. My defense didn't learn about it for ~21 months. ⚖️ Even the DOJ doesn't seem to believe its own theory. Weeks before insisting I'm guilty, the same DOJ told the Supreme Court - in its amicus brief in Cox Communications v. Sony Music — that "knowledge that a buyer plans to misuse a product with substantial legitimate uses, without more, does not support an inference of culpable intent." The exact opposite of what they argue against me. Same DOJ. Weeks apart. 🔁 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… So step back. If you only hear "crypto mixer," you might assume the worst. But this is not a shadowy contraption. It's mainstream, studied, respected technology. 🎓 Stanford teaches Tornado Cash — not as a cautionary tale, but as the textbook example of how cryptographic privacy works. It's a final-exam question in CS251, Dan Boneh's renowned cryptography course. 📚 cs251.stanford.edu/hw/final2021.p… cs251.stanford.edu/lectures/lectu… And Stanford's own exam notes something the prosecutors won't: Tornado Cash ships a built-in compliance tool, letting a user voluntarily prove which deposit was theirs to satisfy an exchange like Coinbase. Privacy and compliance, designed to coexist. 🔎 This isn't fringe, either. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a primer on Tornado Cash for economists and policymakers - treating it as legitimate financial-privacy infrastructure, and describing that very same compliance tool. 🏦 stlouisfed.org/publications/r… ers So add it all up. Technology taught at Stanford. Analyzed by the Federal Reserve. Vindicated in a federal court of appeals. Built with real-time sanctions screening the government waved off as "window dressing." And the developer who helped build it - me, is facing prison. Tell me that sits right. 😞 This is why it reaches so far beyond me. If publishing neutral, open code makes you a criminal for whatever a stranger later does with it, every developer here is exposed. Every wallet team. Every protocol. Everyone who's ever pushed to a public repo. 🧨 Privacy is not a crime. Open source is not a conspiracy. Writing software is not the same as committing the acts of those who misuse it. The easiest principles in the world to defend - which is exactly why we can't afford to lose them here. 🛡️ Van Loon is the law catching up to the truth. Now I deserve the same justice the protocol already received. We're close. The arguments are strong. And with you behind me, we can finish this. 💪 So please — follow my co-founder in this fight @alex_pertsev, and share our stories. And if you're able, support my legal defense at 👉 freeromanstorm.com 💚 Every voice, every dollar, every repost tells a court — and tells me — that I don't stand alone. I'm Roman Storm. We started this together. Let's end it together. 🌪️ 🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️

Ethereum @ethereum

3 weeks ago

13/ Finally, today’s thread might have been about Alex, but Roman Storm’s legal battle in the US is also still ongoing. Please follow @rstormsf as well as @alex_pertsev, and if you can, support Roman’s legal defense too. freeromanstorm.com

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Ethereum only keeps getting stronger. The ticker is ETH

I'm incredibly excited to share that we are launching Ethlabs. The core belief: This is a unique moment for Ethereum. Adoption is here, the global economy is moving onchain. We want to help Ethereum realize its potential and become the shared global settlement layer.

Ethlabs @ethlabs_org

4 weeks ago

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

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We just announced Ethlabs (@ethlabs_org). Its mission is stewarding the growth of Ethereum and ETH. Here is why I decided to stay in Ethereum after four years at the Foundation. We are at the moment Ethereum was built for. Adoption is here. Blokchains are being adopted as the most efficient financial rails and the traction of the very innovative financial services built on Ethereum, is accelerating fast. Ethereum is best positioned to become the base layer for worldwide finance. It is unrivaled in credible neutrality, permissionlessness, and robustness. The core protocol is now steadily increasing its throughput and speed to meet demand. Ethereum’s application layer has the largest developer base and most institutional adoption. The contest now is on product and growth: improve user and dev experience and bring Ethereum’s apps and assets to more people. At Ethlabs, I will focus on growth by: - Supporting Ethereum’s builders. - Improving infra and standards for devs, builders, and institutions. - Increasing distribution for Ethereum’s apps and assets. Throughout setting up Ethlabs it is incredible to see how much support we have gotten. So many of us want Ethereum and ETH to succeed. Largely thanks to the ecosystem’s size, force, and culture, it is now positioned to be an enormous improvement to the global financial system. That’s why I’m staying in Ethereum and that’s the work I want to do. Interested in joining? Go to [email protected]. Today is truly an Ethereum moment, thanks to all our backers (@BitMNR, @Sharplink, @ethereumJoseph, and so many others) and the entire Ethereum ecosystem!

Ethlabs @ethlabs_org

4 weeks ago

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

537 1K 5K 1.8M 638

I'm joining Ethlabs @ethlabs_org, a new R&D lab to grow Ethereum and ETH. The network and the asset are entering a new age of adoption, and this is a shift we cannot miss. More capital is coming onchain, both institutional and retail, through the portals of DeFi, stablecoins, prediction markets, agents, and many other venues. I want a world where this capital powers greater wealth, where the system is transparent and verifiable, while value remains private and uncensorable. This is what Ethereum, with ETH at its centre, can offer better than anyone else. This is at hand, and we need to deliver on it. In recent years, as a core steward of Ethereum Protocol R&D, the need for a tighter loop between the protocol and product layers has become impossible for me to look away from. We'll work to ensure that the Ethereum platform meets the moment and grows to become the settlement layer for the global economy. This means, for me: • Improving blockspace quality and mainnet execution, with a faster Ethereum L1, the heartbeat of the network, and a stronger transaction supply chain. • Improving the free and secure flow of assets on the network, with seamless, unbreakable bridges and composability. • Being a technical partner to innovative products wishing to leverage Ethereum's unique properties with best-in-class user experience. • And delivering without compromise on Ethereum's core properties always, wherever our mission takes us. We're excited to get started and I could not be more grateful for the support we have received from our funders. I am reminded today that we are surrounded with immensely talented and incredibly supportive builders, core devs, allocators and investors, who all share the same passion and care for Ethereum. Ethereum is a special network, in a special ecosystem. Please reach out to chat and learn more, and let us know your interest in joining our mission with an email to [email protected]

Ethlabs @ethlabs_org

4 weeks ago

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

537 1K 5K 1.8M 638

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.