GUNNERBOYKGZY @mempool_monet

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

JUST IN: 75% chance Ethereum falls below $1,500

When Ethereum is back over $4k it’s gonna be obvious.

JUST IN: PumFun has now sold $780M worth of Solana

I invested $5000 in Aster seed round and at ATH it was $500k. There is no industry that is giving you these kind of opportunities. Only Possible In Web3❤️🦅

HISTORY: Seven years ago today, @chainlink launched on Ethereum mainnet with a single ETH/USD price feed and three oracle nodes.

I largely think of "crypto" as a failed asset class at this point. I've written about the causes multiple times. Mainly, most crypto assets are worthless, or have dreadful value accrual, and most founders have abused the lack of guardrails and dumped on people indiscriminately, or are outright scammers. On top of that we had the Memecoins SuperBullshitCycle, a trend that brought the worst out of people, and sucked everyone's souls & pockets dry. And then came the never-ending wave of DeFi hacks, which has dramatically increased since last April. This can seem contradictory, as adoption of "crypto" is surging: > Stablecoin adoption continues growing fast > Politicians in the US are openly pro crypto > Tradfi is looking at tokenizing everything > Usage of equities & commodities perps is exploding in offshore and DeFi exchanges > The US is in the early stages of adopting perps > Prediction markets are becoming part of everyone's daily lives These are more "blockchain" than "crypto", although there are some exceptions with a token in those fields, most of which have been performing very well in recent months. A few among those exceptions even distribute most revenue to holders via buybacks (Hyperliquid in particular), which is what every investor actually wants to see to be invested in a good business rather than a fleeting narrative. We also have the privacy category. The one old school crypto category that is not liquid diarrhea. The world needs private non-custodial stores of value. Crime in particular needs privacy, as proven by the DoJ confiscation of $15 billion in Bitcoin from Cambodia's pig butchering farms, legal filing for which was submitted on October 8, 2025 (coincidentally right before 10/10). Of course, everyone needs privacy, not just criminals, but crime flows are real, and large. The asset attracting the most flows in this niche is Zcash. Zcash's recent performance has been fascinating, as it has been trending higher with bitcoin trending lower, a sign of real reallocation among bitcoiners. Another crypto category that is not dead is the "AI" category, full of high flying, fundamentally lacking, narrative driven tokens. The standout exception is Venice, a private AI platform with growing users and revenue, whose tokens are directly backed by the business rather than a narrative. So one could say old "crypto" is a failed asset class, but from the ashes come new beginnings, and the new face of crypto is one heavily dominated by the needs of Tradfi, prediction markets, AI, and privacy. Crypto sucks. Long live crypto.

Toncoin (TON) -> Gram (GRAM) Community vote is live. Since Telegram took a leading role in TON's development, the chain got 10× faster, fees 6× lower. And now Telegram proposes one more change: renaming Toncoin to Gram - the name from the original TON White Paper that never left the codebase. Vote here -> ton.vote/EQDQvywF226NXo…

Realistic 2026 crypto price predictions: Bitcoin - $92k Ethereum - $1500 Solana - $140 Hyperliquid - $88 Zcash - $790 Bittensor - $450 What else? 🤔

JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇮🇷 US imposes sanctions on Iran's largest crypto exchange 'Nobitex.'

JUST IN: Visa, Mastercard and Stripe to launch crypto stablecoin platform.

this was crypto’s largest liquidation event since 10/10

Yesterday the crypto market just had its 3rd largest liquidation event of 2026. $1.8 billion in leveraged positions got liquidated as $BTC dropped to a 2-month low and $ETH dropped to a 3-month low. And the worst part? This did not happen because of weakness in market or some major bad news, this was a result of pure manipulation to hunt leverage and flush out retail. The US stock market hits historic highs and BTC is down -45% from its peak ? There is no genuine explanation for this.

Been thinking about this all morning tbh.

The halving cycle never lies. Patience = profits #Bitcoin

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back. Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later) But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission: To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet. We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build. These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord. Ethereum is the rebellion against this. To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more. Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will. Wishing everyone an exciting 2026. Milady.

Now, the quantum resistance roadmap. Today, four things in Ethereum are quantum-vulnerable: * consensus-layer BLS signatures * data availability (KZG commitments+proofs) * EOA signatures (ECDSA) * Application-layer ZK proofs (KZG or groth16) We can tackle these step by step: ## Consensus-layer signatures Lean consensus includes fully replacing BLS signatures with hash-based signatures (some variant of Winternitz), and using STARKs to do aggregation. Before lean finality, we stand a good chance of getting the Lean available chain. This also involves hash-based signatures, but there are much fewer signatures (eg. 256-1024 per slot), so we do not need STARKs for aggregation. One important thing upstream of this is choosing the hash function. This may be "Ethereum's last hash function", so it's important to choose wisely. Conventional hashes are too slow, and the most aggressive forms of Poseidon have taken hits on their security analysis recently. Likely options are: * Poseidon2 plus extra rounds, potentially non-arithmetic layers (eg. Monolith) mixed in * Poseidon1 (the older version of Poseidon, not vulnerable to any of the recent attacks on Poseidon2, but 2x slower) * BLAKE3 or similar (take the most efficient conventional hash we know) ## Data availability Today, we rely pretty heavily on KZG for erasure coding. We could move to STARKs, but this has two problems: 1. If we want to do 2D DAS, then our current setup for this relies on the "linearity" property of KZG commitments; with STARKs we don't have that. However, our current thinking is that it should be sufficient given our scale targets to just max out 1D DAS (ie. PeerDAS). Ethereum is taking a more conservative posture, it's not trying to be a high-scale data layer for the world. 2. We need proofs that erasure coded blobs are correctly constructed. KZG does this "for free". STARKs can substitute, but a STARK is ... bigger than a blob. So you need recursive starks (though there's also alternative techniques, that have their own tradeoffs). This is okay, but the logistics of this get harder if you want to support distributed blob selection. Summary: it's manageable, but there's a lot of engineering work to do. ## EOA signatures Here, the answer is clear: we add native AA (see eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8141 ), so that we get first-class accounts that can use any signature algorithm. However, to make this work, we also need quantum-resistant signature algorithms to actually be viable. ECDSA signature verification costs 3000 gas. Quantum-resistant signatures are ... much much larger and heavier to verify. We know of quantum-resistant hash-based signatures that are in the ~200k gas range to verify. We also know of lattice-based quantum-resistant signatures. Today, these are extremely inefficient to verify. However, there is work on vectorized math precompiles, that let you perform operations (+, *, %, dot product, also NTT / butterfly permutations) that are at the core of lattice math, and also STARKs. This could greatly reduce the gas cost of lattice-based signatures to a similar range, and potentially go even lower. The long-term fix is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation, which could reduce these gas overheads to near-zero. ## Proofs Today, a ZK-SNARK costs ~300-500k gas. A quantum-resistant STARK is more like 10m gas. The latter is unacceptable for privacy protocols, L2s, and other users of proofs. The solution again is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation. So let's talk about what this is. In EIP-8141, transactions have the ability to include a "validation frame", during which signature verifications and similar operations are supposed to happen. Validation frames cannot access the outside world, they can only look at their calldata and return a value, and nothing else can look at their calldata. This is designed so that it's possible to replace any validation frame (and its calldata) with a STARK that verifies it (potentially a single STARK for all the validation frames in a block). This way, a block could "contain" a thousand validation frames, each of which contains either a 3 kB signature or even a 256 kB proof, but that 3-256 MB (and the computation needed to verify it) would never come onchain. Instead, it would all get replaced by a proof verifying that the computation is correct. Potentially, this proving does not even need to be done by the block builder. Instead, I envision that it happens at mempool layer: every 500ms, each node could pass along the new valid transactions that it has seen, along with a proof verifying that they are all valid (including having validation frames that match their stated effects). The overhead is static: only one proof per 500ms. Here's a post where I talk about this: ethresear.ch/t/recursive-st… firefly.social/post/farcaster…

JUST IN: Tom Lee's 'BitMine' buys $50M worth of Ethereum

drop your Monad address below within the next 24 hours to receive your soulbound NFT

One last flush lower. After that, $ETH runs the most hated rally of all time! Bitcoin will run to $200,000!