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JUST IN: $150,000,000 worth of shorts liquidated from the crypto market following US-Iran peace agreement.

The best way to build an L2 is to lean into the L1's offerings (security, censorship resistance, proofs, data avail...) more, and reduce your logic to just being a sequencer and a prover (if based, just a prover) over the core execution. This is the combination of trust minimization and efficiency that the 2010s enterprise blockchain crew wanted, but was never able to achieve. Now, with Ethereum L2s, you can achieve it. And we've already seen successful examples of the L1's features protecting users' rights if something on the L2 goes wrong.

In these five years, the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity, in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals: 1. Deliver on an aggressive roadmap that ensures Ethereum's status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness, sustainability and decentralization. 2. Ensures the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term, and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as users' ability to access and use the chain with self-sovereignty, security and privacy. To this end, my own share of the austerity is that I am personally taking on responsibilities that might in another time have been "special projects" of the EF. Specifically, we are seeking the existence of an open-source, secure and verifiable full stack of software and hardware that can protect both our personal lives and our public environments ( see vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… ). This includes applications such as finance, communication and governance, blockchains, operating systems, secure hardware, biotech (including both personal and public health), and more. If you have seen the Vensa announcement (seeking to make open silicon a commercially viable reality at least for security-critical applications), the ucritter.com/ including recent versions with built in ZK FHE differential-privacy features, the air quality work, my donations to encrypted messaging apps, my own enthusiasm and use for privacy-preserving, walkaway-test-friendly and local-first software (including operating systems), then you know the general spirit of what I am planning to support. For this reason I have just withdrawn 16,384 ETH, which will be deployed toward these goals over the next few years. I am also exploring secure decentralized staking options that will allow even more capital from staking rewards to be put toward these goals in the long term. Ethereum itself is an indispensable part of the "full-stack openness and verifiability" vision. The Ethereum Foundation will continue with a steadfast focus on developing Ethereum, with that goal in mind. "Ethereum everywhere" is nice, but the primary priority is "Ethereum for people who need it". Not corposlop, but self-sovereignty, and the baseline infrastructure that enables cooperation without domination. In a world where many people's default mindset is that we need to race to become a big strong bully, because otherwise the existing big strong bullies will eat you first, this is the needed alternative. It will involve much more than technology to succeed, but the technical layer is something which is in our control to make happen. The tools to ensure your, and your community's, autonomy and safety, as a basic right that belongs to everyone. Open not in a bullshit "open means everyone has the right to buy it from us and use our API for $200/month" way, but actually open, and secure and verifiable so that you know that your technology is working for you.

Today, I stepped down as CEO of Binance. Admittedly, it was not easy to let go emotionally. But I know it is the right thing to do. I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility. This is best for our community, for Binance, and for myself. Binance is no longer a baby. It is time for me to let it walk and run. I know Binance will continue to grow and excel with the deep bench it has. I’m pleased to announce that @_RichardTeng, our now former Global Head of Regional Markets, has been named the new CEO of Binance today. Richard is a highly qualified leader and, with over three decades of financial services and regulatory experience, he will navigate the company through its next period of growth. He will ensure Binance delivers on our next phase of security, transparency, compliance, and growth. Prior to joining Binance, Richard was CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM); Chief Regulatory Officer of the Singapore Exchange (SGX); and Director of Corporate Finance in the Monetary Authority of Singapore. With Richard and the entire team, I’m confident that the best days for @Binance and the crypto industry lay ahead. As a shareholder and former CEO with historical knowledge of our company, I will remain available to the team to consult as needed, consistent with the framework set out in our U.S. agency resolutions. What’s next for me? I will take a break first. I have not had a single day of real (phone off) break for the last 6 and half years. After that, my current thinking is I will probably do some passive investing, being a minority token/shareholder in startups in areas of blockchain/Web3/DeFi, AI and biotech. I am happy that I will finally have more time to spend looking at DeFi. I can’t see myself being a CEO driving a startup again. I am content being an one-shot (lucky) entrepreneur. Should there be listeners, I may be open to being a coach/mentor to a small number of upcoming entrepreneurs, privately. If for nothing else, I can at least tell them what not to do. On that note, I am proud to point out that in our resolutions with the U.S. agencies they: - do not allege that Binance misappropriated any user funds, and - do not allege that Binance engaged in any market manipulation. Funds are SAFU! With that, I look forward to seeing the new leadership take the reins. Please join me in congratulating Richard on his well-deserved promotion. Onwards! CZ

Peace unlocks prosperity. When geopolitical walls crumble, capital flows freely — and markets feel it first. BTC kissing $65K while diplomacy rewrites the Middle East narrative is no coincidence. #Bitcoin Thoughts?

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 White House Official Patrick Witt says they're aiming to pass crypto Clarity Act by July 4th.

JUST IN: Tom Lee's 'BitMine' buys $41M worth of Ethereum

I’ve been in crypto for 9 years. I’ve survived multiple bull and bear markets. When the dust settles, the wealth will flow to those who stayed when it was hard & boring. We're still early. Being this early is painful. But it pays.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Former President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, says "fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt." "Decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future."

JUST IN: BlackRock sells $230M worth of Bitcoin and buys $17M worth of Ethereum

If it’s not going to zero, it’s going to a million. $BTC

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Top crypto companies send joint letter urging Congress to include legal protections for developers in crypto Clarity Act. • a16z • Aave • 1inch • Block • BitGo • Aptos • Zcash • Solana • Galaxy • Ledger • Kraken • Uniswap • Coinbase • Hyperliquid • Many others

AI enterprise going mainstream might be the biggest stablecoin catalyst nobody's talking about. A $5T market needing seamless payments is a massive unlock. This feels inevitable to me. #stablecoins Who's paying attention?

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*. We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial. But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value? From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board". See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability. And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher! Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum ZK payment channels (eg. ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage-… ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with. If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases. Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other. *Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too. And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi. --- So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory. I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher). Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

You do not have to agree with me on which applications are and are not corposlop to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with me on what trust assumptions are acceptable in which situations to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with me on political topics to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with my views on defi, decentralized social or privacy-preserving payments to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with my views on AI to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with my view that Berlin has the best food in Europe, suits and ties should be expunged from our culture, and YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format to use Ethereum. And you do not have to agree with me on any one of those above things to agree with me on any other. I do not claim to represent the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol. The whole concept of "permissionlessness" and "censorship resistance" is that you are free to use Ethereum in whatever way you want, without caring about what I think, or even what anyone else in the Ethereum Foundation or even any Ethereum client developer thinks. But on the flipside, if I say that your application is corposlop, I am not "censoring" you. This has always been the flip side of the grand bargain of free speech: I am not free to shut you down, but I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me. In fact, it is *necessary* that we do this. The modern world does not call out for pretend neutrality, where a person puts on a suit and claims to be equally open to all perspectives from all of humanity and not have their own opinions. Neutrality is for protocols (like HTTP, like Bitcoin, like Ethereum), and neutrality within some scope is for some institutions. The modern world calls out for the courage to clearly state one's principles - including stating principles by pointing to negative examples, that is by criticizing the things in the world that are incompatible with one's principles - and work with those with aligned goals to build the metaverse within which those principles are taken as a baseline. Such things inherently cannot be constrained to just the layer of the protocol: any principle you have will naturally lead to conclusions, not just about how the protocol should be built, but also what should be built upon it. Furthermore, any such principle will have consequences that go beyond technology, and reach into specific questions within the larger social world. This should not be avoided. Valuing something like "freedom", and then acting as though it has consequences on technology choices, but is completely separate from everything else about our lives, is not pragmatic - it is hollow. The inevitable converse of this is that (i) a decentralized protocol must not be viewed as belonging to only one metaverse, and (ii) the borders of a metaverse are fuzzy: it is possible, and indeed it is the normal case, to align with any one on some axes and not on other axes. Linux is a technology of user empowerment and freedom, Linux is also the base layer of a lot of the world's corposlop. It's almost certainly the base layer of many things that I think are good, and you think are bad, and vice versa. Hence, if you care about Linux because you care about user empowerment and freedom, it is not enough to just build the kernel, we must also build a full-stack ecosystem compatible with those values, and explicitly accept that this is not the only way that people will use Linux, but it is one way that must be built and must be available. Ethereum is similar. Milady.