If you want to know when the crypto bottom is, it’s simple. Just follow @JustDeauIt

The Ethereum not ETH stuff is the mental fallacy that triggered me into writing and podcasting in the first place. There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions. Without ETH as a global store of value, Ethereum is a failed project. Full stop. ETH is economic bandwidth for DeFi. It is the only asset maximized for CROPs, fail at high value ETH, fail at CROPs, fail at Ethereum. Saying you’re bullish Ethereum not ETH is like saying you’re bullish America not the American economy. They are one and the same - economic engines. Better to admit Ethereum is a failed project than “Ethereum not ETH”. So spew that weak blockchain not crypto stuff out of your mouth, it doesn’t make sense for BTC, ZEC, ETH, or any truly crypto native project.

WEEKLY ROLLUP: The Bottom Signal Everyone Is Watching bitcoin:native is back at Biden-era prices, ETFs are bleeding, and Saylor just did the thing he said never to do: sell. @RyanSAdams and @TrustlessState unpack whether crypto has one more drop left, what trillion-dollar IPOs reveal about broken capital markets, and why their ETH debate may be the real fight for Ethereum’s future. [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 3:07 Markets - @aggrnews - @WatcherGuru - @zoomerfied - @KobeissiLetter 30:11 IPO Season 36:29 Bankless Guys Are Fighting - @steweycrypto - @RyanSAdams - @TrustlessState - @Tommyb631 55:39 @Morpho Flips @aave - @0xLouisT 58:04 ZEC Vulnerability & Jason Calacanis’ Crypto-to-AI Tweet - @Jason 1:02:55 Hester Peirce Almost Out - @hesterpeirce 1:06:03 World Cup Starts 1:07:26 Closing & Disclaimers

NEW REPORT: Has BTC Entered the "Buy Zone?" Has Bitcoin entered the buy zone, or is one final flush still ahead? @JustDeauIt and @RyanSAdams break down why bitcoin:native under $67K looks attractive for long-term buyers, what realized losses and top-buyer cohorts reveal about seller exhaustion, and how AI weakness, inflation, and rising odds of Fed hikes could shape the next major move. [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 1:39 False Bull Flag Revisited 5:32 Tracking Deep Value Signals 11:04 Strategy Fear & Unwind 18:09 Who Is Buying Bitcoin? 22:15 Signs of Seller Exhaustion 25:08 Bitcoin Leads the Nasdaq 26:33 AI Boom Or Bust 35:58 Macro Risks & Inflation 43:20 TDR Portfolio Strategy 48:50 Buying Bitcoin Under 67K

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.

WEEKLY ROLLUP: David Sold All of His $ETH...Why? Crypto’s old leaders are struggling, but new winners are breaking out. @RyanSAdams and @TrustlessState unpack the rise of hyperliquid:native, zcash:native, and $VVV, the macro bear fuel markets are ignoring, the EF talent exodus, and why David selling his last ethereum:native may mark a new era for Ethereum and Bankless. [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 3:28 Bear Fuel for Markets & Pockets of Bullishness in Crypto - @KobeissiLetter - @Barchart - @JesseCohenInv - @Strategy - @arkham - @TheBlockCo 21:27 @HyperliquidX, HYPE, and Pre-IPO Price Discovery - @Matt_Hougan - @Geiger_Capital - @tradexyz - @JasonYanowitz - @KobeissiLetter 32:43 Wintermute Opens DeFi Vaults on @Morpho - @wintermute_t 38:12 Trump’s Quantum Bets and U.S. Industrial Policy & Blockchain.com IPO and @Ronin_Network Migrates to Ethereum L2 - @KobeissiLetter 46:34 EF Exodus and Ethereum’s Identity Crisis - @TrustlessState - @drjasper_eth - @tkstanczak - @0xstark - @trent_vanepps - @barnabemonnot - @TimBeiko - @CarlBeek - @_julianma - @DefiIgnas - @josephdelong - @dankrad - @ETH_Daily - @wmougayar 1:00:04 David Sold His ETH and a New Era for Bankless - @TrustlessState - @RyanSAdams Moment of Zen - @ethcforg

I strongly agree with this. And right now I think the best positioned candidate is @fundstrat and @BitMNR.

Has there been a huge vibe shift in CT over the last 2 weeks, or was that just me selling the last of my ETH

3 years at @Bankless have come to an end. Massively grateful for @RyanSAdams, @TrustlessState and the team for everything I learned helping tell the story of crypto: - turning long-form into short-form distribution - cracking social platform algorithms - creating highly engaging & viral content - building AI-assisted content workflows - editing in fast-paced news cycles I'm looking for a new role. If you need a virality engineer, hit me up.

Time to say something out loud. The first era of Bankless has concluded. A six year collaboration between David and myself exploring crypto, defi, and maximizing Ethereum. We're in the second era now. In this second era I'm planning to take more of a backseat role supporting @TrustlessState as he explores new frontiers in crypto and beyond. I'll still be the pod every week (would never miss a rollup) but less in the role of content direction and guest interviews. David has the helm. He has my full support. For my part, I'm still bullish ETH. And bullish Bankless.

The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it. The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it. If we want to get Ethereum back to winning: - create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap - find a leader who is competent and wants to fight - make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it - fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability). Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).

Sad News: I was laid off from @Bankless :( As I navigate the uncertainties of unemployment and the future, I'm dedicating a portion of my time to the creation of a new newsletter: Unabashed Truth Check out my first article and plz subscribe! unabashedtruth.substack.com/…

After 4 years helping build @BanklessHQ - the sponsor relationships, the community, the Discord, the Weekly Rollups - today is Day One of a new chapter. It's been the best kind of work. The kind you simply love and never get tired of. I'm now looking for what's next. My sweet spot is at the intersection of sponsor relationships, partnerships, and founders and users community - with a deep understanding of the crypto space and how projects think about brand, visibility, and Go-To-Market. If you're building something ambitious and need someone who knows this space inside out, I'd love to talk. DMs open 🙏 And to everyone at Bankless, especially @TrustlessState and @RyanSAdams, thank you for everything ❤️

In 2019, I started listening to @TrustlessState and his buddy debate philosophy, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Then in 2020 Bankless formed, @RyanSAdams joined in, and I was hooked. I went from interested to fully Ethereum-pilled, read everything, listened to everything, and tried to share it with every friend I had. (Most thought I was crazy) I knew I wanted to work in crypto. So I wrote down a goal: "Work with Bankless one day." It took 5 more years in the industry before that chance came. Thanks @shaaa256 for opening the door. I joined in Q3 last year to lead BD, and it's been everything I hoped, going deeper into the industry I love and getting to talk directly with teams building across the space. Today is my last day at Bankless. What's next? Not exactly sure yet. I've been going deep on agentic payments, security, trading, and Stablecoins. If you're building in any of those, my DMs are open. But first: the Puget Sound. Free diving, kayak fishing, hiking, photography, mushroom foraging, live concerts, and finally getting my backyard garden into shape. "So long and thanks for all the fish" 🐟