I really appreciate both @sandeepnailwal's personal contributions and @0xPolygon's immensely valuable role in the ethereum ecosystem. To recap: * Polygon hosts @Polymarket, which is probably the single most successful example of a "not just boring finance" app that has actually been successful and provided value. * Polygon has also hosted plenty of other applications that have needed high levels of scalability. * Polygon put a lot of resources into ZK-EVM proving early on, both by bringing in Jordi Baylina's team and through other efforts, and greatly helped in moving the space forward. * Polygon has built infrastructure for proof aggregation (AggLayer) and many other things And also: * Sandeep put a lot of his personal effort into @CryptoRelief_, which has made large contributions to biomedical infrastructure and research inside India. * He voluntarily returned $190M of proceeds from the SHIB tokens that I donated to me, which has made the whole Balvi open source anti-airborne-disease biotech program possible, and possibly accelerated our understanding of important anti-pandemic topics like clean indoor air by years. @cz_binance also recently donated $10M in BNB to me to help continue the program, and I've recently added ~$20M of my own funds (no, not from selling ETH 😛) Big appreciation to both for this. Most whales passively think that things like this are cool, but are not willing to get off their butts and personally contribute, unless it's in the form of a company that keeps everything proprietary to become yet another vehicle for personal profit. @sandeepnailwal (and CZ) are special here. On the ZK issue (after all, you do need a proof system to get the full security guarantees that L2s are meant to provide), I can see Polygon's difficult bind: they supported Jordi's team putting their heart and souls into the tech at a time when that tech was still too early for production, and so they contributed to the early and most difficult part of the learning curve, but at that part of the learning curve it was difficult for them themselves to directly benefit from the fruits of their labor. Since then, the market structure has split into L2 teams and ZK teams (eg. @SuccinctLabs, @RiscZero, more recently @brevis_zk, many others) being separate entities, which I think makes more sense than the previous approach of every L2 doing (OP or ZK) proof systems in-house: it's very difficult to be both the best L2 and the best ZK team, the two are very different skill sets. Personally, I hope that at some point soon @0xPolygon can just pick up off the shelf ZK tech that has now gotten quite good and apply it to the PoS chain to get full stage 1 and later stage 2 guarantees from the ethereum L1. Many don't realize just how much ZK tech has improved; proving costs are around $0.0001/tx, and many L2s I talk to are very surprised when I tell them the recent numbers, they're still stuck in the mindset that ZK is maybe ok for ethereum L1-scale chains but unviable for anything hyperscale. The latest ZK-EVMs, and live projects like @Lighter_xyz, show that this is false.

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum. These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network. To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far: BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated* Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains. This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: github.com/ethereum/research… , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here. Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out: * In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node * In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe * In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network A third piece of this is distributed block building. A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that. Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness. Onward.

JUST IN: BlackRock to tokenize funds with real-world assets and stocks on blockchain.

JUST IN: Michael Saylor's 'Strategy' buys 1,587 Bitcoin worth $105 million.

Someone said to me yesterday that the era of easy money in crypto is over. If that's true (I don't know if it is), then there's a good chance that most of you are wasting your time here. The reason is that almost everyone you see today who has achieved some level of success started their journey during one of these easy-money cycles. Whether it was buying BTC in 2012, getting into DeFi early, trading NFTs in 2021, memecoins in 2024, or InfoFi in 2025, the pattern is the same. You can't go from zero to one without an easy-money cycle. So if you're at zero now, there is a chance that you will stay there

The Rules of Bitcoin 1. Buy Bitcoin 2. Don't Sell the Bitcoin

$BTC to $200,000. $ETH to $8,000. All of this will happen next bull market. Are you positioned?

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

JUST IN: BlackRock just deposited $172M worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum to Coinbase Prime

CPI reading tomorrow, Warsh's first FOMC & dot plots next week, stocks up infinite with very little pullback so far summer seasonality hitting all at the same time would make sense for some derisking to happen & basing out over next few months IMO, not a believer in the idea of a rotation from tech names into BTC or ETH here MSTR also looks incredibly weak with very little support below

sending $100 in Bitcoin to 5 people that like this post

My price predictions for Q3-4 2026! #BTC : $236,500 #ETH : $7800 #SOL : $520 #HYPE : $200 #ZCASH : $1300 #NEAR : $20

Benzinga asked me about quantum computing and Bitcoin. The answer… Bitcoin is more secure than the dollars sitting in your bank account. Quantum will crack the banks long before it touches the blockchain. Everyone's panicking about quantum breaking Bitcoin's encryption while banks are running on legacy infrastructure that makes Bitcoin look like Fort Knox. Even if something happened to the blockchain, the full node operators can roll back to the last secure block. The network survives. The dollar and banks don't have that option. At some point, Bitcoin eclipses the dollar entirely as retailers begin to accept bitcoin, and then they decide they only want to accept bitcoin. Read the full Benzinga interview to see what else we covered. benzinga.com/crypto/cryptocu…

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.