Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

On Tempo, permissionlessness, L1 vs L2 Tempo will be a permissionless chain. On day 1, anyone will be able to deploy a token, and anyone will be able to transact on the chain. Some projects think that attracting real-world usage and serious institutions requires giving up on base layer neutrality. We do not think that, and that's not how we're building Tempo. The plan for Tempo is to have permissionless validation and permissionless smart contract deployment as well as permissionless usage: just like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc. We’ll start with a permissioned validator set to get going and decentralize further from there. We’re building in features to make it easy for entities interacting with the blockchain (like asset issuers, money transmitters, etc.) to comply with their relevant obligations, but the base layer will remain neutral. This is a principle we feel incredibly strongly about (see: paradigm.xyz/2022/09/base-la…). As many parts of the mainstream world look to adopt crypto, we think there is a risk that they adopt permissioned systems. Our goal with Tempo is to help onboard them onto crypto rails that solve specific payments needs while still being truly permissionless. — Why L1 rather than an Ethereum L2? At Paradigm, we are heavily invested, both intellectually and literally, in the Ethereum ecosystem. We will continue to help it scale, and invest in and support companies building on Ethereum. We are also extremely excited about single-sequencer L2s for many use cases, including trading. But building a network for global payments will require bringing together thousands of partners that may not trust us, or Stripe, or anyone as a platform. We think a decentralized validator set—for the chain itself—is a necessary requirement for those partners, and to ensure that the chain is unquestionably neutral in the long run. From an operational perspective, we feel urgency to build for the demand that’s coming and want fewer dependencies, including on the rate of Ethereum L1 progress. With Tempo, we tried to remove all crypto tribalism and alignment games from our thinking and just focus on building the right product for crypto payments. At a technical level, we are prioritizing attributes like fast finality (L2s are generally only as final as the underlying L1), multiple validators (vs. single sequencer), and custom transaction lanes and gas pricing. Some of these are technically possible for an L2, but could be complex, slow to implement, and/or introduce many external dependencies. Tempo is stablecoin-focused, so interoperability through native issuance is more relevant to us than the native bridge to Ethereum that L2s have. We aren’t Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Tempo maximalists. We’re maximalists for permissionless crypto. We want Ethereum L1 to scale, and we want L2s to thrive. We love Bitcoin as a monetary asset. We find substance in Solana, Hyperliquid, and many other ecosystems. We want to ensure real-world payment flows happen on crypto rails, and that’s why we’re building Tempo.

ETHEREUM SURVIVES THE SEC. Today we’re happy to announce a major win for Ethereum developers, technology providers, and industry participants: the Enforcement Division of the SEC has notified us that it is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0. This means that the SEC will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities transactions.

CONFIRMED: SEC APPROVES LISTING OF SPOT ETH ETF'S Source: DB | Coins: ETH

Excited to unveil what we've been working on! Supported by a grant from @UniswapFND, this guide dives into #UniswapV4. In our first post, we will explore how to craft your own RBAC pool with Uniswap v4 Hooks. Join us on this journey! medium.com/@umbrellaresearch…

Judge Kaplan: Madam Foreperson, I understand the jury has reached a verdict. Please hand it to Andy. Thank you. The clerk will publish the verdict. Please rise. Count 1: Guilty. Count 2: Guilty. Count 3: Guilty.

Welcome to O̵f̵f̵i̵c̵e̵ After Hours with me! Let’s clear up this confusion about securities, investment contracts and digital assets.

1/7 My best guess on the next few years: -Poloniex, Huobi and TUSD -> 0. -CZ agrees to step down from Binance for lower DoJ outcome. -New CEO downsizes a lot, kills of bnb chain. -We get told of accounting gaps related to bnb and BUSD they issue a new claims token to repay

Oh this is sooooo funny 😂😂😂

Esta es la clave de la reforma que no nos contaron ayer y por la que Bruselas ha dado el SÍ: un mecanismo de SUBIDA AUTOMÁTICA de las cotizaciones sociales. Si la actual subida de cotizaciones no es suficiente, las cotizaciones irán subiendo AUTOMÁTICAMENTE hasta 2050.

Kraken and Custodia Bank CEOs say regulators ignored their warnings about scams and fraud @jespow and @CaitlinLong_ said that trying to do the right thing by warning regulators of possible scams blew up in their faces. via @TheMonsoonChild cryptoslate.com/kraken-and-c…

1/ We are pleased to see that the @SECGov's proposed rulemaking on custody recognizes that @GeminiTrustCo is a qualified custodian.

#Breaking: Just in - Reports that 4 politicians from the European union have been arrested for money laundering,Belgian police busted into 16 places in #Brussels today, and that vice president of the European parliament Eva Kaili has been arrested for fraud with ties in #Qatar.