Thrilled to announce I’m part of @etherealize_io as the final cofounder! I’m also the first cofounder. Does that sound a bit confusing? Let me explain… ETHEREALIZE’S ORIGIN STORY I’ve been involved in Ethereum for a decade. I believe in it deeply - it’s the only real shot the world has at putting civilizational infrastructure on fair, transparent rails. July 23rd, 2024: the Ethereum ETFs launched. It was the day I’d been waiting for all year - Wall Street would finally wake up to Ethereum’s potential as the new operating system for global finance and further cement its position as the premier smart contract blockchain. The ETF launch fell short of my hopes, prompting me to dig deeper. I soon realized that the level of education and knowledge about ETH on Wall Street was still extremely low. While Bitcoin benefits from a clear “digital gold” storyline, Ethereum’s complexity makes its value harder to communicate—and no one was bridging that gap. Compounding the issue, competing layer-1 blockchains were—and still are—spreading relentless lies and gaslighting to chip away at Ethereum’s market share. The solution became obvious: Ethereum needed evangelization. It required a dedicated marketing and business development effort aimed squarely at Wall Street institutions. Together with my good friend @jamesfickel, an early ETH investor and Etherealize advisor, we dug deep into the Ethereum community for the right person to spearhead this effort. That’s when we met Vivek Raman. Vivek is a rare talent—a true unicorn. He’s brilliant, tirelessly hardworking, emotionally grounded, and perfectly suited for the role, with over a decade of experience on Wall Street and five years in Ethereum. We reached out to Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation with our idea. They not only endorsed it but provided a grant to kick things off. When Vivek saw Vitalik’s support, he committed fully to Etherealize, and we hit the ground running! Soon, though, we discovered that sparking Wall Street’s interest in Ethereum meant more than talk—it meant action. We needed to build products and software to seamlessly integrate Ethereum into their systems. Enter Zach Obront. Vivek brought in his friend Zach to develop prototype applications. Zach delivered an extraordinary suite of tools in record time—an entire production-ready prototype in just weeks. Having met thousands of developers and working for years as a software developer myself, I can say I’ve never seen anyone ship high-quality code that fast. As Etherealize’s ambitious mission to bring Ethereum into the real world crystallized, Zach joined as a cofounder. Meanwhile, we’d been discussing our plans with Danny Ryan, an Ethereum legend who played a major role in driving critical improvements to the Ethereum protocol between 2018-2024. Danny was considering returning to the EF, or doing something new. We shared Etherealize’s vision with him, and he grasped it instantly. He became excited about the prospect of contributing to real-world adoption and dealing closely with important users, which could feed back into protocol R&D. After an intense weightlifting session with Vivek, Danny was on board—the rest is history. After ideating Etherealize and mostly operating behind the scenes, I’ll now be taking on the role of Chief Strategy Officer. I will work to position Etherealize in the Ethereum ecosystem and drive the highest impact ways we can accelerate our mission of bringing Ethereum to the real world. As we stand on the cusp of a transformative era, Ethereum’s moment to triumph is here. The Ethereum Foundation has appointed two exceptional co-Executive Directors, and we look forward to collaborating closely with them. Etherealize is partnering with the entire ecosystem to bridge innovation and real-world adoption. We’re here to energize Ethereum, elevate its narrative, and enable its potential to reshape the world. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for—Etherealize is ready to help Ethereum not just succeed, but soar. Ethereum is open for business.

If you listen closely to the crypto markets (or look at any price chart), you’ll hear a giant sucking sound. It’s the echo of capital fleeing projects and protocols that have dubious product-market fit for greener pastures. Like data centers where quartz sand is turned into genius-level intelligence. Or rocket companies aiming to make humanity a multi-planetary species. I’d estimate there are tens of thousands of crypto entrepreneurs in aggregate who’ve tried to build applications on failed platforms, forced to wind down their companies and silently despair about what could have been. The beauty of capitalism is that it’s the ultimate decentralized science experiment. Capitalism in a new industry is a gigantic parallelized tree traversal in a possibility space for product-market fit. The truth is, no matter how good those entrepreneurs’ products were, they wouldn’t have worked - there was simply not enough demand at the time for what they were selling on the platform where they were selling it. Most branches in the search die. A few become civilization-scale. The immutable truth of markets, though, is that the volatility of prices nearly always exceeds the volatility of fundamentals. And with crypto in particular, the fundamental need for trustless computation and “outside the system money” has never been greater. DeFi projects that failed or were murdered under Gensler have entirely new possibilities of life today with sustainable exogenous value (RWAs) flowing through them, regulatory acceptance in the form of the GENIUS and Clarity acts and a sane, pro-business SEC. There were at least a dozen prominent video sites that launched before YouTube. Their main problem was that they were too early. I believe the same thing is true today with DeFi. Agentic finance. Tokenization. Stablecoin payments. And, of course, an internet-native store of value. What do they have in common? They’re the sub-sectors that are newly enabled by blockchain-native rails, and their yearly growth is parabolic. It’s trite to say, but important to remember: we’re creating a new financial system that the entire world is going to run on.

Matt Hougan: "If you take out $BTC and you take out stablecoins, what is the market cap of what we're trying to reinvent finance with?" "It is less than a trillion dollars." ETH is ~$200B, but from there it falls off a cliff. The entire DeFi ecosystem trying to recreate global finance has the market cap of half of Micron. "A relatively small industry going after an enormous addressable market. That's why it's interesting and why it's a contrarian investment." FT @Matt_Hougan @LGDoucet.

Super excited to be supporting this

Exciting news! Today I joined @Etherealize_io as Head of Mktg. I join an amazing team: @VivekVentures @gphummer @dannyryan, & @zachobront among others. Just as the internet transformed information movement, blockchains are transforming asset movement. Let's keep building.

You can dunk on ETH and Tom lee all you want, but Saylor has been cheering for and buying BTC for 6 years, spending more than 4X Tom Lee's ETH bet, and the mfer is still down bad. The problem with BTC is that price action is all there is to it. There are no network effects beyond that, so when the price is down the narrative collapses. Ethereum's fundamentals progress when price is up, but also when price is down. The network lives, the asset will recover. Tom Lee is right and he will be vindicated.

'Crypto Spring': StanChart Sees Ethereum Outperforming As Mt. Gox Moves $739M BTC From Cold Wallets zerohedge.com/crypto/crypto-…

Remember when I told you ETHBTC was a decent proxy for how much investors care about quantum risk?

- Glamsterdam in ~3 months - ecosystem activity thriving - clarity act coming up - Tom Lee buying ... VS. - Quantum crisis - Issuance crisis - Activity near 10 year lows - Saylor selling ... 🤷‍♂️

When Ethereum solves cross-rollup fragmentation through EEZ and native rollups, value capture snaps back to L1 - and ETH reprices and decouples from the rest of the market. Underpriced right now.

ETH has mostly ranged $1k-$5k since its 2021 peak near $4.8k. Quality stocks with multi-year consolidations often see powerful breakouts, frequently delivering 3-10x moves over following years in strong bull phases as pent-up demand releases. A decisive break above $5k could target $8k-$12k initially. Over the next 5 years, ETH's scaling, DeFi, stablecoins and RWA growth support potential for $15k in favorable scenarios. Highly volatile though—past patterns offer no guarantees. Not financial advice.

$HYPE vs $ETH: who actually wins the global financial system? On Threadguy's podcast, Defi Monk and Ryan Watkins make a surprisingly bullish case for Ethereum despite not being $ETH holders. Monk points out that TradFi often views Ethereum very differently than Crypto Twitter. Investment bankers, hedge funds, and institutional investors aren't obsessing over Ethereum's revenue. Many simply see the most decentralized and most Lindy smart contract network. Ryan takes it a step further: As bullish as he is on $HYPE, he notes Hyperliquid has just 28 validators co-located in Tokyo. What if Ethereum ZKs everything? What if it evolves into a combination of Bitcoin's monetary premium, Ethereum's settlement layer, and Zcash's privacy? If global payments, trading, and lending eventually move onchain.. can the world's financial system run on infrastructure that's less decentralized? We've already seen outages hit networks like Solana and most recently SUI. An outage is a headline in crypto, Imagine the consequences if the global financial system simply went offline? Ethereum may be less of a blockchain and more of a civilization-scale infrastructure project.

Ethereum is not a company. It is global infrastructure controlled by no entity or consortium — like the Internet That’s why institutions bring the most assets onto Ethereum ETH is not a stock or valued on fees ETH is productive money — and that’s the exponential case for ETH

Raoul Pal: "ETH has the most economic and intellectual density and the most lindy effects." "There's more developers. There's more protocols. There's more layers. There's more use cases." His framework for valuing a blockchain: what happens if you turn the switch off? How much economic value gets destroyed? For $ETH, the answer is far beyond its current price. FT @RaoulGMI @RealVision.

STANDARD CHARTERED REAFFIRMS $40K $ETH TARGET BY 2030, CITES DEFI AND TOKENIZATION DOMINANCE

Ethereum will likely win anywhere between 50-70% of this. A 2-30T tokenization tsunami is coming. $ETH

I’ve been feeling impatient and disillusioned with Ethereum and saw @TrustlessState sold. Figured I’d do some research and maybe start to exit myself. After reviewing, I’m more optimistic than I’ve been in years and won’t be selling. I think the problem is that Glamsterdam, native rollups, preconfs, lean Ethereum, etc. are super boring. We all want to see some flashy use cases we can see and touch, but Ethereum isn’t a consumer product. It’s not even typical internet infrastructure like (Stripe and AWS). It’s digital bedrock (like DNS and HTTPS). CT reminds me of engineering demos where the non-technical audience would be more impressed with the junior dev’s flashy UI than the 100x backend engineer’s data pipelines. The trilemma (secure, scalable, trustless) is solvable and Ethereum still seems to be the best positioned to do so. The “marketing” used to be WAY better and the vibes have fallen apart but I don’t think that matters all that much. I’d rather the devs focus on delivering the increasingly logical and achievable roadmap. L2s were a mess and the “blockchain revolution” has been taking longer than anticipated but when is progress ever linear? In the future when nation states, corporations and ai agents are digitizing identity, ownership records, permissions, and contracts, what’s going to underpin it? Siloed servers with fragile APIs and janky data normalization? Paper still? I still think the “world computer” is IMMENSELY valuable and I still think Ethereum will be the bedrock that enables it. I plan to keep betting my ETH on it for now.

The EF isn't perfect, but it's one of the only principled actors in an unprincipled world. You can't seriously believe the way to build something relevant in 50 years is capitulating to short termists. The sands of time will wash away what you're building. ETH will remain.

Good take on CLARITY Act @medium “Why the CLARITY Act Quietly Makes Ethereum the Biggest Winner in Crypto” medium.com/@adriano.feria/wh…

$ETH is the settlement layer of the future