I’m looking forward to talking at the Institutional and Policy Forum in Berlin on June 15. These kinds of conversations around real institutional adoption and public blockchain infrastructure are exactly what we need right now, especially in Europe. If you work in policy, digital assets, institutions, or Web3, this should be a great event, come along and say hi.

the OIF connects all chains seamlessly & securely Been cooking for over a year. Now the OIF is hitting adoption at scale, thanks to teams like @lifiprotocol and many others The future is: - Ethereum L1 for asset issuance - Canonical bridges for secure transfers across chains (using ZK) - Intents for ultra fast transfers - Sync composability for using assets/apps across chains without transferring at all Next up: plugging more trustless settlement mechanisms into OIF Anyone can contribute! DMs open. And openintents.xyz for more info

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.

ETH the asset is the most important product of Ethereum CROPS (censorship/capture resistant, open, private, and secure) is how we strengthen and protect it

Every serious institutional conversation I've had this year ends in the same place: "we can't put this flow on a transparent ledger." Privacy isn't an ideological preference. It's a human right open.spotify.com/episode/4Eo…

Great to contribute to these institutional seminars hosted by @0xundefined_ and support form @ChinaAMC_HQ @snzholding Korea's $1.7T in institutional capital is waking up to on-chain opportunities. Thanks to everyone who joined looking forward to more collaboration!

🔥 BULLISH: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says “crypto is the obvious answer” for AI-era online identity.

Every passport-based identity system has the same quiet hole: Identifier = hash(passport data, app, scope). Which means whoever knows your passport data (yes, including the issuing government, or anyone who's ever scanned your chip) can recompute your identifier across every app you've signed into. We close it at @TACEO_IO with a threshold-keyed salt that no single party can compute alone. - Deterministic per app, sybil resistance preserved - Uncomputable to outsiders, even the issuer - Key split across an MPC network so no single node can derive it either Already used by @worldcoin and @zkpassport. If you're hitting this, we'd love to talk.

Privacy - is a basic human right! At @ETHLDN

"Every major L1 initiative directly enables more L2 specialization." "Ethereum's credibly neutral base layer makes it the strongest foundation to build on today." 👏👏

Privacy is live on the OP Stack. Last week: drop-in SDK for confidential computing on OP Mainnet. Now: integrating with one of the largest OP Stack chains, @soneium. ZK TEE. Sub-500ms proofs. High throughput. Built for real workloads.

Excited to take part. If you’re around, pop by.

Client diversity matters 👏🏽

Excited to present ERC-8211, an effort led by @biconomy and supported by our Improve UX track! Smart batching fills a gap between users, agents and complex onchain execution, including crosschain execution. --- In our interop work, we've identified three layers of functionalities: - Representation: A crosschain action is made machine-legible via some structure, eg., an array of calls à la ERC-5792 or an intent ("I want X"). - Orchestration: Particularly in asynchronous settings, actions are composed with multiple steps. Some entity is required to trigger these calls at the right time, in the right place and with the right inputs. - Liquidity/message-passing: Moving liquidity crosschain is the goal of intent-based bridges. More generally, passing messages, beyond just value, is the critical building block of crosschain actions. We've been working on the liquidity layer with Open Intents Framework. The framework provides standard, secure and modular components towards instantiating a common marketplace for fast liquidity. Meanwhile, orchestration may be delegated away, with another party taking on the duty to solve an intent or triggering the right calls. However, with the rise of personal agents, it is much more viable for the user to represent and control the orchestration of their complex crosschain actions, via their agent. --- Enters ERC-8211. Smart batching represents execution to make it: - Sufficiently concise for user-friendliness, unlocking the excellent UX of a single signature for many operations - Sufficiently flexible for agent-friendliness, with dynamic values obtained during runtime, and predicates gating execution as it happens, for further user security Smart batching is also friendly to composition with different accounts and different bridge models. This means using secure account and bridge primitives, safety is preserved even as the agent vibes its way through bigger smart batches with more complex steps. --- This is an invitation then to build new ways of interacting onchain and crosschain, with agents as guides and smart batching under the hood. Find more details in the linked post and on erc8211.com/

"Finance is like essentially 50,000 different banks and credit unions that all have segregated infrastructure.” @Morpho cofounder @PaulFrambot on why crypto can reshape lending: “Ethereum is like one single database for the entire world, like one single computer for the entire world.” “Instead of going to a specific bank, you’re gonna come to the open blockchain … and then you’re gonna have the entire world quote you on your interest rate.”

Permissioned RWAs are currently underutilised. DeFi is moving to meet issuers’ requirements. This is the big opportunity and unlock currently underway, with large buy in from both sides. This will happen for instututions on Ethereum, as they prioritise reliability and liquidity. Some elements have to be permissioned. This still happens on publicly verifiable rails, with composability and privacy when required. RWA TVL dramatically lags stablecoin TVL - not for long.

Great work !

Today, the Linux Foundation announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. As the neutral home for x402, the Foundation will advance the x402 protocol and help enable community-based innovation in open payments. Read more here: bit.ly/4sPYPo8

My chat with Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy at Morgan Stanley from @BlockworksDAS 2026 is live. We spoke on why TradFi isn't getting FOMO. They've been on this journey for years and we're just finally at the inflection point. Also, how despite token prices and mood being down, the regulatory landscape has never been clearer. Best time to be building.