Nice highlights reel! Thanks for hosting a wonderful conference @TheBlock__ @Emergence_Conf Looking forward to defending my title next year! Rise new challengers, I'm ready 😎

If you’re trying to get the most out of your coding agents, take a look at this. @christinetyip and I mention a few emerging patterns: 1. Shifting left (or not) in harness engineering 2. Compressing intent and coercing the genius out of the model using precise language 3. Tool interfaces, CLI composition, and when code mode wins 4. Using oracles for testing and even as specs! Check out the recording for the full conversation.

Introducing Shift: Founders' Cohort Shift protocol enables you to send crypto directly to anyone via the Shift chip. Instant, no gas fee is required and neither banks see it nor any blockchains log it. Just like cash. But digital.

How could this be perceived as anything but a massive failure in today’s world? Would Stripe even be investable today? Which investors would ever think that only launching after two years of work and with 50 users would ever be the beginning of something gigantic? I can’t see how anybody would be happy with this today. And yet, almost imperceptibly, Patrick and John were painstakingly laying the foundation for something that was built to last and built to grow strong and immovable like a Sequoia. How can mushroom growth rates produce anything other than mushroom longevity? I’m not saying that real value CAN’T be built quickly. But I think it’s far more common than we like to talk about that founders work for two, three, four, seven, even fifteen years before something extremely valuable is born into the world and really takes off. James Dyson worked on the design of his vacuum cleaner for 5 years before he got to a working prototype and 8 years before it became a commercial product. Dylan Field worked on Figma for four years before launching a *closed* beta. Tim Leatherman worked on his idea and prototype for 8 years before he had his first multitool design that was ready to sell. Palmer Luckey spent about 7 years from the time he began working on VR prototypes before Oculus released the first consumer headset. Jensen Huang started Nvidia in 1993 and it wasn’t until 4 years later in 1997 that they had their first major commercial success with the RIVA 128. Steve Wozniak was the fastest and went from an idea for a personal computer in 1975 to the Apple II release 2 years later in 1977. Time and again the reality is that great things take time to build. I’m not saying it doesn’t take hard work. I’m definitely not saying it doesn’t take determination and extreme focus. But it does take time. I think we try and pretend that it doesn’t take time and lift up the seeming exceptions to the rule. Why not be honest and instead focus on the determination and extreme grit that it takes to keep building for years before any outward success arises or glory is received? I hope we can be honest with young founders and repeat these stories again and again so that they learn to work thanklessly for years before the outward vindication comes, because that’s what it really takes.

Good take which nobody wants to hear because people hope for the quick 100x

As someone with a bit of time on my hands lately, I've become a living microcosm of this. Since leaving Euler, I've built five different startup ideas. None have progressed much beyond the idea stage. All have beautiful web apps. AI can make you feel productive. But without focus, it's often just another form of procrastination.

👀

Looks like they discovered an infinite mint bug in the Nasdaq as well

Didn't expect I'd ever be retweeting @HunterBiden

A lot of orgs have yet to make the shift to shared agents. Frameworks such as @openclaw and @NousResearch's Hermes make it possible, but care needs to be taken in their setup and management, especially with regard to access control.

I’ve been out long enough to say this, but one of the reasons I left academia for crypto was the sheer insanity that swept the sector due to this DEI mind virus thing. It became completely insufferable. The people that run these training workshops are universally unhinged Marxists and / or arbitrary current thing activists. They confuse “speaking truth to power” with whinging about everything. We went from hiring in some random consultant for an hour long workshop that went through a list of things that are cultural faux pas in different countries (fine), to hiring full teams that mainstreamed this weird theoretical grievance discipline into all things. It operates on a debilitating psychosocial level that occupies spaces of perfect subjectivity. Things like “whiteness” and “unconscious bias” and “microaggresion.” I became convinced these concepts had been invented in a lab to be perfect organisational cancer. Squabble fuel. The most insidious bit is that it has this kind of self protective auto immune effect where saying “wait, this is total bollocks”, is equivalent to declaring you are literally Hitler. So no one does. I watched over the course of several years as it ground entire institutions to a halt, it went from 5% of an agenda to 70% then to entire purpose built committees, then the committees had committees. We had baked it into everyone’s performance criteria, then into the curriculum of every course. Even computer science. Literally everything had to be passed through the lens of it. I saw lecturers accuse other lecturers of being white supremacists because they had no African scholars on their reading lists. I sat in equality and diversity committees and watched the people who run EDI training cancel each other for saying the wrong thing. It’s institutional mental illness. It must cost us hundreds of billions at the national level, just due to all the wasted time, but now it’s provably lethal. If we annihilated it from the system it would add points to our GDP and save lives.

Hey Polymarket actually according to you this did not happen

You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup. Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch. I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it. The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊

Gravy is building Agents for your money. @gravy_finance connects to your banks, investments, email and more to explain your money and automate your financial tasks. Congrats on the launch, @alitabba_ & @DevMaxC! ycombinator.com/launches/QdW…

I've joined @TorqueProtocol as Head of Growth 🫡 Hyped to be back on Solana, solving one of crypto's biggest hurdles: sustainable growth. Torque turns data into predictable growth loops. we've scaled from Colosseum winners to driving $5B in volume for Raydium, Axiom, and USD1. Shout out to @SuperteamUK and the House of Sol community for the support, and the welcome back to the ecosystem 🙌 P.S. If you wanna chat growth, agentic incentives, or what we're up to at Torque, drop me a DM.

It's been a while since global sentiment towards crypto has been that bad. I said this many times, we're not in 2021/22 end of cycle because this time no SBF/Celsius/Luna. We're in 2018, a slowand lingering despair of "we're not cool anymore" mostly solely due to price not going up. Back then, when the tourists left, the builders delivered MakerDAO, Compound, SNX, EthLend (Aave) and more with mostly apathetic reception. It's an exciting time to focus and deliver even if the market will be ungrateful for a while.

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.

What if Lovable is the pump fun of the vibe coding era

some things are better left unsaid. Recommend no more news like these, for the sake of the people, our industry (and your business)