Remember that all government money is counterfeit. Such money began as discrete quantities of a real commodity: silver or gold. Such money was used and trusted because it was a bearer proxy for this real good; the paper (valueless) a receipt for a quantity of metal (valuable). And then the metal was stolen by the US Federal Government from all holders of the proxy instrument. The public was rugged, and now all government money is counterfeit, aka fiat. That the world continued on without rebellion says something about how easily the masses may be deceived so long as a charismatic man with a flag pin stands before them. When will he next appear before us? What illusion will we next be asked to believe? The bill for this crime is paid every year by everyone holding fiat, as they see prices rise and struggle with the attendant consequences of being paid in an asset debased in perpetuity. They attribute their suffering to some phenomenon of nature, or to the greed of capitalists, rather than to that specific act of fraud on August 15 1971.

I really want to love Anthropic and all the things that they do. And I really love Claude Code, but I feel like they're trending in a direction that requires more transparency to users.

🚨JUST IN: The White House Council of Economic Advisers has released its study on stablecoin yield and its potential impact on deposit flight and bank lending — the same report I noted last month that Senate Banking lawmakers were pressing the White House to release. The TLDR: Banning stablecoin yield would do little to boost bank lending, impose costs on consumers, and concerns around deposit flight are overstated. The data: At baseline, eliminating yield increases lending by just 0.02% (~$2.1B) and results in a net welfare loss. On deposit flight: The report finds those concerns are “quantitatively small,” noting most stablecoin reserves remain within the banking system, with only a limited share truly removed from lending activity. “In short, a yield prohibition would do very little to protect bank lending, while forgoing the consumer benefits of competitive returns on stablecoin holdings,” the executive summary reads. Link to the report below ⬇️

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The real story here is worse than a fumble. It’s a three-step own goal. January 9: Anthropic locks Claude Code OAuth tokens, killing every third-party tool that built on Claude subscriptions. OpenClaw, which recommended Claude Opus 4.5 as its default model, wakes up to a broken integration. No warning. No partner outreach. January 27: Anthropic’s legal team sends the cease-and-desist over “Clawdbot” sounding too similar to “Claude.” Steinberger complies at 5 AM on a Discord call. During the 10-second window where he releases the old GitHub and X handles, crypto scammers hijack both accounts and run a $16M pump-and-dump scheme. The chaos reflects on the entire Claude ecosystem. February 15: Steinberger announces he’s joining OpenAI. So Anthropic had the fastest-growing open source project in AI history (145K GitHub stars, 2 million visitors in a single week), built by a guy who sold his last company for ~€100M, whose tool literally recommended Claude as the default model to millions of new users. Their response was to cut off his API access and send lawyers. Steinberger spent last week in San Francisco meeting with every major lab. He explicitly said he could have built OpenClaw into a massive company but chose OpenAI because he wanted “the fastest way to bring this to everyone.” Meanwhile OpenClaw has already spread to China, with Baidu planning direct integration into its main app. This is a project that was essentially a free distribution channel for Claude. Millions of developers installing a tool that defaults to your model. The growth marketing team at Anthropic should have been sending gift baskets, not legal notices. Sam Altman just got handed an open-source agent framework with global distribution and a brilliant founder, because Anthropic’s legal department moved faster than their partnerships team.

🚨 NOW: Bank of America, CEO warns up to $6 trillion in deposits could shift to stablecoins on Ethereum if allowed to pay interest by The CLARITY Act. Banks are scared users will go to the better product

Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail. But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already. This includes the following: * Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride. * An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit. * A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment. * An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation) * A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving * A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins) * A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term. Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei.

BREAKING: JPMorgan, $JPM, starts tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, and to seed fund on Ethereum with $100 million internal capital, per WSJ

This is the biggest news of the fucking year. I humbly present you 2 quotes that will radically define 2026 and bring trillions onchain, I promise nothing you read will define the next 3 years more. 1. “The No-Action Letter authorizes DTC to offer a tokenization service for DTC Participants and their clients on pre-approved blockchains for three years. Under the NAL, DTC will have the ability to tokenize real-world assets, with the digital version having all the same entitlements, investor protections and ownership rights as the asset in its traditional form. In addition, DTC will provide the same high level of resiliency, safety and soundness as that of traditional markets.  The authorization applies to a defined set of highly liquid assets, including the Russell 1000, which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded U.S. companies by market cap, as well as ETFs tracking major indices and U.S. Treasury bills, bonds and notes. The No-Action Letter is significant because it allows DTC to launch the service once finalized, under certain limitations and representations, more quickly than would have otherwise been possible.  “ You read that right - the US Gov is not only fast tracking the move on the entire US economy onto crypt rails, they are doing it with all the benefits of existing protections. The era of global financial access at the highest levels is upon us. 2. “Under the No-Action Letter, DTC is authorized to offer a limited production environment tokenization service across L1 and L2 providers. DTCC will provide more details about on-boarding requirements, including registering wallets, as well as the approval process for L1 and L2 networks in the coming months.” Where will the world be settled? In the Ethereum ecosystem of L1s and L2s. This should not come as a shock - DTCC launched their proof of concept using the Ethereum client Besu and now they are ready to use that background to bring the entire world to Ethereum. Trillions in 2026. Ethereum.

ethereum settled more in stablecoins than visa in payments last year. $27 TRILLION > $15.68 TRILLION. ethereum is winning.

Today, I’m incredibly excited to make my first proposal to Uniswap governance on behalf of @Uniswap alongside @devinawalsh and @nkennethk This proposal turns on protocol fees and aligns incentives across the Uniswap ecosystem Uniswap has been my passion and singular focus for the past 8 years. What started as a small side project is now global financial infrastructure powering thousands of applications with ~$1.8 trillion in annual trading UNI launched in 2020, but for the past 5 years Labs has been unable to meaningfully participate in Uniswap governance, and has been greatly restricted in the ways it can build value for the Uniswap community. That ends today! This restriction was in great part due to a hostile regulatory environment that cost thousands of hours and tens of millions in legal fees. Fortunately, the regulatory environment has shifted This proposal comes from a strong desire to see the Uniswap protocol win as the global decentralized exchange for tokenized value At a high level, the proposal: 1. Turns on protocol fees and uses them to burn UNI 2. Sends @unichain sequencer fees to the UNI burn 3. Burns 100M UNI from the treasury representing the protocol fees that could have been burned if fees were turned on at token launch 4. Introduces Protocol Fee Discount Auctions, a new way to improve LP outcomes and internalize MEV to the protocol 5. Introduces "aggregator hooks” which will turns Uniswap v4 into an onchain aggregator that collects protocol fees on external liquidity sources 6. Focus Labs on driving protocol growth and adoption, including a contractual agreement to only pursue initiatives that align with Uniswap governance interests ^ As part of this, Labs will stop collecting fees on its interface, wallet, and API to supercharge distribution and adoption of the Uniswap protocol 7. Moves Foundation employees to Labs with a shared goal of accelerating protocol growth, under a growth fund from the treasury 8. Move governance-owned Unisocks liquidity to v4 on Unichain and burn the LP position I believe Uniswap protocol can be the primary place tokens are traded. This proposal sets the stage for the next decade of its growth @Uniswap will ship relentlessly over the coming years and supercharge the ecosystem of developers, LPs, and traders building on top I'm so grateful to the community that has made this all possible, and excited for what's next 🦄

Yas 👏 It’s true

Watching my gf get a side of guac at chipotle after my $600,000 perps position just evaporated

In the last 4 years, $ETH supply has inflated by 3.89M ETH. In the last 2.5 months, the Strategic ETH Reserve has acquired 3.9M ETH. 4 years of issuance locked up in a little over 2 months. No one is bullish enough. $ETH

ETHEREALIZE'S NEXT CHAPTER We were born as a marketing and BD arm for Ethereum. Today, we're excited to announce that we’re expanding our mission: Etherealize is building for the next era of finance—where Wall Street merges with Ethereum. (1/12)

I am 100% aligned with almost all of what Tom @fundstrat says here. Yes, Wall Street will stake because they currently pay for their infrastructure and Ethereum will replace much of the many siloed stacks they operate on (e.g. JPMorgam probably operates on several siloed stacks from all of the banks they've acquired and absorbed over the years). They will need their heads fully in our game, because our game will be called ... Finance. They will need to become a TradFi company that operates on decentralized rails, and that means staking, running validators, operating L2s/L3s/etc, participating in DeFi and writing smart contract software for agreements, processes and financial instruments, etc. This will be a relatively easy transition for JPM because they've been exploring and using Ethereum technology for their private blockchain networks since 2014-2015. And many other financial institutions also have solid Ethereum experience. The narrative of L2s cannibalizing L1 will very soon be shattered. See @lineabuild and Proof of Burn at github.com/ETHCF/beth for an example of how this will soon pick up momentum. Yes, ETH will likely 100x from here. Probably much more. Yes, Ethereum/ETH will flippen the Bitcoin/BTC monetary base. Yes, Tom and I are friendly and get on calls intermittently to discuss elements of the strategy and ways we can collaborate in the general furtherance of the strategy even while we compete in highly differentiated ways over time. The one quibble that I have with what Tom has been saying, and I keep telling him this: he is not nearly bullish enough. But the real problem is that it is not possible to be bullish enough. Nobody on the planet can currently fathom how large and fast a rigorously decentralized economy, saturated with hybrid human-machine intelligence, operating on decentralized Ethereum Trustware, can grow. Trust is a new kind of virtual commodity. And ETH, the highest octane decentralized trust commodity, will eventually flippen all the other commodities on the planet. Decentralized trust is all you need.