Vitalik Buterin | Paragraph
Vitalik Buterin
vitalik.eth
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jul 8
They are trying to push Chat Control through again. https://firefly.social/post/x/2074600536213737507
\ \ Firefly ✨ Everything App for Web3 Natives\ \ View @levelsio's post on Firefly\ \ 🇪🇺 The EU is now for the 6th time trying to force Chat Control through which lets them scan ALL your private messages, photos and emails without a warrant Implictly showing the EU is not democratic and not about what the people of Europe want, because once a law is rejected, you just re-submit it un](https://firefly.social/post/x/2074600536213737507)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jul 6
And ... we have a winner!
My method when writing the post in 2024 was: I wrote it in Chinese, used qwen2.5 locally to translate it to English, then manually fixed all the bugs in the translation.
Notice that the stylistic hints that his AI picked up on were intellectual habits and style of math and algorithm explanation, which bypassed my obfuscation strategy (which only covered prose) completely. https://firefly.social/post/x/2074176368993034451
\ \ View @frank_liquid's post on Firefly\ \ We used Co-Invest to try and solve this. Its answer: the December 2024 revision of EIP-7503 (Zero-Knowledge Wormholes) — submitted by the throwaway account @0xwormhole in ethereum/EIPs PR #9080. Not the 2023 original. The +120/−18 rewrite that is now ~75% of the canonical text. Why we think it's you](https://firefly.social/post/x/2074176368993034451)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jul 5
13 days.
So far no one has found it.
My only hint is that I would encourage people to somewhat broaden their search; I've seen quite a few searches and AI scripts that fail to include categories of documents that really should be included. https://firefly.social/post/x/2069080988097876084
\ \ View @VitalikButerin's post on Firefly\ \ There have recently been claims that AI text analysis will make online anonymity untenable. So let me cannibalize a piece of my own anonymity to do an experiment. At some point this decade, I wrote a published document of medium importance to Ethereum - I estimate ~200 to 2000 documents in Ethereum](https://firefly.social/post/x/2069080988097876084)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jul 4
Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.
The updated strawmap is at strawmap.org, and I attached a picture of it to this post.
My own high-level takeaways:
\* "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced:
- Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol - Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives - Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today - Multidimensional gas - State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available - Changes to client architecture ...
At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again.
\* H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another.
\* Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?"
\* Formal verification of everything for security.
\* FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.
\* Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months)
\* Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount.
eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state
This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state)
Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees.
Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration.
\* In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area.
\* Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V.
My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away.
\* Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.
Ethereum is CROPS.
Ethereum is scaling.
Ethereum is reinventing itself.
Onward.
\ \ Ethereum Strawmap\ \ L1 Strawmap — Ethereum Draft Roadmap\ \ A work-in-progress draft of the Ethereum L1 protocol roadmap, maintained by EF Architecture.](https://strawmap.org/)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jul 2
"Pokemon" is short for "pocket monsters". "Digimon" is short for "digital monsters".
Therefore, "salmon" is short for "saltwater monsters".
(You might object: salmon spend a big part of their life in freshwater. But pokemon spend a big part of their life outside pockets too!)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 29
A ten-thousand word monster post trying to cover the entire tech tree behind the main lineage of obfuscation (iO) protocols:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/06/29/obfuscation1.html
Special thanks to all who helped!
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 23
This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year.
Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world.
Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring.
Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list):
\* The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. \* PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit, and its underlying task (working on ZKP and related tech to support privacy and scaling) is shifting from an "exploration" strategy to a "build specific things we know are important" strategy, which requires less resources. \* Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. \* Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. \* EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale.
These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play.
In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin.
The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive. https://firefly.social/post/x/2069408300148388113
\ \ View @ethereumfndn's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2069408300148388113)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 22
There have recently been claims that AI text analysis will make online anonymity untenable.
So let me cannibalize a piece of my own anonymity to do an experiment.
At some point this decade, I wrote a published document of medium importance to Ethereum - I estimate ~200 to 2000 documents in Ethereum are as or more important - not under my name.
Find it.
(I genuinely have no idea how easy or hard this is, will be very curious what comes out)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 18
.@hwwonx has been a steadfast contributor to the Ethereum ecosystem for a decade. I still remember her early days in the Ethereum research community, first outside the Foundation and then inside it, and the thought and care she put into making Ethereum research and consensus work more organized and legible. At the same time, she put a lot of work into building an excellent Ethereum community in Taipei, with people and events that were among my favorites.
Last year she, along with @tkstanczak, voluntarily took on the burden of what is perhaps the most challenging position in the Ethereum Foundation, at one of the most challenging times for Ethereum - and realistically, a challenging time for all of humanity. She handled the task skillfully and gracefully, and has constantly strived to find and insist on outcomes that are right both for the Ethereum protocol and for the human beings that build and maintain it.
I look forward to her next adventures. https://firefly.social/post/x/2067612537550729327
\ \ View @hwwonx's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2067612537550729327)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 11
Looks like the options thing is happening already!
See also: various people thinking through and building different versions of the idea in the thread: https://ethresear.ch/t/building-index-tracking-assets-on-top-of-options-instead-of-debt/25036
Though I do strongly urge that if any of these get on mainnet quickly, we formally verify it first. I hope @vyperlang and/or https://github.com/lfglabs-dev/verity folks ( @Fricoben) can help!
(Also, now is a good time to be thinking about robustness-optimized oracles) https://firefly.social/post/x/2064949619583308107
\ \ GitHub\ \ GitHub - lfglabs-dev/verity: Formally verified smart contracts gives mathematical certainty across all inputs and execution paths. We bet that agents will make full formal verification practical.\ \ Formally verified smart contracts gives mathematical certainty across all inputs and execution paths. We bet that agents will make full formal verification practical. - lfglabs-dev/verity](https://github.com/lfglabs-dev/verity) \ \ Ethereum Research\ \ Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt\ \ Special thanks to Vladimir Novakovski, Curve developers, and others for feedback and review. Suppose that you have some ticker T, which represents a price index denominated in ETH. For example, T could equal the USD/ETH price (ie. inverse of ETH/USD). Or CPI/ETH (aka CPI/USD * USD/ETH). Or the same for any other commodity. Or more exotic indices (eg. average rent prices in a city). You want to give users the ability to have exposure to T. In simpler terms, your goal is to create something like...](https://ethresear.ch/t/building-index-tracking-assets-on-top-of-options-instead-of-debt/25036) \ \ View @zengjiajun_eth's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2064949619583308107)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 2
Re-posting the idea from the second half of this post a few months ago https://firefly.social/post/x/2022669570788487542:
(This is very relevant to the options ideas from yesterday)
Question: if we're making a synthetic stable, what should it really be stable WITH RESPECT TO? USD is actually far from the best choice.
---
What do people who want stablecoins ultimately want? They want price stability. They have some future expenses in mind, and they want a guarantee that will be able to pay those expenses. But if crypto grows on top of USD-backed stablecoins, crypto is ultimately not truly decentralized. Furthermore, different people have different types of expenses. There has been lots of thinking about making an "ideal stablecoin" that is based on some decentralized global price index, but what if the real solution is to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether?
Here's the idea. You have price indices on all major categories of goods and services that people buy (treating physical goods/services in different regions as different categories), and prediction markets on each category. Each user (individual or business) has a local LLM that understands that user's expenses, and offers the user a personalized basket of prediction market shares, representing "N days of that user's expected future expenses".
Now, we do not need fiat currency at all! People can hold stocks, ETH, or whatever else to grow wealth, and personalized prediction market shares when they want stability.
\ \ Firefly ✨ Everything App for Web3 Natives\ \ Firefly ✨ Everything App for Web3 Natives\ \ Firefly is a social app for exploring what's happening onchain.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2022669570788487542:)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jun 1
Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt
https://ethresear.ch/t/building-index-tracking-assets-on-top-of-options-instead-of-debt/25036
What if the use options as the base of defi, instead of CDPs and liquidations? So instead of extreme price movements creating a sharp and global "you get liquidated" effect, instead your exposure to the index diverges quadratically from your preferred exposure in a smoother way?
A key benefit is getting rid of the need for instant oracles, and instead making everything work on top of "slow oracles" (ie. the type that prediction markets use)
This design has a significant downside - the need to do regular rebalancing - and an open question of whether and how this rebalancing can be made slippage-resistant enough. But it's worth considering and trying IMO. I would feel much safer holding algostables inside something like this, than in something that depends on an oracle that has to give real-time answers (and therefore could be tricked into giving wrong real-time answers with no time for human recourse).
\ \ Ethereum Research\ \ Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt\ \ Special thanks to Vladimir Novakovski, Curve developers, and others for feedback and review. Suppose that you have some ticker T, which represents a price index denominated in ETH. For example, T could equal the USD/ETH price (ie. inverse of ETH/USD). Or CPI/ETH (aka CPI/USD * USD/ETH). Or the same for any other commodity. Or more exotic indices (eg. average rent prices in a city). You want to give users the ability to have exposure to T. In simpler terms, your goal is to create something like...](https://ethresear.ch/t/building-index-tracking-assets-on-top-of-options-instead-of-debt/25036)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 27
In an ideal world all software and hardware would have "nutrition labels" that provide a full list of trust dependencies - what math and which actors' honest behavior (and on what time scale) the system is relying on to provide its core functionality and implied guarantees.
https://x.com/Fricoben/status/2059567691103371382
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/Fricoben/status/2059567691103371382)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 27
In lieu of more of the usual blog posts, decided to try my hand at writing decentralized governance scifi:
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 24
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.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 18
Many people have claimed that with AI-assisted bug finding, secure code (and hence trustless anything) will be impossible.
I have a much more optimistic take, and AI-assisted formal verification is a major part of the reason why:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/05/18/fv.html
A shallow dive into formal verification
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 17
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 12
Sent another 64 ETH to the Animal Welfare Fund.
I encourage others to think and act more in support of our non-human cousins too! The extreme suffering we're imposing on them in the billions is not something we talk about often, but it continues to be one of the larger blights on humanity.
And I'm getting optimistic that this century we can finally end it. Farming practices are improving, synthetic alternatives are improving.
Also, in my recent experience, good old low-tech vegetarian and vegan food has improved massively worldwide over the last ten years; I encourage anyone who has tried it long before and given up to take second look; there are far more healthier and tastier options today than the "pasta and salad" you would often get ten years ago.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 11
Getting increasingly bullish on just vibe-coding the important things in Lean.
eg. see:
https://github.com/Verified-zkEVM/ArkLib https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/end-coding/
\ \ ZK/SEC Quarterly\ \ The Final Form of Software Development\ \ What if the final form of software development was just watching code and proof popping up while you sip a drink? Letting AI agents write assembly directly alongside Lean proofs sidesteps the whole compiler-trust problem. With a peek at real EVM 256-bit addition code and its specification, you'll see why the assembly + Lean paradigm is final in both the historical and category theoretic sense.](https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/end-coding/) \ \ GitHub\ \ GitHub - Verified-zkEVM/ArkLib: Formally Verified Arguments of Knowledge in Lean\ \ Formally Verified Arguments of Knowledge in Lean. Contribute to Verified-zkEVM/ArkLib development by creating an account on GitHub.](https://github.com/Verified-zkEVM/ArkLib)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
May 10
I continue to not like the idea of calling the name you have in government documents a "real name". It subtly reinforces the idea that government is some kind of uniquely privileged root of reality.
If you want to be boring and neutral, "legal name" is fine.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 28
This is quite an impressive experiment. Vibe-coding the entire 2030 roadmap within weeks.
Obviously such a thing built in two weeks without even having the EIPs has massive caveats: almost certainly lots of critical bugs, and probably in some cases "stub" versions of a thing where the AI did not even try making the full version. But six months ago, even this was far outside the realm of possibility, and what matters is where the trend is going.
AI is massively accelerating coding (yesterday, I tried agentic-coding an equivalent of my blog software, and finished within an hour, and that was using gpt-oss:20b running on my laptop (!!!!), kimi-2.5 would have probably just one-shotted it).
But probably, the right way to use it, is to take half the gains from AI in speed, and half the gains in security: generate more test-cases, formally verify everything, make more multi-implementations of things.
A collaborator of the @leanethereum effort managed to AI-code a machine-verifiable proof of one of the most complex theorems that STARKs rely on for security.
A core tenet of @leanethereum is to formally verify everything, and AI is greatly accelerating our ability to do that. Aside from formal verification, simply being able to generate a much larger body of test cases is also important.
Do not assume that you'll be able to put in a single prompt and get a highly-secure version out anytime soon; there WILL be lots of wrestling with bugs and inconsistencies between implementations. But even that wrestling can happen 5x faster and 10x more thoroughly.
People should be open to the possibility (not certainty! possibility) that the Ethereum roadmap will finish much faster than people expect, at a much higher standard of security than people expect.
On the security side, I personally am excited about the possibility that bug-free code, long considered an idealistic delusion, will finally become first possible and then a basic expectation. If we care about trustlessness, this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. Total security is impossible because ultimately total security means exact correspondence between lines of code and contents of your mind, which is many terabytes (see https://firefly.social/post/x/2025653045414273438 ). But there are many specific cases, where specific security claims can be made and verified, that cut out >99% of the negative consequences that might come from the code being broken. https://firefly.social/post/x/2026252944639934778
\ \ View @VitalikButerin's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2025653045414273438) \ \ View @yq_acc's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2026252944639934778)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 27
Now, scaling.
There are two buckets here: short-term and long-term.
Short term scaling I've written about elsewhere. Basically:
\* Block level access lists (coming in Glamsterdam) allow blocks to be verified in parallel. \* ePBS (coming in Glamsterdam) has many features, of which one is that it becomes safe to use a large fraction of each slot (instead of just a few hundred milliseconds) to verify a block \* Gas repricings ensure that gas costs of operations are aligned with the actual time it takes to execute them (plus other costs they impose). We're also taking early forays into multidimensional gas, which ensures that different resources are capped differently. Both allow us to take larger fractions of a slot to verify blocks, without fear of exceptional cases.
There is a multi-stage roadmap for multidimensional gas.
First, in Glamsterdam, we separate out "state creation" costs from "execution and calldata" costs. Today, an SSTORE that changes a slot from nonzero -> nonzero costs 5000 gas, an SSTORE that changes zero -> nonzero costs 20000. One of the Glamsterdam repricings greatly increases that extra amount (eg. to 60000); our goal doing this + gas limit increases is to scale execution capacity much more than we scale state size capacity, for reasons I've written before ( https://ethresear.ch/t/hyper-scaling-state-by-creating-new-forms-of-state/24052 ). So in Glamsterdam, that SSTORE will charge 5000 "regular" gas and (eg.) 55000 "state creation gas".
State creation gas will NOT count toward the ~16 million tx gas cap, so creating large contracts (larger than today) will be possible.
One challenge is: how does this work in the EVM? The EVM opcodes (GAS, CALL...) all assume one dimension. Here is our approach. We maintain two invariants:
\* If you make a call with X gas, that call will have X gas that's usable for "regular" OR "state creation" OR other future dimensions \* If you call the GAS opcode, it tells you you have Y gas, then you make a call with X gas, you still have at least Y-X gas, usable for any function, _after_ the call to do any post-operations
What we do is, we create N+1 "dimensions" of gas, where by default N=1 (state creation), and the extra dimension we call "reservoir". EVM execution by default consumes the "specialized" dimensions if it can, and otherwise it consumes from reservoir. So eg. if you have (100000 state creation gas, 100000 reservoir), then if you use SSTORE to create new state three times, your remaining gas goes (100000, 100000) -> (45000, 95000) -> (0, 80000) -> (0, 20000). GAS returns reservoir. CALL passes along the specified gas amount from the reservoir, plus _all_ non-reservoir gas.
Later, we switch to multi-dimensional *pricing*, where different dimensions can have different floating gas prices. This gives us long-term economic sustainability and optimality (see https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/05/09/multidim.html ). The reservoir mechanism solves the sub-call problem at the end of that article.
Now, for long-term scaling, there are two parts: ZK-EVM, and blobs.
For blobs, the plan is to continue to iterate on PeerDAS, and get it to an eventual end-state where it can ideally handle ~8 MB/sec of data. Enough for Ethereum's needs, not attempting to be some kind of global data layer. Today, blobs are for L2s. In the future, the plan is for Ethereum block data to directly go into blobs. This is necessary to enable someone to validate a hyperscaled Ethereum chain without personally downloading and re-executing it: ZK-SNARKs remove the need to re-execute, and PeerDAS on blobs lets you verify availability without personally downloading.
For ZK-EVM, the goal is to step up our "comfort" relying on it in stages:
\* Clients that let you participate as an attester with ZK-EVMs will exist in 2026. They will not be safe enough to allow the network to run on them, but eg. 5% of the network relying on them will be ok. (If the ZK-EVM breaks, you *will not* be slashed, you'll just have a risk of building on an invalid block and losing revenue) \* In 2027, we'll start recommending for a larger minority of the network to run on ZK-EVMs, and at the same time full focus will be on formally verifying, maximizing their security, etc. Even 20% of the network running ZK-EVMs will let us greatly increase the gaslimit, because it allows gas limits to greatly increase while having a cheap path for solo stakers, who are under 20% anyway. \* When ready, we move to 3-of-5 mandatory proving. For a block to be valid, it would need to contain 3 of 5 types of proofs from different proof systems. By this point, we would expect that all nodes (except nodes that need to do indexing) will rely on ZK-EVM proofs. \* Keep improving the ZK-EVM, and make it as robust, formally verified, etc as possible. This will also start to involve any VM change efforts (eg. RISC-V) https://firefly.social/post/lens/10403441973837545809595338716622525043489585081375086655812971804118320053624
Multidimensional gas pricing \ \ Ethereum Research\ \ Hyper-scaling state by creating new forms of state\ \ Special thanks to Guillaume Ballet, Marius van der Wijden, Jialei Rong, CPerezz, Han, soispoke, Justin Drake, Maria Silva and Anders Elowsson for feedback and review In order to scale Ethereum over the next five years, we need to scale three resources: execution (EVM computation, signature verification…), data (transaction sender, recipient, signature, calldata…) and state (account balances, code, storage). Our goal is to scale Ethereum by ~1000x. But there is a fundamental asymmetry between th...](https://ethresear.ch/t/hyper-scaling-state-by-creating-new-forms-of-state/24052) \ \ View @vitalik's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/lens/10403441973837545809595338716622525043489585081375086655812971804118320053624)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 26
Now, the quantum resistance roadmap.
Today, four things in Ethereum are quantum-vulnerable:
\* consensus-layer BLS signatures \* data availability (KZG commitments+proofs) \* EOA signatures (ECDSA) \* Application-layer ZK proofs (KZG or groth16)
We can tackle these step by step:
## Consensus-layer signatures
Lean consensus includes fully replacing BLS signatures with hash-based signatures (some variant of Winternitz), and using STARKs to do aggregation.
Before lean finality, we stand a good chance of getting the Lean available chain. This also involves hash-based signatures, but there are much fewer signatures (eg. 256-1024 per slot), so we do not need STARKs for aggregation.
One important thing upstream of this is choosing the hash function. This may be "Ethereum's last hash function", so it's important to choose wisely. Conventional hashes are too slow, and the most aggressive forms of Poseidon have taken hits on their security analysis recently. Likely options are:
\* Poseidon2 plus extra rounds, potentially non-arithmetic layers (eg. Monolith) mixed in \* Poseidon1 (the older version of Poseidon, not vulnerable to any of the recent attacks on Poseidon2, but 2x slower) \* BLAKE3 or similar (take the most efficient conventional hash we know)
## Data availability
Today, we rely pretty heavily on KZG for erasure coding. We could move to STARKs, but this has two problems:
1. If we want to do 2D DAS, then our current setup for this relies on the "linearity" property of KZG commitments; with STARKs we don't have that. However, our current thinking is that it should be sufficient given our scale targets to just max out 1D DAS (ie. PeerDAS). Ethereum is taking a more conservative posture, it's not trying to be a high-scale data layer for the world. 2. We need proofs that erasure coded blobs are correctly constructed. KZG does this "for free". STARKs can substitute, but a STARK is ... bigger than a blob. So you need recursive starks (though there's also alternative techniques, that have their own tradeoffs). This is okay, but the logistics of this get harder if you want to support distributed blob selection.
Summary: it's manageable, but there's a lot of engineering work to do.
## EOA signatures
Here, the answer is clear: we add native AA (see https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8141 ), so that we get first-class accounts that can use any signature algorithm.
However, to make this work, we also need quantum-resistant signature algorithms to actually be viable. ECDSA signature verification costs 3000 gas. Quantum-resistant signatures are ... much much larger and heavier to verify.
We know of quantum-resistant hash-based signatures that are in the ~200k gas range to verify.
We also know of lattice-based quantum-resistant signatures. Today, these are extremely inefficient to verify. However, there is work on vectorized math precompiles, that let you perform operations (+, *, %, dot product, also NTT / butterfly permutations) that are at the core of lattice math, and also STARKs. This could greatly reduce the gas cost of lattice-based signatures to a similar range, and potentially go even lower.
The long-term fix is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation, which could reduce these gas overheads to near-zero.
## Proofs
Today, a ZK-SNARK costs ~300-500k gas. A quantum-resistant STARK is more like 10m gas. The latter is unacceptable for privacy protocols, L2s, and other users of proofs.
The solution again is protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation. So let's talk about what this is.
In EIP-8141, transactions have the ability to include a "validation frame", during which signature verifications and similar operations are supposed to happen. Validation frames cannot access the outside world, they can only look at their calldata and return a value, and nothing else can look at their calldata. This is designed so that it's possible to replace any validation frame (and its calldata) with a STARK that verifies it (potentially a single STARK for all the validation frames in a block).
This way, a block could "contain" a thousand validation frames, each of which contains either a 3 kB signature or even a 256 kB proof, but that 3-256 MB (and the computation needed to verify it) would never come onchain. Instead, it would all get replaced by a proof verifying that the computation is correct.
Potentially, this proving does not even need to be done by the block builder. Instead, I envision that it happens at mempool layer: every 500ms, each node could pass along the new valid transactions that it has seen, along with a proof verifying that they are all valid (including having validation frames that match their stated effects). The overhead is static: only one proof per 500ms. Here's a post where I talk about this:
https://ethresear.ch/t/recursive-stark-based-bandwidth-efficient-mempool/23838
\ \ Ethereum Research\ \ Recursive-STARK-based bandwidth-efficient mempool\ \ Suppose you have a large number of objects that can be sent by users, that all (if valid) need to be broadcasted so that they can be discovered and included by some final builder node. Suppose also that the validity condition can be expressed in a STARK, and we are in a post-quantum environment where elliptic curve SNARKs will not work. This applies in at least three use cases in Ethereum: Post-quantum execution-layer signature aggregation, especially if users are using privacy protocols Post...](https://ethresear.ch/t/recursive-stark-based-bandwidth-efficient-mempool/23838)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 25
A very important document. Let's walk through this one "goal" at a time. We'll start with fast slots and fast finality.
I expect that we'll reduce slot time in an incremental fashion, eg. I like the "sqrt(2) at a time" formula (12 -> 8 -> 6 -> 4 -> 3 -> 2, though the last two steps are more speculative and depend on heavy research). It is possible to go faster or slower here; but the high level is that we'll view the slot time as a parameter that we adjust down when we're confident it's safe to, similar to the blob target.
Fast slots are off in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and do not really seem to connect to anything. This is because the rest of the roadmap is pretty independent of the slot time: we would need to do roughly the same things whether the slot time is 2 seconds or 32 seconds
There are a few intersection areas though. One is p2p improvements. @raulvk has recently been working on an optimized p2p layer for Ethereum, which uses erasure coding to greatly improve on the bandwidth/latency tradeoff frontier. Roughly speaking: in today's design, each node receives a full block body from several peers, and is able to accept and rebroadcast it as soon as it receives the first one. If the "width" (number of peers sending you the block) is low, then one bad peer can greatly delay when you receive the block. If width is high, there is a lot of unneeded data overhead. With erasure coding, you can choose a k-of-n setup, eg: split each block into 8 pieces so that with any 4 of them you can reconstruct the full block. This gives you much of the redundancy benefits of high width, without the overhead.
We have stats that show that this architecture can greatly reduce 95th percentile block propagation time, making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs (except increased protocol complexity, though here the performance-gain-to-lines-of-code ratio is quite favorable)
Another intersection area is the more complex slot structure that comes with ePBS, FOCIL, and the fast confirmation rule. These have important benefits, but they decrease the safe latency maximum from slot/3 to slot/5. There's ongoing research to try to pipeline things better to minimize losses (also note: the slot time is lower-bounded not just by slot latency, but also by the fixed-cost part of ZK prover latency), but there are some tradeoffs here.
One way we are exploring to compensate for this is to change to an architecture where only ~256-1024 randomly selected attesters sign on each slot. For a fork choice (non-finalizing) function, this is totally sufficient. The smaller number of signatures lets us remove the aggregation phase, shortening the slots.
Fast finality is more complex (the ultimate protocol is IMO simpler than status quo Gasper, but the change path is complex). Today, finality takes 16 minutes (12s slots * 32 slot epochs * 2.5 epochs) on average. The goal is to decouple slots and finality, so allow us to reason about both separately, and we are aiming to use a one-round-finality BFT algorithm (a Minimmit variant) to finalize. So endgame finality time might be eg. 6-16 sec.
Because this is a very invasive set of changes, the plan is to bundle the largest step in each change with a switch of the cryptography, notably to post-quantum hash-based signatures, and to a maximally STARK-friendly hash (there are three possible responses to the recent Poseidon2 attacks: (i) increase round count or introduce other countermeasures such as a Monolith layer, (ii) go back to Poseidon1, which is even more lindy than Poseidon2 and has not seen flaws, (iii) use BLAKE3 or other maximally-cheap "conventional" hash. All are being researched).
Additionally, there is a plan to introduce many of these changes piece-by-piece, eg. "1-epoch finality" means we adjust the current consensus to change from FFG-style finalization to Minimmit-style finalization.
One possible finality time trajectory is: 16 min (today) -> 10m40s (8s slots) -> 6m24s (one-epoch finality) -> 1m12s (8-slot epochs, 6s slots) -> 48s (4s slots) -> 16s (minimmit) -> 8s (minimmit with more aggressive parameters)
One interesting consequence of the incremental approach is that there is a pathway to making the slots quantum-resistant much sooner than making the finality quantum-resistant, so we may well quite quickly get to a regime where, if quantum computers suddenly appear, we lose the finality guarantee, but the chain keeps chugging along.
Summary: expect to see progressive decreases of both slot time and finality time, and expect to see these changes to be intertwined with a "ship of Theseus" style component-by-component replacement of Ethereum's slot structure and consensus with a cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, prover-friendly, end-to-end formally-verified alternative. https://firefly.social/post/x/2026755969540108659
\ \ View @drakefjustin's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2026755969540108659)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 24
💛💙
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 24
It will significantly increase my opinion of @Anthropic if they do not back down, and honorably eat the consequences.
(For those who are not aware, so far they have been maintaining the two red lines of "no fully autonomous weapons" and "no mass surveillance of Americans". Actually a very conservative and limited posture, it's not even anti-military.
IMO fully autonomous weapons and mass privacy violation are two things we all want less of, so in my ideal world anyone working on those things gets access to the same open-weights LLMs as everyone else, and exactly nothing on top of that. Of course we won't get anywhere close to that world, but if we get even 10% closer to that world that's good, and if we get 10% further that's bad)
CC @DarioAmodei https://firefly.social/post/bsky/pv7fudnt4dspurzdnyq73pfe_3mfmta2tzha2z
\ \ View @techmeme.com's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/bsky/pv7fudnt4dspurzdnyq73pfe_3mfmta2tzha2z)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 24
I agree with this.
Though with the proviso that because Ethereum is permissionless, various centralized and closed things will inevitably exist on top of it. Our job should be to make the open-source, permissionless, trustless, secure censorship resistant ecosystem strong, so that it can hold its own and ultimately prove itself superior to both anything closed / permissioned / trusted-party-backdoored on Ethereum, and to such things outside Ethereum in the traditional world. https://firefly.social/post/x/2026376598375575755
\ \ View @MarsTrade333's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2026376598375575755)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 24
I actually like private property more than I did a few years ago.
One variable that changed for me is "stable era mindset vs chaotic era mindset". When you're in a "stable era", you see how private property is suboptimal, how economics can easily churn out 10+ categories of situations where it's obvious that certain taxes, incentives to make things available at better prices, etc can produce first-order gains with only second-order deadweight losses (which means that at low levels, the gains greatly exceed the losses). "Pure" private property is only "optimal" under spherical-cow economic assumptions like perfect competition.
But in a "chaotic era", private property is more about schelling points - it's about creating a bulwark that's easy for people to understand and rally around defending, that says "your attempt to intervene in my life from the outside ends here". In the chaotic era, infringements on personal space are less likely to be well-meaning bureaucrats who overreach because they have not read enough Hayek, and more likely to be coming from a place of outright indifference or even hostility to your well-being. And looking at modern politics, yeah, there's a lot of that now.
Since a lot of "Vitalik hates private property" sentiment comes from me liking Harberger taxes, I'll address that topic directly.
My biggest update since the original 2016-19 era ideas was that, when designing details of Harberger taxes, the best motivating example to organize thought around is not "your house", rather it's "corporate intellectual property and walled gardens". If we think about the underlying complaints that people have about powerful corporations, the walled gardens and various ways in which centralized power accumulates on itself is top 5 on the list. What would it look like to build a "Harberger tax" that would tax eg. social platforms, Apple, etc more if they acted as walled gardens, and less if they enabled interoperability (and zero if they were fully open-source and interoperable and forkable)?
There is a lot of energy right now around wanting to tax very wealthy individuals and corporations more, and I wonder: what if the best way to do that is not to tax *wealth* or *unrealized gains* (which has large downsides), but instead to tax *enclosure*? This way you raise revenue in a way that actually *increases* efficiency (any losses from people working less hard are more-than-compensated by gains from people shifting their work into formats where it's easier for people to build on top of each other and markets becoming more competitive).
Any tax is an infringement on private property. But if you think about "tax on social platform that's proportional to some metric of how walled-garden-y they are", in an intuitive human sense, it really doesn't feel like "bureaucrats intervening in my life". It feels like "keeping concentrations of power from getting too out of hand". So I am in favor of doing things like that, and much less than before in favor of anything that forces people (incl entrepreneurs) to outright sell their assets, as eg. "Harberger tax on everything" does. A world where startup entrepreneurs are forced to constantly sell shares, realistically to the same few large VCs, in order to pay unrealized-gains or wealth tax bills strikes me as a world that's likely to be more soulless and homogeneous than today. But a world where the top 50% of large companies ranked by walled-garden-ness are taxed more (and the bottom 25% by that metric taxed less, perhaps some even zero), is a world that feels more dynamic and open and free.
But even the above is somewhat of a "stable era" perspective, because it tries to make a more-perfect solution from the perspective of the political layer being friendly. We live in a chaotic era, and the point of crypto should be to solve important problems from the bottom up (whether "individualistic bottom up", enabling people to resist and escape various shackles, or "collective bottom up", communities organizing around shifting entire equilibria to their benefit)
This ties into what I mean by wanting Ethereum to protect financial self-sovereignty. I do not think that Ethereum has much to offer to the trillion-dollar companies whose goal it is to offer products and services in a way that maximizes walled gardens and enclosure - in fact, much the opposite, censorship resistance can serve as the baseline for rebel communities that play the adversarial game of routing around those walled gardens. I do think Ethereum offers stronger security to people who want to maintain security of (including ability to use) their own financial resources, including surviving through great economic and political turmoil, for their personal or economic needs. And Ethereum offers a base layer for communities to organize large sudden collective shifts away from harmful equilibria into better ones; DAOs should try to solve that problem more. https://firefly.social/post/x/2026353840946045271
\ \ View @AndrewSteinwold's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2026353840946045271)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 24
Defi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides. Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world. Finance is far from the only thing that Ethereum is good for, but it is an important thing. This post discusses how the Ethereum Foundation is approaching defi.
Defi today makes the world's best savings, risk management and wealth-building opportunities permissionlessly available worldwide. We need to build on that.
Ethereum's early defi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate and come up with totally new paradigms (eg. AMMs). Defi tomorrow will bring back that spirit. Don't just "make a better stablecoin", dig a layer deeper, and think about the underlying problem (risk management, hedging one's future expenses), and come up with an even better solution.
But also, as the EF, we are not interested in supporting "onchain finance" or even "defi" indiscriminately. We have a specific vision of what we want to see out of defi: permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people's control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties, and democratizes risk management and wealth building (the two key goals of finance according to modern portfolio theory) as well as payments. We want protocols that pass the walkaway test: that keep working even if the original team suddenly disappears without warning (or even: becomes hostile / compromised without warning).
Bringing this vision to reality will inevitably take a lot of work. Defi is a complex toolchain, including various onchain components, user-side offchain components (ie. wallet, local agent...), other offchain components, etc.
The things that we care about include areas like:
\* Improving security of defi through "traditional" means, eg. audits, standards, wallet-side safeguards \* Improving security of defi through "new" means, eg. AI-assisted formal verification, user-side agents as safeguards \* Oracle security and decentralization (there's A LOT of skeletons in the closet here, we as an ecosystem really need to point a big eye of sauron at it for a while) \* Privacy. Both privacy-preserving payments, and privacy of more complex use cases (eg. what does it mean to have a maximally privacy-preserving CDP? there are clearly benefits in reducing liquidation-sniping risk, but it requires hard tech to get there) \* Open source, and improving the licensing / forkability situation in defi
Ethereum is a permissionless protocol, and nothing stops people from deploying insecure protocols, protocols that enshrine ultimately unneeded centralized trust in the name of convenience, or dopamine-maximizing gambleslop. However, we *are* interested in working with anyone aligned to make permissionless, open-source, intermediary-minimizing and security and user-agency-maximizing defi ecosystem as strong as possible, so that it can be not just individuals and institutions' first choice in Ethereum, but also a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who needs its properties. https://firefly.social/post/x/2026004347008733339
\ \ View @CharlieStLouis's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2026004347008733339)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 24
Interesting to scroll through the comments of this. At least on the socials, there is pretty much zero public support for
(i) corporate intellectual property [especially in this case, given how basically all the models were trained] (ii) the vision of "let's protect against Authoritarian Bad Guys by making sure that the self-appointed Good Guys are the only ones with the best toys"
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2025997928242811253
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2025997928242811253)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 22
How I think about "security":
The goal is to minimize the divergence between the user's intent, and the actual behavior of the system.
"User experience" can also be defined in this way. Thus, "user experience" and "security" are thus not separate fields. However, "security" focuses on tail risk situations (where downside of divergence is large), and specifically tail risk situations that come about as a result of adversarial behavior.
One thing that becomes immediately obvious from the above definition, is that "perfect security" is impossible. Not because machines are "flawed", or even because humans designing the machines are "flawed", but because "the user's intent" is fundamentally an extremely complex object that the user themselves does not have easy access to.
Suppose the user's intent is "I want to send 1 ETH to Bob". But "Bob" is itself a complicated meatspace entity that cannot be easily mathematically defined. You could "represent" Bob with some public key or hash, but then the possibility that the public key or hash is not actually Bob becomes part of the threat model. The possibility that there is a contentious hard fork, and so the question of which chain represents "ETH" is subjective. In reality, the user has a well-formed picture about these topics, which gets summarized by the umbrella term "common sense", but these things are not easily mathematically defined.
Once you get into more complicated user goals - take, for example, the goal of "preserving the user's privacy" - it becomes even more complicated. Many people intuitively think that encrypting messages is enough, but the reality is that the metadata pattern of who talks to whom, and the timing pattern between messages, etc, can leak a huge amount of information. What is a "trivial" privacy loss, versus a "catastrophic" loss?
If you're familiar with early Yudkowskian thinking about AI safety, and how simply specifying goals robustly is one of the hardest parts of the problem, you will recognize that this is the same problem.
Now, what do "good security solutions" look like?
This applies for:
\* Ethereum wallets \* Operating systems \* Formal verification of smart contracts or clients or any computer programs \* Hardware \* ...
The fundamental constraint is: anything that the user can input into the system is fundamentally far too low-complexity to fully encode their intent. I would argue that the common trait of a good solution is: the user is specifying their intention in multiple, overlapping ways, and the system only acts when these specifications are aligned with each other.
Examples:
\* Type systems in programming: the programmer first specifies *what the program does* (the code itself), but then also specifies *what "shape" each data structure has at every step of the computation*. If the two diverge, the program fails to compile. \* Formal verification: the programmer specifies what the program does (the code itself), and then also specifies mathematical properties that the program satisfies \* Transaction simulations: the user specifies first what action they want to take, and then clicks "OK" or "Cancel" after seeing a simulation of the onchain consequences of that action \* Post-assertions in transactions: the transaction specifies both the action and its expected effects, and both have to match for the transaction to take effect \* Multisig / social recovery: the user specifies multiple keys that represent their authority \* Spending limits, new-address confirmations, etc: the user specifies first what action they want to take, and then, if that action is "unusual" or "high-risk" in some sense, the user has to re-specify "yes, I know I am doing something unusual / high-risk"
In all cases, the pattern is the same: there is no perfection, there is only risk reduction through redundancy. And you want the different redundant specifications to "approach the user's intent" from different "angles": eg. action, and expected consequences, expected level of significance, economic bound on downside, etc
This way of thinking also hints at the right way to use LLMs. LLMs done right are themselves a simulation of intent. A generic LLM is (among other things) like a "shadow" of the concept of human common sense. A user-fine-tuned LLM is like a "shadow" of that user themselves, and can identify in a more fine-grained way what is normal vs unusual.
LLMs should under no circumstances be relied on as a sole determiner of intent. But they are one "angle" from which a user's intent can be approximated. It's an angle very different from traditional, explicit, ways of encoding intent, and that difference itself maximizes the likelihood that the redundancy will prove useful.
One other corollary is that "security" does NOT mean "make the user do more clicks for everything". Rather, security should mean: it should be easy (if not automated) to do low-risk things, and hard to do dangerous things. Getting this balance right is the challenge.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 21
"AI becomes the government" is dystopian: it leads to slop when AI is weak, and is doom-maximizing once AI becomes strong. But AI used well can be empowering, and push the frontier of democratic / decentralized modes of governance.
The core problem with democratic / decentralized modes of governance (including DAOs on ethereum) is limits to human attention: there are many thousands of decisions to make, involving many domains of expertise, and most people don't have the time or skill to be experts in even one, let alone all of them. The usual solution, delegation, is disempowering: it leads to a small group of delegates controlling decision-making while their supporters, after they hit the "delegate" button, have no influence at all. So what can we do? We use personal LLMs to solve the attention problem! Here are a few ideas:
## Personal governance agents
If a governance mechanism depends on you to make a large number of decisions, a personal agent can perform all the necessary votes for you, based on preferences that it infers from your personal writing, conversation history, direct statements, etc.
If the agent is (i) unsure how you would vote on an issue, and (ii) convinced the issue is important, then it should ask you directly, and give you all relevant context.
## Public conversation agents
Making good decisions often cannot come from a linear process of taking people's views that are based only on their own information, and averaging them (even quadratically). There is a need for processes that aggregate many people's information, and then give each person (or their LLM) a chance to respond *based on that*.
This includes:
\* Inferring and summarizing your own views and converting them into a format that can be shared publicly (and does not expose your private info) \* Summarizing commonalities between people's inputs (expressed as words), similar to the various LLM+pol.is ideas
## Suggestion markets
If a governance mechanism values "high-quality inputs" of any type (this could be proposals, or it could even be arguments), then you can have a prediction market, where anyone can submit an input, AIs can bet on a token representing that input, and if the mechanism "accepts" the input (either accepting the proposal, or accepting it as a "unit" of conversation that it then passes along to its participant), it pays out $X to the holders of the token.
Note that this is basically the same as https://firefly.social/post/x/2017956762347835488
## Decentralized governance with private information
One of the biggest weaknesses of highly decentralized / democratic governance is that it does not work well when important decisions need to be made with secret information.
Common situations:
(i) the org engaging in adversarial conflicts or negotiations (ii) internal dispute resolution (iii) compensation / funding decisions.
Typically, orgs solve this by appointing individuals who have great power to take on those tasks.
But with multi-party computation (currently I've seen this done with TEEs; I would love to see at least the two-party case solved with garbled circuits https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/03/21/garbled.html so we can get pure-cryptographic security guarantees for it), we could actually take many people's inputs into account to deal with these situations, without compromising privacy. Basically: you submit your personal LLM into a black box, the LLM sees private info, it makes a judgement based on that, and it outputs only that judgement. You don't see the private info, and no one else sees the contents of your personal LLM.
## The importance of privacy
All of these approaches involve each participant making use of much more information about themselves, and potentially submitting much larger-sized inputs. Hence, it becomes all the more important to protect privacy. There are two kinds of privacy that matter:
\* Anonymity of the participant: this can be accomplished with ZK. In general, I think all governance tools should come with ZK built in \* Privacy of the contents: this has two parts. First, the personal LLM should do what it can to avoid divulging private info about you that it does not need to divulge. Second, when you have computation that combines multiple LLMs or multiple people's info, you need multi-party techniques to compute it privately. Both are important.
A Quick Garbled Circuits Primer Polis \ \ View @VitalikButerin's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2017956762347835488)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 19
Good time to switch to Openstreetmap (OrganicMaps is a good mobile app for it)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-maps-is-now-less-useful-if-youre-not-signed-in
My experience has been that OSM's biggest weakness is less detailed info on stores, restaurants, etc. But if that's something that Google is treating as a premium feature and locking down, and meanwhile OSM will almost certainly improve, then...
\ \ PCMAG\ \ Google Maps Is Now Less Useful If You’re Not Signed In\ \ Those who aren't signed into a Google account are moved to what Maps calls a 'limited view.'](https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-maps-is-now-less-useful-if-youre-not-signed-in)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 19
I think Ring might be the first surveillance project that was *accidentally* given a fitting Tolkien name.
https://firefly.social/post/bsky/vi2grzfali5xn5rh2ny2n4d4_3mfap6va7es27
\ \ View @culturecrave.co's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/bsky/vi2grzfali5xn5rh2ny2n4d4_3mfap6va7es27)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 19
Ethereum L1 protocol research is taking leaps forward in 2026. A good post from @ralexstokes:
https://x.com/ralexstokes/status/2024155683319611850
\* Scale \* Improve UX \* Harden
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/ralexstokes/status/2024155683319611850)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 19
There is also an important synergy between FOCIL and AA (EIP-8141, which is based on 7701):
8141 makes not just smart accounts (including multisig, quantum-resistant signatures, key changes, gas sponsorship) first-class citizens, it also can do the same for privacy protocols (either indirectly via paymaster, or if we add 2D nonces, directly as a multi-tenant account). "First-class citizen" means that operations sent from that account can be included directly onchain as transactions, with no wrappers.
FOCIL enables censorship-resistant rapid inclusion of any transaction.
Hence, with FOCIL and 8141 together, anything, including smart wallet txs, gas sponsored txs, and even privacy protocol txs, can be included onchain through one of 17 different actors (the proposer or the includers) that are all chosen randomly in each slot.
This gives us guaranteed rapid inclusion, meaning almost certainly within 1-2 slots, of any such tx, even in an adversarial environment.
In this iteration, the FOCILs are 8 kB each, so they are very small in size. However, there is a natural future extension path to making them much larger, so that the majority of transactions to a block could, if needed, come through FOCILs.
Such a design would have many of the properties of multiple concurrent proposer (MCP) designs, with the key difference being that FOCILs do not try to control the MEV-relevant "last look" role - that's still auctioned off with ePBS. The behavior of the last look role in "full MCP" depends strongly on the specifics of the design.
The FOCIL design ensures that even if literally 100% of all slots get sold off via proposer-builder separation to a hostile actor that refuses to connect to public mempools, discriminates against certain applications, or is otherwise abusive, all transactions can still get quickly included. It's not eliminating the centralization of the proposer role, but it is heavily disempowering it.
With EIP-8141 (AA), transactions from smart wallets, privacy protocols, etc, could be sent *through a public mempool, and directly received by a FOCIL includer*, no wrappers, "public broadcasters", or other intermediaries required.
Ethereum is going hard. https://firefly.social/post/x/2024487767871299767
\ \ View @soispoke's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2024487767871299767)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 16
You do not have to agree with me on which applications are and are not corposlop to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with me on what trust assumptions are acceptable in which situations to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with me on political topics to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with my views on defi, decentralized social or privacy-preserving payments to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with my views on AI to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with my view that Berlin has the best food in Europe, suits and ties should be expunged from our culture, and YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format to use Ethereum.
And you do not have to agree with me on any one of those above things to agree with me on any other.
I do not claim to represent the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol. The whole concept of "permissionlessness" and "censorship resistance" is that you are free to use Ethereum in whatever way you want, without caring about what I think, or even what anyone else in the Ethereum Foundation or even any Ethereum client developer thinks.
But on the flipside, if I say that your application is corposlop, I am not "censoring" you. This has always been the flip side of the grand bargain of free speech: I am not free to shut you down, but I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me.
In fact, it is *necessary* that we do this. The modern world does not call out for pretend neutrality, where a person puts on a suit and claims to be equally open to all perspectives from all of humanity and not have their own opinions. Neutrality is for protocols (like HTTP, like Bitcoin, like Ethereum), and neutrality within some scope is for some institutions. The modern world calls out for the courage to clearly state one's principles - including stating principles by pointing to negative examples, that is by criticizing the things in the world that are incompatible with one's principles - and work with those with aligned goals to build the metaverse within which those principles are taken as a baseline.
Such things inherently cannot be constrained to just the layer of the protocol: any principle you have will naturally lead to conclusions, not just about how the protocol should be built, but also what should be built upon it. Furthermore, any such principle will have consequences that go beyond technology, and reach into specific questions within the larger social world. This should not be avoided. Valuing something like "freedom", and then acting as though it has consequences on technology choices, but is completely separate from everything else about our lives, is not pragmatic - it is hollow.
The inevitable converse of this is that (i) a decentralized protocol must not be viewed as belonging to only one metaverse, and (ii) the borders of a metaverse are fuzzy: it is possible, and indeed it is the normal case, to align with any one on some axes and not on other axes.
Linux is a technology of user empowerment and freedom, Linux is also the base layer of a lot of the world's corposlop. It's almost certainly the base layer of many things that I think are good, and you think are bad, and vice versa. Hence, if you care about Linux because you care about user empowerment and freedom, it is not enough to just build the kernel, we must also build a full-stack ecosystem compatible with those values, and explicitly accept that this is not the only way that people will use Linux, but it is one way that must be built and must be available. Ethereum is similar.
Milady.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 13
Welcome Bastian!
Ethereum is for node runners, UX and product builders, community organizers, forum crews, lurkers, and free software advocates, cyberanarchists, Landian accelerationists, financepunks, femboys, and all others who do not fit into a 280 character limit.
Milady https://firefly.social/post/x/2022318885047779576
\ \ View @aerugoettinea's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2022318885047779576)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 13
Tomasz has always impressed me with his work ethic, his unique personality, and the kind of organization that he built at Nethermind. He brought a perspective on Ethereum, what blockchains fundamentally are, and how they fit into the future of the world as a whole, that was creative and unique and different from what I saw anyone else in any of the various tribes of crypto discourse saying.
In his year at the EF, Tomasz helped to greatly increase the efficiency of many parts of the foundation, and turn the EF into an organization that is much more responsive to the world outside. He brought fresh new energy to the organization, and as a result of his encouragement and support, the Ethereum Foundation is regularly doing things well outside its previous comfort zone.
He has also pushed all of us to think differently about what Ethereum can do and how Ethereum can be used, and to take seriously the radical changes that AI might bring to our blockchain world.
I look forward to seeing the exciting work that Tomasz will continue to do, both within Ethereum and outside. https://firefly.social/post/x/2022315368430067847
\ \ View @tkstanczak's post on Firefly\ \ Join the conversation on Firefly: follow, comment and engage with Web3 social posts in real time.](https://firefly.social/post/x/2022315368430067847)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 12
Скоро будет 24 февраля — 4 года полномасштабного вторжения в Украину.
Я считаю, что лучше оставить тот день для полной поддержки украинцев. Украине нужно много помощи — чтобы продолжать защищаться и чтобы минимизировать человеческие страдания от атак на жилые дома, энергосистему и т. д. Сегодня выскажу своё мнение с точки зрения будущего России.
Я смотрю на эту ситуацию частично с внутренней и частично с внешней перспективы. Я родился в России, моя семья вся русская, но вырос я в Канаде. Политическую ситуацию я всё время наблюдал. В 2017 году даже послал Навальному один биткоин, но сильно вовлечён не был. Я слежу за ситуацией через интернет, как все. И у меня есть свои политические инстинкты после 15 лет в крипте и всякой борьбы в Твиттере (Иксе?). У каждого есть право меня слушать или не слушать — как хотите.
Здесь напишу две части:
1. Почему я поддерживаю Украину и говорю, что эта война — преступная агрессия, а не «сложная ситуация, где обе стороны вели себя грязно», как говорят некоторые? 2. Про будущее: сегодняшний «тупик», идея «мира с народом России», и на основе каких идей может быть создано более положительное будущее России, и правильная роль идей «децентрализации», «цифровой демократии» и.т.д.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 18
An important, and perenially underrated, aspect of "trustlessness", "passing the walkaway test" and "self-sovereignty" is protocol simplicity.
Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails all three tests:
\* It's not trustless because you have to trust a small class of high priests who tell you what properties the protocol has \* It doesn't pass the walkaway test because if existing client teams go away, it's extremely hard for new teams to get up to the same level of quality \* It's not self-sovereign because if even the most technical people can't inspect and understand the thing, it's not fully yours
It's also less secure, because each part of the protocol, especially if it can interact with other parts in complicated ways, carries a risk of the protocol breaking.
One of my fears with Ethereum protocol development is that we can be too eager to add new features to meet highly specific needs, even if those features bloat the protocol or add entire new types of interacting components or complicated cryptography as critical dependencies. This can be nice for short-term functionality gains, but it is highly destructive to preserving long-term self-sovereignty, and creating a hundred-year decentralized hyperstructure that transcends the rise and fall of empires and ideologies.
The core problem is that if protocol changes are judged from the perspective of "how big are they as changes to the existing protocol", then the desire to preserve backwards compatibility means that additions happen much more often than subtractions, and the protocol inevitably bloats over time. To counteract this, the Ethereum development process needs an explicit "simplification" / "garbage collection" function.
"Simplification" has three metrics:
\* Minimizing total lines of code in the protocol. An ideal protocol fits onto a single page - or at least a few pages \* Avoiding unnecessary dependencies on fundamentally complex technical components. For example, a protocol whose security solely depends on hashes (even better: on exactly one hash function) is better than one that depends on hashes and lattices. Throwing in isogenies is worst of all, because (sorry to the truly brilliant hardworking nerds who figured that stuff out) nobody understands isogenies. \* Adding more _invariants_: core properties that the protocol can rely on, for example EIP-6780 (selfdestruct removal) added the property that at most N storage slots can be changedakem per slot, significantly simplifying client development, and EIP-7825 (per-tx gas cap) added a maximum on the cost of processing one transaction, which greatly helps ZK-EVMs and parallel execution.
Garbage collection can be piecemeal, or it can be large-scale. The piecemeal approach tries to take existing features, and streamline them so that they are simpler and make more sense. One example is the gas cost reforms in Glamsterdam, which make many gas costs that were previously arbitrary, instead depend on a small number of parameters that are clearly tied to resource consumption.
One large-scale garbage collection was replacing PoW with PoS. Another is likely to happen as part of Lean consensus, opening the room to fix a large number of mistakes at the same time ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Ym34y3Eoo ).
Another approach is "Rosetta-style backwards compatibility", where features that are complex but little-used remain usable but are "demoted" from being part of the mandatory protocol and instead become smart contract code, so new client developers do not need to bother with them. Examples:
\* After we upgrade to full native account abstraction, all old tx types can be retired, and EOAs can be converted into smart contract wallets whose code can process all of those transaction types \* We can replace existing precompiles (except those that are _really_ needed) with EVM or later RISC-V code \* We can eventually change the VM from EVM to RISC-V (or other simpler VM); EVM could be turned into a smart contract in the new VM.
Finally, we want to move away from client developers feeling the need to handle all older versions of the Ethereum protocol. That can be left to older client versions running in docker containers.
In the long term, I hope that the rate of change to Ethereum can be slower. I think for various reasons that ultimately that _must_ happen. These first fifteen years should in part be viewed as an adolescence stage where we explored a lot of ideas and saw what works and what is useful and what is not. We should strive to avoid the parts that are not useful being a permanent drag on the Ethereum protocol.
Basically, we want to improve Ethereum in a way that looks like this:
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 16
2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness.
Some of what this practically means:
Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer.
Helios: actually verify the data you're receiving from RPCs instead of blindly trusting it.
ORAM, PIR: ask for data from RPCs without revealing which data you're asking, so you can access dapps without your access patterns being sold off to dozens of third parties all around the world.
Social recovery wallets and timelocks: wallets that don't make you lose all your money if you misplace your seedphrase, or if an online or offline attacker extracts your seedphrase, and *also* don't make all your money backdoored by Google.
Privacy UX: make private payments from your wallet, with the same user experience as making public payments.
Privacy censorship resistance: private payments with the ERC-4337 mempool, and soon native AA + FOCIL, without relying on the public broadcaster ecosystem.
Application UIs: use more dapps from an onchain UI with IPFS, without relying on trusted servers that would lock you our of practical recovery of your assets if they went offline, and would give you a hijacked UI that steals your funds if they get hacked for even a millisecond.
In many of these areas, over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding in Ethereum. Nodes went from easy to run to hard to run. Dapps went from static pages to complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen servers. Wallets went from routing everything through the RPC, which could be any node of your choice including on your own computer, to leaking your data to a dozen servers of their choice. Block building became more centralized, putting Ethereum transaction inclusion guarantees under the whims of a very small number of builders.
In 2026, no longer. Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point - every moment where you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption - we are making that compromise no longer.
It will be a long road. We will not get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the next hard fork, or the hard fork after that. But it will make Ethereum into an ecosystem that deserves not only its current place in the universe, but a much greater one.
In the world computer, there is no centralized overlord. There is no single point of failure. There is only love. Milady.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 13
The walkaway test concept needs to pass the walkaway test.
Walletbeat's work is bringing that day many steps closer.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 11
If done properly, this is a very good move.
I hope it can be verifiable and replicable (probably means publishing all tweets and anonymized likes with 4 week delay).
This would not solve all problems, but it would very effectively address concerns about algorithmic transparency that I and many other members of the public have been raising.
I actually think 4 weeks may be over-ambitious, because it means the algo would need to change that often to stay ahead of people gaming it; hence why I proposed 1 year in my recent post advocating algorithmic transparency. But this does really need to be verifiable and replicable though, so that someone who thinks they've been shadowbanned, deboosted, etc would be able to walk through the code executing the algorithm and see why their posts are not being seen by people.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2010062264976736482
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2010062264976736482)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 10
I agree with maybe 60% of this, but one bit that is particularly important to highlight is the explicit separation between what the poster calls "the open web" (really, the corposlop web), and "the sovereign web".
https://x.com/tom777kruise/status/2006710624424702362
This is a distinction I did not realize until recently, and I must admit the bitcoin maximalists were far ahead: a big part of their resistance to ICOs, tokens other than bitcoin, arbitrary financial applications, etc was precisely about keeping bitcoin "sovereign" and not "corposlop". The big error that many of them made was trying to achieve this goal with either government crackdowns or user disempowerment (keeping bitcoin script limited, and rejecting many categories of applications entirely), but their fear was real.
So what is corposlop? In essence, it is the combination of three things:
\* Corporate optimization power \* An aura of respectableness of being a company with sleek polished branding \* Behavior that the exact opposite of respectable, because that's what's needed to maximize profit
Corposlop includes things like:
\* Social media that maximizes dopamine, outrage, other methods of short-term engagement, at the expense of long-term value and fulfillment \* Needless mass data collection from users, often followed by managing it carelessly or even casually selling it to third parties \* Walled gardens charging monopolistic high fees and actively preventing people from even linking to other platforms \* Hollywood releasing the 7th sequel to some tired franchise, because that's the most risk-averse thing to do \* Every corporation that rallied around slogans of diversity and equity and the need to overturn society to fight racism in 2020, and then publicly mocked those causes for engagement in 2025
This is all digital corposlop; there are big and important analogues to this in the physical world too.
Corposlop is soulless: trend-following homogeneity that is both evil and lame https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/30/balance_of_power.html#how-we-fear-big-business
These are things that appear to serve the user, but actually disempower the user.
I have many qualms with Apple, but aside from their monopolistic practices, they actually have many non-corposlop traits. They serve users not by constantly asking "what do users want this quarter", but by having an opinionated long-term vision. They have a strong emphasis on privacy. They resist and create trends rather than following them. I just wish they could take the brave step of ending their monopolistic practices and switch to an open source first strategy. It may damage their market cap, but man must live for something higher than market caps.
Zac from Aztec was also early to recognize the importance of this, with a post that is on the whole very pro-freedom, but at the same time does not shrink back from labeling what is essentially corposlop a primary enemy, even when it does not violate the libertarian non-aggression principle.
https://x.com/Zac_Aztec/status/1986086241276657868
In 2000, the understanding of "sovereignty" largely focused on avoiding the iron fist of government. Today, "sovereignty" also means securing your digital privacy through cryptography, and securing your own mind from corporate mind warfare trying to extract your attention and your dollars. It also means doing things because you believe in them, and declaring independence from the homogenizing and soul-sucking concept of "the meta".
These are the kinds of tools that we should build more of. Build tools like:
\* Privacy-preserving local-first applications that minimize dependence on and data leaks to third parties \* Social media platforms and tools that let the user take control of what content they see. Appeal to people's long-term goals, not short-term impulses \* Financial tools that help users grow their wealth, and do not encourage 50x leverage or sports betting or taking out a loan to pay for a burrito \* AI tools that are maximally open and privacy and local-friendly, and that maximize productivity from merging the power of human and bot, rather than encouraging the user to sit back and let the bot do all the work, so they learn nothing \* Applications, companies, and physical environments that take an opinionated view on the kind of world they want to see, and have an opinionated culture \* DAOs that can support organizations and communities that steadfastly pursue a unique objective, and do not all get captured by the same groups. Privacy-preserving and non-tokenholder-driven voting can help here
Be sovereign. Reject corposlop. Believe in somETHing.
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/Zac_Aztec/status/1986086241276657868) \ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/tom777kruise/status/2006710624424702362) Balance of power
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 8
One metaphor for Ethereum is BitTorrent, and how that p2p network combines decentralization and mass scale. Ethereum's goal is to do the same thing but with consensus.
Another metaphor for Ethereum is Linux.
\* Linux is free and open source software, and does not compromise on this \* Linux is quietly depended on by billions of people and enterprises worldwide. Governments regularly use it. \* There are many operating systems based on Linux that pursue mass adoption \* There are Linux distributions (eg. Arch) that are highly purist, minimalistic and technologically beautiful, and focus on making the user feel powerful, not comfortable
(Actually, BitTorrent is depended on by enterprises too: many businesses and even governments (!!) use it to distribute large files to their users https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised )
We must make sure that Ethereum L1 works as the financial (and ultimately identity, social, governance...) home for individuals and organizations who want the higher level of autonomy, and give them access to the full power of the network without dependence on intermediaries. At the same time, what Linux shows is that this is fully compatible with providing value to very large numbers of people, and even being loved and trusted by enterprises worldwide. Many enterprises in fact desperately want to build on an open and resilient ecosystem - what we call trustlessness, they call prudent counterparty risk minimization.
This is the gwei.
\ \ MUO\ \ 8 Legal Uses for BitTorrent: You'd Be Surprised\ \ Like HTTP, which your browser uses to communicate with websites, BitTorrent is just a protocol. You could use your browser to download pirated content, just as you could use a BitTorrent client to download pirated content, but that isn't the only possible use. Sure, let's face it -- BitTorrent is probably primarily used for downloading unauthorized content. But that's far from its only use, and the protocol still has a lot of value to people who don't pirate.](https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 5
“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”
This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://trustlessness.eth.limo ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means.
“efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec.
These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience.
Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY.
Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms.
Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant.
Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign.
This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away.
This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need.
The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others.
Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 3
Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.
These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network.
To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far:
BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus
Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated*
Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth
The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains.
This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/A-note-on-data-availability-and-erasure-coding/52e1d03b0254cded8b67105be17ba9890b7ad8d3 , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here.
Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out:
\* In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node \* In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe \* In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network
A third piece of this is distributed block building.
A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that.
Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness.
Onward.
\ \ GitHub\ \ A note on data availability and erasure coding\ \ Contribute to ethereum/research development by creating an account on GitHub.](https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/A-note-on-data-availability-and-erasure-coding/52e1d03b0254cded8b67105be17ba9890b7ad8d3)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 1
Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.
Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later)
But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission:
To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.
We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.
These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord.
Ethereum is the rebellion against this.
To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more.
Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will.
Wishing everyone an exciting 2026.
Milady.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 30, 2025
Balance of power
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/30/balance_of_power.html
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 27, 2025
Question to people who oppose the USB-C standardization mandate because you think it will prevent the next generation of even better ports from being created:
What are some possible features that such a port could potentially have, that USB-C does not?
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 21, 2025
Happy solstice!
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 21, 2025
I'm impressed by Vivek and his one-man quest solo battling all of heritage american twitter.
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/2002209838357754064
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/2002209838357754064)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 17, 2025
My latest views on popups, network states, coordi-nations, zones, and where all of these things could lead us.
(Long poast)
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/17/societies.html
Let a thousand societies bloom
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 10, 2025
I've been impressed by @fileverse (decentralized open-source encrypted docs https://docs.fileverse.io/ ). Every month more bugs get fixed, and recently it's finally at the point where I can comfortably send docs off for comment or collaboration, and things reliably don't break.
\ \ dDocs | Privacy-enhancing Alternative to Google Docs\ \ Decentralized Docs: peer-to-peer document editor that keeps your data secure with end-to-end encryption. Real-time collaboration, onchain. Start collaborating privately now!](https://docs.fileverse.io/)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 8, 2025
These attacks on Europe, including from people I've generally considered interesting and sophisticated, are getting unhinged...
I get that EU has problems - GDPR clickthroughs are dumb, Chat Control is awful, they needs to get better at supporting entrepreneurs, people saying mean things about criminals getting longer sentences than the criminals is just crazy - but the apocalyptic attitude about the issues seems really over the top.
It just does not match my experience from spending over a month every year there.
https://x.com/palladiummag/status/1998124927485186193
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/palladiummag/status/1998124927485186193)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 5, 2025
My rough math based on average difficulty stats suggests that Bitcoin mining crossed the total 2**96 hashes milestone very recently?
Seems like a good reason to insist on (close to) 128 bit security (ie. @drakefjustin was right)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 5, 2025
I love how "algodón" is the word for cotton and apparently has connotations of healthy naturalness, but the word itself (at least to my eye that has never seen it before until last month) seems like a word that clearly means "given by an algorithm"
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 3, 2025
Always glad to see when people appreciate the protocol changes that add hard invariants, improving protocol security and future adaptability
2021: EIP-2929 + 3529 (SLOAD gas cost increase, refunds nerfed) 2024: SELFDESTRUCT nerf (Dencun) 2025: 16,777,216 gas per tx limit
All of these put various kinds of hard caps on how much can happen within a single block or a single transaction, eliminating entire classes of DoS risk, enabling client code simplification, and creating more options for how to increase efficiency.
Invariants I expect we will want soon:
\* Cap number of code bytes accessed (short term: increase cost of calling big contracts, medium term: binary tree + per-chunk pricing) \* Bounds on ZK-EVM prover cycles (repricings) \* Changes to memory pricing to create a clearer hard bound on max EVM memory consumption
https://x.com/no89thkey/status/1996266248225845698
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/no89thkey/status/1996266248225845698)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Dec 3, 2025
PeerDAS in Fusaka is significant because it literally is sharding.
Ethereum is coming to consensus on blocks without requiring any single node to see more than a tiny fraction of the data. And this is robust to 51% attacks - it's client-side probabilistic verification, not validator voting.
Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015 , and data availability sampling since 2017 ( https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/A-note-on-data-availability-and-erasure-coding/52e1d03b0254cded8b67105be17ba9890b7ad8d3 ), and now we have it.
That said, there are three ways that the sharding in Fusaka is incomplete:
\* We can process O(c^2) transactions (where c is the per-node compute) on L2s, but not on the ethereum L1. If we want to scaling to benefit the ethereum L1 as well, beyond what we can get by constant-factor upgrades like BAL and ePBS, we need mature ZK-EVMs. \* The proposer/builder bottleneck. Today, the builder needs to have the whole data and build the whole block. It would be amazing to have distributed block building. \* We don't have a sharded mempool. We still need that.
But even still, this is a fundamental step forward in blockchain design. The next two years will give us time to refine the PeerDAS mechanism, carefully increase its scale while we continue to ensure its stability, use it to scale L2s, and then when ZK-EVMs are mature, turn it inwards to scale ethereum L1 gas as well.
Big congrats to the Ethereum researchers and core devs who worked hard for years to make this happen.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 7, 2025
One of my more radical beliefs is that many more classes of governance actions should be anonymous / secret ballot (eg. I've advocated for secret-ballot UN general assembly votes before)
This situation is a good argument for judges' identities being hidden (!!) when they make their rulings. The function of a judge is to rule according to the facts as interpreted through their conscience, not to be "accountable" to violent mobs.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 5, 2025
Left: Singapore, as seen by the average visitor Right: Singapore, the parts that I like the most
We need to do more of our events in the other parts!
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 4, 2025
Memory access is O(N^[1/3])
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/10/05/memory13.html
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 3, 2025
The longest chess game is exactly as long as the tallest mountain is tall.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 3, 2025
CO2 levels around 1300 on the subway, despite it being quite crowded.
Not too bad!
The medium-high CO2 and low PM2.5 in a crowded space suggest that both ventilation and filtration are being used.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 2, 2025
Reminder that Peter Thiel is, to put it mildly, not a cypherpunk
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 26, 2025
Taxis are cypherpunk.
You can get into a taxi without showing anyone any ID or even phone number, or installing any proprietary app, and you can even pay in cash.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 26, 2025
"[X] is underpriced" is a perenially unpopular, but often very correct take.
If demand > supply at the current price, you are going to get back to equilibrium _somehow_. Either that happens by people paying more in money, or it happens by people paying more in time (eg. waiting in line, staying up until 3AM to snap up a ticket). The former is more honest and is far less value-destructive.
If you want to give non-rich people a chance to participate, then sure, allocate some tickets non-financially, but do it in a way that targets some other goal (eg. proof of volunteering, proof of getting good grades...). Basically, acknowledge that an auction will exist, but create more ways for people to bid that target diverse constituencies.
Lotteries and lines are just an awful way to allocate things.
https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1971272756302844069
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1971272756302844069)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 24, 2025
Fusaka will fix this.
But also, safety first is of the utmost importance for Fusaka. The core feature, PeerDAS, is trying to do something pretty unprecedented: have a live blockchain that does not require any single node to download the full data.
The way PeerDAS works is that each node only asks for a small number of "chunks", as a way of probabilistically verifying that more than 50% of chunks are available. If more than 50% of chunks are available, then the node theoretically can download those chunks, and use erasure coding to recover the rest.
https://x.com/hildobby/status/1970875271843872815
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/hildobby/status/1970875271843872815)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 24, 2025
This is far from the most important thing about this situation, but it still fascinates me that we're now in an era where computer science metaphors ("random number generator") are regularly used at the highest levels of politics, and no one thinks this is even slightly unusual anymore.
The internet is real life.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 23, 2025
The importance of full-stack openness and verifiability
(including applications, operating systems, hardware, and bio)
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/09/24/openness_and_verifiability.html
The importance of full-stack openness and verifiability
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 23, 2025
TIL Wolfgang Mozart's middle name literally means "ask me anything, God"
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 23, 2025
TIL the UK Foreign Office advises against all travel to Sudan, but is ok with "essential" travel to Bir Tawil.
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/sudan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 21, 2025
Being "anti-establishment" and seeking a north star of "balance" can in a certain light be viewed as being the same thing. After all, "the establishment" is almost by definition the force in society that is currently too powerful relative to others.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 20, 2025
Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/09/21/low_risk_defi.html
Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 20, 2025
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Sep 19, 2025
Man was born free, and everywhere he is onchain.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Aug 24, 2025
Debate on whether prediction markets are good or bad.
One major point I will add is that right now the major markets mostly don't pay interest, which makes them very unappealing for hedging because to participate at all you sacrifice a guaranteed 4% APY on the dollar.
I expect lots of hedging use cases to open up once that gets solved and volumes increase more.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jc_46jk6UEdDY7Dc3hoX0gkTAyXAE07sjV93jPbrU40/mobilebasic
\ \ Google Docs\ \ In Response To: Predicting our own demise\ \ Below, I’ve responded to the most compelling/interesting points made in Agustin’s “Predicting our own demise” I’ll preface with the following: A. I am biased and will financially gain from the proliferation of prediction markets B. Agustin is a MUCH better writer than I am, sorry in advance C. ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jc_46jk6UEdDY7Dc3hoX0gkTAyXAE07sjV93jPbrU40/mobilebasic)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Aug 12, 2025
On idea-driven ideas
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/08/12/ideas.html
On idea-driven ideas On idea-driven ideas
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Aug 12, 2025
"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/08/12/onlyopensource.html
"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint "I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Apr 12, 2025
Solution to a puzzle from the other app
(This is actually relevant to energy-efficient ventilation!)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Apr 11, 2025
我最近发现，很多人还是以为山海坞的名字是"上海坞". 我在想，是不是大家可以fork山海坞一下，给不同的fork基于其他城市的名字？ 比如：
\* 圣镇坞 \* 晨都坞 （大家每天5点起床！） \* 京东坞 \* 牛约坞 \* 多人多坞
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Apr 10, 2025
My own current privacy roadmap (much lighter on L1 changes, but also more limited in its consequences): https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-maximally-simple-l1-privacy-roadmap/23459
Highly encourage people to read both!
https://x.com/pcaversaccio/status/1909939119037313255
\ \ Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians\ \ A maximally simple L1 privacy roadmap\ \ See also: pcaversaccio’s roadmap: Ethereum Privacy: The Road to Self-Sovereignty - Privacy - Ethereum Research These are my current thoughts on how we can practically improve the state of privacy experienced by Ethereum’s users in a way that is very light on Ethereum consensus changes. This covers four primary key forms of privacy: Privacy of onchain payments Partial anonymization of onchain activity inside applications Privacy of reads to the chain, ie. RPC calls Network-level anonymization ...](https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-maximally-simple-l1-privacy-roadmap/23459) \ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/pcaversaccio/status/1909939119037313255)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Mar 28, 2025
A simple L2 security and finalization roadmap
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-simple-l2-security-and-finalization-roadmap/23309
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Mar 28, 2025
The tree ring model of culture and politics
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/03/29/treering.html
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Mar 28, 2025
We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/03/29/pubos.html
We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 11, 2025
One way to characterize an era, is to look at the extent to which ideas of "scientific rationality" and "freedom" are pulling in the same direction, vs in opposite directions.
The answer flips back and forth surprisingly often!
https://chatgpt.com/share/67abbbff-fec8-8012-b772-bade8a93c8b7
In more modern times, I feel like I've noticed a rapid shift from the 2010s, when the two were aligned (eg. see SSC rationalism) to the 2020s, where the two are perceived to be quite a bit more at odds with each other.
\ \ ChatGPT\ \ ChatGPT - Scientific Rationality and Freedom\ \ Shared via ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/share/67abbbff-fec8-8012-b772-bade8a93c8b7)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 10, 2025
If you find yourself writing a bullet point list and passing it to GPT to make a "proper" article, it's often better to just give people the bullet points.
The GPT adds "wordcel noise" that the reader has to struggle to extract useful info from more than it adds useful context.
(As usual, any AI-related advice has a life expectancy of ~6 months)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 9, 2025
Thank you to everyone to has given their kind support over the last few weeks
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Feb 3, 2025
I'm loving wartime Scott Alexander.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 29, 2025
I actually really love how america has this deep level of culture of people (in this case, both the driver and the company execs) willing to be disobedient to authority in service of higher principles
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 24, 2025
大家好，这是我第一个用tako发的cast 🙂
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 23, 2025
Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/01/23/l1l2future.html
Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 23, 2025
Reposting a note comparing some aspects of the current crypto space to weed that I made on the other app:
-----
Ten years ago, to many weed represented freedom, and rebellion against sclerotic old order that denied self-sovereignty over our bodies. Then, weed became legalized, and "official".
On that day, I remember my personal interest in weed dropping by > 2x overnight.
And since then, public discourse is moving toward a balanced view of weed: it is much less harmful than alcohol and smoking, and has valuable medical uses, but it is also far from harmless, especially in its modern corporate hyper-optimized versions.
Crypto finance is similar. In the old order, @GaryGensler created a regime where tokens that give investors clear indication of what their rights are and where their revenue comes from is a "security", but obfuscated "governance tokens" are potentially in the clear.
...
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 23, 2025
Markets gud, price mechanisms gud. Congestion pricing in NYC continues to be winning, just as it has been winning for years in Stockholm, Singapore and elsewhere.
When demand > supply, there is always an auction. Either you pay with money, or you pay by waiting in line, with often grievous costs to mental health ( https://nytimes.com/2019/01/21/upshot/stuck-and-stressed-the-health-costs-of-traffic.html ) and to no one's benefit.
Blockchain transaction fees are similar: in the dark ages we used to wait some random number of 5-60 minutes for a transaction to get included into a block, and made excuses about how this is a virtuous act of expressing "low time preference".
Today, transactions reliably get included in 1-2 slots, and the more efficient fee market design in https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559 is a major reason why. Tomorrow, transactions will be included even faster.
Ethereum Improvement Proposals\ \ EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 23, 2025
The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send *them* any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.
Furthermore, there is deniability: holding the coin is, in financial effect, a linear combination of donating to the issuer and gambling. Hence you can intend to do the former but when challenged claim that you are doing the latter.
You can even hold the coin privately, and show that you are holding it to whoever; you do not need any zero knowledge proofs, you just send a test transaction.
This is all risky to democracy, for reasons similar to what I wrote in https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html and elsewhere. TLDR: the economic arguments for why markets are so great for "regular" goods and services do not extend to "markets for political influence".
I recommend politicians do not go down this path.
Moving beyond coin voting governance
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 18, 2025
We are indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure, which has been ongoing for close to a year. Some of this has already been executed on and made public, and some is still in progress.
What we're trying to achieve is primarily the following goals:
\* Improve level of technical expertise within EF leadership \* Improve two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors, old and new, that it is our role to support: users (individual and institutional), app devs, wallets, L2s \* Bring in fresh talent, improve execution ability and speed \* Become more actively supportive of app builders, and make sure important values and inalienable rights (esp privacy, open source, censorship resistance) are a reality for users including at the app layer \* Continue to increase our use of decentralized and privacy tech and the Ethereum chain, including for payments and treasury management
...
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 17, 2025
Dependency minimalism (writing software that deliberately tries to have as few dependencies as practical) is a really underrated virtue imo.
Every single dependency is a risk that "something will go wrong" during someone's installation process. Installing projects with hundreds of dependencies and walking through errors can be incredibly frustrating.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 17, 2025
Blob fee market is already looking very different from what it was like before October.
It's important that any improvements we make to the blob fee market don't overfit to any one specific time period.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Jan 11, 2025
It's interesting how AI is changing the game on old concerns around legalese.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 18, 2024
This is a fascinating essay on education (that happens to be a tweet)
https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1858012912557633800
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1858012912557633800)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 18, 2024
One part of L2 scaling is Ethereum increasing its blob capacity. The other part is rollups becoming more data-efficient. Good to see Starknet rising to the challenge.
Would love to see more EVM rollups increasing data efficiency too (see https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html#3 )
https://x.com/Starknet/status/1858471396323836276
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/Starknet/status/1858471396323836276)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 14, 2024
d/acc day bio section starting soon! Lots of people already here
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 13, 2024
d/acc day starting in 10 min!
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 11, 2024
Blobs have quietly "entered price discovery"
Total fees seem to be averaging ~10 ETH per day lately.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 8, 2024
From prediction markets to info finance:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/11/09/infofinance.html
From prediction markets to info finance
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 7, 2024
The voters banned banning banning banning charging too high rent.
(To be clear I'm in favor of this, the best way to keep rent low is buidl buidl buidl)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Nov 2, 2024
Two great new educational songs dropped this week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzN148WQ2OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS8SdwzlKCQ
- YouTube\ \ Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. - YouTube\ \ Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 31, 2024
Argot, a collective of developers who have been working on important Ethereum dev tools we know and love for many years, is in the process of becoming an independent org.
https://x.com/argotorg/status/1851947521842512203
\ \ X (formerly Twitter)](https://x.com/argotorg/status/1851947521842512203)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 29, 2024
Highlighting an EVM upgrade idea: combine EVMMAX and SIMD
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 29, 2024
ok I'm actually not sure why you US people are now making rallies for monosodium glutamate and I'm not sure I want to find out
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 28, 2024
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 6: The Splurge
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/29/futures6.html
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 6: The Splurge
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 26, 2024
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 5: the Purge
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/26/futures5.html
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 5: The Purge
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 25, 2024
Interesting OSI debate on how to define "open source AI":
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/995159/a37fb9817a00ebcb/
[\ \ OSI readies controversial Open AI definition [LWN.net]](https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/995159/a37fb9817a00ebcb/)
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 23, 2024
wow so this is what ZK projects' ads look like to normies
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 23, 2024
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 19, 2024
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 3: The Scourge
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/20/futures3.html
(I tried my best to be fair to all sides of the debates here!)
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 3: The Scourge
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 16, 2024
Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 14, 2024
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: the Merge
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/14/futures1.html
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: The Merge
vitalik.eth](https://paragraph.com/0x96b6bb2bd2eba3b4fbefd7dbac448ad7b6cbf279)
Oct 5, 2024
OK TIL HPMOR is longer than lord of the rings. This thing is a monster...
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