The latest EF manifesto set off another fight inside Ethereum. This time I got involved.
So we brought in @tayvano_ and @TrustlessState to talk through the fault lines:
> builders vs. priests
> growth vs. values
> sanctuary tech vs. economic relevance
Which side do you take?👇
The latest EF manifesto set off another fight inside Ethereum. This time I got involved.
So we brought in @tayvano_ and @TrustlessState to talk through the fault lines:
> builders vs. priests
> growth vs. values
> sanctuary tech vs. economic relevance
Which side do you take?👇
The latest EF manifesto set off another fight inside Ethereum. This time I got involved.
So we brought in @tayvano_ and @TrustlessState to talk through the fault lines:
> builders vs. priests
> growth vs. values
> sanctuary tech vs. economic relevance
Which side do you take?👇
Everyone has been blaming crypto founders for hiding the ball.
@hosseeb thinks that's the wrong take entirely.
Up until very recently, being transparent didn't just cost you credibility.
It made you a target.
Good actors and bad actors were being treated exactly the same
NEAR AI's confidential inference now brings @AskVenice users verifiable privacy 👇
The line "decentralization doesn't matter" is getting repeated more and more these days.
I recently broke out into debate on-stage with @masonnystrom about why decentralization was essential to prediction markets existing at all.
It got heated.
Worth the 5 minutes:
There's an ideological schism between the @ethereumfndn and the for-profit ecosystem in Ethereum's orbit
- Is Ethereum a tool you keep in your pocket?
- Or an institution that competes with the world?
My take: A soul without a body is just a ghost
Read👇
More playing to the base.
This kind of cypherpunk vagueposting is precisely why people were so incensed at the EF in 2025 and what led to the EF leadership shakeup.
Sorry, but of COURSE Ethereum needs to compete. Of COURSE it needs to attract institutions. Of COURSE it needs to attract entrepreneurs. Of COURSE it needs to attract buyers.
There is no glory in virtuously becoming irrelevant. You either meet users where they're at, or you eventually become Urbit. This is classic motte and bailey nonsense.
To be clear: there's nothing wrong with the content of the Mandate. It's stuff the EF has said before many times, and nobody disagrees with the values of neutrality and free exit and so on.
But the question is the same as it is with all marketing: why are you saying this now?
Right as Tomasz exited the EF, as the drumbeat of the last year has been toward more focus on pragmatism and shipping and supporting builders, suddenly this 40 page screed that embraces "going slower"?
Obviously in the last year there's been great progress! We've all lauded that. But it's always at risk of backsliding, because this tension doesn't just exist in the public conversation, it also exists within the EF. And the voices pushing back against it in public are also essential to the conversation happening internally.
The fact that people are reacting this way to this document should tell you something. And it's not "fuck the greedy capitalists, they have nothing to say to us virtuous decentralization warriors."
If you value decentralization, you should value your critics too.
I hate to be the one to say this, but please--no more manifestos.
They've made great progress on this in the last year. What people want to see from the EF is less manifesting, more shipping.
Institutions are flooding into crypto.
But @hosseeb just said that's actually the worst news for one part of the market.
And the data from every major exchange backs him up.
Retail is gone.
The buyers everyone was counting on have left the building.
And what's filling that
Two of the sharpest minds in crypto just sat down together.
@hosseeb runs one of the most successful funds in the space.
@santiagoroel has been quietly backing the companies actually making crypto work in the real world.
This conversation went somewhere I wasn't expecting...
🗣️ @hosseeb "Don’t fall for the AI doom"
"Just use this stuff. Enter hackathons. Commit yourself to shipping something.
AI equalized the cost of production.
The number one scarce resource in the world now is agency."
Remember
Well, besides having their vibe coded app leak database credentials, it turns out that the DB shows only 13 of the 11,023 bounties were ever fulfilled.
So, yes, the "AIs are employing humans" meme is pure hypemaxxing right now.
The inimitable @ErikVoorhees comes on this week to talk us through why he built @AskVenice and the inevitable fight between AI and the state.
We talk through Anthropic vs DoW, the Moltbook acquisition, and the future of private/uncensored AI. Interesting throughout ⤵️
Insane story...
Some guy tried to buy $50M of $AAVE on his phone, like 3% of the total supply, tapped through <INSANE SLIPPAGE AHEAD> warnings, ended up with only $40K of AAVE. Block builder made off with ~$40M, Aave refunds $600K of fees.
Net result, AAVE token is down. 💀
privacy wars are here and apparently the robots are better at using crypto than most founders
@ErikVoorhees came on and basically said:
> the state will always spy
> AI labs are too comfy censoring you
> agents may be crypto’s real users
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:16 Erik’s
The inimitable @ErikVoorhees comes on this week to talk us through why he built @AskVenice and the inevitable fight between AI and the state.
We talk through Anthropic vs DoW, the Moltbook acquisition, and the future of private/uncensored AI. Interesting throughout ⤵️
In retrospect, I kinda nailed all of this (from ~1 year ago)
Can someone explain to me how the Kalshi Jupiter integration works? It has a geoblock + VPN block, so I can't play around with it.
AFAICT, you don't need to KYC to trade a Kalshi position, as it's just an SPL token. So what stops someone from insider trading via the SPL secondary market and selling out of their position before the market resolves?
Had a great debate with @arjunsethi from Kraken at NEARCON about when AI agents will actually be ready to manage real capital.
My take: agent reliability is a step function.
At 90% accuracy, it's a cool demo, but doesn't really change anything. Even at 98%, it's not good enough. But at 99.8%, it changes everything.
Right now we're still around 90%, which puts us in the "cool experiment" territory, but you can see it starting to poke through. That's why everyone's excited; we're rapidly ascending the reliability curve. But we're not there yet.
Think self-driving cars circa 2017. Small pockets of places willing to try them, frequent failures, high risk tolerance, human drivers as guardrails. That's where we are right now with "self-driving wallets."
Arjun says he'd put 100% of his crypto into an AI agent within 6-12 months. I don't believe it. 2 years, maybe. But I'll be checking back in 12 months!
Has crypto lost its soul? Is the cypherpunk dream dead? Or is this just what it looks like to grow up and mature as an industry?
We debate the soul of crypto with none other than @izebel_eth—plus perps, prediction market insider trading, and the ethics of death markets ⤵️
Crypto was cypherpunk. Now we're stuck in a never-ending "financial nihilism" era.
Is this our dystopia... or are we just coping?
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:07 @izebel_eth x Tarun Lore
03:24 Cynicism & Rug Culture
09:00 Back To Cypherpunk Roots?
14:37 Compromises & Reality
23:36