Inspired by: https://polynya.medium.com/a-vision-of-ethereum-2025-bb92a0d4dc4f Celestia is the global schelling point for data availability, acting as the technological and cultural mesh between competing crypto tribes. Put another way, Celestia has cemented itself as the default choice for data publishing the same way Tendermint/CometBFT is the default choice for rollup consensus today. There's a cultural pluralism of rollups (some based, some not) building on top of Celestia. Many of these communities choose to think and settle in tia. But just as many choose to think and settle in a currency of their choice. Leading L2s and L3s from across the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana ecosystems choose to use Celestia for DA -as a way of reducing costs while making the minimal amount of tradeoffs to security. This dual ability to foster a fiercely loyal tia community and be credibly neutral towards communities who prefer to think and settle in other currencies has allowed for a cultural richness of sovereign communities -- each with their own unique identities, values, beliefs -- to flourish. celestia-ethereum an illustration by rain&coffee showing how celestia relates to cosmos and ethereum

“If it's not broke don't fix it. Looking at you - ETH issuance rate change advocates.” @ViktorBunin “the potential (or really the NEED) for a change in issuance must DRAMATICALLY outweigh possible harm in order to achieve the social consensus needed to make a change to a parameter like this. and making changes to issuance now seems to suggest (to me) more potential harm than indisputable good at this point” @iamDCinvestor “Simple curve adjustments invite future adjustments. If the previous magic number wasn't sustainable, why should this new proposed number be sustainable? Analysis can't put this question to rest. It's a political issue.” @ryanberckmans “Recall all the similar things historically - btc miner *(bitmain), eth pool *(spark + f2pool). Tend to believe eventually (native player such as) Lido > 30% problem will be relatively easy to solve. The bigger problem is what if there are big corp/state own huge nodes >30%.” @suji_yan “Are a handful of Ethereum devs really going to be comfortable socially slashing millions of dollars of ETH of Coinbase customers because Coinbase follows the law by censoring OFAC'd smart contracts? I doubt it, and it seems Vitalik also doubts it (now advocating privacy pools).” @lex_node

N.B geopolitical decentralization is very different from geographic decentralization. One can have nodes evenly distributed between the US and a bunch of EU countries and still be extremely centralized from a geopolitical point of view. Looking at the distribution of Ethereum nodes, the situation, from a geopolitical point of view, is far from ideal. 40-50% are in the US (the exact % depends on which day of the week you look). And more than 75% are in the West (i.e. under the same geopolitical influence). Lido's node distribution, although better, is still far from ideal. While, the NOM team does keep track of, and try to optimize for, both geographic and jurisdictional diversity, Lido has slipped backwards with respect to metrics like the amount of stake in the US (25% in 2023 vs 10% in 2022). My take is that we need to be optimizing for a new metric. One which better represents this notion of geopolitical resilience. The best way to measure this is an open question, but I think we should start by looking closely at the existing literature; Sam Hart's thought experiment, and the answers contained within the thread, also offer a good starting point. Not only is this notion of geopolitical decentralization crucial to the long term health and mission of Ethereum, I believe it will become an increasingly important differentiator for Lido going forward compared to US / European bound entities like Coinbase, Alluvial, or Kiln.

co-written with arixon. inspired by justin. forked from charlie and dan. thanks to barnabe, mike, and justin for reading drafts of this. On Ethereum L1, all applications run atomically on a shared state machine. The rollup-centric roadmap sacrifices this core property in order to scale Ethereum. The current rollup approach works well while applications remain local to the rollup. However there is a limit to the number of applications each of these rollups can support (because of inherent sequential bottlenecks), and they are not designed to talk to one another. Today, regulatory pressure and the lack of native interoperability is driving rollups towards middleware blockchains (or rollup frameworks in the spirit of superchains/hyperchains) that allow for shared sequencing (and hence some degree of liquidity sharing and atomic composability between them). A possible end-state here is a world in which each new L2 needs third-party middleware -- a shared sequencer service -- to efficiently communicate with the others.

Editor's note -- Since this post was released Ethan, Zaki, and Jack have all made Bad Kids their PFP of choice In this open source world, where applications and infrastructure can be freely forked (and vampire-attacked), the strongest long-term moat is culture (both at the developer and community level). It is my belief that NFTs -- and PFPs in particular -- are perhaps the most powerful tool we have for encapsulating, transmitting, and shifting this culture. In the words of punk4156 : yes the pfp bubble was larger than the 1/1 bubble, but the meme that pfps are worthless and 1/1 art is the ‘true form’ of the medium is probably incorrect in the long run. if anything pfp communities are more native to the medium bc of the way network effects map to liquidity

tl;dr: while minimum viable issuance is, by definition, a good idea, if we are to minimize the risk of unexpected negative externalities we need to start viewing viability through a more multidimensional lens. It’s not enough to simply look at it through the lens of economic security. Thanks to Vasiliy Shapovalov, Sam Kozin, Barnabé Monnot, Justin Drake, Mike Neuder, Jon Charbonneau, Myles O'Neil, Vishal Talasani, Sam Hart, Hasu, Arjun Balaji, and Jasper the friendly ghost for reading drafts of this. and in particular to Vasiliy and Sam for the thought-provoking conversations that gave birth to it The main arguments Anders puts forward in his mammoth thread on minimal viable issuance are solid if you agree with the underlying axioms -- issuance should be reduced as much as possible, ETH (not stETH) should be the money of Ethereum, and stakers should be a minority to allow for frictionless forking of bad actors. But it feels like there is a lack of adequate exploration of the tradeoffs at hand, which stems from an overemphasis on economic security as the guiding metric. Focusing too much on economic security in this way increases the risk of negative externalities that could make the outcome worse than the status quo. In particular, one can sense an underlying (perhaps subconscious) power struggle around the moneyness of ETH vs stETH, which is muddying the waters somewhat. In a response to Jasper's concerns

A section by section response to an essay authored by Danny Ryan. Originally posted May 30, 2022 on notes.ethereum.org and later copied over to github. Thanks to Hasu, Jon, Barnabé, Sam, Victor, Vasiliy, and Izzy for reading drafts of this Preamble The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr Viewed holistically, I think it's great Danny is taking the stance he's taking. But I also think there are equally important risks to his approach which have not properly been debated in public.

The first of a three part series that introduces the concept of Brand Archetypes (parts 1 and 2) and explores how to apply it to DAOs (part 3) How does Brand relate to Purpose? Today, there is an increasing acknowledgement that purpose defines both the direction of the organisation and its course, rather than simply messaging. Going forward, we can expect purpose to only increase in importance as people look for greater meaning, greater understanding, and greater clarity on the organisation they work for, the organisations they engage with, and the brands and services they use. Rather than fitting a brand around a product, the strongest brands of tomorrow are building capabilities around a brand truth – the overarching promise or positive ideology that the brand has the credibility to enact (a credibility derived from the authentic expression of the organization’s purpose). Under such an approach, the brand effectively acts as a central organizational principle – the truth which brings everything together (therein lies the link between purpose, brand, and organisational design).

In order to lay the stage here, I want to start with two pieces of writing that have marked me deeply. The first is Satoshi’s whitepaper. And the second is an essay by Vitalik on credible neutrality. As a crypto nerd, there are few pieces of writing more beautiful than Satoshi’s whitepaper. In particular, I want to draw your attention to three lines: "the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required” "financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes”

N.B. these thoughts were written in the aftermath of prop 82 I'm not going to do a full retrospective of prop 82 here, because I think a good one has already been written. And I don't have much to add to it. I'm going to talk about culture instead, because it's what seems to be missing from the discussion so far. And where I think I can add the most perspective. For what it's worth, my personal view is that what we've seen play out over the last few weeks runs much deeper than just prop 82. The primary issue in my mind is not that we lost the vote, but the culture in which the campaign was fought under.

This is a living document meant to provide clear and succinct answers to questions that have been frequently asked about ATOM 2.0. Why do we need a new direction for the Cosmos Hub? Up until now, the Hub has not solidified its place as a major schelling point in the ecosystem. In particular, new projects don't necessarily hold ATOM and therefore are not incentive-aligned with the Hub. ATOM 2.0 aims to solve this problem. The idea is to move ATOM from a purely monetary asset with speculative premium and only loose ties to the rest of the IBC economy, to a reserve asset for the Interchain -- one which is held by a multitude of incentive-aligned projects, and backed by tangible value and revenues.

See proposal text and vote results so far. this work is a combined effort between jelena, udit, and sacha How many funds have been requested, and what will they be used for? This proposal requests 150,000 ATOM from the Cosmos Hub community pool. These are valued at approximately USD $1.2 million given current rates of $8 USD/ATOM. The funds will be put towards 3 projects that are looking to leverage Interchain Security and the liquid staking feature of Cosmos Hub. The funds will be managed by a 3/4 multisig committee, which will lead the business development efforts to bring "blue chip" projects to the hub. You can think of this initiative as a business accelerator that is supporting the launch of three projects relevant to two important Cosmos Hub capabilities in 2022: Interchain Security and liquid staking.

Thanks to Vasiliy Shapovalov, Isidoros Passadis, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Ryan Berckmans, James, Joe Clapis, and Darren Langley for reading drafts of this Ethics disclosure: This work has been funded by a LEGO grant. I do not have any direct or indirect economic interests in Lido. I do not hold any LDO, stETH, or any other staking derivative or associated governance token. I hold an immaterial amount of ETH. Motivation Vasiliy has created a Lido forum post that frames the motivation as follows: Multiple Ethereans (most prominent being Superphiz, Vitalik Buterin, Danny Ryan) argue that a single staking protocol should have no more than some share amount of stake (with numbers ranging from 15% to 22% to 33%. ... [In preparation for a governance vote] We will need to establish, whether: limiting Lido is desirable; if yes, what should be the limit, what should be the mechanism and the timeline to do that.

Thanks to Sam Hart for the extensive discussions and for encouraging me to write this up. Motivation Amidst all the drama and confusion around Proposal 69 it has become apparent to me that the Hub needs an equivalent to the Swiss direct democracy handbook if it is to flourish. The challenge here is to provide clear and succinct answers to every question that a reasonable Cosmonaut might have regarding a proposal, regardless of their level of education or knowledge. If Cosmos is to succeed as a democracy we need every citizen to be able to understand the question they are voting on, even if they are not familiar with the subject. While the forum is an essential part of the puzzle, it doesn't simplify things enough for those who aren't already in the know (too much background knowledge is assumed). And while twitter is great for spirited debate, it's a mess for synthesising information.