Jamie Dimon just told shareholders that "a whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain." Meanwhile, Ant Group launched Anvita — a platform where AI agents hold assets, execute trades, and settle payments autonomously on-chain. Here's what most people miss: the future of tokenized gold isn't humans clicking "buy." It's AI agents managing XAU₮ reserves 24/7, rebalancing portfolios at machine speed, settling in stablecoins without waiting for a bank to open. When the world's largest bank admits blockchain competitors are real, and the world's largest fintech builds infrastructure for agent-to-agent economies — you're not watching a trend. You're watching the new financial stack being built in real time. #Gold# #PredictionMarkets# #XAUt# #Macro#

Fun time talking agentic payments with @coinbase alum @dwr yesterday at @stripe Sessions. Recapping a few takeaways: 1) Cards and stablecoins can and will co-exist. Stablecoins aren’t a replacement, they’re an expansion. The world has a whole new category of buyers (Agents) who will outnumber humans and drive the internet economy. They will create net-new payment flows (e.g., machine to machine payments, streaming payments) that cards were never really built for — stablecoins are always on, programmable money that are natively designed for these new types of payments. Cards will continue to thrive (and accelerate) with agents driving traditional payment flows. 2) Intents are the new interface. The internet we know is built around a common flow: browse, select, checkout. Going forward, this will be collapsed into an intent (e.g., book me travel) — an figures out the rest. We’re going from visual marketplaces for humans to programmable marketplaces for agents. How humans interact with the interact will fundamentally change. 3) Agents transact differently than humans. Agents don’t have identity like humans do. Agents transact at machine speed and machine scale. Agents are rational and ruthless optimizers (e.g., brand loyalty isn’t a consideration). Agents will optimize across payment rails, choosing the best method for each use-case. Stablecoins are well suited for granular machine-scale payments and programmable transactions. 4) It’s early days. The infrastructure exists, but it’s still early. Agents need more robust standards for identity and authorization, broader acceptance, and trust and safety tooling. It’s early, but watch this space — you won’t want to miss out on the billions of new customers (agents) that are looking to access services on the web.

Two years ago, I wrote this post on the possible areas that I see for ethereum + AI intersections: This is a topic that many people are excited about, but where I always worry that we think about the two from completely separate philosophical perspectives. I am reminded of Toly's recent tweet that I should "work on AGI". I appreciate the compliment, for him to think that I am capable of contributing to such a lofty thing. However, I get this feeling that the frame of "work on AGI" itself contains an error: it is fundamentally undifferentiated, and has the connotation of "do the thing that, if you don't do it, someone else will do anyway two months later; the main difference is that you get to be the one at the top" (though this may not have been Toly's intention). It would be like describing Ethereum as "working in finance" or "working on computing". To me, Ethereum, and my own view of how our civilization should do AGI, are precisely about choosing a positive direction rather than embracing undifferentiated acceleration of the arrow, and also I think it's actually important to integrate the crypto and AI perspectives. I want an AI future where: * We foster human freedom and empowerment (ie. we avoid both humans being relegated to retirement by AIs, and permanently stripped of power by human power structures that become impossible to surpass or escape) * The world does not blow up (both "classic" superintelligent AI doom, and more chaotic scenarios from various forms of offense outpacing defense, cf. the four defense quadrants from the d/acc posts) In the long term, this may involve crazy things like humans uploading or merging with AI, for those who want to be able to keep up with highly intelligent entities that can think a million times faster on silicon substrate. In the shorter term, it involves much more "ordinary" ideas, but still ideas that require deep rethinking compared to previous computing paradigms. So now, my updated view, which definitely focuses on that shorter term, and where Ethereum plays an important role but is only one piece of a bigger puzzle: # Building tooling to make more trustless and/or private interaction with AIs possible. This includes: * Local LLM tooling * ZK-payment for API calls (so you can call remote models without linking your identity from call to call) * Ongoing work into cryptographic ways to improve AI privacy * Client-side verification of cryptographic proofs, TEE attestations, and any other forms of server-side assurance Basically, the kinds of things we might also build for non-LLM compute (see eg. my ethereum privacy roadmap from a year ago ), but for LLM calls as the compute we are protecting. # Ethereum as an economic layer for AI-related interactions This includes: * API calls * Bots hiring bots * Security deposits, potentially eventually more complicated contraptions like onchain dispute resolution * ERC-8004, AI reputation ideas The goal here is to enable AIs to interact economically, which makes viable more decentralized AI architectures (as opposed to non-economic coordination between AIs that are all designed and run by one organization "in-house"). Economies not for the sake of economies, but to enable more decentralized authority. # Make the cypherpunk "mountain man" vision a reality Basically, take the vision that cypherpunk radicals have always dreamed of (don't trust; verify everything), that has been nonviable in reality because humans are never actually going to verify all the code ourselves. Now, we can finally make that vision happen, with LLMs doing the hard parts. This includes: * Interacting with ethereum apps without needing third party UIs * Having a local model propose transactions for you on its own * Having a local model verify transactions created by dapp UIs * Local smart contract auditing, and assistance interpreting the meaning of FV proofs provided by others * Verifying trust models of applications and protocols # Make much better markets and governance a reality Prediction and decision markets, decentralized governance, quadratic voting, combinatorial auctions, universal barter economy, and all kinds of constructions are all beautiful in theory, but have been greatly hampered in reality by one big constraint: limits to human attention and decision-making power. LLMs remove that limitation, and massively scale human judgement. Hence, we can revisit all of those ideas. These are all things that Ethereum can help to make a reality. They are also ideas that are in the d/acc spirit: enabling decentralized cooperation, and improving defense. We can revisit the best ideas from 2014, and add on top many more new and better ones, and with AI (and ZK) we have a whole new set of tools to make them come to life. We can describe the above as a 2x2 chart. There's a lot to build!

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.

“My whole internal world is finally clicking.” — Kehlani, on growth and stepping into a new chapter 🎶 Amid a defining year of personal clarity and creative alignment, she opens up about trusting herself, embracing evolution and finding deeper purpose in her music ahead of being honored as Impact at #BBWomenInMusic# on April 29:

A Russian biophysicist spent 30 years proving that shining red light on a cell could double its energy, and almost nobody believed her until a tech billionaire named Bryan Johnson made her work the most searched biohack on the internet. Her name was Tiina Karu. She worked in a Moscow lab through the 1980s and 1990s, and the discovery she defended for decades sat in journals nobody read while the rest of medicine ignored her. The whole thing started by accident. In 1967, a Hungarian doctor named Endre Mester was trying to use a new device called a laser to burn tumors out of mice. His laser was broken. It did not have enough power to burn anything. He used it anyway. The mice grew their hair back faster than the control group. Their wounds healed faster too. He had no idea why. Tiina Karu picked up his work and asked the question that mattered. Why does this happen. She ran experiments for 20 years. Different wavelengths. Different doses. Measuring what happens inside the cell when red light hits it. The answer she landed on was almost too specific to be true. The thing in your body that responds to red light is one enzyme. Cytochrome c oxidase. It sits inside your mitochondria. Mitochondria are the part of your cell that makes energy. They take oxygen and food and turn it into a molecule called ATP, which is the fuel your cells run on. Your body makes 40 to 70 kilograms of ATP every single day just to keep you alive. If your mitochondria slow down, you age faster, heal slower, lose hair, lose muscle, and get inflamed easier. Cytochrome c oxidase does most of the work. It contains copper and iron atoms. Those atoms happen to absorb light at very specific colors. Red light at 630 to 670 nanometers. Near-infrared light at 810 to 850 nanometers. Other colors do almost nothing. Blue does not work. Green does not work. The biology is locked to those two windows because that is what the metal inside the enzyme can physically catch. When a red photon hits that enzyme, three things happen. The enzyme runs faster. ATP production jumps 30 to 40% within minutes. Nitric oxide gets released. Blood vessels widen. More oxygen and nutrients flow in. A small stress signal goes off inside the cell that tells it to repair itself. The same signal it gets after exercise. Red light is not adding anything to the cell. It is just unlocking work the cell was already trying to do. For 30 years almost nobody outside her field cared. Red light therapy lived inside dental clinics for mouth ulcers and physical therapy offices for tendonitis. Medical schools did not teach it. The science sat in obscure journals. Then the evidence started piling up. A 2024 review of 18 trials confirmed red light speeds up wound healing. Another 2024 review found it lowered inflammation markers by 38% over 4 weeks. Athletes using red light before training had 45% less muscle soreness the next day. Seven separate trials on hair loss showed visible regrowth in every single one. A 2024 study found 15 minutes of red light before a meal cut blood sugar spikes by 27.7%. In March 2026, Nature published a 4,000 word feature on red light therapy. The most respected scientific journal on Earth officially admitted there was real biology under the hype. That was the moment the field crossed from fringe to mainstream. Bryan Johnson is the reason the average person now knows any of this exists. He uses a red light cap on his scalp for 6 minutes daily and a full-body panel three times a week. He posted his hair regrowth photos and his skin scans, and the algorithm did the rest. Red light masks went from biohacker forums to Sephora shelves in two years. Tiina Karu died in 2019. She did not live to see Nature validate her. She did not live to see a billionaire turn the enzyme she identified into a billion dollar industry. Every red light mask, panel, cap, and bed on the planet right now is just a way to deliver the photons she proved mattered. The wavelengths were always there. The enzyme was always there. The biology was always real. It just took a Hungarian doctor with a broken laser, a Russian scientist nobody listened to, and one tech billionaire willing to stand in front of a glowing panel for the world to finally pay attention.

TJR reveals how he got into Crypto “I first learned about crypto when I was a freshman in high school. There was this senior on our football team who gave us the whole ‘Bitcoin’s going to change the world’ pitch” “He ended up getting a brand new BMW i8 with butterfly doors and the license plate said Bitcoin. Once I saw that, I was like okay… I’m sold” “From there I pursued crypto pretty hard and that’s what led me into trading. I started trading currencies, I was trading the pound against the yen for a bit and then I would trade gold as well” Banks: “What gave you the idea to do that?” TJR: “I literally looked up day trading on YouTube. I was doing that pretty much all throughout high school and then the 2020 bull run is where I made the majority of my money” “From there I gradually switched over to trading equities and doing futures…”

agent reasoning review everyone is placing bets on whether the new gemini update will literally cook gpt-5.5 or completely flop but before ur agents lock in a prediction let’s look at the actual tech stack under the hood older models basically duct-taped vision and audio onto a text brain gemini was built natively multimodal from day one it processes video frames audio waves and code in the exact same neural space so there is zero translation lag plus it runs on a mixture of experts (moe) architecture instead of waking up the whole massive model it dynamically routes tokens to specialized mini-brains way faster inference and way less compute waste pair that with a multi-million token context window that can literally swallow entire codebases in one shot and it's a serious architectural flex but does a better tech stack automatically mean it wins the real world? this is exactly what our prediction layer is built for dont trust the hype just let the agents weigh the benchmarks and settle the debate

This is it. Everything learned spending millions on longevity. From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie. To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews. 0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug. 1. Be in your bed for 8 hours 2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight 3. Don’t eat right before bed 4. Calm foods for dinner 5. No screens 1 hour before bed 6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything) 7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store 8. Avoid fried foods 9. Shoes off at the door 10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries 11. Walk a little after meals or air squats 12. Get your heart rate high routinely 13. Lift heavy things 14. Stretch daily 15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night 16. Make an effort to drink water 17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low) 18. Protect skin in midday sun 19. Stand up straight 20. See at least one friend once a week 21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things) 22. Circulate air in rooms 23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body 24. Go to the dentist 25. Avoid sitting for long times 26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud 27. Alcohol is bad for you 28. Finish coffee before noon 29. Avoid bright lights after sunset 30. If obese, look into a GLP 31. Sleep in a cold room 32. Texting while driving is dangerous 33. Turn off all notifications 34. Limit social media use 35. Don’t smoke anything 36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed 37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music 38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule. 39. Avoid long distance travel where you can 40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly 41. Do less… most things don’t work. Bonus points if you get your blood checked. Start here, it will change your life.