London Smith delivers remarks at Rededicate 250 on the National Mall: "I am honored to be here today. On July 4th of last summer, I went to bed after a long day of doing what I loved most. I was a camp counselor at Camp Mystic, where I was honored to care for 17 campers. It was my second summer as a counselor there. I do not believe I was asked to be here today because of anything heroic I did that night. In fact, I could name many other girls who I feel deserve to be here much more than I do. But I do believe I'm here to share what God has done in my life. Not a day has gone by that I do not remember that night, leading my girls out of our cabin through rising waters towards Rec Hall on higher ground. I remember 100 of us climbing to the second floor and crowding onto a narrow balcony, watching water rise to just inches below our feet. I remember losing all hope and feeling completely alone, when my soul stirred my voice to sing the song "Good, Good Father" under my breath. It was a song I would sing whenever I needed the reminder that God is good and on the throne despite my circumstances. It reminded me that He was still a good father, and that above anything else in that moment, I was still deeply loved by Him. And by the grace of God, the water stopped rising and it started to recede. It is hard for me to understand why my life was spared that night while so many others whom I love were not. That is still something that I wrestle with. But even in that grief, I get to hold onto the hope and the promise of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Because I know this: there is still a God of love and miracles in our midst. If you begin to listen, to watch, and to pursue a relationship with Him, I am sure you will see it. Thank you."

Recently i noticed the general social media atmosphere related to China becomes much much more favorable to China (thanks to Rednote). I felt quite surreal as I still remember when trying to tell Europeans what the real China is, all the cyberbullies and mockeries I have received. And now, immediately I felt many people follow up to realise I told the truth before. But guys you are still late already. I have already heavily invested myself into China because I'm deeply convinced of its bright future after my ten years of experience with it. Im determined to enjoy a shared future with its prosperity so that my benefits will not get sunk with the descending West as a whole. In my eyes the problem of the west is deep-rooted beyond easy repair, and it will still take a long time for the western public to accordingly reform and improve. You can still join me to recieve the fresh and real China experience, and adopt accordingly to grasp its oppurtunities with me together. I have mostly quited posting political posts in both English and Chinese platforms because I have already completed my mission, as a girl, to send the voices to both societies. I recieved all kinds of feedbacks from both sides that both help and harm me. Looking back, I cannot help to feel I may have gone too far, too ahead, and too alone, which causes me to decouple from the public. Thus I recently shifted to be an influencer that dedicated to "touch" the public, and be part of a community seeks for solidarity and mutual understanding. My recent posts in social media enjoy more attention and appreiciation than before, meaning my life in social media have a lot more to be discovered and expanded. I will disipline myself in future to restrict voicing anything negative about any matters. It is not because I'm not wise enough to criticize the ugliness and dirts, but on the other hand I found myself is more needed elsewhere.

People mistakenly believe peptides are only good. Peptides can be bad, too. They can cause adverse effects. Some dangerous. I did a peptide experiment and measured its effects in my body. The results are complicated. I tried a peptide called CJC-1295. It pushed my growth hormone up by ~8x. That’s good. That’s what it was supposed to do. But, it also came with adverse effects: > increased my morning fasted blood sugar up 20% > increased stress hormone by 12% > tanked my REM sleep by 23% > made my pancreas work 53% harder and was still losing to rising blood glucose > increased my insulin resistance by 50% These were the most obvious side effects, and I only ran a very narrow panel for this experiment. So I’m sure there’s more. I stopped after two doses, without even reaching the intended target dose. For those of you new to peptides, your body sends instructions to itself using tiny chemical messengers called peptides. There are thousands of them. For example, GLP-1s are drugs that take an existing class of short-lived peptides and modify them to extend their activity duration, which turns them into drugs, following rigorous clinical testing. CJC-1295 is one of those peptide-drugs. It tells your brain to release more growth hormone. Growth hormone is your body's signal to build muscle, repair tissue, and recover. However, and like most grey market peptides, CJC-1295 did not succeed its clinical trial, and hence never became an “official” drug. There is a version called CJC-1295 with DAC. DAC is an attachment glued onto the peptide that makes it last for days in your body instead of hours. One shot, longer effect, just like GLP-1s. Why people use it: more growth hormone could mean better recovery, leaner body, faster healing. The experiment I completed. Two injections a week of CJC-1295 with DAC: > 1.2 mg > 1.8 mg 48 hours after the first injection I was nearly comatose. It felt like severe jet lag, the type you’d feel after traveling nine time zones. My sleep was wrecked and I felt continuously awful. My REM sleep dropped by 23%. REM is when your brain processes memories and repairs itself. Less time for my brain to repair itself. During the experiment, I never felt rested and always fatigued. Why we chose CJC-1295 with DAC. Some will say we picked the wrong peptide. They will say I should have used a different version, CJC-1295 without DAC, mixed with another peptide called Ipamorelin. We went with CJC-1295 with DAC instead as it has the most controlled studies. CJC-1295 with DAC has 2 controlled trials in healthy adults. Ipamorelin alone has 1 controlled trial in healthy adults, plus 1 study that failed when they tried it on bowel surgery patients. The mix of the two has zero controlled trials. On Ipamorelin, it copies a chemical called ghrelin, the one that makes you hungry. On its own it gives you a quick burst of growth hormone that fades fast. It does not keep your longer acting growth signal (called IGF-1) up. Clinics mix Ipamorelin with CJC-1295 no-DAC because the two together are supposed to work better. But we don’t know if that’s accurate because we don’t have trial data. This is a problem with peptides. Almost none of them have been tested properly. We are flying blind. Most of what people use is based on what someone said online, what a clinic claims, or what a friend reports from their subjective feelings. Peptides have the potential to be great when well-studied.

At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs. 6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority. Certain orgs like ads and MRS are notorious for being Chinese dominated. I think Americans would be outraged if they knew that their own citizens were getting marginalized and laid off at their own companies, while Chinese promote themselves up, conquer entire orgs, and reap millions. Imagine if Huawei in Shenzhen had entire orgs and leadership chains completely dominated by Japanese people who brazenly spoke Japanese at work without a care in the world that their Chinese coworkers don't understand, imposed their own work culture without respecting Chinese culture, excluded the Chinese, and laid off Chinese people while promoting their own. I imagine Chinese citizens would be outraged, and never allow that to happen in the first place. The most blatant and obvious way that non-Chinese are excluded is that Chinese primarily speak Mandarin at work. I'm not talking about one-off conversations, I'm talking about every single conversation. Loudly and brazenly with no respect for others. 10+ teammates and leaders having a group conversation in Mandarin while the 2 non-Chinese don't understand and feel excluded from the team. Although everyone at least has the decency to speak English during formal meetings with a non-speaker present, it was common that right after the meeting ended everyone would immediately switch to Mandarin. Funny I'm in Korea right now and was just on a double date with 3 other Koreans, and I was shocked that when the conversation would split into two, the other couple would speak to each other in English in my presence just out of respect. A Korean couple on a double-date had the courtesy to speak to each other in English in front of me even though I'd never expect that from them, but my Chinese coworkers did not. Lunch was another place where non-Chinese were blatantly excluded. Recall that the team I joined was an all Chinese team with only one other non-Chinese person. The Chinese would always get lunch together and never invite us (except for one of them who occasionally would, though at some point stopped). Me and the non-Chinese person would invite them, they'd always refuse, and then shortly after they'd disappear and get lunch together. As a result, it was usually just the two of us getting lunch. (caveat, some of the newer Chinese who joined afterwards also experienced similar treatment. So it's moreso a clique thing than a Chinese vs. non-Chinese thing, though 100% of the clique was Chinese) On Wednesdays and Fridays I'd often be the only non-Chinese person on my team in the office, and they'd all get lunch together without inviting me. It was depressing, and made me not want to come into the office on those days. One team dinner we went to a Korean BBQ. I arrived with a non-Chinese coworker and the first table was full, so we sat at one end of the next empty table. Shortly after one of the Tech Leads walked in, and sat at the complete opposite end of our table, alone and not in talking distance to anyone. We invited her over, and she declined. Later another Tech Lead came in and sat across from her. Non-Chinese and Chinese at opposite ends of a long table at a team dinner, and they refused to sit with us. Eventually more people came and the TLs joined our side because I guess maybe it was too obviously anti-social, and they spent the entire dinner speaking speaking Chinese to each other. These were our tech leads. I could not understand how Meta could have "Tech Leads" that so blatantly excluded teammates. I thought Tech Leads were supposed to uplift the team, and that Meta would hold tech leads to a higher standard. Now someone might say that it's just lunch or a one-off team dinner, who cares? To that I vehemently disagree. Lunch is extremely important for team bonding, and so much information is transferred through informal socializing. I'm not saying that everyone needs to get lunch together everyday, but if a minority of people are excluded from getting lunch with the rest of the team, and especially the most tenured and senior employees, then naturally that minority is going to feel alienated, disadvantaged, and excluded from opportunities. And the very fact that they're excluded from lunch is reflective of being excluded in general. When 90% of an org and the entire leadership chain is dominated by one ethnicity, naturally their work culture is going to spill through. Chinese culture is completely different from American work culture, and learning to navigate that was a huge obstacle for me. For example I'm the type that tends to question everything and isn't afraid to challenge a "superior", but I quickly realized that my TL seemed to take offense to that, and would punish/retaliate me for it. I want to make it clear - I have nothing against Chinese people. Most of them are very kind (strong correlation between kindness and not engaging in the kind of exclusionary behavior I mentioned above), and I have many good friends who are Chinese. I get that some barely speak English (though I question how they got hired). I do genuinely believe that most are good people, and not deliberately trying to exclude others. But regardless of intent, the result is that non-Chinese get excluded. The fact that 6 of the 7 layoffs I observed were not Chinese in a 80-90% Chinese dominated org is testament to this. The fact that 90% Chinese dominated orgs even exist in the first place is testament to this. I might not even be posting about this given the sensitivity of the topic if not for the fact that I've seen and/or heard stories of some very toxic people who I do not believe would otherwise survive if not for their ability to exclude others, throwing others under the bus for the next layoff. The same people do this over and over again, and get away with it because they're part of the "clique" that essentially has immunity. I think the company needs to take this more seriously. Some ideas would be enforcing English at the office (I've heard of other teams that do this), raising leaders to a higher bar when it comes to team inclusivity (eg. under the "People" axis), investigating potential discrimination cases (eg. layoffs and/or mistreatment disproportionally affecting certain groups) and having a zero tolerance policy around that, having a zero tolerance policy around injustice in general (eg. lying or deliberately throwing somebody under the bus), ensuring more diverse teams, etc. But to be honest, I don't have faith that much would change so long as the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is dominated by the same ethnicity, language, and culture. Nor does it seem that leadership even remotely cares given that this has been happening in the HQ for probably at least the last decade, and is obvious to anyone who's stepped foot in the office.

I’ve been holding $ZAMM since last year. Never sold. Then I checked the TAC airdrop. Not eligible. At first I thought maybe I missed something. But the more I looked into it, the less it made sense. If ZORG is basically staked ZAMM — if it represents ZAMM that has been deposited into the DAO — then why were long-term ZAMM holders not included in the snapshot? That’s the part I can’t accept. I didn’t buy late. I didn’t farm and dump. I didn’t rotate in after the hype. I held ZAMM the whole time. But now the answer is: you didn’t stake it into ZORG, so you don’t count. Then what exactly was ZAMM supposed to represent? If ZORG = staked ZAMM, why does the snapshot recognize ZORG but ignore the original ZAMM holders? If the goal was to reward the real early supporters, shouldn’t ZAMM holders have been included by default? The way this played out makes it feel like the old pool provided liquidity, while the new entry point captured all the rights. If you didn’t follow the exact path later designed by the team, you could hold from last year until now and still be left out. That’s not just “missing the rules.” That’s realizing after months of holding that your position was not recognized when it actually mattered. ZAMM → ZORG → TACIT looks clean from the outside. But for long-term ZAMM holders who never staked, it feels very different. You say $ZORG is staked $ZAMM. Then why was my ZAMM, held for this long, not in the snapshot? That is the real issue. So when people say the pool got drained, I’m not surprised. In DeFi, liquidity providers often look like early supporters, but in the end they become exit liquidity. They take the volatility, the impermanent loss, the opportunity cost, and the waiting. Then a new narrative comes along, and the rights move somewhere else. I’m done participating in these kinds of activities. Not because I missed an airdrop and got emotional. Because this kind of structure makes the whole thing feel pointless. Old users can accept risk. What we can’t accept is holding through everything, only to find out later that the rules were never really on our side.

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.

Nicky is a machine. He moves at an insanely fast pace while still staying relentlessly focused on the north star. He’s incredibly efficient, but also very thoughtful in how he makes decisions. On top of that, he’s ridiculously charismatic and genuinely lovable… the kind of person who can walk into a room, break the ice instantly, and get people to cut through the bullshit. What stands out most to me though is how good he is at delegation and trust. He empowers the people around him, gives them ownership, and backs them to execute. It feels really great to have someone see your strengths and skill set and really trust your judgement and ability to execute, because they see your worth. It’s sometimes shocking to feel how un-micromanaged I am on a daily basis. Earlier this year, Nicky reached out to me and basically warned me he was about to take on something big. He told me we’d probably need to have a conversation soon about how I could help build the vision with him. One smoothie meetup in Wynwood later, I was completely sold and it’s been full speed ever since. I’m fully in my lane and essentially in my solana ecosystem dream job. I’m incredibly proud of what we’re building with @SuperteamUSA. I’m working harder than I ever have, largely because Nicky’s energy and vision for what we can accomplish in Miami and across the greater USA is genuinely inspiring. I think his vision that we are building is extremely valuable for the ecosystem, and I honestly can’t think of anyone better to lead the charge. Really proud to be doing the damn thing alongside him, and even luckier to call him a close friend. (Also today’s his birthday, so everyone wish our founding father a happy birthday.)

I feel so completely grateful to have been asked to open the Paris @Olympics 2024 this year. I am also humbled to be asked by the Olympics organizing committee to sing such a special French song—a song to honor the French people and their tremendous history of art, music, and theatre. This song was sung by Zizi Jeanmaire, born in Paris a French ballerina, she famously sang “Mon Truc en Plumes” in 1961. The title means “My Thing with Feathers.” And this is not the first time we’ve crossed paths. Zizi starred in Cole Porter’s musical “Anything Goes” which was my first jazz release. Although I am not a French artist, I have always felt a very special connection with French people and singing French music—I wanted nothing more than to create a performance that would warm the heart of France, celebrate French art and music, and on such a momentous occasion remind everyone of one of the most magical cities on earth—Paris. We rented pom poms from Le Lido archive—a real French cabaret theater. We collaborated with Dior to create custom costumes, using naturally molted feathers. I studied French choreography that put a modern twist on a French classic. I rehearsed tirelessly to study a joyful French dance, brushing up on some old skills—I bet you didn’t know I used to dance at a 60’s French party on the lower east side when I was first starting out! I hope you love this performance as much as I do. And to everyone in France, thank you so much for welcoming me to your country to sing in honor of you—it’s a gift I’ll never forget! Congratulations to all the athletes who are competing in this year’s Olympic Games! It is my supreme honor to sing for you and cheer you on!! Watching the Olympic Games always makes me cry! Your talent is unimaginable. Let the games begin!