[Teaser] 양요섭(YANG YOSEOP) 2nd PHOTO BOOK [Somewhere in Time] 💛 #하이라이트# #HIGHLIGHT# #비스트# #BEAST# #양요섭# #YANGYOSEOP# #Somewhere_in_Time#

Have you ever done something for someone — expecting nothing, telling no one — and felt so good that you still remember it years later? When you do a mitzvah, the spark of God inside you touches God Himself. And in that instant you step outside of time. You go above it. That's why the moment never fades — because it was never in time to begin with. Everything else you did that week is gone. That one thing is still burning. The Baal Shem Tov taught something staggering: a soul may descend into this world and live seventy, eighty years — through childhood, marriage, work, illness, joy, loss — for the sake of doing one single act of kindness for one single person. Seventy years. For one moment. Which means the errand you almost didn't run. The call you almost didn't make. The stranger you almost walked past. That may be the reason you were born. I have sat at many bedsides at the end. I have never once heard a person speak about their title, their portfolio, or the year they finally got what they wanted. They speak about the moments they showed up for someone. Those are the only things that make it through the door with you. So don't wait to become a better person. You don't have to be one. You only have to move — once, today, toward someone who needs you. Because somewhere in this world, right now, there is a person waiting for the kindness only you can give them. And your whole life may be the long road you took to reach them.

Somewhere in this country, a young American family is doing everything right. They got married. They saved. They worked overtime, cut expenses, and put money aside every month with one goal in mind: buying their first home and building something lasting for their kids. The average first-time homebuyer in America is now 40 years old, a record high. Home prices relative to income have nearly doubled since 1976. That young family playing by the rules is getting crushed, and Washington has spent years telling them it’s complicated. It’s not complicated. A new Federal Reserve study found that illegal immigration was responsible for 30% of home price growth and 20% of rent growth between 2021 and 2024. Biden flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens, every one of them competed for the same finite housing stock that young family was saving for, and Washington subsidized it the entire time with taxpayer-backed mortgage loans that were never meant for noncitizens. That family deserves better. My Homeownership Eligibility Reform Act restricts taxpayer-backed mortgages to U.S. citizens only, permanently. No future administration can reverse it with the stroke of a pen, and no young American family gets priced out of their dream because Washington decided illegal aliens come first. I’m fighting back.

Love crypto? Pass CLARITY to promote its growth. Hate crypto? Pass CLARITY to prevent its abuses. Don’t care or feel somewhere in the middle about crypto? Pass CLARITY to show Congress can still actually do something with the power granted by the American people. It’s time.

I'm a cardiologist. I've had my hand on the human heart for more than twenty years. I've felt it race with fear and go still with grief. And somewhere along the way I stopped believing the thing they taught me in medical school — that the heart is only a pump. The heart is a witness. It keeps a record of everything we were too afraid to feel. Let me tell you about a patient. I've changed her details, but the truth of her is exact. She came into the ER gripping her chest, certain she was dying. Her EKG was alarming. Her cardiac enzymes were up. We rushed her to the cath lab expecting a blocked artery. We found nothing. Her coronaries were pristine. Beautiful, even. What she had was Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. We call it broken heart syndrome. Under a surge of overwhelming stress, the heart muscle balloons and fails — mimicking a heart attack down to the last detail, with no blockage at all. The artery is innocent. The grief is not. When she was stable, I pulled a chair to her bed and asked her a quiet question. Not about cholesterol. About her life. And it came pouring out of her. She was the one everyone leaned on. The daughter who never said no to her aging parents. The mother who never said no to her grown children. The wife who never said no, period. She had spent fifty years being everyone's reliable vessel — and had not, in her own words, "taken a full breath in decades." Her arteries were flawless. Her heart had simply had enough of holding what she would not put down. I have thought about her for years. Because she is not the exception. She is most of us. And here is the part I need you to understand — because it is not poetry, it is physiology. Swallow yourself for forty years and your body keeps the score. Your sympathetic nervous system stays quietly switched on. Cortisol runs high. Blood pressure climbs. Inflammation smolders in the vessel walls. Heart rate variability — one of the truest signatures of a resilient heart — narrows and stiffens. Her ballooned heart was not a metaphor. It was her body doing the math on a lifetime of unspoken no. We think we are burying our feelings. We are not. We are storing them — in our arteries, in our sleep, in the tension we carry so long we forget it isn't part of us. Two hundred years ago the Kotzker Rebbe said a thing I can now confirm on an echocardiogram: there is nothing so whole as a broken heart. He didn't mean it as consolation. He meant the heart that has been broken open is the only one large enough to hold the truth. Rumi, from the other side of the world, said the same thing: the wound is the place where the light enters you. Your broken heart is not your malfunction. It is your assignment. The break is where the light gets in — and where your light finally gets out. So here is the one question I now ask before I write a prescription. It is so simple it embarrasses me that I did not learn it in medical school: Where in your life are you not saying no? Almost everyone knows the answer before I finish the sentence. There is a no you are swallowing right now — to keep the peace, to please someone, to stay the strong one, the reliable one, the one who never needs anything. And every swallowed no is a small dose of stress hormone. A quiet tax on the heart. Paid daily. For years. Until the bill comes due in a cath lab, or a sleepless 3 a.m., or a body that suddenly won't cooperate and no one can tell you why. If that question just landed somewhere in your chest — don't rush past it. That feeling is not nothing. That is your own heart, finally getting a word in. My patient went home. She started saying no. Small ones first. Then real ones. She let people carry themselves for a change. The last time I saw her, her blood pressure was down. Her sleep was back. And she laughed — a real, unguarded, surprised-by-itself laugh — right there in my exam room. Her arteries were still perfect. But now, so was her breathing. You do not have to wait for a broken heart to learn what it came to teach you. Call the friend you've been meaning to call for a year — call, don't text. Say the no you've been swallowing. Feel the thing you've been outrunning. And let yourself be happy anyway, even with the world on fire, because your joy was never a betrayal of anyone's pain. The wound is where the light enters. Your heart already knows the way home. It's just waiting for you to stop holding your breath. I wrote and essay — the five regrets of the dying, why nobody was ever born a coward, and how the heart keeps its record — on my Substack:

A foodborne outbreak spreading across the country right now is worth every doctor's attention — and yours. The CDC just issued a formal Health Alert. A parasite called Cyclospora has exploded across 34 states. As of July 13, over 6,700 confirmed or probable cases have been reported nationally in 2026 — compared to about 2,700 in all of last year. The CDC has confirmed 1,645 domestically acquired cases since May 1, with over 5,100 more awaiting analysis. That's running more than 6 times ahead of this time last year. 141 hospitalized. Zero deaths. But the misery is real, and it lasts. Here's what you need to know, because this one is genuinely miserable and often missed. Cyclosporiasis is caused by a microscopic parasite you swallow on contaminated fresh produce — historically leafy greens, herbs like cilantro and basil, and berries. It spreads through the fecal-oral route: produce contaminated with human waste somewhere in the supply chain. It does NOT spread person to person, so you can't catch it from a sick family member. The symptoms: profuse, watery, sometimes "explosive" diarrhea that can last weeks if untreated. Plus cramping, nausea, bloating, loss of appetite, fatigue, and dramatic weight loss. Symptoms usually start about a week after exposure and can come in waves — you feel better, then relapse. That relapsing pattern is a classic clue. Now the part I most want you to hear, because it's where people get missed: Standard stool tests do NOT reliably detect Cyclospora. A routine "ova and parasites" panel can miss it entirely. Your doctor has to specifically order Cyclospora testing. So if you've had watery diarrhea for more than a few days — especially if it's dragging on for a week or waxing and waning — tell your doctor directly: "Could this be Cyclospora? Please test for it specifically." The CDC is actively urging clinicians to order that test right now. It's treatable. The standard treatment is an antibiotic combination — trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. People with sulfa allergies need an alternative, so that conversation matters. Untreated, it can drag on for weeks. Treated, it usually resolves. The current investigation: the CDC and FDA are tracking a multistate cluster of 400+ cases across Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky that likely share a common food source. Michigan has been hit hardest — thousands of cases against a typical background of a few dozen a year. Leafy greens and salad mix are under scrutiny, but no single source has been officially confirmed yet, and there's no formal recall. Prevention — and here's the sobering part: Wash all fresh produce thoroughly under running water, rubbing the surfaces. It helps, but be honest with yourself: Cyclospora oocysts are tough, and washing does NOT reliably remove them. Hand sanitizer does nothing to it. Cooking DOES kill it — heat is your most reliable defense. During an active outbreak, if you're in a hotspot state, cooking your vegetables is far safer than eating them raw. So: wash everything, cook when you can, and if you get prolonged or relapsing watery diarrhea, see a doctor and ask specifically for Cyclospora testing. This isn't a reason to panic. No one has died, and it's curable. It's a reason to be informed — to wash and cook your produce, and to know the one word that gets you the right test if you fall ill. Sometimes the most important medicine isn't a breakthrough. It's knowing what to ask for before a two-week illness becomes a two-month one.

I am the Senior Director of Workforce Optimization at Cisco Systems and I want to share something I'm proud of. In August we identified 5,500 roles that were misaligned with our AI infrastructure pivot. I use the word "misaligned" because HR approved it. The previous word was "redundant" but redundant tested poorly in the internal communications focus group. Misaligned tested well. It suggests the employee did something wrong. That was important to us. The market gave us 4%. Honestly, I was disappointed. I told my team we need to think about this the way the Street thinks about it. The Street doesn't care that you removed 5,500 people. The Street cares that you removed 5,500 people *and* raised guidance in the same sentence. So that's what we did in Q3. We dissolved 4,000 additional roles and raised full-year guidance to $62.8 billion in the same paragraph of the same press release, and the stock surged 16% after hours. I was in the office watching. I keep a Bloomberg terminal on a second monitor for earnings nights. When the number moved I stood up at my desk. Nobody else was on the floor. It was 4:47 PM and the building was mostly empty, which I realize now is a thing I helped cause. Revenue hit $15.84 billion. Each of the 4,000 dissolved roles generated approximately $70,000 in market cap. I track this ratio quarterly. I built the spreadsheet myself. It has a tab called "Per-Head Value Creation" and another tab called "Projection Scenarios" where I model what happens to the stock if we do 5,000 next quarter, or 6,000, or 8,000. I have not shared the 8,000 tab with anyone yet. I'm waiting for the right meeting. Chuck said "focus, urgency, and discipline" on the earnings call. I helped draft that language. It took nine revisions. The first draft said "strategic headcount rationalization" and Legal flagged it because "rationalization" implies the prior headcount was irrational, which creates liability for two years of hiring decisions. So we workshopped alternatives. Someone suggested "realignment." Someone suggested "simplification." I suggested "focus" because focus is the only word in the English language that sounds like a strategy and a threat at the same time and no one can sue you for it. Our internal tracking system is called VELOCITY. It stands for Value Enhancement Through Labor Optimization and Cost Intelligent Transformation, Year-over-year. It took a naming committee four weeks to finalize the acronym. During those four weeks we separated 1,200 people. I mention this only because the naming committee had six members and none of them found this uncomfortable. I found it efficient. $5.3 billion in AI orders year-to-date. Raised to a $9 billion pipeline target. The CFO projects $6 billion in hyperscale AI revenue by FY2027. To get there the workforce needs to go from 86,200 to somewhere in the low 70s. I have a slide for this. The slide has two lines. One is headcount, going down. The other is AI order volume, going up. They cross somewhere around Q2 FY2026. I haven't titled the slide yet. My working title is "Alignment." I think that's clean. Networking orders up 50%. Data-center switching up 40%. Restructuring charges up to $1 billion. I put these three numbers on a single slide for the investor deck. An analyst from Morgan Stanley emailed afterward and said it was "elegant." I printed the email. It's in a frame on my desk next to the Operational Excellence in Transition Award from our internal leadership council. The trophy is a glass cube with nothing inside it. I've been told this was an aesthetic choice by the designer. I think it's the most honest object in my office. One of the 4,000 was a network engineer named David. Eleven years. He once drove from San Jose to Sacramento on a Saturday to physically restart a router that kept a hospital's ICU monitoring system online. I know this because it's in his performance file, which I reviewed as part of the Q3 separation list. His annual cost-to-company was $287,000. His departure improved our AI-readiness score by 0.003 points. I presented both numbers at my Thursday sync. Someone asked what the AI-readiness score was tracking toward. No one asked about the hospital. The DOW hit 50,000 the same day we filed the restructuring notice with the SEC. I watched it on the terminal. I took a photo and sent it to my wife. She said "that's great." I wrote back explaining how our filing contributed to the broader rally and that the index was essentially agreeing with my Q3 plan. She didn't respond. I reread my message later and realized it was four paragraphs long. I think maybe I should have just said "good day at work." We are entering Phase 3 planning for FY2026. VELOCITY has flagged another 6-8% of the workforce as what we internally call "the drag layer." These are roles that generate labor costs without contributing to the AI order pipeline. I have a preliminary separation model ready. The Slack channel for this work is called #restructuring-wins#. It requires VP-level approval to join. We use a custom emoji for milestones. It's a green arrow pointing up. Someone on my team designed it. I approved it. I didn't think about it very hard at the time and I still don't. I received a 22% performance bonus this quarter. The category on my review was "Demonstrates Focus." My skip-level told me it was the highest in the division. He shook my hand. I went back to my desk and saw that David's severance had been processed that morning. I noted the date. I did not note the coincidence. I don't think it was one. I think these are just two outputs of the same system, running correctly, at the same time. I have a meeting Tuesday to review the Phase 3 list. The deck is formatted. The projections are loaded. I'm going to recommend we accelerate the timeline by one quarter. I think the Street will respond well. I think Chuck will say "focus." I think my phone will buzz. I'm proud of the work we're doing here.

I collect tariffs for the United States. My title is Liquidation Specialist, which sounds like a threat and is, in fact, a desk job. This spring the job quietly doubled: I refund tariffs now too, which is the same job run backward. Same tariffs, same companies, same chair, same finger. For about a year I helped charge the country's imports $166 billion. Then the Supreme Court ruled we were never allowed to charge a cent of it, so now I am giving all $166 billion back, and I did not have to learn one new thing to do it. I press the key. The key runs backward. I work at a port. When a shipment arrives, a machine and I decide what the country charges it to come in. Last year that number was a tariff. This year, retroactively, it is nothing. Same shipment. Same machine. Same desk. They called it Liberation Day. I remember it as a Tuesday with unusual volume. Here is the shape of it. That $166 billion came from 330,000 companies, across 53 million shipments. I did not take it cruelly. I took it the way a bathroom scale takes your weight, without opinion and slightly wrong. Then in February, 6 of the 9 Justices ruled that a tariff is a tax, and a tax is Congress's to invent, and the emergency law we had used to invent this one was not, on a close read, a law about tariffs at all. The 6 did not line up the way anyone had a chart for, which was the single most surprising thing that happened all year. 16 months of collecting. One footnote's worth of Latin. Give it all back. So we are giving it back. About $100 billion has gone out the door so far, with interest, because we are a scrupulous country that honors its debts, including the ones a court has to sit us down and explain are debts. We pay 6%, compounded daily, which runs to roughly $22 million a day. Hold that the way I hold it every morning: the government of the United States is paying $22 million a day to apologize with money, and the apology is the part of my job that passes audit. There is an accounting word for money you hold that isn't yours, at a comfortable rate, for a year, against the owner's wishes. The word is loan. So 330,000 companies lent the United States $166 billion, involuntarily, and are being repaid at 6%, and somewhere in the building I am the loan officer. My qualifications for the largest forced-lending program in the country's history are a lanyard and a strong opinion about the office coffee. Now the part people ask about, on the one day a year that someone asks. The refund goes to the importer of record, the company whose name is on the customs paperwork. It does not go to you. You met this tariff twice. Once at the port, paid by a company you have never heard of. Once at the register, folded into a price that never said its name. The company files a form and gets its money and its 6%. You get to keep the receipt. I have searched my entire system for the key that refunds a shopper, and I can report that it is not there, that no one has requested it, and that the drop-down menu does not go that low. And I refund the tariff. Only the tariff. I do not refund the lawyer. I do not refund the plane ticket a company bought to fly to Vietnam and find a cheaper factory, and I do not refund the factory, which is still in Vietnam and does not want to come home. I do not refund the 8 months your operations lead spent renegotiating a contract that is now, technically, unnecessary. The tariff is the one number in this whole affair allowed to run backward. Everything it knocked over stays down. People keep telling me the refund is the machine saying sorry. The machine does not say sorry. It performs the exact motion it performed before, at the exact speed, with the exact absence of feeling, and it files one direction under Policy and the other under Justice, and it could not tell you, at knifepoint, which was which. It knows one thing. I pressed the key. The scale took the weight. The scale gave the weight back. I pressed it both times.

THINGS MY PATIENTS TAUGHT ME — No. 2 A patient mailed me a letter after he went home. Actual paper, actual stamp—I didn't know people still did that. He said I could share it if I kept his name off it. So here it is, in his words, not mine. Doctor, For most of my life I was the one who showed up. The one people called when something broke. I answered every message, made every flight, carried whatever needed carrying. I mistook that for strength. I think a lot of us do. Then my body stopped asking my permission, and I ended up in one of your beds, hooked to machines I couldn't name, unable to do the one thing I'd built my whole identity around—being useful to other people. I want to tell you what I saw from down there. I saw my brother cancel a closing he'd worked on for a year and just sit. I saw a friend I'd been too busy to call for three years walk in at 6 a.m. with coffee he knew I wasn't allowed to drink. And I saw my wife fold herself into that terrible vinyl chair in the corner every single night and sleep sitting up, because she wasn't going home without me. One night I woke and she was spooning ice chips into my mouth because my hands were shaking too hard to hold the cup. A grown man, fed by his wife, in the dark. I had spent forty years terrified of exactly that kind of helplessness. It turned out to be the closest thing to holiness I have ever felt. Somewhere in those days it occurred to me that God wasn't just sending me people who loved me. He was letting me feel His love through their hands. He'd finally gotten me to hold still long enough to notice what had been true the entire time, underneath all the striving: that I was already loved, and had been all along, and none of it was ever something I had to earn. So I'm writing this down while I still remember it, because I know myself. Life will speed back up. The messages will pile in. And I will be tempted to become useful again and forget. When that happens, I need to remember the chair. The ice chips. The 6 a.m. coffee. What it felt like to be loved with nothing to offer in return. That was a gift too. Maybe the biggest one. Thank you for keeping me alive long enough to learn it. He's back at work now. Fully recovered. I keep the letter in my desk drawer, and on the days this job tries to turn my patients into charts, I read it again. He treated me. Not the other way around. Blessings,

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.