1/ Today, the Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team is publishing Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions, a non-technical primer to equip the leaders making policy and deployment decisions with an understanding of how Ethereum works, how it's governed, and how it compares with perceived alternatives.

🚨News: @anza_xyz has published @Solana’s Agave v4.2 release schedule, targeting Aug. 17 for the first step toward 200ms slots, larger transactions and rent reduction as Alpenglow, Solana’s biggest consensus upgrade, moves closer.

Compute trading, right now, feels a lot closer to the earlier part of the fracking boom (early 2000s) or pre-ETF BTC than a mature commodities market Clearly a real thing in the long run, but likely something that requires more supply chain stability before hedging costs are brutally optimized There are a lot of "irrational" or wrong-way premiums that cost many percentage points that far outweigh the 10s-100s of basis points you save with hedging These premiums can disappear quickly (as we see with both shale and BTC) but when they exist, it is hard to bootstrap a de novo hedging marketplace because participants are spending more on keeping supply alive [BTC basis trades, fracking land purchases/leverage on land] than on lowering risk from variable demand There are numerous persistent premiums that reflect the non-existence of a stable market clearing price in compute trading: - price of new powered land > land cost of an existing build - refurbished A100s/H100s being worth more than list - cost of refurbishing existing data centers to handle ASICs/Vera Rubin/etc. > cost of a pure new build - cost of origination + new rate for a new build > refinancing an existing data center loan In the fracking boom, there were many idiosyncratic, long-term wrong-way financing costs that persisted for years until 'Bakken' and 'Marcellus' were footnotes in a debt arrangement rather than in the name of the SPV In such a market, owning supply and order flow (proven shale deposits/fresh BTC/proven token demand) is usually better than owning the right to hedge. It is a bit like being a crypto exchange in 2013 — you would have a huge amount of demand if you survived for 4 years, but you were at the whim of your only persistent customer (miners) until that day arrived. And they would bleed you dry via 1000 cuts [remember quanto perps?]. The only thing I see accelerating the visceral need for hedging, much like there was for BTC, is the introduction of a new technology that moves the Pareto frontier and lowers borrowing/refi costs by an order of magnitude For BTC, that came from wrapped assets, DeFi, and the ETF complex (e.g. IBIT options) For AI, that seems to be coming from open source models, model routers, and inference providers Trillion(ish) Dollar Question: Should we expect the same microstructure that we see in DeFi in the matching algorithm token routing algorithms used to match inference capacity with open source demand?

I think both Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 get approved for general release next week, and for use outside of the United States as well. But people should remember this moment and remember this feeling, because it is almost inevitable that we eventually reach a point where approval does not arrive. Capitalism is going to tip the scales this time. I doubt they will approve one model and not the other, because doing so would be seen as incredibly anti-competitive. Fable and GPT-5.6 will probably receive the same clearance, probably on the same day. I also doubt they want to restrict sales outside the US, because that would be seen as anti-business and would trigger a major backlash against American closed-source AI. The rumblings of which you can already hear today. There is also a plan now taking shape on both the US left and right to create some version of an AI public wealth fund that pays a dividend directly to American citizens. That fund needs to be fed by the global sale of the big labs top models to people outside the US. So I think there will be no freeze on their use outside the United States this time. The other reason is that allowing this will make people happy, and it will soften the fact that Mythos, as was announced yesterday, is available only to a vetted group of US agencies and companies. I do not think that this basic structure will change from here on out. Mythos may eventually be made available to certain allies, but only after the US government, its agencies, and then some chosen American companies have access to Mythos-2, Sol-2, or whatever the new uber-model turns out to be. I do not think this gap ever closes again, not even for allies. And that means the US will increasingly possess an intelligence advantage that touches almost everything: voting, markets, corporations, academia, infrastructure, and the internal operations of foreign states. Having Mythos-n will always be trumped by whoever has Mythos-n+1. Anthropic themselves have said within nine months Mythos will look like a toy. That advantage, standing at the top of this tower, is too large to give up voluntarily. It also means that many things will become suspect. People will see shadows everywhere. Barring espionage, a deliberate leak, or the emergence of a non-US competitor at the top end of the scale, this structure will persist for some time. The public fight is about access to models. But the real fight is about access to the future. And from this point forward, whoever holds this power will also become increasingly capable of keeping it for themselves.

Can you imagine your loved ones coming down from the attic with your medals, achievements and honors asking about the time you shaped the strategic environment? How would you even begin to explain that–by being part of the shaping.

My primary coverage at Galaxy has been Solana and Crypto x AI. About a year ago I started paying more attention to Ethereum as I saw real shifts in its technical direction and management. The past few months feel like a culmination of that reset: the Strawmap, the Mandate, the EF cuts, and now @ethlabs_org. A lot of people read this as a bad sign. I don't. - The @ethereumfndn is smaller and narrower, focused on the one thing it should be protecting: Ethereum's credible neutrality. - The Strawmap puts L1 scaling back at the center after years of chasing rollup-centric priorities. - And a new set of ETH-aligned organizations with funding and skin in the game is emerging to drive adoption (Ethlabs, @Etherealize_io @BitMNR, etc...) As @VitalikButerin recently wrote, this is Ethereum's "Third iteration." Now lets see some execution. Glamsterdam first.

For all the talk about the Ethereum Foundation's shortcomings, the refusal to get more involved or "build product" or fund/promote specific projects or be too focused on neutrality too early...this I know to be true: There have been dozens of other L1s who did the opposite. Raised a gazillion dollars, had a Foundation and Labs, hired many engineering, product, & BizDev people, ran points programs, invested in startups or gave grants, did TradFi PoCs and theater, promoted specific projects, spent lavishly on bougie conference parties, and did even crazier things like launch a memecoin fund (!). All but one of those L1s are so dead we don't even talk about them. For many, you can trace the failure to the "un-Ethereum" like GTM strategy. You can't build succesful decentralized infra by going out of your way to give a small opaque group of people excess power. You certainly can't build a global settlement layer that way; the billions of people, and trillions in assets, that aren't on your chain yet will always fear that control lever being used against them. All of which is to say: while there are many critiques one could have of the EF, they did one thing right, which was to err on the side of doing too little, as opposed to too much. Whatever other work needs to be done will be picked up by outside parties who have their own vested interest. That's what is happening now. In crypto, the greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince an army of smart people that the best way to be decentralized tomorrow was to be centralized today.

Ethereum's Strawmap is the protocol's most significant strategic reframing since The Merge An attempt to fix the gaps that drove users to rival chains, and to position Ethereum as infrastructure for quantum resistance, privacy, and the AI economy. My latest for @glxyresearch