1/ As crypto winter comes to an end, it's time for a new blue chip asset to lead the way forward All major innovation - tokenization, stablecoins, perps, L2s, DeFi - happens on Ethereum Blockchain's NVIDIA moment is here at last... And so this next cycle belongs to ethereum:native

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. The updated strawmap is at and I attached a picture of it to this post. My own high-level takeaways: * "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced: - Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol - Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives - Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today - Multidimensional gas - State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available - Changes to client architecture ... At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again. * H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another. * Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?" * Formal verification of everything for security. * FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM. * Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months) * Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount. eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state) Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees. Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration. * In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area. * Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V. My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away. * Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes. Ethereum is CROPS. Ethereum is scaling. Ethereum is reinventing itself. Onward.

1/ JPMorgan launched JLTXX, the OnChain Liquidity Token Money Market Fund, on May 13. @jpmorgan seeded the fund with $100m of its own capital. Other launch investors brought day-one TVL to $200m. Seven weeks later, TVL has grown 248% to $695m as of July 3. @ethereum is currently the only blockchain available for use by investors in the fund.

Lighter CEO Vlad Novakovski: "Ethereum is the clearing layer of decentralized security you want to build on for finance" Vlad comments on yesterday's announcement that Robinhood Wallet now offers native in-app perps trading powered by the Ethereum-based Lighter: "One thing we strongly agree with the Robinhood team on is that decentralized rails and tokenized finance are the future and that Ethereum is the clearing layer of decentralized security you want to build on for finance." He continues: "When those things come together, that has attracted both retail and institutions. For a lot of the institutions that are currently not on chain, we believe the first time they come on chain will be in the context of the work we're doing with Robinhood, the CFTC, and so on."

"The next few years will determine the base layer of global finance, institutions will either fragment across competing ecosystems, or converge on a credibly neutral, programmable base layer. Ethereum is already winning that race." - Ethereum Institutional We're glad to be building alongside this team to accelerate institutional adoption on Ethereum.

Ethereum is not built by or run by a single organization. Ethereum is a network of independent nodes that collectively make the infrastructure inevitable Ethereum Institutional will play a key role in amplifying and growing Ethereum. Could not be more excited for this launch!

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Tokenization will change finance forever “There are slews of middleman in the financial services area. We have elongated settlement and elongated processes. If we could digitize every asset and have a more seamless way of going from a digital wallet of cash or a stablecoin into equities or bonds — through, in most categories, an ETF — it will reduce the friction cost and the transaction cost.” “There’s $4.1 trillion of money in digital wallets globally… Right now, if they wanted to go into a bond, stock, or make a real estate transaction, they’d have to move the money from a digital wallet to a traditional wallet, with all the commissions and fees [that entails]. The idea of tokenization of all assets, including real estate ultimately, is to just reduce huge friction costs and make investing easier and simpler. It’s going to allow for a more free-flowing process of investing.” In January, Larry Fink called for the usage of a single common blockchain to tokenize and secure all assets. Ethereum is the only real choice. Watch below 👇

Nic Carter on why Ethereum will be a beneficiary of quantum “The fact that Justin [Drake] is on [Google’s quantum] paper is also quite telling. It’s night and day. In Bitcoin, it’s just me worrying about this and like a half dozen other people. In Ethereum, it’s already been decided — the transition is going to occur. I was reading the blog on the pq.ethereum site, and I was like, ‘I could’ve written this.’ I completely agree with every word written on here.” “I think Ethereum is also a beneficiary in the sense that it has not gone through this relentless optimization route like some of the ‘high-throughput’ blockchains have because they’re going to suffer from this.” Source: @Bankless (Apr 2026)

"Institutional-grade controls and public-network interoperability can be achieved without compromising Ethereum’s openness or neutrality." - Andreas Kubli, Group Head of Digital Assets at UBS

Ethereum is global, resilient, decentralized, and institutional. So are the multiple organizations building on Ethereum. Extremely excited for Ethlabs to play an important part in building the future of the network.

Beautifully crafted piece on "Why Ethereum?" Very powerful. Some quotes: “The original vision of consortium blockchains – the idea that you have 5 banks or major companies that come together and create their own chain – has been mostly a failure,” Vitalik Buterin explains . “It ends up inheriting most of the disadvantages of centralization and most of the disadvantages of decentralization at the same time.” The problem, as he describes it, is that the first few banks feel like equal founders, but bank number twenty is just joining something its competitors already control. You take on all the engineering cost of a distributed system and get none of the benefits of openness, composability, and credible neutrality that made blockchains worthwhile in the first place. The single-most important blockchain property is sovereignty (Note: Another way to express "sovereignty" is: credible neutrality + censorship resistance + privacy + security). What made Bitcoin revolutionary was that it was the world’s first sovereign computer platform. Before Bitcoin, all computer platforms belonged to a person, a company, or a government, and they had to obey the will of their owners and the rules of the jurisdiction where they resided. But a sovereign only obeys its own rules, and no single entity could impose rules on Bitcoin. (Note: On Ethereum, builders and users also have far more personal sovereignty than possible on any other large public platform in the world.) Much of Ethereum’s lead in sovereignty and credible neutrality comes from path dependence that no other blockchain can replicate. Ethereum launched with proof-of-work in 2015 and ran on it for seven years before transitioning to proof-of-stake in 2022. During that period, ownership of the network was distributed through an open 2014 crowdsale and GPU mining that was deliberately kept accessible to consumer hardware. The result was widespread token distribution with no single entity controlling a meaningful fraction of the network (an essential factor in the sovereignty of a proof-of-stake network). According to Token Terminal’s Ethereum Q1 2026 Report, Ethereum holds 79% of active DeFi loans across the top five chains, 62% of stablecoins, 73% of tokenized funds, and 84% of tokenized commodities. Erik Voorhees, the founder of (the privacy-first AI inference platform with 3+ million users and tens of millions of dollars in ARR), articulated a similar rationale a few days ago "It wasn't even a question for us," Erik replies when asked why he built Venice on Coinbase's Ethereum L2 Base, "The Ethereum ecosystem is the far more authentic, resilient, and robust ecosystem of all smart contract platforms."

Vitalik Buterin on why consortium blockchains have mostly failed “The original vision of consortium blockchains — the idea that you have 5 banks or major companies that come together and create their own chain — has been mostly a failure. I think the reason why is it ends up inheriting most of the disadvantages of centralization and most of the disadvantages of decentralization at the same time.” “The first five banks join, and they all feel like ‘Yay, we’re building a system together. We can all be part of it.’ But then once bank #6# and bank #7# and bank #29# come in, they’re joining a system where there’s already an established power structure, established participants, and basically to them it still feels like they’re joining some kind of centralized thing that’s controlled by a cartel.” “You don’t actually gain the benefits of true openness that people are looking for. You don’t have Etherscan. You don’t have a connection to an open, public network. At the same time, if you build on one of those systems, you have to figure out how to program distributed systems; you lose privacy — you might think you still have some, but the reality is you’re putting your data on a network where the only people that get to see it are you and all your closest competitors. From a privacy perspective, it actually doesn’t make much sense.” “The compromise between centralization and decentralization that actually makes a lot more sense is: you have an application and today that application is a server. You can keep your server, but instead, we’re going to add scaffolding on top to give users extra security guarantees. You put Merkle roots on chain. You put proofs on chain. And you give your users assurance that whatever is happening inside of your system is actually following the rules. So you have high scale, high performance, and you optimize for a minimal delta for existing centralized infrastructure deployment. Keep your existing infrastructure the way it is, and you just add a side car that makes the roots and the proofs.” Source: @arbitrum Read our report "Why Permissionless Infrastructure Wins" below 👇

Etherealize Team Commentary on Token Terminal's Ethereum Q1 2026 Report The headline tension this quarter was Ethereum mainnet hitting record usage levels while transaction fees fell. Ethereum is deliberately scaling the network at the expense of near-term fee capture, betting that cheaper blockspace unlocks far more demand (and eventually network revenue) in the long run. Token Terminal's Ethereum Q1 2026 Report shows that bet is working. On a year-over-year basis, monthly active users rose 85.9%, transaction count is up 81.5%, and throughput climbed 81.7%. This is Jevon's paradox at work, and we expect the increase in total network demand to more than make up for lower fees, similar to how the semiconductor industry generates several orders of magnitude more revenue today than it did in 1975, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a microchip doubled roughly every two years. Furthermore, the scaling payoff is still ahead of us with the Glamsterdam upgrade targeting a more than 3x increase in the gas limit in Q3 and Ethereum's roadmap guiding to 10,000 TPS and a "fast L1" with finality in seconds by 2029. We agree with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink who wrote in December that "tokenisation today is roughly where the internet was in 1996—when Amazon had sold just $16m worth of books." The consensus at the time was that Amazon was a money-losing online bookseller propped up by an internet bubble. However, Jeff Bezos saw that the internet was going to transform retail and optimized for network effects and economies of scale, rather than near term profits. Ethereum is making a similar tradeoff to cement its position as the settlement layer for global finance. The other lesson worth drawing from the Internet is that open, permissionless networks tend to beat closed ones. In 1995, Bill Gates published The Road Ahead predicting digital commerce would run on proprietary corporate networks he called the "Information Superhighway" rather than the open internet. Microsoft was building MSN. AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy ran walled gardens with millions of paying subscribers. France's Minitel had more users than the entire web until late 1996. They all lost. No serious company would build on top of a network controlled by a competitor, and perhaps more importantly, no corporation could keep pace with permissionless innovation indefinitely. We have seen this play out again and again: Linux out-built proprietary Unix, the open web displaced corporate walled gardens; Wikipedia displaced Britannica. Each time, the proprietary alternative had the early lead — a more focused product, larger marketing budgets, business development teams — and each time that lead eroded after the open system crossed a threshold of accumulated contribution, tooling, and credible neutrality. We are now seeing this theme play out in financial infrastructure, and this report's data is evidence that Ethereum has crossed the threshold with dominant market share in every metric that matters. The institutions building tokenized finance are choosing Ethereum not out of ideology but because the liquidity, composability, and institutional precedent are already there. As this report highlights, Ethereum holds 79.2% of active DeFi loans across the top five chains, 61.8% of stablecoins, 73.0% of tokenized funds, and 84.0% of tokenized commodities. Every new tokenized asset deepens the liquidity that pulls in the next one, and a neutral substrate is the only equilibrium that holds because large players will never agree to settle on a competitor's infrastructure. Furthermore, institutions are realizing that privacy, permissioning, KYC, and transfer restrictions can all be implemented on Ethereum through privacy-preserving environments and permissioned token standards without surrendering access to public liquidity; the reverse (bolting public liquidity and an open application ecosystem onto a closed chain) is not possible. The institutional momentum, if anything, has accelerated since quarter-end. In May alone, BlackRock filed for two more tokenized funds, JPMorgan launched JLTXX as its second tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum, and Fidelity International launched FILQ, a Moody's AAA-rated dollar liquidity fund, as an ERC-20. In the world of stablecoins, the Japan Blockchain Foundation's yen stablecoin EJPY will launch on Ethereum, and a twelve-bank European consortium (including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, and BBVA) is preparing a regulated euro stablecoin. The internet looked impossible in 1990 and inevitable by 2005. If Fink is right about where tokenization sits on that curve, the next few years could be some of the most exciting in Ethereum's history. And as we argued in our Productive Money report, network fees give ETH an intrinsic value floor, while the bull case is ETH absorbing the ~$30+ trillion monetary premium held by gold and Bitcoin given its superior monetary attributes. ETH doesn't need exorbitant fees to win.

Vitalik Buterin explains why proof-of-stake is more secure than proof-of-work “I think proof of stake is very secure because to attack the system, you need to have basically as much stake as the rest of the network. Right now, for example, we have 5 million ETH staking, which means you have to come up with 5 million ETH and then join the network.” At the time of this writing, more than 37 million ETH are being staked, with 3 million ETH waiting to join via the validator queue. At today’s prices, that’s more than $80 billion of ETH someone would have to acquire to attack the network and revert finalized blocks, which is more than the cost of attacking even the Bitcoin network by some estimates. The other defense mechanism that proof-of-stake has that proof-of-work doesn’t is slashing, which makes Ethereum antifragile. Vitalik explains: “Recovering from attacks is much easier in proof-of-stake than proof-of-work. For many kinds of attacks you do against [the Ethereum] network, we have this concept of automatic slashing. In order to revert a finalized block, you basically have to have a big portion of your validators sign two conflicting messages. This is something where once these messages are on the network, you can go and prove ‘these people did it.’ So we have this feature in the protocol where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins.” Vitalik also acknowledges the possibility of censoring attacks, where if 1/3rd of validators refuse to attest, the chain can’t finalize. But, as he explains, Ethereum has a contingency plan for this as well: “Everyone who got censored would create a minority chain, and the community would have to do a soft fork. The would have to say, ‘this chain is clearly attacking us and this one is not attacking us, so we’re going to join this chain.’ Then what happens is, on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins. The difference between proof-of-stake and proof-of-work is that in a proof-of-stake system, you can identify specific participants — and this isn’t a human going in and saying ‘I don’t like you’. It’s all automated.” One last benefit of proof-of-stake is that security scales with the value of the network. As Vitalik put it five years ago, it is really relative security, and not absolute security, that matters: “The security needs of a thing have to be proportional to the size of that thing, because as a thing gets bigger, its enemies become bigger and more well-motivated. If BTC were 100x as big as it is today, the value from destroying it would be 100x higher, and the kinds of actors that would want to care about destroying it would be much bigger and scarier. This is also why countries of all sizes have roughly similarly sized militaries as a percentage of GDP. Hence, cost of attack divided by market cap really is the correct statistic to measure, and in the long run issuance-free PoW really does look not that good." Source: @lexfridman (Jun 2021)

Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick explains his $40,000 ETH price target by 2030 “I think a lot of [tradfi activity] happens on Ethereum Layer 1. I think about how BlackRock rolled out BUIDL, for example — all on layer 1 Ethereum… which I think is a more logical playbook for how tradfi will approach this buildout in the next year. And if you assume that more activity equals higher token price — which I think is correct (today I find the best measure is fees paid on the applications or protocols built on the Ethereum network) — I think that means ETH outperforms now and for the foreseeable.” Geoffrey Kendrick is the Global Head of Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered and former Head of Asia FX & Rates Strategy at Morgan Stanley. He believes the ETH/BTC ratio will go from 0.03 today to 0.04 by the end of 2026, which is a $4,000 price target for ETH at $100,000 BTC. “My long-term forecast is $500,000 BTC by 2030 and $40,000 Ethereum by 2030… roughly 20x [for Ethereum], but a huge outperformance [versus Bitcoin] as well. And it’s because all the use cases we’ve been talking about, will almost all happen on Ethereum.” Source: @MilkRoadMacro @milkroaddaily (Mar 2026)

"A year and a half ago it was: dip your toe in. Now it's: jump in head first," Etherealize Co-founder & CEO @VivekVentures told @CoinDesk the quiet part out loud: Wall Street is done piloting @ethereum. 🧵