Big news in the industry and potentially historic if it launches. Some thoughts on the potential $BASE token today: - I don't think this is particularly shocking. The market is likely to price this token in excess of its future cash flows, could be value creative. So they are exploring it. I don't think its a decentralization thing, I think its a business decision. - The conflicts between $COIN and $BASE are the most interesting questions that will need to be resolved. I assume the only path forward for value capture for equity holders will be via the Coinbase balance sheet holding $BASE tokens. I can't imagine they will airdrop to shareholders. I have no idea how you would structure the "sale" of the Base cash flows to a foundation or something unless one of the following were true: (a) the spinout will unlock value for shareholders or (b) the shareholders lose control of the cash flows Base currently generates without seeing value. My suspicion is (a) is logical but (b) could be a legal nightmare and Coinbase is smart enough to avoid. - The timing of this is interesting. Base and Solana have been heavily competing with trying to attract the social, consumer and speculative use cases. This is a very expensive class of crypto to support and win. I have no idea how much Solana spends on this, but Base just got another tool that they can use outside of their existing cash flows. Could be super transient capital they are looking to attract but probably factored into the timing of this decision. - I don't think anyone knows how to value the token until the second bullet above is designed. The breakdown of what belongs to $COIN and what belongs to $BASE needs to be exceptionally clear for this to work. We did that with $ARB and OCL so I don't think it is impossible, but I think much harder with public shareholders. Interesting times and will watch closely.

Upgrading Finality - Edition 1 Check out the plan for bringing fast finality to Ethereum. Hosted on the the brand new and shiny EF Protocol Consensus website 😁 Lots of good stuff there!

argot was spun out of ethereum foundation with a mandate to maintain ethereum's core programming languages and developer tooling. then it immediately begins to launder research as if it was core infrastructure maintenance. if you read their blog, they spend a lot of resources on fe, a language that has been "emerging" for over 5 years. they have long plans for fe, while the language itself has seen zero adoption and zero production use. their long term goal is "non-trivial contracts in production-like setting". meanwhile vyper is actual production infrastructure. it secures real protocols, with real users and tvl, and real audit surface. curve, lido, yearn, frax, velodrome all use vyper. yet vyper lives grant-to-grant, while argot started with a $16.6m check, about as much as ethereum started with. argot doesn't disclose how much time and energy it spends on the fe fantasy versus solidity, sourcify, hevm, or other genuinely core tooling. but clearly this pet project abuses and stretches the mandate. even though it's a programming language, by no serious measure it's "core". it should spin out and try to survive and prove demand independently. production compiler maintenance should get baseline funding before speculative language incubation gets considererd. vyper is in good shape today despite the ecosystem, not because of it. and it still does not sit right with me that resources keep getting misallocated away from the compiler people actually use. ethereum keeps saying "public goods", then funds the toy compiler like infrastructure and makes the production compiler pass the hat. that is not stewardship.

Solana & Ethereum Fireside. Deep Dive on Privacy, Security and Cross-chain Lessons with @omw_to_the_moon from @ethereumfndn and @jito_sol @JET_EUROPA_ , EU Growth Co-lead @Kxrnel