i believe most engineering teams working on core ethereum will disappear over the next 3 years. there is no real money to be made there, and nowadays there isn't even that much status to gain from doing it. AI changed the landscape pretty fast because implementing a client is simply not as difficult as it used to be. i actually think this is good for ethereum users and stakers. most crypto engineering teams outside ethereum will disappear even earlier. lambda's biggest strategy is to just keep doing what we are doing while most people eventually vanish from crypto. there aren't many teams with lambda's combination of expertise in cryptography, compilers, security, consensus and performance, together with the connections we have across corporations and startups. we're finding different ways of making money from the connections and expertise we have across aligned and lambda. i also don't think there are going to be many fundamentally new use cases beyond the ones we already know. what will happen instead is that ethereum will become the financial backend for a large part of international payments and fx. there are almost no economic incentives to be a core dev, and i don't think donations from ETFs or similar mechanisms will fundamentally change that in the long run. the reason is that it doesn't make sense to keep pouring money into large groups of people that don't produce that much. most of the work that actually needs to be done is researching new ideas, testing them and implementing them well. the ethereum spec will likely end up being written in lean, and lean may eventually become one of the main implementations too. there won't be a need for so many independent engineering teams, apart from having enough competition to keep progress moving quickly. the problem today is that many of the existing engineering teams have very little incentive for the system to change too much or too fast. most people on CT believe the EF is the main thing blocking progress in ethereum. it's true that for a few years after the merge, i think research progress stagnated and we weren't bold enough outside of ZK research. most of my criticism towards the EF was related to its size and the fact that it never prioritized making the UX of ethereum better or spreading the gospel to corporations and governments. now there are multiple new organizations doing this, so we're fine. nowadays i believe engineering teams are the biggest bottleneck preventing ethereum from becoming faster and better. the EF is actually the one pushing things forward. most engineering teams have almost zero economic incentive for things to change dramatically. what ethereum needs is to accelerate the natural consolidation of these engineering teams so that we can push for bigger changes much more aggressively. i hope the EF and CT start realizing this. ethereum won't have a real competitor thanks to: - current network effects - formal verification - minimalism - post-quantum security - privacy - zk becoming stupidly fast, with proofs verifiable on basically any piece of hardware - lean ethereum: new consensus, faster p2p and faster finality, while supporting even more stakers and maximizing decentralization - propamms solving many of the problems around pricing assets and trading on a slower chain like ethereum i don't think solana, tempo, hyperliquid or robinhood have a chance against Ethereum if we just focus on the important things and do the inevitable: remove the bottlenecks that slow progress.