Pulse

With Republicans, we got: - More crypto rugpulls by administration - No Clarity Act - More war and uncertainty With Democrats, we'll get: - Less crypto rugpulls - No Clarity Act - Less war and uncertainty That's why the crypto market has started pumping now

I think one of the biggest problems in crypto right now is how projects keep using their communities to grow and then completely change the rules when it’s time to reward them. We have seen three completely different projects, but somehow the same people end up disappointed. Let’s start with KAST. They originally had a points program where 1 point was supposed to equal 1 token, with 35% of the supply allocated to the community. Then they announced there wouldn’t be a traditional token, but users would receive tokenized equity instead. Sounds pretty good, right? Right?!??? Well, now that equity has turned into something called KAST Pioneer Units. According to their own terms, these units aren’t actual equity, don’t give you ownership or voting rights, can’t be traded or transferred, and have no guaranteed cash value. And we’re talking about a company that raised $80M at a $600M valuation this year. I understand the argument that launching a token isn’t always the best decision, and honestly, I agree with that. But if you’ve spent months encouraging people to accumulate points based on one reward structure, you can’t expect everyone to be happy when you replace it with something completely different. Now ofc we have to talk about Abstract. Millions of wallets, hundreds of applications, an entire ecosystem built around XP, badges and community participation. And after all that, the chain is shutting down on December 15. This is one of the biggest disappointments we have seen recently And finally, Cambria. Unlike the other two, they actually launched their token. After multiple delays, $RSGP went live on October 29, and within four days it’s down 80%. The project previously raised $1M at a $30M valuation, while the token’s FDV is now at $7M Imagine spending months playing, buying NFTs, participating in different seasons and waiting for the token launch, only to see the market value it at a fraction of what early investors paid. I think there’s a responsibility that comes with building a business around people’s expectations. KAST benefited from people using its card and accumulating points. Abstract benefited from users generating activity across its ecosystem. Cambria benefited from players spending time and money inside its games. And when the moment came to deliver something back, the outcome was disappointing in three completely different ways. I keep seeing projects talk about community, loyalty and long-term alignment, but sometimes it feels like those words only matter when they’re trying to attract users. The funniest part is that we’ll probably see another points program launch tomorrow, promising some revolutionary new way to reward early supporters. And thousands of people will start farming it immediately. I don’t blame them, I’ve participated in plenty of these opportunities myself. Crypto has become incredibly good at selling promises. But I’m just not buying them anymore

Crypto Twitter KOLs are a fucking scam. And we have the numbers to prove why. We hired 200+ KOLs with 10M+ combined followers. Every single one had a 400+ Sorsa score and 100+ Smart Followers. Most had 1,000+ Sorsa. 200+ KOLs posted twice each. Our result? 280 NFTs sold at $5. Now let’s talk about this circus. Fake views. Fake likes. AI-generated replies that don’t even understand what the project does. The same fucking accounts liking and replying to each other in engagement groups, recycling engagement and pretending they’re influential. You have 200K followers but can’t prove you have actual buyers. You’re scared of referral deals because deep down you know nobody will click your links, buy anything or convert. YOU HAVE BOTTED FOLLOWERS, NOT INFLUENCE. And the funniest part? You genuinely think you’re marketing professionals. You’re a bunch of engagement farmers playing influencer, selling fake numbers to projects and calling it a career. Our team tested this firsthand. We were ready to pay for influence, but got fucking nothing. And you wonder why CT is dying? Why projects are cutting deals? Why marketing teams are moving to TikTok and Instagram? BECAUSE NOBODY WANTS TO PAY FOR YOUR BULLSHIT ANYMORE. Honestly, go work at McDonald’s. At least you’ll serve people something useful instead of selling projects fake engagement and pretending to be important. 200+ KOLs. 10M+ followers. 280 NFTs sold. That’s your fucking influence.

JUST IN: 🇧🇷 Brazil's largest crypto exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, suspends deposits and withdrawals after reportedly being hacked for over $40 million.

If you have made under $100k in memecoins please don’t @ me or share your opinion on my timeline. I don’t care what you have to say. Reality is you need to work harder, move out of your moms basement, stack btc/sol, buy a rolex then share your opinion.

Records show something interesting 📊✅ People who got into crypto around 2016 and actually stayed through the cycles include some of today’s millionaires in naira and thousands of dollars. But here’s the part people forget. Being early wasn’t enough. You had to survive the crashes, manage risk, and actually hold something valuable. So the real question is! Was being early the advantage, or was conviction + patience the real edge in Web3? What do you think?

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pre… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-c… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.