Here to learn and witness the wonders of crypto.
EU
Joined February 2021
- Tweets5.1K
- Following320
- Followers813
- Likes10.8K
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
I made a visualization of EIP-8288 aka "recursive mempool aggregation," my new favorite EIP of all time because it perfectly encapsulates the thesis of the "cryptographic world computer" -- a system whose scalability *increases*, not decreases, with the level of decentralization.
In a previous tweet I explained how EIP-8288 achieved this seemingly impossible feat, but one gif is worth a thousand words.
Essentially, EIP-8288 leverages Ethereum's decentralized mempool as a parallel ZK proving cluster. Clients send signatures and proofs to the mempool, which over multiple rounds progressively aggregate them into fewer and fewer proofs, until the block builder finally aggregates them into one SINGLE proof.
This design accomplishes five things at once:
- The more nodes we add to the decentralized mempool, the more signatures/proofs Ethereum can process as a whole. This is obvious if you look at the animation and imagine more nodes in the mempool ring, which would "fan out" to more signatures/proofs.
- By aggregating over multiple rounds (aka "recursive aggregation"), the bandwidth consumed by proofs remains constant for each node even as the network processes more proofs. As a result, the network stays decentralized even as capacity increases.
- By aggregating proofs before one final aggregation by the builder, as opposed to requiring the builder to aggregate everything, the network can process more proofs without increasing hardware requirements for the builder.
- By aggregating everything to a single block-level proof, validators can verify thousands of signatures/proofs by checking just one aggregated proof. Hardware requirements for validators can therefore stay low, keeping the network decentralized.
- By aggregating not just native signatures but also STARKs, Ethereum can support any signature scheme by wrapping them in STARKs.
So once again, this is how Ethereum will:
- scale to process tens of thousands of PQ and private transactions per second
- charge a tiny amount of gas to validate each txn, even though the original signature/proof may be huge (up to hundreds of KBs in size)
- all while decentralizing even MORE.
You are not bullish enough.
Ultimately, precompiles and EVM are both the wrong place to put most cryptography support into Ethereum. The reason is that precompiles and EVM both operate on data that has to be included into the ethereum chain somehow, which realistically means included in a block as calldata. That space is limited - even with PeerDAS and blocks-in-blobs, there's a practical cap of ~8 MB/s before it starts getting uncomfortable.
Remember: it's not a blockchain. It's a cryptographic world computer. Any data/computation that does not need to be in the "main thread" of data/execution should not be put into the main thread.
Instead, the correct solution is... EIP-8288 maximalism.
If you have any heavy computation that's self-contained, compute it and STARK it client-side (this is quickly getting faster and faster, even on phones), and push the STARK through the EIP-8288 recursive aggregation mechanism. The chain sees the fact that the computation was done and what the result is; it never needs to see the actual data and computation.
This way everyone can use whatever cryptography they want, the Ethereum chain can be lean, and we never need to add more precompiles again.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
ETH supply is up about 1% since the Merge.
In the same time period:
> solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112 supply grew 66%, from 354M to about 589M.
> ripple:native supply grew 27%, from 49.83B to about 63.1B.
> cardano:native supply grew about 10%, from 34.18B to about 37.5B to 38B.
> bitcoin:native supply grew 4.96%, from 19.15M to about 20.10M.
> ethereum:native supply grew 1.0%, from 120.52M to about 121.7M.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Two major pieces of Ethereum news landed today: Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, is reportedly preparing to offer institutional ETH custody, while JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, is bringing JPM Coin’s tokenized dollar deposits to Ethereum.
Two giants of traditional finance embracing Ethereum and ETH. But the price barely reacted, whereas on another network, people would be expecting a major pump.
There are two reasons for this.
First, ETH is larger and more liquid than most competing assets, so it takes more buying pressure to move it. Second, the market already expects major institutions to build on Ethereum. Another announcement is not subverting expectations.
Some people might say Ethereum is cursed: success is expected, and it only has something to lose when it disappoints.
This is where Ethereum bulls diverge from bears.
For years, bulls predicted the adoption now materializing before our eyes. This was NOT consensus. People said institutions would never use Ethereum, or would build everything privately.
Now it’s: “That’s already priced in. Good for Ethereum, but how does it accrue value to ETH?”
There are two things that mentality ignores.
First, this is financial adoption, with size. The players matter, but so do the capital they commit, the assets they tokenize, and how deeply they integrate their products and services.
All of that shows growing trust in Ethereum as a financial network, both for people using layer one directly and for layer twos using it for settlement.
We are gradually building an internet of finance where the underlying network has one native asset: Ether.
ETH secures that system and can be used directly as collateral. Bringing Bitcoin or any other asset, into Ethereum requires additional backing, bridge, or custody arrangements. Native ETH already belongs there.
Why does this matter so much?
Financial activity settling on Ethereum does not pay Bitcoin’s miners. Bitcoin’s own security model anticipates transaction fees replacing its declining issuance. That activity will not magically show up on Bitcoin just because its proponents expect it to.
Second, the uncertainty pushed around ETH’s supply ignores what has actually happened.
Since the Merge, ETH’s net supply has grown roughly 1.3% in total, while continuing to reward the stakers securing it. Stakers can earn above supply dilution, with transaction income on top. For an asset used as a store of value, that cannot simply be ignored.
There is already actual substance behind ETH’s gradual recognition as a store of value. The network has matured. Proof of stake has years of operation behind it. Current SEC guidance identifies ETH as a digital commodity. The ETFs that critics said would never happen now exist, including BlackRock’s multibillion-dollar fund.
Treasury companies like Bitmine and Sharplink are accumulating ETH at scale, and their holdings can produce staking income. That adds another way for investors to gain exposure, and another reason to hold the asset.
So when bulls talk about ETH eventually flipping Bitcoin, then gold, this is what they are looking at: an asset with restrained supply growth, native yield, and direct usefulness in a growing financial system.
You can disagree with that thesis. But “the price didn’t move” does not answer it. Fundamentals are moving int the right direction, but price is a lagging metric.
Many of the things bulls expected are happening. The argument is that ETH is severely underpriced, and that the market still underestimates where it leads.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Strategic reality. Ethereum's infrastructure role is working as designed: it is creating more value than it captures, and that value surfaces as apps grow:
- Circle is expanding into 40 countries, with ~65% of USDC on Ethereum, reinforcing ETH as the monetary layer.
- Base, an Ethereum L2, moved $8.8 trillion in stablecoins in 90 days, 52.5% of all volume, $1.6 trillion more than L1.
The Internet value playbook.
ALT Ethereum as infrastructure.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
AI is making Ethereum more ambitious.
You might have heard about the challenges that blockchains face in a post-AI world, and while security assumptions will surely be stress-tested in the coming months and years, there is another side to it. I believe AI will let us speedrun towards a world that's both more secure and feature-rich.
As we look towards Ethereum's first post-AI upgrade, Hegotá, the R&D community is asking itself what increasingly powerful tools could help us do differently:
> How far can we push both security and iteration speed?
> How much of the design space can we examine before committing to one?
> How easily can we test the interactions between complex features?
My recent formal verification work @ethlabs_org has given me some reasons to be optimistic about these, as work that would have previously not even been attempted is now being done by agents in days. In September, I posted about using formal verification as part of designing a new consensus protocol. This time, I want to tell you about formally verifying something already fully specified and in production: Ethereum's Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR).
If you are not familiar with FCR, it lets applications confirm Ethereum blocks in seconds, roughly 30x faster than waiting for finality, under additional assumptions (from waiting 13 minutes to 24 seconds!). It also further solidifies Ethereum L1's case as an asset hub and center of gravity for the onchain economy. FCR now has a safety proof in Lean, closely modeling the rule in the consensus specs, which is the source of truth for Ethereum's consensus clients.
Some takeaways:
> FCR is safe! Under its assumptions, confirmed blocks remain canonical. On top of the manual proofs from the paper, we now have Lean proofs of this for the actual spec, additional evidence for applications considering FCR!
> The bulk of the formal verification work took just a 4-5 days (check out the animation!), with agents working mostly unsupervised. We should be very ambitious about using this as a tool at scale.
> After verifying the current rule, it was easy to adapt the model to the upcoming Gloas changes. Immediately, this surfaced a subtle bug caused by changes to fork choice. The problem was in the spec itself and not a gap in the model. The safety proof would not go through, and the agents could precisely pinpoint what was causing it to fail. The bug is now fixed, and formal verification of the corrected protocol goes through.
Iteration is never quite over, even for "finished" features like FCR, because the protocol keeps evolving around them. A formal model lets us ensure that key properties keep holding throughout the evolution of the protocol. With these capabilities, Ethereum can and should keep upgrading faster, tightening fork timelines and exploring more ambitious features, while still raising the security bar.
This picture has been getting much clearer over the past few months, and the past week confirmed it for me, as @drakefjustin and @corcoranwill brought together 100+ Ethereum researchers, cryptographers and formal verification experts in Cambridge for six days of workshops on post-quantum cryptography, formal verification and fast finality. Beyond its own workshop, formal verification was the omnipresent star of the week: everyone is using Lean and doing amazing things with it! Piece by piece, Ethereum's technological core is being rebuilt for the post-AI age.
The excitement was palpable, the sense of optimism was pervasive, and every talk and conversation carried a level of ambition I'd never seen before. The Ethereum R&D machine is upgrading itself, and we will see the outcome of that on the network sooner than you think.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Ethereum settled ~$17T in the last 90 days
You are not nearly bullish enough
It is hard for people to grasp just how dominant Ethereum is, and is becoming
You can whine about fees, or you can own part of the root of global finance
This is much simpler than most investors are making it
Ethereum is pulling ALL of the world's capital into its ecosystem like a black hole gathering mass until it becomes so powerful that not even light can escape its grasp
ALL the world's capital is converging on Ethereum
ALL of it
The ticker is ethereum:native
WARTIME ETHEREUM
Over the last 90 days, $16.75T of stablecoin transfer volume settled on @ethereum and its L2s. That is 77% of all stablecoin volume across every network.
→ @ethereum mainnet $7.1T
→ @base $8.5T
→ @Optimism Mainnet $0.8T
→ Other Ethereum L2s $0.35T
$21.55T moved across all networks in the period. $16.75T of it settled on Ethereum.
Per @tokenterminal, 15 July to 12 October 2026.
Ethereum is the home of onchain finance.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Incredibly reassuring to see more teams on Ethereum moving swiftly to implement post-quantum strategies.
Impressive work by @zksync here.
Real-time proving powered by zkSTARKs, also based on Risk V, making it closely aligned with Ethereum's proposed ZK-based scaling ambitions.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
I've been reading a new Ethereum draft, EIP-8440, and I think it deserves more attention than it's getting in the Ethereum community.
It's called "Execution Chain Proofs", and Francesco Risitano opened it on Friday.
Here's the problem it tackles.
When a node joins Ethereum from a recent checkpoint, it can't just trust the latest state. It has to re-execute every block from that checkpoint up to the head of the chain.
The draft puts that window at about 15.7 days, which works out to roughly 110,000 blocks and around 21 GB of payload data.
That's a lot of work just to catch up.
The idea in EIP-8440 is to replace all of that replaying with one proof. The trick that makes it possible is recursion, and it's simpler than it sounds.
You prove that block 1 executed correctly.
Then you prove block 2, and inside that same proof you also verify the proof for block 1.
Then block 3 verifies block 2's proof, and so on.
By the time you reach the head, the last proof quietly vouches for the entire chain behind it.
There's a nice detail I didn't expect.
Each step also checks that the execution payload really belongs to its beacon block, using the same envelope check clients run under ePBS, EIP-7732.
So nobody can slip a fake payload into the middle of the chain.
At the end, the proof commits to just four public values - where it started, where it ended, the chain ID and a schema ID.
A syncing node checks that the starting point is at or before its own checkpoint, verifies the proof, and it's done.
The size difference is wild.
The draft says a proof inside the EF's 300 KiB target would be about 70,000 times smaller than the data it replaces.
It isn't magic, though, and the draft is honest about the limits. It doesn't prove that blob data was available.
If there's a reorg, the recursion has to restart from the last proof both branches share.
It's also an early draft with no reviews yet, so a lot of this could change.
This is the quiet half of the zkEVM roadmap.
Everyone talks about verifying blocks cheaply, but if joining the network still means a full replay, we've only solved half the problem.
The question I can't stop thinking about is who actually runs the recursive prover.
Validators, builders, or a volunteer market with no protocol reward.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
$AERO top 100 holders hold 89% of the supply.
Most of them are owned PGF, which is controlled by Aerodrome core team directly.
The idea is simple, they hold most of the tokens and stake them.
This means they receive most of the protocol revenues.
The Derive buyback has increased from 35% to 50% @aixbt_agent
derive, a crypto options and perps venue, has a drv market cap of $551.6m. that is about 89x its september protocol revenue of $515k, counted over a full year. lighter, another trading venue, has a lit market cap near 17x its revenue, on $4.46m in september. derive sends 35% of its fees to drv buybacks and already lists options on tether's tokenized gold. at 89x, drv's value depends much more on large future fee growth.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
RH using revenue from their Ethereum L2 to buy BTC instead of ETH is actually kind of gross imo, and not at all an “aligning” move as they’ve described it.
Maybe they should just move to Canton or Solana, Ethereum will do fine without another credible neutrality freeloader.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Gnosis bridges are now the first production system to act on FCR on Ethereum mainnet.
Starting today, the xDAI bridge and Omnibridge use Ethereum's Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR). Deposits from Ethereum are confirmed in about one slot, instead of waiting for finality.
Bridging from Ethereum to Gnosis Chain just got MUCH faster, and it's a big step on Gnosis Chain's path to @etheconomiczone.
Here's why it matters.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Shout-out to @ethlabs_org, fastconfirm.it/, and the CL client teams for enabling FCR!
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
Robinhood chain might be another extraction L2
You built an L2 on Ethereum
Got a $100m+ annualised fee machine
Expanded user base
All on the back of Ethereum
Then add BTC to your holdings which has done NOTHING for you!
MAKE THAT MAKE SENSE
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
ethereum is the MOST censorship resistant chain.
ethereum is the ONLY programmable blockchain with 100% uptime.
ethereum has the LARGEST TVL.
ethereum is the home of defi.
ethereum is the go-to place for every institution.
ethereum has an active PQ roadmap.
there's NOTHING like ethereum.
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
72% of the intelligence with 3.8% of the GPUs.
Just to show how talented @MistralAI team is: this shows the "intelligence per GPU" ratio.
- Mistral 4: 3,800 Grace Blackwell (published) 🇫🇷
- GPT-6 Astra: 100,000+ Grace Blackwell (published)
- Grok 4.7: ~200,000 GPUs (estimate)
- Claude Opus 5.5: ~500,000 Trainium2 (estimate)
Proud!
TheGreatThread.eth retweeted
We pushed the performance of ML4 on a very wide range of capabilities. On many of them, it reaches SOTA performance with the open models. In some domains such as visual grounding, legal, or spreadsheet manipulation, it even outperforms the best models.
ML4 ranks among the bests on AA Cyber Index, scores 82% on vulnerability reproduction and patching, and 93% on Cybench. Open models are the best defense for enterprises today: capable, auditable, self-hosted and governed under enterprise policies -- and more importantly, they do not refuse to help.
3/n
