Founder @ https://teapawt.net/t.co/CofUyEeUaU | @umadotrocks https://teapawt.net/t.co/jDjW3E47XE
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The most common critic against holding ETH is that, although Ethereum provides useful infrastructure for the world, nothing forces people to buy ETH.
In other words, it is possible that even if the entire financial world in 2050 settles on Ethereum, ETH the asset can still be valued at $2,000 and the chain will work just as well as today. As long as people aren't incentivized to buy ETH, they won't buy it, and the ETH price will stay low, no matter how successful the underlying chain is.
To be fair, this is probably the strongest argument I've ever heard against holding ETH.
However, I'm increasingly convinced the answer is that once Ethereum becomes too big to fail, it won't be allowed to fail.
Once most financial transactions will settle on Ethereum, do you really think governments and central banks will allow crypto degens and weirdos on the internet to own the infrastructure of the financial world? Of course not.
If Ethereum becomes too successful, it is possible that we will live in a world where governments and central banks will be required by law to hold ETH, in the same way that every sovereign country today holds gold and nuclear weapons to protect itself.
After all, the financial infrastructure of the world is at stake. Let strangers own ETH instead of you and they can perform a 51% attack and hijack your financial infrastructure. Isn't it something that governments will want to avoid at all costs?
Ethereum will probably become as important as the TCP/IP protocol which powers the internet. Do you think that governments will let TCP/IP fail? If keeping TCP/IP alive would require governments to buy an imaginary $TCP-IP token, would they not do it? Of course they would, because it is a matter of national security and nothing is more important for governments than national security.
As long as Ethereum matters as a network, I think the future for ETH the asset is bright.
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I'm currently reviewing hundreds of so-called "web3 projects" and this is unfortunately true.
99% of projects are totally useless at best or just blatant scams.
web3 is about finance and money at its core, so the temptation and incentives to scam is much much higher than in other industries.
Web3 is just traditional database businesses with extra steps, speculative incentives, and a shitcoin nobody asked for.
somehow, it all works because there’s enough money, easy manipulation involved to keep the system running.
apparently, that’s innovation, ngl.
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Interesting strategy I've discovered recently for token accumulation.
Let's say there is a token you really believe in like ETH or HYPE. You want to hold it on spot and ideally accumulate more. What's the best way to do it?
The risky way would be to long the token on perps or buy call options. Perps have liquidations and options may not pay off. So you can potentially lose part, if not all, of your money. What you want is a reliable way to accumulate no matter where the market is going.
A better approach is to sell call options backed by your token, so you collect a premium while holding the token on spot. This is called a covered call and it is the business of @ryskfinance, although you can also buy covered calls on @DeriveXYZ with much better rates at the price of a slightly more complicated UX.
Covered calls are great but they mainly enable accumulation during downside trends. When the market is going up you are giving away the upside of your token so it is harder to accumulate. It's not good enough.
Which brings us to an even better way to accumulate... 🥁
Covered calls where the call option and its collateral are 2 different tokens 🤯
For example a BTC covered call collateralized by ETH. As far as I know, only @DeriveXYZ enables you to do this.
Why is it such a good way to hold and accumulate ETH?
Well, it has to do with the token you choose for the covered call (in this case BTC but it can be something else). If you choose a token that you believe is greatly overvalued compared to the token you are holding (ETH in this case), then your covered call is more likely to expire with more money earned on the collateral than the money lost on the option.
Basically, when BTC goes up, ETH usually goes up even more so your earnings compensate your loss. And even if that's not the case, the premium you got for selling the call option compensate your loss too.
Use your earnings to buy more ETH and repeat indefinitely until you think that BTC is no longer overvalued compared to ETH.
It isn't proven math and it really depends on your ability to accurately predict that one token is overvalued compared to another, but if you are right, then it's a great and consistent accumulation strategy.
What is particularly good with this strategy is that it's an asymmetric bet. You can potentially earn big in the long term while the downside should be quite limited, because as we've seen, the premiums earned compensate potential losses.
What do you guys think about it?
Derive king @koolkrypto223, any thoughts on this?
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Lancelot retweeted
in absence of other information, always judge a plan by its outcomes. say what you want about the mandate, it was successful in 1) executing a badly necessary downsizing at the EF, 2) purging unwanted political elements, and 3) increasing ecosystem diversity at the same time.
if someone had promised all of these in one swoop a year ago, we'd have called them a genius
Lancelot retweeted
3. Optimizing for ETH as SoV is aligned with decentralization and CROPS
Whenever I ask what people appreciate the most about Ethereum (as opposed to either other blockchains, or anything outside the blockchain world), the most common answer is: decentralization and CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security).
Decentralization and CROPS have a lot of value, even to institutions. For individuals, privacy is often viewed as an abstract ideology. For institutions, it's prudent risk management, data protection law compliance, and a number of other things. Likewise for security. And likewise for running your own node (enterprise buzzword: "on-prem deployment").
But what about for the ETH holder? Well, it depends why you're an ETH holder. If you want ETH to optimally chase financial trends and collect fees from them, then you want a Fearless Leader™ who bravely shouts on the socials that Ethereum loves [insert opportunity here] and will pragmatically reconfigure itself to give it explicit protocol support.
But if your primary reason to hold ETH is as an SoV, then you will be judging ETH by SoV-ish metrics. And what is the first and most important SoV-ish metric?
To survive.
That's what a big chunk of this last Devcon was about ("post-quantum and post-AI"). You want a chain that is taking conservative tradeoffs ("hash-only security, all formally proven, >3x more rounds than known to be necessary for security"). You want a chain that is aiming for at least partial ossification, where the great balance of work will move to higher levels of the stack once the core is complete. You want a chain that aims to minimize protocol politics, by having a very high bar before it accepts either precompiles that bloat the protocol or new kinds of in-protocol rewards that could get captured.
What other SoV'ish metrics?
The ability to easily hold it safely (hence, work on multisigs).
The ability to hold it privately (hence, kohaku work).
The ability to hold it privately *and* safely (hence, 8288 and private-AA workstreams already starting).
The guarantee that if you have coins, you can send them, and block builders can't stop you (FOCIL)
Minimized infrastructure dependence (basically the whole decentralization roadmap, including the fact that I am able to currently run a node on this laptop, and it synced in < 6 hours and takes up only 1/8 of my hard drive - better stats than in 2019!)
Now, are there "adoption" goals that are highly synergistic with SoV?
Very much so.
The more assets there are natively issued on L1, including both RWAs and native decentralized assets, the larger a set of things you can "do" with your ETH, the better. Being able to easily (including safely, trustlessly) convert back and forth between ETH and other assets, use ETH as collateral to do things with other assets, etc, all forms part of the utility of holding ETH.
There are still some conflicts between serving these use cases and decentralization (eg. we want to be careful about fast slots and impact on centralization), but on the whole much less than what you get if you maximize fees.
Conclusion:
The best social reason to care about Ethereum is because it makes decentralization and CROPS properties a reality for more people and uses.
The best private reason to hold ETH is its SoV properties, which are a direct consequence of that decentralization and CROPS.
Lancelot retweeted
🚨 C'est officiel, le parti de David Lisnard devient le 1er parti de France
Avec près de 113 000 adhérents, Nouvelle Énergie a déjà dépassé Les Républicains et passe devant le RN ce matin. Aucun parti ne reste devant.
9 places gagnées depuis début septembre 📈🇫🇷
Lancelot retweeted
No
People need to understand that Ethereum is not a business and Ethereum needs to continue to do exactly the *opposite* of what other blockchains are doing
It’s quite literally the whole point
RIP near.ai
Anthropic is releasing an open source library, FlashProve, for provable inference. It was measured on Llama 4 Maverick, a 400B-parameter mixture of experts model.
Code:
github.com/anthropics/FlashP…
Blog post:
anthropic.com/research/prova…
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Also, NEAR intents is forced to compete with cheaper alternatives like ERC-7683 and the Open Intents Framework, both supported by the EF.
erc7683.org/
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Another advantage of betting on ratios is that your Sharpe Ratio is high so you can increase your leverage to earn more while keeping your liquidation risk low.
Beautifully explained in this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=9HD6xo2i…
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The ratios ETH/BTC and HYPE/NEAR are criminally low and may well be the most underrated crypto trades of the decade.
Thesis for ETH/BTC going up:
BTC is valued 6x more than ETH even though it has the quantum threat, the security budget problem, no privacy, no smart contracts, no Defi, $20M/day selling pressure from miners to cover energy bills, and bad decentralization (you need a datacenter at home to be a miner). ETH has none of these issues.
Thesis for HYPE/NEAR going up:
Holders revenue (buybacks) for NEAR is 11.2x (or 2.6x using FDV) lower than HYPE per $ of market cap, its buybacks are not even burned, and its moat is much weaker than Hyperliquid: NEAR doesn't own the distribution (no app, no frontend), has to beg 3rd parties for integrations VS Hyperliquid's users/liquidity/OI are sticky and hard to replicate.
Another reason why ratio trades are good is that in times of uncertainty like we are now, betting on ratios is far safer and more resistant to black swan events than betting on single coins. You're much less likely to be liquidated if the whole market crashes. Plus funding fees balance each other if you are 50% long and 50% short at the same time. So you can literrally open these trades now and let them run for a few years while paying almost no fees.
Lancelot retweeted
Ce qui est inquiétant en France, ce n'est pas tellement la situation économique ou politique, mais le profond décalage entre la réalité et le logiciel mental des français.
Personne n'est mentalement préparé à ce qui va arriver. Le breakdown mental sera cataclysmique pour beaucoup, comparable à celui d'un communiste convaincu vivant la chute de l'URSS.
🇫🇷 France's protests are turning into something MUCH BIGGER than a weekend of unrest.
Huge crowds are flooding the streets over soaring living costs and concerns about democracy.
In Paris alone, police counted 110,000 demonstrators.
And the movement isn't winding down.
Protest organizers are already building toward a nationwide GENERAL STRIKE on November 5.
What started as street protests is becoming a sustained challenge to the French government.
Writer: Oliver
Lancelot retweeted
totalement d'accord avec Taleb, l'IA est le meilleur filtre à bullshit de l'histoire moderne pour tous ceux dont le métier se résumait à aligner des mots sans jamais penser par eux-mêmes
notez que la panique générale qu'on observe chez les cols blancs en dit long car la plupart découvrent en direct que leur prétendue plus-value professionnelle tenait simplement au fait qu'écrire des rapports creux prenait du temps
ce qu'on vit c'est une purge systémique, tous ceux qui pensaient en formule toute faite se font balayer, tandis que les esprits vraiment vivants, ceux qui créent du chaos, de la poésie et de la stratégie pure…deviennent infiniment plus rares et donc infiniment plus précieux
Lancelot retweeted
Idiots think "traveling" is a virtue or something special, like it's the pinnacle of human experience or achievement.
This isn't the 1700s. There's nothing inherently difficult, special, or impressive about traveling anymore.
It's just another form of consumption, like watching TV.
For a lot of people, it's just an excuse to avoid developing any genuine intellectual curiosity, mastering something, or building anything real.
They confuse consuming experiences with actually accomplishing something.
Fuck traveling. There's nothing to see, nowhere to go. Especially nowadays, when the entire world is converging into one giant monoculture.
Lancelot retweeted
This is craazy. I asked one of our PhD engineers to look into NEAR *Confidential* Intents wondering how they designed their system. Unredacted, word-for-word, this was his answer 😱😱😱
"Everything I found out about the privacy claims and confidential intents is so bad that it seems almost comical and I cannot believe what I am seeing. Apparently they run a completely separate instance of the protocol, which is called FAR (as an opposite to NEAR), and that has a permissioned operator set. The entire confidentiality claim seems to rest upon the fact that it is a permissioned chain and the nodes are trusted to keep things private, there doesn't seem to be any deep technology behind it and it also does not seem to be open source. The entities running the nodes are also not publicly known.
I almost feel weird writing this because it is so absurdly bad that it feels like ... I don't know ... a simulation? I know the usual level of overpromising in Web3 but this is so many levels beyond believable that it still feels unreal."
The Open Intents Framework ( openintents.xyz ) is basically the same as NEAR Intents but without fees.
Already adopted at scale by LI.FI.
There is unfortunately no future for $NEAR.
Lancelot retweeted
My first job out of college was as an options market maker at SIG. I have a CFA, MBA, and I traded the first ever Bitcoin VAR swap. I’ve been a net loser in equity options over my lifetime, and that was without any blowups or big mistakes. Better to just avoid them (rare exceptions.) Buy good assets and hold them until A. You find much better assets or B. Those original assets are clearly overvalued.
Leopold Aschenbrenner might genuinely be the unluckiest motherfucker alive.
After getting absolutely destroyed in July and being forced to liquidate much of his AI portfolio, he reportedly came back swinging in early September, buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of options premium.
Look at how those stocks have performed since September 8:
$CRWV: -37.4%
$SKHY: -25.8%
$SNDK: -23.8%
$DRAM: -22.9%
$BE: -18.1%
$INTC: -9.4%
$AMD: +9.1%
Six out of seven are underwater, with an average decline of roughly 18.6%.
And remember, we're talking about someone who reportedly rebuilt exposure through leveraged options, not just common shares.
Imagine surviving a massive forced liquidation, watching your favorite stocks recover, deciding it's finally safe to get back in, and then getting hit by ANOTHER brutal selloff barely a month later.
The worst part about options is that you can be absolutely right about the long-term AI infrastructure thesis and still lose a fortune because your timing was wrong.
I genuinely feel for the guy.
The market has absolutely no mercy.
Probably the most bearish stat of the year for Bitcoin.
After a three-week competition on yukon.org/qsb to cut the cost of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction, with 27 solvers from around the world competing, the best estimate is still $59 per transaction.
It’s unlikely to get much better than that anytime soon.
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