vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin)

I think the best case is to make the "monitor" as un-agentic as possible. We don't mind being "monitored" by various random tiny insects we don't even notice, even guard dogs are fine, but we really do mind if it's a globally connected networked system. And the intermediate case, human security guards with no recording equipment, we mind only a medium amount. The best idea I've come up with so far is to make these monitoring devices out of open-source verifiable hardware that has etched on it an open-weight LLM that classifies for a limited number of activities (basically, just violence; sorry, no scanning for jaywalking or not wearing a mask or drugs or unauthorized manufacturing or illegal immigrants, really just violence) and only records and forwards if that's what it sees. The device has no storage, no ability to load new algorithms, this is all it does. Also, a hash of every recording is published onchain (and a device can't record the next one until it sees confirmation of the previous one) so we can all count how much recording is done. Finally, everyone has a legal right to take any such device they see and grab it and dissassemble and verify the hardware themselves. Explicitly fund university clubs, hacker groups, etc to regularly do this.

These are all great questions, taking a quick stab: 1/ More than off the table I'd say it's a distraction. ETH is a programmable store of value. And importantly Ethereum chooses security over zero issuance, and I think that's the correct choice. Bitcoin still needs to answer the question of what security will look like once block rewards are zero. Very unclear. @adietrichs and I gave a talk covering this point starting at 20:55: 2/ I agree it needs to settle once and for all. I'd characterize Ethereum's philoshopy as "fastest viable ossificiation". Ethereum is playing a long-term game, and zooming out I strongly believe we'll be happy that Ethereum did not myopically ossify but is willing and able to converge on a policy that is fit for this civilizational foundation that we're all building. And importantly: Ethereum has only ever decreased its issuance and I consider this to be part of the social contract. 3/ I think Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become the canonical root of trust for the world. Only Ethereum is credibly neutral and secure enough, and (!) set up architecturally for settling other chains. (Bitcoin is the former but not the latter). And I think of L2s as a critical piece in making this vision a reality: Ethereum as the root of trust but with activity that demands differentiation along dimensions that the L1 cannot offer (e.g. different configurations of speed, compliance, privacy) it can flow from Ethereum to L2s, while still inheriting the strongest guarantees that only Ethereum can offer. I spoke about this a lot in my recent talk at Devcon: 4/ This is a great question and I don't have an immediate answer, would love to hear your thoughts on this! :) 5/ I strongly agree, and Ethereum is incredibly well positioned here. The EF has led the path with years of investments into post-quantum research, and Ethereum is now in this privileged position where we can accelerate timelines to be post-quantum and post-AI in 2027: And ETH will be a pqai store of value btw :)

Something not enough people know about the @ethereumfndn : 1. We have an applied AI team 2. It’s stacked 3. Most of us are at the frontier of agentic usage We host our own inference servers, GPUs, customised meeting bot and much more!

There is a part of the Ethereum space that's often pushed to the sidelines, yet refuses to disappear @EFDevcon gave @sbetamc and me a stage to talk about the Iranian Ethereum community's journey over the past decade

We’re making a personalized cancer vaccine for Yash, a 34 year-old pancreatic cancer patient, in the open with his consent. We want external experts to review our design and make their own contributions before we manufacture it at the RNA Foundry.

🪇🎉 Announcement 🎉🪇 An Epistemics Fund, sponsored by @oughtinc Ought plans to make between $500k and $5M in grants to top recommendations in community notes, reliability tracking and more. Apply! Or Ask Me Anything on the fund/my grant evaluations

Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token". Three primary reasons: 1. ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed 2. Optimizing for ETH as fee-burning token would demand Ethereum and ETH function in ways that are very hard to make compatible with decentralization and capture resistance. 3. Meanwhile, optimizing for ETH as SoV is aligned with Ethereum focusing on its unique strengths (decentralization and CROPS) EIP-1559 (including its burn) is fine and good, we should keep them. But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere. The core idea: the big thing that people appreciate about Ethereum is decentralization and CROPS. The main pragmatic benefit that these things translate into is stability. SoV is the category where that is not an unneeded extra we merely put effort into for ideological reasons, but rather a pragmatic strength from the perspective of people putting in their assets. And in the era of AI disruption, stability will be highly valued.

It wouldn’t be Devcon without @VitalikButerin. This November, Vitalik is back on the Devcon stage, joining builders and communities in Mumbai to question, debate and build what comes next for Ethereum. Mumbai, November 3–6. 🇮🇳 Get your ticket →

we just made @ethrex_client again the fastest client in @ethereum. i've always said, lambda would deliver and push the boundaries of ethereum. after a couple of months focused on Glamsterdam hardening and Hegota prototyping, including hosting several public testnets for the most important EIPs coming in Hegota, we've turned our attention back to performance. this doesn't mean we're stepping away from that work, where we still have a lot to contribute. The early results are very promising. In just a couple of days, we brought block processing time down from ~40ms to ~26ms in mainnet, making ethrex the fastest client once again. The image below compares how we perform today (ethrex-baseline) with what we've been cooking (ethrex-testing). congrats @class_lambda, i'm proud of the team we've built. i love working with people that are way smarter than me. thanks @ethereumfndn for the constant support.

Doing a bit of a self-experiment. Goal: use my personal health and travel data to provide personalized diet and exercise recommendations for me, using frontier models but in a way that avoids leaking to them any private information. Strategy: use a local model (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next) to orchestrate, and use powerful remote models as a tool call to benefit from higher-level thinking and knowledge that the local model does not have. Three-layer approach to privacy: Avoid leaking personally identifiable information, or leaking my identity through writing style -> local model writes the queries to the frontier model, not me Avoid leaking who I am through the payment channel -> zkAPI Avoid leaking who I am through networking / IP -> Tor You need all three (and finally we have all three, at least to some extent) A skill file teaches the local model when and how to construct minimally-data-revealing requests to remote models. Use zkAPI-wrapped-with-Tor as a CLI tool. And everything works! I got the recommendations back, info from frontier models helped to improve them. Main deficiencies: * Tor is really not optimized for request-by-request de-linking, which is the only form of network-layer privacy that really makes sense in today's world (long-running identifiers are too fragile). Probably not private enough, and latency 10-100x higher than it could be, at the same time. * The skill file's request construction strategies are definitely far from optimal. * Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is still too slow for comfort. It's comfortably running at 20-30 TPS, but it would only really start to feel fast at 100+ * There is a tradeoff: the more careful you are about what data you give to a remote model, the less it can help you

Today the EF and OA announce zkAPI—a new means for private AI Picture this: deposit ether into a vault, sign a zk proof, get a fixed amount of private inference. Advances like these help us move past middlemen's requirements that we link our data and identities. Read more below

Quick updates on the Open Anonymity project (@OpenAnonProject)! 1. OA-chat is live! You can now signup: 2. We collaborated with @ethereumfndn (@VitalikButerin, @DavideCrapis, @VittoStack, @curryrasul) to develop zkAPI, a new zero-knowledge protocol for accessing gated / paid APIs with unlinkability. It’s like a generalization of OA unlinkable inference that also abstracts payments away. Now also available on OA-chat! I'm excited because more infrastructure should exist where privacy and sovereignty is foundational and people are in control.

Ethereum is both an abstract philosophical concept (the ontological Turing machine) and a practical research and development effort that aims to answer this question that pertains to the nature of Ethereum. How the nature of "Ethereum" as a protocol comes to be determined through the ACD governance mechanism, how cryptographic truth comes to be defined, and how convergent consensus is reached using majority representation of Ethereum's observers is what reduces the ontology of the world computer down to what we today call the Ethereum network. Here's how the world computer comes to be defined: