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: https://ethresear.ch/t/combining-preconfirmations-with-based-rollups-for-synchronous-composability/23863 and https://ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-composability-between-rollups-via-realtime-proving/23998 ). 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.

Source and credits to OP: https://firefly.social/post/lens/2qyrfkkt3q3693rc3qn

Comment ta ville change-t-elle?

C'est toujours agréable de voir plus de verdure autour

Some people were worried about quantum computers, so here in this video is a little bit on how we'll be dealing with it

🔐 Post-Quantum Ethereum is coming, and here's how it works.

We just delivered a self-study sharing session of leanMultisig - the breakthrough tech that will protect Ethereum's consensus layer in the quantum era.

Learn how leanMultisig will quantum-proof Ethereum, enabling post-quantum signature aggregation, the core mechanism enabling thousands of validators to vote together, through proving and verifying signatures with purpose-built zkVMs! 🤯

The Quantum Challenge:

Why Ethereum needs post-quantum signatures  
How leanSig replaces BLS signatures  
The role of zkVMs in aggregation  

Technical Deep-Dives:

Lean ISA's minimalist design (only 4 instructions!)  
Execution traces → polynomial transformations  
Proof generation and verification with WHIR  
Reducing 1000 signatures (3MB) to just 380KB  

Perfect for ZK enthusiasts and anyone curious about Ethereum's post-quantum future. A great starting point to explore the concepts before diving deeper into the official specs.

Source: https://xcancel.com/ReamLabs/status/2016202675105460568
YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A812DZvOLI

The whole piece is quite funny as well, check it out: https://adelaidemail.com/single-post/2024/01/16/cyclists-take-up-so-much-room-says-man-from-4-metre-wide-emotional-support-vehicle/

Quelques conseils pour rouler à vélo dans la neige, en sécurité :

▶️ Dégonflez un peu vos pneus.

▶️ Baissez la hauteur de votre selle.

▶️ Modérez votre vitesse.

▶️ Freinez doucement et privilégiez le frein arrière !

▶️ Et si vous n'êtes pas à l'aise, laissez votre vélo pour aujourd'hui

source: https://piaille.fr/@parisenselle/115848079715186560

The New York Stock Exchange is building a venue using blockchain technology to allow for trading tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds around the clock.

NYSE, which is owned by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., plans to use its existing technology that matches buyers and sellers, combined with private blockchain networks, to facilitate the trading of tokenized securities in real-time, according to executives. The company is looking to launch the new digital trading platform later this year, pending regulatory approval.

“This reflects an evolution of NYSE’s trading capabilities which went from trading floor, to electronic order-book, to blockchain,” Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at ICE, said in an interview. “It allows for new types of investor accessibility, and will create new opportunities for retail to participate in the stablecoin-funded markets that have attracted their attention.”

The firm is in active dialogue with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as it seeks permission to operate the new platform, he said. Part of the digital infrastructure would allow for trades to be funded, and settled in real time, as opposed to the one-day delay that now exists in today’s equity markets.

“We think it aligns with the retail investor’s emerging desire to be able to trade something at 5:04 p.m. on a Saturday and then use that money to buy something else at 5:05 p.m. on a Saturday,” Blaugrund said. “This would facilitate that trade in a way that traditional equity infrastructure cannot.”

NYSE’s plans are addressing some of the foundational elements of how stocks are defined, issued and settled — questions that could decide whether tokenization becomes embedded in the plumbing of Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange is the largest equities exchange operator in the US by volume.

A tokenized security is a digital representation of a security that can be traded on a blockchain network, rather than in a brokerage account. They have been touted as a way to deepen liquidity, support fractional ownership and widen access of the US stock markets because they can be traded at all hours of the day.

Blaugrund said the new venue is just one of several digital strategies that ICE is exploring. The company is also looking at new clearing infrastructure that would support trading 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ICE is working with banks to support tokenized deposits, eventually looking to move money and manage funding requirements for trading outside of traditional banking hours.

“This is just the first step in a broader re-platforming, in a longer journey for ICE and for the industry,” Blaugrund said.

Round-the-Clock Access
NYSE’s main competitor in the US, Nasdaq, asked regulators in September to let investors trade tokenized versions of stocks on its public exchange. The company proposed that tokenized securities should trade under the same rules of execution and documentation as the underlying security, and that tokenized assets should be clearly labeled as such.

Supporters of tokenization say the move could be a step toward round-the-clock access to certain assets. NSYE already outlined its path to extend trading hours on its Arca equities venue, with plans to offer trading 22 hours on weekdays. That separate proposal got initial approval from the SEC in February, pending updates to the market’s data feed which is a necessary step for exchanges to offer extended trading hours.

NYSE’s new digital venue could be another push toward non-stop trading, and help bridge the gap between traditional markets and digital finance. Skeptics counter that the digital technology may be new, but the underlying risks in lending and borrowing remain unchanged — and that winning over regulators and major investors will be essential before such trades become routine.

Qui sabote la lutte pour le climat en France ? Comment s'organisent ceux qui nient l'évidence scientifique ?

Enquête cartographique ici:
https://deni-climatique.fr/wp-content/carto.html

2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness.

Some of what this practically means:

Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) and BAL (Block-level Access Lists), it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer.

Helios: actually verify the data you're receiving from RPCs instead of blindly trusting it.

ORAM (Oblivious RAM), PIR (Private Information Retrieval): ask for data from RPCs without revealing which data you're asking, so you can access dapps without your access patterns being sold off to dozens of third parties all around the world.

Social recovery wallets and timelocks: wallets that don't make you lose all your money if you misplace your seedphrase, or if an online or offline attacker extracts your seedphrase, and also don't make all your money backdoored by Google.

Privacy UX: make private payments from your wallet, with the same user experience as making public payments.

Privacy censorship resistance: private payments with the ERC-4337 mempool, and soon native AA (Account Abstraction) + FOCIL (Fork-choice enforced Inclusion Lists), without relying on the public broadcaster ecosystem.

Application UIs: use more dapps from an onchain UI with IPFS, without relying on trusted servers that would lock you our of practical recovery of your assets if they went offline, and would give you a hijacked UI that steals your funds if they get hacked for even a millisecond.

In many of these areas, over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding in Ethereum. Nodes went from easy to run to hard to run. Dapps went from static pages to complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen servers. Wallets went from routing everything through the RPC, which could be any node of your choice including on your own computer, to leaking your data to a dozen servers of their choice. Block building became more centralized, putting Ethereum transaction inclusion guarantees under the whims of a very small number of builders.

In 2026, no longer. Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point - every moment where you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption - we are making that compromise no longer.

It will be a long road. We will not get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the next hard fork, or the hard fork after that. But it will make Ethereum into an ecosystem that deserves not only its current place in the universe, but a much greater one.

In the world computer, there is no centralized overlord.

There is no single point of failure.

There is only love.

Milady.

All credits to OP u/vbuterin on reddit. Sharing it here to try to engage some discussion. Added abbreviations meaning for those that might not be familiar with them, so it is easier to research in case you get interested.

YT link for those that prefer it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aucsiGWbEyU

What about you? Would you have done anything different?

Synopsis from the video description:

Five years ago, Mathieu Munsch walked away from the “normal” script— rent, bills, loans, a 40-hour workweek (35 in France)— and headed for a sloping meadow in northeast France to build something radically simple: a small home made from the earth under his feet, wood from nearby, and straw bales from local farmers.

He kept it to 50 m² on purpose—small enough to draft the plans himself, and to build without hiring an architect or engineer. He simply asked a friend studying engineering to double-check his calculations. The result is a softly rounded earth-and-straw house the town didn’t quite know what to do with at first (“round walls” aren’t exactly the local tradition)… yet they couldn’t argue it didn’t belong: the materials are literally from the land around it.

And the price tag? About €15,000. No mortgage. No utility bills. Just time, patience, and a lot of mud.

But the house is only the beginning. Mathieu is building an entire life around low inputs—less energy, less money, less dependence.

He lives off-grid on roughly €200/month, powered by solar panels, with solar thermal for hot water in summer and a wood stove for winter warmth (and water-heating when needed). For water, he doesn’t rely on the town at all: he encourages groundwater into an underground pipe and stores it in a cistern halfway down the hill—made easier by the slope of his land.

Food is where his project becomes something more than “self-sufficiency.” He grows what he can, forages what he can’t—and then he goes a step further into what he calls “tending the wild.” Instead of clearing and controlling nature, he collaborates with it: inoculating mushrooms on logs, encouraging edible plants to thrive, even turning a wet patch of land into a cattail pantry. “Tending the wild is sometimes easier than erasing everything that’s there and starting from scratch," says Mathieu, "it does all the farming for you.”

And he keeps evolving the site. In the pit left from building the house, he created a submerged greenhouse—a walipini—to extend his growing season. He’s also now building a second earth unit, Japanese-style, as a bathhouse.

This is a story about natural building, yes—but also about something deeper: emancipation from debt, from high-energy living, and from a life spent earning money just to hand it straight back over to the system. “It’s actually the whole possibility of emancipation from labor… If I don’t have a 20-year loan, that’s 20 years less of my life that I have to work.”

We visited on a freezing winter day, and were welcomed into his warm, cozy home—heated only by a few logs burned the night before. He made our family lunch from his foraged, grown, and preserved foods, and it felt like the whole philosophy in one meal: simple, local, deeply satisfying.

If you’re curious about earth-and-straw construction, off-grid systems, permaculture, wild foods, or what it really takes to live with less—this one is a full, grounded tour. If you enjoy these deep dives into people quietly building real alternatives, consider subscribing—and let me know in the comments: what part of this life feels most possible for you, and what feels hardest to imagine?

—Check Mathieu's project and philosophy of life: https://habiterlaterre.com/en/

I agree with maybe 60% of this, but one bit that is particularly important to highlight is the explicit separation between what the poster calls "the open web" (really, the corposlop web), and "the sovereign web".

https://firefly.social/post/x/2006710624424702362

This is a distinction I did not realize until recently, and I must admit the bitcoin maximalists were far ahead: a big part of their resistance to ICOs, tokens other than bitcoin, arbitrary financial applications, etc was precisely about keeping bitcoin "sovereign" and not "corposlop". The big error that many of them made was trying to achieve this goal with either government crackdowns or user disempowerment (keeping bitcoin script limited, and rejecting many categories of applications entirely), but their fear was real.

So what is corposlop? In essence, it is the combination of three things:

• Corporate optimization power
• An aura of respectableness of being a company with sleek polished branding
• Behavior that the exact opposite of respectable, because that's what's needed to maximize profit

Corposlop includes things like:

• Social media that maximizes dopamine, outrage, other methods of short-term engagement, at the expense of long-term value and fulfillment
• Needless mass data collection from users, often followed by managing it carelessly or even casually selling it to third parties
• Walled gardens charging monopolistic high fees and actively preventing people from even linking to other platforms
• Hollywood releasing the 7th sequel to some tired franchise, because that's the most risk-averse thing to do
• Every corporation that rallied around slogans of diversity and equity and the need to overturn society to fight racism in 2020, and then publicly mocked those causes for engagement in 2025
  This is all digital corposlop; there are big and important analogues to this in the physical world too.

Corposlop is soulless: trend-following homogeneity that is both evil and lame https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/30/balance_of_power.html#how-we-fear-big-business

These are things that appear to serve the user, but actually disempower the user.

I have many qualms with Apple, but aside from their monopolistic practices, they actually have many non-corposlop traits. They serve users not by constantly asking "what do users want this quarter", but by having an opinionated long-term vision. They have a strong emphasis on privacy. They resist and create trends rather than following them. I just wish they could take the brave step of ending their monopolistic practices and switch to an open source first strategy. It may damage their market cap, but man must live for something higher than market caps.

Zac from Aztec was also early to recognize the importance of this, with a post that is on the whole very pro-freedom, but at the same time does not shrink back from labeling what is essentially corposlop a primary enemy, even when it does not violate the libertarian non-aggression principle.

https://firefly.social/post/x/1986086241276657868

In 2000, the understanding of "sovereignty" largely focused on avoiding the iron fist of government. Today, "sovereignty" also means securing your digital privacy through cryptography, and securing your own mind from corporate mind warfare trying to extract your attention and your dollars. It also means doing things because you believe in them, and declaring independence from the homogenizing and soul-sucking concept of "the meta".

These are the kinds of tools that we should build more of. Build tools like:

• Privacy-preserving local-first applications that minimize dependence on and data leaks to third parties
• Social media platforms and tools that let the user take control of what content they see. Appeal to people's long-term goals, not short-term impulses
• Financial tools that help users grow their wealth, and do not encourage 50x leverage or sports betting or taking out a loan to pay for a burrito
• AI tools that are maximally open and privacy and local-friendly, and that maximize productivity from merging the power of human and bot, rather than encouraging the user to sit back and let the bot do all the work, so they learn nothing
• Applications, companies, and physical environments that take an opinionated view on the kind of world they want to see, and have an opinionated culture
• DAOs that can support organizations and communities that steadfastly pursue a unique objective, and do not all get captured by the same groups. Privacy-preserving and non-tokenholder-driven voting can help here
  Be sovereign. Reject corposlop. Believe in somETHing.

Just sharing it here from reddit again to bring some discussion to these parts as well, all credits to the OP u/vbuterin

In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web, all on the backs of a suite of technologies.

Ethereum: the blockchain. The world computer that could give any application its shared memory.

Whisper: the data layer. Messages too expensive for a blockchain, that do no need consensus.

Swarm: the storage layer. Store files for long-term access.

Over the last five years, this core vision has at times become obscured, with various "metas" and "narratives" at various times taking center stage. But the core vision has never died. And in fact, the core technologies behind it are only growing stronger.

Ethereum is now proof of stake. Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs. Thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS, the "sharding" vision is effectively being realized. And L2s can give additional and different kinds of gains in speed on top.

Whisper is now Waku (https://docs.waku.org/), and already powers many applications (eg. https://www.railway.xyz/, https://status.app/ just to name two I use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has increased. Fileverse (decentralized Google Docs and Sheets alternative: https://fileverse.io/) has seen massive gains in usability over the past year.

IPFS is now highly performant and robust as a decentralized way of retrieving files, though IPFS alone does not solve the storage problem. Hence, there is still room to improve there.

All of the prerequisites for the original web3 vision are here, in full force, and are continuing to get stronger over the next few years. Hence, it's time to buidl, and buidl decentralized.

Fileverse is an excellent example of the right way to do things:

• It uses Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for what they are good for: names, accounts and permissioning, document registration
• It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate changes to documents
• The application passes the walkaway test: https://github.com/fileverse/walk-away-ddocs (even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve them and even keep editing them with the open source UI)

This is what we mean by "build a hammer that is a tool you buy once and it's yours, not a corposlop AI dishwasher that requires you to register for a google account and charges a subscription fee per month for extra washing modes, and probably spies on you and stops working if you get politically disfavored by a foreign country".

If you think this criticism of corposlop is hyperbolic, well turns out, it's literally a concatenation of these three:

• https://mein-mmo.de/en/user-buys-new-dishwasher-can-only-use-some-features-if-he-subscribes,1186249/
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer-excessive-surveillance-smart-devices-which-watches-speakers-trackers
• https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-us-sanctions-lock-international-criminal-court-judge-out-of-daily-life/

In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it and send them to other people to collaborate. The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.

Just sharing it here from reddit, all credits to the original author u/vbuterin