Bankless - Ethereum Foundation's New Mandate Has The Community Divided | Bankless Takes

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

The Ethereum Foundation’s new mandate has reignited one of Ethereum’s oldest debates: Should it stay laser-focused on cypherpunk values, or lean harder into adoption, product, and market share? Ryan and David debate CROPS, self-sovereignty, ETH as money, and whether the EF is protecting Ethereum’s soul or holding it back. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast  🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast  🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 🐇MEGAETH | 1ST REAL-TIME BLOCKCHAIN https://bankless.cc/megaeth ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:39 The EF Manifesto https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/2032460726728573298  https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/03/13/ef-mandate  https://ethereum.foundation/ef-mandate.pdf  10:18 Bullish Takes https://x.com/lay2000lbs/status/2033326038122438677  https://x.com/EvgenyGaevoy/status/2033160316079534510  https://x.com/malekanoms/status/2032599584640315706  https://x.com/lex_node/status/2033189653587677343  https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/2032462574571204924  15:15 Bearish Takes https://x.com/dankrad/status/2032532067527856216  https://x.com/tayvano_/status/2032549549550743925  https://x.com/masonnystrom/status/2032558469786775993  https://x.com/yugacohler/status/2033225486847885758  https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2033603057347616869  https://x.com/divine_economy/status/2033547178803708371  27:43 Bullish Response to Bears https://x.com/divine_economy/status/2033547178803708371  https://x.com/dimabuterin/status/2033548385974735174  35:44 David’s Takes https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2032832671206748551  47:29 Ryan’s Takes https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/2032512531856503181  56:32 We Can do Both https://x.com/vibhu/status/2032574444724449605  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2033545623345967572  59:51 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

The Ethereum Foundation dropped a mandate document describing its values, describing its approach. This caused a reaction, let's say. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. We're going to discuss it today and give our takes because it is time for another bankless takes episode. David, we do these things whenever we're feeling what, like motivated, that there's something to discuss. What's the cadence of bankless takes episodes? Yeah, when there is a conversation happening that you and I are like a part of or can contribute to or otherwise have takes about. Ethereum is a very frequent topic of this.

We've done other ones in the past as well. I think maybe the most common reason or way that these episodes come about is somebody in the EF, usually Vitalik, releases a blog post and everyone's talking about it and then therefore so do we, which is exactly what happened this week. Galaxy operates where digital assets

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end-to-end. Explore Galaxy at galaxy.com slash bankless or click the link in the show notes. Why does managing investments still mean juggling multiple apps, accounts, and currencies? Crypto trades around the clock, stocks, ETFs, and commodities are moving on-chain. Yet most platforms still keep everything split apart, turning diversification into unnecessary friction. BitGet is delivering a different kind of experience with its universal exchange. One platform where users can access crypto, tokenize stocks, ETFs, and other assets in the same place, all traded directly using USDT. No constant transfers, no currency conversions, just a single account built for how markets actually move today.

As the line between crypto and traditional finance continues to blur, BitGets goal is straightforward. Make trading and investing simpler, not more complicated than it needs to be. Learn by clicking in the link in the show notes. This is not investment advice. Yeah, a lot of these are Ethereum-related, let's say. I'm actually very curious in this conversation what your opinion is and how that contrast with my opinion to see whether there's a delta on that or not

or whether we have somewhat similar opinion. But tell us what happened. We usually don't have that much of a delta. That's true. But like, let's tease it. This could be a big clash, bankless nation, all right? This could be the... Gloves are coming on.

Yeah, gloves are coming off, all right. David and Ryan are going to brawl on this one. What happened was the foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, released what they call an EF mandate. What was the EF mandate? It was first a tweet, then a blog, that linked to a 38-page document. It's not 38 pages of writing.

It's probably a third of that. A lot of art, a lot of just like, you know, blank pages, just title pages. is very aesthetic. Aesthetistically really like turned up the dials on this one. Yes. The idea, it was stated that the EF mandate is a document by the EF for the EF, but they are publishing it, you know, publicly so that anyone who is interested in

following along, you know, the broader theorem community, can follow along. So it was for the organization itself. It was for the- An internal guiding document. But then also it said also for fellow self-sovereign individuals on the journey. So people in the Ethereum community as well was the secondary audience for this, you'd say. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

And like the core of the document are two pillars. There's a technical pillar, which outlined this idea of crops. I don't think crops had been a thing. I think this document introduced crops. Is that correct? I think so. I've never heard of crops.

It's not been popularized. It has not been popularized until now. Now everyone in Ethereum knows what crops are. It's an acronym, we should say. C-R-O-P-S. David will give us the definition in a minute. Yes. And then the second pillar,

of the two is the social pillar. So the technical pillar and the social pillar, the social pillar is really just how the foundation conducts itself and guides its own decision-making. Just like if you want to learn about what the ethos of the EF thinks it should have, that's what it's for. I think crops, crops, I will say, was the star of the document.

Yeah, I think so. That was the big emphasis. Crops, censorship resistance, open source, private, and secure. And so this is a guiding principle boiled down into an acronym about what the EF, its mandate for itself, about how to guide the Ethereum Protocol. Yeah, those are the letters if you didn't catch us. So the CR is the CR in crops and the O is for open source and the P is for private privacy. And S is for security, secure. Yes.

And in this document, the document stated that if the EF puts crops above everything else. So that's not only are the crops important, but it is the most. important thing. Yeah, if I guess if you're asking what the North Star for the EF is, and they're saying this is part of the North Star for Ethereum 2, so why it exists, is probably crops. Those are the feature set that it wants to bake in. So censorship resistance means they define it. No actor can selectively exclude valid use or break functionality, including by gaining durable, non-competitive control of any critical mechanisms. Open source means open source code, no privileged code, nothing hidden. It's all

transparent. Privacy means user data is not exposed beyond necessity or against their interests and secure to them mean things must do what they claim they do no more and no less. I mean pretty standard definitions of all of these things. No big surprises here. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting. Ryan, actually, if you go into the document and go Command F North Star, there is a, it shows up once. Okay. It says the North Star is disintermediation. Oh, yes. I actually had a take on that. We'll get to that. What this document was not, though, this document was not a roadmap for Ethereum.

It wasn't the straw map that Justin Drake came out with. It was not an org chart, it wasn't financials. It was not any, like, Ethereum marketing or product information. It wasn't anything you could, you know, send to your friend who's bullish on ETH to get them. To make them further bullish on ETH, yeah. Right. It very much was a internal type of document,

almost like a mission statement type of document, I'd say, for the EF. for Ethereum. It would be in a 300 level course about what Ethereum is for. This document would be in that curriculum. One of the words that was used repeatedly, I don't know if you've done a search for this, but was the word, the term, self-sovereignty.

I think that was one of the big takeaways from this, that what is Ethereum for and what will the EF protect is self-sovereignty of users? Actually, on the first page of this document, which was maybe my favorite part, kind of a summary of what Ethereum actually is. And I think they mentioned self-sovereignty. They also mentioned this, David, which I was overjoyed to see. Ether is a store of value and money that also happens to be an application. There's going to be many, many more applications,

but money is the first application for Ethereum. This to me is something I have never heard the EF say as explicitly, and certainly not in any document. I mean, It has felt like there have been members of the Ethereum community that have said, hey, just say eth is money. Say it's a store of value asset. Please. Please just say it. Just say it.

We're saying it. We're viewed it as such. It's very clear the Ethereum economy views it as such. And so does defy decentralized finance. Why did you guys say it? Well, this is them saying it. So I was happy to see that on the very first page under a definition of what is Ethereum. Well, ether is an app.

It's a store of value app on Ethereum. This is one of the very few times where we can say that the Ethereum community kind of wagged back at the EF and got the EF to like change its position. Oh, you think so? I think there's been a lot of other times actually, but this is definitely one of the best times. We'll say that. One of our biggest wins. One of the community's biggest wins. I do have to tip my hat.

I'll give a tip of the hat to you specifically here because I think like it wasn't, it was a couple of weeks. ago where you like got Vitalik to tweet that and now a couple weeks later now it's in a document. Yeah, I think it's been a slow boil though over the past, you know, probably five to seven years of work from the... Since Ethereum lies in Tel Aviv in 2019. Also, I mean, let's be honest, Gary Gensler and different regulators, the boot being off the Ethereum Foundation's neck has probably allowed them to be more open in saying things like this. And plus, the proofcase is here. I mean, Vitalik has always been of the mindset that, you know, it can be a money if you earn it

and if the community wants it to be a money. And, you know, $250 billion or so and over for persistent period of time. This is something, this is a store of value. Because God knows he can't get to a discounted cash flow analysis and see a $250 billion Eath. So that was good to see. And that was on the first page where they defined Ethereum. They talked about it.

Self-sovereignty of computation, users having, the ability sanker-sanked self-sovereignty was a sacrosanct sacrosanct thank you the word self-sovereignty

appears like three times just on this first page I did a command daff it appears almost 50 times throughout the whole entire document all right that was the big takeaway word I think from this doc

so in response to the EF releasing this document there was mixed opinions some very bullish some bearish some in between starting with the bullish takes Lincoln QSack

over at World he goes the new Ethereum Foundation mandate is bullish. Abandoning the antiquated concepts of companies, differentiating on performance metrics, embracing the network future, all value is downstream of sovereignty. Ethereum is competing with Bitcoin and gold,

not Tempo and Solana. Yevgeny from Wintermute, he said something similar. The EF is currently the only player with both the resources and the network effects to not just keep the cypherpunk dream alive, but to actually make sure it happens. I absolutely think we should have at least somebody,

at least trying this on a grand scale, instead of pursuing financial applications. I should also say he makes this point in his tweet. This is Evgeny again. Will this accrue to Eith price-wise short-term? Certainly not. Will it accrue to it long-term only if it wins and wins under the conditions it's set for itself,

not because of it being adopted by Tradfai? That's interesting. Maybe we come back to that theme later. I do think that is a theme that you're right. We have to come back to you and talk about at the end. A post from bankless guest, Omead, as well. He says, kudos to the EF for sticking to what matters and markets and beyond.

He wrote a long tweet about this, but he's saying that Ethereum is the clear leader in all the activities, all the crops activities, censorship resistance, transparency, and security. And that's really what makes blockchain and crypto special. So this is a doubling down on the only thing that matters for blockchains. Why are you a blockchain? It's for crops reasons. So, of course, doubling down, emphasizing those things,

that would be bullish. and it separates you from some others in the field. Potentially all others in the field. Like I think this is kind of what the Ethereum community, why this Lex-Node tweet was actually a copy-and-paste retweet of a tweet that was copied and pasted and retweet of that. It was like a chain of copy and pasta.

Yeah. Because, you know, Ethereum is known to be the only one with meaningful crops. Everyone else has done shortcuts. Yeah, what is the tweet here? The Lexone tweet? Yeah. I do find it kind of hilarious

that the main criticism of Ethereum has been that it's remained laser focused on the reasons blockchain exists at all. And you can go and you can click into that tweet and I'll like turn you into a tunnel of people tweeting that tweet. Okay, yeah. And we also have Stani from Avey who just gave a broadly bullish take saying resilient vision from the Ethereum Foundation. Just a big thumbs up from Stein. Okay, so what are the positives we're seeing in the bold takes here? So this is positive that Ethereum is doubling down on its values on the things that make in blockchains,

blockchains, the reason why we're doing this whole thing in the first place, which is crops, and also saying that this separates them from the pack, right? It's not like an alternative layer one chain. You know, Ethereum is the only chain doing this, maybe at some level Bitcoin as well, but those are in a class of their own. They are doubling down on crops. It's definitely some tradeoffs here, but these are the tradeoffs that Ethereum should be making, and that's bullish. Maybe not short term for price. but in the long run, if it wins, that will be bullish and because of decisions like this,

doubling down on the things that matter. It's the long game type of argument. It's the long game, yeah. People just getting behind the idea that like crops is the point. Ethereum really established what the broad point of a blockchain ought to be, and we're not getting deterred from that

or distracted from that by pursuing short or medium-term games. We're actually going to double down on, focusing on the longest-term game possible. The one other point I'll make here, too, is the P in Crops is something that Ethereum has not traditionally had. It does not have. It certainly has not achieved on mainnet or on the layer one, which is privacy. This has been a theme that has emerged far more at the EF and with Vitalik's emphasis over the last 12 to 18 months, I'd say, is this emphasis on privacy.

And I do think a lot of work is being done to push that forward. So the P in Crops is something that Ethereum historically hasn't had. And also in general, crops, it's just like, Ethereum has not achieved the CROPS yet. Not to the number of nines that the Ethereum. And what I mean by that is like, you know, you can have 50% of crops. You can achieve, have a 50% success rate. You know, we're still missing all the P. So we're missing a very big component of that.

But what I think the EF is really stating here is they are going for a very high number of 9. 99.99% success on the crops vision is something that the EF is doing. That's kind of like my understanding of this document. It's like optimizing for a lot of nines around crops. That's right. And some of it's aspirational. Some of it is the North Star that we're pointing towards and that the EF wants to guide Ethereum towards.

All right. So that was the encapsulation of the bullish takes. There were some bearish takes about this as well. Yeah. The first one that caught my eye was from Donkrad. Donkrad Fis, who notably was part of the Ethereum Foundation up until recently. He was one of the largest, I don't know if detractors is the right word, but the emphasizing the need or the urgency for Ethereum to go in a newer direction, a fresh direction.

Yeah, he was an accelerationist of the L1, should we say, or of just moving faster in general, potentially cutting, you know, getting rid of some sacred cows and, I don't want to say cutting some corners. I don't know. I don't think he would cut corners. Making some tradeoffs. having a level of product urgency and promoting product as a core vision, not to the detriment of anything crops related, but to the urgency of actually needing to get people on specifically Ethereum.

If people are coming on chain, we need to put them on Ethereum. We need to do some product research about what it's going to take to get them on Ethereum and that needs to happen in the short and medium term rather than focusing on crops in the long term. So Dankrad, also the father of Danksharding, of course, and he notably left about a year ago,

maybe a little less than a year ago, for tempo. Yeah, the chain kind of EVM. With no shortage of product optimization efforts. Yeah, that's right. So what does he say? Donker said, the EF last year. Hey, we want to listen to users to make Ethereum better.

The EF now. JK, we looked at the real world. We don't like building for it after all. We want to go back to building cypherpunk stuff only. This is the EFFF. going back to us old ways, undoing the changes from last year. I feared this would happen because Fetalik clearly wasn't in with his heart. But whatever they say about the ecosystem being able to take care of this,

the fundamental problem remains. There are very few voices in the all-core devs call, caring about real-world Ethereum usage, and there is nobody doing Ethereum BD. Everyone else who is doing this also has their own separate interests. So this connects us, this part of the storyline, connects us back to the rabbling around the Ethereum pivot, which happened around the end of 2024.

I would say the start of 2024 to the end of 2024 in Ethereum, I will mark it as a growing crescendo from the community of a need of a directional pivot from the EF about where to focus his time and energy. We got some sort of pivot. It's debated whether or not the pivot actually happened or not, or reprioritization, as other people say. something happened at the end of 2024 where the dev focus of the Ethereum

of the EF turned into the scale layer one scale blobs improve UX3 tracks like simplify the tracks have a level of urgency focus on product and then we got like we kind of got the pivot and so this is what Donkrat is saying is we're getting a second pivot back

to the way things were yeah some regression regression to the way things were before. I think a leader that may be best exemplified some hope in this change of direction and actually helped to emphasize the three pillars that you mentioned at the EF was Tamash. Right. Coming in from Nethermind, he was the executive director and he recently resigned about 30 days ago. Now, there was some follow-up here because, you know, people are saying, yeah, and Tamash leaving, there had to be some drama there. You know, the board at the EF must have pushed him out.

Right. Tamash, like, swears up and down that there's blood. I don't think that's, yeah, I don't think that's what that happened. He was not pushed out. He left because basically he was feeling like mission complete. Yeah, it was a job well done. I've done my job here. Yeah.

I signed up for this role to, like, serve my time as a steward of Ethereum. Right. But Tamash is inherently an entrepreneur. He sees the power and potential of AI from an entrepreneur's perspective. Yeah. And he wants to go back to Ethereum's app layer and do. do some AI Ethereum thing. I think that story holds up to me.

I agree. I agree. I think that that makes sense. And yet still, Donkrat here is saying that, you know, the EF is going to move back to the pre-Tamash, you know, timeline where users, it didn't matter as much. The application layer didn't matter as much. Ethereum was going to build this thing, whether the market needed it or not. The EF would be slow in terms of build out of the roadmap. kind of the before time era, which is perceived by people like Donkrad as kind of negative.

And a reason that he left, a reason he would say that he left for tempo. I think part of the reason he left for tempo was so that he could pursue the product market fit of stable coins, you know, like on chain and an aggressive type way, of real world application that he didn't see the Ethereum community

and the EF maximizing. Yeah. My take about this is Donkrad, went to tempo to bring crops to tempo, not because he needed to bring product to tempo. He wanted to work in a place that had product and distribution that he could bring crops to, and he was frustrated that no one could bring product to Ethereum. That's what he has said publicly. Yeah, that's what he said.

Yeah. Okay, moving on to you some other bear takes, Miles Nystrom from Pantera. He tweeted out words not mentioned in the EF manifest, product roadmap, finance, payments, stable coins, customer, developers, market share, scalability. And he says that the absence of these words speaks volumes, basically taking a very specific lens about what a blockchain is, applying it to the manifest and saying none of these words show up. Like none of the real world use cases were mentioned.

We're talking about pie in the sky stuff like self-sovereignty and disintermediation and just like flowery sounding language, but we're not actually talking about concrete tangible things. The things that the market cares about, which is what these things are, is what he's saying. uga.e.eath made an even deadlier tweet about Ethereum downstream of this to have released at the mandate. Ethereum is on a trajectory to become the Netscape of crypto, historically foundational with this invention of the EVM, as Netscape did with JavaScript and SSL, unfortunately

destined for irrelevance due to an inability to focus on what matters. And EF determined to win would focus on how to make. Ethereum the best chain for finance. That's not what it's doing today. Oof. As Yuga.D.E. The dye Eth is hard what they used to be. Used to be a bit more bullish back in my day. I should say there was one counter to something that Donkrad said from Taylor Monaghan over at MetaMask. And this is taking issue with Donkrad's use of, I guess, the term product

when describing Ethereum what it was building. And she said this, users do not use blockchain they use products. The EF is not building a product. They are building a blockchain, which is a platform that allows anyone to permissionlessly build whatever that they want. I know it's confusing because there's a lot of shallow single-purpose blockchains out there.

Shallow single-purpose blockchains are products. The EF is not building a product. So what she's saying is all of the people complaining, like Mason, that there aren't use cases or like Dancrad that the F is kind of not responding to real-world. users. She's saying that's not what the EF should be doing. Okay. They're not the product development firm building on top of Ethereum. Their job is to just build this permissionless open crops

substrate so that the rest of the ecosystem has room and the ability to build out the apps. So, and she calls that a platform rather than a product. What do you make of this take? Everything is a product for someone. And so I can agree with Taylor. and say, okay, sure, like, we don't build for the end user, build for, but you're still, you have to build for somebody else. Somebody is the consumer of the value of Ethereum. It's a little bit of semantics. And so, like, yes, I take Taylor's point in the sense that, like, you know,

shallow, single purpose, blockchains are products, are a more direct product pipeline between blockchain and user, and, like, there's fewer moving parts, and Ethereum has more moving parts. and so maybe the users aren't the direct customers or maybe not even the apps. Yeah. Like Ethereum is a blockchain of chains, but somebody is a product consumer

and a better product will be able to better express the values of Ethereum in the first place for someone. I kind of get that. I would just say just like, if you think of the substrate of a nation state, like, you know, America or something like that, is America is the nation state, is that a platform or is that a product, right?

and at some level, it's kind of a platform, right? It's very deep in the stack. But there are services that citizens want, and you are at the end of the day. You need to attract businesses and citizens and talent and individuals. And you provide things like security and rule of law and court systems. And you pick a portfolio and a mix of services for your platform for that user group. So I kind of agree that like, no matter what you call it,

whether it's a platform or a product, you have to be in the business of providing things that somebody wants. That people want, yes. Yeah, and we'll build on top of and we'll choose to build on top of due to these features. Yes, I 100% agree with that articulation. Maybe one last bear tweet or just detractor tweet from Haseeb. He goes, I hate to be the one to say this, but please, no more manifestos. They've made great progress on this in last year.

What people want to see from the EF is less manifesting, more shipping. Yeah, this is probably the one that I resonated with. Yes. If you remember, there was, so this was not a manifesto, to be clear, this was an EF mandate, but there was another recent manifesto that Vitalik advertised and signed on to. This was from November of 2025 called the Trustless Manifesto, a bunch of authors. This is exactly what he's talking about. Okay.

And this was a few months. ago. And at that time even in November, I was like, okay, cool. We got another kind of manifest. It feels like we're being indicted with these manifestos and vision documents. And I think we are very much in crypto and Ethereum world coming off of like, you know, five years of relatively stagnant growth in a bear market. We're in kind of a show me market, which is, all right, but what are you shipping today? Yep. Right. I love the roadmap, but what are you shipping? And so at some level of the criticism here is publishing this mandate right now and another document rather than code or like something something that you're about to ship in order to further crops is a little

tone deaf or at least it's like not being responded to well because we're in the show me phase of the marketing we actually want to see code we want to see you shipping privacy on the l1 rather than just talking about privacy as something that you value and so that's just just the how everyone is feeling right now. It's certainly how I feel. Not to say, by the way, they should be able to chew gum and walk. I mean, they should be able to publish manifestos and mandates and vision documents and all of this while also shipping. And some might argue, well, we just got a hard fork in December. And there's another one in the first half of this year. So for every hard fork, we get one manifesto. Well, some are just arguing that like, no,

we're doing both. Okay. And so we're, we could publish mandates, but, and we're also shipping code. It's just, I don't know, the climate is not the environment and the temperament and the, the feelings right now are not as conducive to long documents when we want price to go up and we want use cases to be manifest in the real world. So Ryan, you read my Ethereum weekly post goes out to bankless premium subscribers. Yes, I did read this, yes. Okay, so the part about that post that I put out for the premium subs this week was the time to write a mandate of Ethereum's values as a guiding document for the direction of Ethereum was in the 2015 to 2020 era. And I'm sure there was something like this published back then too.

And it just seems the main export of the EF these days are these kind of mood board documents to remind themselves and us about what their vibe is. Yeah, that is a take. Although I would, I give that a partial agree because I actually think over the past year we've seen an increase in shipping from the EF. and so I would say... I think so? Yeah, I do.

We definitely haven't seen a decrease, so I will definitely say that. Pace has definitely been positive. They get points for increase of urgency. They do get that. Yeah, you know, and this goes into kind of how you perceive this document and what your individual takes are.

Maybe we'll do one last retort, and then I want to get your takes, David. So this is a poster who said, I've read many criticisms about the new EF mandate, but here's what the mandate actually does and why the criticism is wrong. The criticism is the EF is abandoning adoption, but the reality is the mandate prioritizes crops,

and this isn't anti-adoption, it's actual sustainable adoption, right? Without crops, why are people even, you know, adopting blockchains in the first place? Another criticism is that the EF should do business development, institutional outreach, would have liked to see more in the doc about that, but the reality is that's not what the EF is for.

And they are staying focused in their lane as a nonprofit protocol steward. They're not a sales team. They're not good at that. Could you imagine Vitalik in kind of a sales meeting? Like it wouldn't go well. The F can't be all things to all people. The F's job is to ensure the protocol stays credibly neutral.

And that's what this type of a mandate doc actually promotes. Another criticism. They're undoing pragmatic progress, but the reality is we have a lot of progress. I think you made this point in your article too. Larry Fink building like ETF, staking ETFs, Tom Lee is buying Eath on a weekly basis, like 100 million a week he hasn't stopped.

Institutions are adopting it. Like the real world usage of Ethereum is actually growing. It's not stagnant. So I think that's some of the counter to these bearish takes. What I like to boast about this tweet is that it kind of identified the two camps around this manifest pretty well. And it put it into like either or language. And then it pierced right through that.

you know, criticism, the EF is abandoning adoption, reality, blah, blah, blah. It's not like because they are promoting crops, they are therefore not doing non-crop stuff. Exactly. Which is definitely what a lot of people interpreted as. Exactly. It can be both and.

Yes. It can be both and. Why can it be both and can be? Yes. Yeah, that's definitely something to talk about. There's also one more fulcrum before we get into our takes, one more like fulcrum. I want to bring up Dima Buteran, Vitalik's father.

He tweeted this out that I thought was pretty illustrative. He goes, the point is to build the world we want to live in, as opposed to building for the real world as the real world stands today. And so this is also the line that I think is drawn between the bulls and the bears from this mandate is some people are like, if we build for the world as it stands today, we won't change the world. We'll capitulate on our values, nothing will really change.

what we actually want to do is build something that the net new, something the world doesn't have. That's right. Then we'll be the change that we want to be and will manifest a brand new world that will be better. And people are kind of taking two sides of picking a side of that line. Yeah, that word manifest is good too.

I do think a document like this can put a beacon out into the world of like, hey, if you're like minded, if you want to build towards a self-sovereign future, then come aboard. That's what we're doing at Ethereum. can help manifest that vision for sure. I do think that there's a related folk from here. You know, you were talking building for the world or or being the change, the world as it exists, or being the change to change the world. I think that there is a deep worry that some have,

and indeed, you know, sometimes I share, that Ethereum becomes too cyphurpunk and niche to be important. There's a project that you and I refer to a lot. It was a project called, Irbit, which has been around since, I don't know, 2009 or something, 2012, 2013. A lot, like, it's been around for a while in kind of geek culture. Some people get so pilled by urban, yes, that they, it's like they stare into it and then they can't look away. Yes. And they just go down the rabbit hole and they become an urban person. Yeah, it's like a whole different approach in operating system where everyone has a self-sovereign operating system. I can't even just.

It's not unlike how people saw crypto and you go down the crypto rabbit hole and you become a crypto person. But the difference is, is crypto as a technology got 10,000 times the amount of like adoption and did change the world. And did, has changed the world. Yeah. It's currently changing the world. Erbit people. It still hasn't. It's been a long time.

They think it's going to happen. But it's, it's right now, it's just like a fun little toy to play with. Mish tech, utopian dream, self-sovereign dream that like, I don't know, has a few thousand users. or something, and it's always three to five years from being mainstream and being the biggest thing ever. And when people see things like this, doubling down on some of the crop stuff, without the corresponding,

and this is what it means for real world use cases. I think the worry is that Ethereum takes a path that is not going to change the world because it's too niche and too disconnected from what's happening in the real world and a bit to ivory tower. And at some level, I think that has always been the risk that Ethereum has had or that crypto has had in general.

It's just we saw such mainstreaming of crypto last cycle and it has seemed to have slowed down since. And there's some question as to whether this direction gets us closer there. Or if we're better off just doubling down and focusing really on the use cases that do have some traction. I also think that helps illustrate the environment in which this manifest has come into the world. It's come into the world in which the lynxization of the crypto movement is at its highest. It's like we are at fear of being irrelevant higher than we've ever been.

Since 2019, yeah. We haven't had this fear of like the crypto industry becoming irrelevant. And so and then this manifest comes into world saying we're optimizing for this mandate. This mandate and it doesn't, a, doesn't abet any of these fears that people are having. Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi report.

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Okay. So what was your take? As you read this and looked at the take. surrounding it. I have a handful of takes. The fulcrum that I see is that when it comes to crops, the question is, how many nines is the theory I'm going to optimize for to produce crops? Okay. And like putting words in his mouth, I think Vatalic is saying all of them, all of the nines, like four nines or more. Like we're going for max number of nines and the higher the better. my preference is that, you know, three nines is really good.

Even two nines is like if we can get 99% and if we give up some of these crazy number of nines so that we can 10 to 100 X Ethereum's capability on actually imparting change in the world, that is a trade I would make. Now it's not black and white. It can be positive some. Like it's not we take from this end and we give it to that end. It is a, it's not, not that. But it isn't such a strict dichotomy.

But when I read this document, it seems that EF wants to build an Ethereum to be a check on power of the world's most powerful institutions. And not be one of the world's most powerful institutions itself. It's, it's, there was this, we did this at Bankless Takes on Vitalik's article in defense of Bitcoin Maximilism, which came out on an April Fool's Day. And he used this metaphor. Blockchains are like the file of Gadriel, Galadriel. You know this metaphor, right? This is Lord of the Rings. Of course.

What is the file of Galadriel? A light to you in dark places when all other lights go out. It is not a low-cost light. It is not a fluorescent hippie, energy-efficient light, or a high-performance light. It is a light that sacrifices

on all those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only to be a light that does what you needed to do when you're facing the toughest challenge of your life. And so this is what I see Vitalik

emphasizing is we are going to make sure that we maximize the Dax side of Ethereum. We're going to be a tool in everyone's pocket. Kind of like how no one, no nation state uses nuclear weapons. But the existence of nuclear weapons has materially changed the world. But in terms of like the economy around nuclear weapons,

it's not saying I want that, but it's just like the existence of Ethereum, he's going, he wants it to be a check- on the power of everything, rather than it being the thing. Now, I and many others have dedicated my life up to this point to, like, help Ethereum be the thing, be the institution, not a smaller, albeit so powerful, but not a smaller thing that is a check on larger institutions. Like my interest in crypto and Ethereum has always been to maximize Ethereum.

Like people call us ethmaxis. they mean they kind of mean that for the bags but like if anything I've always meant it for like I want the maximum version of Ethereum the version of Ethereum. Yeah I feel like you're saying maybe two things there if I'm understanding you David so the first thing you're saying is David would be willing to exchange some of the kind of the medium term type of

make some tradeoffs let's say you know for decentralization for adoption right and so things like you've brought up in the past are like slot times right you know bringing those down, I know that there's some cost maybe with latency. It's not as decentralized as we'd hope, but you make up for that with some real-world adoption. And those types of trade-offs you would be more willing to make than a hard stance of let's not sacrifice anything or very much at all when it comes to crops.

That seems to be one of the things that you're saying. I don't like the word trade-offs because I do think we can have like very hard lines hyperpunk stuff and get adoption at the same time. Like I don't want people to be in this mindset of it's like either or. Sure. And I don't want like,

I don't also want people to be like, oh, David is willing to cut corners. Why doesn't he just go to Salana? Salana's cut too many corners. I don't care about Salana. I don't have any interest in being there. I'm actually interested in the ecosystem that doesn't cut corners.

Sure. And I definitely don't want people to think that like because I want user adoption and I want to build for the real world, then that means. means I also believe in cutting corners. Like I don't, I don't. No, I get it.

But you said, like, rather than four nines, you're fine with two nines, right? So you're willing to make some. That's a trade off. Fair. Fair. I would also argue that, like, going from 99.99% to 99.9% to 99.9% is the same thing. It's the same outcome. You're saying pragmatism, maybe.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Ultimately, if we do not put people on Ethereum, put institutions on Ethereum. and if we also optimized for too many nines and made it impossible for them to come, then what are we even doing here? Yeah, so you're worried that maybe like a hardline stance

on crops or these types of manifesta or these types of mandates maybe shed some of the pragmatism that is going to be valuable if Ethereum is actually going to win and change the world and accomplish its big ambitions here. Yes, yes. As a North Star for Ethereum, I think we should have Ethereum's like market share of not ETH price, but ETH price is highly correlated, but like market share.

And there was a tweet that I saw in this whole debate that I think does kind of exemplify this whole dynamic. Yeah. This is from Ceteris from Delphi. He goes, if Ethereum didn't have a token that people wanted to go up, the new EF mandate wouldn't be controversial at all. It would be unanimously celebrated. I agree with that tweet.

That's a correct tweet. there would also be one one thousand to the amount of people having this discussion in the first place. Sure. So I want to emphasize the point that there is a very strong correlation between Ethereum having market share of stuff on it, how like percentage of the world on chain and how much can actually change the world. Yes. If we just, you know, we all, we have said this many times. Decentralization is not the end goal. is a means to an end to achieve certain properties and things.

I'm going to apply that to crops. The point of blockchains is to not produce crops. The point of blockchains is to use crops as a means to an end. And that end must be Ethereum growing in market share. And that is a North Star. That I think is part of your second take, which is, I think, if I'm going to summarize your take, you've definitely won Ethereum to win.

And when you read a document like this, It doesn't convince you that the EF also wants that. There is some language in here that I didn't personally vibe with, but it's this idea, again, of subtraction for resilience. And the EF has talked about addition by subtraction in the past, and that was indeed the mandate four or five years ago. I don't think that has gone so well. I think some of the subtraction has led to a vacuum in the space

that has been filled by other entities like Tradfai. And then there's this concept, you know, philosophically in the mandate itself of detotalization. I'll read this to you. We believe that detotalization, building toward a world in which no organization, system, or moral order, has total dominance over any individual life is the most reliable, reliably good aim. They also talk about the North Star, as you said, being disintermediation. What I worry about a little bit with the idea of detotalization is, does this mean you, you're content with Ethereum

just being a niche side type of project. Instead, I would rather totalization of credit mode neutrality and totalization of Ethereum. You know what I mean? Rather than Ethereum being just like a small thing to the side

among these other appraisal, like why not the entire world based on this global property rights system that gives everyone their sovereignty. Like, if we're so proud about the crops we have, what if we put the world on the thing with all the crops? Totalization of crops, rather than de-totalization.

Yeah. And that's sort of, it was kind of been this recurring theme when you sort of ask you, like, yeah, like, do you want Ethereum to win? Like, are we going to, are we going to get ETH to $10 trillion in value, 30 trillion in value? Like, what are we doing towards that? Like, detotalization, addition by subtraction,

I'm not convinced it gets us there, which is some of the underlying, I think, philosophy of the EF that I don't necessarily vibe with. But I do aspects of it. I mean, if the EF was this hungry monster that was consuming everything and trying to control everything and assert dominance, of course that would be,

that would be too much and that would be a negative. We would probably move elsewhere. But we are so far. away from that being a problem. The problem in Ethereum, if there is a problem, is kind of the opposite of that, where we haven't won enough. You know what I mean? Yes. Like, that's kind of the problem. So I get that take. What other takes did you have? To round out some of my takes here, we had a recent episode with Zuko, and Zuko brought up a talk that he heard from Moxie, the founder of Signal. Yep. He brought this up multiple times in the podcast. It's such a good,

such a good piece. Yeah. And he talked about like a guiding framework for cypherpunks to build products in 2026. And he said, this is what Moxie said in this talk. Cypherpunks built for themselves and then they expected the world to adapt. That never works. You have to meet users where they are. Scale is the only thing that matters. Under 100 million users, you're irrelevant.

Crypto is making the same exact mistake that Linux and other cypherpunks have made. Powerful tools for insiders and meaningless for everyone else. And the bottlenecked is always U.S. if a user has to learn anything new, you're already lost. And so when I read this manifest, none of Zucco's concerns about what Moxie said in this one talk

seems to be acknowledged. And it seems to be like we're actually driving towards the failure mode where we're doing the thing. Like, Vitalik is building the tool for him and all of his friends and people who can keep up with them. Right.

To survive in a very, like, dystopian, totalitarian world of the future. Yeah. But we are not allowing, like, a very friendly way to get on the arc. So you would have rather read a document coming from the EF of, like, the 10 biggest UX problems that hinder us from having a million stakers and 100 million people directly on the L1.

Yeah. Here they are. How we get an Ethereum note into everyone's home, like something like that. Yeah. I think, see, I agree with that. I understand. And again, like, you could just say the mandate itself was not that document. And Ethereum's working on that in other ways.

I will also express bearishness that that document was coming. But I will shelve my bearishness for the time. I want to hear some of your takes. My take. So when I first read the document, just raw, before you read the takes on the takes, right? And then you kind of get colored by that. I loved the ETH is a story value asset thing. I'm so glad that they put that at the very beginning.

that to me already cancels out everything else. I'm already bullish because it's like that. Five-star review, all right? I did really like the crops thing. Because in particular, in order to have a store of value asset like ether, you need crops. That's the thing. That's the thing that Bitcoin is supposed to deliver. And that's the thing that Ethereum can even deliver more further.

And so it's very beneficial for the eth application itself. So I like the doubling down on crops and the thing that Ethereum can do that all the other corp chains can't do and that Bitcoin is arguably starting to fall down on which is crops. So that's all bullish to me. It was also like wholesome this document.

All right? It was a little niche, a little out there, right? Not necessarily my cultures like anime graphics and such. Yeah, a little milady, whatever. That's fine. But there was an optimism about it, a hopefulness about it. It's just like Ethereum is good for the world, self-sovereignty. And so we're in this world in crypto.

We're kind of looking in the mirror and we're like, what have we done? What have we been doing? Is this just a casino? Is there something more here? So this was not a embrace of the nihilism. It was the opposite. Like, hey, we're building for a better future here. And I appreciated that.

Some other things, maybe some quibbles. Like I felt it was a little grandiose. There are these multiple lines of our mandate is written for a thousand year, horizon. I was like, this is, this is probably not the document that's going to live a thousand years in the future. Funny, I kind of like that part. You did. To me, it just felt a little bit like, I don't know, it was a lot to me. But also, the sanctuary tech is kind of cool. There seem to be doubling down on that meme. But Alex's been talking about it a lot. I still think sanctuary money is closer because sanctuary tech is a whole field of all sorts of things, right? But Ethereum is a

If it's a blockchain. It's a blockchain. It's a luxury blockchain. It's a luxury money. It's deviant accounts. It's to do with money. It's sanctuary money. So why don't we just talk about the money use case a bit more?

Also, I do echo the Haseeb thing. Like, are we shipping manifestos? Is that the signal that we're putting here in mandates? Are we shipping code? All right? We're definitely in the show me era. And yeah, I do share some worries that the F might be going to a pre-Tamash era, though I'm not sure. I'm not there.

I do think, well, sometimes the EF appears a little, feels a little virtuey. It is a force for good. I'm like so glad the EF is here in crypto and so glad that they are the shepherds for Ethereum. And I think it's a good thing that this document exists and this organization exists because I guess maybe my takes on some of the takes. This was the Rookshire test, the inkblot test for problems that people, have had historically with the EF or Ethereum. And so if you're bullish on the EF,

you remain bullish. If you had problems in the past with the EF and their approach, then you saw that in this document, another example of. I do also think that there's an unfair expectation on the EF right now, which is people expected to be all things to all people.

And they expect Fatalic to be all things to all people as well. Okay? And Vitalik is just a, guy. Remember that used to be how he signed his Reddit as just some guy? Just some guy. He really is. I mean, Vitalik is just Vitalik and we are fortunate to have him. If he does one thing for Ethereum moving forward, other than just dream the whole thing up, it seems like he thinks his mission and the EF's mission is to preserve Ethereum's soul. Okay? Preserve its soul. Yes. And that might be

the thing that is hardest to actually do and the most important thing to this whole process. And when you read this mandate, you get the sense that the risk of Ethereum losing its soul is less with this kind of social contract out in the world and with Vitalik around and with the EF at the helm. Okay? Maybe Ethereum will go into Erbit territory, but at least it won't lose its soul. Okay? And maybe that's the bigger threat here.

Yeah. So on the whole like Rojerk thing, I do notice this pattern, like we're doing it. we've done podcasts on this, where Vitalik will write a blog. And then all of Ethereum and broader crypto Twitter will be like, well, I interpret it like this. I interpret it like that. It's like we have this profit giving us the word of the good word of Vitalik and like everyone's like interpreting it differently. And then we have discussions about our interpretations.

And it's like we're at Bible study like trying to like understand what he meant about stuff. I mean there's an element of that. And that is the power, like the fact that everyone is talking about this mandate is the power of legitimacy of Fatalic and the EF and the organization they're building. And that's part of Ethereum's cultural DNA and its soul. But getting to the point of other people need to step up and do other things, right? If the EF is kind of the soul and the moral compass of Ethereum, okay, it's not going to be its business development arm. It's not going to do the things that Tom Lee is doing.

It's not going to do the things that Black Rock is doing. So if this whole thing is going to work, other organizations need to step up. And at some level, we need to just accept the EF for what it is. And to realize that it's not, in fact, in the document, they actually say we're not like a product studio. We're not building end user applications. Like we're not marketing. And then the community is constantly like, hey, why aren't you guys doing marketing and business development? And they're like, we're not doing that.

Now, your counter might be, well, I worry if you're not doing it, then no one's doing it, and then Ethereum becomes a smaller project. But at some level, this whole Ethereum thing is a bet that, you know, adoption comes through other means that aren't the EF. And I think there's evidence that that is what has been playing out. You could certainly be bearish about it, but you can certainly point to the evidence of massive adoption that Ethereum has had with the EF doing what it's, doing. I do think the roadmap is getting shipped. So I do think they are actually being pragmatic. I think this is, it's a mistake to think that because this manifest got shipped, that like the last year of progress that Tamash has made at the EF, like streamlining the organization and like doging the EF didn't happen. No, that like that still happened. And like I find it highly unlikely that Vitalik is like,

I'm going to undo what Tamash did. Yes. No. No. Like, Tamash did the things to the EF that Vitalik didn't have the executional capacity, the operational CEO capacity to do. And now those things are done. And that's why Tamash left. He was like,

you know, I did it. I don't want to optimize for four nines on this job. I'll call it good at two nines and I'll leave. And that's what happened. So as long as things

continue getting shipped on the road map, you know, I'm kind of happy and this mandate is whatever. I mean, ultimately, aren't we all just

talking about this because there's nothing else in crypto going on? I mean, even if there was something going on, when EF does something, I think everyone pals on no matter what season it is. But part of the response, I think, reflects the mood that we're in and the lack of other things going on and the price and all sorts of other things. That's the environment, you know, in which this lands. So overall, I guess my take is nothing has really changed as a result of this mandate. You know, the risk to Ethereum we've already talked about is that, you know, it's the

are a bit niche tech, but we have evidence that that's not been the case. And the bigger risk to me that this whole thing, the mandate mitigates is the risk that Ethereum loses its soul. And you start to get that sense when you look at the rest of crypto that TradFi has kind of stepped in and they're like, okay, guys, we'll take it from here. And it's all BlackRock and Bitcoin and ETFs and the question of, and tempo corporate chains like Stripe. And the question is like like, all right, why are we still here? And this document ultimately helps to preserve why we're here, crops, self-sovereignty. And I think that's a good thing. So overall, I was net bullish on it. Not perfect, but net bullish. And yeah, I was pleased it was published.

So this is a tweet that I retweeted, and this is some guy from the Salana Foundation, chief product officer at the Salana Foundation. And he's sub-tweeting the EF mandate. He's trolling it. He's trolling. Well, I don't know if it's trolling. It was a sub-tweet. Counter-propaganda. He goes, my mandate, ensure Solana captures 90% of global finance, that every asset

will want to live on Solana, that every human has a Solana wallet, that Solana will become the preeminent network state that Sol sets us all free. And so then I retweeted this tweet and I go, hey, Vitalik, if Ethereum doesn't build for the real world, then what's the point? And people, A, people didn't like that I was retweeting the Salana person to begin with. And then we got, like, Taylor Monaghan came after me and saying, blah, blah, blah. This is like, crops is the whole point, all this kind of stuff. So we have two different, like, tale of two cities.

You have the Ethereum side of things, which is like crops, crops, crops, crops, crops. And then you have Solano, which is like, users, users, users, users. And we should be able to do both. And my biggest complaint about the mandate is that I do not at all think that Ethereum's crops is at risk. The values and ethos that Ethereum has, the cypherpunk ethos

is so deeply... We're doing great on that. We're scoring top marks. And yes, to many people's points, the reason why we have BlackRock, base, Robin Hood, like Tradfis, stable coins, the reason why Ethereum

is a dominant winner in that category is because we are the dominant winner in the crops camp. Yep. Optimizing for more crop, is good. Is it optimal? I'm unsure.

10 years in, you're looking for more use case adoption, change the world, show me the numbers, ship some code, that sort of thing. And the idea is we have an ecosystem that is both doing crops

and doing everything that this guy is saying that he wants to do in Solana. 90% of global finance. Everyone, whoever lives, will have a wallet on Solana. Like, that's kind of the energy that is missing from Ethereum, and this mandate does not have.

And to your point, maybe it's a different document. Well, maybe we'll do a podcast when that document comes out. I don't think that document's coming out. And there's like a principle in psychology, but you can apply this broadly, is like, if you have like a bunch of things to do, the thing that you need to do in your life that is best for you is the thing you want to do the least.

Like if you are a big weight trainer and the idea of like going on a run is like, ugh, running is probably the best thing you need to do. And so like that's kind of my challenge to the EF is like, yeah, dude. Like speak more like this basically. Getting users is scary. Ensure. And sure Ethereum captures 90% of global finance that every asset anyone will want lives on Ethereum that every human has an Ethereum wallet.

Yes. Ethereum becomes the real. Ethereum maximism. Ethereum is the background. And also speaking like this, speaking like this, wouldn't be so bad. Yes. Well, I'll agree with you on that. And maybe this is where we wrap the bankless takes.

Guys, hope you enjoyed it. Got to let you know, of course, these are just our takes. None of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky, including Eft. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.