Honored to win the ACJR award for Best Crypto Op-Ed for my piece on Ethereum security problems and the proposed recovery fund debate. Big thanks to @ACJRnetwork and everyone involved. Very good company to be in.

Collected what can be verified so far about @hsinju's death. Maybe it saves someone some time. sergeenkov.com/hsin-ju-chuan…

The linked paper is an opinion ("Perspective") article. It explicitly states it is "not proposing that ADHD be reclassified exclusively as a circadian disorder" and that "evidence on remission of ADHD with circadian interventions is lacking." doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1…

Arbitrum (@arbitrum) pays its delegates $54,000 a month between them, down from $67,000 under the programme it replaced last year. Over the same change the number of proposals they vote on fell from 5.6 a month to 2.5, so the cost of getting one proposal voted on went from $11,964 to $21,600. The programme got smaller and each vote it buys got more expensive. For scale, the DAO pays one advisory firm $250,000 a month on a two year contract to work on Arbitrum alone. Everyone who votes, together, gets a fifth of that. No delegate can earn more than $700 on a single constitutional vote. And the most common reason one lost their reward was missing the five day deadline to post a comment explaining how they voted. All four figures come from the programme operator's own update, published in April. The two pairs sit four paragraphs apart in it and are never divided.

Copy trading the @HyperliquidX leaderboard is sold as a product by exchanges. In a backtest the moment a leader enters carries no information at all, and the fee alone decides the outcome. I simulated 9,125 copied entries over 150 days, equal weighted, each held one hour. The traders were picked four ways: those who build positions gradually and those who finish most days in profit, each as a fixed list and as a list rebuilt monthly. Before fees the four land between −2.2 and +2.1 basis points a trade. Every 95% interval brackets zero. Break even needs 9 bps, the round trip taker fee at the entry tier, and that is a floor because copy platforms take a cut of profit on top. After the fee the four lose between 6.9 and 11.2 bps a trade. The loss is arithmetic: a fixed tariff applied to an edge of zero. Market drift does not explain it. Over the window the mean coin returned −0.07 bps an hour, so a cohort that sits long every single time picks up about a hundredth of the fee.

A @Polymarket volume figure built from chain data is short by about a third. If the query was written before April, it returns nothing at all. Those figures are how the market gets sized, valued and compared with other venues such as Kalshi. In the last week of August the three contracts took about $558M of taker volume. Reading only the main one loses $171M of it. The main contract handles ordinary yes or no markets and carries 69%. A second handles markets with several outcomes, an election with a field of candidates, and carries 29%. The rest goes through a third contract for multi leg bets. Volume here sits in very few trades. The median fill is $3.60, and the largest 1% of fills carry about 70% of the money. So the multi outcome book is 18% of the trades and 29% of the money, and counting trades will never tell you whether a missing venue matters. Polymarket replaced all three contracts on 28 April. The old addresses still resolve and still hold three years of history, and they have taken no trades since. A query pointed at them returns an empty result with no error, so it reports a market that went quiet.

The only major precedent for a Treasury buyback of this scale is the 2000-2002 program, when the Treasury retired $67.5 billion of old 30-year bonds. Day one back then looked just like yesterday: a sharp spike in long-bond prices and chaos among traders, which then settled into steady repricing. But the effect held for the entire life of the program, so shorting the rally was a losing trade.

Who can apply? You should apply if your project has existing traction and is actively advancing privacy on Ethereum and across the open internet. Our two categories for this epoch are: - Privacy: everything from private transfers, shielded pools, wallet/RPC privacy, encrypted mempools, and zero-knowledge (ZK) tooling - Open internet: includes secure messaging, metadata-protecting communication tools, private compute hardware, and the privacy libraries that everything else is built on. Important dates: Deadline to apply: 10 September, 2026 Epoch Accelerator: 6 - 10 October, 2026 Epoch allocation window: 14 - 21 October, 2026 Apply now: octant.fillout.com/epoch-13

Keeping Ethereum's core devs paid costs $30M a year. That's 0.17% of the money parked in ETH ETFs on top of their code. The institutions earning fees on it contribute nothing. morrow.report/18-billion-in-…

Ethereum staking yield is quietly paying for Bitcoin's infrastructure. @OctantApp's latest round sent its biggest grant to the Tor Project, the network behind roughly 1 in 4 $BTC nodes. 148.7 ETH to Tor all-time, all of it from yield on staked $ETH. btcpeers.com/ethereum-stakin…

It's not a bug, it's a feature. "As time goes to infinity, all keys will be lost."

$8.86M is what @OctantApp has funded to impactful projects with no strings attached (valued in USD at each on-chain claim's ETH price). Soon we'll find out how much the current round will add to that. About 7 hours left for you to take part.

Bitcoin has the lowest DeFi adoption of any major asset relative to its market cap. But I wouldn't call the rest useless. For most holders, store of value is the use. Gold in a vault isn't idle. And a few examples of where it works: Babylon has around $3.2 billion of BTC staked natively, securing PoS chains. Lombard's LBTC sits near $1.5 billion live in 70+ protocols. Stacks ran a 30x capacity upgrade and opened sBTC to 1,800+ institutions through Fireblocks. Spot ETFs hold more than 1.2 million BTC as a regulated product. Public companies hold over $80 billion of BTC in treasury, used as reserve and borrowed against.

Shayne Coplan (@shayne_coplan), one decision right now can override every credibility hit Polymarket has taken. Airdrop the token to the people who lost money, proportional to their losses. They funded everything @Polymarket have, and the only way to keep them is to reward them. sergeenkov.com/loss-based-po…

If you publish promotional content about @Polymarket, please consider attaching a disclosure to avoid misleading your audience about the platform's gambling-like nature. Example disclosure: Polymarket can rewrite market rules after the event has happened, affecting which side wins. When outcomes are contested, the decision is made by anonymous third-party voters who often hold positions in those markets and have direct financial incentive to influence the result. Earnings shown in promotional materials are advertising. The vast majority of users lose money over time.

Aren't PR experts hired precisely to get the coverage a founder can't land on their own? Otherwise, why hire PR at all, if not to turn their announcements into news? The way I see it, the filter for what is or isn't news is the journalist. They're the one judging the pitch from the PR who framed the announcement into a story. So filtering isn't what you hire a PR's expertise for in the first place, which means that hardest part is one you can just let go of.

We're moving our newsletters over to Substack. Signup at: octant.substack.com (we got some pretty exciting news we'll be emailing tomorrow)

Before I'd only seen @Polymarket change rules mid-market before and never after the event happened

Interesting that The Block writes about @Polymarket changing rules after the event and right below this article they advertise Polymarket theblock.co/post/403312/poly…

🏆 Best Crypto Op-Ed @Nikopolos, "Will TheDAO's $220M Security Fund Actually Make Ethereum Safer?" Pointed, principled commentary on governance and security: sergeenkov.com/will-thedao-m…