im in a group chat with a bunch of solana engineers and this is how they’re talking about alpenglow

Alpenglow is officially running on testnet ⛰️ The handoff completed at slot 444625255: Alpenglow genesis block formed and TowerBFT is retired.  Testnet now finalizes with Votor and votes have entirely moved off-chain. Devnet is next. Mainnet-beta after our observation period.

nouveau riche

Nakaflow now puts @Solana's Nakamoto Coefficient at 6. Not because the network changed, but because we changed how we count. Most trackers report ~18 by counting validators. Grouping them by the operator actually running them, building on @andreivacariu_'s research, gives 6 operators holding more than a third of stake. More NC data for proof-of-stake blockchains 👉 nakaflow.io

Aave V4 myths “Aave V4 doesn't isolated markets.” No. Aave V4 hubs and spokes are isolated by default based on their risk profiles. Risk-adjusted markets can share liquidity through hubs, up to defined caps, supporting new use cases without unnecessarily fragmenting liquidity. Full liquidity isolation is often counterproductive: it fragments capital, reduces utilization, and increases costs for users. These trade-offs become even more visible when incentives used to bootstrap isolated liquidity eventually run out. “Hub-and-spoke fragments liquidity.” It’s the opposite. In V4, spokes represent lending markets, while hubs can share liquidity across those markets. This allows isolated risk profiles to access pooled liquidity, improving utilization and capital efficiency. “It’s just isolated markets. Aave is catching up with curated vaults.” A curated vault typically launches with zero liquidity and requires capital or incentives to bootstrap. A V4 spoke can launch with the entire hub balance sheet behind it from day one. That’s the difference between an isolated market and an isolated risk profile with access to pooled liquidity. “V4 is complex.” The architecture is simpler while remaining flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases. The overall codebase is also significantly smaller than Aave V3. “V4 is still a new deployment. It’s too early to use.” V4 is already securing $1.2B in deposits and is deployed across multiple networks, including Ethereum, Avalanche, and Arc. V4 is already scaling. “V4 is less open to curators.” V4 already supports third-party curators such as EtherFi, with more to come. The key difference is that curators can build and manage an entire market structure, rather than simply manage deposits inside a vault. This gives them the opportunity to participate in the economics of the broader lending market instead of being limited to fees on deposit AUM. Over time, curators and integrators should be able to own more of their market structure and retain more of the economics they create.

Alpenglow is coming to testnet this week. 🧵 Testnet exercises the exact migration devnet and mainnet-beta will run. The Alpenglow community cluster rehearsed the migration numerous times and has been running Alpenglow for over 4 months.  Now Alpenglow moves to the formal activation path.

Damn, MiMo just leapfrogged the pareto frontier--beats Grok 4.7, GLM 5.3, and Kimi K3, all while being cheaper than Luna. Truly insane value on this model. Wow. The Chinese Labs are keeping the frontier honest.

Give credit when credit is due: - Gets the trenches from user pov - Embraces trenchers - Embraces Ethereum - Catalyzes the biggest crypto breakthrough since prediction markets gg 🫡

Vast majority of technology improvements will be meaningless to the median American that consumes $80+ per day. I can’t even give a cell phone away to the median American consumer. Median global consumption rate is $8 per day. Literally a 10x difference. So cutting the cost of a financial transfer from $0.25 to $0.0025 per use is only going to have impact for the bottom 4 billion people. Not the top 350 million.

It’s “trump is a grifter” (true) or “the Democrats are communists” (true) but never “maybe a third additional reason clarity failed is because crypto has done virtually nothing for the lives of the median American, the notion that this is a grassroots movement is entirely fabricated, at least greatly exaggerated, evidenced by last election cycle’s biggest donor class being able to get their people elected with money but when it came time to vote on a comparatively tame piece of legislation there was just no demand, no outraged constituents begging to tokenize helocs, no wine aunts demanding to speak with their rep about how perps should be classified, that’s just not a real person that exists in our society, we have Venmo and we have many ways to gamble already. It’s mainly just suits versus suits and whatever outcome, most people will be just fine, moisturized, in their lane etc etc. Americans do call their senators about data centers and abortion but they just don’t call their senators about crypto because it’s not very important one way or another, this is not even occupy Wall Street, flip a coin, they don’t really care and so senators decided the cost of voting for something people are apathetic about was greater than the cost of voting against something people are apathetic about. Almost no introspection on this

Glamsterdam is pushing hard on L1 capacity, and for Hegotá we think the next major focus should be latency. Quick slots gives us a way to start doing that progressively, by reducing slot times as the network demonstrates it can support them while preserving decentralisation. Our priorities are: 1. A focused upgrade that makes Ethereum faster and better to use. 2. Well-defined, concrete work towards major future improvements. 3. Removing unnecessary protocol complexity wherever we can.

Security researchers, get ready! The Glamsterdam upgrade is approaching. The Ethereum Foundation’s bug bounty program will begin accepting reports for Glamsterdam bugs once the Sepolia upgrade blog post is published. And take note of the reward multipliers! ethereum.org/bug-bounty/#gla…

Be aware if you get a DM from @1_RenTs claiming to be from Liquid Capital. I believe this is a scam operation. Here is how they tried to run it. 1/ Ren reached out about a potential collaboration with their “fund.” Red flag #1: he refused to send a calendar invite, saying he would share a meeting link 15 minutes before the call. I asked to use Google Meet instead. He agreed. 2/ Red flag #2: 15 minutes before the call, Ren opened a Telegram group chat and sent a Tencent Meeting link, saying his “teammates” were in China and could not use Google Meet. 3/ Red flag #3: there were seven people in the Telegram group for an introductory call. The setup is designed to pressure you into joining because “everyone is waiting.” 4/ How I checked further: I asked one of the supposed partners whether this X profile was theirs. It looked legitimate at first glance, but there were no mutual follows. 5/ Two simple checks can uncover impersonated accounts: • Check whether the account has changed its username recently. • Scroll to its oldest posts. The profile may look normal at first, but the historical posts shows he spoke Arabic in 2021. Stay safe everyone.

Tagging @Liquid_Capital_ for your attention And @HorinekPM.@0xtoki_, @zhengjielimm, @zhengjielimm, @robplust, @ario_57_, @Scott_eth, @Uptodatenow be aware of this account.

@dsrvlabs have been running distributed validators since our very first public test network four years ago. It’s a great pleasure to have them now adopting distributed validators for a significant percent of their Lido curated set stake. This deployment will allow them to run up to 40 0x02 distributed validators as part of Lido’s ongoing consolidation transition.

Good article. The forest has gotten a lot darker this year. Apologies for the long tweet but I have a lot of thoughts as we've seen these trends grow. 1. These services claim no front-running but enforcement is spotty and retroactive. We saw persistent sandwhiching instances from them on popular retail apps that were not corrected until outside intervention. 2. SOL's investment pitch is REV. With these and similar deals, REV capture is structurally declining. The value still exists but it's captured in opaque side deals. Our community should probably rethink REV as a KPI if we accept these as inevitable. It is going down only as these arrangements proliferate. 3. Stakers get screwed. Opaque yield is captured by validator operators or sophisticated institutional stakers that shop their stake to the highest bidder. Average staker doesn't have knowledge or access to this. This further reduces incentive to own SOL. 4. This disadvantages less sophisticated validators and centralizes stake. Each validator builds their own prop trading operation to internalize the profit. Only a handful have enough scale to do it right and capture maximum value. Jito was founded to bring structure to the dark world of Solana MEV capture. The system is transparent, identical for everyone, whether big or small validator, and stakers of any size. The mechanism includes strong protections to prevent info leakage and front-running. In some cases, this structure means slightly less yield. BAM was introduced a year ago as the next generation of block building. It has ~35% of network stake. BAM's design prevents most side deals. It was designed to put the network's user first - that rigidity is actually our biggest blocker from a validator onboarding perspective. Many operators want flexibility for side income they can keep for themselves, despite the impact on our network's lifeblood: users. MCP solves some of these concerns but makes others worse. Regardless, the train has left the station and MCP isn't going to fix it soon. I appreciate Andrei surfacing some of these items. We as a community should make proactive decisions about how we want the network to operate and what our ultimate values our. The status quo is letting it quietly change under the surface: centralized stake, disadvantaged retail stakers, little REV and worse user execution. The window for real discussion is now, otherwise the momentum will be irreversible.

man everytime i check base or tempo's docs, there is some new precompile or tx customization/improvement cooking the growth in complexity of tokens and transactions over the next few years is underestimated by most teams

Looking forward to attending and sharing this talk at Ethereum Korea!

i recognize where this is coming from, and like the motivation for bipartisan gov action, but this is not the way safe development, adoption and societal transition to ASI should be the goal rather than banning it

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.