How I View Creator Tokens Over the past decade, we've seen people experimenting with content incentives in the cryptocurrency space, from early platforms like Bihu and Steemit, to BitClout in 2021, Zora, and tipping features on decentralized social platforms. So far, I don't think we've achieved much success, which I believe is because the problem itself is very complex. First, I want to talk about my perspective on the problem. A key difference between incentivizing creators in the 2000s and now is that the main problem in the 2000s was a lack of content. In the 2020s, content is abundant; AI can generate a complete metaverse for just $10. The problem is content quality. Therefore, your goal isn't *incentivizing content creation*, but *promoting high-quality content*. Personally, I think the most successful example of creator incentives we've seen so far is Substack. To understand why, look at the top ten authors: Now, you might disagree with many of these authors. But I have no doubt that: 1. They are generally of high quality and make positive contributions to the discussion. 2. Without Substack's platform, most of them probably wouldn't have achieved such high visibility. Therefore, Substack is truly discovering high-quality and diverse content. Now, we can compare it to creator token projects. I don't want to criticize any single project because I think there's a certain failure pattern in the entire category. For example: Zora Top Creator Token: BitClout: Basically, the top ten authors already have high social status; they tend to be impressive, but the main reason isn't their content. Substack's core is a simple subscription service: you pay N dollars per month to read an author's articles. But the key to Substack's success is that they didn't just build this mechanism and leave it at that. Their launch process was very pragmatic, deliberately bringing in high-quality content creators to the platform. This was based on their unique vision of cultivating a high-quality knowledge environment, including providing income guarantees for specific members. Now, let's look at an idea I think is viable (of course, coming up with new ideas is inherently more speculative and prone to error than criticizing existing ones). Create a non-tokenized decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It could be inspired by Protocol Guild: It has N members who can (anonymously) vote on the addition and removal of new members. If N exceeds approximately 200, consider automatic splitting. Importantly, don't try to make the DAO universal, or even try to cover the entire industry. Instead, embrace strong viewpoints. Embrace a dominant content type (long-form writing, music, short videos, long videos, novels, educational content, etc.) and a dominant style (e.g., country or region of origin, political viewpoint, or, in the cryptocurrency space, which projects you most support, etc.). Carefully select initial members to maximize their alignment with the intended style. The goal is to build a community larger than a single creator, capable of building a public brand and collectively negotiating revenue opportunities, yet small enough for manageable internal governance. Now, tokens come in handy. In summary, my assumption for the next decade is that most effective governance mechanisms will take the form of "a large number of people and bots participating in prediction markets, while the output oracles are composed of a diverse group of optimized individuals capable of aligning with objectives and resisting information snatching." In this scenario, our approach is as follows: anyone can become a creator and create creator tokens. Then, if they are accepted into a creator DAO, a portion of their earnings from the DAO will be used to burn their creator tokens. This way, token speculators are not participating in a recursive speculative attention game that relies solely on themselves. Instead, they are actually predicting which new creators a high-value creator DAO will be willing to accept. Simultaneously, they provide a valuable service to the creator DAO: they help the DAO discover potential creators for it to choose from. Therefore, ultimately, it is not speculators who rise and fall, but high-value content creators (we assume that excellent creators also possess good quality judgment) who determine who rises and falls.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating education, research, and decision-making on a massive scale. At the World Laureates Summit, Dr. Dong Kaichen highlighted how AI tools are transforming how the next generation accesses and interprets information, while Stuart Haber reflected on the limitations of technology in answering deeper questions about truth. As AI becomes a cross-disciplinary source of information, whom should we trust? Join the discussion. 🗓️ February 1-3, 2026 Dubai, UAE

$SEI {future}(SEIUSDT) Strategy: Go long on the upgrade using 20x leverage momentum; target volume high. Sei (SEI): High-speed L1 for trading. Related Events: $10B DEX volume milestone and SeiDB upgrade.

TheDAO is back with a vengeance! The future looks bright! Ten years later, we begin a new chapter. TheDAO Security Fund: Launching over 75,000 ETH to enhance Ethereum's security.

This morning I needed to check the signing address of my multi-signature wallet. I was using my phone, which didn't have the Safe app installed. I realized I could look up my address directly on Etherscan and then use the "Read Contract" function to get the information I needed. This kind of additional user experience advantage is possible if your wallet or app is open source and has passed security testing. Providing users with alternatives can often be very helpful in unexpected situations, more common than the Safe website simply "crashing." (Of course, this workflow will eventually have to be broken due to privacy concerns. One way to achieve an equivalent, privacy-focused workflow is for users to save a "view key," an extended version of their address containing additional private information. Block explorers could support this by placing the private information in the hash tag portion of the URL, keeping it on the client side. However, the downside of this approach is that it risks encouraging users to paste any type of secret information into URLs or web pages; ultimately, we still need to be able to perform more operations directly through the wallet.)

Blockchain scalability hierarchy: Computation > Data > State Computation is easier to scale than data. You can parallelize computation, request various "hints" from block builders, or directly replace any amount of computational data with proofs. Data lies in between. If data availability is required, then it must be guaranteed; there is no other way. However, you can split it and use erasure coding, like in PeerDAS. You can achieve graceful degradation: if a node's data capacity is only one-tenth that of other nodes, it can always generate blocks one-tenth the size of the other nodes. State is the most difficult to scale. To ensure that even a single transaction can be verified, you need the complete state. If you replace the state with a tree and retain the root node, then you need the complete state to update the root node. While there are ways to split the state, this involves architectural changes and is not a universal approach. Therefore, if it is possible to replace state with data (without introducing a new form of centralization), this approach should be seriously considered by default. Similarly, if it is possible to replace data with computation (without introducing a new form of centralization), this approach should also be seriously considered by default.

In 2026, we will regain lost ground in the realm of computational autonomy. But this extends far beyond the blockchain space. In 2025, I made two major changes to the software I used: * Almost a complete switch to (open-source, cryptographic, decentralized documentation) * Decisively making Signal my primary instant messaging tool (no longer using Telegram). I also installed Simplex and Session. This year, I've made the following changes: * Google Maps -> OpenStreetMap. OrganicMaps is the best mobile app I've ever seen. It's not only open-source but also privacy-preserving because it's localized, which is important because reducing the number of apps/locations/people that know your actual location is beneficial. * Gmail -> Protonmail (although ultimately, the best approach is to use a truly cryptographic instant messaging tool directly). * Prioritizing decentralized social media (see my previous post). While continuing to explore local LLM setups. This is where significant improvement is still needed in the "last mile" domain: while there are many excellent native models, including CPU-based and even mobile-enabled models, their integration is not high. For example, there isn't yet a user interface as user-friendly as Google Translate that seamlessly integrates with native language learning (LLM) models, supporting transcription/audio input, personal document search, and more. Comfyui is great, but we need a Photoshop-like user experience (I know people will recommend GitHub repositories in the replies, but the key is "various GitHub repositories," not a one-stop solution). Also, I don't want Ollama running continuously, as that would consume 35 watts of my laptop's battery. So, we still have a long way to go, but we've made tremendous progress—a year ago, most native models didn't even exist! Ideally, we would leverage native LLMs as much as possible, using dedicated fine-tuned models to compensate for the limited number of parameters, and then, for high-usage scenarios, we could combine the following two approaches: (i) pay-per-query zero-knowledge proofs, and (ii) TEEs. (iii) Local query filtering (e.g., allowing smaller models to automatically remove sensitive information before pushing documents to larger models) essentially combines all imperfect measures as a best-effort approach, although ideally, we should ultimately find a highly efficient fully homomorphic encryption method. Sending all data to a centralized third-party service is unnecessary. We have the capability to significantly reduce this effort. We should continue to build and improve upon this.

I'm now more supportive of native Rollups than before. A major reason I previously opposed them was that native Rollup pre-compiled versions require either "Zero-Knowledge Mode" or "Optimistic Mode," and ZK-EVM wasn't mature enough to support ZK mode. Therefore, if we gave L2 servers two options: "Withdrawals take 2-7 days but require sufficient proof of trust from Ethereum" and "Instant withdrawals but require self-provided proof," they would almost certainly choose the former. This is very detrimental to Ethereum's composability, and we'll see more multi-signature bridges adopted, etc. But now it seems that the timeline for Ethereum to fully adapt to L1 server zero-knowledge mode, and the realistic timeline for adding native Rollup pre-compiled versions, actually aligns. So, the problem is solved. Furthermore, I'm seeing more and more work using synchronous composability as a core value proposition of "Why do L2 testing?" (I previously suggested combining Rollup-based testing with the low latency of L2 pre-configuration). Therefore, this feels like the right direction. I believe we should be proactive and invest more effort in exploring the right approach to pre-compilation. A key feature I'd like to see is that if you create an EVM + some new features Rollup, you should be able to use EVM's native Rollup pre-compilation capabilities and introduce your own validator that runs only for your new features. Perhaps a lookup table could be used to connect the two in a standardized way.

A crucial and long-underestimated aspect of "trustlessness," "passing the abstention test," and "autonomy" is the simplicity of the protocol. Even if a protocol has hundreds of thousands of nodes, is highly decentralized, possesses 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and all nodes are fully verified using quantum-safe Peerda and Stark algorithms, if the protocol is a bloated system comprised of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five PhD-level cryptographic techniques, it will ultimately fail the following three tests: * It is not trustless, because you must trust a small group of "senior experts" to tell you the properties of the protocol. * It fails the "leaving test," because if the existing client team leaves, it will be difficult for a new team to achieve the same level of quality. * It is not autonomous, because even the most skilled technicians cannot inspect and understand it; it does not truly belong to you. Furthermore, its security is lower, because every part of the protocol, especially those that can interact with other parts in complex ways, is at risk of protocol collapse. One concern I have about Ethereum protocol development is that we might be too eager to add new features to meet specific needs, even if these features bloat the protocol or introduce entirely new interactive components or complex cryptographic techniques as key dependencies. This might provide short-term functional improvements, but it would severely damage the protocol's long-term autonomy and the construction of a decentralized superstructure that transcends the rise and fall of empires and ideological shifts, lasting for centuries. The core issue is that if protocol changes are measured by "how much they modify the existing protocol," then to maintain backward compatibility, far more features will be added than removed, and the protocol will inevitably become bloated over time. To address this… Ethereum's development process needs a clear "simplification"/"garbage collection" mechanism. "Simplification" includes three metrics: * Minimize the number of lines of code in the protocol. An ideal protocol should be contained within one page, or at least a few pages. * Avoid unnecessary dependencies on overly complex underlying technical components. For example, a protocol whose security relies entirely on hashing (or even better: only one hash function) is better than one that relies on both hashing and lattices. Introducing homology is the worst approach because (sorry to the truly talented and hardworking geeks who figured it out) nobody understands it. * Add more _invariants_: Core properties that the protocol can rely on, such as EIP-6780 (self-destruct removal), which adds properties that can be modified up to N storage slots, each of which can be modified up to N times, significantly simplifying client development; EIP-7825 (gas cap per transaction) increases the cap on the cost of processing a single transaction, greatly aiding Zero-Knowledge Proof Virtual Machine (ZK-EVM) and parallel execution. Garbage collection can be piecemeal or large-scale. A piecemeal approach attempts to simplify existing functionality, making it simpler and more reasonable. For example, Glamsterdam's gas cost reform changed many previously arbitrary gas costs to depend on a few parameters explicitly related to resource consumption. A large-scale garbage collection replaces PoW with PoS. Another large-scale garbage collection is likely to occur within the Lean consensus, allowing for the simultaneous fixing of numerous bugs. Another approach is "Rosetta-style backward compatibility," where complex but infrequently used features remain available but are "downgraded" from the mandatory protocol and incorporated into smart contract code, thus sparing new client developers the trouble of handling them. For example: * After upgrading to a fully native account abstraction, all old transaction types can be deprecated, and EOA can be converted into a smart contract wallet whose code can handle all these transaction types. * We can replace existing pre-compiled versions with EVM or newer RISC-V code (except for those *truly* needed). * We can eventually change the virtual machine from EVM to RISC-V (or another simpler virtual machine); EVM can be converted into smart contracts within the new virtual machine. Finally, we hope that client developers will no longer need to handle all older versions of the Ethereum protocol. This can be left to older client versions running in Docker containers. In the long term, I hope the pace of Ethereum's evolution will slow down. I believe this *must* happen for various reasons. These first fifteen years should be viewed, to some extent, as a growth phase. We explored many ideas and learned which worked, which were useful, and which were not. We should strive to avoid those useless parts becoming a permanent drag on the Ethereum protocol. In conclusion...

Surprisingly and frustratingly, very few people truly uphold pluralistic/classical liberalism, especially among the highly educated elite. They may emotionally agree with certain viewpoints, but they easily succumb to making demands, such as banning/restricting things that don't concern them, justifying it with some arbitrary higher principle or double standards. Once the situation reverses and they gain power, they exhibit the same primitive behavior as those they once accused of wrongdoing. Identity politics is evil until your identity ultimately triumphs. Discrimination based on political ideology is evil until your ideology gains power. Freedom of speech is good until it is abused by outgroups. Academic fraud is bad unless it benefits me and somehow promotes what I like. Trade is good unless people are trading what I don't like. The voices of the illiberal are also louder: those who think, "I'm disgusted by this, but it's not something I should ban," don't write commentaries, don't launch campaigns, and don't gain widespread attention. Principled tolerance is inherently quiet, and I can't help but wonder what changes we need to make to ensure that principled adherence to norms and the maximization of freedom are more strongly rewarded by institutions and society. It's also quite ridiculous that for some, democracy simply means majority rule. They point to a large group wanting to do something, and that's enough to prove it's "democratic." If a group can suppress any diversity, dissent, and difference simply because it's large, it's an absurd and terrifying system. The tyranny of the majority should still instill fear in you, and your political principles should not be easily changed when convenient.