While everyone else is distracted by AI or crying over bear market spilled milk, we're over here building the war machine that will take the space by storm. With ETH moving to store-of-value posture, the EVM DeFi field is wide open.
Watch and learn about the tech that will win!
Category Labs is now on YouTube 📺
If you missed us at OPEN in Singapore last month, the recordings of our sessions are now live:
Flexible Authentication by @JanCamenisch
MIP-8: Theory, Practice, and Future by @kkuehler
RaptorCast: Practical Challenges of Blockchain Block Propagation by @kaijuneer
The Rise of PropAMMs on Monad by @bhuan_
The Coming Blockchain Data Crisis, and How You’ll Survive It by @oldmangrypto
monad-query: Rethinking the Blockchain Query Layer by @andrthesnek
Watch here: youtube.com/@CategoryLabs
Market access that's there when you need it most.
Fade Monad and lose every time.
Ken retweeted
Ethereum deserves enormous credit for bringing the vision of programmable, decentralized finance into reality.
but the vision was always bigger than one network.
the next chapter is about expanding what decentralized infrastructure can deliver: performance, accessibility, resilience, and the ability to support applications at global scale.
solana and monad represent different approaches to that challenge, with monad carrying forward ethereum compatibility while pushing the boundaries of execution performance.
the most interesting development isn’t one ecosystem replacing another.
It’s the emergence of a broader landscape where different networks contribute to the same fundamental ambition: making open, global, permissionless infrastructure practical for everyone.
Read the full article here: teapawt.org/oldmangrypto/status/21…
Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token".
Three primary reasons:
1. ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed
2. Optimizing for ETH as fee-burning token would demand Ethereum and ETH function in ways that are very hard to make compatible with decentralization and capture resistance.
3. Meanwhile, optimizing for ETH as SoV is aligned with Ethereum focusing on its unique strengths (decentralization and CROPS)
EIP-1559 (including its burn) is fine and good, we should keep them. But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere.
The core idea: the big thing that people appreciate about Ethereum is decentralization and CROPS. The main pragmatic benefit that these things translate into is stability. SoV is the category where that is not an unneeded extra we merely put effort into for ideological reasons, but rather a pragmatic strength from the perspective of people putting in their assets. And in the era of AI disruption, stability will be highly valued.
Ethereum subtly exits the transaction-processing space, becoming "digital silver" to Bitcoin's "digital gold."
Ken retweeted
Let me be blunt. Those who are afraid of AI feel deep down that they are impostors & have no edge. If you have a 1) clear mind, 2) a deep, not just cosmetic, undertanding of your specialty, 3) and/or are original enough to reinvent yourself when needed, AI will be your friend.
People are portraying this as AI related, but if you look at the data for how many employees Microsoft has, it seems more like they waited until now to cut their “COVID bloat”, whereas most tech firms did their massacres in 2024 or 2025.
BREAKING: Microsoft, $MSFT, is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers as part of the company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg.
Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible.
This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce.
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If you anything about consensus, you know this is a big deal.
Dolev-Strong, while not practically useful, is the first big result you learn about in any academic treatment of distributed systems.
And CL research was able to improve on it?
Fade Monad and lose every time.
Dolev–Strong is arguably the best-known consensus protocol, and for roughly 45 years, no deterministic protocol improved on its O(n³) communication.
A new paper by @komasito55, Yuval Efron and Ling Ren improves that bound to O(n² log⁴ n) for Byzantine Broadcast, tolerating t < n faults in O(t) rounds.
After thinking about the problem on and off for years, they started leveraging AI models. The paper is the result of a month of human experts digesting and simplifying the discourse with AI.
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Ken retweeted
Staff engineer in 1937: has 16 patents in electronics field
Staff engineer in 2026: "chat bpp why it no woooork"
