It's 2030 You're a merchant receiving payment from a customer. They pay with USDC on CircleChain but your payment termainl only receives StripeUSD on StripeChain. But once you get StripeUSD, you want to transfer it to your account with Bank of America, so you need to transfer it to BofAUSD on BofAChain. But wait, you go and pay your supplier. The problem is, they custody with JPMorgan. So then you need to get your BofAUSD on BofAChain to JPMorganUSD on JPMorganChain. But JPMorganChain is permissioned, so you need to route it through a special intermediary... and so on Is this the future we're headed toward?

This is the most bullish thing for Ethereum. The recent wave of big fintechs (Stripe, Circle) launching their own L1s isn’t a sign that the L2 thesis is dead. It’s the clearest signal yet that the world is splitting into two camps: Infinite censorship resistance /or/ Zero censorship resistance. And in that split, Ethereum owns one of the poles. People imagine censorship resistance as a sliding scale, where you can park yourself somewhere in the middle and get “just enough” decentralization. But in practice, the middle collapses. The moment a chain can censor at all, it becomes impossible to distinguish between “some censorship” and “total censorship.” Users, regulators, and counterparties treat it as fully centralized. That collapse forces builders to choose. If you need your system to be unstoppable, you choose the infinite censorship-resistant option: Ethereum and its rollups. If you don’t, you might as well go fully permissioned, because the regulatory, operational, and commercial advantages of centralization only pay off when you stop pretending to be decentralized. This is why the middle (Aptos, Sui, Avalanche) will be squeezed to zero. They’ll try to buy relevance with incentives and partnerships, but they’re competing in a no-man’s-land where neither the censorship-resistant camp nor the permissioned camp takes them seriously. History is littered with these failed hybrids — the AOLs of the open internet, the proprietary “almost Unix” systems of the 80s, the closed “sort-of open” software ecosystems that vanished when real open source and fully closed platforms took the market. The bifurcation is already here.

The Lit Protocol ecosystem is growing fast! Meet some projects running on Lit, what’s ahead, and how you can get involved. 👇

Happy 10th birthday, @Ethereum! You're shown the world that a community built on open, programmable infrastructure can reshape markets, redefine governance, and power sovereign digital economies by putting new tools for freedom in everyone’s hands. believe in somETHing

100 years ago, the modern fund was born. 10 years ago, money became programmable. 1 year ago, onchain vaults emerged. Soon, @LitProtocol’s Vincent lets users grant agents and vaults scoped abilities that work everywhere, for every asset.

If you’re in the Bay Area next week for @StanfordCrypto SBC and building agents or vaults, please join us Tuesday the 5th to understand how decentralized programmable ability can work for your product: ? Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Hey @DavidSacks , my one request is that we make it illegal for AI models to offer advertising. And, we need to really examine referral fees as well. The last thing we need is to have algorithms designed to maximize revenue driving LLM output and interactions. They are already recommending brands and we don’t know if they are getting paid for it We need to have learned our lessons from algos in social media. @GovCox @govofco @GovPhilScott @GovStitt @Linda_McMahon