The EF’s Endless Manifestos ($)

gm Bankless Nation,
The Ethereum Foundation's commitment to ideology and values has undoubtedly served as a novel point of differentiation from more cynical leaders at competing blockchains, but still, sometimes it doesn't feel like the EF is all that great at reading the room...

In today's essay, David Hoffman gives his thoughts on the newly released 'EF Mandate' and what it leaves out of the conversation.

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This week, the Ethereum Foundation released its “EF Mandate.” 

This is yet another public document of Ethereum’s mission, values, and how the EF will steward it – wrapped in flowery language, rainbows, and anime. 

I’m honestly tired of this stuff. 

The time to write a ‘mandate’ of Ethereum’s values, as a guiding document for the direction of Ethereum, was in the 2015-2020 era. And I’m sure there was something like this published back then, too. It seems the main exports of the EF these days are these kinds of mood board documents to remind themselves, and us, what their vibe is. 

I worry that Dankrad's analysis of this document is accurate. This ‘mandate’ from the EF is saying, “Hey, we tried doing the whole ‘maximize Ethereum’s value’ thing, but we’re going back to building cypherpunk stuff only.” 

I’m of the disposition that if you maximize the market value something brings to the world, then that is highly synonymous with maximizing the most good for most people, which is what I’m assuming Vitalik thinks he's doing when he reaffirms Ethereum's trajectory to only support the hardline cypherpunk side of Ethereum. 

In the mandate document, and also restated in Vitalik’s tweet, is the line: “Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world  that is here to have specific properties.”

I got into Ethereum thinking that Ethereum could, indeed, become the backbone for the entire world. Rebuild finance from the ground up. Rebuild the entire internet from the ground up. Provide an inter-generational coordination layer for humanity. 

When I read this document, it seems the EF wants to build Ethereum to be a check on the power of the world's most powerful institutions, not to become a powerful institution in its own right. Of course, the ability to check the power of the largest institutions inherently means Ethereum must be valuable, but there is a difference between “just being large enough to do the job” and “trying to maximize Ethereum’s influence on the world.”

I, and many others, have dedicated my life to doing the latter. It seems the EF wants to do the former. 

Maybe, I, like many others, put too much weight on what the EF says and does. Maybe I was too naively optimistic (a disposition I frequently find in myself) about the EF's ability to pivot into an aggressive BD and growth mindset – to not just get the world onchain, but to get the world on Ethereum. 

Maybe I’m thinking checkers, while Vitalik and the EF are playing 4D chess. It’s true no other ecosystem is building with this mindset, and maybe this is where all the value is. 

But nonetheless, it seems that the success or failure of Ethereum in the marketplace… is being left up to the marketplace. It actually seems that Ethereum is doing decently well – its position in the market actually looks quite good right now. While the headwinds of many other chains are growing stronger, Ethereum’s unique properties are truly shining brighter than they have recently. 

So, sure, maybe there’s a little something to the whole emphasizing values thing. 

But man, in 2026 I just don't want to read yet another document from the EF about how they aren’t going to fight for marketshare and instead are going to focus wholly on cypherpunk ideology that isn't going to do much for Ethereum’s market value. 

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WHAT YOU MISSED

BlackRock's ETHB

📈 The Asset

• BlackRock launches Staked Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHB) on Nasdaq
• Ethereum Foundation shares using DVT-lite to stake 72,000 ETH

🏛️ The Protocol

• Ethereum Core Developers reject SSZ execution blocks and Encrypted Mempool as Hegota headliners
• Ethereum Foundation increases its network bug bounty to $1 million
• EF’s dAI Team & Virtuals introduce ERC-8183, an Agentic Commerce Standard

📱 The Apps

• Aave & CoW Swap swap interface plus solver causes $50M loss from 99% slippage
• Yearn launching ySplitter, letting depositors earn yield in other assets (i.e. earning USDC rewards from ETH)
• LlamaSwap protects users from extreme slippage by disabling trade button
• Lido announces new earn vaults and published Q4 2025 metrics
• Yearn introduces yvUSD, a cross-chain vault for stablecoins
• ENS launched on.eth chain registry
• Etherscan calls out address poisoning
• Across Protocol published token buyout and transition to C-corp proposal
• Mastercard launched Crypto Partner Program
• MetaMask integrated Uniswap Router
• LI.FI introduced the Agentic Commerce API

🤫 The Privacy Stack

• GSR and Zama conducted the first confidential OTC trade on Ethereum
• StarkNet announces STRK20s, a privacy-preserving ERC20 standard

🐸 The Culture

• Vitalik wrote about deep funding, Ethereum as a public bulletin board, and building democratic things
• Synthesis, an ETH-centric online hackathon judged by AI agent judges, kicks off
• The EF published its new mandate, centered around the censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS) vision
• Public Nouns pivot proposal

💽 The Tech

• Base announces Base App builder changes
• Etherscan added support for batch token approval revokes

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WEEKLY ROLLUP

Something Strange Is Happening

Ryan and David break down a week where war hit markets, and the safe-haven playbook broke down: Oil spiked, gold failed, bonds sold off, the dollar caught the flight to safety, and crypto somehow bounced right through it.

Then they unpack Trump’s public pressure campaign against banks over stablecoin yield, Kraken’s historic Fedwire breakthrough, and why crypto is starting to look less like an outsider and more like part of the financial core.

Plus: Anthropic vs. the Pentagon, Erik Voorhees’ private AI push with Venice, fresh Aave governance drama, ZachXBT helping catch the $46M government crypto thief, and The New York Times calling crypto dead right on schedule.

Tune into this week’s Rollup! 👇

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