Vibecoding Ethereum's Roadmap

gm Bankless Nation,
The capabilities of AI agents and vibe coding have hit a tipping point in 2026, but... are we ready to let AI take over Ethereum development?

In today's essay, David talks through the brain-breaking promise and the existential questions that AI coding advances have prompted inside Ethereum's dev community.

Thanks for being a free subscriber [But you should upgrade here!]
luma 🫡

Sponsor: Mercuryo — Infrastructure powering the crypto economy.

A developer by the name of YQ just finished the rest of the Ethereum roadmap and shipped it as a client. I guess we’re done here! The 5+ year long roadmap, completed in just a few weeks thanks to AI! 😄

“Two weeks ago I made a bet with @VitalikButerin that one person could agentic-code an @ethereum client targeting the 2030+ roadmap. 

So I built ETH2030.

702K lines of Go. 65 roadmap items. Syncs with mainnet.”

Obviously, this will not be going into production, and is really just a Proof of Concept rather than a full production client, but the PoC really shows that we need to update what we think about the Ethereum roadmap timelines, and the steps it takes to get there. 

Vitalik responded to YQ's effort, saying it was "quite an impressive experiment" while flagging the obvious caveat - that something built in two weeks without finalized EIPs "almost certainly" contains critical bugs and incomplete implementations.

But the core point is about trajectory...

FRIEND & SPONSOR: MERCURYO

If you're building in crypto, your users need a way in — and a way out. Mercuryo's on- and off-ramp infrastructure is trusted by leading wallets and platforms to move money fiat to crypto and back in seconds. White-label ready, globally licensed, and built for scale.

See how Mercuryo can power your product →

.  .  .

WHAT YOU MISSED

Aave Drama

📈 The Asset

• ETH ETFs saw $168M in inflows on Tuesday 
• Bitwise donated $100k to Protocol Guild + PBS Foundation, its 2nd annual contribution from ETHW ETF profits
• Bitmine acquired another ~51,000 ETH, pushing total holdings to 4.47M

🏛️ The Protocol

• Vitalik made the case for switching to a binary tree + a new VM and broke down Ethereum’s block building pipeline roadmap

📱 The Apps

• Aave Chan Initiative is leaving Aave DAO
• Uniswap's latest class-action was dismissed (the court ruled protocol devs can't be held liable for third-party fraud)
• Gitcoin is eyeing a revamp of Gitcoin Grants
• Gnosis Pay crossed $150M in transaction volume
• Lido completed the rollout of its new V3 infra
• SuperRare launched Liquid Editions, a new generative ERC-20 artwork format

🤫 The Privacy Stack

• Aztec Network announced that its Alpha Upgrade is ready
• Privacy Pools rolled out self-reporting for compromised addresses

🐸 The Culture

• Vitalik: “What are the most valuable things to build” and “Ethereum is for sanctuary technologies”

💽 The Tech

• Andreas Bigger unveiled Edge, a new flexible programming language for the EVM
• OtterSec found a Fiat-Shamir bug in six different zkVMs
• ENS introduced ENSIP-25, which can link AI agents to ENS names via a verifiable text record

.  .  .

WEEKLY ROLLUP

War Hits the Markets

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! 👇

Watch on YouTube