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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.”
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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...
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📈 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
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! 👇
