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gm Bankless Nation,
Ethereum is far bigger than programmable money.
The resources we’ve built here are evolving into something that can become the 21st century's most impactful public infrastructure. Civilization's open backend, if you will — private, trustless, and verifiable by default.
Today’s essay from Peaster explores this future we're advancing upon — the rise of Ethereum as the world’s leading digital public works project, through which anyone, anywhere, can manage their lives autonomously. Enjoy.
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Sponsor: Frax — Fraxtal Ecosystem: Where DeFi Meets AI.
Now 10 years old, Ethereum is entering its "civilization infra phase."
The network has become a digital public works project. Like how power grid modernization revolutionized 20th-century life, Ethereum will optimize 21st-century society.
But Ethereum isn't backed by a government, and it's not just for the people of one nation. It's for the world, built by people from around the world. And it's actualizing as The Universal Protocol so that anyone, anywhere, can increasingly do anything on their own terms.
Put metaphorically, Ethereum can be the fortress and the cathedral. Ethereum can get to a point where it's indefinitely impervious to nation-state attacks and beyond, and it can do this hardening while scaling to the point that it can trustlessly facilitate all the world's commerce and culture.
That's the future. And it's not a mystery how to complete this becoming. It'll take making good on visions like Lean Ethereum and lowercase snarks, while living up to the tenets of The Trustless Manifesto.
We'll evolve through lean consensus, and lean data, and lean execution. And this streamlining will come via programmable cryptography, i.e. next-gen cryptographic primitives like zkSNARKs, which allow for provably correct and private computation and point the way to Ethereum's zkVM future.
The potential here cannot be overstated. This power is why Ethereum researcher 
Justin Drake has said Ethereum's SNARKs embrace is "a cryptographic Manhattan Project, one the [Ethereum Foundation] is investing tens of millions into" as it evolves "into a snark-first org."
Better yet, this zk vision won't just make Ethereum cheaper and faster, as it'll also help the L1 offer better privacy through things like private account abstraction, private RPC queries, and proof aggregation protocols for more affordable private transactions.
also:
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 11, 2025
* Kohaku roadmap (wallet-side privacy work, including work on often-less-mentioned areas like reading the state privately with TEE+ORAM and later PIR)
* BAL + ZK-EVM provers (along with other benefits, makes a full node much lighter, letting you query state without giving…
Plus, the underlying cryptographic primitives here are mathematical extensions of the philosophical values written into The Trustless Manifesto (which you, too, can sign). No unverifiable outcomes. No indispensable gatekeepers. Autonomy, security, and verifiability for all.
My read, then? Lo the ascent of the World Computer! The unlimited public good, the universal machine, lean, snarky, trustless, and always on. This dream is a dream worth fighting for, and one upon which an open civilization can stand and thrive. Bully for us, and now let's finish the job.
📈 The Asset
- BlackRock disclosed holding +$200M worth of shares in the BitMine and SharpLink ETH DATs
- BTCS, another Ethereum treasury company, just had its best quarter yet
- SharpLink released its Q3 earnings
- The US Treasury paved the way for crypto ETPs to offer yield via ETH staking
🏛️ The Protocol
- Justin Drake laid out the “lowercase snarks” vision for Ethereum
📱 The Apps
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Aerodrome is merging with Velodrome and expanding to Ethereum- Bracky is preparing thread markets
- ElizaOS migrated its native token to Ethereum
ENS DAO is running an ENS Contract Naming reward pool- Football.fun launched fantasy NFL trading on Base
- JAKE introduced Kondo, a batch swapping tool for cleaning wallets
- J. P. Morgan launched its USD deposit token on Base
- Octant unveiled yield-donating vaults in its V2 protocol
- Polymarket partnered with Yahoo and the UFC
- PoolTogether crossed 100k unique users
- Tokenized gold is surging on Ethereum
- Unchained released a podcast mini app in the
Base App 
Uniswap proposed turning on protocol fees and introduced Continuous Clearing Auctions on Ethereum and Unichain- Zapper is rolling out Farcaster support
🐸 The Culture
- The EF announced its 1st Founders Lab selections
- Devconnect published a map of the Ethereum World’s Fair grounds
- Vitalik introduced and signed “The Trustless Manifesto”
🔏 The Privacy Stack
Aztec* introduced its AZTEC token sale and opened bidding- Nillion, the "blind compute" L1, is migrating to an Ethereum L2
- Vitalik posted a primer on Ethereum’s privacy roadmap
- Paul Brody published “2026: The Golden Year for Ethereum Privacy”
💽 The Tech
- Base notched a new ATH of 16.1M daily transactions
EigenLayer introduced EigenZero, the 1st implementation of the Cryptoeconomic DVN Framework- T1 released the whitepaper for its trustless rollup interop architecture
In this week’s Rollup, Ryan teams up with Dragonfly's Tom Schmidt to make sense of the markets: are we chopping further down or setting up for the next leg?
They also dig into Trump’s “bullish plan,” Coinbase’s 
Monad ICO, Uniswap’s long-awaited fee switch, and JPM’s deposit token on Base—plus the whiplash of “privacy season” with Zcash’s surge contrasted against a harsh sentence for a wallet dev.
Tune in to catch up on all the latest crypto intrigues! 👇
The Fraxtal ecosystem is expanding at lightning speed—this month’s biggest highlight is IQAI.com, the newest Agent Tokenization platform from IQ and Frax. IQ is building autonomous, intelligent, tokenized agents launching on Fraxtal in Q1. Empower on-chain agents with built-in wallets, tokenized ownership, and decentralized governance—all within a fast-growing Fraxtal ecosystem.
