Peanut Butter, Pickles and Horseradish Harmony: GM Farcaster ep366

The first round of Clanker Ecosystem Fund grants will be announced on Thursday so we wanted to share some thoughts on how we as the stewards are thinking about this. Below see our guiding principles and information about the different categories of grants 🧵 Mission: The mission of the CEF is to distribute protocol fees to creators and communities who positively contribute to the Clanker and Farcaster ecosystem. Philosophy & Guiding Principles: 1) The Clanker Ecosystem Fund (CEF) exists to strengthen the Clanker and Farcaster ecosystem by supporting the people and projects that make it better. 2) Mission first. Be rigid about the mission and flexible about everything else. Processes and frameworks will evolve over time. The guiding question is simple: does this meaningfully improve Clanker and/or Farcaster? 3) Human judgment over strict systems. The CEF is opinionated and human-directed. While algorithmic or KPI-based approaches can be useful, early ecosystems are too nuanced for purely formulaic allocation which can be easily gamed. Many of the most valuable contributions (culture, community, creativity) are difficult to quantify. Broad eligibility, selective allocation. Anyone contributing meaningfully to the ecosystem may be considered, including builders, creators, and community leaders. Not all contributions will be funded. Allocation decisions are inherently subjective and based on impact, alignment, and quality. 4) Grants are a supplement, not a business model. CEF distributions are not intended to replace sustainable revenue. They are best used for recognition, bridging support, or covering costs for valuable work, not as long-term funding for teams. 5) Default toward self-sustainability. The strongest projects in the ecosystem generate their own revenue. Clanker and crypto-native primitives make this more achievable than on traditional platforms. As a rule of thumb: it is better to earn your own fees than receive grants - you keep 100%. 6) Reinforce the right behaviors. The fund should reward meaningful, original, and positive-sum contributions. We aim to support people building real value and avoid incentivizing short-term or extractive behavior.

My full uci allocation to the first person who can guess who he’s talking to on his banana phone. 📞 🍌 We had a slide show at my son’s graduation party and this is one of my fave pix.

Gm all, Just wanted to be transparent instead of just letting time pass by. As we shared over the past updates, @indexy has been in maintenance mode, we had to sunset operationally expensive features and reduce the team to the minimum. This was the only way to keep analytics and index creation running for those that find it useful. Crypto, blockchains, and the ecosystems that made indexy successful (Base, Farcaster) are going through changes and their own challenges. We used all the resources, but more importantly, we do not see a path forward in the short term. Appreciate all of you that have reached out, those that love the product and those that offered feedback and support over the past year. As always happy to chat, feel free to send me a DM on fc or x

It is time to reveal the next chapter for $Fight ! Welcome to Fight Night: Zombies! 🧟‍♂️ Fight your way trough hordes of Zombies both solo or in co-op with friends! But that's not all! 👉 Convert your in game score directly into $Fight tokens, but beware, picking up weapons to defend yourself from the hordes requires you to burn those well earned tokens directly onchain! Zombies v1 is available now on Fight Night! https://fightnight.world

chillin with the fam today

29 Seconds of Farcaster ... What did you miss this weekend? * Vini App announced a $500 prize for the best mini app built on vini app during Farcaster Batches next week. s/o @nikolaii.eth & @1dolinski https://farcaster.xyz/viniapp/0xf2856418 ... Farcaster batches is the brain child of @jubjub and is a week-long builder spaces (next week June 1-5) pairing up with /gmfarcaster for @adrienne & @nounishprof to host * The Kismet crowd is bringing art back to the timeline (this is the artist group that got rolling at Farcon Rome)...last night they hosted a Farcaster Space for folks who are interested and released this mini app and collection: Link in first comment ⬇️ (because Farcaster is acting wonky with embeds this morning) * @pichi is bringing back Farcaster Union tonight at 9 PM EST! Link in first comment ⬇️ (because Farcaster is acting wonky with embeds this morning) * On the building front, @kevang30.eth jumped into the mini app scene with this cast translating mini app he built with vini app Link in first comment ⬇️ (because Farcaster is acting wonky with embeds this morning) * /gmfarcaster is off today for the Memorial Day holiday in the US, but back tomorrow, so put that on your calendar to catch up on all the FC news and fun 💜

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

Farcaster Batches is coming! #events add VINI Batches Build June 1 - 5

To whom it may concern: peanut butter and pickles (+horseradish)

Clanker Ecosystem Fund was first 😤 @nounishprof @adrienne wen?

Wait, what can snaps do now? A small teaser... Release notes coming soon

we did it everybody. hypersnap node is live 🙌🏿

thanks to everyone who has been joining/hosting Spaces and giving feedback! the vibes have been immaculate and we have kept the devs busy. high priorities on the fix list: -chat input staying put and being easier to follow -variety of audio glitches (when joining/leaving, as a speaker) -silent mode on mobile not having audio -keeping audio alive when you background the space -like 45 more small things we've rolled this out to Farcaster Pro users to start. if you have Pro you can join, start, and schedule from the Spaces section in the left sidebar. rolling out to everyone in the near future! (android pro users, hang tight, it might not be rolled out to you yet because we are deep in a fix for android performance issues.) hear you later!

Prominent Ethereum Dev Proposes $1 Billion ETH Organization With Leader Who 'Wants to Fight' Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist appeared to take pointed shots Thursday at ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

positive & negative perspectives on @qrcoindotfun negative: @qrcoindotfun is in the midst of its worst month in more than a year. Not going to sugarcoat it. Through 441 daily auctions, the average winning bid has been $500. This past month, it has been just over $100. Not great. We're also seeing less attention driven to the daily winner. Around 2,000-3,000 uniques daily vs. 5,000-10,000+ as we had seen previously. Also not great. positive: @qrcoindotfun is still alive. There is an auction every day. There has been for 441 straight days. The most popular daily auction in the history of crypto effectively died during this time. Many of the most popular projects and protocols in crypto have died during this time. Some people think crypto is dead now. But at least one person is still willing to pay every day to control the QR coin. Because the winner of every auction actually gets something of tangible value. Crypto-native attention driven to any link they'd like, for a full day. So people are still using it to promote their tweets, apps, tokens, etc. There's always someone on the internet looking to drive attention to something. Fortunately for them, the onchain attention machine is still working. also positive: @qrcoindotfun can stay alive. We spent a good amount of time and money in recent months to save time and money on a recurring basis moving forward. What does that mean? Automation & cost-cutting. These counter the things that kill businesses, which are recurring time requirements and recurring expenses. QR's are now trivial. With $100 of daily revenue from the daily auction, it pays for its continued existence 2-3x over. $33 bids are breakeven. So as long as the QR continues to drive what the market deems to be worth more than $33 worth of attention on a given day, the onchain attention machine can continue to pay for its own persistence. Worth noting, we have only had 4 auctions go for less than $33 in QR's 441 auction history. And all 4 of those auctions were within the first 30 days of its existence, when it was more of a meme than a genuine attention machine. That was early April 2025. It's May 2026 now. QR is not as big as I would have liked it to be, but it is still alive with the ability to survive a lot longer than I expected it would the day I launched it, just being pragmatic about the probabilities. The half life of most crypto projects is measured in days or weeks. We are now at 1.2 years. That feels like forever considering how fast crypto moves. What a story it would be if it worked out in the end.

We apologize for the recent outage—for context, both our indexer and backup indexers were impacted by the Railway issue. Your progress is stored onchain, so we’ve re-indexed and farms should now be up to date. As a thank you for bearing with us, we’re gifting everyone a free 600 gem pack in the Gems tab 🙌 You’ll just need a small amount of gas to claim ❤️

Got targeted by a scammer / hacker today, some context and how to spot those suckers, had claude generate a nice infographic on what happened and how we spotted it (so you can do this too). More context 👇