Inspired by Arthur Hayes and because I wanted to try ralphing, I did a drawdown analysis on the October 10 market maker crash. Here's the narrative that we use to implement the trading idea (from Arthur Hayes): "On October 10th many market makers were liquidated in an unexpected sharp draw down. Many of them had been in the process of drawing fake patterns on charts for fake projects. But all of them got liquidated or badly hurt in the Oct 10 flash crash meaning after Oct 10th the market traded without their fake activity. Hence, it is now easier than ever to spot bad projects simply by looking at how they've performed after the flash crash. If a project has a real community and price floor we'd see the price to do decently well. If the project was just kept propped up by market makers we'd see deep drawdowns." So I set up a Hetzner instance, installed Claude and had it ralph on my challenge. Basically I asked it to scan the top 200 Coingecko projects and to list the deepest drawdowns since Oct 10. Below are the results for the best and the worst performers:

I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( https://strawmap.org/ ). In general, a lot of overlap, but: * Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized) * Some things deprioritized (eg. VDFs; many EVM improvements) * Some things replaced with superior constructions (eg. Verkle -> unified BT -> PBT; state expiry -> new state types) What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all. These reflect changing priorities. Notably: * First-class attention to strong privacy. This covers: keyed nonces and recent roots, aspects of FOCIL, lean privacy pool & wormholes * Aggressive scaling in the context of post-quantum. This covers: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, zkzk frames (see https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-828… ) * Lean-ification of the spec, to assist in formal verification (full FV of everything is only possible because of modern AI) * Blob and gas futures (this idea just didn't exist back in 2023) * Native rollups (SNARKs were nowhere near mature enough to even consider this back in 2023) * A more open design space for the "future of the EVM". zkzk frames already implies that the protocol will expose to users some ISA that's not the EVM - current leading candidates are leanISA and RISC-V. These ISAs are more simple, modern and efficient than the EVM. Once they're there, why not expose them to developers everywhere? (And then, why not turn the EVM into being an IR on top of that ISA, instead of an enshrined feature massively complicating the base protocol?) Though much of the deeper exploration here is too early even for the strawmap. * New state types are not just a replacement for expiry, they're a fundamentally different paradigm to how Ethereum does scaling A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale ALL ethereum activity, we try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols). The other common theme is treating STARKs and AI-accelerated FV as first-class objects, that we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on. There are recursive STARKs in many layers of the protocol, one particular primitive (the "aggregate to union verified dependencies" primitive) is expected to be used in *three* places in the protocol: EL, CL and DL. This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools. In general, many steps forward in maturity. And a huge amount of hard work by many dozens of Ethereum researchers and developers on all of these features. Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.

In these five years, the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity, in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals: 1. Deliver on an aggressive roadmap that ensures Ethereum's status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness, sustainability and decentralization. 2. Ensures the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term, and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as users' ability to access and use the chain with self-sovereignty, security and privacy. To this end, my own share of the austerity is that I am personally taking on responsibilities that might in another time have been "special projects" of the EF. Specifically, we are seeking the existence of an open-source, secure and verifiable full stack of software and hardware that can protect both our personal lives and our public environments ( see https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/09… ). This includes applications such as finance, communication and governance, blockchains, operating systems, secure hardware, biotech (including both personal and public health), and more. If you have seen the Vensa announcement (seeking to make open silicon a commercially viable reality at least for security-critical applications), the https://www.ucritter.com/ including recent versions with built in ZK + FHE + differential-privacy features, the air quality work, my donations to encrypted messaging apps, my own enthusiasm and use for privacy-preserving, walkaway-test-friendly and local-first software (including operating systems), then you know the general spirit of what I am planning to support. For this reason I have just withdrawn 16,384 ETH, which will be deployed toward these goals over the next few years. I am also exploring secure decentralized staking options that will allow even more capital from staking rewards to be put toward these goals in the long term. Ethereum itself is an indispensable part of the "full-stack openness and verifiability" vision. The Ethereum Foundation will continue with a steadfast focus on developing Ethereum, with that goal in mind. "Ethereum everywhere" is nice, but the primary priority is "Ethereum for people who need it". Not corposlop, but self-sovereignty, and the baseline infrastructure that enables cooperation without domination. In a world where many people's default mindset is that we need to race to become a big strong bully, because otherwise the existing big strong bullies will eat you first, this is the needed alternative. It will involve much more than technology to succeed, but the technical layer is something which is in our control to make happen. The tools to ensure your, and your community's, autonomy and safety, as a basic right that belongs to everyone. Open not in a bullshit "open means everyone has the right to buy it from us and use our API for $200/month" way, but actually open, and secure and verifiable so that you know that your technology is working for you.

The kind people at @eth_limo have warned me that there has been an attack on their DNS registrar. So please do not visit vitalik.eth.limo or other eth.limo pages until they confirm that things are back to normal. You can check my blog via IPFS directly here: https://bafybeiaql2jo3fu5b7c4lmpoi5drh5s…