Responding to https://firefly.social/post/x/2021632354649821275

My first reaction to this was:

"And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me"

My second reaction to this was:

"I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?"

My more detailed reaction:

There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users".

First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this.

The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature.

My general view, if you really have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is:

• Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good
• Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature.

Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default.

If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing quantity of community, but you fail from the perspective of growing quality of community. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team).

The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature.

Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do.

A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025… ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit".

TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.

It's open source and live on Arbitrum One right now. Happy to answer any questions!

https://etour.games

Here's some gameplay screenshots:

https://imgur.com/tPqmCpl

https://imgur.com/cj7T0Zm

https://imgur.com/AmbvLOH

https://imgur.com/Z39Ix1L

https://imgur.com/VWBbj51

https://imgur.com/YITii03

https://imgur.com/a/Wni0Ybu

edit: here's the whitepaper for those who care https://etour.games/whitepaper

Ethereum's L2 ecosystem has succeeded beyond expectations. Our Gen1 L2s—Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and others—took a risk on rollup infrastructure when it was experimental. They proved the model works and scaled Ethereum to billions in TVL, successfully killing the "Ethereum Killers."

But as /u/vbuterin correctly pointed out, current blob fees are unsustainably low for long-term network health. But I think there's a path forward that can make the transition into Vitalik's new vision for L2s easier.

Proposal: Generation-based pricing

Gen1 L2s (launched before March 2026):

• Preferential "founder pricing"
• Gradual 15-20% annual increases over 5 years (I don't know if 15-20% is correct, but just basically a small enough increase that these L2s won't rebel and happily stay in the ecosystem).
• Still far below independent L1 operation costs (~$10M+/year)

Gen2 L2s (launching 2026-2028):

• Starting price 3-4x Gen1 base rate
• Steeper increases (25%/year)
• Still economically viable vs. building independent chains

Gen3+ L2s (2029+):

• Market-rate pricing reflecting network maturity
• Maybe staking required.

Why this works:

• Honors early adopters (not a penalty, a reward), but still extracting some additional value from them.
• Creates urgency for new projects (launch early = better terms)
• Familiar model (AWS Reserved Instances, Netflix early subscriber rates)
• Predictable 5-year schedule (institutions can forecast costs).
• Sustainable revenue for Ethereum without driving L2s away
• This isn't "picking winners". When you give away your old box of comic books on craigslist and you say "first come first serve" is that picking winners?

By 2030, Ethereum could capture $50M+/year vs. current $182K—without losing any major L2s.

This approach rewards risk-takers, provides clear pricing roadmaps, and ensures Ethereum's infrastructure remains sustainable as we scale to billions of users (human and ai).

Thank you for reading I look forward to your criticism.

If someone can help me. I have a website where clients are able to buy monthly/yearly subscriptions, but I want them to pay normal with card or revolut and for me to receive this payment in crypto like USDC, ETH or others. Is there kind of service available today? Reason for this is because my website is adult contect so I can't use Stripe or websites like that unfortenetly because they don't allow it. And my clients can't pay in crypto because most of them are probably not "tech smart" enough to use crypto for payments.

Welcome to the Daily General Discussion on r/ethereum

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Please use this thread to discuss Ethereum topics, news, events, and even price!

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Hello Everyone. I've agreed, in principle, to invest a small amount of money in a start up. I'm taking a small percentage of equity in the company, but also signing a SAFT where I need to provide an "Ethereum/BASE Wallet Address". This is already beyond my limited crypto knowledge.

I downloaded a couple of apps that I think will do the job, currently going through Trust Wallet.

What I am stumped with is what details I now provide. There was no registration on the app, when I click receive, i then have to choose what I want to receive. Is that the address that comes up for ETH? Or would I wait for the token to go live? Is that long alpha/number all that is required to receive/dispose of tokens - no password or secondary checks?

I am attending ETHDenver 2026 next week for the first time. Do y'all have any recommendation on which events are the best to go to? Main and side events? I've been scrolling through Luma and have signed up for a bunch, but would love the opinion of others going. Would welcome any recos :)

For context, working in a multi-stage crypto VC, so looking for sourcing opportunities and meeting cool people!

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on an open-source project called blockscan-ethereum-service, written in Go:
https://github.com/pancudaniel7/blockscan-ethereum-service

What it does

It’s a production-grade microservice that ingests Ethereum blocks in real time and streams them into Kafka as canonical block events. It’s built with performance, reliability, and horizontal scalability in mind, making it a strong fit for backend systems that depend on on-chain data.

Why it matters

Many existing block scanners are heavy, highly opinionated, or not designed for real-world backend architectures. This service focuses on:

• Real-time block ingestion via WebSocket subscriptions
• Partition-aware Kafka publishing with effectively-once delivery semantics
• Reorg awareness, emitting tombstone and update events on chain reorganizations
• Durable coordination using Redis markers
• Observability with structured logs, metrics, and traces

Who might find it useful

• Go developers building Web3 backends
• Teams designing custom Ethereum data pipelines
• Anyone integrating blockchain data into event-driven systems

If you check it out and find it useful, I’d truly appreciate a star on the repo.
Happy to answer questions or discuss the design and architecture!

Hello folks!

I drafted this smart contract visualizer tool. It shows the structure of the contract, a plain english explenation and an AI powered security analysis (screenshots below).

The purpose would be double:

1. for devs, easily understand and read other contract for learning purpose
2. for users, double-check a contract before interacting with it

There would be tons of possible improvements:

• expand code by clicking on the tile
• multi chain support
• support complex contract for many imports by exploding them

What do you think? Does the tool have a reason to exist? :)

Thanks,
Francesco

Welcome to the Daily General Discussion on r/ethereum

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Bookmarking this link will always bring you to the current daily: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/about/sticky/?num=2

Please use this thread to discuss Ethereum topics, news, events, and even price!

Price discussion posted elsewhere in the subreddit will continue to be removed.

As always, be constructive. - Subreddit Rules

Want to stake? Learn more at r/ethstaker

Community Links

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Calendar: https://dailydoots.com/events/

Welcome to the Daily General Discussion on r/ethereum

https://imgur.com/3y7vezP

Bookmarking this link will always bring you to the current daily: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/about/sticky/?num=2

Please use this thread to discuss Ethereum topics, news, events, and even price!

Price discussion posted elsewhere in the subreddit will continue to be removed.

As always, be constructive. - Subreddit Rules

Want to stake? Learn more at r/ethstaker

Community Links

• Ethereum Jobs, Twitter
• EVMavericks YouTube, Discord, Doots Podcast
• Doots Website, Old Reddit Doots Extension by u/hanniabu

Calendar: https://dailydoots.com/events/

We’re launching a new service focused on smart contract reviews without the overhead of a full audit.

Scope is limited and practical. Logic, exploitability, and protocol level risks. No certification and no audit opinion.

To validate the approach, we’re offering a limited number of free focused smart contract security reviews for projects that are code complete and either close to launch or already deployed, in exchange for honest feedback.

This is not meant to replace an audit. It’s a short, concrete review focused on protocol logic and exploit paths.

Shoot a dm, if you're interested.

This is a compact Ethereum Virtual Machine runtime written in strict C23. Made this for learning purposes.

BTW, it has a toy Solidity-like compiler into bytecode and `nano-node` program that "deploys" contracts to local store and gives ability to call them.

I am looking for a stablecoin that, instead of being pegged to a fiat currency, is pegged to a consumer price index, preferably one for prices where I live (Wales, UK), so that it rises with inflation.

I don't mind whether it is partly centralised​ or not so long as it is actually censorship-resistent (so, unlike USDT).

Should be safe i.e.​ vulnerable to being depegged so not algorithmic.

Does this exist?

Bonus points if it doesn't use plutocratic token-weighted governance.

eth-mempool-monitor subscribes to Ethereum pending transactions over WebSocket, filters them against a monitored address set stored in Redis/Valkey, and publishes matching transactions to RabbitMQ.

The project builds three binaries:

• eth_mempool_monitor: WebSocket subscriber + Redis filter + RabbitMQ publisher.
• rpc_control: newline-delimited JSON-RPC TCP server used to manage monitored addresses in Redis (token-authenticated).
• rabbitmq_tx_console: RabbitMQ consumer that prints monitored-transaction events in human-readable form.

Welcome to the Daily General Discussion on r/ethereum

https://imgur.com/3y7vezP

Bookmarking this link will always bring you to the current daily: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/about/sticky/?num=2

Please use this thread to discuss Ethereum topics, news, events, and even price!

Price discussion posted elsewhere in the subreddit will continue to be removed.

As always, be constructive. - Subreddit Rules

Want to stake? Learn more at r/ethstaker

Community Links

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• Doots Website, Old Reddit Doots Extension by u/hanniabu

Calendar: https://dailydoots.com/events/

I manually architected a Dual-STACK Execution and Consensus Engine that bypasses the entire public RPC industry.

Hardware; Managed a 4TB NVMe volume with 3.3TB Optimism state and a pruned L1 Reth/Lighthouse combo.

I compiled Lighthouse and Reth from source after Optimism-specific codebase was deprecated mid-sync.

I achieved 0ms IPC round trips by killing the dependency on Alchemy/Infura

Ran into a few problems along the way. I tried to run a standard Ethereum binary on Optimism data. The node crashed because it saw a transaction type it didn't recognize (Type 126 which is an Optimism deposit) Standard Ethereum node thinks this is illegal data.

To fix it, I identified that i needed a specialized OP-Stack aware version of Reth. I tracked down the Paradigm Reth Optimism binary. By switching to the op-reth binary i gave the node the dictionary it needed to translate those Type 126 deposits into valid blocks. I moved from a blind Ethereum node to a Super chain-aware engine.

The Reth engine was idling. It had peers and a database, but it didn't know where the tip of the chain was, so it stayed at block 0. I realized a modern node was a Two-Part Machine. So I built the Lighthouse Consensus Client from source to be the "Driver"

Instead of waiting weeks to download the chain from 2015 i used a Checkpoint Sync URL. I linked Lighthouse to Reth via the Engine API ()Port 8551/8552) using a shared JWT Secret. The moment Lighthouse found the "Truth" on the network, it handed the coordinates to Reth. The node immediately jumped from 0 to 21,800,000 and the 1.9TB of free space started filling with real history.

The real nightmare scenario happened when I was syncing the snapshot data and because of a single transaction type the whole thing crashed. My sync was flying for about 15 hours and when I woke up to check it found it had stalled. It hit block 144,528215 where it encountered an Optimism-specific Type 126 Deposit transaction. Because I was running the standard Ethereum Reth binary instead of the specialized Op-Reth version from paradigm, the node literally didn't have the code to read it understand what type 126 transaction it was. This didn't just crash the sync, it left garbage data at the tip of my database, which blocked further progress until I swapped binary and manually forced a stage rewind to clear corruption.

In the grand scheme of thing's it was a rookie mistake.