Hey,
I got buried and this is landing a day late. But there's too much going on right now to skip, so here's what I've actually been paying attention to.
🎭 Ethereum is having an identity crisis.
The story I kept hearing all week: the Ethereum Foundation is bleeding people.
At least eight senior contributors have left the EF this year, five of them in May alone, including some well-known researchers.
That much brain drain in a short window kicked off a wave of "what is Ethereum even doing" takes, and it landed on top of a rough price story (ETH is down roughly 60% against BTC over five years).
Real morale problem.
Vitalik's answer was a vision post for a leaner EF.
The framing: a "smaller ship" that does less, lasts longer, and sells less ETH (the foundation now holds only ~0.16% of supply).
He recast the EF as "one node" in the ecosystem rather than its boss, and pointed everything at four principles:
Censorship resistance
Openness
Privacy
Security
He’s calling it CROPS. 🌾
Less chasing raw speed, more credible neutrality.
My read: the market shrugged, ETH barely moved on the news.
But this is Ethereum picking a lane, be the neutral, censorship-resistant settlement layer instead of trying to out-TPS everyone.
Whether that's maturing or quietly retreating depends on who you ask.
🕵🏼♀️ Privacy is suddenly cool again.
Notice privacy sitting right there in Vitalik's four principles.
Zcash (ZEC) has been one of the loudest privacy trades around — sitting in the mid-$600s today.
At the same time the EF shipped its Kohaku initiative (an SDK to bake privacy into wallets at the base level), and chains like NEAR are rolling out confidential payments.
Why now? 🤔
As stablecoins and actual institutions move on-chain, people are waking up to the fact that a public ledger means anyone can see your entire financial life.
Privacy stopped being a "what are you hiding" thing and became basic hygiene.
The narrative flipped from criminal-tool to default-need, and the market is pricing it.
💧And then there's Hyperliquid.
Perps (perpetual futures) are leveraged bets on price with no expiry date (the way most people actually trade crypto).
That volume used to live almost entirely on centralized exchanges.
Hyperliquid dragged it on-chain with CEX-level speed and no sign-up, and it's eating everyone's lunch.
Hyperliquid, a single app, now pulls in more daily fees than the entire Ethereum base layer.
It's running ~$600M+ in annualized revenue, and roughly 99% of that goes straight into buying back its own token (HYPE).
👉 That's a real business with a real flywheel, not a points farm.
Why it's vacuuming up attention and liquidity?
It's the rare on-chain product that feels as good as a CEX while keeping you in self-custody, and the fee-to-buyback loop gives the token an actual reason to exist.
That combo is magnetic right now.
So that's the week in three lines:
Ethereum is redefining what it wants to be
Privacy is back on the menu
Perps are quietly printing.
More soon, on time next week (probably).
— Juan