
Bitcoin Family is moving more than $1 million into decentralized exchanges after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX disaster
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3 years agoon
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adminThe Taihuttu family in November, days after moving back to Phuket.
Didi Taihuttu
Confidence is quickly eroding in the crypto sector, as it faces a wave of bankruptcies and investigations into Sam Bankman-Fried and his failed exchange, FTX, for losing and misspending billions of dollars in user deposits.
But Didi Taihuttu; his wife, Romaine; three daughters, and Teddy, a Pomeranian puppy they adopted in Portugal last year, are as confident as ever in their bet on bitcoin — they’re just changing how they store it.
Ever since liquidating all of their assets and buying bitcoin in 2017 back when it was trading at around $900, the Taihuttus have safeguarded their crypto riches in three main places: centralized exchanges, or CEXs, such as Bybit and Kraken; decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, such as Uniswap; and hardware wallets hidden in secret vaults on four different continents. But as digital asset brokers, lenders, and exchanges continue to fall into bankruptcy — locking up customer funds in the process — the Dutch family of five is proactively moving $1 million in crypto into DEXs, which allow users to hang on to custody of their tokens.
“For me, bitcoin is still about freedom, and decentralized currency should be able to be used by everyone in the world without needing to do KYC or any other regulatory stuff,” Taihuttu told CNBC, referring to the know-your-customer, or KYC compliance, required by many centralized platforms such as Coinbase. DEXs don’t require users to connect an ID or bank account to the platform, hence making it an ideal custody solution for the Taihuttus.
The Taihuttu family in Lagos, Portugal on the day they adopted Teddy, their Pomeranian puppy.
Didi Taihuttu
CNBC caught up with the 44-year-old patriarch a few days after the family made the move from Lagos, Portugal, to Phuket, an island just off the western coast of mainland Thailand in the Andaman Sea. The family is currently living on 0.3 bitcoin a month — about $5,000 — and they are buying back the bitcoin that they sold when the cryptocurrency was trading at around $55,000 a year ago. For the Taihuttus, the cascade of crypto bankruptcies and failed tokens just shows that “bitcoin is the king” and “completely different than all the other projects.”
While the Taihuttus did not have any tokens tied up with FTX, Celsius, Voyager Digital, or any of the other platforms that recently went under, the wave of failures did remind them of the importance of ownership.
In crypto, one of the mantras is “not your keys, not your coins,” meaning that rightful possession of tokens comes through the custody of the corresponding private keys. DEXs such as Uniswap and SushiSwap are peer-to-peer platforms where transactions happen directly between traders, entirely cutting out intermediaries such as banks and brokers. That means that users retain custody of their tokens by never handing over their private keys.
DEXs eliminate centralized intermediaries from financial transactions such as trading, holding and transferring assets through programmable pieces of code known as smart contracts. These contracts are written on a public blockchain such as ethereum, and execute when certain conditions are met, negating the need for a central intermediary. In essence, with DEXs, you trust code, and with CEXs, you trust people.
“You never send your bitcoin to an exchange. Your bitcoin stays in your own wallet, meaning you have complete custody of your coins,” explained Taihuttu. “You connect to a DEX, and by making that connection, you trade out of your own wallet.”
That nuance of ownership is critical.
“If the DEX collapses, it doesn’t matter, because the bitcoin are always in your own wallet,” he added.

Changing their storage strategy
From the beginning, Taihuttu said he could tell something was “really off” with FTX, even though it was one of the biggest CEXs on the planet before it imploded in November.
“Too many influencers were paid too much money to promote that one,” said Taihuttu, who added that reliable crypto products and companies typically don’t rely so heavily on celebrity endorsements.
The Dutch father of three had learned his lesson in 2017, when he lost four bitcoin to a hack of a centralized exchange known as Cryptopia.
“From that moment, I was always searching for alternatives,” he explained.
The Taihuttu family in the Netherlands.
Didi Taihuttu
People who choose to hold their own cryptocurrency can store it “hot,” “cold,” or some combination of the two. A hot wallet is connected to the internet and allows owners relatively easy access to their coins so they can spend their crypto. The trade-off for convenience is potential exposure to bad actors.
“Cold storage often refers to crypto that has been moved to wallets whose private keys — the passwords that enable the crypto to be moved out of the wallet — are not stored on internet-connected computers, so that hackers can’t hack into the computer and steal the private keys,” said Philip Gradwell, chief economist of Chainalysis, a blockchain data firm.
Thumb drive-size devices such as a Trezor or Ledger offer a way to secure crypto tokens “cold.” Square is also building a hardware wallet and service “to make bitcoin custody more mainstream.” The Taihuttu family has largely relied on cold storage to safeguard their tokens for the last six years.
Currently, the Taihuttus keep 27% of their crypto holdings “hot” on centralized exchanges such as Bybit, a platform Taihuttu said is transparent and backed by real assets. He also keeps some tokens on Kraken, since it is one of the oldest exchanges. He refers to this crypto stash as his “risk capital,” and he uses these crypto coins for day trading and potentially precarious bets.
The other 73% of Taihuttu’s total crypto portfolio is in cold storage. These cold hardware wallets, which are spread around the globe, hold bitcoin, ether and some litecoin.
Didi Taihuttu in a desert in Dubai.
Didi Taihuttu
The family declined to say how much it holds in crypto, but they did disclose that they are shifting $1 million worth of bitcoin, ether, litecoin, polkadot, and other tokens from these hardware wallets and centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges.
Taihuttu said he ultimately wants to move 100% of the family’s crypto savings into DEXs and invest 15% of their net worth into upstart DEXs since he sees these decentralized platforms as the centerpiece of the next bull run. When asked why he is going all in on DEXs instead of keeping his crypto cold, Taihuttu pointed to ease of access.
DEXs allow him to connect the crypto he safeguards on thumb drives in hiding spots all over the world directly to the platform, meaning that he can make trades far more easily while still protecting his tokens.
“Our capital now is really difficult to use in trading, because then I need to send my bitcoin from my ledger into an exchange,” Taihuttu said.
The financial privacy offered by DEXs is also a huge incentive.
“You’re trading from an anonymous ledger on an exchange as an anonymous entity,” he said. “You get full access to non-KYC trading in a decentralized way on a DEX.”
Taihuttu isn’t alone in shifting his focus to DEXs. Following the FTX bankruptcy, Trezor’s sales revenue reportedly jumped 300% and billions of dollars in bitcoin fled exchanges. Meanwhile, Multicoin Capital, a crypto investment firm, told limited partners that 7% of its assets are similarly stored cold, in self-custodied wallets.
Didi Taihuttu and two of his daughters on a boat trip in Portugal.
Didi Taihuttu
The pros and cons of DEXs
Centralized exchanges are a big part of what helped spur crypto adoption by offering new investors an easy on-ramp.
“Centralized exchanges have played a vital role in the adoption of cryptocurrency,” said Auston Bunsen, co-founder of QuikNode, which provides blockchain infrastructure to developers and companies. “With their growth came the industry’s growth.”
But in the last few years, and especially in the last six months, decentralized exchanges have grown in popularity as investors look to trade in a manner that protects their funds.
Boaz Sobrado, a London-based fintech data analyst, sees three main advantages to DEXs: they are noncustodial, meaning you don’t have to trust someone, like Sam Bankman-Fried, to store your funds for you; they are open, meaning anyone in the world can participate; and transaction data is more widely available, reducing the risk of insiders getting an edge from knowledge only they have.
Didi Taihuttu in Lagos, Portugal.
Didi Taihuttu
Uniswap has facilitated more than $1 trillion in trading volume from around 100 million trades since it launched in 2018, according to a research note from Bank of America on June 13. Rival DEXs such as SushiSwap and PancakeSwap have also gained traction among traders, though Uniswap still accounts for around 51% of all trading volumes on DEXs year to date.
While DEXs play an important role in the digital asset ecosystem, there are a lot of reasons these decentralized platforms won’t eclipse their centralized peers any time soon, according to Alkesh Shah, Bank of America‘s head of web3, crypto and digital assets strategy.
“Centralized exchanges provide a one-stop shop for investing or trading digital assets with someone to speak to if something goes wrong — this will be critical for mainstream adoption beyond the early adopters of today,” Shah told CNBC.
Shah said that investors are likely to prefer exchanges that are more transparent about their operating practices, adding that regulated and transparent CEXs are likely to be important for mainstream adoption long-term.
Bank of America said in its June note that it expected Uniswap, in particular, to face regulatory scrutiny. The bank said it also saw the potential for the Securities and Exchange Commission to require its registration as a National Securities Exchange or broker-dealer.
Didi Taihuttu and his eldest daughter, Joli.
Didi Taihuttu
“Uniswap may be unable to comply with regulatory requirements, given its inability to verify user identities, implement AML/KYC [anti-money laundering/know your customer] requirements or provide the necessary disclosures for the thousands of tokens listed on its platform,” the research note said.
Some centralized platforms are splitting the difference by offering DEX-type services, but it is unclear what sort of regulatory blowback they might ultimately face.
Meanwhile, Sobrado told CNBC that at this stage, most DEXs lose money, meaning they might not be sustainable.
DEXs are also automated market makers, meaning that the exchange pools liquidity from its users and then uses an algorithm to price the assets within that pool. Sobrado said that this model has proven remarkably resilient — but is unproven versus orderbook exchanges such as Coinbase.
Under it all, the Bitcoin Family still believes that the original cryptocurrency is a solid bet. They say they haven’t been swayed by the turmoil of the last six months.
“We seem to get that lesson every bitcoin cycle,” said Taihuttu. “It was Mt. Gox, it was banning bitcoin in China, it was banning mining. There’s drama every time.”
“But looking at the current situation: We have a huge war going on, we have a huge financial crisis, we have FTX, we have Celsius, we have a lot of bear market signals,” he said. “I think that bitcoin is really holding strong at $16,800. For me, bitcoin is still doing perfect and still doing what it always does: Being a decentralized currency that is usable by all people all over the world.”
Didi Taihuttu giving a speech on bitcoin adoption in Tulum, Mexico.
Didi Taihuttu
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Environment
State of New York commits $21 million to support zero-emission mobility
Published
10 hours agoon
August 3, 2025By
admin

While the Trump Administration walks back emissions standards and pretends science isn’t real, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is announcing plans to improve the quality of life for her constituents by investing over $21 million in support of zero-emission mobility and transportation solutions across New York State.
New York’s newly announced Clean Mobility Program will provide funding for scalable, community-led demonstration projects highlighting micro mobility, ride sharing, and community-managed “on-demand shared transportation” options.
The Governor’s office believes these solutions could help lower air pollution in the state while offering residents affordable connections to services, jobs, and transit. Objectively needed wins, in other words – and even more needed in traditionally underserved communities.
Governor Hochul gets it

“Even as the federal government walks away from clean air and energy standards, New York continues to invest in modern, flexible and efficient electric transportation options that improve air quality and expand affordable consumer choices,” explains Governor Hochul. “Our priority is linking communities, including areas that have been historically marginalized, with resources that provide residents with a variety of flexible transportation options that allow them to conduct their daily business uninterrupted.”
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The program is the latest of the state’s recent EV funding initiatives, and the official release (on the New York State website) announced more details about The Clean Mobility Program:
The Clean Mobility program offers up to $21.6 million for projects across New York State and will award up to $3 million per project, with priority given to projects in disadvantaged communities, as defined by the Climate Justice Working Group.
Additionally, up to $8 million is set aside to fund demonstration projects located in specific areas of the state, including those served by the upstate investor-owned utilities. This includes a total of up to $5 million for micro mobility projects in the Central Hudson, National Grid, New York State Electric & Gas, and Rochester Electric & Gas region and up to $3 million for any type of eligible demonstration projects located in the Bronx.
Proposals for demonstration projects must include a completed planning document that includes community engagement, site identification and operations, project partner identification, technical feasibility assessment, and a policy and regulatory feasibility assessment. Any e-bikes or e-scooters deployed in these projects must meet industry and state safety standards to be eligible.
Proposals are due on September 25, 2025 by 3:00 PM EST. For more information on this funding opportunity please visit the NYSERDA’s website.
Electrek’s Take

Times Square banned cars in 2009 and New York City implemented congestion pricing earlier this year, angering exactly the right people in exactly the right way for exactly the right reasons. In both cases, the plans worked, the problems were solved for, and the lives of the people of New York improved. Governor Hochul’s latest plan is sure to be the latest in an ever-growing line of green success stories.
SOURCE | IMAGES: New York State.

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Environment
EVgo set to borrow up to a $300 million to build 1,500 new DC fast chargers
Published
11 hours agoon
August 3, 2025By
admin

EVgo has secured a massive, $225 million loan facility with five commercial banks in a bid to accelerate its expansion plans and add more than 1,500 new DC fast chargers to America’s EV charging landscape – and they have an option to borrow even more!
This week, EVgo announced that it has closed on a first-of-its-kind, senior secured, non-recourse credit facility with “top tier” banks for $225 million – and they have the option to increase their line of credit by $75 million more to fund additional network growth.
“This groundbreaking financing transaction sets a precedent for expanding high-power charging infrastructure by leveraging debt capital,” said Francine Sullivan, EVgo CLO & EVP Corporate Development. “Such resounding support from the global project finance bank market marks another milestone in EVgo’s plan to enhance value with our growing industry-leading fast charging solutions. We look forward to partnering with our banking partners to continue to grow our leadership position into the future.”
The credit card facility is being funded by a group of five “top tier” banks, according to EVgo, with the project being led by SMBC as Structuring Agent, Coordinating Lead Arranger, and Joint Bookrunner. Bank of Montreal, Royal Bank of Canada, and ING Bank NV are acting as the Joint Lead Arrangers and Joint Bookrunners, while Investec Bank Plc is also on, though “just” as a participating lender.
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The companies involved are calling this new capital for public fast charging an important milestone that reflects both the maturity and profitability of the EVgo network, and broader confidence in the company’s management team.
“This financing demonstrates SMBC’s continued ability to lead innovative financing solutions for clients in emerging sectors across the broader infrastructure landscape,” said Juan Kreutz, SMBC Americas Head of Global Structured Finance. “We are proud to partner with an industry leader like EVgo on this pioneering financing as the company expands its network of accessible charging infrastructure throughout the US.”
Electrek’s Take

The people running EVgo are smart. They understand that the loss of the $7,500 Federal tax credit isn’t the dealbreaker it’s being made out to be, and that the demand for chargers is only going to continue to grow. What’s more, the banks have done their research, looked at the projections, and decided the odds of getting their $225-300 million were pretty good.
Glad to see it. Now, for give me – I’m off to watch The Big Short again (for unrelated reasons).
SOURCE | IMAGES: EVgo.

If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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Environment
Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street’s invisible backbone
Published
17 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
admin
CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren’t corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality.
From that sparse office, they launched “Frontier,” Ethereum‘s first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system.
Bitcoin had captured headlines as “digital gold,” but what they built was something else entirely: programmable money, a financial operating system where code could move funds, enforce contracts, and create businesses without banks or brokers.
One year earlier and 520 miles away in Zurich, Paul Brody got a call from IBM security: A kid was wandering the lab unattended.
“That’s not a child,” Brody told them. “That’s Vitalik. He’s a grown-up — he just looks really young.”
Paul Brody and Vitalik Buterin with IBM and Samsung executives at CES 2015, where IBM unveiled its first blockchain prototype built on Ethereum’s early code.
Paul Brody
At the time, Buterin was building the bones of Ethereum. The blockchain was still in its alpha stage, an early version of what would become a $420 billion platform rewiring Wall Street and powering decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenized markets across the globe.
Brody, then leading a research team at IBM, remembers how quickly the idea clicked.
“One of the guys on the research team came to me and said, ‘I’ve met this really interesting guy. He’s got a really cool idea…It’s like a version of bitcoin, but we’re going to make it much faster and programmable,'” he said. “And when he said that to me, I thought, ‘That’s it. That is what I want. That is what we need.'”
With Buterin’s help, IBM built its first blockchain prototype on Ethereum’s early code, unveiling it at CES in 2015 alongside Samsung. “That was how I ended up down this path,” Brody said. “I was done with all other technology and basically made the switch to blockchain.”
Even now, as EY’s global blockchain leader, Brody remembers feeling a pang of envy. “This is a kid, and it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was jealous of Vitalik… to be able to do that.”
He added, “I don’t think opportunities like that could have been surfaced when I was that age.”
Now, a decade later, that experiment has quietly rewired global markets.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivers a keynote at ETHCC, laying out the network’s next steps — and its values test — as institutional adoption accelerates.
EthCC
“It’s very impressive, just how much the space has succeeded and grown into, beyond pretty much anyone’s expectations,” Buterin told CNBC in Cannes on the sidelines of the blockchain’s flagship event in Europe.
Buterin said the change over the past decade has been staggering. Ten years ago, he recalled, the crypto community was “just a very small space,” with only a handful of people working on bitcoin and a few other projects.
Since then, Ethereum has become “this big thing,” Buterin reflected, with major corporations now launching assets on both its base layer and layer-two networks. Parts of national economies are beginning to run on Ethereum infrastructure, a far cry from its cypherpunk origins.
But Buterin warned that mainstream adoption brings risks as well as benefits. One concern is that if too few issuers or intermediaries dominate, they could become “de facto controllers of the ecosystem.” He described a scenario where Ethereum might appear open, but, in practice, all the keys are managed by centralized providers.
“That’s the thing that we don’t want,” he said.
Prague to the Riviera
Two years earlier in Prague, CNBC met Buterin at Paralelní Polis, a sprawling industrial complex turned anarchist tech hub in the city’s Holešovice district. The building’s labyrinthine staircases and shadowed corridors felt like a physical map of the crypto world itself — part resistance movement, part experiment in reimagining power.
It was a place built on Václav Benda’s concept of a “parallel society,” where decentralized technologies offered refuge from state surveillance and control. It’s the kind of place where Buterin, a self-described nomad, found himself at home among cypherpunks and cryptographic idealists.
At the time, Buterin described crypto’s greatest utility not in speculative trading, but in helping people survive broken financial systems in emerging markets.
ETHPrague 2023 was held at Paralelní Polis in the Czech Republic.
Pavel Sinagl
“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value,” he told CNBC at the time. “Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don’t have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there.”
Even in Prague, where coders worked to make payments fast and censorship-resistant, the technology felt like a resistance movement — privacy-preserving, anti-authoritarian, a lifeline in countries where banking collapses were common and money couldn’t be trusted.
This year, Buterin keynoted Ethereum’s flagship conference at the Palais des Festivals — the same red carpet venue that hosts movie stars each spring.
It was a fitting symbol of Ethereum’s journey: from underground hacker dens to a network that governments, banks, and brokerages are now racing to build upon.
Brody, who currently leads blockchain strategy at EY, says what matters most is how deeply Ethereum is integrating into traditional finance. “The global financial system is really nicely described as a whole network of pipes,” he said.
“What’s happening now is that Ethereum is getting plumbed into this infrastructure,” Brody continued, noting that until recently, crypto operated on entirely separate rails from traditional finance.
Now, he said, Ethereum is being wired directly into core transaction systems, setting the stage for massive financial flows — from investors to everyday savers — to migrate away from older mechanisms toward Ethereum-based platforms that can move money faster, at lower cost, and with more advanced functionality than legacy systems allow.

Becoming the plumbing of Wall Street
Stablecoins — digital dollars that live on Ethereum — power trillions in payments, tokenized assets and funds are moving on-chain, and Robinhood recently rolled out tokenized U.S. equities via Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer two.
Circle’s USDC — the second-largest stablecoin — still settles around 65% of its volume on Ethereum’s rails. According to CoinGecko’s latest “State of Stablecoins” report, Ethereum accounts for nearly 50% of all stablecoin activity.
Between Circle’s IPO and the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, now signed into law by President Donald Trump, regulators have new reason to engage with, rather than fight, this transformation.
Data from Deutsche Bank shows stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year — more than Mastercard and Visa combined. The bank itself has announced plans to build a tokenization platform on zkSync, a fast, cost-efficient Ethereum layer two designed to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements.
Digital asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are racing to capture this crossover between traditional securities and crypto.

As part of its quarterly earnings release, Coinbase said this week it’s launching tokenized stocks and prediction markets for U.S. users in the coming months, a move that would diversify its revenue stream and bring it into more direct competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Kraken announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of U.S. stock tokens in select overseas markets.
BlackRock‘s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, launched on Ethereum last year, offering qualified investors on-chain access to yield with real-time redemptions settled in USDC.
Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum has proven its staying power as the trusted network for global finance. Buterin told CNBC in Cannes that there’s a misconception about what institutions actually want.
“A lot of institutions basically tell us to our faces that they value Ethereum because it’s stable and dependable, because it doesn’t go down,” he said.
He added that firms frequently ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, “really value.”
Institutions are choosing various layer twos to meet specific needs — Robinhood uses Arbitrum, Deutsche Bank zkSync, Coinbase and Kraken Optimism — but they all ultimately settle on Ethereum’s base layer.
“The value proposition of Ethereum is its global reach, its huge capital flows, its incredible programmability,” Brody said.
He added that the fact it isn’t the fastest blockchain or the one with the quickest settlement times “is secondary to the fact that it’s overall the most widely adopted and flexible system.”
Brody also believes history points toward consolidation. He said that in most technology standards wars, one platform ultimately dominates. In his view, Ethereum is likely to become that dominant programmability layer, while Bitcoin plays a complementary role as a risk-off, scarcity-driven asset.
Engineers, he said, “love to work on a standard… to scale on a standard,” and Ethereum has become precisely that.
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, in Cannes for Europe’s largest annual gathering for the blockchain.
MacKenzie Sigalos
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, sees the same pattern from inside the ecosystem.
“Institutions choose Ethereum over and over again for its values,” Stańczak said. “Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance.”
When institutions send an order to the market, they want to be sure that it’s treated fairly, that nobody has preference, and that the transaction is executed at the time when it’s delivered. “That’s what Ethereum guarantees,” added Stańczak.
Those assurances have become more valuable as traditional finance moves on-chain.
Scaling without losing its soul
Ethereum’s path hasn’t been smooth. The network has weathered spectacular booms and busts, rivals promising faster speeds, and criticism that it’s too slow or expensive for mass adoption. Yet it has outlasted nearly all early competitors.
In 2022, Ethereum replaced its old transaction validation method, proof-of-work — where armies of computers competed to solve puzzles — with proof-of-stake, where users lock up their ether as collateral to help secure the network. The shift cut Ethereum’s energy use by more than 99% and set the stage for upgrades aimed at making apps faster and cheaper to run on its base layer.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in Prague, where he finds refuge with like-minded programmers looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.
CNBC
The next decade will test whether Ethereum can scale without compromise.
Buterin said the first priority is getting Ethereum to “the finish line” in terms of its technical goals. That means improving scalability and speed without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and security — and ideally making those properties even stronger.
Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, could dramatically increase transaction capacity while making it possible to verify that the chain is following the rules of the protocol on something as small as a smartwatch.
There are also algorithmic changes the team already knows are needed to protect Ethereum against large-scale computing attacks. Implementing those, Buterin said, is part of the path to making Ethereum “a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place.”
Buterin believes the real change won’t come with fireworks. He said it may already be unfolding years before most people recognize it.
“This type of disruption doesn’t feel like overturning the existing system,” he said. “It feels like building a new thing that just keeps growing and growing until eventually more and more people realize you don’t even have to look at the old thing if you didn’t want to.”

Brody can already see hints of that future. Wire transfers are moving on-chain, assets like stocks and real estate are being tokenized, and eventually, he said, businesses will run entire contracts — the money, the products, the terms and conditions — automatically on a single, shared infrastructure.
That shift, Brody added, won’t simply copy old financial systems onto new technology.
“One of the lessons from technology adoption is that it’s not that we replace like for like,” he said. “When new things come along, we tend to build on a new technology infrastructure. My key hypothesis is that as we build new financial products, it will be attractive to build them on blockchain rails — and we’ll try to do things on blockchain rails that we can’t do today.”
If Brody and Buterin are right, the real disruption won’t make headlines. It’ll simply become the way money moves, unseen and unstoppable.
WATCH: Robinhood hits record high as OpenAI, SpaceX go on-chain

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