decentralize the whole damn thing ✨
Joined May 2017
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ash.err retweeted
Gitcoin has always been oriented around the mission: Fund What Matters. Historically, that’s meant open source software – $69m in funding distributed over the last 9 years 💚
Our next chapter will bring this mission home. To the places we live, the people we belong to, and the real life right in front of us – all built on community-owned rails to keep power in people’s hands.
Crypto showed us that, with the right tools, communities can fund their own future. We think it’s time to bring those tools to Main Street.
Private alpha is live, and we’re holding a seat for you.
Read more from @owocki below.
theres been a sudden wave of interest in where @gitcoin is headed.
but have we *earned* it?
i worry about the hype getting out ahead of fundamentals, so where things actually stand.
we are building techne: an everything app for localism. the first pieces are small, and over time we expect it to grow into local commerce, local funding, local events, and whatever else a town needs to coordinate itself.
this represents our most serious attempt to date to go mainstream. if we are successful, we bring our mission (Fund What Matters) and impact ($69m funding via 5mm txns) to everyday people. if we are successful, your nocoiner friends will be using our app.
the bet: if enough of a community's daily life runs on shared rails, you get network effects that bootstrap a local commons, and the money moving through it stays in town longer. (today a lot of it leaks out to platforms skimming 15-30% off every transaction.)
where things stand:
1. one of the applets is live in private alpha. it's in a small group's hands and it's rough in the ways alphas are rough.
2. we've got an sdk in private alpha too, so other builders could eventually ship their own local applets on the same rails. (builders: help build it!).
3. the other applets are very early. if you're waiting on one of them, expect to wait a while (builders: unless you want to help us build it!).
4. nothing has changed with GTC. it's still a governance token with no claim on economics, and nothing in this plan changes that. Allo Protocol and Grants Stack (our last gen products) are still wound down (but protocols live on on mainnet!). there are no plans for a new token. (governerds: proposals welcome).
5. beacon (the first app) helps you meetup with friends locally ran its first in-person test: 10 of roughly 15 invitees showed up in bad weather, we have 8 engaged beta testers, and 5 people reported a new connection. promising pilot, way too small to conclude anything from. (alpha testers wanted!).
6. buoy (the second app) helps you fund locally is targeting november. this will be a test of a simmilar magnitude of the beacon first test. (alpha testers wanted!).
7. we will continue to scale product - this means rolling out apps and pilots. if/when the trend is bigly up and to the right, and the final everything app slaps, we ship it and we do a big splashy launch around it. (beta testers wanted!).
8. we're setting up a 501(c)(3) and aiming to raise $$ from mainstream grants and mains donors eventually. this may also mean that future fundraising on our platforms will be tax-exempt in the US!
9. we're moving fast on product because the window on localism is open right now, the tools to rebuild enshittified technofeudalist corposlop SAAS products into something better are available now, and people are feeling the squeeze of ai displacement and platform rent in their actual towns.
10. this is my personal interpretation, not a decision by gitcoin governance, and not financial advice. dates are targets, not commitments, and all of it may change as we learn. this post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, make your own decisions.
11. if you think im doing it wrong, REeEEeeeE at my in the comments.
12. if you think im doing it wrong, and constructively/earnestly want to help right the ship, @ me on gov.gitcoin.co - make sure you tag the transition stewards (there are a half dozen of them, and they're here to hold all of us accountable to a new direction!)
tldr
1. what we care about is people using this stuff where they live. the 1st private alpha is live but that number is small today.
2. if you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is fill out this form and start contributing: forms.gle/gh7vNtZJhpCBBRJD9
3. lets not get ahead of ourselves.
4. yall shouldve heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and you should heed mine today - ask yourself "have we earned it?"
ALT callback!!! if you had heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and not gotten ahead of yourself, you'd have had a good time!
ash.err retweeted
I think it's plausible that within a year we'll see AI-based cyberattacks on the power grid, financial system, internet infra, or water. Things like the French supermarket cyberattack but worse. As basic prep I would recommend:
Cash: Get a few weeks of spending in cash
Internet: Get a Starlink Mini so that you have Internet if local fiber or cell is down (~$150 plus $10/month in standby mode)
Power, minimal: Enough to run Starlink Mini and phones (~$1,250)
Daily need: about 1 kWh (Starlink Mini 0.7, phones and laptops 0.2; can limit runtime)
Battery: 1 kWh LiFePO4, e.g. EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus
Solar: 1x400W folding panel, which refills about 1 kWh on a sunny day
Power, better: Enough to run a fridge, Starlink Mini and phones (~$5,000)
Daily need: about 2.5 kWh (fridge 1.5, Starlink Mini 0.7, phones and laptops 0.2)
Battery: 4 kWh LiFePO4, e.g. EcoFlow DELTA Pro 3
Solar: 3x400W folding panels, which refill about 3 kWh/day in sun
Generator: ~2,500W dual-fuel inverter generator; refills battery in a few hours even if weather is bad; get a few 20 lb propane tanks
Water: 14+ gal of water per person for two weeks
Food: 2+ weeks of shelf-stable food
Comms: Hand-crank NOAA emergency radio
ash.err retweeted
LEDGER HARDWARE WALLET IMPLANTS WERE DISCOVERED OVER A YEAR BEFORE THIS WEEK’S SUPPLY-CHAIN ATTACK REVELATIONS
Renowned hardware security researcher and computer engineer Joe Grand (@joegrand), also known as “Kingpin,” explains how he was contacted in August 2025 by a man in Thailand who had discovered a compromised Ledger Nano X.
The man had purchased a cheap Ledger online to replace the battery in his existing device.
When he opened it, he discovered a smaller battery, unauthorized circuitry, additional wiring, and an antenna.
After posting his discovery on Reddit and reportedly receiving little interest from local police, he contacted Grand to investigate.
The discovery came more than a year before the Ledger supply-chain attack became a major public controversy, with nearly $100 million in cryptocurrency reportedly stolen this week.
ash.err retweeted
So the logic is…
The ruling class lies to us, loots us, poisons us, surveils us, brutalizes us, extorts us, cages us, and experiments on us, but the only solution is to hand power back to the other wing of the same criminal cartel?
How many times are we going to do this?
ash.err retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
ash.err retweeted
15 years ago, if you did the responsible thing & bought $10,000 of 'risk-free' long-term Treasuries, you'd have $11,072 today.
If instead you spent $9,995 on drugs & $5 on bitcoin, you'd have $42,778 today.
ash.err retweeted
DAOs are evolving: @trustgraphs alpha is live on mainnet.
It's time to TEST IN PROD again.
trustgraphs.xyz
ash.err retweeted
millennial midlife crisis be like
maybe i should reinstall world of warcraft – at Burbank, CA
ash.err retweeted
Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them.
There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas:
coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re providing funding at three levels:
1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team
2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale
3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start
If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true!
Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.
ash.err retweeted
The people who voted for Trump so he'd rename bodies of water must be freaking pumped right now.
ash.err retweeted
the ENS DAO drama - neutral rundown 🧵
one of ethereum's best-known products is having a rough governance month.
here's what happened, and who's on each side. 👇
(i wrote this for myself, so i could stoicly understand all sides before considering taking a position myself. im sharing it for others who also wish to be informed before taking a side.)
the setup:
- the ENS DAO governs a treasury reported between ~$350M and ~$500M.
- the ENS token's circulating market cap is only ~$168M, and ENS is down ~95% from its 2021 peak.
- so the money the token controls is worth multiples of all circulating tokens.
- that ratio creates a "residual floating value takeover" risk - someone could in principle buy cheap tokens to reach the treasury. (that risk is also the whole justification for having a Security Council.)
the trigger: june 19
- Katherine Wu (katherine.eth), COO of ENS Labs, posted a temp check to move day-to-day treasury ops, the ENS token holdings, and the Karpatkey-managed Endowment to a 5-seat Foundation board.
- token holders keep on-chain authority over upgrades, pricing, and root key.
the delegation move : june 22
- ENS co-founder Nick Johnson (nick.eth) self-delegated ~3.1–3.26M ENS tokens to himself.
- that's only ~3% of total supply
- but because governance turnout is low, it's ~50% of active voting power
- in Lefteris Karapetsas's words: he "delegated ~50% of the voting supply to himself, essentially becoming the DAO."
- for the moment, nick.eth could pass or block almost anything.
the security council fight:
- the DAO's Security Council - a 4-of-8 multisig that can veto malicious proposals - was set to expire July 24, and needed a renewal vote.
- nick.eth abstained on the off-chain Snapshot round, then on the binding on-chain vote (concluded june 30) voted his full stack against renewal, sinking it single-handedly.
- his stated reason: the current council lacks adequate checks and he wouldn't renew it unreformed.
- critics saw something else: with no renewed council, there'd be no body able to veto the Foundation treasury transfer he supports.
- hours later, a successor council was proposed: 8 members, veto threshold raised from 4-of-8 to 5-of-8, and members must sign formal contracts with the ENS Foundation.
- nick.eth backs it and self-nominated. supporters call it tighter/legally accountable; critics call it a weaker check that's harder to trigger and now contractually bound to the Foundation.
the sides
side 1 - "governance attack / treasury capture":
- Lefteris Karapetsas (@LefterisJP, Rotki founder, Security Council member): "there is no DAO anymore… I am just sad and disappointed." later: the DAO is "dead."
- Brantly Millegan (@BrantlyMillegan, Security Council member): "the equivalent of treasury capture by ENS Labs"; pledged to veto if it passes on Labs-aligned votes alone.
- netto.eth (@alextnetto, @anticapture lead steward): board is conflicted - "the downfall of ENS."
- James (@blockchainjames Fire Eyes): limiting the council's veto strictly to constitutional violations guts the community's main defense against treasury extraction.
- Gabriel Shapiro (@lex_node): characterizes it as part of a broader pattern of Ethereum DAOs being quietly "privatized" into foundations while on-chain mechanics stay nominally intact.
- Christoph Jentzsch (@ChrJentzsch, wrote the 2016 "The DAO" code): the DAO should wind down and revoke its own upgrade authority.
- Simona Pop (@sim_pop): The legitimacy test isn’t whether those exercising power have good intentions (or what they believe are good intentions). It’s whether the same actions would be considered legitimate regardless of who was exercising it! Imagine the exact same situation, the exact same actions but a different person/org doing all this. (veil of ignorance test) If that changes whether the arrangement feels acceptable then the legitimacy is borrowed from the individual.
side 2 - "reasonable, even honest, restructuring":
- Nick Johnson (@nicksdjohnson): token holders keep ultimate control (upgrades, pricing, root key, removing board members); he wanted council reform, not no council; notes he launched with a <6% allocation and took zero VC; says he'll only oppose council candidates who'd veto proposals that don't violate the Constitution.
- Katherine Wu (@katherineykwu): it fixes an operational reality - routine treasury moves were choking on governance overhead, per the DAO's own early-2026 self-review.
- Sympathetic analysts (e.g. ainvest): "a governance confession, not a crisis" - an accountable board may beat a decentralized facade that only produces gridlock,.
side 3 - "the end-state of every DAO" (commentary more than camp):
- aged DAOs drift to concentration,
- then "fix" it by returning to the centralized structure they were meant to replace.
- the proposal is the symptom doubling as the cure.
the through-line everyone agrees on:
- low turnout means token-voting already produced extreme concentration
- one founder, ~3% of supply, ~50% of the vote.
- the fight is whether the Foundation restructure is part of the cure or part of the disease.
appendix: the brantly millegan subplot
in 2022, Brantly Millegan held four roles in the ENS ecosystem:
1. Director of Operations at True Names Limited (TNL, the company developing ENS),
2. a director of the ENS Foundation,
3. a community-working-group steward,
4. and the single largest DAO delegate.
in 2022, a 2016 tweet resurfaced with views many read as anti-LGBTQ; he declined to retract.
what followed was actually three separate removals proposals (not one clean firing as is sometimes told):
- Community steward: the community stewards voted him out (4 of 5 stewards voted; majority to remove) - a stewards' vote, not a DAO-wide token vote.
- TNL Director of Operations: TNL terminated his contract, announced Feb 7, 2022 by Nick.eth; per ENS's own forum summary the decision "was made by Nick" (company management), not by a DAO vote. this termination presumably canceled Brantleys ENS token vest, which likely may have been significant.
- ENS Foundation directorship DAO vote (EP6.1): this was the one true DAO-wide token vote - and it was contentious. Millegan's own large delegated voting power (thousands of small delegators, ~10% of active votes) actually helped shield his Foundation seat, prompting members to argue whether the token-weighted result "is not indicative of the ENS ecosystem's wishes" and to warn about "the irony of a decentralized service centralizing around the voice of one person."
fast-forward back to 2022:
- Millegan is now one of the loudest voices defending the DAO against Nick.eth, sitting on the Security Council ready to veto what he calls Labs' "treasury capture."
- the man Nick.eth helped remove in 2022 is now the check on Nick.eth power in 2026 - and the 2022 "centralizing around one voice" warning reads very differently now that one person holds ~50% of the vote in 2026.
- as of July 3rd 2026, brantley has taken his .eth off and is leaving the ENS ecosystem.
why some re-litigate it: the 2026 and 2026 fights show ENS "governance" resolving high-stakes fights through concentrated power and informal pressure, with Nick.eth central to both, and cancel culture/culture wars looming ominously in the background.
the counter-view: it's a category error - a values-based staff removal (governed by an employment contract at a centralized company) and a treasury-structure fight share only the word "governance" - and re-litigating brantly is old grievance riding new drama.
the brantly precedent is part of why some read this as a legitimacy problem, not merely an operational one.
---
DYOR. best effort attempt. not financial advice. i dont have a position, nor do i plan to take one. this is not my fight - i'm just mapping the territory. if i got something wrong, missed, or mischaracterized something @ reply it. but don't project your weird ass shit on me.
Sources: Crypto Briefing, The Defiant, Cryptopolitan, ainvest, ETH Daily, Toobit, CoinAlertNews (The Block/CoinCentral), ENS DAO governance forum. Numbers vary by source: treasury ~$350M–$500M; market cap ~$168M; Johnson's stake ~3% of supply / ~50% active power / ~80% of votes cast.