lore @optimism | ex: @coinbase | views are my own | what if it all worked out? 

good (in different ways): railgun, farcaster, polymarket, signal
bad (in different ways): pump.fun, Terra/Luna, FTX

The differences in what the app does stem from differences in beliefs in developers' heads about what they are here to accomplish.

I strongly disagree with Vitalik that pump is bad.

pump is a nascent form of content moving onchain — thereby letting it be valued and creating real value that can flow to creators and curators who can identify content value early.

there's absolutely things *around* pump (and other asset classes + venues) that are bad (e.g. people manipulating markets), but I think it's actively harmful to denigrate pump itself.

onchain creativity is good — and pump has been pioneering. thank you to @alon and team for their leadership 🫡

Strong agree — pumps (and the inevitable dumps) are net negative on multiple levels:
- Top developers avoid the space, leave it, or feel disheartened — turned off by a culture that feels hollow and extractive.
- Most newcomers aren’t serial speculators. When they hear “crypto” they think betting, risky assets, and scams. I saw this happening again and again at /appcon.
- A few win at the casino, but most lose — many permanently scarred.
- It flattens what Ethereum is really about.

This doesn’t mean tokens are bad. But the dominant narrative paints crypto as a giant betting arena — when we have far more meaningful problems to solve.

It’s fine if Solana leans into speculation, and some Ethereum apps will too. But as an ecosystem, we must resist reducing Ethereum to “crypto” and “speculation”.

Ethereum is the world computer. Let’s project that vision and champion apps aligned with the problems we’re here to solve.

disagree — pump is short-term euphoria with long-term, ecosystem-wide side effects.

we should absolutely keep using tokens in innovative ways to reward onchain creators and curators. but we shouldn’t socially align ethereum with speculation — it undermines the broader vision and turns away the people we need most.

@base builder #001; onchain cities w/ OAK & city3

disagree — pump is short-term euphoria with long-term, ecosystem-wide side effects.

we should absolutely keep using tokens in innovative ways to reward onchain creators and curators. but we shouldn’t socially align ethereum with speculation — it undermines the broader vision and turns away the people we need most. https://warpcast.com/jacopo.eth/0xf6f6791e

yes—but we need to stop highlighting speculation as the flagship use case. It’s just one of many, and arguably one of the least meaningful, sustained only because it plays into the illusion of quick gains.

as an ecosystem, we should be intentional about the values we champion—just as founders must be careful of the culture they build.

given how much attention is skewed toward speculation, we should consciously distance ourselves from it and actively focus on the values we want to be known for.

we can have both! it's a big, wide open sea.

Anything of perceived value, when tokenized, in a permissionless system, can be speculated on. It’s more of a fact of reality than a design choice. 

Early adopters speculated on Ethereum itself, and were called shitcoiners for it. I don’t think we know yet what the results of all this will be. And I don’t think there’s a dichotomy between speculation and “utility”, other than who seems to be allowed to benefit financially from it.