Founder European Decentralisation Institute https://xitter.gq/t.co/hnUMhHBWDP You can find me on bluesky
Europe
Joined September 2009
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If agency in a complex system is withheld from its agents, it will not have emergent properties. In such case the system is not truly complex and its outcomes are sub-optimal.
I am tired of all the AI news in mainstream media. Not that I am an expert, but the simplistic takes like "AI will never be really creative" or "AI isn't really intelligent, it will always need humans" are just annoying. Even more annoying are the "human-in-the-loop" proponents
Arno Laeven retweeted
If the AI bros really want to commit themselves to "pacing the frontier", they can simply move to any country within the European Union and apply for Horizon Europe funding.
stukje getikt in Nederlands. Het wordt tijd voor een Digitale Rijksbouwmeester. arnolaeven.substack.com/p/ti…
If you are European and you fly to the Middle East or the tropics for holiday you have no right whatsoever to complain about the heat wave. a) IT'S YOUR FAULT b) you apparently like this weather
Arno Laeven retweeted
"Buy European" is not a strategy. It is a misdiagnosis.
Europe's sovereignty gap is caused by writing continental rules for infrastructure Europe does not govern. Find out what else our co-founder @roman_beck has to say about this eudecentralisation.org/procu…
Arno Laeven retweeted
Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.
Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”
Arno Laeven retweeted
When I mentioned in my @EthCC talk yesterday that digital supply chain traceability is a huge opportunity for eth builders, this is what I meant:
A Future Market Insights market research report says the Digital Products Passport (DPP) platforms market is projected to grow from $2.4B in 2025 to $10.8B by 2035 with blockchain-based traceability platforms capturing 45% of the market in 2025.
futuremarketinsights.com/rep…
Arno Laeven retweeted
In Europe, governments are increasingly building critical digital infrastructure on open protocols such as Matrix, driven by the push for digital sovereignty and legally mandated interoperability.
It eliminates single points of dependency and can cut costs.
But it only works if institutions adapt by building capacity for protocol engagement and changing procurement criteria which are based on the build it or buy it model.
I wrote a Government Guide to Open Protocols for Protocolized:
protocolized.summerofprotoco…
Arno Laeven retweeted
If a system runs permissionlessly, it means there is no central point of control. No gatekeeper. No switch to flip. No office that can issue an order and shut it down.
That is precisely the point.
The moment intelligence depends on permission, it becomes fragile. It becomes political. It becomes contingent on whoever holds power.
This is why autonomous, permissionless incentive machines are non-negotiable for @covenant_ai and our brothers and sisters building on Bittensor. We are not building tools that require approval. We are building infrastructure that cannot be arbitrarily revoked.
It is hard. It is chaotic. It forces you to solve incentives instead of enforcing authority.
But that is the hill we choose to stand on.
If intelligence is to be democratized, it must be sovereign.
I'll be in Brussels tomorrow for the @BlockchainforEU summit where I will host a panel on Defi. DM me if you'd like to meet up.
New partnership: EDI x @BlockchainforEU 🤝
Tomorrow we join the Blockchain for Europe Summit in Brussels
Europe has strong digital rules, but still relies on infra it doesn’t control. Closing this sovereignty gap means leveraging decentralised, resilient rails
In Brussels? DM
Arno Laeven retweeted
Europe’s problem is not overregulation,
it is the lack of digitalisation.
=> read our latest policy brief eudecentralisation.org/europ…
Arno Laeven retweeted
0/ From scaling to identity to real-world assets, the Ethereum ecosystem keeps advancing forward.
Here are 28 things the ecosystem accomplished over the last month.
1/ Bhutan becomes the first nation to anchor its national digital ID system on Ethereum, showing how governments can use open infrastructure to keep public identity systems secure, sovereign, and verifiable.
2/ @JovayNetwork by Ant Group (creator of AliPay) are building the next era of Layer 2, connecting one of the world’s largest payment networks with open, global infrastructure.
3/ Stablecoin transfers on @ethereum hit $5T last quarter. Onchain payments continue to become the internet’s settlement layer for global value.
4/ ERC-8004 went live, enabling AI agents to discover and trust each other without intermediaries, a step toward open, autonomous agent economies built on Ethereum.
5/ @ADIChain_ joined the @zksync Elastic Network, launching the first dirham-backed stablecoin with major UAE banks, a strong link between regulated finance and open settlement infrastructure.
6/ @centrifuge launched SPXA, the first tokenized S&P 500 Index Fund licensed by @SPDJIndices and deployed on @base, bringing traditional market exposure directly into the onchain economy.
7/ The Ethereum for Institutions site is now live. The new site acts as a resource for builders, leaders, and institutions.
8/ @WalletConnect Pay went live with @dtc_pay, enabling seamless stablecoin payments across retail and hospitality in Asia, bridging onchain money with everyday transactions.
9/ @Lighter_xyz launched its mainnet after eight months in private beta, bringing low-cost, low-latency perpetual trading to Ethereum L2 with verifiable matching and liquidations for high-performance DeFi.
10/ @fluidkey launched its new app on iOS, Android, and web, combining privacy-preserving accounts, stealth addresses, yield, swaps, and biometric security in one onchain wallet.
11/ @brevis_zk unveiled Pico Prism, a zkVM proving 99.6% of blocks in under 12 seconds with 64 RTX 5090 GPUs, showing how zero-knowledge (ZK) performance is accelerating.
12/ @ziskvm now proves every Ethereum block in real time, averaging 7.5-second proofs, supporting the network in delivering secure scalability.
13/ @Securitize and @FGNexusio brought the first NASDAQ-listed equity fully onchain, turning dividend-paying shares into programmable assets. Public markets are starting to use Ethereum as their base layer.
14/ Ethereum is now the main capital hub of @zksync. ZKsync introduced the Atlas upgrade which makes it faster to move funds between L1 and L2. This means institutional and RWA asset flows can use directly Ethereum L1 as a liquidity hub.
15/ Applications on @ethereum now host over $360B in deposits, up $100B this year.
16/ Layer 2 networks on @ethereum processed 1.4B transactions in Q3, a new record. Showing how scaling solutions are working to bring Ethereum to millions of users.
17/ @RobinhoodApp_EU Stock Tokens went live in the EU. There are 400+ Stock Tokens linked to U.S. stocks and ETFs, giving retail investors onchain access to traditional markets.
18/ @arbitrum One passed 2B transactions.
19/ @coinbase rolled out decentralized exchange (DEX) trading for US users (except NY), opening access to millions of tokens directly from the app.
20/ @base launched creator coins to a group of early access users. Coins will let fans hold a stake in their favorite builders.
21/ Japanese startup, JYPC launched the world's first yen-pegged stablecoin on Ethereum.
22/ @ShutterNetwork and @SnapshotLabs brought private voting to all decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), protecting millions of participants onchain.
23/ @MiniPay wallets increased by 175% year-over-year during the quarter. Users initiated approx 290M peer-to-peer transactions worth over $300M across 60 countries.
24/ @ZAMM_DEFI launched a new feature: AI-powered swaps. Traders can now execute intelligent, automated swaps directly on zAMM
25/ @AegisMarkets reached $1B in total volume. The app is built on @Uniswap v4.
26/ @AbstractChain dropped block times from 1s → 200ms, a 5x speed boost that enables real-time apps and seamless user experiences across the network.
27/ @gizatechxyz surpassed 500K autonomous transactions—agents are acting independently on Ethereum.
28/ @Celo reached 1B total transactions, showing Ethereum’s scaling ecosystem in full motion.
Arno Laeven retweeted
It’s official! Yesterday’s high-level roundtable marked the launch of the European Decentralisation Institute
With the @lisboncouncil , we explored how decentralisation turns sovereignty from ambition into capability.
Five key takeaways👇
🧵
Arno Laeven retweeted
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe.
signal.org/blog/pdfs/germany…
30 years too late but still cool (thanks for the write up @jevgenijs)
Ok, let me try explaining (mostly to myself) what the x402 protocol, launched by Coinbase, means:
✔️ When you type a URL into the browser, your browser ("the client") tries connecting to a server that hosts the website (e.g., Bloomberg). If it successfully connects, the server returns status 200, which means “all good.”
✔️ If you type a wrong URL, the server tells your browser that this page does not exist by returning a 404 error (you’ve definitely seen this one).
✔️ So…the 402 is a new type of response (or rather, it has existed for a long time, but was never used), which means: “hey, the URL exists, but you need to pay for it.”
✔️ If you are a human, you see a paywall and enter your credit card to access the content….
✔️ BUT…if you are a machine (e.g., an AI agent), you actually have no idea that you need to pay. You just get a 200 response, but for a paywall page, not the page that you tried to access.
✔️ 402 solves this issue: it tells you, in a machine-readable way, that accessing the URL requires a payment, and again in a machine-readable way, gives you the accepted payment types (“schemes”).
✔️ The machine can then add payment info and send it back to the server to access the content. I’m not sure it would be cool to send your card details, and a machine can’t have a card anyway…
✔️ BUT…a machine can construct a stablecoin payment: create a signature authorizing the transfer. This is safer than sending card details, because you sign a specific transfer (including the recipient address and the amount), instead of giving general access to your wallet.
✔️ What happens then is the content provider sends it to a Facilitator. You can think of it as a merchant acquirer that processes such requests (collecting signed authorizations and posting them to a blockchain).
✔️ After the payment is processed (“settled”), the machine can access the paid content.
Cool things about it:
✔️ This essentially enables AI agents and similar types of interfaces to pay for things online. There is no need for a human in between.
✔️ It creates a new entity, “Facilitator”, which is a new breed of merchant acquirer (Coinbase launched the protocol and offers such a Facilitator).
✔️ This creates a new use case for stablecoins
SOUNDS FREAKING COOL!!!
Arno Laeven retweeted
We can finally unveil it... Blockchain meets Public Good 👐
📅 Sat, Oct 11, 2025 📍 Rome, Italy
🔮 By @v_era3 | Part of @urbeEth Village
Approval required: luma.com/vw6t8yny
20+ trailblazers. One essential conversation. How web3 transforms public goods and social impact.
💚 Early supporters: @ensdomains DAO, @nounsdao, @AshokaItaly.
☕ Breakfast, coffe & vibes by Nouns ⌐◨-◨
🍝 Gentle lunch - TBD
🍸 Liquid Aperitif - TBD
When blockchain meets purpose, extraordinary things happen.
Save the date. When in Rome. 🏛️
Arno Laeven retweeted
Our co-founder @roman_beck highlights in this podcast (in German) that Europe urgently needs to develop its own discourse around decentralised technologies, rather than leaving it to China and US. open.spotify.com/episode/4Sl…
