July 30, 2025
The next publish comprises a recap of reports, initiatives, and essential updates from the Spartan Council and Core Contributors from final week.
👉TLDR
Ethereum turns 10: A decade of uptime and composability.BaseVol: Constructing simplified crypto choices with quick durations and clear UX.Additional time: 600+ on-chain sports activities & e-sports markets, now that includes AI betting brokers.Synthetix Mainnet: Coming to Ethereum L1 for safety and deep liquidity.L2 fatigue is actual: Base is successful, however most rollups are fragmented and UX-painful.Trustless betting issues: Customers are transferring from Web2 rugs to auditable, on-chain platforms.DeFi’s subsequent frontier: Brokers, bots, and people constructing aspect by aspect in Ethereum’s open sandbox.
Spartan Council and SIP updates
First, Ethereum turns 10 in the present day! Ten full years of uninterrupted uptime — no halts, no reboots, no central switches to flip. That’s not simply spectacular for a blockchain, that’s fairly exceptional for any world tech community.
To have fun, Synthetix hosted a Spartan House with friends from BaseVol and Additional time Markets to speak in regards to the community that began all of it. What adopted was a wide-ranging dialog on every thing from betting bots to scaling wars, so let’s briefly recap the decision.
First up was BaseVol, a workforce targeted on reimagining crypto choices as one thing that standard folks can truly use. Overlook complicated technical jargon and bloated dashboards, as a result of BaseVol provides short-dated, intuitive, fast-settling choices. Assume Robinhood UX meets DeFi volatility.
The workforce argued that with ETH and BTC volatility tightening and meme coin seasons maturing, customers are hungry for recent, high-upside performs, and choices are the right instrument (if delivered merely sufficient).
Subsequent was Additional time, which began as a Synthetix experiment (Thales binary choices) and has now grown right into a full-scale, decentralized sportsbook. They now help 600+ markets throughout conventional sports activities, e-sports, and world leagues — all trustless, on-chain, and KYC-free. And in a wild twist, bots are getting in on the motion: AI brokers like Billy Bets have already wagered over $1M on the platform by connecting to the API.
Throughout slower sports activities seasons, e-sports are filling the hole with Counter-Strike, Valorant, and Dota seeing surging curiosity. The group, and betting circulation, now rotates seasonally with world occasion calendars.
Later within the name, Burt shifted again to Ethereum (the birthday lady), the place Synthetix is getting ready to launch perps on mainnet. Whereas L2s supplied cheaper transactions and experimentation area, they’ve additionally launched downtime, fragmentation, and bridging friction. In contrast, Ethereum L1 provides the uptime, safety, and composability that actual merchants and liquidity suppliers want.
The protocol’s new perps product will settle immediately on mainnet, and combine natively with initiatives like Ethena. This enables merchants to earn yield and publish margin with the identical capital, because of Ethereum’s distinctive composability.
After all, the group additionally mentioned scaling. Everybody agreed: L2s performed an important function throughout gas-fee hell. However now? Most are too fragmented to help sustainable, unified progress.
And Base is rising because the clear frontrunner — Coinbase help, robust ecosystem, and actual customers. Most different rollups aren’t attracting sticky liquidity or compelling UX. Additional time confirmed they’re targeted on simply three chains: Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum. Extra deployments means greater infrastructure prices and thinner liquidity, which isn’t definitely worth the tradeoff.
To shut issues out, a person shared that they have been lately rugged for $16,000 by a standard sportsbook. That loss drove them to change to Additional time, the place each wager, market, and payout is absolutely auditable. In an area typically referred to with uncertainty, this was a reminder that transparency wins in DeFi as a result of Ethereum lets customers confirm the principles.
And now, with AI brokers getting into the sector, a brand new section of DeFi is taking form. Ethereum isn’t only for people anymore — it’s for brokers, bots, and protocols speaking immediately to 1 one other in a worldwide monetary sandbox.
All through the dialog, one theme was fixed: Ethereum is exclusive, and that’s what makes it work!
It’s filled with merchants, artists, builders, AI brokers, sports activities bettors, and even hackers — all figuring issues out as they go. That chaotic, permissionless tradition is what makes folks keep lengthy after the bull runs fade. It’s been ten years, and that is only the start.
