🚨VITALIK: ETHEREUM’S THIRD MAJOR ITERATION, “LEAN ETHEREUM” IS COMING!... After Berlin researcher meetings, Vitalik outlined “Lean Ethereum”, the next big multi-year upgrade, following Frontier and The Merge. Key shifts: recursive STARKs as a core feature, full quantum safety, new consensus with faster finality, multidimensional gas, new state types for massive scalability, privacy as a first-class goal, and formal verification everywhere. It will roll out over 3-4 years with minimal disruption to existing apps.show more

Vitalik Says Quantum Safety Has Become Urgent Priority For... Ethereum Vitalik Buterin (vitalik.eth) outlined a new "Lean Ethereum" strawmap in a post on X. He said the upgrades will roll out over the next three to four years. Buterin compared the shift in scale to the 2022 Merge upgrade. The plan touches nearly every layer of the network, he said. Vitalik Buterin also said quantum resistance has jumped sharply in priority for the network. He said privacy has also become a first class goal under the new plan. The roadmap calls for a new virtual machine to support both goals. Options include leanISA or RISC based designs, Buterin said. Worth noting, the foundation aims to reduce its budget by 40% under a new structure. The cuts follow several executive departures in recent months. Hsiao Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak both left the organization. Protocol contributors Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot also departed in May.show more

VITALIK BUTERIN TARGETS 500 BILLION PRIVACY RECORDS WITH NEW... DESIGN Ethereum $ETH co-founder, Vitalik Buterin (vitalik.eth) has a new idea for scaling the network. He wants to use something called keyed nonces, which could help with both privacy and storage at the same time. Buterin says a dedicated space for storing nullifiers could hold up to 500 billion entries over eight years without hurting decentralization. The problem with regular state is that it gets too large to manage, sometimes growing to hundreds of terabytes. Nullifiers are different. They follow a fixed, predictable structure, which makes them easier to handle using techniques like sharding and bloom filters. Buterin sees this as an early step toward building specialized storage on Ethereum, designed for specific jobs rather than trying to do everything at once.show more

$BNB turns 9 today! On July 14, 2017, $BNB... launched as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. It started out as a utility token for a young exchange, and nine years later it sits at the center of one of the most active onchain ecosystems in crypto. Here’s a quick breakdown of that journey: 2017 - Launched on Ethereum at $0.15 with a 200M total supply 2019 - Migrated to its own chain and became a native asset for the first time 2020 - Binance Smart Chain went live, bringing EVM smart contracts and making $BNB the gas of a fast-growing dApp ecosystem 2021 - The DeFi and GameFi boom put the chain at the center of onchain activity, and $BNB reached $690 2022 - Binance Smart Chain became BNB Chain, and BNB took on a new meaning: Build N Build 2023 - The stack expanded with opBNB for scale and BNB Greenfield for storage 2024 - Beacon Chain fusion brought staking, governance, and everything else onto one chain 2025 - Pascal, Lorentz, and Maxwell cut block times from 3s to 0.75s, DEX volume set records, and $BNB hit a new all-time high of $1,370 2026 (so far) · Blocks now land in 450ms with 650ms finality, roughly double the throughput the chain had in January Along the way, over 65M of the original 200M $BNB supply has been burned, on the road to a final supply of 100M. The H2 2026 roadmap keeps the focus where it has been all year: doubling mainnet throughput again, and building a next-generation L1 designed for 100K+ TPS with transactions confirmed in under 50ms. Nine years in, and $BNB has never been faster to use, cheaper to move, or scarcer to hold. Happy birthday, $BNB.show more

June Life Stats - 1 wife date - 4... kid dates - 2 books completed - 1 pound gained - 28/30 mornings with quiet time and Bible reading - 26/30 days with workouts - 18/30 days no alcohol - 1 meat smoke 13 day trip to Europe dominated the month. My wife and I had a lot of fun taking my oldest daughter and a friend on a senior trip to Germany, Italy, and Austria. Father’s Day was nice cooking out with my dad and family. Business had a great month with 3 closings and a bunch of new deals signing up with us. Jet’s Little League All Star team did great winning district and taking 2nd place in Regionals- ALMOST made it to state. Was fun watching him play. Lifted a lot. Ate a lot. Drank alcohol on my trip most nights cuz Europe baby. Overall pleased with the health performance despite the trip and eating/drinking a lot in Europe. Just started a 3 month cut to try to get as lean as I can before the end of September. Locked in. Business will be the big focus in July. Lots of deal activity and we’re moving to our new office HQ in Boerne. Thanks for following along if you’re reading this!show more

What Actually is Sei Network's “Giga” Upgrade? Sei Network’s... (Sei) Giga upgrade is a major overhaul designed to make the network faster, more scalable and better suited for high-performance onchain trading. Put simply, Giga is rebuilding three critical parts of the blockchain: consensus, execution and storage. (1) The first track focuses on consensus, with upgrades such as Autobahn designed to improve how Sei validators agree on the state of the chain. (2) The Ares upgrade targets execution, the part of the blockchain responsible for actually processing transactions. (3) Eidos focuses on storage, which is becoming increasingly important as blockchain throughput rises. Why does storage matter? Every transaction a blockchain processes has to be recorded. If the database cannot write data as quickly as the network executes transactions, higher throughput eventually becomes meaningless. Eidos is designed to solve that bottleneck. (4) Sei plans to replace the traditional Merkle-tree structure used for EVM state with FlatKV, a flat key-value database where updating one piece of state requires essentially one write. A lattice hash, or LtHash, is then used to maintain a verifiable fingerprint of the entire state without repeatedly recalculating an entire hash path. (5) Eidos also separates live EVM state from other blockchain data. This means transactions accessing current state no longer have to compete with historical data for the same database resources. (6) Sei is also introducing LittDB-backed storage for blocks and receipts. These records are written once but queried repeatedly, making them a different workload from constantly changing blockchain state. Older historical data will eventually move away from active nodes into archival storage, allowing nodes to focus their resources on the data needed for real-time operations. The interesting part is how Sei plans to deploy all of this. Instead of shutting down the network and migrating the entire database at once, Eidos is designed to migrate storage while Sei continues producing blocks. The old and new systems can run side by side during the transition, with data moved in batches and integrity checks performed throughout the process. The first phase arrived on Sei mainnet with the v6.6 release in August 2026, beginning the separation of EVM state and introducing improvements to the pruning process. The broader Eidos architecture, including FlatKV, LtHash, the new receipt store and off-node archival storage, is expected to arrive through subsequent releases. Sei’s ultimate Giga target is 200,000 transactions per second. But reaching that kind of execution speed requires more than a faster transaction engine. The blockchain also needs a storage system capable of keeping up. That is essentially what Eidos is trying to build. Giga is not just about making Sei execute transactions faster. It is about rebuilding the infrastructure underneath that speed so the network can actually sustain it.show more

🚨 Hedera recently posted their plans for 2025 so... I’ve put together a summary of what the next year should look like for $HBAR. 👀 Key Highlights: 🔥 •AI and Tokenization: Hedera plans to emphasize AI integration and tokenization, aiming to advance blockchain technology. This includes new partnerships with tech giants like Nvidia, Intel, and Chainlink to push forward in these areas.  •DeFi Accessibility: The Hedera Foundation is set to launch initiatives in 2025 to make DeFi more accessible. These include providing secure and straightforward tools for managing digital assets, ensuring that users can engage confidently in the emerging financial landscape. •Institutional DeFi and RWA: Hedera anticipates integration with Stargate Finance to expand Hedera USDC liquidity into the DeFi ecosystem, further supporting institutional DeFi and real-world assets (RWAs) on the network. •Ecosystem Development: Hedera is investing in its developer ecosystem by offering new tools and services to attract a broader range of developers. This includes the launch of a transparent blockchain grant management platform in Q2 2025 to empower community funding of projects directly. •Partnerships and Rebranding: With new leadership, including CEO Charles Atkins, Hedera is planning a rebranding effort alongside its focus on AI, which is expected to solidify its position in the tech sector through strategic partnerships. •Technical Enhancements: There are plans for JSON-RPC relay access in 2025 by hGraph, which will streamline developer onboarding, allowing them to use Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) tools to interact with Hedera just like they would with Ethereum. 2025 will be groundbreaking for Hedera as these moves are part of a strategy to position Hedera as a leader in the evolving blockchain landscape, focusing on scalability, security, and compliance. The future is being built on $HBAR 🚀 🔥 💰show more

Over 1000 people are racing from New York City... to Boston tomorrow. And nobody is talking about it. The Five Sisters Cup will feature 4/5 tall ships designed to a common specification by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, Germany. Each barque has 3 masts, and a crew over 250. Gorch Fock II 🇩🇪 Eagle 🇺🇸 Sagres 🇵🇹 Mircea 🇷🇴 The Gorch Fock I, Eagle, Sagres, and Mircea are 1930s contemporaries. The first three were purpose-built training vessels for Germany with Mircea built for Romania. After the war, the German vessels were redistributed as reparations. Gorch Fock II was built as a replacement for Gorch Fock I in the 1950s. Unfortunately, Gorch Fock I is no longer seaworthy and currently resides in Stralsund as a museum. The last time all these ships saw one another was for the 🇺🇸 Bicentennial in 1976. Gorch Fock II claimed the Five Sisters Cup then, but who will claim it in the days ahead?show more

A summary of my fireside chat with vitalik.eth at... the Home Staking Summit in Singapore last week if you weren't able to attend. *Disclaimer: This also includes some of my prior understanding and interpretation. Part 1 of 3: The importance of solo stakers Solo stakers serve as both the first and last line of defence for the Ethereum network. First line = Providing censorship resistance. Last line = Quorum-blocking set by preventing 67% finalisation of the wrong chain As a censorship resistant set, solo stakers are typically uncorrelated and unaligned with any organisations, making them a difficult target for regulatory capture or coercion. What this means is that, certain organisations can try to impose censorship on Ethereum but will likely only go as far as delaying these transactions. Full censorship will be extremely difficult because solo stakers exist on Ethereum (amongst other mechanisms). IMO this is a huge part on why ETH is the credibly neutral block space that serious money wants to settle on!😎 As a quorum-blocking set: Ethereum's social layer can organise a recovery from a 51% capture where the chain splits in 2 but finalising the wrong thing (i.e., 67% capture) will be very bad as the blockchain's past & future can be changed without direct slashing risks. One way to prevent finalisation capture is to increase the quorum threshold - e.g., from 67% to 75% or even 85%. At 85%, current numbers of identified solo stakers + unidentified stakers from hildobby 's dashboard will be sufficient. But on the other hand, will this decrease the cost of attack to prevent finalisation? - e.g., from >33% to just >15% of staked ETH? Not necessarily, as there are cheaper backdoor ways to mount this attack even today. Eg. Bribing core devs or key employees of large node operators, or even outrightly buying out the large node operators Hence, the 33% of staked ETH here represents the highest cost of attack to hold the chain hostage. If so, then we are currently overpaying to prevent >33% front door attack today, which means there is room to decrease the budget in favour of better security against ">66%" attacks. The analogy Vitalik uses is that if we imagine a house with 10cm thick bulletproof glass as windows but has a crappy wooden door, then we should reallocate resources to strengthening the weakest link. The other more ambitious but realistic method is to increase the number of solo stakers such that we become the quorum-blocking set of the current finalisation threshold. How do we achieve this? Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 for my discussion with Vitalik on Orbit SSF and Rainbow Staking!show more

$1,000,000,000+ in tokenized stock TVL. In less than 8... months, Ondo Global Markets became the first tokenized stock & ETF platform to reach $1 billion in TVL, one of the fastest climbs in the history of onchain finance. Ondo Global Markets has established itself as the standard for tokenized stocks and ETFs: → Over 70% market share → Tens of thousands of holders → Over $18B in cumulative volume → Live across Solana, BNB Chain & Ethereum Since launch, the platform has scaled to 260+ tokenized stocks & ETFs, expanding access to the world's most in-demand sectors across AI, biotech, defense, energy, and more. The pace of tokenization is accelerating with every new asset class. What took stablecoins and tokenized Treasuries years, Ondo tokenized stocks and ETFs achieved in under a year, faster than any asset class before them. This milestone reflects a generational shift in how global investors access capital markets, one that is more transparent, more accessible, and more efficient than the legacy system. One billion down. Trillions to go.show more

From a list of 112 blockchains, only 6 chains... show up repeatedly (80%+) in the Top 10 by DEX volume since March 2021 when crypto first saw new ATHs. #Fantom is one of them. The others are Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, Avalanche and Arbitrum. This next sentence applies to the above as well as the below: You are as good as who you surround yourself with. Since its rise, Fantom operated smoothly as a top Layer 1 with massive DEX volume (good metric of real users/usage), and is among good company. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Do yourself a favor, stop listening to fools shouting "its over", "ftm to zero", "community is broken", "treasury gone". 🛑STOP giving attention to misinformation peddlers who were never $FTM believers to begin with. No matter how much they grift, seem to have good intentions, they do NOT have your best interest in mind. Fact is: Fantom Foundation treasury is diversified across different crypto and non-crypto assets. The biggest impact was on the value of its MULTI tokens that were held long term. The Foundation WILL continue to develop and grow the ecosystem for the long term. The community, many of them reading this now, are here for it. Moving forward, we will build confidence, nurture bridging solutions and continue to build out the tech as top priority 💯show more

A new week is here, but what makes it... more fun is the amount of information you hop in on early enough. Here are some projects I’ve got my eyes on; 1) Brevis comes in first with verifiable computing solving issues of re-executing orders on the blockchain. Recently, team introduced the new pico prism; a state of the art zkVM for faster Ethereum proving in seconds. 2) Modular layer chains for better integration of RWAs are also not left out with integra. as the XP gathering has begun. Everything about integra stays under the carpet, but they are making big moves for RWAs on chain. 3) ⁠Cysic; the future of computefi has also been quiet lately. After the buzz around the cubes minted, I expected an update from them soonest. 4) Momentum finance has been the buzz all over CT the last few days after announcing the community round on Buidlpad Ⓜ️Ⓜ️T coming soon. A recent title deed nomination wave swept across MomentumⓂ️Ⓜ️T community members to reward those that have been supportive all along. 5) AI development and innovation are also not left out as Michael Heinrich (Ø,G) spearheads the entire 0G Labs (Home of Infinite AI) ecosystem to finality. It’s crazy enough if you think the second round of airdrop was all from the 0G team, they keep shipping new products daily. Only believe in them. 6) On the track to integrating AGIs, Sentient isn’t left out as well, as they’re recently on one of the biggest stages; NeurIPS Conference. The recent update showed that 4 of their papers were accepted across various categories. Screams bullish to be IMO. 7) In all of the TGEs and allocation announcements this year, Everlyn ranks one of the worst. They eventually came up with an option to refund subscription users (Who ever thought that was a good idea?😶). They need to realize that as a web2 company coming into web3, you need to understand the lingual here before engaging. These are basically the major updates on them all, but I’ll definitely add to them as I find more. Stay woke ANON.show more

Let’s dive into how the Confidential Layer Bridge launch... will unfold - and why the phased approach benefits you as a user. Stage 1 - EVM + BTC Bridging Initially, you will be able to bridge between EVMs, Bitcoin, and the Zano privacy blockchain. This major milestone enables you to upgrade your crypto to unlock DeFi opportunities and privacy enhancements. Stage 2 - Cross-Chain Swaps of Native Assets Thanks to the development of our own Transaction Bundler, you will be able to pick a native asset on the source chain and receive a different native asset on the destination chain - all in a seamless, user-friendly way. Stage 3 - Ecosystem Token Bridging The addition of $CLONE to the bridge will mark the official start of DEX trading. At this stage, $CLONE will become omni-chain, allowing you to choose where you want to trade it. Stage 4 - Addition of New Blockhains We’re not stopping there. With the foundation set, we’ll continue integrating more and more blockchains - opening new possibilities for you. The next major additions will be TON 💎 and Solana, both scheduled for Q3 2025. This step-by-step rollout keeps the bridge stable, liquid, and constantly expanding. Stay tuned for the first stage - and every new chain that follows. You can learn more about the Confidential Layer Bridge launch in this Discord announcement:show more

AI token usage is up 10x in 7 months,... compounding 40%/MONTH! There is NO BUBBLE when demand is STILL accelerating And this is just OpenRouter, it doesn't count the labs direct token usage and APIs But here's what's interesting about these numbers, the demand is coming from everywhere at once US models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) keep growing, while Chinese open weight models (DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, Minimax) grew even faster and now drive over 60% of usage on OpenRouter Closed source and open source both compounding at the same time. This is literally the best case scenario for AI Infra investors It means both frontier model tokens and cheaper tokens have product market fit. This means the application layer is finding ways to use both and generate ROI with both types Demand for tokens IS demand for compute. This is why SpaceX is looking to build 10GW of compute by next year, because the demand is clearly here Now combine this demand set up, with NVIDIA yesterday announcing financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion of third party capital for AI infrastructure And Jensen has said publicly he expects $3 to $4 TRILLION of AI infrastructure spend by 2030 The build out will have to continue for a lot longer than the market is expecting, that is very clear to me. Don't let this consolidation period in AI infra stocks shake you out, they will have their moment again and take their next leg higher p.s. if you want to see how im investing in this, you can track my real-time portfolio and the research of all 5 Milk Road PRO analysts with live trade notifications, and it's just $1 to try it out (insane price just to check it out). Learn more here: Good luck out there!show more

ChainSwap Yearly Recap 2024 -Key Metrics and Growth- 2024... has been a transformative year for ChainSwap, defined by remarkable growth and user trust. We onboarded over 1,370 unique users and achieved over $35,000,000 in total volume, with $10,000,000 generated in just the past two weeks during ChainBot’s testing phase. This volume brought in over $170,000 in EVM revenue and an additional $70,000 from Solana ChainBot beta testers, highlighting the utility’s immense potential. Every dollar generated will be reinvested into revenue sharing as well as buybacks and burns, directly benefiting nearly 20,000 ChainSwap token holders. -Utility Development- We’ve developed and continue to enhance over a half-dozen utilities, redefining DeFi usability. These include our cross-chain dApp, the Telegram bot 'ChainBot' for CCIP-supported chains and Solana, privacy swaps, the cold storage alternative 'ChainSafe,' and many more tools that cater to both seasoned and new DeFi users. -Community Engagement- This year, ChainSwap hosted 29 episodes of UnChained, featuring notable guests like AvaLabs, PeaPods Finance, and MetaTrust Labs. Topics ranged from security to marketing, offering diverse perspectives and invaluable education. Over $500,000 in giveaways and interactive discussions solidified UnChained as a cornerstone of our engagement efforts. -Boots on the Ground Networking- ChainSwap’s team actively participated in global blockchain events, including Token2049 in Dubai and Singapore, the Future Blockchain Summit, and numerous other meetups. These efforts built relationships with industry leaders, laying the groundwork for future collaborations and innovation. -Cross-Marketing and Partnerships- Collaboration fueled ChainSwap’s growth, with over a dozen new partnerships, including Chainlink's CCIP recognition. We worked with AvaLabs, Ethereum-based utilities like Hash AI and Spectre AI, and even meme coins, demonstrating our adaptability. Participation in cross-marketing X Spaces with names like Three Protocol and Moon Tropica further amplified our visibility and reputation. -2025 Roadmap- ChainSwap is set for an even bigger 2025. We aim to launch over new utilities outlined on our roadmap, such as ChainSafe, a multi-chain block explorer, and many more while scaling interoperability and user experience. Partnerships remain key, with plans to onboard more collaborations and innovative use cases. Our community is not just a support system but an integral part of our team, sharing in our vision and driving our collective success. Building on the achievements of 2024, ChainSwap is poised to set new standards in blockchain interoperability and DeFi innovation, fueled by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team committed to shaping the future of decentralized finance. We’re excited to have you with us as we shape the future together.show more

🚨 THE BIGGEST BOTTLENECK IN AI ISN'T COMPUTING POWER... ANYMORE IT'S MOVING DATA. Instead of laying new cables, Chinese researchers have upgraded existing fiber infrastructure by doing two things at once: Using three wavelength bands (C + L + S) instead of the usual two. Using four cores inside each fiber instead of one. Each core acts like an independent highway, and each band acts like an extra lane on that highway. Together, they’ve reportedly increased transmission capacity per core by nearly 50% and overall data throughput by up to 5×. This matters enormously for AI. Modern AI clusters move terabits of data per second between thousands of GPUs. The biggest bottleneck is often not the chips themselves, but moving data fast enough between them. If you can push 5× more data through the same physical cables, you can train bigger models faster and reduce network congestion. Why this is significant: • It shows multi-core + extended spectrum technology moving from labs into real-world commercial use • The system has already run over 35 km of existing telecom network • It could be especially useful for submarine cables and large-scale data center interconnects • China is also eyeing it for its “Eastern Data, Western Computing” project The deeper implication: We’re reaching the physical limits of how much data we can push through single-core fibers using traditional methods. By combining spatial multiplexing (multiple cores) with spectral multiplexing (more wavelength bands), engineers are finding new ways to keep scaling bandwidth without having to dig up the planet to lay new cables. This kind of breakthrough is quiet but foundational it’s the kind of infrastructure upgrade that will determine how fast AI and cloud computing can actually grow in the coming years. The future of data movement might not require more cables. It might just require smarter ones. How important do you think multi-core and multi-band fiber will be for keeping up with AI’s exploding data demands? Follow for more frontier networking, photonics, and infrastructure technology.show more

🚨🔥🇷🇸 SERBIA ON EDGE: NOVI PAZAR BLOCKED 🕌⚠️ PROTEST🔥🚨... Protests erupt in Sandžak as university dispute exposes deep cracks inside the state Novi Pazar was effectively brought to a standstill as students and citizens blocked Stefana Nemanje Street, escalating a conflict surrounding the State University of Novi Pazar into one of the most sensitive internal crises Serbia has faced in recent years. What started as a dispute over university governance and autonomy has now spilled decisively into the streets — and with it, long-suppressed questions of identity, trust, and cohesion inside the Serbian state. ⸻ The immediate cause of the protests lies in disagreements over management, appointments, and oversight at the state-funded university. Students and parts of the academic community argue that increased central control from Belgrade threatens institutional autonomy and weakens local influence over a key public institution. Yet the scale and speed of the mobilization make clear that this is not merely an academic issue. The university has become a symbol — and in Sandžak, symbols rarely remain confined to classrooms. ⸻ To understand why this confrontation resonates so strongly, one must understand the historical weight of Novi Pazar and the Sandžak region. Founded in the 15th century as a major Ottoman administrative and trade center, Novi Pazar developed for centuries outside the political and cultural core of the Serbian medieval and later national state. Sandžak itself takes its name from the Ottoman administrative system, reflecting its long history as a frontier zone between empires, religions, and identities. Unlike most of Serbia, Sandžak retained a strong Muslim — largely Bosniak — population, whose historical memory and social structures were shaped within a different civilizational framework. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and later Yugoslavia, the region became part of Serbia, but the sense of being fully integrated never entirely followed. For many locals, Novi Pazar represents more than geography. It represents continuity, recognition, and the ability to exist within Serbia without being absorbed into a narrative that does not fully reflect them. ⸻ This is why the university matters so deeply. It is one of the few major state institutions in Sandžak where local academics, students, and elites feel genuinely represented. Control over it is not perceived merely as bureaucratic authority, but as influence over the future — who teaches, who decides, and which perspectives are treated as normal rather than peripheral. Crucially, protesters are not claiming that Serbia is pursuing open anti-Muslim policies, nor that the university will become a site of ideological indoctrination. The fear is subtler, but no less powerful: that tighter centralization will gradually normalize a dominant national framework in which Sandžak’s identity becomes secondary, diluted, or reduced to regional color. ⸻ The moment protests moved from the campus to street blockades marked a turning point. Blocking major roads in Novi Pazar is not random disruption; it is a signal that institutional trust has eroded to the point where pressure politics replaces dialogue. When identity, history, and dignity become intertwined with administrative decisions, every move from the center is read symbolically. Silence becomes provocation. Reform becomes suspicion. ⸻ Serbia is not collapsing. There are no calls for secession, no parallel authorities, no territorial challenge. But what is unfolding in Novi Pazar reveals something more uncomfortable: fragile internal cohesion in a state that presents itself as unified and stable. States rarely weaken through sudden rupture. More often, they erode slowly — when regions feel unheard, when institutions lose legitimacy, and when identity becomes the language of protest. Novi Pazar is not an exception. It is a warning. Slavic Networksshow more

🇬🇧 STARMER BREAKS RULES: TIKTOK BANNED ON GOV’T PHONES,... HE POSTS CLIP ANYWAY Starmer just took his first steps into the world of short-form video, launching a TikTok account with a rather cringe-but-charming clip of himself and wife Victoria turning on Downing Street’s Christmas lights. “Follow me,” urges Starmer, stepping out of the iconic black door - a moment that feels equal parts festive and awkwardly viral. Here’s the thing: TikTok remains banned on government devices, over fears about data security and Chinese ownership. That hasn’t stopped Starmer from opening an account or posting content. A No10 source shrugged it off: “We’re finding new ways to share our vision… from TikTok and Substack to traditional media.” The move comes ahead of a planned trip to Beijing in the New Year, as Britain tries to thread the needle between economic engagement and managing strategic competition with China. Starmer is clearly testing new channels to communicate directly with younger audiences - and maybe soften his public image after recent low approval ratings and unconventional media appearances, including a podcast with Towie star Pete Wicks. The optics are messy - a global leader engaging on a platform officially deemed a security risk at home... Expect this to spark a minor storm in Westminster. Many will frame it as symbolic naivety or security risk, while supporters may call it savvy modern outreach. The real test will come during the China trip: will Starmer’s TikTok persona help open doors in Beijing, or will it underscore the contradictions of promoting transparency on a platform flagged for data vulnerabilities? For now, Britain’s PM is playing global diplomacy and domestic image in parallel - TikTok as a launchpad, China as the proving ground. The next few weeks will show whether the stunt lands as clever engagement or a political faux pas. Source: Daily Mailshow more