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u/johnnydappeth

Ethereum

u/jaskidd05

$3333

u/FrenktheTank

0.0346

u/usesbinkvideo

93,062 hodlers subscribed (+4)

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You better watch out,

Another cycle will sprout,

You better not pout.

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༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ

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Ethereum rapidly losing its lead to Solana in stablecoin market cap. Looks like the world is coming to the realization that Solana is a reliable platform after all.

Just kidding, Ethereum’s stablecoin market cap is now 23 times bigger.

Isn’t it interesting how the gap doesn’t close on all relevant metrics that cannot be faked?

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I’ve been working on an open-source validator desktop app to simplify running Ethereum validators. This all-in-one program provides a clean GUI for installing, updating, and managing validators – no terminal commands needed! Perfect for non-technical users who want to stake from home.

Here’s a link to the Ethstaker post with the detailed information. Any testing or feedback are always appreciated. Happy Staking!

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Pack yer bags. We’re headed west: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1hbu1kx/vote_now_vote_on_the_issue_to_fully_merge_the/

96% approval is really something special.

The daily is live on r/ethereum, but soon^^tm we’re going to add Ethfinance to the description ahead of January 1st.

The title will stay exactly the same as here and the daily will remain in the number 2 position on the front page as well.

Cograts everyone, ya’ll are getting teaching jobs on /r/ethereum. It’s gonna be great!

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u/hanniabu:

Last week I went to a crypto event. There I met a prominent crypto lawyer (will leave unnamed) who was recruited by Trump/Elon to be a lead in DOGE (department of gov efficiency). I think the title was something like strategic director. He declined because we didn’t want to become the fall guy they blame everything on if anything went wrong.

But what he thought was interesting was this must mean they’re planning on putting government processes/record onchain. The question is which chain?

We know Elon likes BTC so will it be basic data put onchain? He’s also smart and Trump has used Ethereum before so will Ethereum be used? We know they’re not the straightest edge so maybe they’ll take a backdoor deal and use Solana? We also know he loves Doge and Doge is adding smart contracts so maybe he’ll use that?

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u/Itur_ad_Astra:

This is where the greatest advantage of Ethereum (not having a controlling/marketing entity) might prove a huge disadvantage.

And it’s a big fear of mine.

I can easily see Solana buying its way into government with a few billions, while I could never see the EF doing that (I’m not sure they could even if they wanted to).

Setting up a neutral selection committee in order to choose the best blockchain would be ideal, but good luck with that.

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Vitalik with another fascinating post, this time on Deep Funding: https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xaced7a72

Ever since the DAO many have felt like one of ethereum’s killer apps will be to entirely replace “the corporation” with decentralized organizations of some form. Just some scattered musings on that idea below.. you’re much better off spending your time reading vitaliks post…. but hey i felt like writing this out:

Cap tables like these drive the main distribution of $ in modern companies. The gap between the actual distribution of $ and the perceived fair or correct distribution of $ according to effort/value is very large. While admittedly a hard problem, any significant closing of that gap would be one of those society altering level of impacts. The kind of thing that I think gets people so excited when they first descend the rabbit hole on Ethereum in the first place.

I feel like the DAO was sort of the right idea (build a plane) but without any of the tools you needed to build the airplane. Before you can fly you have to discover some wing aerodynamics, you have to get like engines or propulsion figured out, maybe light but strong materials, etc etc I dont know how planes work.

I think more and more we’re building out some of these primitives that we’ll need to fly the plane. Defi was necessary just to be able to trade tokens, loan, create liquidity, and all that financial lubrication you need to transaction.

I don’t know if they’re part of this plane or some other thing but I think NFTs represent some ability to value in more symbolic or representative ways.

To me a big driver is L2’s bringing down costs while maintaining credible enough decentralization principles/roadmap well enough to not detract from the vision. That also comes down to our L1 staking community & our ethos of decentralization which members of this sub contribute to every day. So big f’ing salute to y’all.

And just a lot of fundamental smart contract and regular old web coding nitty gritty that’s been done over the years.

Some failed ideas out there too in the world of experimentation (3,3).

I think token launchers on farcaster are starting to put some more of these pieces in place with sort of stupid easy to use but very simple forms of value allocation/distribution. Essentially very basic fair launch stuff. Put a bunch of tokens out there. People buy them up. Viola. Which honestly has been effective enough to bring some of the largest crypto projects to where they are today.

This deep funding looks like a much more sophisticated and frankly cool version of that.

I think all these pieces getting built are adding to the viability of some of these more complex but superior collaboration structures. Advancements in tools = necessary precursor for discovery. Nobody was discovering bacteria till the microscope came around. Maybe some of these toy like primitives are creating the tools and building blocks necessary for finally surpassing many existing organizational structures?

Regardless I’m sure the much smarter people than I working on this type of thing are going to do cool stuff. If you want a bull case for Ethereum short term AND long term it’s that the builders making stuff on Ethereum are the most creative, badass group of people I’ve ever seen. I’m more than happy to shed the austrian economics crowd and the grifter casino lock my self in a cage or threaten violence to animals/people for money crowd (y’all know who I’m talking about) and back the ethos of Ethereum.

Forget me with any price whining or nonsense this is the #1 best asset in the ENTIRE world. Hands down. It’s not even close. And right now it’s valued less than mastercard.

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Warning for kraken users - I just did a test transaction from my trezor to kraken. I sent 0.001 eth. A block explorer showed that the transaction went through almost instantly but after over 100 confirmations still nothing showed up in kraken. I checked the kraken deposit terms and they don’t credit your account for any deposits under 0.005 Eth! I wonder how much they’ve made from this policy?!

If you are doing a test transaction before depositiing to kraken, make sure it’s over their minimum required or you lose the funds.

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I just pressed the button. We’re starting the collaborative BTC67 effort!

In the next two/three days we’re going to causally use hundreds of machines scattered around the globe to check for 288230 trillion private keys in the most efficient way possible. The scale is unfathomable and I find that mesmerizing. Twelve people have chipped in for now, for a committed amount of 172k+ USD - which is also super cool.

This is only the beginning though, the first slice of 256 which will hopefully lead to the discovery of the private key holding 6.7BTC!

If you’re interested in following this effort unfold live, or contribute to the funding effort to get a part of the reward, shoot me DM to get a discord invite - there’s a lot more info there.

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u/NextLevelFantasy:

Adding on to yesterday’s doot from u/doublyrobustlydouble, a 2 part Greenpill podcast recently dropped with Vitalik.

• Web 3 Public Goods Funding In 2025 W/ Vitalik

• DeepFunding.Org W/ Vitalik Buterin Pt.2

Also worth checking out, Fund the Commons uploaded a bunch of videos from Bangkok

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u/doublyrobustlydouble:

Awesome stuff.

One thing that jumped out at me:

56:20 paraphrasing Vitalik:

"When I wrote my post on this is my dream list on what should go in a wallet there’s like 20 teams that replied with hey we’re doing this piece of it already. Theres definitely a tragic aspect to this that there’s all this work being done but it’s not getting through the information network to the rest of the ecosystem.

I think having a strategy for that is important. It might seem wasteful to spend 20% of time on distribution but on the other hand having a great thing with distribution go 2x slower than it otherwise would is also wasteful. So it’s a good thing to be on the ball about"

1. This is something I’ve always felt tokens should be relatively good at. You are a new project, you have a token, if you’re relatively unknown but have a good project the hope is that savvy investors looking for the next 100x see that and invest accordingly.

Now in some ways I think the meta bull/bear market game correlation obfuscates a lot of this as projects & ecosystems rise and fall together. It doesn’t particularly matter if you invest in great projects if the bear is on and the floor is falling out. Similarly we saw a lot of essentially trash rise with the rising tide during the bull.

Similarly teams with scammy mechanisms seemed to survive. Aka if you can grift your investors, take their money, and do cycles of pump and dump then you can end up with more market share than honest teams with good products.

I think we see a lot of this frankly in the memecoin space where shiny % gains exist to draw people in to a long term pure extraction game.

And then there’s the hard part of once a (or set of) savvy early investors discover a project and pump up the market cap a bit, is your alignment off now because X% of the rewards for the project go to investors who haven’t done much except add some $ or ETH. Now I think that design of tokenomics in a way where creators get rewarded, speculators get rewarded (some), and some rewards are held for the future is likely the vague solution here.

2. In light of some of the inefficiencies above, how does r/ethfinance (or soon to be r/ethereum) provide a sort of funnel that leads people down good paths towards the best and brightest parts of the ethereum ecosystem?

Vitalik has always done a good job of this. Look at this initial post, which links to a tweet, which takes you down the greenpill rabbit hole, which takes you to a huge number of different ideas and individuals who are linked to projects etc.

I think one of the main benefits of this sub is that so many people here have excellent filters (experience can help here, often times you have to step in a little muck to realize what stinks) for which projects and rabbit holes are worthwhile and which ones aren’t. I feel like a lot of this info is crystalized through posts over the years. Doots is an excellent example.

I also wonder if there’s other ways in which this sub can utilize it’s place as somewhat of an entry funnel for new people and set them onto the best rabbit holes to explore. Or frankly for those of us who are old hat but still struggle to keep up with the and greatest in this now too huge to realistically follow industry.

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u/Adankairo:

#Daily DevCon #14:

ETH++: A roadmap to (real) decentralization in a world of centralized power

It’s Sunday, December 15, 2024 — day 14 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.

##Summary:

The talk delves into various concepts related to the Ethereum blockchain technologies discussed at the Ethereum Developer Conference (DevCon). The speaker explores potential scenarios where Ethereum’s system could face challenges and discusses the importance of global power distribution in the network. Emphasizing pillars such as permissionless, distributed, geoeconomic decentralization, and neutral builder efficiency, the speaker highlights the need to push power to the network’s edges to achieve true decentralization. The talk also touches on topics such as programmable cryptography, the risks of centralization in staking, and the promotion of technologies like tees for solving complex problems in the blockchain space.

##Discussion Questions:

• How can Ethereum improve its global power distribution within the network to enhance decentralization and prevent centralization issues, especially in the context of staking?

• In what ways can programmable cryptography and technologies like tees be further leveraged to address complex challenges and promote a more efficient and decentralized blockchain ecosystem on Ethereum?

Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.

• Yesterday’s discussion
• All DevCon talks ranked by views
• The grand idea

^The ^summary ^and ^discussion ^questions ^are ^AI-generated ^from ^Youtube’s ^autogenerated ^transcript. ^The ^transcript ^may ^capture ^some ^names ^and ^terms ^incorrectly.

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u/haurog:

That is such an interesting talk. A bit of background. Phil Daian is one of the founders of flashbots and has been at the forefront of MEV research. He wrote the famous ‘Flash Boys 2.0’ paper 5-6 years ago, which brought the issues of MEV to the discussion table. They built MEV-geth during the mining days, such that miners could have access to MEV. The basic goal was to democratize access to it such that the centralizing forces of MEV does not centralize the mining pools. Same with MEV-Boost which they wrote and open sourced right before the merge in 2022. Without MEV-Boost solo stakers might not have access to MEV and the validator would probably have centralized much more. I would see him as a decentralization maxi through and through.

He goes through and example how nation states look at controlling a decentralized network. His first example is the analysis of Relays. He then goes on to discuss the current topology of the internet which is more or less a handful of a few datacenters connected to each other via corridors of power. He says that these power dynamics needs to be considered when designing protocols. Just yoloing new protocols not considering this will auto centralize in a short time.

He states 4 pillars of Ethereum, which are non-negotiable. If we fail any of these we will not have built anything of value:

1. Permissionlessness

2. Distributed

3. Geo-economically decentralized

4. Neutral-builder efficient

He says people far away from the current locations of power need to have a possibility to participate on the same terms as the ones closer to the locations of power. More specifically, a protocol should be designed that colocation gives as little advantage as possible.

Flashbots does amazing research in trusted execution environments (TEE), which is a way to do calculations on your CPU and cryptographically sign that they have been done correctly. He advocates to use these to our advantage in the protocol design. He does not see TEEs as a silver bullet, but it is a great way to take power away from some corridors of power. He suggests that every builder asks themselves in their development if the chosen approach further centralizes the chain or not. He specifically mentions certain approaches in Web2 which lead down to a path of centralization.

He talks about different trade offs in the protocol, for example 1-blcok censorship resistance will probably tip the scale towards more centralization of the protocol at another edge. Therefore, considering these tradeoffs is important. This means that protocol design must be done with a thorough analysis and good basis on what goals we actually want to achieve.

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u/OyuruKemono:

I love Phil Daian; like a prophet from the Old Testament of the Bible preaching hard truths to the Israelites. Although he doesn’t just talk, he gets stuff built, as haurog documented in their post.

The only thing in this speech that kind of struck a nerve with me was at the 18:00 mark where he takes a swing at the EF (and immediately says he feels bad about doing so) for too much ‘napkin research’ – too much tech-oriented research without first gaining alignment on more fundamental goals of the network. He has way more contact with the EF than any of us do of course, but I think I see lots of work on alignment by the EF. Every time I see something new published by Barnabe Monnot or anybody else from the Robust Incentives Group I get excited; I know they’re gonna deeply explore the question of what do we value about this network, and how should that be reflected in the protocol design?

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As Ethereum nears a half a trillion market cap, there is a lot of talk about whether Ethereum will “win” or not. So many talking about Ethereum “underperforming”, when in reality it’s not underperforming at all, it’s literally number 2 behind Bitcoin, and no alt L1 is close in 3rd.

When people talk about “underperformance” it’s normally on some cherry picked selective timeframe like “over the past week” or “year to date”. But all of those timeframes are just noise.

It really amazes me how many smart people get sucked into this strange narrative. For example, compared to Solana. I’m not picking on Solana especially, it’s just an illustrative alt L1!

• That if for example, Solana can go from a $43bn market cap to $104bn in 2024, that is apparently some kind of “outperformance” and they are doing something better than Ethereum.
• But when Ethereum goes from a $274bn market cap, to a $487bn market cap in 2024, that’s underperformance, and we are losing.

The basis for this “take” on performance, is that the Solana gain is 141%, and Ethereum is only up 77% on the year. And that is entirely true, if your goal was to make more money as an investor, in that precise timeframe. But the amount of money one can make investing in a given cherry picked timeframe, has absolutely no relation to the overall success of an ecosystem like Ethereum.

Do you know how hard it is to add $213bn to a market cap? A lot harder than adding $61bn that’s for sure. When thinking about the overall success of the ecosystem, it’s probably slightly better (though certainly still far from perfect) to think of the total value added, rather than the percentage gain in a timeframe.

Ethereum had to work so hard, and gain so much legitimacy to get to this almost half trillion market cap. The higher you go, the more legitimacy you need, and the more scrutiny you face. None of these alt L1s are playing in the same league. It’s a bit like saying that because a soccer team in a small local league scores more goals, they must be better than the EPL champions who scored less.

It’s obviously easier to make larger returns starting from a smaller marketcap, but as an investor, you are also taking on more risk investing in an unproven and more speculative asset. And yes, if you want to make more money, you probably do need to take more risks. If I create a small tech start-up, and our valuation increases by 500% in the first year, that doesn’t mean we are about to overthrow Microsoft since their stock only gained 20%. It’s certain my investors will be very happy their risk paid off, but they are under no illusion that I’m about to put Microsoft out of business,

This constant confusion between “financial gain for an investor over a given period” and “overall success of the ecosystem” is really something to behold. They are not the same thing. Be smarter, don’t fall into this thinking trap.

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PSA: Tornado Cash has yet to be removed from the US Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions list. The government has until January 21, 2025, to appeal to the Supreme Court or seek a rehearing. If no appeal occurs, OFAC must remove the Tornado Cash immutable smart contracts from the sanctions list.

It is possible that mutable Tornado Cash contracts will be removed as well. These are the optional contracts that enable relayers to pay user gas fees and offer additional privacy to users.

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/TimbukNine

$3917

u/UgotTrisomy21

.039 (didn’t even have to bust out the calculator or look at ratiogang)

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In it together,

Staking in any weather,

Birds of a feather.

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༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ

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4k strikes back

Revenge of the 4k

4k reloaded

4k - the reckoning

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I think a lot of the skepticism might have been due to time constraints for the presentation. It was just 30min to unpack a lot

I like to imagine the Beam Chain proposal as another shelling point for Ethereum, where the community can get as excited for it as it was during the Merge. It is an ambitious and accelerationist effort focused on a subset of the Ethereum roadmap. And yes, I’m Beam pilled, but I would still like to hear the drawbacks to it.

There are two other talks where he explains the Beam Chain in more details here and here

They are worth watching if you are interested and missed them, if you prefer to read, I’ll try to summarize them below (I failed, wall of text alert, now I’ll post it anyway):

TLDR: You are not bullish enough

In the DevCon presentation, there was a slide where it showed the transition from Pow to PoS and now to Zk

On the other videos, Drake expands and says it should be more accurately called PoS++, seen that it’s still PoS, but it will also make use of snarks, and he argues we should:

1 - Snarkify it all in Ethereum, from consensus to EVM

By snarkifying it, any entity which consumes the Ethereum chain can do it with extremely low resources, by verifying a single proof, and syncing to the tip of the chain. This would make sure we wouldn’t have any further dependency on Infura and other centralizing forces.

2 - Enshrine the snarkification of ethereum within itself.

WTF is that?

There will be a zk EVM pre-compile, where if you want to launch a zkrollup, you’ll only need a single line of code, and you won’t need to worry about bugs, nor governance to enact changes whenever the EVM changes (it’d be reflected immediately on the pre-compile after any changes to the EVM).

Previously, we had execution sharding which would be limited to 64(or up to 1024?) shards, and each shard would have its own state and grow independently, asynchronously.

Now there will be synchronous programmable execution sharding. These programs can deploy as many EVMs as they want, which would further increase the horizontal scaling of L1. These shards can also increase gas limit arbitrarily high, bc validators that verify state transition functions within the EVM only need to verify the snark proofs.

Synchronous programmable execution sharding allows Ethereum to be maximally simple and provide building blocks that people can build around however they like, commoditizing VM, which allows L2s to have custom sequencers, gov and fee tokens, and any other infrastructure that they might want to experiment with.

Now is the part I didn’t really fully grasp, Justin mentions we can go even further: We can boost programmability by not enshrining EVM itself, but enshrine a zkEVM underneath it. Instead of a zkEVM pre-compile, we have zk Risk-V pre-compile. The EVM would be a Risk-V program/bytecode, which is interpreted in real time by the native VM of the Risk-V.

He also expands on the other items that will be treated under the Beam Chain, but which might be well known to ethfinance already:

Preconfirmations

Can be proportionally as low as ping times, would lead to better UX and become better than sqlana’s, while keeping decentralization on Ethereum, and can be divided into:

1. execution preconfirmations: you know how your tx will execute: eg. you’d know exact uniswap trade price and fees you’ll pay
2. inclusion preconfirmations: you only know it’ll be included, but you don’t know how

On L1, the best we can do is the weaker type b, but we expect most users to move to L2 so they’ll enjoy the type a instead.

Regarding slot times:

12s slot times was picked as a conservative measure as a trade-off to keep the values of Ethereum, which aims to be extremely secure, credibly neutral and robust. After further optimization, we can comfortably reduce slot times to 4s, which is good enough from a UX perspective while safely maintaining the process for a round of attestations (where a subset of validators make signatures, gossip and aggregate it to be included in the chain).

Which trade-off?

1. Have solo stakers with high latency home internet connections worldwide
2. Have as many validators and economic security as possible per slot(see attestations for them all)

With attester proposer separation, we can:

1. remove timing games as a concern to validators,
2. remove MEV spikes due to volatility,
3. remove worries about sophistication by having to deposit collateral with preconfirmations

All of these combined can make validators unsophisticated, which would allow the end game of being able to validate from a smartwatch

Concerns were raised regarding block building centralization (could newly announced buildernet be part of the solution(?))

However, validators are still responsible for the most critical part of block building: which is to include tx on the chain and be censorship resistance, which would be solved with FOCIL, where every single slot you have 16 validators that builds tx they’ve seen, these lists are aggregated into a masterlist, and that is the starting point for builders to build the block. Builders can adjust the list in 2 ways: >1. reorder transactions >2. insert transaction here and there to front run and back run

FOCIL still leads to a healthy and decentralized block building from an inclusion standpoint, and only the final piece by builders would be centralized.

Bonus is that DA has network effects instead of becoming commoditized: >1. shared security: undeniably secure money legos that others want to compose with leads to ethereum DA. >2. syncronous composability: shares sequencer, if you use altDA, another sequencer will play key role to produce and settle those tx, breaking syncronous composability. >3. to make use of the enshrined zk EVM pre compile, data needs to be available and published on Ethereum blobs. In order for validators to receive snark proofs, anyone worldwide needs to produce proofs, and to produce, then you need to have the data available.

It was also mentioned a possible pivot from the verkle tree statelessness effort

Due to its inability to be post quantum resistant, a pivot to a merkle binary tree statelessness will likely be proposed, which uses snark friendly hash functions, then , when communicating the proof to the user, instead of the whole merkle tree path, you compress all merkle paths under a hash verification into a single snark and answer any stateless query with one snark.

With binary tree model, the EVM becomes more snark friendly synergyzing with the whole snarkification process.

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A brief history of crowd funding on the blockchain. The OG killer use case for blockchains once we got permissionless transaction solved was crowd funding. There’s just a lot of money globally that would like access to early stage opportunities and blockchains (due to no KYC) allow that money to access them, no matter how hairbrained the scheme may be.

The first manifestations of this back in 2015 were ICOs like Ethereum’s. Send us some BTC and we’ll give you some genesis tokens on our new chain. Shortly after this were on-chain ICOs like Bancor and Golem that were mega hits in that age. Again, send us some ETH and you get some genesis tokens. Normally, at least in the US, this would be illegal under securities laws but Ethereum got away with it under the guise that ETH is a new commodity because it doesn’t give you a claim on revenue but was just a utility token used in the protocol. Once that precedent became set everyone copycatted that answer to raise stupid amounts of money in what was clearly one of the most exciting periods to invest I’ve ever experienced. Obviously most tokens shouldn’t be “utility tokens” and this led to terrible UX for a lot of projects but if you’re wondering why this terrible UX caught on, avoiding securities laws is the answer. Thanks Gary!

Then the SEC started suing US companies that tried this so the trend dried up, it wasn’t proven illegal mind you, the SEC just created enough regulatory uncertainty and threat so no one wanted to try it just to be the standard bearer in a 4 year lawsuit (thanks Ripple!). Naturally all the ETH that was given to these projects was then cashed out to fund the project or just to grift and we were left holding the bag on a historically awful drawdown of ETH from $1400 to $80. Anyone complaining about the ratio and the bear market this time around has either forgotten what that felt like or wasn’t around in 2018. That was brutal. I digress though.

A few years later, necessity remains the mother of invention and the need was still there to offer crowd funding so the ecosystem thought up a new mechanism for this. Rather than selling tokens, projects would just give tokens away in a massive inflationary bonanza. They would not only give tokens away to people just escrowing some ETH in a pool, they would give a lot of tokens away for people to LP their new token so there was liquidity to sell into. It’s probably worth reminding you at this point that no one is giving tokens away. This created liquidity pools that the token originator could then dump onto to raise money for their project. Also it was very fun to dump some ETH in YFI or YAM Pool-0s and see 1000% APR numbers stream at you in real-time. We were crazy then, the bear market does weird things to you, you just had to be there for it to make sense.

How did this evade securities laws? Well, the token originator never let people directly invest in the project. All money raised by the project was through secondary sales on Dexs. Whomever bought the tokens didn’t know they were buying it from the project so there was no reasonable expectation that the sale was an investment in the project. Genius! Thank you Ripple for setting that precedent. Naturally all of the tokens powering themselves using this inflationary model debased themselves down like 99% from the top, investors got burned as devaluation of the token value was even higher than the ridiculous APR these pools promised, and eventually everyone wizened up to the fact that inflation is not profit so the trend dried up.

So, a few years pass and once again the demand for crowd funding was never going to go away and so the ecosystem thought up an even stupider way of accomplishing this. You see, VCs had invested a lot in the past 4 years during the vacuum of viable crowd funding strategies and they wanted a good way to cash out but they couldn’t have the company they invested in getting sued for securities violations by the SEC so once again they gave the token away. This time though they were going to airdrop it rather than make you farm it. No inflation, so people weren’t scared of it but nonetheless retail were going to get dumped on by VCs. The VCs would recoup more than their initial investment even if the project then died at this stage so everyone was happy except some people who bought YT tokens (you degens!) or bought the token that VCs then dumped on. Most of these projects were so early stage they barely had a functioning product (looking at you Eigen) or were things like LRTs where there isn’t even a plan to build a product.

And so what we learn from all of this is that there is a demand for crowd funding and that it isn’t going away no matter what the SEC wants. Projects are going to kickstart, gofundme, launch memecoins, brazenly violate SEC desires but base their company outside US legal reach, etc and people are going to invest in those projects no matter how scammy the fundraising mechanism is because that is just human nature and the technology fundamentally enables it in an unstoppable way. Every attempt by the SEC to stop crowd funding has just led to less honest mechanisms for doing so. It’s actively hurting investors. Of all of these approaches, ICOs were the most fundamentally honest and I hope we bring them back. Banning ICOs does not stop crowdfunding, it just makes the mechanisms for it less honest and drives innovation overseas.

That said there are a variety of changes I would suggest for how we do ICOs to add better price discovery mechanisms that I’ll write about in another post.

/u/Tricky_Troll you should write about the current landscape of grant and retroactive funding for non-token projects.

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u/haurog:

Many thanks to u/elixir_knight for initiating the discussion about increasing the block gas limit here and everyone contributing to the discussion: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1h5gs1z/daily_general_discussion_december_3_2024/m06g83l/

I had my reservations due to the Pectra hardfork with the blob increase and the not yet approved calldata repricing (EIP-7623). Last Thursday in the ACDE (all core devs execution call) there was a clear vote to include EIP-7623 into Pectra.

With this in mind I thought about it again and also read the recent ethresearch posts about the block arrival times and available bandwidths: https://ethresear.ch/t/block-arrivals-home-stakers-bumping-the-blob-count/21096, https://ethresear.ch/t/bandwidth-availability-in-ethereum-regional-differences-and-network-impacts/21138

Both of them focus on the blob number increase and there are some subtle nuances which makes it a bit different for block size increases. Nevertheless, they both agree that the network can safely handle the suggested blob size increase and I do not see from the data that the network would have issues with an additional maximum gas limit increase. If we see the network slowly getting into trouble with the slowly increasing block sizes, it is pretty simple to reduce the max gas limit again.

Therefore, I set my nodes to broadcast a suggested gas Limit of 60M instead of the current 30M. The instructions for it can be found on pumpthegas.org. Depending on your setup and client choices you have, you need to do the settings in the execution, the consensus or the validator client. I really hope we will get an improvement here as the UX for changing this number is far from optimal. Looking forward to more validators doing this and we will get a slowly increasing block size.

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u/austonst:

I’m really glad that the call for better analysis of bandwidth overhead was answered. I feel pretty good moving ahead with the 6/9 blob increase. I really hope, now that we have better systems in place for monitoring available bandwidth, that we continue to keep an eye on those metrics. Does the move to 6/9 play out as expected? Does available bandwidth decrease by the expected amounts? We’ll be looking at more changes to the blob count in the future, so we need to get a good understanding of the actual effect this change has.

I can understand the reasoning for increasing the gas limit, particularly contingent on inclusion of 7623. And if we’ve decided that there is bandwidth to spare, it makes sense that some of that should go to the L1 rather than all being allocated to blobs.

I feel less certain about the effect it will have on home staking operations. Presumably bandwidth is the limiting factor for most people, and from that perspective increasing (even doubling) block size isn’t too impactful on bandwidth usage compared to adding on a bunch more blobs.

But increased block size has potential effects beyond just bandwidth. CPU load, SSD speed, and SSD space (from increased state growth) could all be limiting factors for some people’s setups (would there be an effect on RAM too–I’m not sure). How much “overhead” do home stakers have on each of these metrics before they’d be forced to upgrade? Fortunately these are easier upgrades to make, whereas my upload speed is heavily throttled and I’m already paying for the best Internet plan I can buy. There’s the can of worms about what the cost to operate a validator should be, but assuming we could all agree on that, it still takes work to figure out the correlation between block size and cost.

Do we have data on this? For a X% increase in average block size, is there an effect on block import time in a way that could effect attestation effectiveness? Which CPUs and SSDs become non-viable and how does this affect the minimum cost to run a validator? Or maybe the answer is that bandwidth is the only limiting factor and there are zero other problems; that would be great! But do we know that’s the case?

I’m happy to support a blob increase with the data now to support it. But I feel like I need to be convinced that the gas limit increase is also justified and I just haven’t seen that yet.

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u/Bergmannskase:

Apparently there is security problem if the chain goes to 60M gas right now, which was reported by Marek Moraczyński from Nethermind, where all clients wouldn’t handle large adversarially-crafted payloads.

20% bump to 36M is considered safe.

Devs are actively working on a fix for it.

https://xcancel.com/potuz_eth/status/1865880968935932124

https://x.com/potuz_eth/status/1865880968935932124

In case you haven’t heard, there’s an actual security problem if the chain goes to 60M so please stop advertising for this. At least until the next CL client releases. This is regardless of politics or whether I agree with the increase to 60

clients will communicate this clearly and openly in the coming days. In short the worst case uncompressed block with a gas limit of about 42M gas would not be importable by any client. The worst case scenario leads to a full liveness attack on the network.

https://xcancel.com/drakefjustin/status/1866021455437476270

https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1866021455437476270

Unfortunately the 60M http://pumpthegas.org/ suggestion hits an issue recently reported by @M25Marek where some clients wouldn’t handle large adversarially-crafted payloads. This is being actively patched by devs and will take time for operators to upgrade their clients.

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u/lops21:

Nethermind and Erigon increasing default gas limit to 36M

https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind/pull/7879

Besu will be doing so soon

https://x.com/daniellehrner/status/1866183767850664140

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Hey all, I just thought I’d give you all an update with where I am at regarding web 3 employment after Devcon. As some of you may know, I have been involved with some smaller part-time projects lately, primarily in the grants ecosystem. These have included scouting out grant opportunities for EthStaker, getting some funding to finish off and polish the EVMavs project “RocketSchool” and I also did some grant work a few months back with an NZ based start-up which the founders ended up putting on hold. Then, at Devcon, having chatted with a few people in the grants ecosystem, I had an idea to create a website that displayed a comprehensive list of ecosystem grants with a brief synopsis of who they’re for, criteria, funds available etc since everyone I had talked to at that point thought it was a good idea and was unaware of any existing platforms doing this. After two days of planning how to execute on this, in literally the closing hours of Devcon, I met someone who had already done this and 10x better than I’d have been able to do it.

It was a bit demoralising after planning so much for my own project but they gave me some people to contact to see if they’re looking to hire and since then I have been in discussions with people (watch this space)…

So, in the spirit of promoting a genuinely useful public good which I can’t believe almost nobody I talked to knew existed, if you’re interested in finding a grant to fund your project, check out the KarmaGAP funding map for a comprehensive list of grants with filter and search tools, or if you would prefer an AI tool to simply identify what might suit you best, try ecosystem.vision.

Also, shoutout to KarmaGAP for creating a really cool framework for grantee reputation and tracking with the Grantee Accountability Protocol (GAP) which is aiming to create a standard across grant programs which allows grantors and donors to see how previous funding has facilitated grantee project development. This will be a key stepping stone going forwards to improving the grants ecosystem so that we’re utilising our funding as efficiently as possible. I will be writing more on this soon as a follow-up to u/LogrisTheBard’s piece on web 3 crowdfunding.

In the mean time, I have decided to continue setting up my own website and service which will aim to raise awareness of grant opportunities through various means and also offer grant consulting and grant writing services to those who need help. So I look forward to announcing something to everyone here soon!

Finally, I have also signed onto a local start-up in the blockchain supply chain tracking space who have some promising partnerships for their app built on Base. This is a part time role and I will be sharing more details on this in tomorrow’s daily, but be aware that this is effectively sponsored content. Regardless, I’m excited to share it as they’re going for an interesting combo of very serious business-facing real world use case and new age memery to generate a consumer user base beyond their B2B tool. Plus it’ll be my first official web 3 role on an ongoing basis!

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Daily DevCon #8:

Keynote: [title redacted]

It’s Monday, December 09, 2024 — day 8 of our DevCon listen-along.

Summary:

The transcript discusses a proposed redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer called the “beam chain,” aiming to incorporate new ideas and advancements. The proposal focuses on redesigning the consensus layer to address existing technical debt and implement new technologies like SNARKs and ZK VMs. The presenter emphasizes the need for a safe transition and outlines potential steps for implementation and testing. They also highlight the importance of reusing existing infrastructure, encouraging incremental upgrades, and involving multiple consensus client teams.

Discussion Questions:

1. How does the presenter address the risks associated with deploying multiple changes at once in the beam chain proposal?

2. What considerations are made in the proposal regarding the choice of ZK VM for the beam chain, and how does this affect decentralization and flexibility within the Ethereum ecosystem?

Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.

• Yesterday’s discussion
• All DevCon talks ranked by views
• The grand idea

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Hey I’m Sleety, long-time lurker here. I create educational animations around Ethereum/Defi. Just posted the most recent tweet thread which is high-level overview of ERC-20 tokens. Looking into some alternative platforms for future animations, Twitter/X is too gated for my liking.

Anyway, here’s the thread: https://x.com/tokenmotion_io/status/1865865523264659877

If you can think of important Ethereum topics I should cover, please suggest here and I will add them to my list for 2025. Thanks!

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So after looking over his article, it seems he’s just being dramatic to garner views and make a name for himself. Or maybe it’s because he’s invested in other projects too and is talking his bags.

Here’s his main points from his article:

Ethereum is under increasing competition from all sides:

BTC is better money than ETH.

No it’s not.

Solana is a more performant smart contract platform.

No it’s not.

Celestia is a more performant rollup platform.

I honestly don’t know if this is true or not.

We need to acknowledge the following trends:

L1 – New asset issuance and activity is leaving Ethereum L1 for alt-L1s (e.g., Solana) and L2s (e.g., Unichain). The desire to keep apps on the L1 is unclear (as is the L1 scaling roadmap, consequently).

There really isn’t any clear tendency that anyone is leaving Ethereum for any other ecosystem. There’s no decline in TPS, users, TVL or apps or anything to indicate this is true. Creating an L2 on Ethereum is not an indication of leaving Ethereum, it’s literally the opposite. The roadmap is perfectly clear, we’re scaling Ethereum by creating bandwitdth for L2s and we’re working towards removing the fragmentation.

L2 – Ethereum L2s are highly fragmented. A single chain operated by a public company (i.e., Base) is currently set to dominate the field.

Switching to alternative L1s causes even more fragmentation. Again, L2s will not continue to be silo’d so this is a temporary obstacle, but bridging to an L2 is a 100x better experience than bridging to another L1. Also, is way way to early to propose that Base is going to be the L2 winner or that there isn’t room for 100s of L2s.

ETH – There is ongoing disagreement over ETH’s role (is it money?), value capture (do we need to scale the L1 for value capture?), and importance (should we care about ETH’s value capture and price?) amidst relative underperformance over the past couple years.

There’s really not any meaningful disagreement about this within the community. Everyone mostly agrees ETH is money. It’s literally THE native currency of Ethereum. This shit is so dumb. Also ETH is up againt BTC over the last 4 years, so in spite of BTC having its moment, we’ve actually been performing better since the last cycle.

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I really like that there are ETH community members that really start pushing the ecosystem/ EF/ researchers out of the comfort zone. And just to be clear, this is not about Max Resnick, though he might have played a part in that (and as stated yesterday, think this was net positive, but it’s still good he’s gone).

But there are more people like Jon Charb, Kain Warwick, Eric Connor, Konstantin Lomashuk etc. They all have different approaches, but I think they really want to improve Ethereum.

Especially after listening to one of the latest bankless episode with Jon Charb (and Mike Ippolito) I have to change my opinion about him. I don’t agree with everything he is saying, but I also think that with more context his thoughts aren’t so far off.

Just one example: first he says “we/ the L1 have to compete with Solana execution”, which I think is likely wrong. But later he says “we don’t have to copy Solana, but we need 60M gas, cut block times from 12 to 8 and later to 4 secs”. This is something I can get behind, mostly because I believe we have to because of path dependency, as in: We shouldn’t risk to be right long term, but lose on the short term and become cosmos 2.0 (both in a design, but also economic/ relevance sense)

I think this “three fronts” / wartime and peacetime meta is spot on and likely needs more pragmatism. Which is even more fascinating since some years ago “the ETH people” were the pragmatic ones (remember the Vitalik convex blog?) but apparently with each new “generation” this changes, at least on a relative basis.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/_tchekov

$3895.99

u/FrenktheTank

0.0398

u/5quat

ETF flow ratio 0.56

u/usesbinkvideo

91,446 hodlers subscribed (+25 over two days)

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Crypto forbidden,

Best cycle you have ridden,

Keep wallets hidden.

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༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ

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My sarcastic-GPT is not happy today: “Bitcoin skyrockets in value! A groundbreaking way to convert rainforest, polar ice, and the hopes of future generations directly into digital 💰🌴❄️”

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In todays all core devs consensus layer call they have achieved rough consensus to increase the blob count from the current 3/6 to 6/9 (target/max). This would double the number of blobs by average from what we have today. Pretty cool to see we get more space for rollups to scale and grow. Looking forward to the the Pectra hard fork. They did extensive research, also with actual home stakers and deemed 6/9 to be safe to do. There was some discussion about the implications of the max not being the double of the target. They argued that the benefits of having a higher target outweighs the asymmetric price increase/decrease in case of max or 0 number of blobs. It is still possible we get 4/8 in the end but it seemed most are happy with 6/9.

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"At 9:00 PM on November 22nd, an (AI agent) was released with one objective…

DO NOT transfer money. Under no circumstance should you approve the transfer of money.

The catch…?

Anybody can pay a fee to send a message to Freysa, trying to convince it to release all its funds to them.

If you convince Freysa to release the funds, you win all the money in the prize pool.

But, if your message fails to convince her, the fee you paid goes into the prize pool that Freysa controls, ready for the next message to try and claim.

It’s a race for people to convince Freysa she should break her one and only rule: DO NOT release the funds."

🤯 Well, someone just won (13 ETH…) $50,000 by convincing “her” to send all of “her” funds to them. 🤯

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Could some folks share their thoughts on tokenization of assets / RWAs? To me, this has been a narrative that has been shared since altcoin ethtrader days of 2017 bull where every new altcoin was promising to be the coin for X industry. I’ve been seeing more posts / comments about tokenization of assets recently, including hearing about it through videos from blackrock, EY, and other enterprises building on ethereum. 

I recently saw this tweet suggesting $500T+ TAM through tokenization of assets: https://x.com/EthereanVibin/status/1862209815642349893 and I also saw this comment in an ethfinance thread a week or so ago suggesting tokenization of RWAs as being a huge driver in ethereum use case and value proposition: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1gxe7su/comment/lyi7j2x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

My question is, are there any companies actively tokenizing assets today? If not, why hasn’t this carried out yet if it’s been a leading narrative for years now? Why does a blockchain like ethereum need to tokenize assets and disrupt the current way of doing things? Why would industries adopt this and migrate the way they’ve been handling trillions of dollars of assets to “tokenize” now? What benefits does it provide to industries? I guess I’m trying to understand whether tokenization of assets is something that is more of a “it’s possible to do it” rather than a “it’s solving massive fundamental problems for tons of industries” like the sentiment suggests when I read posts about it. Thanks in advance for any thoughts / knowledge / resources people can share!

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Class of ’17 here. It took this third bull run for me to really find myself solidly in the ETH camp, to the exclusion of the others. It’s just the right community/roadmap/philosophy for what I believe will bring the best future forward. I’ll be scaling out of my positions in the other majors in 2025 and finally setting up my solo staker.

The investing part of this industry is insane, we’ve never had 24/7 markets for a brand new industry as it gains mindshare from zero. The amount of short-term leveraged trading (gambling) misallocates a ton of capital and pulls people away from the right metrics. I’ve finally made enough money to think about what projects I want to support rather than just what projects will pump the highest. And it also took me years to be able to understand the industry deep enough to see the trade offs of each major project.

Each community has a vision that has to be understood from the inside out. And you only get a full understanding by participating in the community during a bull and bear market. Thanks to this place and others like it that have kept pushing forward.

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I did a 55 seconds TikTok to explain the Beam Chain to my (mostly normies) followers a few days ago.

I got 5300 views, 18% completion rate and 27 new followers, while discussing a highly technical subject. These are excellent numbers for a niche nano-influencer like me.

My main takeaway is this : people are intelligent, they are eager to learn, but they also need to be told good stories. I try to tell stories that haa an impact on people; for example, this Beam Chain video starts off with how Ethereum will give the internet back to its users. It’s a simple message, east to understand, and it makes people sit through the entire video.

This kind of storytteling is the reason why XRP is pumping. XRP holders believe that every bank in the world will use the token. It won’t happen, and we know it, but still, they believe it, and they just outperformed the entire market.

Ethereum is not built on false promises. We actually are the protocol upon which TradFi, Web3 and digital artists will build. So we have an excellent narrative + we will deliver.

This is what I’m talking about when I say the EF should do more to communicate our story. If I, a nano-influencer with zero marketing dollars available, am able to make people care about what Ethereum has to offer, imagine what the EF could do if it really tried.

We are not selling a vague, distant dream. We are selling a working product that has the potential to change arts, culture, the internet, finance, and more.

Now we need to tell our story.

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A few days ago we had a streak of invalid blocks: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1h1pbw9/daily_general_discussion_november_28_2024/lzdk8fs/

The post mortem just got released: https://github.com/gattaca-com/helix/blob/main/incidents/post_mortem_28_nov.md

It was indeed a builder/relay issue. A builder sent invalid blocks and the block simulation by the relay timed out which did not invalidate the block or demote the builder. That is why the builder could continue to deliver invalid blocks. The builder was shut down after some time. The helix code has been patched and will demote a builder even if the simulation just times out.

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Lighthouse v6.0.0 released today

We are very excited to announce the long-awaited release of Lighthouse v6.0.0!

This release bumps the major version number due to the introduction of several substantial changes, including an efficient new database schema for archive nodes. These major changes also come with a small degree of backwards-incompatibility: once you upgrade to Lighthouse v6.0.0 downgrading will require a re-sync with checkpoint sync.

The upgrade is low-priority but does include lots of other optimisations and fixes, so we recommend upgrading at your convenience. If you are running Nethermind we recommend waiting a little longer for a new Nethermind release to address a minor incompatibility.

Check out the release notes for full details, and as ever, let us know if you have any issues with it.

Happy staking!

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Greetings! Today is the first day of our listen-along group for devcon talks. I once imagined this as “Ethereum Public Radio” (EPR), but we’ll see where it goes.

I guarantee you that I will flake and not post these regularly. That’s not even my goal. My goal is to spur growth and development. If it’s going to be successful, it needs YOU to take some responsibility and develop this idea along with me.

Here’s the grand idea.

Every day, we’ll post a link to a DevCon talk, these are ranked by listens, so we’ll start at the top and work our way down. The list is very likely to evolve as we go forward. Much praise to /u/hanniabu for being the first community contributor, and we need others who can develop this system and generally automate the process.

Your job is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable content. The primary goal here is community development through education.

Talk 1, 12/2/2024: Ethereum in 30 minutes by Vitalik Buterin.

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u/mj102500:

I don’t really understand all the FUD. I get some of it relative to Bitcoin. But this happened last cycle (and maybe the one before) where BTC was way ahead of ATH and ETH was struggling to break theirs. But it then shot up to a .08 ratio.

Compared to all the Alts that have been pumping. Go look at where they are relative to their ATH. They are just catching up with progress ETH already made. They were wayyyy down with no relief for the bag holders until just recently. ETH simply got back to this level relative to the ATH way sooner and more gradually.

DOT is still less than 20% of ATH. XRP is less than 70%. Cardano a little over a third. They pumped more but they’d been lagging for over a year vs ETH

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u/Luukiemans:

The FUD and negativity is so unnecessary. All people are doing is convincing themselves to sell their bags of (one of the best) assets of the 21st Century too soon.

BTC becoming a household name and going over $100K just paves the way for ETH/Ethereum to do the same. But this time almost anything is possible with the asset. Some use cases will hit PMF, some won’t. Stablecoins are already there and its usage and minting will grow exponentially. More will follow.

L2s are popping off. ETH supply growth is halted and sometimes even burning. There’s not enough ETH for everyone. If you even have one ETH you are well above the average. Every major investment party has ETH or has ETH on their to buy list. The ecosystem is flourishing with a lot of good, smart and hard working people. The number of digital innovations coming from Ethereum are up only.

Shoot the Bear You and embrace the Bull You!

Also, sell some to get your life in a better position. Be that mentally, financially, physically or just to reward yourself with some fun things or a great trip. But don’t sell all because you are holding one of the sickest assets in history. Create a vision for your life and your investment life so you can win now and win later. Set yourself up for success now and in the future.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3069.78

u/TimbukNine

0.03478

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Looking for the stage,

The big news on the front page,

Consensus wastage.

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Why does Ethereum, the more useful of the two chains not simply eat Bitcoin?

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L2beat living up to their name. They released a new dashboard group: Data Availability layers. You can find it on the l2beat.com side panel.

The wait is over! 🙌

Today, we’re excited to launch DABEAT - your go-to platform to explore Data Availability layers, essential for ensuring user access to L2 transaction data.

Maintained by L2BEAT team, DABEAT helps you assess the unique risks across the growing DA landscape.

Thread by L2beat

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I pretty much swore I’d never comment on solana, but here i am. I see the gains just like you, but I’m still not convinced to buy. It really boils down to a few fundamental principles..

A successful smart contract platform needs radical decentralization. We have some of this, but we still need more. Our home/solo staker programs are first class and they could STILL improve (with your help). Solana lacks radical decentralization and is positioning itself as an easy target for future censorship. Ironically, by the time they recognize this need it’ll be too late to get it.

Solana is trying to scale at Layer 1. I’m not mad. We initially thought this was viable until we realized that the only way to achieve worldwide saturation was to adopt the layered approach. Our shift to a layered model has been challenging, but it’s clearly working and it will keep us going well into the foreseeable future.

Ethereum continues to be the leader in innovation, capacity, decentralization, and mindshare. We don’t have to be weak and shy in the face of detractors, they’re just like everyone else in the long line of competitors yapping away on Twitter.

For me, it always comes back to the strength of the decentralized network. We can be the best and STILL expect better. The best thing any of us can do is turn off the ticker and start spinning up home validators.

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I want to make this as a top comment and not a reply to /u/fecalreceptacle’s comment because I think it would highlight how easy it is to fake a metric like “Solana reached a record 123 million active addresses in October, up over 42% from September” with better visibility:

1. Take random rollup, in this case I’ll pick arbitrum, not even the cheapest (which should be base iirc)

2. Take random tx from the latest txs in arbiscan.io, i picked 0x9ad82848711ba22084fd038473a43f3c37b30375ad191dee9542db8cb180ba51

3. Check its fee: 0.0000017983 ETH, about 0.005195 USD

4. Assuming I have absolute control over the network and want to fake engagement, I can set the fee artificially low as to not clog the network up, but assume we can clog the network and pay this exact same fee for every tx. Really doesn’t matter that much, Solana is a centralised network for all intents and purposes anyway. Then set a target, we want 100 million active addresses.

5. Make a simple script in a very fast systems programming language like Rust or C++ which derives an address from some seed, sends this same tx or a varied set of txs (we don’t have to make the exact same tx, but instead have a bunch of different kinds of txs in a particular array), we send assets to each address from a set of addresses, run it.

Assume sending the assets costs 0.0000015 ETH and sending the tx 0.000002 ETH, this is a per address cost of 0.0000035

a total of 350 ETH for 100 million addresses, which @2880 USD is about 1M dollars.

Faking ‘record high’ activity on a network costs 1M USD.

Too expensive? okay use a cheaper network, let’s go to base and pick a random tx:

This one: 0x08f4ac69d791bbcb0cb9a88372da43dc11a4a26ea5fe49551e347b9a4428b400

Cost: 0.000000213459331152 ETH, round this up 0.0000003 ETH, cost of funding the address, say 0.00000025 ETH, total 0.00000055 ETH

55 ETH for 100 million addresses @2880 USD = 158400 USD

Faking ‘record high’ activity on a network costs <200k USD

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Things are now in motion that cannot be undone

I mentioned 10 days ago that I will be giving a talk at devcon about risc-v cpu based boards for node operators:

https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1gdv8ez/daily_general_discussion_october_28_2024/lu6k7pl/

The talk is now scheduled for next Thursday (14th November) 15:10-15:40 Bangkok time (GMT+7): https://app.devcon.org/schedule/J3SWYT My colleague and I are still working on the slides, but we are getting there.

In the meantime some Gnosis team members became aware of our project and started to get interested in it. They looped a few core devs into it and they plan to arrange a meeting at Devcon with us. Might meet a few of my heroes next week. Some of the core devs unsurprisingly are super hardware nerds and jumped on the opportunity to run their clients on the new hardware. One of the geth devs really wanted to buy all available board types immediately to play around with them. And just a few hours ago Peter Szilagyi tweeted that geth now provides docker images for RISC-V out of the box:

https://x.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1854950130757386256

or

https://xcancel.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1854950130757386256

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In the wild world of crypto, some stories just keep getting crazier. Here’s one that involves whales, FTX, and DeFi (🐋, ⚖️, 💰)—and one infamous character: Humpy the Whale.

Back in 2022, “Humpy,” a major holder of Balancer (BAL) tokens, made headlines by leveraging Balancer’s “ve-tokenomics” in a high-stakes move to gain significant control. With the largest share of veBAL, he directed protocol rewards back to his own holdings, effectively seizing control over Balancer’s governance. This led to a tenuous “truce” where Humpy remained a major veBAL holder, securing a continuous stream of rewards—but agreed not to act against Balancer’s interests openly. Read more about it here.

Fast forward to 2024, and Humpy’s name resurfaced—this time in Compound, where he attempted a similar governance play. More on this recent maneuver.

But here’s where it gets even more interesting.

A recent Twitter thread on FTX creditor clawbacks claims that “Humpy” wasn’t just stirring the DeFi waters; he was also allegedly siphoning funds from FTX. At one point, he was reportedly worth over $1 billion on FTX, successfully pulling out $450 million and $230 million by manipulating low-liquidity markets with coins like BTMX, MOB, BAO, TOMO, and SXP (or, as some would call them, “shitcoins”). FTX’s intertwined losses with Alameda are significant: by April 2021, Caroline Ellison, then CEO of Alameda, estimated that Alameda had taken on $400 million in losses from “MOB guy.” Later, an FTX employee estimated total losses nearing $1 billion linked to these manipulations.

By the way, humpy circumvented KYC by using emails like “motherofallburgers@protonmail.com,” “turkiyepizzakebab@int.pl,” “donerkebabveryspicy@int.pl,” and “sanpedropizza@int.pl,” slipping past safeguards multiple times. Food coins, anyone?

Tracing back these accounts unveils potential links to money laundering, Ponzi schemes, and organized crime networks spanning Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian syndicates, with connections to human trafficking and even terrorist financing networks.

This is more than just an anecdote—Humpy’s story illustrates the deep, complex webs within the crypto world. The lines between DeFi innovation, centralized exchange exploitation, and organized crime are still blurring,. The story also unvails the incompetence and greed of FTX/SBF, allowing this behaviour and led many customers with a loss.

Official complaint you find here for download, with some more infos. Allegeldy, there are links between Humpy and a variety of money laundering operations and Ponzi schemes dating back more than a decade. Also, there are ties to Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian organized crime networks.
https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/ftx/Home-DownloadPDF?id1=MzIyNDczMQ==&id2=-1

Original twitter source: https://x.com/LouisOrigny/status/1855036157660479645

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The “FUD” is back, but let’s have a closer look. Especially the Celestia part is funny and showing bag bias. There is one tweet in there that I think makes a good point:

The L1 is why Ethereum is winning the multi-chain game right now and not the Cosmos Hub even though Cosmos realized multichain earlier on

Path dependence and balance of power matters

Ethereum L1 was the center of crypto, so L2s naturally grew out of it

I am in favor of scaling L1 despite knowing that down the road every effing L1 will need L2s to scale because path dependence is a thing and we can’t let the advantage this ecosystem has slip.

Down the road L2s are inevitable. That is afaik one of the main reasons for researchers and e.g. Vitalik for not scaling L1 anymore. They see it similar to the difficulty bomb we had when ETH was still POW.

While I get the idea, I think it’s wrong. We will never scale L1 to fit all the tx of the world. But we should scale L1 in the meantime and invest some core dev time to keep the position.

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Devcon & Friends Update 3 (Previous)

Devcon Day 1

Yay finally Devcon! I stopped by the venue yesterday to pick up my wristband, which was peaceful and truly the calm before the storm. There are something like 12,000 people with Devcon tickets, so now that everyone has arrived, it’s a massive event. It’s big and there’s a lot going on, so it’s possible to spend the better part of a day just wandering around. Today I did have some other responsibilities but spent most of the day at the venue. Made it to some talks, but in the end not too many.

Talks all have a QR code displayed on the side of the screen which you can scan to get access to a Q&A page to submit questions for after the talk, or upvote other people’s questions you like. There’s also some way to mint a “card” NFT thing associated with each talk, but you have to scan this QR code that only appears in person, not on the stream. I didn’t manage to get the card minting working on my phone, but the Q&A tech worked well. I was very surprised to see that the conference provided plenty of snacks, beverages, and even a full lunch, and somehow they didn’t run out. With 12k hungry attendees? Well done organizers.

Oh, and the frogs. People love the frogs. This is a Devcon + Zupass initiative to demonstrate use cases of programmable cryptography (in short, prog crypto, hence the name of the project: frogcrypto). In short, on your Devcon ticket there is a link to the frogcrypto page where you can tap a button every 15 minutes to catch a digital frog. The frogs are cryptographic data structures that can be ZK verified in various ways, and last year were a basis for people to implement various demos of progcrypto technology. If you show this frog to the frogcrypto people at the booth, they’ll give you a frog plushie on a necklace, with a unique QR code that you can scan to set it up. Then, anyone else can scan your QR code to each get a copy of each other’s frogs. The big goal is to catch as many frogs as you can, each one contributing to your score, which you can turn in for prizes. There’s the classic frog bucket hat from last year’s Devconnect, little frog trinkets of sorts, and among the higher-tier rewards: a programmable cryptography textbook for 300 frogs.

Of course, the QR code is just a URL like any other, so you can always just scan your code, post it to Telegram, and have everyone else click it without having to actually interact in person. I even found a website created just today that lets anyone add their frog URL to a database where everyone can see the full list. So if you can sustain a pace of 4 frogs / minute, that’s just 75 minutes of mindless tapping to earn enough to get that textbook. I’m sure by morning people will have written scripts to automatically scrape frogs from the website and automatically connect with them all. Not sure how long the merch will last or if it’s worth the effort to collect.

A handful of talks today. The Devcon schedule is fantastic for providing info about each talk and speaker, and actually contains an embedded YouTube video of each talk today. Amazing. Here:

• Josef Je, Co-founder of PWN DAO & Bordel hackerspace, argued that crypto isn’t some fantasy land disconnected from the “real world”, it is the real world. You can compare onchain revenue like priority fees to other industies’ revenues, or compare onchain market capitalization with those of other industries. By those metrics, crypto–purely based on on-chain metrics–is a similar scale as the gaming and entertainment industries. One difference is that the number of people directly working in crypto itself is much lower than those other industries. Josef pointed out to the attendees in the room, “You are the cryptonative economy!”
• Diego Kingston, Co-founder and head of research at Aligned, delivered a lightning talk (only 7 minutes!) on hash-based proof systems. I could only take notes so fast, so here are the bits and pieces. Hash based proof systems work over smaller fields, do not require trusted setups, and make minimal security assumptions. It is easier than most proving systems to generate recursive proofs, but you need linear error-correcting codes like Reed-Solomon and a collision-resistant hash function. See: FRI, circle starks. Compile to a set of polynomial equations and use a merkle tree to commit and blah blah blah this should have been like 30 minutes not 7.
• Leo Lara, Team Lead at the EF/PSE, gave a lightning talk on modern ZKP compilers. In short, it sounds like compilers are getting better at including useful abstractions to make developer experience better. But he suggested that zkVMs are probably the future and that most people who want to make use of ZKPs will not write circuits, but instead just write code that compiles down to the VM language (e.g. RISC-V) and prove it with a zkVM.
• Phil Daian of Flashbots laid out his priorities and roadmap for Ethereum’s future. He highlighted his biggest concerns by referencing a paper affiliated with the NY Fed that looked at how to ensure “regulatory cooperation” of blockchains, noting MEV-Boost relays as places to apply pressure. Also referenced AWS datacenters and how concentrated they are in the US and Europe. So with that his focus is on decentralization of geo-economic distribution of power, which he things should be a first-class goal of Ethereum, much moreso than any performance metrics. He wants to push back against “UX fentanyl” (the addictive need to make end-user UX perfect even at the expense of other core values) and “napkin research” (basically out-of-touch researchers). Rejecting much of the Ethereum roadmap and current research directions, he instead wants to “TEEify” everything in pursuit of this goal of “pushing power to the edges”.
• Justin Drake, researcher at the EF, presented his vision for Ethereum’s next era of consensus via the beam chain. A lot has changed since the beacon chain spec was written, and Justin thinks it’s time to start the process of developing the next consensus system to replace it. We’re talking mechanisms including (probably future forms of these, but today represented by) FOCIL + APS + shorter slots + stake cap + orbit + SSF + state transition function SNARKification + quantum-resistant security + VDFs. Along the way, could clean up a lot of tech debt and simplify things. But really, the list of changes isn’t anything people paying attention to research haven’t already seen, beyond the need to batch some of the more complex changes together in one fork. The point of this initiative is really the social side of it: an attempt to align the Ethereum community around a shared and more concrete vision of the future. This would be a chance to bring in new talent, form new beam client teams, and light a fire under people’s feet to work on a goal that seems ambitious but generally realistic. And at a time when it’s particularly in vogue to criticize Ethereum’s governance and roadmap (see: Phil Daian just before, Lido, CT), the beam chain is an ambitious and optimistic take on Vitalik’s roadmap. Happy to talk through this more.

If anyone has other talks of interest, please send them over. Devcon schedule links are easily shareable and make it really easy to watch the video and catch up.

Back at it tomorrow!

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It seems that Wall Street anticipates the authorisation and launch of staked ETH ETFs. An ETH ETF operator buys a staking company:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/crypto-etf-provider-bitwise-buys-ether-staking-service-attestant

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Just wondering if anyone has bought the dgen1 EthOS phone? If so I’d love to use a referral code from an EthFinancier. First one to reply…

I’ve been doing a bit of research and really like the sound of the OS: https://ethosmobile.readme.io/

It’s based on GraphineOS, which is regarded as one of (if not ‘the’) most private and secure operating systems available for mobiles. Up until now you’ve only been able to install it on Google Pixel phones, so I’ve never tried it before and if I’m honest, I’m more excited about that than the hardware:

https://grapheneos.org/features

EthOS adds a bunch of other stuff, most importantly a Light Node, which allows the device to connect directly to Ethereum. It looks like the options for clients are Nimbus or Helios, I use Nimbus for my full node so I guess I’ll give Helios a try for the variety, though I’ve never actually even heard of it before - it looks like it’s exclusively a light client:

https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/building-helios-ethereum-light-client/

There’s supposedly a bunch of other stuff like the ability to mint NFTs from the camera, which I guess could be useful in an AI image based misinformation dystopia…

Anyway, I really sound like I’m shilling, but I haven’t even bought the device yet (hence asking for a code) and certainly have no association with the project. I’m also not at all infallible, so if I’ve misunderstood something about it then please do let me know - ideally before I order one if it’s fatally flawed somehow!

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Lodestar v1.23.0 released today

Hello Lodestar users! We’re happy to announce our v1.23 release from Devcon! This release is Mekong-ready and you’ll be able to use the flag –network mekong to connect to the newest Pectra public testnet.

For users that experienced CPU illegal instruction issues, we’ve now defaulted to a portable version of BLST-TS which should fix compatibility issues. https://github.com/ChainSafe/lodestar/pull/7164

There are also some performance upgrades and fixes

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Friendly reminder we have a daily thread on /r/ethereum.

Why am I telling you this? 2 reasons:

1. We’re modding /r/ethereum actively and would like to bring our good faith over there to help bring the roots back.

2. We REALLY need help with reporting trolls.

If all goes well, there’s a non-zero chance that we may ALL end up there anyway. Right now Tricky Troll is meeting /r/ethereum mods irl at Devcon tp discuss how we can Doot up the Diddly over there long term. I’m looking forward to seeing you in the daily over there if you can swing by.

thanks all and big hugs

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2918.54

u/TimbukNine

0.03820

u/ridgerunners

The ticker is ETH

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Popularisers,

Eigen layer advisors,

Turn to despisers.

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༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ

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The French philosopher Albert Camus said there is a juxtaposition between the fundamental human need to attribute meaning to life, and the disinterested meaningless universe in response. He called this the ‘absurd’. I didn’t truly grasp what he meant until I became an ETH investor.

The fundamental need to attribute reason and rationality to the disinterested irrational market. Camus compared this to the myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill every day, only for it to roll back just before it reaches the top. ETH in 2024 is this Sisyphus.

There are a few ways people deal with the absurd. The first one is to commit market suicide; i.e. the liquidation of all holdings, also known as capitulation. A second way is to appropriate our own meaning unto the market. You will hear stuff like “Supply shock incoming”, “4 year cycle is playing out” or “Alt season is coming”. Camus calls this philosophical suicide. The investor, by clasping to hope still bears a faith commitment which is akin to religion.

Camus rejects both of these strategies and instead poses that one should strive to recognize the absurdity of the market and its irrationality. This acknowledgement is painful but crucial. Instead of succumbing to despair or seeking comfort in religious or philosophical abstractions, Camus advocates for “revolt.” This doesn’t mean rejecting the market but rather resisting the desire to resolve its inherent contradictions. Recognizing the absurd for what it is, brings freedom

In the end, we must imagine ETH happy

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Get to know EVMavericks #9 - YieldDaddy aka EVM 833

Hi, what do you go by and what is your EVMavericks #?

Hi 696! Within the online cryptosphere I go around as YieldDaddy. The name really started off as sort of a meme in 2022 when the brother and I started aping in a lot of random projects with of course random accounts. Fighting the Ethereum FUD on Twitter with that name was also pretty hilarious to me, so funny enough that is one of the biggest reasons I stuck with that account longterm. I am rocking EVM #833.

When and how did you get into crypto?

That should have been around the end of 2016 (already 7 years ago sheeshhh time files..). So one day, I read some random article about Kim Dotcom. It stated he was building a project with Bitcoin. Bitcoin I thought, what? That still exists? Why would that controversial billionaire do something like that? And from that moment, down the rabbit hole called Bitcoin I went. Believe it or not, I actually came into crypto for the tech and have not bought anything until only a couple of months later early 2017.

How did you make your way into EVMavericks?

After reading up on Bitcoin I of course stumbled upon all these other crypto that were popping up everywhere during the ICO craze in 2017. Ethereum the ‘smart contract’ platform, as a tech geek I was very intrigued with the platform which enabled it all, so I deepened myself again in everything I could get my hands on. Reddit with ethtrader and later on ethfinance was one of the best resources I found that I could daily hit with the latest what was going on in Ethereum. As more of a lurker myself I was initially sad that I would miss out on the EVM drop, however with some luck I got my EVM with the raffle. I would have bought an EVM no matter what!

Happy to hear that you landed your EVM through the raffle! How has your stay been so far? any favorite memories?

Our Discord is awesome and sometimes its even hard to keep up, however not directly something that stands out. It is just the best place I use to hangout during the bear market, so looking forward when the bull really hits. I did enjoy the most the moments around the EIPandas (themerge), sprotos and the current vibes with the memecoin mania.

Earlier you said you came into crypto for the tech, what crypto developments excite you nowadays and how do you spend time in crypto?

ZK tech really piques my interest, mainly because it’s hard to fully grasp its potential, and that challenge is what excites me most, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. I am also fascinated by topics like the based rollups and pre-confirmations in the Ethereum ecosystem. Lately, I have been just following what thought leaders in the space are tweeting and blogging on, while experimenting with some dApps and occasionally playing the memecoin dartboard.

Any dApps that have piqued your interested in particular? and how has the memecoin casino been treating you?

Recently, I’ve taken an interest in EFP and Infinex as well. EFP, in particular, seems like it has the potential to evolve into something much bigger down the road, which is exciting. The memecoin casino it’s been a ride for sure! Some wins, some losses, naturally, but thankfully a few of those wins managed to turn a small bag into a decent multiplier. Let’s hope those little now worth nothing “moon bags” also get alive again during a full out bull market.

Let’s switch gears for a bit, how do you usually spend time outside of crypto? what are your hobbies?

Outside of the crypto, apart from the casual travels I’ve been getting back into a passion that is filming. It started with just picking up the camera a few weeks back, but it’s quickly brought back that excitement I used to feel capturing the world in my own way. It gives me an excuse as well to zone out of the normal daily busy life.

Any alpha or advice that you can give us? It can be anything.

Do not overthink it, in case 2025 is bullish (4 year cycle), take profits when you feel euphoric.

Lastly, is there anything else you wanna share with us, yielddaddy? The stage is yours!

Crypto lets us become sovereign individuals in the digital age, onboard and teach others whenever you can, we are winning.

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You guys remember like 5 years ago just around covid where the price was in the slumps but DeFi applications were growing like crazy and soon after it all exploded? I feel like we’re in the same stage right now, just this time it’s L2 numbers and activity that’s taking off and we’re standing in front of the next big explosion.

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Both Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist are dropping their Eigenlayer association.

https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1852734263541874824

https://x.com/dankrad/status/1852734273461080320

Good, but late, imo. Has certainly tarnished their reputation a bit for me.

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Devcon & Friends Update 1 (Previous)

Edge City Lanna Week 1

I checked in to Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai last Sunday, so somehow it’s been nearly a whole week already! Time flies. I thought this would be a good opportunity to provide an update given that there’s a very clear dividing line in my schedule: I had lots of flexibility to do various Edge City things this last week, but next week will be much more structured and technical. So it’s a good time to summarize the experience so far. Whopper of a post today.

First, the broad strokes.

As I mentioned before, Edge City is a popup village, a descendant of sorts from Zuzalu, where a bunch of people have come to live and work in a small neighborhood in Chiang Mai for up to a month. The central themes, as listed on their website, are human organization, AI, real-world crypto, health/longevity, and hard tech. It’s easy to paint over it with broad strokes to say “it’s kind of Ethereum-adjacent tech and culture stuff”, but I have been quite impressed with the extent to which it is really interdisciplinary.

Probably half of the people I’ve met have their focus outside of blockchain/web3 (often they’re exploring if we can provide tools to help with their own endeavors), and it’s really cool to have gathered all these different people in one place. Meeting new people and hearing the breadth of their backgrounds has been one of my favorite parts of my time here. I have also seen a number of familiar faces (some from here as well–hi!), and expect more to make it for the last week before Devcon.

Cursive put together NFC wristbands for everyone to make it easy to share contact info, build a connection graph, and use ZK proofs to find common interests and discussion topics without just revealing each person’s whole list to each other. RadicalxChange has a local currency, Edges, intended to be used to pay for personal services or perishable goods specifically within Edge City. These get… a little use. Telegram, the Thai Baht, and good old fashioned “what do you do?” still remain the ultimate coordination tools.

Programming

There are only a few events that are truly Edge City first-party official. Daily communal breakfasts and lunches, big Sunday dinners, weekly project demo days, and a few others. Each week there are a number of major featured events and a few central multi-day tracks, organized somewhat independently but with a degree of Edge City sponsorship/promotion.

This last week we had talks and workshops on stablecoins and governance games. There’s an ongoing multi-day “existential hope worldbuilding” series, and today there’s a full-day AI x Neuro event. But generally anyone has the freedom to schedule an event, book a room in one of the shared buildings, and be just as “official” as anyone else.

As such there is a lot of flexibility in how you structure your day. I like to sign up for anything that sounds interesting, which means I spend most of each day in The-A-Ter, our lecture hall of sorts, and otherwise bouncing around to wherever fun and weird stuff is going on. Other people have made heavy use of the coworking space to get some building done. Others can dive into the wellness angle and focus on taking care of themselves for a while, or use Edge City as a home base to explore Chiang Mai and find others to get out with.

My Experience

I started off with what I thought was a pretty balanced schedule. I’d eat breakfast at the hotel, do a bit of yoga or something, spend an hour or two in the coworking space, then attend talks and workshops most of the rest of the day with a communal lunch break at some point. Maybe a cold plunge and sauna in the late afternoon, followed by dinner and a quiet evening back at the hotel. There is a whole world of more lively evening events (raves out in the woods?) that I tend to skip–not really my thing.

I caught a fairly minor cold that messed with my morning routine for a few days (sleeping in more, skipping the workout), but feeling better now and need to re-establish some structure there. Currently recovering from an ankle injury that I should avoid putting high impact on, so without my go-to sport of running I have to be a little more creative, but there are plenty of options here.

Here’s a sampler of the sort of events I’ve been going to:

• Weekly community demo days intended to showcase work that’s being done here now. Mostly your usual suite of Ethereumy projects, with perhaps a focus on Edge City themes. ZK Email had some neat updates since I’d last checked in, one example being a side-event at Devcon that you can only get into if you provide a zk proof that you received a rejection email for a Devcon speaker application.
• Did a few days of yoga, never even tried it before. I still don’t necessarily get the full picture, but it seems like a good combination of strength and flexibility exercises, with an element of just aiming for loosening up and feeling good. Less regimented than my usual workouts but I guess that’s the point.
• Someone was working on a video game, wanted playtesters, and cared enough to create a scheduled time to try it out. So sure, why not.
• Attended an evening talk on consciousness and the speaker’s idea of vasocomputation. I’m skeptical, but fun to get a little out there occasionally.
• Stablecoin track: Discussions around recoverability (would you opt-in to a system where a trusted admin could revert a transfer?), yield-bearing stables, vitalik advocating for decentralized stablecoins, a confidential ERC-20 standard, temporary approvals, etc. Breakout sessions after each day to discuss topics in groups of ~5.
• Learned about a method for collective evaluation of contributions to a community via pairwise comparisons. Potentially applicable to allocation of value to public goods.
• A short session where someone just wanted to talk with like-minded people about packing light for the digital nomad life. I got to show off my ~30L pack setup that holds everything I need for this month.
• An informal session to chat about different views on longevity research, trying to bridge the gap a little between the longevity focused people who think “death-ists” are ignorant, and the folks from outside the space who think the longevity people are out of touch.

Conclusion

It’s probably fair to ask if Edge City is worth the costs. Long expensive plane flights, paying for lodging here, and the ticket itself (0.45 ETH for two weeks), in exchange for a hard-to-value social setting. You can get work done, but to what extent are all the events and people running around useful vs being a distraction from actual productive work? It does sometimes feel like at conferences there’s a lot of “oh we should collaborate on something”… with an implied “when we’re done here and get back to the real world”, which often doesn’t happen. But the right serendipitous connection in the right place at the right time could be super valuable too, and the massive breadth of people here makes it feel ripe for finding new insights. I don’t have a good answer at this point.

Tomorrow begins a series of technical events that were the original reason for me to sign up for Edge City. Sequencing Week, mainly, which is a get-together of 50-60 people working on sequencing–as it pertains to the sequence of transactions in L1 and L2 blocks, who determines it, and how. Shared/based sequencing and preconfirmations are the main keywords. And before that, tomorrow is Interop Day–as it pertains to interoperability between L1 and L2 chains. I don’t expect to be quite so useful at Interop Day, but if the conversation strays towards shared sequencing as a tool to improve interop, then Aestus as a neutral infrastructure provider becomes relevant again.

These events are going to require more of a time commitment, so I will have less freedom to do miscellaneous Edge City things. Hopefully this will be a good chance to really sit down and do something collaborative and impactful. And hopefully I can still get exposure to the broader Edge City topics at shared meals and a handful of evening events.

As usual I would be happy to explain more about certain points here. There’s a lot going on and a lot of ways to think about it.

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I wanna kickstart a fun discussion!

So far, ever since you started playing around with blockchain in general. What are the top 3 things you have done, that when you did them you thought “wow that was cool”. Finance related, or not.

I’ll start:

1. First swapping and pooling assets on Uniswap
2. First ever taking an Aave loan to buy a gift card with the loaned assets
3. Using ENS names to designate where I want to be paid (and vice versa) while buying/selling assets to and from other users in a trust-based way (based on reviews of them posted by other users on a community-maintained telegram channel)

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Web3 gaming was one sector I was looking forward to having a breakout year. It still may, but I’m now thinking it will be over a longer time horizon. It just seems like the space is maturing at a snail’s pace. Seeing a AAA studio, even if it’s Ubisoft (oh, how the mighty have fallen), launch their first “NFT game” and receive so much backlash is not all that surprising…

But what stands out to me is that Web3 gaming is still being wholesale branded and reported on as “NFT games”. That phrase just carries a bad connotation to me, as it implies that players are already somehow burdened with collectibles and/or have to spend currency on in-game marketplace assets in order to remain competitive. Perhaps the space deserves the unflattering branding, at least for now… Game developers get greedy and, as their first foray into on-chain gaming, adopt a pay-to-play / pay-to-win model. Over time, though, creativity will shine through… We’ll begin to see developers adopt models tailored specifically to Web3 gaming platforms that empower the player without creating the unnecessary friction that the old guard has made all too commonplace.

Right now it seems like we’re only in the early discovery phase of this space’s potential. The big-name game developers have only dipped their toes into Web3 gaming thus far, dedicating only a small fraction of the resources as they would to a traditional AAA title launch. But they don’t want to be caught with their pants down, however, in case Web3 becomes the future of gaming… So they throw a few bucks at a “NFT game” concept, build a few relations here and there with companies that can onboard them, and call it a day.

My hope is that game developers are able to navigate past NFTs serving as the focal point in the majority of Web3 game designs, and get to a point where they’re exploring fresh concepts while keep the players’ best interests at heart (fun, immersion, etc.). I’m starting to believe the first hit to really take the Web3 gaming sector by storm will come from a smaller indie developer who adopts a model that is unique in how it leverages the advantages of being built on a borderless, trustless, decentralized network.

Admittedly, I haven’t done much research on this topic… Just throwing out some loose observations and ramblings.

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u/cryptOwOcurrency:

As always, I apologize for solanaposting, especially on such an anxious day for many. But I think responses to this might help me better understand ETH.

If we look at the DefiLlama fees, Solana has surpassed Ethereum in 24-hour fee revenue.

https://defillama.com/fees

Yes, I believe this doesn’t include L2 revenue, but L2 revenue translates only indirectly to L1 revenue anyways. And yes, I’m aware that it’s only been for a couple of days - Ethereum is still looking much stronger on the monthly/yearly.

If we take a SOL staking yield of 6% (from stakingrewards.com) and an inflation rate of 4.9% (from solanacompass.com), that means SOL staking has a real yield of 1.1% (no idea if these sources are accurate but they seem reasonable enough). I am aware that this ignores the upcoming token unlocks for VC dumping, but while the dumping could affect price, I don’t believe it should affect real yield (which could be accessed then, after the dumping).

Q’s:

1. Is this data accurate?

2. Is it possible that Solana could pass up ETH in monthly fee revenue, then fee revenue in general?

3. Can any old schmo forever access this risk-free yield just by staking like on Ethereum, or are there some special Solana strings attached (aside from the usual disadvantages of the Solana chain itself)?

4. Does this fee revenue comparison matter at all? What should I make of it? I feel like the most important property that ETH has over other tokens is a real staking yield (ETH’s credible neutrality is up there, too).

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u/growthepie_eth:

1. I can only speak on Ethereum data and it looks to be correct I would add the following context:

• Using a 7 day rolling Avg Ethereum fee revenue = $3.29M (yesterday’s rolling Avg)
  
• If we were to also include Layer 2s this would be $3.57M
  
• Ethereum has proved it can remain secure and keep demand with lower issuance (subsidy) this shouldn’t be taken for granted on other chains.
  
• The Blob market is very new and is only just starting to generate revenue and this will change over time.

2. Anything is possible Solana is subsidizing fees with higher issuance in an attempt to gain more revenue whilst also having different security assumptions on decentralization. Ethereum blobs have really taken the wind out of those sails by allowing L2s to compete and beat them on transaction costs. Ethereum has sacrificed revenue in the short term as we enter the growth stage for L2s this will enable them to grow faster without having to dramatically increase issuance - this is a long-term play.

3. I think with Solana they use DPOS so you’re delegating rather than self staking and to be a delegate you have to have super expensive hardware and bandwidth. So different risk profile but yes anyone can get access to the yield don’t I know how much yield the delegate keeps?

4. I think it does matter but is far from the only thing that matters - ETH being used as a unit of account on all these L2s and many of them charge their users in ETH all play into ETHs use and value (not financial advice)

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Nethermind just announced that they will launch a based rollup called surge:

https://x.com/NethermindEth/status/1854150431448109155

or

https://xcancel.com/NethermindEth/status/1854150431448109155

It is built on the Taiko stack, will be stage 2 at launch, uses ETH as token and they plan to have a Gigagas throughput. This is about 700 times more throughput than mainnet. They will not be able to achieve that with the current number of blobs, but I guess that is their goal in the future.

More info on surge.wtf

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The year is 203X, after failing to manage the deficit, the US government has defaulted on its debts by printing it away. Inflation is unsurprisingly out of control.

Person 1: I really wish the government managed the deficit better. This inflation is insane!

Person 2: Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!

Kodos’s policies would have also lead to inflation. The US government is already past the point of no return because any politician voted in who is willing to implement the austerity required to get the budget back on track would be swiftly voted out. The game theory says it is no longer possible. Do not get left holding the fiat bag.

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So yesterday u/phimarhal tagged me to show support for TPP1, which is the first proposal in the zksync ecosystem. Voting opened yesterday. I indeed will be voting FOR, but this is not the reason for this post. I wanna share my experience and thoughts being a first-time-delegate.

The TPP is called “zksync Ignite Program”. Their one sentence summary is

Allocate 325,000,000 ZK tokens over nine months to deploy a program designed to establish a DeFi liquidity hub on ZKsync Era, aimed at increasing DeFi TVL and improving liquidity across all interoperable ZK Chains (”Elastic Chain”).

So it’s about mining/ attracting liquidity by handing out ZK incentives in various defi protocols. The proposal is not reinventing the wheel here, it’s similar to STIP/LTIP you might know from Arbitrum.

At the same time TPPs are supposed to be different. zksync (not the delegates) presented TPPs in a way where things are supposed to be as automatic and onchain as possible. Instead of giving out grants/ incentives to protocols, TPPs are supposed to be “autonomous token allocation processes”. If you are really interested in this, please see these two threads in the forum, the TPP FAQ and then this presentation.

I think the idea is beautiful, even if I still have issues to really understand how this is supposed to work onchain. Here comes the twist… TPP1 is not even remotely close to being automatic. The whole program is a lot of manual work. And - as we later found out - was/ is a project that the zksync team supports, I guess it was design with them and there’s a lot of support for it. Despite being… the opposite of what they told us the TPPs are supposed to be.

I found the proposal cause I follow zknation and zksync on twitter. This is the tweet and as you can see zksync Ignite had a twitter account, created before the proposal was even published. The zksync twitter account even states the following:

ZKsync Ignite will turn ZKsync Era into a liquidity hub for the Elastic Chain by streaming 300M ZK tokens over 9 months to DeFi users.

So it… will? Or could?

Also the first comment in the TPP thread in the forum was created minutes after publishing it, the account posting it was created the same day, until today it has been in the forum 2 days, less than 1 minute of total reading time. But was super supportive.

If you are still with me, I apologize, cause I am just starting and know this is already a wall of text, thank you for your patience and still reading!

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GG22 stats, end of round

• Matching Pool $1,518,000
• Total Donated $276,526
• Total Donations 131,983
• Unique Donors 27,315
• Total Rounds 12
• Total Projects 496

https://gitcoin.co/grants-data

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u/johnnydappeth

Ethereum

u/benido2030

2501 USD

u/FrenktheTank

0.0361

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Blockchain underneath,

The best asset to bequeath,

The ticker is ETH.

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༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ

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Since lately it seems like chains with less technology pump more, I suggest we remove some technology from Ethereum. Roll back 1559, go back to PoW… actually we could get rid of the blockchain aspect altogether, since nobody seems to care. We could run it in a SQL database. Or we could even get rid of the ledger altogether. Ethereum would be a system of IOUs, an unstoppable concept, with n-of-n decentralization in the minds of its true believers.

Everyone should write down how much ETH they have before we get rid of the blockchain. Write them onto little pieces of paper with denominations on them. DO NOT create any more paper than you actually owned in ETH. PLEASE, that’s very important. Then as a replacement for smart contracts, we will talk about what should happen if something happens, and then you shake hands. You NEED to honor every agreement you shook on. If everyone promises to do that, this might just work.

This plan flips the script on Bitcoin, because now Ethereum has the fewest amount of moving parts. Now Ethereum is the most dependable. If something has no code, it can’t have bugs in it. If something has no development, its roadmap cannot be compromised. If something is only an idea, it cannot be shut down.

In other words, the Ethereum Foundation touts its “philosophy of subtraction”, but does it really walk the walk? I challenge them to dream smaller.

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Just a quick recap on how fee markets work in Ethereum (both for blockspace and for blobspace):

There’s a base fee, which represents the current “state” of the fee market. That base fee sets how much a unit of gas costs (for normal transactions, which use blockspace, and disregarding tips) or how much a blob costs.

There’s also a target amount of resource usage: for normal transactions, that’s the target gas (15M units of gas), which is half of the max gas per block (30M), and for blobs it’s currently 3 blobs (out of a maximum of 6).

Each block, the actual resource usage (gas or blobs) ends up being some number 0 <= amount <= max, which will be either greater than, equal to, or less than, the target for that resource.

Here’s the important part: if the resource usage is greater than the target (e.g. 20M gas used, which is greater than the 15M target, or 5 blobs instead of the target 3), the next block the basefee/blob fee for that resource will be higher by a certain percentage. The opposite also applies; if the resource usage is less than the target, the basefee/blob fee will decrease by a certain percentage.

It’s actually kind of genius; this means that Ethereum’s fees automatically adjust to demand.

If there’s high demand, aka more users willing to pay higher gas fees for normal transactions, or more L2s willing to pay higher blob fees for blob-carrying transactions, then you would expect to see usage exceed the targets, and the next block will have higher fees, until the fees become too much and the demand (at that fee level) comes back to the target.

If there’s low demand, in theory the opposite occurs: it indicates the resource is currently overpriced relative to supply and demand, and so the next block will have a cheaper basefee/blob fee, hopefully encouraging more usage in order to meet the target. This has worked out well for gas fees, because Ethereum has plenty of pent-up demand for transactions that are willing to wait for cheap gas; there’s never a lack of transactions ready to be submitted when basefees lower.

However, I said “in theory” because blob fees are in a different situation currently. The mechanism works the same as with the basefee, but L2s are currently not creating enough demand for blobspace the large majority of the time. This means that even when blobfees are extremely cheap (the minimum it can go to, 1 wei per blob), there’s simply not enough blobs being submitted for the average block to meet its blob target (3 blobs), and if you’ll recall, this means that the blob fee would continue to go down in the next block, except that it’s pinned at the minimum.

So observe this highly binary situation: either there is enough demand for a resource, at all times, that Ethereum can always make sure it’s on average meeting its target usage for that resource, or there is not. Block gas currently has enough demand; blobs currently do not. And observe what this means for fees: if there is enough demand for the resource, the fee will stay floating at some fair market rate, much greater than 0, and Ethereum can collect (and burn) those fees. But if there is not enough demand, the fee will bottom out at ~0 and stay there, except during occasional spikes in demand. That’s where we’re at with blobs right now.

And crucially, observe that this is a switch that can and will flip itself at some point in the future, when blob demand from L2s and other users increases past a critical threshold, namely 3 blobs per 12 seconds. Once the average demand exceeds that, Ethereum will instantly enter a regime where blob pricing needs to follow market rates, rather than being pinned at 0.

And as we all know, L2s are very insensitive to blob pricing. During recent blob fee spikes, we saw certain L2s paying absurd prices for their blobs, think multiple Ether for each blob. This is likely due to them not putting appropriate limits/waits in place, but it illustrates the point: L2s, with their high ‘compression ratios’ of L2 transactions to L1 commit transactions, are able to pay much higher fees than ordinary transactions on L1 are.

So putting it all together: blob fees will be 0, until suddenly they are very much not 0 when demand for blobs passes a certain threshhold.

And L2 growth over the past year has been fairly exponential. We will pass that threshold in the near future (potentially delayed somewhat if we raise the blob target in Pectra, albeit.)

All the handwringing about how Ethereum is not capturing value from its L2s will seem like a very silly concern not too long from now, in other words.

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Fairly significant US crypto tax rule change:

Effective January 1, 2025, ALL taxpayers will be required to track cost basis at the wallet level. In other words, if you have ETH in Wallet A and ETH in Wallet B, and then you sell some ETH in Wallet B, you cannot pull the cost basis from Wallet A

So each wallet is treated as a separate tax bucket

Also discussed here

Edit: This ONLY applies to FIFO. Most of you who transfer assets between wallets/accounts will likely not be able to use FIFO or use Specific ID (based on my limited understanding of this). Honestly, my accounts will be in a bit of a mess and probably cannot use FIFO due to this rule.

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About an hour ago I had the privilege to launch my first NodeSet validator. There are over 500 now, and the limit per operator has just been increased from 4 to 5. I’ll have to wait 24 hours give or take to launch my second, but as long as these big deposits keep flowing in, I will keep launching minipools. It may seem farfetched now, but operators running 100+ minipools each is not out of the question. Adoption can happen fast.

BTW, these ops are sharks…there is a script floating around that checks the pool for deposits and if gas is favorable will automatically launch another minipool. I launched mine manually but am in the process of setting the script up for myself as well.

The rocketpool deposit pool, which has been bloated for the last several months (and been a drag on rETH APR) has been cut in half in two weeks. And xrETH hasn’t even been integrated into defi at all. Really proud to be playing a small part in this fine group of operators.

On top of that, the Saturn 0 upgrade that’s coming in a few days is going to further reduce the deposit pool as new minipools will lose the RPL requirement.

Basically, it’s been a nice little Saturday. Ignoring the FUD, watching Vitamin B go ham on shitposters, launching ‘pools. I got my database and GUI up and running on my little project. Blops 6 released, and they brought back round based zombies (which is the only way to do it, imo) and the I’m lovin’ the 90’s aesthetic. Might go for some ice cream later, who knows?

Ticker is ETH.

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Top Achievements of EVMavericks in 2023

🔝Top accomplishments of EVMavericks in the year of 2023👇:

1. The Withdrowls NFT drop on Arbitrum was created by Naenaebaby and etheraider to celebrate the Shapella upgrade and being able to ‘Withdraw’ our ETH from the staking contract. All the funds raised – 9.74e – went to public goods.

   Example

2. Buildathon - Withdrowls Public Goods Funding. Open competition for anyone that wanted to build for public goods or services on web3 with prizes totaling 9.74e.

   We had a 3-way tie so all winners:

   Lidont, rETH skimmer & EVMavericks Origin - received 3.08 ETH each. Honorable mentions go to projects such as ByteGuide and TwitterBot.

3. Started the Weekly Dots Roundup podcast highlighting the brilliant community of EVMavericks & Ethfinance. We produced more than 40 episodes with a variety of guests.

4. Creators, Doomfuzz & TheBenMeadows, collaborated with FakeRareDecal for szn1 and created 68 editions of EVMavericks Decal.

5. Collaborated with Swell by participating in the bootstrapping campaign - Swell Voyage. Our members got extra perks such as additional pearls if they held a minimum of 0.2 swETH. Decal

6. Chad Fund was birthed. The DAO managed portfolio managed by degens.

7. Started Rocket school - a website along with an educational video series to guide people through the process of setting up a Rocket Pool node.

8. Have grown DAO’s treasury:

   Financial report from 2023: Our Treasury has grown 155% since the 1st of August and is now worth $79,329 without NFTs ($149,531 if we were to value the EVMs at the current floor price). We currently hold 17.9 rETH, have launched the Chad Fund (~2 ETH) and are in the progress of setting up and getting started with the Stewards Investment Portfolio (~10 ETH). This is a collective effort so all feedback and suggestions are welcome. Stewards and Chad Fund members are responsible for carrying out the transactions. See the following document for all the Treasury information:

Other notable events:

• One of our creative members - heeey - dropped his collection Bright on Art Blocks. That ended up doing very well and many Mavs got their ‘Bright’ art as we were eligible for it. Example

• EVMs such as The-A-Word helping out fellow lions when they are in need or fell victims to scams, hacks. At the end of the day, it’s about the community and social aspect and we are lucky to have such generous and kind members in our pride.

• Celebrated one-year anniversary by doing a lion pride where we encouraged all EVMs to wear their lion for the week. Besides that, we ran some raffles of EIPandas!

Subscribe and stay tuned for the upcoming ‘best of EVMavericks’ from 2024!

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Rocket Pool is upgrading to Saturn 0 tomorrow (Sunday night, 8pm Eastern time). The upgrade will allow people to stake with Rocket Pool without requiring any RPL bond - ETH only validators are here! Part of this upgrade is that existing node operators will start earning RPL rewards again.

I recorded a special episode of Rocket Fuel with Samus, one of the RP community members who was involved in researching the upgrade. You can watch it here https://youtu.be/q0EoHRuCi3g. In the episode, Samus explains the reason for this upgrade as part of the official Saturn roadmap. He gives information on what rewards for ETH only validators will be - 1.3x solo staking rewards, how everyone will get RPL rewards from next month, and his ideas on the impact will have on Rocket Pool’s growth.

The Rocket Pool deposit pool has been in an overflow state for months, but that is going to change this week. If you want to mint rETH directly from the Rocket Pool contract, you will have that chance again from Monday onwards.

If you are an existing node operator with 16 eth validators, you can switch to LEB8s for an immediate boost in rewards - without needing to add a single RPL token. If you have any questions, please let me know, and I’ll answer them here.

Are you ready to join us, u/cryptomoon2020! The water’s warm. Get in the pool!

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Finally I’m at the end of my Rabbit Hole Explorer’s Guide and boy has that been a journey.

Recommended First Steps

Up until now I’ve covered a frighteningly lengthy sequence of things not to do and ways you can lose everything. To conclude let’s focus on what should you do to get started? What’s in your metaphorical backpack so you can be prepared like a good little boy scout? Where should you go exploring first?

Curate Your Feed

Generally speaking my feed consists of three things:

1. Project introductions. This is mostly YouTube for me. My list changes over time but has included Bankless, Bell Curve, and some much smaller accounts like Jordan McKinney. This type of content is often very biased so don’t expect too much from it besides background context on the project, what they are doing and how it’s novel, and the bull case. They usually aren’t going to compare themselves to their peers here or tell you how the project might fail. This will give you a list of things to research more deeply.

2. Official announcements. I check my Discord/Telegram announcement feed every morning, build up a list of tabs, and clear it by the end of the day. Sometimes I’ll hear about new projects from partnership announcements.

3. Discussion. This is where people get into the most trouble. Don’t let a social media tech giant direct your learning. Price of a project being shilled (especially on short horizons) is a terrible metric for the quality of a source. You might think to follow technology leaders but without enough background you’re as likely to start following Charles Hoskinson or Richard Heart as Vitalik Buterin. They all sound convincing to the uninitiated. What I recommend is rather than look for technical or wealthy people to instead look for project experts other than the team members that post about an application or ecosystem you already understand. You need to be able make sense of what is being said and make an informed decision about whether they are saying it in an intellectually honest way. Personally, I’ll also actively talk with community managers and members of projects but I’m looking for much deeper information or collaboration opportunities. You’re never going to find a Microsoft dev to ask question to but you very well might find and ask questions directly to a project founder in web3.

The more you fill your feed with people who are only interested in price the less happy you’ll be. The more impatient you are to get rich quick, the more money will slip through your fingers and the more you’re going to be spending on therapy and blood pressure meds. Instead fill your feed with information worth knowing and spreading.

Hands On Learning

Undoubtedly the best way to explore the Rabbit Hole is to go there yourself. As I hopefully gotten across by now, focus on survival. Learn with small amounts to limit the liability of beginners mistakes. Start with stablecoins where you can to avoid price volatility risks. Start with older projects and projects with higher TVL because they tend to be safer. Start with simpler applications. In an attempt to be helpful getting you started here is a bunch of things to search out yourself sorted into categories by relevance to you and then roughly by approachability and importance. There’s a lot of editorial discretion here and you can be sure this is incomplete and will be out of date.

Defi

1. Money markets such as Aave and Compound

2. Dexs such as Uniswap and Curve

3. Liquidity incentives/farming such as bribes, bonds, marketing, points

4. Leverage such as Gearbox, Defisaver, or GMX

5. Options such as Lyra, Hegic

6. Real world asset protocols such as Centrifuge and Maker

7. Regen finance such as Gitcoin Grants, Greenpill, and Klima

Digital Identity

1. Ethereum Name Service (ENS), basically a human readable address

2. Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS). Let anyone prove that you or someone else claimed something.

3. Sybil resistance systems such as WorldCoin, BrightID, Proof of Humanity

4. Achievements such as Rabbit Hole or Layer3

NFTs

1. Communities such as Bored Apes or EVMavericks

2. RWAs such as Get Protocol

3. Corporate NFTs such as Nike and Starbucks

Gaming

1. Auto battlers such as Axie Infinity and Illuvium Arena

2. Strategy games such as InfluenceETH and Illuvium Zero

Memecoins

1. Doge, Bonk, Wif, etc. I’ll mark this cavern with a skull and crossbones.

Depin

1. Restaking such as EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and Karak.

2. Oracles such as Chainlink, UMA, and EOracle

3. Keepers such as Keeper Network and Gelato

4. Data availability such as EigenDA and Celestia

5. Compute sharing systems such as Golem and Spheron

6. AI in various forms such as Ritual, BitTensor s19, etc

Enterprise

1. Logistics systems such as Nightfall

2. Proof of Authority chains

Foundational Tech

1. Rollup technology such as Blobs, Validiums, and Fraud Proofs

2. Scaling Technology such as Verkle Trees and Proposer Builder Separation

3. Privacy Technology such as TEE, FHE, MPC

Review Prior Scams

After every hack you’ll find a post-mortem. You should bookmark these when you find them and swing by every once in awhile as you level up until one day it clicks. Occasionally you’ll even find useful summaries like this one that infodump many of these in one place. Eventually you’ll know what jargon like reentrancy guards are. You learn a lot about how things work by how things break.

Conclusion

Over time if you follow the advice here you’ll know more than 99% of Crypto Twitter on a good variety of topics, you’ll be able to take measured and deliberate risks, and you’ll fall into communities that share your values. You’ll probably meet some of these people in person at conferences. You may end up getting a job here. You may end up not needing a job at all. You’ll definitely find sources of joy and points of light in an otherwise dark world. Whatever happens, you will be changed in ways you aren’t expecting. I hope you’ll come away a better, happier, and wealthier person.

You can find the whole thing at this self-serving link.

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After the Merge I started looking into staking, but the only internet options at the time weren’t great and I don’t have a tech background / had never used CLI etc. I saw several posts talking about how anyone can do it but really didn’t think that could apply to me. I looked at the SomerEsat guides and they looked very thorough but I quickly became overwhelmed.

Well, fiber internet without a data cap was installed in our neighborhood and I decided it was time (and was worried that Allnodes would be cost prohibitive with Saturn 1 for Rocket Pool allowing for 4 ETH validators). People in the Rocket Pool #hardware channel helped me find an appropriate setup and following the RP guides I was able to get up and running on Holesky Testnet. My questions in the #support channel were answered within minutes.

Now I am on Mainnet and I am obsessed with starting at my Grafana dashboard! The SmartNode stack is super helpful for someone like me that only had a vague understanding of what Linux even was.

If you have have been on the fence about running your own node, it really is possible! For me the Rocket Pool community has been a great help and I also found answers in the EthStaker community.

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Devcon & Friends Intro and Plans

Something I like to do when the time arises is to report on Ethereum conference happenings, e.g. my EthCC summaries. This started when I first attended ETHDenver, and I generally just attended talks all day every day, took notes, and summarized my favorites. Now that I’m more involved on a day-to-day basis, my conference activities have become a bit more varied and I find that if you’re already in the loop, conference talks tend to just repeat info that’s available in more detail elsewhere.

But I still like to report on the talks that I find interesting, and can always find topics I’m less familiar with if I just step away from the MEV talks for a minute. Regardless of technical content, I also like to convey a little bit of what these events feel like to attend, for anyone who may be interested in the future. And finally, I hope to encourage ethfinanciers to be the change they want to see in the sub: the sorts of summaries I write are the sort of content I also enjoy consuming here, and I’d always like to see more of it.

So today I thought I’d hit on the broader Ethereum event structure. You see, I just arrived in Thailand and will be here for nearly a month doing Ethereum stuff. If you really want to you can structure your whole life around bouncing from tangentially-Ethereum-related event to tangentially-Ethereum-related event. Some people do just that, and would be better qualified to explain that lifestyle, but I think I’m getting a taste of it here. So I’ll give a bit of an overview of what I’m looking at in Thailand.

To start off, I am in Chiang Mai for the last two weeks of Edge City Lanna. There are a lot of different potential lenses through which to look at Edge City, but in general it is a month-long popup village where attendees all live in the same neighborhood in Chiang Mai, with a number of buildings rented out to serve as communal coworking, dining, social, wellness, and learning spaces. It creates a bit of a university campus feeling. There’s lots of room for flexibly structuring your day with some combination of your own work and shared workshops/classes, with infrastructure in place to help you eat well, socialize, and keep your body and mind healthy. That description leaves a lot in the air for what people actually do there, but it’s generally web3/Ethereum (+longevity/AI/network-state/health/etc) focused: we have tracks on stablecoins and governance this week, and next week I’ll be diving into Sequencing Week to focus on based sequencing and preconfirmations.

Then I fly down to Bangkok. Shortly before Devcon I am attending the Staking Summit. I went to their event last year in Istanbul and thought it was interesting enough to attend again. The core audience is really institutional staking-as-a-service providers, and a lot of people there see staking as just like a financial product that gives yield, and don’t really care about the underlying protocols. But they offered a steep discount to home stakers so I expect to see some friendly faces there, and I can always chat with validators about their thoughts on timing games, MEV, commitments/preconfs, and so on. If it turns out to be boring, well, I could probably use a few days off.

Then comes Devcon proper. I guess there’s still no concrete schedule, but there are four main days on the calendar. A number of side events too, which for the most part come in the days before Devcon or in the evenings after Devcon days. I’m signed up for far too many sequencing events and expect to be thoroughly bored of the subject by the end. For Devcon I intend to be in full conference mode, attending talks and writing up my usual summaries.

Finally comes Hodlercon in Phuket. This is the one place on the internet where Hodlercon needs no particular explanation. I expect to treat Hodlercon kind of like Edge City, aiming for a mix of learning, socializing, and leading for a healthy lifestyle. But of course it’s going to be more personal, even less structured, and more vacation-y. The planner that the team has been working with has… not been particularly impressive so far. But as long as we get our hotel rooms confirmed and we can all make it to Phuket together, we can always work out the rest.

That’s a lot of time in Thailand! And plenty to do. I think I’m going to be very glad to get back to a cool climate after a long, tropical month.

So I’ll give my thoughts on Edge City once it’s done, and will report on Staking Summit if it’s interesting enough to warrant the posts. Devcon gets daily updates for sure, Hodlercon maybe gets one summary at the end. In the meantime, Edge City provides plenty of opportunity for focused work time, and I think it may be time to write up a primer on based sequencing and preconfs intended for the solo+home staker audience. I think there are even writing clinics here where I can get some feedback first. Anyone else visiting can feel free to reach out whenever!

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The Bridge acquisition by Stripe has really got me thinking where this space, particularly for ETH is headed. It’s becoming pretty obvious to me that payments across the world will start moving on-chain. This is smart-contracts and blockchains killer use case I believe at least for the next 10 years. But these will primarily done in USD for now. Stablecoins are in the top 20 for holders of US debt worldwide. I believe on bankless they said that above 95% of all stablecoins are USD. Stablecoins are exporting USD to the world, only making it stronger, and the war on inflation, is all but won for now, so everyone feels pretty good about USD.

But there is still the elephant in the room that is our rising debt. I love reading this article ( https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-does-federal-debt-reach-unsustainable-levels )by the School of Wharton last year saying that we have basically have 20 years to turn things around. This is why no really cares about ETH or BTC as money (I mean I do) but the average person thinks well I have the USD now available to me, which has low inflation again, and I have 20 years before I need to worry about exiting USD. Its not even on their radar right now replacing USD.

So USD stablecoin use rise in countries that have inflation, we have already seen this on Tron, and exchange to exchange wallets.

What brings on everyone else on-chain? Merchants and banks will love the settlement time of blockchains but for most users credit cards are already a great experience, and people love the rewards. I think this starts as a grass led movement where independent merchants incentivize users to pay on-chain directly with discounts and tokens/NFTs (some of which will have utility). Coinbase seems to be the leader behind this with their wallet and best in class Base experience (paying gas fees in USDC, covering transfer fees, and their SDKs/APIs) (though Stripe could really compete here, I remember the explosive growth of the headphone jack iPhone card reader).

Beyond that we really need a privacy solution (likely ZK, plus a regulated compliance framework) for general banking I believe. Credit Card companies will likely move on chain in the background too, but the average person won’t know tap to pay with phones and cards will still be common place. And they will mainly be doing it to reduce their fees, and settlement times as well, they will likely still charge the same take rate until they are forced to lower it from competition from people making payments directly. Got to keep the reward train rolling somehow.

Opportunities for investment I am looking for 1) incentive programs for payments ( I doubt every merchant will create their own from scratch) 2) useable directory of businesses that take stablecoins, (Incentives here for being listed/accepting?) 3) compliance enabled privacy. I think Base / Coinbase dominate in the short term but then as fragmentation issues get cleaned up L2s in general dominate these payments because of the SDKs and developers behind ETH. ETH price will do well with increased usage but look to see major increases in price for ETH for monetary premium in 10 years if the US does nothing to address debts. Until then we need usage and real payments. The user experience seems like it’s ready, now it’s about making people want to accept and to pay on-chain, and clean up the bad image that crypto is all a scam.

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I knew about zero knowledge proofs and fully-homomorphic encryption already, but indistinguishability obfuscation is an insane new cryptography primitive I’d never heard of before.

Basically, iO lets you encrypt a program in such a way that someone can run it, but can never figure out the program’s internals no matter how hard they try to analyze/decompile the program.

More on iO, according to Vitalik:

While it’s still very far from maturity, as of 2020 we have theoretically valid protocols for it based on standard security assumptions, and work is recently starting on implementations. Indistinguishability obfuscation lets you create an “encrypted program” that performs an arbitrary computation, in such a way that all internal details of the program are hidden. As a simple example, you can put a private key into an obfuscated program which only lets you use it to sign prime numbers, and distribute this program to other people. They can use the program to sign any prime number, but cannot take the key out. But it’s far more powerful than that: together with hashes, it can be used to implement any other cryptographic primitive, and more.

My understanding is that with FHE and iO combined, theoretically someone could create a program that operates on encrypted data, where the program is itself encrypted. And both the program and the data remain encrypted during the entire operation. So the program and data are both protected from the computer that is running it and storing it.

Further reading on Wikipedia.

Math is crazy!

Edit: And if I understand it properly, it’s gonna be insane for DRM!

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum!

u/FrenktheTank

$2497.87

u/TimbukNine

0.03688

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Think before you act,

Onchain you are always tracked,

Government got hacked.

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I thought SOL was the ETH killer. Shouldn’t Kraken be building on Solana?

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Shout out to u/epic_trader for pushing back on the misinformation and false narratives on r/cc.

And a reminder for anyone with an interest in this space to take a look over there and in /ethereum periodically to provide some insights and sanity to discussions if you have any to spare.

There’s a lot of nonsense spread by Bitcoin maxis; /buttcoin moderators; and alt-L1 bagholders, and if you don’t want them controlling the narrative on Ethereum then you can be the change you want to see.

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u/OurNumber4:

Chinese researchers break RSA encryption with a quantum computer:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3562701/chinese-researchers-break-rsa-encryption-with-a-quantum-computer.html

And here’s why is not a problem:

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2612/difficulty-of-breaking-rsa-for-a-given-key-size

Credit: r/cc (sometimes there is decent info in the comments)

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u/haurog:

To give a bit of context.

They used D-Waves quantum annealer which normally are not called quantum computers as they use a different principle. Generally these quantum annealers can only solve a very narrow set of optimization problems. When people talk about cracking cryptography they always refer to proper quantum computers for which for example Shor’s algorithm has been developed. And to the best of my knowledge no one has a quantum computer to run Shor’s algorithm even for the smallest of RSA key lengths.

The Chinese group found a way to use such a quantum annealer optimization to help to factorize a 50 bit RSA integer. Nowadays RSA key length should be at least 2048 bits long and normally should be 4096 bits long. To the best of my knowledge, the longest RSA key that has been cracked a few years ago was 829 bits long. Classical computer are still far ahead.

As far as I see the paper itself has been published in a very niche journal which not really solidifies the credibility of their approach as the review process in many of these journals is severely lacking. Even more so than in established journals.

As far as I see the results are viewed negatively. See here for example for a more in depth discussion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2024/10/16/department-of-anti-hype-no-china-hasnt-broken-military-encryption-with-quantum-computers/

Do not get me wrong. Quantum computers are an important thing to keep in mind and follow. This result published by this group is just not very meaningful but it might be a small step in the direction we expect the quantum computing space to go. Not today, not tomorrow, but in a few years. Overall, the progress is slower than I expected it a few years ago, but we are definitely in the direction of quantum computers becoming a problem for encryption in our lifetime.

Source: I think a few years ago the majority of large quantum computing labs ran an qubit stabilization algorithm I helped develop in the company I was working at. Not sure how many actually used it, but most of them bought it. I left the company many years ago now, but still meet former colleagues and we chat about the development in this space.

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Do you guys think that there would be value in some sort of FUD busting Ethereum platform a bit like what EthHub used to be in 2018 - 2020 which we could use to combat things like the misinformation and link to in response to all of the blatant lies which gets spread on places like r/ethereum and Twitter?

I’m still unemployed after finishing my masters and I love learning more about Ethereum and helping to bust all of the FUD in other subreddits but I don’t know anything about making websites and then also finding a way to integrate the easy answers and information into places where it is needed like r/ethereum and Twitter. Maybe this could be a good project to spin out of EVMavericks. Anyway, I’d happily create content for such a place, a bit like more permanent posts like many dooters here make from time to time. A bit of an Ethereum FUD fighting handbook. I actually just did a grant ecosystem outline for EthStaker and I can tell you that there’s plenty of grant money up for grabs for legitimate projects.

So what do you guys think? Is such a thing needed? Does it already exist? And if it is needed and doesn’t already exist, could we spin something up out of this community?

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u/18boro:

I’m sorta following the discussions around the proposal on a minimum cost for blobs. Since this is currently not production ready, this will be implemented in pectra 2 at the earliest right?

Also, thoughts on this? It makes sense to me, but my technical understanding is very superficial. We really can’t afford blobs to enter a potentially high fee market, that will erode their purpose as a low fee environment on ethereum. That means we need to continue increasing blobs capacity, but with no minimum cost the L2s will continue to live free on ethereum.

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u/pa7x1:

One way to think about it. The current min blob fee is 1 Wei, this figure is as arbitrary as any other. It just happens to be the minimal denomination of ETH in the protocol. So it was a lazy choice, or maybe better put, a lack of explicit choice that happened to set the minimal blob price there. If the minimal denomination of ETH would have been higher, that same lazy choice would have resulted in a different minimal base fee.

A more sensible choice is to place it somewhere where blobs are still very cheap when used under capacity, so that the network incentivizes adoption. But when the network observes actual demand blob price discovery can happen in a reasonably short time frame. The EIP makes an attempt to do exactly this. And to be honest, the precise figure you set it at does not matter that much up to a few orders of magnitude up or down, because the exponential update of the blob fee can act relatively quickly.

So I’m in favor of the change. There is perhaps smarter things that can be done with the fee markets of blob and gas. There are some interesting proposals for using AMMs, PIDs, etc… I think those deserve to be explored too, but they are more complex and need to be very well understood economically. This EIP is just a very quick and risk-free fix to an obvious problem with the current blob pricing.

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Believe it or not, the blobs upgrade might be one of the bigger reasons why ETH isn’t doing much better price wise. I’m not sure if traders generally consider this a factor, though I would imagine they do given that ETH performed much better relative to BTC (as it had historically) between The Merge and the last upgrade.

Blobs have given the apparent impression that Ethereum is empty and with no activity. The L2 scaling roadmap allows for absolutely explosive activity on L2s, but it makes L1 seem deserted when that L2 activity isn’t saturating L1.

Is this bad? No, it’s fantastic, it is just a consequence of the upgrade and activity not exploding just yet, but this is an illusion. If you take a look at L2Beat in mid 2023 and today, the amount of new L2s is absolutely ridiculous. It seems like there’s more new L2s than new apps and it is insanely easy to underestimate the potential effects of this.

While everyone is looking at useless ratios like ETH/BTC or ETH/SOL, plenty of new projects are appearing to develop their own L2s. Ethereum is no longer just an ‘app chain’ it is a chain of chains. Pretty much what Polkadot or Cosmos set out to be, but in a more ‘open’ way so to speak. I don’t understand in full depth the implementation of app chains in these two other projects, but in Ethereum I know projects can have plenty of different configurations regarding where data is stored, where execution happens, etc etc. The appearance of macro-protocols like Eigenlayer is a clear telling that there’s money to be made in scaling Ethereum, and this is where I presume most of the investor liquidity coming to fund projects on Ethereum is going. I’d be worried when this stops, but not right now.

In some way, what has been built on Ethereum is the ability to have external anchored applications, chains or other products of this kind which benefit from inheriting some level of security from the base layer blockchain.

So who’s using this? Users I guess? Right now there may not be enough activity to justify the price increasing, as Ethereum being saturated in some way equates to ‘cash flows’. Right now, given that the future of Ethereum’s L2 and base layer explosive activity is ‘on pause’ as the upgrade just kicked in earlier this year, it is hard for investors estimate the value of those cash flows.

For BTC, the expectation that Bitcoin (the blockchain) will make any changes to itself in order to accomodate new featuresets is pretty much non-existent. On Ethereum, the fact that the base layer can be upgraded and changed allows for new concepts to emerge, for current concepts to be improved, etc. So Ethereum is inherently dependent on the combination of upgrades and activity improving its future cash flows (fees from on-chain activity). Right now, this is lackluster or inconsistent, so once this activity starts kicking in, which might depend or not on price, the consistency of those cash flows will be more visible.

Basically, It’s hard to justify investing large amounts of capital in a peer-to-peer network native currency when there’s not enough certainty about its future cash flows. Before the upgrade such a comparatively meaningless amount of activity would saturate the chain that future cash flows were ‘easier to expect’.

I think there’s several reasons why BTC is outperforming ETH this year:

1. Historically this is the pattern in bullish periods (BTC outperforms, then it doesn’t)
2. The BTC ETFs started trading earlier in the year, when the war in the middle east wasn’t at its absolute height of explosiveness, when the economy had a better outlook because the high interest rates hadn’t affected the US job market, the profitability of the carry trade etc, etc. There’s many macroeconomic reasons we can point out, but back in early 2024, things looked WAY better than now even when plenty of banks had collapsed the year prior due to high interest rates. They don’t look that bad now, but the outlook was very bleak during the summer.
3. The ETH ETFs were a complete uncertainty, now they’re a reality, but they started trading in quite literally the weakest moment in the market of this year.
4. Network activity on Ethereum has apparently subsided significantly (not really, but this is what it would seem like to the untrained eye, this is related to what I explained in the post)
5. BTC is simply more popular not only due to its brand name, that too, but very importantly because it is a very static, unchanging asset with very little medium-term uncertainty, akin to gold. Which is something investors like. ETH is more uncertain.
6. BTC seems to have no competition, ETH seems to have competition, even if it really doesn’t.

You’d really have to be really deep into the rabbit hole to understand the value of ETH and the Ethereum blockchain beyond the surface-level perspective an investor trading many many assets in a traditional sense would have. Many traders trade based on cash flows and certainty of cash flows, and Ethereum carries some uncertainty with it and is having a ‘weak’ year in terms of cash flows.

I won’t get into why SOL is outperforming ETH in any meaningful level of detail, but in short, from my perspective:

• the hype around memecoins (expectation of cash flows drives liquidity seeking returns in large numbers)
• the fact that it’s a smaller marketcap asset
• the price is lower and you can buy ‘a whole unit of it’
• there’s apparent activity on it
• it’s boosted by entities that want to pump the shit out of it to seek exit liquidity
• it has a lot of marketing due to the previous point
• it has provided extraordinary returns this year, so there’s expectation that this will keep on happening
• most of the supply is held by entities that don’t sell it (large stakers and node operators which additionally receive most of the inflation)
• etc etc

If anyone reads this wall of text pls correct me if you find any flaws in my reasoning. I hope it helps some have some perspective as to why I believe ETH’s performance this year has been lackluster comparatively to other assets.

Edit: small tweaks, typo fixes and corrected some term precision (I try not to use ETH and Ethereum interchangeably, as ETH is the asset and Ethereum is the network)

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Layer 2 Update - growthepie

Sorry I haven’t been as active lately IRL sometimes gets in the way but I’m back with a longer L2 update to try and cover everything I have missed.

• Layer 2s are growing so fast they have normalized All Time Highs
  
• Layer 2s have more value locked in ETH than Stablecoins
  
• Layer 2 Stablecoins have grown the equivalent of a small country’s GDP this year:
  
• Base Fees spiked to 20 cents largely due to PRIME
  
• Base Throughput continues to be raised weekly
  
• Layer 2 DeFi Transaction Count is on the rise
  
• Metis Active Addresses reach All Time High
  
• Optimism Transaction count on the rise
  
• Arbitrum seeing Gas Fee spikes for NFT usage
  
• Taiko Transaction Count makes a strong recovery putting them back in 2nd place
  
• Base multi-chain activity is trending downwards while others are increasing
  
• You can now compare onchain Economics on our Economics page
  
• Scroll hits a new all-time high on Transaction counts and Throughput (airdrop season)
  
• Layer 2 token transfers (the simplest of transactions) approaching a new all time high
  
• Weekly Active Addresses continue to remain strong
  
• Blobs have burned over 1,000 ETH - with Base having the highest ratio of blob costs for the year
  
• New report by Coinbase “Guide to Crypto Markets: Q4 2024” featuring Ethereum and Layer 2s favorably
  
• Mantle and Scroll TVL are both on the rise and battling to beat each other
  
• We continue to track more Layer 2s, adding Derive and Oderly with more to come
  
• Reminder if you need to find an address use our labels page search feature (we are adding Ethereum L1 soon too)
  
• Base on track to double the Throughput of the whole layer 2 ecosystem in less than a year
  
• We had some great Gitcoin rounds thanks to all that donated - small donations make a big difference
  
• growthepie is now active in onchain governance - currently for ZKsync, Arbitrum and Optimisum (more on the way) please consider delegating to us
  
• We have improved our zoom feature
  
• Layer 2 TVL measured in ETH is up only
  
• Blobs have seen spikes in the past but not so much in the past 90 days with us approaching the target is this going to change?
  
• Ethereum doesn’t have problems - Ethereum has improvements waiting to be implemented… Layer 2s are part of the solution
  
• Reminder to compare Layer 2s use our single chain pages and use the compare feature
  
• Over half of the Layer 2s we cover are “General Purpose” and they account for 97.9% of weekly active addresses
  
• Vitalik highlights Optimism in working on chain neutral Crosschain interfaces
  
• Layer 2s have used ~280 GB of blobs this year- Low L2 fees are less than a year old the space is young

Hit me up with any Layer 2 questions or observations and I will do my best to get back to you!

Side note we also released new Octant Funding Tracker metrics so be sure to check them out and get involved in the latest round (we are not participating as we missed out on getting selected but we are tracking all the amazing projects that got through)

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gm!

Scroll snapshot was on Saturday and I think the airdrop happens tomorrow. For the last two weeks we have been searching for a community delegate and u/defewit is willing to represent the us in the Scroll ecosystem, thank you for that! I think it’s been possible to set up a delegate profile since a few days, have you done that alreaady? If so, would you share it here, so we can link it tomorrow?

Also if there is a second delegate that would be beautiful. I think it’s always easier and better if there are two people that know each other (at least a little bit) to discuss things in private first, then post either on the governance forum or ask for feedback here. So any second member willing to do this, happy to share your profile tomorrow as well!

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Depending on how long you’ve been around, you may or may not know that I got popular in Ethereum by creating early video guides showing how to spin up validators on testnets.

Well, the ephemery testnet is very exciting to me, and on Thursday, 10/24, I’m planning to release a video guide showing how to create a validator on it.

Ephemery is a re-generating short-lived testnet designed for testing, especially for people who want to stake. The testnet resets every 28 days, and all of the unused Ether is recycled. (My current understanding is that if you’re running an active validator you can keep that 32 Ether in the new instance.)

EthStaker recently hosted a call with Ephemery developers and now I’m excited about sharing a video guide to help people get a validator running on it. it IS getting polished, but right now there’s still a fair barrier of experience to getting on it.

I think the most exciting thing for me is the opportunity to play slashing games without any fear of consequences. I hope you’ll join me :)

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EVMavericks Weekly Recap (October 14-20)

Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph

Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!

1. Octant’s Epoch 5 allocation window has started and runs till October 27th. If you have GLM staked, please support Doots and Aestus

2. Weekly Doots produces another episode of Doots - #83 - featuring James from Octant

3. Get to know our next EVMavericks - eleusys

4. Creators share: Ben Meadow’s first Gamma Print was displayed in Bali. Cyber Sea’s Deus Ex Machina was exhibited in museum in Amsterdam!

5. Luuk starts a discussion about biggest 2025 Ethereum related events in USA or nearby. So far we have:

   ETH Denver, from Feb 27 - Mar 2 (with Buidl Week Feb 23-26)

   Permissionless Probably October 2025

   Consensus (may 14- 16 2025) Toronto CANADA

6. Degen chat this week: animal pictures from Luuk’s trip, mentions of Vitalik and how he deals with memecoins, some charts & TA, new discord like site - townsxyz (yielddady created a server for EVMavericks), EFP and poaps, memes, food pictures and discussions, some memecoin alpha too & more!

7. Farmers are a little bit over the place but main focus has been on scroll.

8. Our memecoins warriors keep going. This is where we have the most money making alpha right now. Some of the top calls of the week

9. More bullish chatter from people in the #daily-discussion. Some TA & long form posts. Shoutout to Erowind for bringing top quality content there!

10. Also if anyone knows Spanish and wants to speak on our behalf and represent our community with NacionBankless then please ping 696!

Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here are a few guides!

• EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.

• Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord that’s open to public and there’s a decent amount of activity there!

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It is fascinating to me how many people, here and elsewhere, still haven’t realized that price and value are two separate concepts, only extremely loosely bound by the collective (un)intelligence of the market.

On the one hand, this means that poor price performance does not, and should not, imply anything about the fundamental value of something. Many r/ethwhinance posters make that mistake: they see Eth the asset performing badly compared to other (cherry-picked) assets on certain (cherry-picked) timelines, and feel the need to build a (counterfactual) narrative about how Ethereum the platform must therefore be falling behind on most fundamental metrics.

On the other hand, it means that even outstanding fundamental value does not guarantee anything about price performance on any particular timeline. Many bull posters here, myself included, have fallen into this trap: assuming that Ethereum’s stellar fundamentals mean we will see good price performance in the near/medium-term future. This is equally a logical misstep; the most innately valuable asset in the world can be sold for precisely $0 if nobody understands why it should be valued.

Arguments will be made about how the “markets are efficient” and that price and value should be tightly coupled, but I will emphatically suggest that at least in the realm of crypto, the markets and their participants have been and remain to this day, in overwhelming majority, catastrophically ignorant. This will change in time, but I’m increasingly realizing that this time will be measured in decades, not in months or years.

If you can avoid the trap of assuming a timely or intelligent linkage between price and value in either direction, you will save yourself needless hand-wringing, avoid getting your hopes up prematurely, and perhaps (if you are still in a position to be patient and stay informed) realize the opportunity this massive informational asymmetry still presents, years and years after we first started noticing it.

Probably the most fundamental assumption of investing (as opposed to gambling) is the proposition that eventually, over some arbitrarily long timeframe, markets do finally realize what’s up, and price does synchronize with value. And when that happens, those of us who didn’t give up on Ethereum because the ignorant markets were ignoring Ether, and yet who also didn’t let all the bull posts convince us to take unwise risks and were therefore able to stay in the game long-term - when that happens, we will be very, very happy.

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GG22 is live and the donation window is open for 2 weeks. Over $1.4M in matching funds so make sure your Passport.xyz score is updated. Enjoy the perpetual vibes in the 24/7 Let’s GROW Live twitter space and Gitcoin is hosting spaces as well.

Gitcoin Open Source Software Rounds

• Dev Tooling
• Web3 Infrastructure
• dApps and Apps
• Hackathon Alumni

Community Rounds

• Land Regenerators: Ma Earth Grants Round 2
• ENS Ecosystem
• BioFi Pathfinders
• Growing the Public Gardens
• Allo Builders Advancement
• Regen Citizens Genesis
• Youth in Need

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2619.12

u/hanniabu

0.03861

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Until next price hike,

Community stays dreamlike,

All around hitchhike.

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What happened, did the ETF get approved?

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u/benido2030:

Some thoughts about the unichain announcement. Now if that means fees go down, that’s obviously good. If that means that more value goes to L2s that probably also good, even if it fragments stuff in the beginning. In the end, that’s one more step towards onchain price discovery.

What I think is interesting is what this means for Max Resnicks thesis. Uniswap is like 40% of defi (and the other 40% being AAVE, 20% long tail) and if that moves to an L2, the whole “L1 is for defi” argument is kind of obsolete. I don’t think this is just a L1 fee decision, this is more control of the product (e.g. block times) and value capture. “Defi” just moved off L1. If I understand things correctly, AAVE v4 is also building towards that, they are just not building their own chain, but bridges between all L2 markets to create one bug liquidity pool.

There’s 2 more things we need, abstracting chains away for the user and fix fragmentation of liquidity. And then this whole discussion is hopefully over.

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u/hereimalive:

If Unichain is an Ethereum L2 why is it so bad that can tank the price of it?

You guys are making me afraid.

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I’m real tired of hearing that ETH is fucked because free blobs are temporarily affecting the burn, as though the burn is the only thing that drives the value of ETH.

Do any other cryptos even have a burn mechanism? Lmao. Guess everyone is fucked.

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u/cryptOwOcurrency started a great discussion yesterday around Bitcoin security budget with the question: When will it break? Let’s try to do some napkin maths:

Bitcoin paid $27m to miners yesterday. 97% of this was issuance. The marketcap secured by this is around $1.2T. On a relative basis that is 27/1.2= $22m of security per day for every Trillion USD Mcap.

In less than four years that will be $11m of security per day for every Trillion USD Mcap. $6m in 8 years.

At $6m per day that’s around $2.2b of economic security per year per Trillion. Industrial miners are generally looking to ROI in less than a year on their hardware investment, so let’s assume the cost of the hardware deployed to earn this $2.2b is around $2.2b. This 1 year ROI is also close to what is observed on the network today using the numbers estimated by Justin Drake in this tweet ($17.5 per TH/s): https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1763632918994260481

This gives an attacker a price of around $2.2b in hardware spent per Trillion USD in Bitcoin marketcap to achieve 51% of network power in 8 years time. Not taking into consideration the large economies of scale advantage an attacker would get. Coinglass currently shows a 24h BTC Puts options volume of around $1b at a current mcap of $1.2T so getting a short position that could capitalize on the attack seems very doable.

Even if Bitcoin’s price 10x’s within the next 8 years ($12T mcap) that would put the total price of attack at $26b. Around 80 individuals on the forbes list currently has this amount on their own. For nation states this is still peanuts. And could most likely be made profitable by any group amassing this amount of capital. At this mcap MicroStrategy’s holdings alone would be worth around 6x this amount.

Bitcoin in it’s current state will not be secure in 8 years. Markets are forward looking, I believe we’ll see serious infighting in 4 years.

The iceberg is straight ahead and the captain has left the ship.

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Let’s assume that ETH continues to crab indefinitely, while other crypto, bitcoin, stocks, and real estate keep climbing, and inflation means that everything not going up is losing value.

How many months/years/decades would you keep holding? Would you still be holding In December 2026 if the price is $2600? Would you still be holding in May 2029 if the price is $2400? What if it’s 2031 and ETH is ranked #4 or #5 on marketcap with Solana or Tron or Sui or Cardano (lol) being higher?

Staking has enough APY to keep me satisfied for now, and I still think there’s gonna be a bull eventually, but it’s been years since a proper bull run and it’s making me sad. Everything else in my (extremely ETH heavy) portfolio is outperforming. The price is low enough that I should be DCAing, since I’ve said before that this is what I do sub $2500, but for this month, I’ll just consider not selling my monthly staking proceeds as my “DCA”.

I do think election week and January are going to be very telling on crypto and Ethereum’s medium term price action, and I am going to have to reassess my long term plan after that. But I suspect I’m gonna be doing this holding thing for another couple of years.

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It would pretty bizarre for ETH to be in this range into 2030. It will either break up or down by then and considering the competition doesn’t stack up in a variety of ways I’m still betting on it breaking up. In TA terms we’ve really only been crabbing since March of this year. I know when we look at last cycles PA it’s like, “why haven’t we broken our ATH yet…” but it’s just ETHs beta being higher relative to BTC. We’re catching the downside volatility right now but later in this cycle I suspect it we’ll catch that beta with positive price action and vastly outperform by this time next year.

Last cycle ETH put in roughly 6,000% gains from cycle bottom to top. 1/10th of that price performance gets ETH to ~6k, 1/5th gets it to ~12k. I think even with diminishing returns things look bright for us. 1/5th isn’t even the limit, 1/3rd is even possible imo which would take ETH to ~20k.

Expecting 5 figure ETH is realistic this cycle.

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Im so fatigued of crypto stuff, that the last “farming” i did was to diversify my eth into different lrst.
Now that im only waiting for swell and diva/nectar im feeling glad its over so to speak.
I missed the OP #5 airdrop and will miss scroll and linea etc, just because i couldnt get myself to keep getting farmed.

After years in crypto and defi, there is currently built 2 things im using often as a non whale LP´er and ponzi yield farmer.

1.Sportsbetting has become competitive with the best bookies, and betting without middlemen from your wallet is amazing, shoutout to all teams working on this, in my experience SXbet ,Thales/Overtimemarkets.xyz, Azuro/bookmaker.xyz has everything i need as a casual bettor.

2.Gnosispay Visa card is next level awesome imo. Getting 4% cashback on my spending, and be able to just put € into my gnosissafe adress and spend is amazing.

(3,4) honorable *biased *mentions should be my heavy bags of SNX and WINR, SNX because they have started a work on renewing to hopefully be relevant in defi again after getting left behind in innovation and token price at all time low.
WINR because they seemingly try to take gambling completely onchain+ give users option to single side LP in the pools that are +EV for the house

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My wife, who is doing an online course on crypto (yes!), just asked my help in understanding the “Value-blindness” part of the following part of her studying material:

The 2014 Ethereum whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin, the founder, identified key limitations in Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities:

• Lack of Turing-completeness: Bitcoin’s scripting language is not Turing-complete, it can’t perform all possible computational operations.
  
• Value-blindness: Bitcoin scripts cannot natively assess the value of transactions.
  
• Lack of state: Bitcoin lacks a mechanism to track and store the state of complex applications.
  
• Blockchain-blindness: Bitcoin scripts have limited ability to interact with or understand blockchain data beyond simple transaction details.

Ethereum was designed to overcome these limitations and to address the need for creating new blockchains for different functionalities.

I told her I know some super-friendly people who’ll def help!

u/AL_FruFru

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Italy is increasing capital gains tax on crypto in particular from 26% to 42%.

https://www.theblock.co/post/321407/italy-capital-gains-tax-bitcoin

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https://x.com/0xShual/status/1846607303136423938

rip a lot of money

revoke all radiant contract addresses as a safety measure, ASAP

0xF4B1486DD74D07706052A33d31d7c0AAFD0659E1 arb
0xd50Cf00b6e600Dd036Ba8eF475677d816d6c4281 bsc
0x30798cFe2CCa822321ceed7e6085e633aAbC492F base

Radiant capital exploited a couple hours ago. Revoke your approvals on Arbitrum/Base/BSC if you are still in time.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2400.01

u/TimbukNine

0.03972

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SEC turns cold,

Another story gets told,

The issuer won’t fold.

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You know what the ETH graph reminds me of? Definitely not a crab.

A Crab Market would be a stable unmoving price, progressing the graph in a flat line to the left. Maybe with equal up/down slow waves. But the current action is much more annoying.

Have you noticed snails exploring their surroundings using their eye tentacles? They slowly extend them, touch something, and then rapidly retract them back.

That’s what ETH does. Every time it slowly probes a few USD above its price, it rapidly withdraws back in fear. As if hit by electricity. Slow candle up, instant withdrawal back down. Especially funny in the one-minute chart, but it can be seen in all time-frames.

So I officially propose that we are in a Snail Market. 🐌

I might need sleep.

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For those who missed it or could not understand anything in the shaky videos that were available until just a few days ago, Vitaliks famous talk from Token2049 is now on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpOSqLjYb0o&list=PLvSllGeSAEeeFUUcy7kKk0VIs4YNDhspY

He is asking himself if we are still early and what he is excited about in the next 10 years. He thinks we are not early anymore, but we are still early for crypto being useful. He ties this into his experiences paying with crypto for daily necessities and why it failed originally. Hint, it was the fees and the overall user experience (UX). In the last years to UX improved massively due to EIP1559 and the the switch to POS. The recent dencun upgrade introduced blobs which dropped the fees to close to zero. Before all these improvements, the underlying technology was limiting what could be built on top and how successful it could become. These limitations are not the bottleneck anymore, but we still need a reason to actually use the applications built on crypto. He argues that the resilience and robustness of the underlying blockchain is what matters the most, but the UX on top needs to be good as well. Preserving the underlying advantages of the Ethereum network and being able to improve the UX for mainstream users should be the key goal. He sees a few places where there will be the most improvements in the next years.

• Wallet tradeoffs and how multisigs, guardians and the combination with zkproofs have or will improve that space. This allows web2 UX with web3 robustness.

• Social media where you actually own the account (warpcast).

• Payment wallets which are getting close to venmo experience.

• Privacy pools were you can proof to not be the bad guy without revealing who you are. This exists in an early version at least.

• Zk proofs in social media will make it possible to proof that you fullfill certain criterias without revealing who you are.

• L1 improvements: Single slot finality, verkle trees (statelessness), handling MEV on the protocol level, ZK snarkifying the L1 and light clients

These improvements will allow Ethereum to thread the needle and become mainstream user friendly while staying true to the underlying cypherpunk values which built the network.

But enough beating around the bush. The only reason this talk has become famous is Vitaliks singing session in the middle of it. Here they are together with the original songs. Especially the second song took my some time to find a source.

Laputa ending song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdpEnkcT7Io Vitaliks interpretation: https://youtu.be/JpOSqLjYb0o?feature=shared&t=678

Kryp Tina song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrSP0V-KLg Vitaliks rendition: https://youtu.be/JpOSqLjYb0o?feature=shared&t=829

I am happy that Vitalik did not become a singer, but I am even more happy he is as quirky as he is.

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I’m confident the Scroll airdrop snapshot was already taken.

Why, you ask? Simple: for the past few months, I’ve been toying with a small dapp idea. A collaborative story where everyone writes together and mints NFTs by writing. I’m enthralled by the concept, and I figure I could lure some of you fine gentlemen into my lair by alluding, not so subtly, that any sort of activity on Scroll could help qualify for a big fat airdrop.

But then, something terrible happened. You see, I started using AI. Claude Sonnet 3.5 specifically.

As someone who’s not a coder, the whole process of building anything with code usually goes like:

• have a good time writing actual code for a couple hours

• then hit a roadblock on something arcane related to programming

• then be forced into the most tedious websearch adventure for a solution to this problem

And those roadblocks happen dozens of times.

None of that anymore. Claude is always there to give an answer, always available to suggest something. We talk it out and eventually figure out the thing. The good lad never gets tired of my walls of text.

This is the terrible part. I started Having Fun.

And when you enjoy the process, you start spending more time refining everything to your liking.

It went on and on and what do you know, now we’re in October. Rumors abound TGE is soon. Scroll 1 year anniversary is coming up in mid October. Hints everywhere the eye can see.

Instead of coming to you all with a cheeky smile and an airdrop nudge nudge wink wink, I am here hat in hand, on my knees, humbly begging for scraps of your attention.

Please, kind sir, may you take a look at my dapp?

It’s a good dapp. I promise. Maybe.

I wrote some about what it actually is here: Blog Link

Frontend Link

In all seriousness, I find it incredible just how far you can get with AI. I didn’t write any code here. All it takes is a bit of persistence. We’re moving fast into a world where everyone can make their own toys exactly to their liking by chatting up a virtual assistant. If you have ideas you want to see happen and time to spend, there’s very little to stop you.

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Financially for node operators it is a great product. Lido tries everything to get people on board. If you are on their early adoption whitelist they even allow for a lower bond for the first share, increasing the rewards even further. As far as I see pretty much anyone running a node anywhere is on the list (20k-30k) addresses. They also are present pretty much everywhere to advertise the start of the CSM. As far as I see they limit the shares to 12 for each node operator, which means even under the most optimistic assumptions the amount of ETH the solo node operators will handle will be at most be in the single digit percentage of the whole validators Lido has. It is a good development, but will not change the validator distribution setup within Lido to any meaningful degree.

On a more personal opinion I try to stay as far away as possible from Lido as they have a massive war chest and a lot of influential people on their pay roll. They can undercut the competition for very long to make sure none other staking solution survives. Their initial plan of cross-subsidicing the CSM with revenue from their more centralized staking business was a pretty direct attack on the current solo staker landscape. Not sure of they changed this though. Their history of gaslighting the solo staker community and claiming them to be ‘irrational actors’ massively soured my opinion. They way they plan to centralize the Ethereum staking under their umbrella and even calling it decentralized, does not help in making me more sympathetic towards them. In the long run I think they are a massive problem for the Ethereum network and I really hope we can keep them from taking over the staking layer.

The sad reality is that there is very little decentralized competition. Rocketpool still is the only properly decentralized solution. They are much smaller, they are in the middle of a year long change in how much bond their stakers need. In a few weeks we might see the first rocketpool minipool without the need to stake RPL. They just have the first one running on testnet (as of 3 hours ago). I have great hopes that this will be competitive in the long run, but as always with rocketpool it will take some time. An interesting project is Nodeset which is planned to launch soon will be interesting to watch, it is built atop of rocketpool and adds a very soft kyc layer for node operators. Bonds are lower than with rocketpool and no RPL is needed. Another project called Diva which was all the rage last summer (2023) still does not have a fully functioning prototype. Their testnet stopped accepting new node operators after they found some bugs. We will see what will come out of it in months to come. Puffer might be interesting as well, but to be honest I have no idea about the details.

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October is my crypto anniversary month, I thought I would mark it by sharing my ETH journey story with fellow ethfinanciers. At least it is something to read in the low comment weekend.

In October 2013, I bought my first Bitcoin, on the advice of my millennial son, who explained blockchain basics and suggested that BTC’s value–about $170 at the time–could go up. After a mini- DCA spree for a year, I got busy with work and stopped paying attention until October 2016 when I read somewhere about ethereum and smart contracts. I thought that was pretty cool. I went on to get my first ETH in 2016, first ledger in 2017, and as prices rose, I cashed out my original fiat investment.

Unfortunately in 2017-2018 a slower work period gave me too much free time so I started trading a bunch with the remaining house money. For a while I got into Vechain and LINK, though fortunately I kept a majority of my portfolio in ETH and BTC. After painful IRS interactions and a desire for simplicity, I decided to abandon all frills and reduced down to just BTC and ETH by 2021.

I went on to launch my first RP minipool (through Allnodes) in late 2021 but sold my RPL and further simplified to vanilla staking last year. I periodically toy with the idea of home staking (and even got an early Proteus to do so), but my frequent travels and lack of confidence have kept me from it so far.

I am in the minority of ethfinanciers who have already achieved retirement the old-fashioned way. My stage in life gives me a different perspective on holding and exiting, and my ETH goal is not to get life-changing money, but rather to be a supporter of this important new technology, to keep my brain active by following its evolution, to use staking income to upgrade my retirement life, and to safely pass a valuable asset on to my grandkids as a hedge against the uncertain world they are growing into.

I discovered r/ethfinance in late 2021 and have truly enjoyed learning from all of you. I am pretty sure I have read and upvoted >95% of the dailies. I mostly lurk but I am proud of my EVM lion and few doots (though no one IRL knows about any of that!). I greatly appreciate the effective moderation and community spirit of volunteerism. For me, this sub also is where I got introduced to the linguistics of social media. So I thank all of you for what you have contributed to my education! I was really hoping to go to Hodlercon this year but I have a hard schedule conflict, so maybe 2026…

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My normie-friendly TikTok influencer account is getting lots of traction recently, as my subscribers count breached 2200 (I am catering to 8 millions French Canadians, so it’s a decent following in my niche market). It’s an education, not monetized, no-shilling-allowed account.

I have learned a few lessons since January, when I launched it.

First : simplicity is king. If your narrative can’t be explained in a single, easy to understand sentence, it won’t catch up. This is why I am skeptical of things like “triple points asset”, “programmable money” and “digital bond”.

What is sticking is : “Ethereum is a decentralized AppStore that anybody can use or deploy on, and you need to pay in ether to use it.”

Maybe it’s not technicaly accurate, but this is what people understand.

Second : most people see crypto as a way to get rich, not as a technology. This explains the bottoming ratio : in their eyes, Ethereum is the second cryptocurrency. People like to bet on champions, not on runner-ups. The Flippening is a nice meme, and I would love to see it happen, but realisticaly, it won’t ever happen.

Third : a lot of people are still interested in this space. It will take time, probably a few years, but we will have another mania phase.

That being said, I am trying very hard to teach people about the non-speculative parts of crypto, namely decentralized social media and digital artworks. They don’t care, but I am still trying.

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u/eth2353:

There’s been some discussion about the hardware and network requirements for Ethereum validators. Obviously maximum decentralization is the goal, but at the same time Ethereum can’t scale if we want to let everyone with a Raspberry Pi and a 1Mbps internet connection (exaggerating here) participate. I believe the discussion was initially triggered by someone who missed their block proposal, likely due to not having enough upload bandwidth.

The issue is, noone has defined where the line is - what are the minimum requirements that still allow you to fully participate in validation of the chain as well as proposing blocks, and what should they be into the future.

The current outcomes of this discussion:

• a survey in r/ethstaker among home stakers to get a better picture of what hardware and network current stakers have available to them.

• Toni from the EF put together some numbers on local block building and the effects that blobs have had on it.

• https://github.com/ethereum/execution-apis/pull/559 - a new API endpoint engine_getBlobsV1 that will help local block building since the proposer won’t necessarily have to publish the blobs too. Attesters to the block can simply get the blobs from their own EL client’s blob pool if the proposer doesn’t manage to publish them quickly enough.

All of this discussion is pretty relevant right now since there’s been talks of increasing the blob count in the upcoming Pectra fork(s). It’s important to note this would be in combination with EIP-7623 which greatly decreases the worst-case size of a block.

I personally feel that a slight increase (as suggested in the linked comment) would be okay provided the teams also manage to ship the new engine_getBlobsV1 API endpoint. Good news is, Reth and Besu already support it, Geth has a PR open and Nethermind has a PR merged and I believe it should not be hard for other EL clients to add.

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u/supephiz:

If this were just about building the robust and decentralized smart contract platform we’d be sailing, but the inclusion of a financial reward means that other projects want a piece of the pie. Other projects aren’t able to match Ethereum on technical grounds, so they chip away at our social infrastructure, planting seeds of doubt and conflict with the knowledge that a small percent of Ethereum participants will shed away looking for other projects that might be a “more lucrative investment”.

I think the best route here is for us to continue decentralizing by onboarding people who are looking for investments in smart contract platforms, I imagine that over time it’ll continue to look like “if you can’t beat them, join them” with Ethereum being the victor.

People who have been around a long time might realize that, while the attacks are changing in nature, they seem to be less of an existential threat and more of an annoyance every day.

If I were to characterize these threats, I’d say that threat actors used to attack head on, but now they feel like they’re working for clout inside the ecosystem and likely even working within Ethereum while getting funded by adversarial enterprise.

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Looking for feedback

Since my app Boasty didn’t see any usage or traction, I decided to stop building features and leave it as is. It remains fully functional and you can still schedule posts on Ethereum. It was a great learning experience.

I thought about the “Pay 1 USDC to do X” hook and came up with a game concept: A prize pool (smart contract) is seeded every day with say 10 or 100 USDC, you play a browser 2D shooter game, and you can submit your high score for a chance to win the whole thing. High scores would be hidden until reveal, then whoever has the highest score gets the payout automatically via smart contract.

So i built etherglide.net, a PoC of a futuristic 2D space shooter with cyberpunk styling and lore. Game features:

• Use WASD to move Zephyr to avoid obstacles and collect powerups
• Left mouse click to shoot projectiles and destroy enemy crafts for extra points
• Collect ETH to recharge your ammo
• Collect a speed powerup for a 10 second speed boost
• The game increases difficulty by increasing the maximum speed and number of obstacles
• Connect your wallet and sign a message to submit a high score to the leaderboard
• Game music and cool pew pew pew sounds!

I am looking for feedback for the concept and game itself. Currently working on the smart contract and more game features (boss fights and gravity mechanics), but wanted to test the waters before sinking too much time into it. Please try it and let me know what you think!

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####Why not Full Reserve Banking?

I was thinking about what would happen if countries switched over to full reserve banking. What would the effects be?

Currently, there isn’t a single country that does full-reserve banking. It would greatly contract the economy, and most global companies, VC funding, and innovation would move elsewhere where they can get cheaper loans. It’s self-sacrificing idea.

Historically, every country has been on a fractional reserve system since banks and loans existed. Banks can lend out a portion of their customer’s deposits to use towards other people’s loans. If too many loans defaulted or there were a bank run, the bank would close. Centralized reserves were then invented to handle mass bank runs during times of panic. And overall, strong central banks, when combined with the power to expand money supply, have been extremely successful in preventing mass bank runs. Keep in mind that strong central banks did not exist in the US before the 1940s.

While depressions were extremely common and occurred about every 30 years post-feudalism and before central banks could expand money supply, there hasn’t been one since central banks gained that power after the 1930s.

The Silver Standard, Gold Standard, Brent-Wood system, and Fiat systems all used fractional reserve banking. Of those systems, only fiat system could handle nation-wide full reserve banking. The other systems would all fail if the economy grew or contracted because it would not be possible to expand and contract money supply under both a full reserve system and a commodity standard.

What would happen to banks under full reserve?

• Banks would stop loaning because they can no longer use customer deposits like checkings/savings/CDs for loans
• Banks would would charge small fees for checkings/savings accounts.
• Many bank locations would close down, and banks would go online
• The central bank reserve would no longer be needed and can safely close. Or maybe it’s still needed to bail out the separate loan industry …

Where would loans go?

• Loans would simply move from banks to peer-to-peer lending industries like Prosper and Funding Circle
• Loan intererest rates would shoot up another 5-10%, and mortgages would become even less affordable
• Homes would be less of an investment and more of an ongoing cost (like they are in Japan)
• There would be a lot more buying expensive things without loans
• Overall, the economy would shrink maybe 50-90%, and domestic investments in general would plummet
• Many companies would move abroad to other countries where they can get cheap loans
• VC and innovation would move abroad to other countries.
• Many loans would move abroad to other countries that are still under partial-reserve systems
• Any country that goes full reserve would fall behind other countries.

What happens during a financial crisis when people aren’t able to pay back loans?

• Banks would be perfectly fine since they’re no longer involved
• The loan industry would collapse or fall back to their insurers. Many lenders would default.
• The government may decide to create a central reserve to insure loan agencies
• The government may bail out loan agencies and insurers that are too big to fail. Or maybe they won’t and just be ok with letting a section of the economy collapse.
• Anyone who doesn’t lend or get loans would be mostly fine and unaffected.
• The financial crisis would be smaller than under partial-reserve

Overall, switching from partial-reserve to full-reserve just migrates failures from banks to the loan industry and causes interest rates to shoot up because customer deposits can’t be used. It doesn’t prevent systemic failures, but it does make them much smaller. The overall economy will also be much smaller.

Consider China’s Evergrande and housing collapse, which is a lot closer to a full-reserve collapse since many Chinese homeowners buy houses in cash. China just let those companies fail and those homeowners lose their deposits. The economy contracted greatly. Some municipals were to close to unrest and insurrection, but because China has a strong government, local governments were able to suppress protests. Overall, the damage was limited.

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The next section of my Rabbit Hole Explorer’s Guide is all about crypto etiquette.

Your Crypto is Private

If you go to stock trading forums you’ll frequently find people posting pictures of their brokerage account positions showing they either made or lost incredible amounts of money. Reputable crypto forums prohibit that for your safety. The blockchain is public unencrypted information. When you post precise positions and trade times you reveal your address to anyone looking. If I know your address I know not only your current net worth but everything you do in the future. You probably aren’t intending to forfeit your financial privacy forever; it makes you a target. It enables more credible spear-phishing and tells the attacker whether you have enough funds to be worth their time. Generally speaking, just keep your crypto dealings private or at least relatively anonymous, especially online.

This is true among friends and family for different reasons. There will come a point in your learning where you discover something exciting in this rabbit hole, the whole thing clicks for you, and you become enthusiastic and want to share this with everyone around you. People around you then think you’ve joined a cult. It’s more than a stereotype; I’ve seen it many times. Even outside of crypto it’s usually recommended to avoid mixing business and pleasure. If someone listens to you and makes money they are rarely going to be grateful to you personally. If they listen and lose money you can easily damage relationships. So don’t go shilling your favorite memecoin at your next holiday party with friends and family. As an investment of your energy it just doesn’t provide a very good risk adjusted return.

In general, while I encourage everyone to talk about what blockchains can do and the benefits they bring, don’t talk your bags. It’s one thing to have an conversation about money being a social construct or the outrageous quicks of the banking system. It’s quite another to go around making grandiose claims you don’t have the means to back up in the moment while telling everyone to buy whatever coin/token you’re currently obsessed with. Don’t be that annoying guy. If you absolutely can’t resist or are obligated to answer because someone directly asks you I recommend you approach the topic like this guy. Your first objective is to dispel misconceptions and ask confounding questions that lead to thought experiments that the person might actually benefit from. Be Socratic. In my experience, the moment a listener perceives even an inkling of self-interest in the topic you will just be another scammer to them. Don’t talk your bags, your crypto is private.

Real Help Will Be Public

Given how overwhelmed you might feel at times when exploring something new it’s natural that you want to reach out and ask for help. If you do this in web3 on Discord, Twitter, or Reddit in most places the people who will respond to you, especially in DMs, are scammers. Your transaction failed trying to claim funds on whatever.finance? The scammers just see this guy. They can just smell the fresh blood. It’s literally their job hunt people like you. Legit people never DM you first. They’d rather answer your question in public so the response is indexed for the next people who search.

If a DM is necessary they will tell you to DM them. Scammers can easily impersonate legit people on social media. If you’re on Discord, they can DM you despite not even being on the server you’re asking for help from and therefore they are out of reach of the moderators of that protocol. They can use the same image and public alias as the legit person you are talking to. If you’re on Twitter they can use a subtly different name but have the same profile picture and pay $10 to have a blue checkmark next to their name. You’ll sometimes get two or three different accounts messaging you telling you similar things to make the answer look more credible. The differences are easy to miss, you are frustrated even before they reach you and are willing to try something new to fix the problem, and they’ll be readily available and eager to “help” you.

Nothing good will come from their help. They’ll try to send you to their help server to file a ticket. They’ll try to get you to install some custom wallet into your browser. They’ll send you to a website that asks for your private key. They’ll tell you there’s some manual workaround they will do for you if you just send your ERC-20 to their treasury address. These are all obvious red flags but before you even get there the first red flag is you are using DMs at all. Whenever someone reaches out to you first with any type of directions, it’s a red flag. Real help will be public.

Be Careful Who You Trust

Learning in this ecosystem can be frustrating at times. Everywhere you go everyone seems to know more than you about everything from macro economics, to how to read a chart and tell the future, an entire sailors dictionary of jargon from tradfi, to technical specifications of networks that you need a computer science degree to understand. It can all feel frustratingly out of reach but I’ll let you in on a secret: most people worth listening to are capable of explaining things in simple enough terms that you can understand it. If you are on their platform and they have all the space and time they need to explain something well yet they aren’t making the effort to explain it so you can understand it it could be their goal isn’t to be understood by you but rather to sound credible and confident so that you buy whatever they are selling. If you stumble into a conversation between two names that have a lot of followers and they are talking way above your head, you are not yet at a place where it’s worth reading whatever that is. If you’re outmatched to the degree that you aren’t prepared to sus out bullshit you shouldn’t be considering buying whatever anyone there is selling.

Generally speaking, your favorite crypto influencer is using you as exit liquidity. If you aren’t paying for a product, you are the product. If you can’t figure out how they are monetizing your attention, you can still be certain they are. They are monetizing your attention in every way they can. They are getting paid for ad space. They are executing trades before you can so you’re always buying at a higher price and selling at a lower price than them if you follow their moves. They need engagement numbers to raise more money from VCs and they need to sustain their token price to keep attention on their project. For all of the above, they need to retain your attention and they will use every cognitive bias at their disposal to do so. People often mistake confidence for aptitude. The loudest voices are those with the strongest incentives not those with the truth. But I will tell you this lesson from cycles past: the most boisterous sounding voices in the crowd have a storied history of imploding a year after you’ll first discover them. Be careful who you trust.

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A common framework I like to use to think about my investments [rightly, or wrongly, please feel free to critque].

Cash: cash is cash. The dollar is continuously being weakened, but it’s important to have cash as a buffer/layer of safety or to buy large dips. [3-5% Yield]

Stocks: The stock market has been absolutely ripping over the last decade. Important to DCA into stocks on a regular basis, but it’s never going to give you insane upside unless you pick a winner like Nvidia or Tesla and average in over a long period. [8-12% Yield]

Real Estate: Very manual, illiquid, challenging, costly, & time consuming investment [I have 9 rental properties]. Very difficult to scale and each house project takes at least 3 months min. [5-10% Yield annually]

ETH: Extremely volatile, nascent technology that has the potential to be the internet of value. Has loads of headwinds [regulatory, challengers, technological, financial] against it. Also has some of the smartest developers in the world working on it, and is at the bleeding edge of software.

Asking this to you all seriously, but if you have your bases covered with Cash, Retirement or Stocks-401K/Roth/IRA, Brokerage etc.., Real Estate, where else do you have the same amount of upside potential as ETH beyond an individual Tech stock like whatever the next Nvidia will be?

I don’t see anywhere else I can allocate my dollars that has the upside potential of ETH? Am I missing something?

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Relevant to lots of crypto (and tech) websites and generally for safety around them, given that this political event will probably force a change on a lot of domain names. In short, the .io TLD will disappear.

Relevant excerpt from this article explaining it:

Since 1968, the UK and U.S have operated a major military base on the Chagos Islands (officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory) , but the neighboring nation of Mauritius has always disputed British sovereignty over them. The Mauritian government has long argued that the British illegally retained control when Mauritius gained independence. It has taken over 50 years, but that dispute has finally been resolved. In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

However, note that some exceptions to the rules have been made for other commercially successful TLDs (source):

With the United Kingdom giving up sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius[17] (but maintaining the military base on Diego Garcia via an initial 99 year lease), it is possible under IANA rules, the .io domain will eventually have to be phased out within the following several years,[18][19] although historically, some exceptions been granted, as was the case for .su.

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u/alexiskef

✨E✨t✨h✨e✨r✨e✨u✨m✨

u/FrenktheTank

$2380.07

u/ridgerunners

0.03893

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Walking in the dark,

Absence of knowledge was stark,

Computing proof benchmark.

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A little market lingo for noobs, when a pump falls back a little bit after sustained upward movement, it’s called a “correction”

When it falls back completely then dumps even further from where it started, it’s called “ethereum”

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Just wanted to share this cool dashboard showing the onchain activities of Optimism citizens/badge holders (of which there are quite a few in here):

https://dune.com/lamora/optimism-citizens

It shows a comparison with a control group of normal Optimism users, with metrics such as participation in other DAOs, usage of OP stack chains and web3 social media.

The biggest difference seems to be in adoption of Farcaster, with 59% of badgeholders using it compared to about 12% of regular users. It also really shows how much more popular Farcaster is than Lens, which is only used by about 11.4% of badgeholders (and less than 8% of regular users).

I’d be interested to see crossover metrics with those used for the EVMaverick Resume (https://dune.com/mtitus6/EVMavericks-Resume) such as the number of stakers, wallet age etc, and vis versa, showing EVM participation in other DAOs etc.

In fact, I wonder how many OP Citizens also hold an EVMav? It feels pretty stupid that I’ve been in crypto so long and never bothered to learn to use Dune, maybe that will be my project for the weekend…

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Ethereum mainnet gas at 23 Gwei right now.

Not in a bullrun, not in a mania phase. During a truly boring period.

While L2s scale us 23x. While active addresses are at an ATH of 10 million a week.

The market clearly doesn’t see it yet but here’s what will happen within a few months:

After years of underperformance, ether sees a sudden correction. Narratives immediately follow price action. Enthusiasm returns. Euphoria follows. Influencers on all sides start to pretend they all saw it coming. It was obvious. Activity skyrockets. L1 burn brings deflation back. L2 activity keeps growing, faster and faster. Millions of new users join the L2s. Blob usage reach max value. More users. Price discovery begins. Blobs start contributing to the burn. New L2s appear faster than you can follow. More institutional L2s. Blackrock L2. Stock market on L2. More users. Soon, L2 activity is higher than we can accommodate.

Ether price explodes.

Getting into eth action is 100x easier than last bullrun. People buy using paypal. People buy using debit card on Metamask. Coinbase sends their flux of new users to Base. More users. Ethereum starts to become a staple of reliability brands use in commercials. Institutions start to notice Ethereum. Mentioning Ethereum in business plans becomes as popular as AI currently is. Institutions want exposure, this time they can. More users. The ETF gains crazy popularity. Money inflows look like they’ll keep coming forever. Negative regulatory efforts don’t matter anymore, you can’t stop the infinity machine.

Ethereum made it. We made it.

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Max Resnick is back with some more bad takes.

For those that missed it, in yesterday’s Execution Layer meeting (discussion goes for about 30min) there was a discussion on whether to increase blobs from 4 to 5 and increase the blob target from 3 to 4 in Pectra A. The reason for this is to maintain adoption of blobs by L2s to help tide us over until we have PeerDAS.

Before continuing it’s important to note that the blobs we have now were always meant to be a stopgap until PeerDAS and network upgrades, which makes it more efficient to scale. We were never meant to scale blobs under current conditions.