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1105 Dooters - Last Updated November 15, 2024
Ethereum
$3069.78
0.03478
Looking for the stage,
The big news on the front page,
Consensus wastage.
Why does Ethereum, the more useful of the two chains not simply eat Bitcoin?
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! đ
Today, weâre 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.
I pretty much swore Iâd never comment on solana, but here i am. I see the gains just like you, but Iâm 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 itâll be too late to get it.
Solana is trying to scale at Layer 1. Iâm 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 itâs 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 donât have to be weak and shy in the face of detractors, theyâre 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.
I want to make this as a top comment and not a reply to /u/fecalreceptacleâs comment because I think it would highlight how easy it is to fake a metric like âSolana reached a record 123 million active addresses in October, up over 42% from Septemberâ with better visibility:
Take random rollup, in this case Iâll pick arbitrum, not even the cheapest (which should be base iirc)
Take random tx from the latest txs in arbiscan.io, i picked 0x9ad82848711ba22084fd038473a43f3c37b30375ad191dee9542db8cb180ba51
Check its fee: 0.0000017983 ETH, about 0.005195 USD
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 doesnât matter that much, Solana is a centralised network for all intents and purposes anyway. Then set a target, we want 100 million active addresses.
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 donât 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 ârecord highâ activity on a network costs 1M USD.
Too expensive? okay use a cheaper network, letâs 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 ârecord highâ activity on a network costs <200k USD
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
In the wild world of crypto, some stories just keep getting crazier. Hereâs one that involves whales, FTX, and DeFi (đ, âď¸, đ°)âand one infamous character: Humpy the Whale.
Back in 2022, âHumpy,â a major holder of Balancer (BAL) tokens, made headlines by leveraging Balancerâs âve-tokenomicsâ 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 Balancerâs governance. This led to a tenuous âtruceâ where Humpy remained a major veBAL holder, securing a continuous stream of rewardsâbut agreed not to act against Balancerâs interests openly. Read more about it here.
Fast forward to 2024, and Humpyâs name resurfacedâthis time in Compound, where he attempted a similar governance play. More on this recent maneuver.
But hereâs where it gets even more interesting.
A recent Twitter thread on FTX creditor clawbacks claims that âHumpyâ wasnât 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, âshitcoinsâ). FTXâs 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 âMOB guy.â Later, an FTX employee estimated total losses nearing $1 billion linked to these manipulations.
By the way, humpy circumvented KYC by using emails like âmotherofallburgers@protonmail.com,â âturkiyepizzakebab@int.pl,â âdonerkebabveryspicy@int.pl,â and âsanpedropizza@int.pl,â 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 anecdoteâHumpyâs 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
The âFUDâ is back, but letâs 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 canât 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 itâs 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.
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, itâs a massive event. Itâs big and thereâs a lot going on, so itâs 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 peopleâs questions you like. Thereâs also some way to mint a âcardâ NFT thing associated with each talk, but you have to scan this QR code that only appears in person, not on the stream. I didnât 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 didnât 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, theyâll 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 otherâs 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. Thereâs the classic frog bucket hat from last yearâs 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, thatâs just 75 minutes of mindless tapping to earn enough to get that textbook. Iâm 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 itâs 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:
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!
It seems that Wall Street anticipates the authorisation and launch of staked ETH ETFs. An ETH ETF operator buys a staking company:
Just wondering if anyone has bought the dgen1 EthOS phone? If so Iâd love to use a referral code from an EthFinancier. First one to replyâŚ
Iâve been doing a bit of research and really like the sound of the OS: https://ethosmobile.readme.io/
Itâs based on GraphineOS, which is regarded as one of (if not âtheâ) most private and secure operating systems available for mobiles. Up until now youâve only been able to install it on Google Pixel phones, so Iâve never tried it before and if Iâm honest, Iâm 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 Iâll give Helios a try for the variety, though Iâve never actually even heard of it before - it looks like itâs exclusively a light client:
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/building-helios-ethereum-light-client/
Thereâs 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 dystopiaâŚ
Anyway, I really sound like Iâm shilling, but I havenât even bought the device yet (hence asking for a code) and certainly have no association with the project. Iâm also not at all infallible, so if Iâve misunderstood something about it then please do let me know - ideally before I order one if itâs fatally flawed somehow!
Lodestar v1.23.0 released today
Hello Lodestar users! Weâre happy to announce our v1.23 release from Devcon! This release is Mekong-ready and youâll be able to use the flag ânetwork mekong to connect to the newest Pectra public testnet.
For users that experienced CPU illegal instruction issues, weâve 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
Friendly reminder we have a daily thread on /r/ethereum.
Why am I telling you this? 2 reasons:
Weâre modding /r/ethereum actively and would like to bring our good faith over there to help bring the roots back.
We REALLY need help with reporting trolls.
If all goes well, thereâs 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. Iâm looking forward to seeing you in the daily over there if you can swing by.
thanks all and big hugs
Ethereum
$2918.54
0.03820
The ticker is ETH
Popularisers,
Eigen layer advisors,
Turn to despisers.
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 âabsurdâ. I didnât 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 âSupply shock incomingâ, â4 year cycle is playing outâ or âAlt season is comingâ. 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 ârevolt.â This doesnât 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
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 âsmart contractâ 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 itâs hard to fully grasp its potential, and that challenge is what excites me most, pushing the boundaries of whatâs 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, Iâve 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 itâs 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. Letâs hope those little now worth nothing âmoon bagsâ also get alive again during a full out bull market.
Letâs 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 Iâve been getting back into a passion that is filming. It started with just picking up the camera a few weeks back, but itâs 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.
Subscribe to our paragraph to get these interviews & more sooner
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 weâre in the same stage right now, just this time itâs L2 numbers and activity thatâs taking off and weâre standing in front of the next big explosion.
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.
Devcon & Friends Update 1 (Previous)
Edge City Lanna Week 1
I checked in to Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai last Sunday, so somehow itâs been nearly a whole week already! Time flies. I thought this would be a good opportunity to provide an update given that thereâs 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 itâs 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. Itâs easy to paint over it with broad strokes to say âitâs kind of Ethereum-adjacent tech and culture stuffâ, but I have been quite impressed with the extent to which it is really interdisciplinary.
Probably half of the people Iâve met have their focus outside of blockchain/web3 (often theyâre exploring if we can provide tools to help with their own endeavors), and itâs 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 wellâhi!), 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 personâs 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 âwhat do you do?â 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. Thereâs an ongoing multi-day âexistential hope worldbuildingâ series, and today thereâs 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 âofficialâ 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. Iâd 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 skipânot 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.
Hereâs a sampler of the sort of events Iâve been going to:
Conclusion
Itâs 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 thereâs a lot of âoh we should collaborate on somethingâ⌠with an implied âwhen weâre done here and get back to the real worldâ, which often doesnât 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 donât 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 sequencingâas 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 Dayâas it pertains to interoperability between L1 and L2 chains. I donât 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. Thereâs a lot going on and a lot of ways to think about it.
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 âwow that was coolâ. Finance related, or not.
Iâll start:
Web3 gaming was one sector I was looking forward to having a breakout year. It still may, but Iâm now thinking it will be over a longer time horizon. It just seems like the space is maturing at a snailâs pace. Seeing a AAA studio, even if itâs Ubisoft (oh, how the mighty have fallen), launch their first âNFT gameâ and receive so much backlash is not all that surprisingâŚ
But what stands out to me is that Web3 gaming is still being wholesale branded and reported on as âNFT gamesâ. 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⌠Weâll 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 weâre only in the early discovery phase of this spaceâs 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 donât 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 âNFT gameâ 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 theyâre exploring fresh concepts while keep the playersâ best interests at heart (fun, immersion, etc.). Iâm 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 havenât done much research on this topic⌠Just throwing out some loose observations and ramblings.
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 doesnât include L2 revenue, but L2 revenue translates only indirectly to L1 revenue anyways. And yes, Iâm aware that itâs 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 donât believe it should affect real yield (which could be accessed then, after the dumping).
Qâs:
Is this data accurate?
Is it possible that Solana could pass up ETH in monthly fee revenue, then fee revenue in general?
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)?
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 (ETHâs credible neutrality is up there, too).
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.
I think with Solana they use DPOS so youâre 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 donât I know how much yield the delegate keeps?
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)
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
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: Donât blame me, I voted for Kodos!
Kodosâs 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.
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 âzksync Ignite Programâ. 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 (âElastic Chainâ).
So itâs about mining/ attracting liquidity by handing out ZK incentives in various defi protocols. The proposal is not reinventing the wheel here, itâs 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 âautonomous token allocation processesâ. 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 thereâs 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!
Special guest Paul Brody joins us from EY.
Ethereum
2501 USD
0.0361
Blockchain underneath,
The best asset to bequeath,
The ticker is ETH.
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, thatâs 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 canât 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 âphilosophy of subtractionâ, but does it really walk the walk? I challenge them to dream smaller.
Just a quick recap on how fee markets work in Ethereum (both for blockspace and for blobspace):
Thereâs a base fee, which represents the current âstateâ 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.
Thereâs also a target amount of resource usage: for normal transactions, thatâs the target gas (15M units of gas), which is half of the max gas per block (30M), and for blobs itâs 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.
Hereâs 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.
Itâs actually kind of genius; this means that Ethereumâs fees automatically adjust to demand.
If thereâs 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 thereâs 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; thereâs never a lack of transactions ready to be submitted when basefees lower.
However, I said âin theoryâ 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), thereâs simply not enough blobs being submitted for the average block to meet its blob target (3 blobs), and if youâll recall, this means that the blob fee would continue to go down in the next block, except that itâs 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 itâs 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. Thatâs where weâre 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 âcompression ratiosâ 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.
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.
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. Iâll 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 sharksâŚthere 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 hasnât 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 thatâs coming in a few days is going to further reduce the deposit pool as new minipools will lose the RPL requirement.
Basically, itâs been a nice little Saturday. Ignoring the FUD, watching Vitamin B go ham on shitposters, launching âpools. 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 Iâm lovinâ the 90âs aesthetic. Might go for some ice cream later, who knows?
Ticker is ETH.
Top Achievements of EVMavericks in 2023
đTop accomplishments of EVMavericks in the year of 2023đ:
The Withdrowls NFT drop on Arbitrum was created by Naenaebaby and etheraider to celebrate the Shapella upgrade and being able to âWithdrawâ our ETH from the staking contract. All the funds raised â 9.74e â went to public goods.
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.
Started the Weekly Dots Roundup podcast highlighting the brilliant community of EVMavericks & Ethfinance. We produced more than 40 episodes with a variety of guests.
Creators, Doomfuzz & TheBenMeadows, collaborated with FakeRareDecal for szn1 and created 68 editions of EVMavericks Decal.
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
Chad Fund was birthed. The DAO managed portfolio managed by degens.
Have grown DAOâs 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 âBrightâ 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, itâs 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 âbest of EVMavericksâ from 2024!
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 Poolâs 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 Iâll answer them here.
Are you ready to join us, u/cryptomoon2020! The waterâs warm. Get in the pool!
Finally Iâm at the end of my Rabbit Hole Explorerâs Guide and boy has that been a journey.
Recommended First Steps
Up until now Iâve covered a frighteningly lengthy sequence of things not to do and ways you can lose everything. To conclude letâs focus on what should you do to get started? Whatâs 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:
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 donât expect too much from it besides background context on the project, what they are doing and how itâs novel, and the bull case. They usually arenât 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.
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 Iâll hear about new projects from partnership announcements.
Discussion. This is where people get into the most trouble. Donât 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 youâre 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, Iâll also actively talk with community managers and members of projects but Iâm looking for much deeper information or collaboration opportunities. Youâre 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 youâll be. The more impatient you are to get rich quick, the more money will slip through your fingers and the more youâre 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. Thereâs a lot of editorial discretion here and you can be sure this is incomplete and will be out of date.
Defi
Money markets such as Aave and Compound
Dexs such as Uniswap and Curve
Liquidity incentives/farming such as bribes, bonds, marketing, points
Leverage such as Gearbox, Defisaver, or GMX
Options such as Lyra, Hegic
Real world asset protocols such as Centrifuge and Maker
Regen finance such as Gitcoin Grants, Greenpill, and Klima
Digital Identity
Ethereum Name Service (ENS), basically a human readable address
Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS). Let anyone prove that you or someone else claimed something.
Sybil resistance systems such as WorldCoin, BrightID, Proof of Humanity
Achievements such as Rabbit Hole or Layer3
NFTs
Communities such as Bored Apes or EVMavericks
RWAs such as Get Protocol
Corporate NFTs such as Nike and Starbucks
Gaming
Auto battlers such as Axie Infinity and Illuvium Arena
Strategy games such as InfluenceETH and Illuvium Zero
Memecoins
Depin
Restaking such as EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and Karak.
Oracles such as Chainlink, UMA, and EOracle
Keepers such as Keeper Network and Gelato
Data availability such as EigenDA and Celestia
Compute sharing systems such as Golem and Spheron
AI in various forms such as Ritual, BitTensor s19, etc
Enterprise
Logistics systems such as Nightfall
Proof of Authority chains
Foundational Tech
Rollup technology such as Blobs, Validiums, and Fraud Proofs
Scaling Technology such as Verkle Trees and Proposer Builder Separation
Privacy Technology such as TEE, FHE, MPC
Review Prior Scams
After every hack youâll 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 youâll even find useful summaries like this one that infodump many of these in one place. Eventually youâll 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 youâll know more than 99% of Crypto Twitter on a good variety of topics, youâll be able to take measured and deliberate risks, and youâll fall into communities that share your values. Youâll 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. Youâll definitely find sources of joy and points of light in an otherwise dark world. Whatever happens, you will be changed in ways you arenât expecting. I hope youâll come away a better, happier, and wealthier person.
You can find the whole thing at this self-serving link.
After the Merge I started looking into staking, but the only internet options at the time werenât great and I donât have a tech background / had never used CLI etc. I saw several posts talking about how anyone can do it but really didnât 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.
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 Iâm more involved on a day-to-day basis, my conference activities have become a bit more varied and I find that if youâre already in the loop, conference talks tend to just repeat info thatâs available in more detail elsewhere.
But I still like to report on the talks that I find interesting, and can always find topics Iâm 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 Iâd always like to see more of it.
So today I thought Iâd 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 Iâm getting a taste of it here. So Iâll give a bit of an overview of what Iâm 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. Thereâs 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 itâs generally web3/Ethereum (+longevity/AI/network-state/health/etc) focused: we have tracks on stablecoins and governance this week, and next week Iâll 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 donât 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 thereâs 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. Iâm 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 itâs 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.
Thatâs a lot of time in Thailand! And plenty to do. I think Iâm going to be very glad to get back to a cool climate after a long, tropical month.
So Iâll give my thoughts on Edge City once itâs done, and will report on Staking Summit if itâs 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!
The Bridge acquisition by Stripe has really got me thinking where this space, particularly for ETH is headed. Itâs 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 wonât 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 itâs ready, now itâs about making people want to accept and to pay on-chain, and clean up the bad image that crypto is all a scam.
I knew about zero knowledge proofs and fully-homomorphic encryption already, but indistinguishability obfuscation is an insane new cryptography primitive Iâd 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 programâs internals no matter how hard they try to analyze/decompile the program.
More on iO, according to Vitalik:
While itâs 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 âencrypted programâ 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 itâs 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, itâs gonna be insane for DRM!
Ethereum!
$2497.87
0.03688
Think before you act,
Onchain you are always tracked,
Government got hacked.
I thought SOL was the ETH killer. Shouldnât Kraken be building on Solana?
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.
Thereâs a lot of nonsense spread by Bitcoin maxis; /buttcoin moderators; and alt-L1 bagholders, and if you donât want them controlling the narrative on Ethereum then you can be the change you want to see.
Chinese researchers break RSA encryption with a quantum computer:
And hereâs 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)
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 Shorâs algorithm has been developed. And to the best of my knowledge no one has a quantum computer to run Shorâs 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.
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?
Iâm 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 donât 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, Iâd 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 thereâs 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 doesnât already exist, could we spin something up out of this community?
Iâm 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 canât 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.
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 Iâm 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.
Believe it or not, the blobs upgrade might be one of the bigger reasons why ETH isnât doing much better price wise. Iâm 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 isnât saturating L1.
Is this bad? No, itâs 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 thereâs 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 âapp chainâ it is a chain of chains. Pretty much what Polkadot or Cosmos set out to be, but in a more âopenâ way so to speak. I donât 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 thereâs 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. Iâd 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 whoâs 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 âcash flowsâ. Right now, given that the future of Ethereumâs L2 and base layer explosive activity is âon pauseâ 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, Itâs hard to justify investing large amounts of capital in a peer-to-peer network native currency when thereâs 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 âeasier to expectâ.
I think thereâs several reasons why BTC is outperforming ETH this year:
Youâd 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 âweakâ year in terms of cash flows.
I wonât get into why SOL is outperforming ETH in any meaningful level of detail, but in short, from my perspective:
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 ETHâs 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)
Layer 2 Update - growthepie
Sorry I havenât been as active lately IRL sometimes gets in the way but Iâm back with a longer L2 update to try and cover everything I have missed.
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)
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 itâs 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 itâs 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!
Depending on how long youâve 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, Iâm 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 youâre running an active validator you can keep that 32 Ether in the new instance.)
EthStaker recently hosted a call with Ephemery developers and now Iâm excited about sharing a video guide to help people get a validator running on it. it IS getting polished, but right now thereâs 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 youâll join me :)
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (October 14-20)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!
Octantâs Epoch 5 allocation window has started and runs till October 27th. If you have GLM staked, please support Doots and Aestus
Weekly Doots produces another episode of Doots - #83 - featuring James from Octant
Creators share: Ben Meadowâs first Gamma Print was displayed in Bali. Cyber Seaâs Deus Ex Machina was exhibited in museum in Amsterdam!
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
Degen chat this week: animal pictures from Luukâs 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!
Farmers are a little bit over the place but main focus has been on scroll.
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
More bullish chatter from people in the #daily-discussion. Some TA & long form posts. Shoutout to Erowind for bringing top quality content there!
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 thatâs open to public and thereâs a decent amount of activity there!
It is fascinating to me how many people, here and elsewhere, still havenât 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 Ethereumâs 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 âmarkets are efficientâ 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 Iâm 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 whatâs up, and price does synchronize with value. And when that happens, those of us who didnât give up on Ethereum because the ignorant markets were ignoring Ether, and yet who also didnât 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.
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 Letâs GROW Live twitter space and Gitcoin is hosting spaces as well.
Gitcoin Open Source Software Rounds
Community Rounds
Ethereum
$2619.12
0.03861
Until next price hike,
Community stays dreamlike,
All around hitchhike.
Some thoughts about the unichain announcement. Now if that means fees go down, thatâs 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, thatâs 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 âL1 is for defiâ argument is kind of obsolete. I donât think this is just a L1 fee decision, this is more control of the product (e.g. block times) and value capture. âDefiâ 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.
Thereâs 2 more things we need, abstracting chains away for the user and fix fragmentation of liquidity. And then this whole discussion is hopefully over.
If Unichain is an Ethereum L2 why is it so bad that can tank the price of it?
You guys are making me afraid.
Iâm 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.
u/cryptOwOcurrency started a great discussion yesterday around Bitcoin security budget with the question: When will it break? Letâs 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 thatâs 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 letâs 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 Bitcoinâs price 10xâs 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 MicroStrategyâs holdings alone would be worth around 6x this amount.
Bitcoin in itâs current state will not be secure in 8 years. Markets are forward looking, I believe weâll see serious infighting in 4 years.
The iceberg is straight ahead and the captain has left the ship.
Letâs 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 itâs 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 thereâs gonna be a bull eventually, but itâs been years since a proper bull run and itâs making me sad. Everything else in my (extremely ETH heavy) portfolio is outperforming. The price is low enough that I should be DCAing, since Iâve said before that this is what I do sub $2500, but for this month, Iâll just consider not selling my monthly staking proceeds as my âDCAâ.
I do think election week and January are going to be very telling on crypto and Ethereumâs medium term price action, and I am going to have to reassess my long term plan after that. But I suspect Iâm gonna be doing this holding thing for another couple of years.
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 doesnât stack up in a variety of ways Iâm still betting on it breaking up. In TA terms weâve really only been crabbing since March of this year. I know when we look at last cycles PA itâs like, âwhy havenât we broken our ATH yetâŚâ but itâs just ETHs beta being higher relative to BTC. Weâre catching the downside volatility right now but later in this cycle I suspect it weâll 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 isnât even the limit, 1/3rd is even possible imo which would take ETH to ~20k.
Expecting 5 figure ETH is realistic this cycle.
Im so fatigued of crypto stuff, that the last âfarmingâ 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
My wife, who is doing an online course on crypto (yes!), just asked my help in understanding the âValue-blindnessâ part of the following part of her studying material:
The 2014 Ethereum whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin, the founder, identified key limitations in Bitcoinâs scripting capabilities:
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 whoâll def help!
u/AL_FruFru
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
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.
Ethereum
$2400.01
0.03972
SEC turns cold,
Another story gets told,
The issuer wonât fold.
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.
Thatâs 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. đ
I might need sleep.
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.
Iâm confident the Scroll airdrop snapshot was already taken.
Why, you ask? Simple: for the past few months, Iâve been toying with a small dapp idea. A collaborative story where everyone writes together and mints NFTs by writing. Iâm 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 whoâs 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 weâre 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?
Itâs a good dapp. I promise. Maybe.
I wrote some about what it actually is here: Blog Link
In all seriousness, I find it incredible just how far you can get with AI. I didnât write any code here. All it takes is a bit of persistence. Weâre 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, thereâs very little to stop you.
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 âirrational actorsâ 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.
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 BTCâs valueâabout $170 at the timeâcould 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 2026âŚ
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 itâs a decent following in my niche market). Itâs 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 canât be explained in a single, easy to understand sentence, it wonât catch up. This is why I am skeptical of things like âtriple points assetâ, âprogrammable moneyâ and âdigital bondâ.
What is sticking is : âEthereum is a decentralized AppStore that anybody can use or deploy on, and you need to pay in ether to use it.â
Maybe itâs 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 wonât 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 donât care, but I am still trying.
Thereâs been some discussion about the hardware and network requirements for Ethereum validators. Obviously maximum decentralization is the goal, but at the same time Ethereum canât 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 wonât necessarily have to publish the blobs too. Attesters to the block can simply get the blobs from their own EL clientâs blob pool if the proposer doesnât manage to publish them quickly enough.
All of this discussion is pretty relevant right now since thereâs been talks of increasing the blob count in the upcoming Pectra fork(s). Itâs 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.
If this were just about building the robust and decentralized smart contract platform weâd be sailing, but the inclusion of a financial reward means that other projects want a piece of the pie. Other projects arenât 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 âmore lucrative investmentâ.
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 itâll continue to look like âif you canât beat them, join themâ 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, Iâd say that threat actors used to attack head on, but now they feel like theyâre working for clout inside the ecosystem and likely even working within Ethereum while getting funded by adversarial enterprise.
Looking for feedback
Since my app Boasty didnât 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 âPay 1 USDC to do Xâ 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:
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!
####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 isnât 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. Itâs 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 customerâs deposits to use towards other peopleâs 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 hasnât 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?
Where would loans go?
What happens during a financial crisis when people arenât able to pay back loans?
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 canât be used. It doesnât prevent systemic failures, but it does make them much smaller. The overall economy will also be much smaller.
Consider Chinaâs 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.
The next section of my Rabbit Hole Explorerâs Guide is all about crypto etiquette.
Your Crypto is Private
If you go to stock trading forums youâll 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 arenât 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 youâve joined a cult. Itâs more than a stereotype; Iâve seen it many times. Even outside of crypto itâs 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 donât go shilling your favorite memecoin at your next holiday party with friends and family. As an investment of your energy it just doesnât 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, donât talk your bags. Itâs one thing to have an conversation about money being a social construct or the outrageous quicks of the banking system. Itâs quite another to go around making grandiose claims you donât have the means to back up in the moment while telling everyone to buy whatever coin/token youâre currently obsessed with. Donât be that annoying guy. If you absolutely canât 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. Donât talk your bags, your crypto is private.
Real Help Will Be Public
Given how overwhelmed you might feel at times when exploring something new itâs 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. Itâs literally their job hunt people like you. Legit people never DM you first. Theyâd 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 youâre on Discord, they can DM you despite not even being on the server youâre 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 youâre 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. Youâll 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 theyâll be readily available and eager to âhelpâ you.
Nothing good will come from their help. Theyâll try to send you to their help server to file a ticket. Theyâll try to get you to install some custom wallet into your browser. Theyâll send you to a website that asks for your private key. Theyâll tell you thereâs 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, itâs 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 Iâll 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 arenât making the effort to explain it so you can understand it it could be their goal isnât 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 itâs worth reading whatever that is. If youâre outmatched to the degree that you arenât prepared to sus out bullshit you shouldnât be considering buying whatever anyone there is selling.
Generally speaking, your favorite crypto influencer is using you as exit liquidity. If you arenât paying for a product, you are the product. If you canât 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 youâre 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 youâll first discover them. Be careful who you trust.
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 itâs 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 itâs 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 donât see anywhere else I can allocate my dollars that has the upside potential of ETH? Am I missing something?
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 âIOâ 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, .ioâand countless websitesâwill disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, itâs 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.
â¨Eâ¨tâ¨hâ¨eâ¨râ¨eâ¨uâ¨mâ¨
$2380.07
0.03893
Walking in the dark,
Absence of knowledge was stark,
Computing proof benchmark.
A little market lingo for noobs, when a pump falls back a little bit after sustained upward movement, itâs called a âcorrectionâ
When it falls back completely then dumps even further from where it started, itâs called âethereumâ
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).
Iâd 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 Iâve been in crypto so long and never bothered to learn to use Dune, maybe that will be my project for the weekendâŚ
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 doesnât see it yet but hereâs 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 theyâll keep coming forever. Negative regulatory efforts donât matter anymore, you canât stop the infinity machine.
Ethereum made it. We made it.
Max Resnick is back with some more bad takes.
For those that missed it, in yesterdayâs 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 itâs 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.
There were mentions that some are already struggling with bandwidth, but was brushed off as anecdotal. Thankfully Potuz spoke up for home stakers and said we should treat data from both sides the same since those that are having no issues is anecdotal too. So there was agreement to get more data on this first before deciding whether to include these changes or not. Ryan Berckmans also made a post on the research forum for this data.
Today Ben Edgington, who is a major contributor to getting Ethereum to where it is today, wrote in a Twitter thread that he was seeing he was having signs of issues too.
In comes Max Resnick quote tweeting Benâs post and the following conversation insued:
Max: Bandwidth capacity grows at 50% a year. Asking the entire global network to slow down while we are actively battling for market share with an extremely competent opponent because you live in a swamp with 12mb/s bandwidth is extremely selfish.
Ben: Where did I ask for the entire global network to slow down?
Max: You are literally saying your node can not keep up, so you want to propose fewer blobs in your blocks. Why donât you shut your node down and unstake? You are slowing down the network by doing this.
Ben: I dislike your dystopian future.
Max: We can no longer afford to eat the cost of these luxury beliefs. Solo staking in a place where you do not have appropriate bandwidth imposes an externality on the network. If Ethereum doesnât win, the world looks much more dystopian than a world where Ethereum sacrifices a few rural solo stakers in exchange for vastly increased performance.
end
Nixo put it perfectly with how it feels reading that:
That feeling when arrogant young blood opining on the future of Ethereum comes in hot and tells the one of the most OG cypherpunks I know, who literally wrote the book on Ethereum, to shut down his node and unstake [image of sad pepe looking out a rainy window]
And Max replies to nixoâs tweet with a gif saying to shut it down. What a disgrace.
To better understand how home stakers are doing bandwidth wise, please take this EthStaker survey (itâs POAP gated):
https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1839763102952501613
Calling all home stakers! Weâre looking to investigate if stakers would be concerned about increasing network bandwidth
Please help by filling out a quick survey: https://poap-feedback.deform.cc/Solo-Staker-Bandwidth-Survey/
You need one of the staking community POAPs to fill out the survey. Let me know if there are any we should add so you can fill this out.
Share on the everything app: https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1839763102952501613
𼧠This Week - In the Ethereum Pie - Layer 2 update:
(I have a version with links but they are all to X postsâŚ. Would that be allowed and more importantly would that be wanted?)
After a decade in the crypto space, I finally became a victim of a scam. Fortunately, it was only for about $20 worth of useless Hamster Kombat tokens, and I was already fullly prepared for it to be a scam.
This was entirely expected. At least I got front-row tickets to see this shitshow, and itâs been the most fun Iâve had from the utterly-boring Hamster Kombat game.
Around this August, the HamsterKomat team promoted a non-KYC, no-gas method for the token airdrop that used the Ebi.xyz DEX. All the other airdrop methods uses CEXs that werenât available in the US, so that was my only choice. I figured the airdrop would be tiny, and I couldnât care less about it, so I picked it because it the easiest method.
I already knew Ebi.xyz was an unknown DEX that was created around the time that Hamster Kombat launched, possibly by the same Hamster Kombat team. Pretty much nothing is known about the real members of either team.
And that wraps up what I know so far.
Some pontification⌠I feel like Iâve been able to predict all the major tech trends from the last 25 years, whether it was operating systems, search engines, cloud computing, weed stocks, EVs, crypto, or AI. Right now, for the first time in a long time, I just donât know.
AI, at least at the startup stage, is clearly in a bubble. I strongly believe in the transformative power of AI but itâs already had its 10x recently and random VC investments Iâm reviewing are raising $100M just for mentioning AI. Do you honestly expect NVDA to do another 10x from here? You can buy MSFT and just sit on it or something broad spectrum like VTI and probably make your 8% a year but thatâs not a play for risk-seeking capital like all these other bets have been. Goldâs been having a great run with nation states trying to de-dollarize and basically rotating US bond reserves into precious metal reserves but even if Iâm up like 40% there itâs just boring and I donât see a future in it outside of the current run. Maybe I need to look into emerging markets? Maybe there just is no 1000% tech investment to be found right now and I just need to stay informed, preserve capital, and wait? In the meantime Iâm just parked barbell style in liquidity farming and working the fiat mines but it increasingly feels like if Iâm not making 10% a year on my whole portfolio Iâll be falling behind to inflation let alone able to live off my assets.
I feel like I have enough most people would consider me wealthy but increasingly capital is the only thing that will make money in the world while the supply and demand of human labor will be increasingly out of balance as AI accelerates. Child care costs over $2k a month while the employees watch 8 kids each and make like $10-15/hr. Universities put students hundreds of thousands into student debt yet lecturers are working multiple jobs to get by. The medical industry and end of life care is going to systemically drain all the boomers wealth before it passes down but the caretakers of those facilities are overworked and couldnât afford a room at the facilities they work at. All of our services seem to cost astronomical amounts compared to pre-covid but the people doing the work arenât making that. So who is? Capital.
You can see whatâs happening to the 98% of people already left behind. Now add in AI displacing tens of millions of jobs over the next decade. As is the nature of automation, it will replace labor with profits to AI companies but a 10/1 ratio. I once led a team of AI engineers that was automating the jobs of 200 workers at $15 an hour per engineer per year. The software was considered a depreciating asset with a three year shelf life so we were considered to be making $18M in savings per engineer per year. That was 6 years ago; the technology is much more powerful now.
I feel like thereâs this metaphorical wave I need to catch and Iâm just behind the crest of it working hard to get on top of it so I can let the water do the work instead of me padding the whole way. The fear of being left behind keeps me motivated but itâs not a happy mindset. The way out of it is to combine let the fiat mines pay the bills while I find the next 5x tech innovation to ride up but again I feel stumped there for the first time in a long time.
Regarding eth-usd
Google data: You may have noticed Google removed the nice chart in search results. This data used to be powered by CoinMarketCap.
Earlier in the month, the data just stopped and was stuck.
Myself and other members of this community called attention to Google (and I tried getting in touch with CoinMarketCap, but, no surprise, no one responded). Last week, a Google search for âeth-usdâ started working again, but without a chart. Itâs actually returning data from Yahoo! Finance.
I also noticed that my Google Sheets function (=GOOGLEFINANCE("ETHUSD")
) was still stuck on the wrong price, so I clicked the âDisclaimerâ in the footer of Google Sheets around stock/currency prices, which led me to this familiar page: https://www.google.com/googlefinance/disclaimer/
HOWEVER, the provider of cryptocurrency data has changed from CoinMarketCap to Morningstar (I assume this Morningstar).
I canât find the price of regular old ETH (or BTC or anything else crypto-related thatâs not a fund) on their public site, but maybe itâs behind a login/paywall.
Anyway, the point is, Google must be aware shitâs not working, but they didnât really fix anything yet. I encourage you to click those little âHelpâ buttons/links in Sheets or in Search or in your Admin Console and complain! Squeaky wheel and all that!
Somethingâs brewing in Chinese markets. Iâm sure you guys remember the Chinese housing market was going through a bubble pop and property prices had come down significantly from their peak over there. With lots of property in horrendous conditions, lots of property being liquidated at low prices but nobody purchasing them, etc.
Recently the Peopleâs Bank of China announced several measures that in isolation might seem appropriate to stimulate the economy, but when combined all together generate a crazy amount of stimulus. This is with the intend of pushing economic growth up, increasing stock market prices and increasing property prices.
The measures are:
Interest rates paid to savings in banks were pushed down from 1.7% to 1.5% - The lowest interest rate in its history. This is intended to push banks to seek to lend more and the movement of savings into the market for investment.
The % of deposits that must be covered by liquid reserves in banks (only for the largest banks). It used to be 10% but itâs been reduced to 9.5%. Its lowest level since 2007. This is expected to come down even more in the future. This allows them to use this additional liquidity to provide more credit. Approximately an additional injection of about 140 billion USD equivalent of liquidity.
Cut of interest rates for business debt and mortgages, reduced from 3.35% to 3.15%. Incentivising more lending for families and businesses.
Additionally, they want to create a new monetary policy tool to refloat the stock market, a swap program for securities, insurance companies and funds to obtain liquidity through asset collateralization, essentially collateralized lending.
This essentially opens up 500 billion yan (~70 billion USD) of liquidity with possible expansions in the future.
Theyâre also intending to create a fund to âstabilize the stock marketâ. Essentially a centrally planned monetary policy plan to artificially push the stock market up and property.
Lastly, for property purchases, they want to reduce the barrier of entry for 2nd home purchases, which used to be limited for banks to lend about 75% of the value of the property, but now banks can lend about 85% of the value of the property. For smaller local government entities, banks will be allowed to lend 100% of the value of properties if those local government entities want to buy those âunpurchaseableâ properties. Up until now banks were allowed to lend 60% of the value of those properties to those local government entities.
The Peopleâs Bank of China also said that this âwonât be enoughâ and that they will have to resort to fiscal stimulus as well.
Since September 13th, the CSI 300 (capitalization-weighted stock market index designed to replicate the performance of the top 300 stocks traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange) has since risen in price about 27%.
Generally if youâre invested in this market, congratulations. For everyone else, this is generally very risky. Every time megastimulus plans like these are launched, enormous amounts of liquidity flow into perhaps not the most productive places in the economy, but instead often times those targeted sectors affected by the stimulus, regardless of the productivity of these markets or if they can even recover.
The fear and greed index of the CSI 300 and the ETF call volume have both risen to their highest level since 2015.
TL;DR: The Peopleâs Bank of China is applying a megastimulus to the economy to refloat the stock and property markets to a concerning extent.
Some articles in case anyone wants to do more reading:
Eigenlayer is a restaking protocol, which means it provides security/ trust for new protocols/ products that donât have the time/ money/ community to build it from scratch. People stake ETH to secure Ethereum and the same collateral can be reused (ârestakedâ) to secure new L1s, L2s, oracles etc.
Usually when you stake, you can be slashed when you misbehave. When you try to misbehave (e.g. double spend) on ETH mainnet this can (and will) be slashed and you will lose ETH as a consequence because this happens onchain and is easy to judge.
But there are things that the blockchain/ nodes canât detect or that arenât easy to judge. These decisions are âintersubjectiveâ. Slashing isnât possible. One famous example is a data availability layer where a node withholds information. This doesnât happen onchain, because the submission of the data happens offchain.
For these âintersubjectiveâ cases $EIGEN comes into play. If people believe that nodes misbehaved they challenge the nodes, fork $EIGEN and hope that others follow their arguments and make their $EIGEN fork the new central token within Eigenlayer. Eigenlayer obviously canât and shouldnât even try to fork ETH, so they created their own token to take this task.
tl;dr
ETH is used for objective misbehaviour
EIGEN is used of intersubjective misbehaviour
Also posted in r/ethstaker, but I donât think people will mind seeing it here too:
Iâd like to share an article Iâve written about what u/KuDeTa and I are doing with respect to block proposal timing games for the Aestus relay. Weâve been experimenting with timing games for a while and in the interest of transparency would like to share our motivation, proposer-configurable parameters, and a bit of data.
The full article is here: https://hackmd.io/@austonst-aestus/BJsvEoia6
Itâs a little long to copy directly onto Reddit, but I can provide and elaborate on the main points:
?headerDelay={ms}&headerCutoff={ms}
to the Aestus listing in their mev-boost relay list.If you need some background on timing games, I provide a few links at the start. Timing games arenât a good thing in general: theyâre zero-sum for proposers and basically negative-sum when you consider the impact on network health. You can draw reasonable comparisons to an iterated n-player prisonerâs dilemma, where once you know a handful of actors are always going to defect, itâs in your best interest to defect as well, if only to mitigate your losses.
But this isnât too different from mev-boost: if we canât solve the problem (without protocol changes) we can at least reduce the advantage sophisticated actors have over everyone else. And when it comes to timing games, implementing them on the relay side with a careful eye towards consensus health should accomplish this. The article should cover the rest.
To quickly address the current hot topic, the blob-shaped elephant in the room whose ISP strangles their upload bandwidth: yeah, relay-side timing games will delay block publication (thatâs the point), giving less time for blobs to propagate around the network. But when you accept a bid over mev-boost, the relayâwith its well-connected clients and prime data center locationâwill be the one responsible for initial block propagation.
If you use mev-boost with relay-side timing games, the block may be delayed but you can trust the relay to propagate it fast. If you donât use mev-boost at all, your client will produce a block ASAP but you need to trust your own network to propagate it. The middle ground may be more interesting: mev-boost with timing games AND a --min-bid
means you delay block production but may end up responsible for your own block propagation.
If youâre a validator concerned about local propagation after delays, you could specify ?headerDelay=0
in your Aestus mev-boost entry to disable timing games at the cost of lowering bid value, though if youâre doing that, make sure to also remove Ultrasound and BloXroute relays from your list, as they also run timing games (BloXroute does allow for timing configuration, but I think you need to pay for their validator gateway service separately). Thereâs no point in making Aestus return a bid early if your mev-boost client is just going to sit there waiting 900 ms for the other relaysâ responses.
Iâm always happy to discuss. Feel free to reply or reach out directly.
I dislike every part of this, but unfortunately timing games are a reality. Thank you for the transparency, making a reasonable compromise and especially the possibility to change the defaults. I think currently there is very little incentive for solo stakers to actively optimize for timing games as the execution layer income is just a small part of the overall income. As far as I see this year execution income is slightly above 10% of the overall staking income, at least for the 20 random validators I checked, and increasing that by timing games by another 1-2 percentage points is not really a lot. At least for me it is not worth it to compromise the network integrity over it. Obviously there are different opinions about it. If the MEV opportunity increases again it might become a more substantial part of the revenue. I think overall it shows for how little reward some actors are ready to compromise the Network. Not really surprising, but just interesting to keep in mind.
Special guest Mark Richardson joins us from Bancor to discuss Carbon DeFi, an automation tool for onchain trading.
Ethereum
$2645.30
0.04053 grandpas
90,891 hodlers subscribed! (+8)
Caroline got two,
Crypto market bumps into,
Sam is a crook too.
Even Google realizes the price is never going to change.
Context: When you google âeth priceâ it was stuck on September 14thâs price, this feature has since been removed all together while remaining for BTC đ
Oh my god you guys. Whoâs cutting onions in here? đĽš
Yes Iâm coming to Hodlercon now!!! I am at a loss for words with your generosity! I am so grateful to be a part of this wonderful community and the doots wonât die until this subreddit dies or I do⌠(unless Reddit nukes my account or something, but Iâm sure Iâd find a way around it though). Anyway, through the incredibly kind funding, raising 1.2 ETH from from u/superphiz, u/allinat40, u/haurog, u/alexiskef, u/shiftli, u/KuDeTa, u/Gumpa-Bucky, u/austonst and u/da3vr, I will absolutely be seeing you all in Phuket!
As a token of my appreciation I will be sending out a POAP soon (please DM me if you donated from a CEX or not your POAP wallet with your preferred wallet). I also have some ideas for a special something to give each of you in person (please let me know if any of you wonât be at Hodlercon). Nothing big, but hopefully something meaningful, think of it like a physical POAP. No promises just yet but Iâve got an idea of something I may be able to do.
I have already checked and I can definitely change my flight for minimal extra cost. I still need to figure out the logistics, ie can I fly out of Phuket to Aus/NZ or do I need to go back to Bangkok but it seems I can change my flight and get credit for another flight for no extra cost! This just leaves any extra cost for getting to Phuket, the Hodlercon ticket, accommodation, food and airport parking for an extra week. All of which I have no reason to believe will go over my newly increased budget.
I also just want to say it was impressive/bold of you all to remember/have faith that tricky.eth was indeed my address. I have rarely mentioned that and it couldâve gone very wrong if you had the wrong address haha.
Finally, I just want to say that this community never disappoints and all of the work being done around the doots now with the podcast is incredibly motivating for me. I love to see the awesome things coming to fruition out from this community and I hope this is just the beginning.
Just watched the documentary about Ethereum and Vitalik. I thought it was pretty good overall. Thereâs a great scene with a recording of Charles crying about how he wonât become a CEO because Ethereum is going to be a public good (Iâm paraphrasing). Gave me a good chuckle. The movie is here https://ethereumfilm.xyz/. Costs $20 in ETH for a streaming ticket, but this is stuff I like to see onchain, so props.
In the all Core Devs Consensus call last Thursday they discussed the size of the upcoming Pectra Fork. They pretty much decided to make the Pectra fork much smaller again and split it into two hard forks. In essence all the EIPs that are currently being live on devnets (i.e. internal testnets) will be bundled into the first upgrade, whereas anything not part of these devnets will get its own hard fork later on. The reasoning is that the EIPs that are currently tested will soon be ready for public testnets and then mainnet. Waiting for the other EIPs to be ready would delay these upgrades by several months. More details about the reasoning can be found here: https://hackmd.io/@ralexstokes/rJVuKtlpR
As it currently stands it is planned to have the the following EIPS in Pectra 1
EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 curve operations
EIP-2935: Save historical block hashes in state
EIP-6110: Supply validator deposits on chain
EIP-7002: Execution layer triggerable exits
EIP-7251: Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE
EIP-7549: Move committee index outside Attestation
EIP-7685: General purpose execution layer requests
EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for one transaction
Most important for stakers are the maxEB (EIP 7251) and EL triggerable exits (EIP 7002) changes. These two allow a single validator to have up to 2048 ETH in balance and the advantage that one can trigger a validator exit by signing a message from the withdrawal address. The account abstraction EIP (7702) is interesting as it allows and EOA account to behave like a smart contract account. There is also the discussion to include a smaller change which would increase the Blob target and max from the current 3/6 to either 4/6 or higher numbers. But there is no consensus about this yet.
Notably absent from this list are the bigger EIPs (PeerDAS and EOF). This means we are pretty much at the size of Pectra as it was initially planned (until May 2024), right before the size blew up massively by including PeerDAS and EOF. The plan is to have the first upgrade at the beginning of next year (q1/q2) whereas the second upgrade with PeerDAS and EOF would be at the end of next year. Obviously this still is in discussion so details might change. No idea what this means for the already scoped Verkle tree upgrade which is a large execution layer change which was planned to come afterwards. I guess the next few weeks will give more clarity.
The bankless episode with Mike Neuder was pretty interesting. I am not yet done, but one thing caught my attention: I think we discussed centralized sequencers here probably years ago and pointed out that these arenât perfect, but that we expect some L2s to have only one sequencer that will do all the work and that there will be some decentralized L2s. My mental model from these discussions was âthere will be a bit of everythingâ.
Mike yesterday basically said that he expects âallâ (most) L2s to have a decentralized sequencer and that it is the best strategy for them, because they wonât be more decentralized than L1, inherit all the necessary properties from l1 and shouldnât even try emphasize that dimension. His conclusion is more or less that real-time censorship resistance is cool (which is the result of decentralized sequencing), but itâs probably not as important with the possibility of forced inclusion via L1.
Is a decentralized sequencer only important in our bubble? The more I think about, the more I believe it is - and we are a niche, so developing for us and similar users might be good enough for one or two L2s, but thatâs it. So will we see 99.9% of the sequencers running on one machine?
https://warpcast.com/growthepie/0xd8c82434
Itâs gonna keep happening. Excess supply of blockspace will eventually be gobbled up. Even if itâs to do the same stuff but leaner, easier, more user friendly.
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/14l05iz/daily_general_discussion_june_28_2023/jptzgx4/
Even without new use cases that are brought forward with cheaper blockspace, which I think there are, there is a lot of pent-up blockspace demand in the form of better UX and easier to write code.
We saw something similar with our computers and the internet. As the resources available were scaled up, the computers didnât get much faster to do the same things we were doing. And web pages didnât load up faster. Instead, a lot of those extra new resources went into nicer UX and cheaper/easier to deliver code. We are in the era of smart contract programmers thinking long and hard about how they implement the functionality to minimize gas costs, looking at OPCODES and trying find microoptimizations to squeeze those extra gas savings. There was a time when programmers thought long and hard about the performance of their applications and would often go to assembly to optimize them. For most use cases programmers donât do that anymore because CPU cycles have become so cheap that itâs silly to optimize for that. The same will happen with blockspace, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper we will start to use it less efficiently in exchange for improved UX or easier code.
As a casual hobbyist developer, I keep hitting a wall at the block explorer verification step.
You can write just about any smart contract idea you have by messing around in Remix IDE. You can deploy it to the blockchain. It will run on its own forever on a permissionless network for everyone to interact with. Thirdparties can even build more stuff on top of your contracts. Amazing!
But the moment you want to make your code easy to check on a centralized block explorer? Thereâs this huge skill bump, where you need to use the command line, install git/nodejs/npm/truffle/hardhat/scoop/foundry and a million of other things, and none of it works anyway.
Well, I say âyouâ, it is of course âmeâ, dumb old me who never gets this stuff.
But, still, isnât this wild? Intuitively it feels like the hard part would be, you know, building the actual thing? Rather than proving the thing you built is what you say it is.
Imports used to be my main grievance. Now Iâm discovering the fresh hell that is âvia-ir verification. At least now I have AI⌠To help me fail faster.
â edit: finally found a way! Nothing like a good rant in public to have a breakthrough.
For any other tortured soul who might end up in the same situation, the working path was
âgenerate contract metadataâ ticked on in Remix IDE
get the giganormous hexadecimal .json in artifacts/build-info folder
crop its contents to keep just the âlanguageâ, âsettingsâ and âsourcesâ bits
on the block explorer verification page, use Solidity Standard-Json-Input in the compiler type dropdown panel
It Just Works.
The world is saved. Praise Vitalik. Praise all of you. I love you all. Good night.
âItâs different this timeâ
Just sharing some ramblings to help me solidify my theory on where we go from here.
I was a bit worried for a while, when the hype of the Bitcoin ETFs was going on it all got a bit too excited, too quick for me for a while, I was slightly concerned the 4 year cycle wasnât gonna happen as usual.
We seem to be back on course. Bitcoin still rules the jungle (for now) so what is happening with it still matters deeply for Ethereum.
Rate cuts have started in the US, the rest of the world has largely yet to follow course but they will as the cycle turns. Gold is rising and Peter Schiff is getting all excited about it but what usually follows after this is Bitcoin making him eat his words. Pretty sure this will happen again.
In my gut, I think there is one more big drop still to come, there is usually some event that scares people witless before we go to Valhalla. Would love to be wrong on this and we go straight there from this but it fits the usual pattern. From there we start marching on with Bitcoin leading the charge.
Next what happens is money starts to look elsewhere and the fabled Altcoin season has its time to shine. I think Ethereum will start attracting attention sooner rather than later and considering the hate it seems to be getting lately, it will be a glorious, hated rally by those who miss out.
Iâm sure others will pump but Iâm not worried by the likes of Solana etc. Itâs still a centralised shitcoin thatâs good for meme coins but anything else? Pretty sure it will go the way of EoS, Cardano and all the other so called Eth killers in the long term.
Iâve been staying well way from buying any crypto other than BTC/ETH since the 2017 cycle and sure Iâve missed out on shit but Iâm in it for the long haul.
We have ETH ETFs and weâve moved to PoS so all those ESG/green funds can take part that canât in Bitcoin.
We have scale this time, L2s are growing and growing.
Crypto is getting easier and easier to use.
Still waiting to see what the next narrative will be, we had ICOs, DEFI, NFTs all started on Ethereum to kick things off before, what will be next? Is it time for the long talked about real-world assets to enter the party this time?
Ignore all the noise, am pretty sure that we see a great bull market starting as per the usual 4 year cycle. I might even sell some of my precious ETH for the first time this time around :)
I have finished the recent bankless episode with Max Resnick called âIs the Ethereum Roadmap Off Track?â: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLUJ0uLye0U
I knew it will be difficult to listen to for me and I ranted about the guest a bit here before. It is mostly due to the guest being unable to contribute in any meaningful way to the discussion and making false statements everywhere. Now that I have finished it, my conclusion is: should we really listen to someone on their opinions about rollups who seems to have such a gross misunderstanding how this stuff works. He might have very good opinions about the MEV part of the roadmap or about auctions, I cannot judge that but he seems unable to understand how the rollup part really works.
I keep it to the largest issues I have heard and leave out many smaller wrong statements the guest made. To be very clear, my understanding of rollups has a lot of gaps, so please correct me if I am stating something wrong here I am eager to be corrected and learn.
After the 55 minute mark he states
ZK technology inherently compresses the state whereas the optimistic rollups have to put the transactions on chain and maybe they can run a little bit of compression but itâs not nearly the amount of compression you can get with uh ZK roll up
Wrong. There is no compression in ZK technology used today in rollups. The zk part just gives a relatively short string of numbers and characters which prove that the calculation state transitions has been done right. There is no extractable information about the state in this proof. Both rollup types have to put all transactions on chain via blobs. Many people use the simplified term âcompressionâ to get the meaning across, but this is not an accurate description of what is happening in the case of ZK rollups. It really seems like Max took the marketing term of ZK is compression and went with it without understanding what is happening and to draw his conclusions based on this flawed understanding. To make matters worse optimistic rollups do have less overhead in the calldata as they do not have to publish a fraud proof. So it is actually the exact inverse from what he says. Donât get me wrong I am a big fan of zk rollups and really hope they will dominate in the coming years. Max is just wrong here from a technical point.
let let me just be very precise that optimistic rollup does not actually substantially reduce the amount of bandwidth required
This is very wrong the bandwidth requirement can get reduced by the same amount in zk rollups and optimistic rollups. They both publish all transactions in the same way into blobs. They can employ the same optimization techniques to reduce the size of this blob data. Zk rollups have a slight overhead so use a bit more bandwidth. If he would have read/understood vitaliks post about rollups he would know that: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
like we can start to build uh ZK compression into the L1 as well and that would reduce the bandwidth requirements
Again the âcompressionâ which does not really exist. But on the L1 ZK technology can be used to massively reduce the bandwidth and still validate that the state transition has been applied correctly. The node would not know the actual state but it could validate that it is correct. Like the Mina L1 does zk proofs of their state transitions. So, the statement is only half wrong.
from a bandwidth perspective you have almost the same usage from a optimistic L2 as you would if it was happening on the layer one and the only thing youâre saving is on execution
Bandwidth argument is wrong, as explained above. One massively saves on execution in both cases of rollups though.
I think his misunderstanding of the ZK part in zk rollups works fits into his initial rant at the beginning of the episode where he accused the EF and companies behind optimistic rollups to have pushed a roadmap which is against zk rollups. If one does not understand what zk rollups really need it is a bit bold to accuse someone of pushing a wrong roadmap which actually massively benefits zk rollups as well.
we do need to take some tools from the newer blockchains one of them in particular is this kind of parallel execution
Parallel exection is already part of Besu: https://besu.hyperledger.org/development/public-networks/concepts/parallel-transaction-execution
if optimism is not arbitrum then by the transitive property cannot also be the case that optimism is ethereum and arbitrum is ethereum because then arbitrum would be optimism this is like a fundamental contradiction
I am just weirded out by this statement as the transitive relation in mathematics is not really something I would apply here to try to prove something. It is pretty normal to have a subgroup being part of a bigger group but two subgroups not being the same. I am thinking about the taxonomy hierarchy in biology. A lion and a tiger are not the same species, but they still belong to the same genus called âpantheraâ. That is how I think about the Ethereum ecosystem and the rollups. This is not really an important statement by him it just shows that he is using vocabulary to sound more important but applying things in a way which does not really make too much sense.
Rant finished. I now definitely have a worse opinion about him because he does hold strong opinions about things which he apparently does not really understand. This makes it very hard to judge if his opinions are worth considering as one cannot really say from his statements where the limit of his knowledge is. Everything has the same strong absolute language there is no nuance, nothing. And only if one perfectly understands the underlying technology one can judge if his statement makes sense. That is not very helpful for most people at all.
Yesterday I announced the âGoodbye Dannyâ POAP, itâs a POAP to appreciate the contributions of Danny Ryan, the person who is most responsible for the Ethereum beacon chain as we know it.
Itâs launching with a new POAP platform, called âAirshipâ. Airship lets you send funds to an address to receive a POAP without the need to connect to any web3 browser wallet. Effectively, if you send 0.001 Ether (exactly $5.00 at todayâs prices) to theprotocolguild.eth on mainnet, you will receive the POAP in about a minute. This is kind of a cool evolution and Iâm excited to see where it will go.
https://airship.poap.xyz/danny
* Also, I definitely encourage gaming this to get the POAP with a minimal gas cost. How low can you go? The worst that could happen is a dropped tx and you can just try again later.
** depending on how well you know this stuff, setting a very low gas price can effectively get your wallet stuck since all transactions are processed in order. There are ways around this, but i didnât want to surprise anyone.
Some thoughts on EigenLayerâs Operator Set security model.
AVSs assign operators to operating sets. I donât know if this means that by default all AVSs are whitelist only but it certainly reads that way. Itâs not the epitome of permissionless if true.
Stakers delegate stake to operators. How do stakers find an operator to delegate to? At the moment thereâs a list on the EigenLayer website which basically means EigenLayer can exclude an operator from participating just by censoring them here. At the protocol level though I donât believe they have any power so itâs just like Uniswap with their front end which I guess is good enough. The bigger problem though is why does a staker trust an operator to delegate to them. At the moment the only answer here is trust. You are either trusting someone you know like Aestus or you are trusting an LRT to underwrite for you, KYC your operators, etc. We need a better answer here.
Operators then assign unique stake to operator sets. The goal here seems to be to prevent restaked ETH from being restaked multiple times which is confusing to me. Itâs already the case that the underlying stake securing a task can become unbacked, why is it suddenly different if it becomes unbacked within EigenLayer rather than at the LST level? The proper answer here is that capital should be reusable to the extent that the cost of dishonesty still outweighs the profit from dishonesty. The cost of dishonesty is the stake being slashed. The profit from dishonesty scales with the amount of promises youâre allowed to make with that stake. I donât see how this security model is even attempting to discover a rational answer to that equation.
Within an operator set, operators are expected to vote on whether the answers of other operators are correct. Their vote is weighted by the stake they assigned to that operator set. The thing that feels wrong about this design is we are using restaked ETH as a Sybil resistance source when the nature of being an operator on an AVS consists of doing provable work. Why not just use the proof of work as the Sybil resistance source for this? I have the same feedback for subnets on BitTensor. Why do we need validators for that at all when the miners have the hardware to validate and the miners have to do work so the system canât be Sybiled?
They state that if a malicious operator takes over the operator set the system can slash him. I assume this refers to the EIGEN governance system above the AVS but they arenât explicit about this. All they say is that the only stake at risk within an operator set is the stake assigned to the operator set. I refer to stake voting schemes as subjective consensus. Ultimately, even with objective proof systems it still comes down to who runs what software e.g. Ethereum layer 0, but why involve local operator set at all at that point since the EIGEN governance system participants will apparently be required to host all the proof-validators for all AVSs since operators in every AVS will be allowed to appeal to them? If the goal is to reduce the computational load on the EIGEN governance system participants then Iâd say you should first vote using PoW within an operator set then appeal to a contest amongst all the operator sets on the matter and every appeal should require slashable stake to initiate. That looks a lot more like the Colony governance design than what I just read. Itâs also worth noting that an operator only needs to be slashed in an eventually consistent way so zk-proofs that rely on repeated games are perfectly valid here. Thereâs a long unlock period for validators to unstake from AVSs.
I also donât know what happens in this model if a staker undelegates to an operator. Which operator sets is the unique stake removed from? Is it proportionate, LIFO, etc? And how does stake affect rewards? Can an operator just forfeit their operator set consensus power but do honest work without any unique stake and still be rewarded? Thereâs just a lot of undefined aspects to this system at the moment.
Special guests Nick, Wander, and Rhett join us from NodeSet, a node operator incentivization layer.
Ethereum
$2539
0.03987
90,873 HODLERS SUBSCRIBED (+6)
Know where you belong,
Interest rates bang a gong,
Ether sings along.
GM EthFam, Iâve got an idea, feel free to veto it, but hear me out firstâŚ
Premise 1: We are pretty well represented in many of the biggest DAOs: https://dailydoots.com/#delegates;
Premise 2: Those DAOâs control treasuries worth over $20 billion: https://deepdao.io/organizations;
Premise 3: To successfully take over 50% of Bitcoinâs hashrate (either by buying ASICs or setting up facilities to manufacture them yourself) would cost ~ $20 billion: https://blockchainbeat.co/how-much-to-hack-bitcoin-and-ethereum-study-reveals-price/;
Conclusion: EthFinance should orchestrate the take down of Bitcoin, then the annoying trolls that have been showing up here the last few days would be less obnoxious, mods would have less work to do, and the daily threads would be less cluttered.
zksync governance went live yesterday. There are no proposals yet, but at least everything seems to be set up technically. Since I am one of the ETHFinance delegates, I had been visiting the page regularly to check for updates. Thatâs why I noticed some interesting changes in voting power, some examples:
Stani (from AAVE): 9M in August, 45M in September
Baki Er: 12M in August, 61M in September
polynya: 8M in August, 38M in September
2 of the top 3 delegates (syncswap, l2beat and olimpio) are more or less unchanged with the exception of L2beat. They have more than doubled in voting power (from 47M to 106M)
For Stani and Baki Er the changes are perfectly visible in the chart on the right hand side here. For polynya I checked the âReceived Delegationsâ tab in their delegate profile. All three profiles show basically the same, huge delegations on both the September 9th and September 12th.
So where do all these delegated tokens come from? The biggest delegation to polynya is from this account which is basically non-existent onchain according to the zksync explorer. It received the zk tokens 3 months ago from a wallet that received 6999999300 zk tokens and has been transfering the tokens to a lot of new addresses. I did a quick check and most of these accounts donât show any activity. The top delegations to both Stani and Baki Er from the past couple of days show basicalyl the exact same patternsâŚ
With some basic maths we can see that 6.9B is basically 33% of the total supply - which makes me think, this is likely the wallet that distributes to team and investors, because according to this blog post thatâs the only receiving party that makes sense?
So are these changes in voting power just team members and investors delegating their (locked) tokens just before governance goes live? Did zksync just tell everyone to delegate? I donât see any other explanation, but maybe I am completely off? Any other ideas?
The US SEC backpeddled and finally admitted that cryptocurrencies are not âsecuritiesâ but simply âcrypto assetsâ.
There were multiple articles that covered this yesterday:
In summary, the SEC admitted that they didnât consider cryptocurrencies as âsecuritiesâ but as âcrypto assetsâ. (Note that this only applies within the US, and many other countries never classified crypto as securities in the first place but as âdigital assetsâ.)
âWith its use of the term âcrypto asset securities,â the SEC is not referring to the crypto asset itself as the security,â the agency said. Instead, a tokenâs status as a security âconsists of the full set of contracts, expectations, and understandings centered on the sales and distribution of the [crypto asset],â it said, citing language from an earlier filing.
Thus cryptocurrencies are not securities, but how theyâre offered along with contracts and expectations can be considered securities.
Thatâs what Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and the entire crypto community have been saying all along, and it took the SEC this long to finally admit it in court.
Things are starting to (finally) take shape for HodlerCon 2024 Thailand Edition. If youâre planning on going to DevCon in Thailand this could be the perfect opportunity for you to spend some time with your EthFinance Fam.
Weâll be in Phuket from Nov 16th - 23rd at the Pullman Panwa Beach. Cost of the hotel is $800 and I have 30 rooms currently on hold. If your interested in coming to HodlerCon, fill out the hotel interest form.
Hereâs some of the events from the itinerary:
Weâre still working on the final price for the event ticket. Want to stay up to date on whatâs happening Join the Discord.
beautiful writeup on an alternate reality where we went all in on L1 scaling (it did not end well) https://x.com/domothy/status/1835188625950101590
Upcoming EthStaker community calls:
- Lido CSM: Run a validator with 2 ETH - 19 Sep, 4pm UTC
- NodeSet: Become part of a curated operator set - 25 Sep, 4pm UTC
- Puffer: Run a validator with 1 ETH - 2 Oct, 3pm UTC
- Stereum: Run a validator on easy mode - 9 Oct, 4pm UTC
- Ephemery testnet: Help test upgrades by running testnet validators - 14 Oct, 4pm UTC
Google is coming further and further into the web3 game. They started supporting ENS addresses some time ago and directly show a summary of the address in the search results. Today they announced that they provide Ethereum RPC endpoints for developers for mainnet and testnets: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/introducing-blockchain-rpc-service-for-web3-builders
I guess this is a continuation of what started a year ago when they becam part of the holesky genesis validators and they run 10k holesky validators: <https:// explorer.rated.network/o/Google%20Cloud%20Web3?network=holesky&timeWindow=1d&idType=nodeOperator>
This new announcement is in direct competition to Alchemy, Infura and all the other commercial RPC providers. Pretty impressive how these large companies enter the Ethereum ecosystem bit by bit. And this time it is definitely not because of a hype they have to sell to their shareholders but probably rather strategically to get a foot into the door of the Ethereum space.
The next section of my Rabbit Hole Explorerâs Guide is all about managing risk.
Donât Invest More Than You Can Afford to Lose
Crypto is full of amazing heights and soul-crushing lows. The fact that there have been multiple 90% drops and it is still the best performing asset class in the last decade is incredible. However, you canât always afford to ride it out. The crypto highs and lows tend to follow the macro highs and lows. So when crypto is low youâre also jobless, economic opportunities are scarce, and youâre scared. If you invest more than you can afford to lose when times are good, you could very well be one of the millions who find themselves selling while the market is down only to watch it do some crazy 30x the next cycle. People not following this advice is the source of the bitterness every time crypto comes up on your Facebook feed or technology subreddit. The problem was never crypto, the problem was they invested more than they could afford to lose.
Pay Taxes As You Go
This is actually just a specific case of the above point but I think it bears special mention. Itâs one thing to be penniless. Itâs another to be in debt. Itâs another still to be in debt to the government. The first case is miserable but you can still live on credit. The second case is bankruptcy and homelessness. The third case is debtorâs prison. You cannot afford to invest money you owe for taxes into speculative assets. Therefore, whenever you rotate positions you should take whatever sum you need to to cover the taxes out to safer havens.
The specific case that wrecks people has to do with a crash just after the start of a new year like happened in⌠well 2018 and 2022. Just before the crash everyone rotates their capital back into the blue chip coins. When this happens even though they are reducing risk they are now selling something and buying something else at near all-time-high valuations. Then the crash hits, they tell themselves itâs just a bear trap and donât sell, and by the time the tax bill is due they canât even liquidate their entire portfolio to pay the tax bill. Seriously, itâs just less stressful to pay taxes as you go.
No One Is Giving Away Free Crypto
Whenever anything of significance happens in crypto some scammer always replies to the announcement to say âTo celebrate X event weâre giving away free crypto. Send scamAddress some coins and get twice that back!â. This is a ridiculously stupid scam that has gotten a ridiculously stupid amount of money. I seriously canât fathom how this bullshit has managed to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto. Sometimes I feel like people who lose money to this type of thing deserve to do so. Mostly though I just feel sad for how this money is going to power the next wave of scams to be that much more prevalent and effective. They do this because it works and they are never going to stop.
Let me make this abundantly clear. I have been around awhile. I have been around for many significant events in crypto. No one reputable is ever giving away free ETH. For any reason. Ever. I donât care if their account name is Elon Musk and you think heâs so eccentric he might actually be doing it. I donât care if they have a blue checkmark next to their name and it appears to be the same account as the one making the announcement. I donât care if it says its part of a fun new airdrop they are doing. Ever.
More generally, even in an ecosystem where 1000% gains arenât uncommon, if it looks too good to be true, thatâs because it is. If you see some 1000% yield LP position on some token youâve never heard of itâs almost certainly being fueled by inflation and you are gambling against the loss of value of your collateral. If you see some stablecoin position with unusually high yield that stablecoin probably isnât stable. If it actually is using a safe collateral and is on a safe platform and isnât a scam itâs either a very new position and is about to be quickly diluted or itâs being fueled by someoneâs marketing budget and is about to be quickly diluted.
Whether in web2 or web3, if you donât understand how youâre adding value to an ecosystem youâre the product. When you receive airdrops, you are being compensated for being an early user, taking early risks, boosting the numbers the team uses for valuations so they can get more funding, etc. Even legit airdrops that you can sell the day you get them are not free crypto. No one is giving away free crypto.
Inflation Is Not Profit
Every bull market in crypto has been marked by certain design patterns in tokenomics. I can mostly tell you a time range when a token was launched by its tokenomics alone like how an archeologist can tell you which civilization some ruins come from by pointing at architecture and art styles. One of those design trends in early 2021 was to launch highly inflationary tokens and then use high APR numbers to encourage people to buy the token and stake it for rewards. This was basically just a new type of casino. Your net worth would go down even as the number of tokens you hold went up 10x a year. This was basically preying on the ignorance of users who didnât really understand finance but it worked for a time while the profit the hype generated was able to expand the user base faster than the inflation rate. Once the model ran out of users to expand to the rest was history.1234 Whenever you see a high APR in some LP or staking pool you need to slow down and investigate where the money is coming from. If itâs coming from inflation you need to understand that inflation is not profit.
If Itâs Good Enough For a Screenshot, Take Profit
As volatile as crypto is there will come a time where you are massively up. Youâll be up so much you will be in disbelief. You will refresh your portfolio checker every 15 minutes and the person sitting across the table from you will know youâre doing it again because the green from the screen will reflect from your eyes. At this point, they will think you have a problem. At this point you actually do have a problem but thatâs besides the point. Hereâs the thing: you arenât a genius. Even if you actually are a genius you arenât up because you are a genius. Itâs just that time of the cycle.
At that time of the cycle everything youâll see in your media feed will reinforce how much of a genius you are. Itâs like the whole world just woke up and finally saw what you saw first. However, if you havenât heard this yet let me be the first to tell you: sentiment follow price. People love the investment now because it is up. If the price wasnât up, youâd still be waiting like you were when you first bought. 90% of those investments everyone seems to agree canât possibly fail are destined for the dustbin of history. Ever heard of Feathercoin? If you were around at the time you couldnât not hear about it. How about EOS? OmiseGo? Luna? None of these things are going to be top 100 again. When prices are up, everyone is a genius. At the end of the cycle when youâre holding the bag you wonât feel like it any more.
How will you know when the top is? If there was a numeric answer to that then weâd all just sell then and the top would come sooner. The game theory of that makes the price chart look highly chaotic at the tops. The best answer I can give you having lived through some unbelievable peaks and valleys is if itâs good enough for a screenshot, take profit.
Leverage Will Fuck You Up
Leverage in crypto takes many forms. We have all kinds of financial gizmos youâve probably never heard of and which youâll take years to acclimate to. Like, yes, we have options protocols but we also have rate stripping futures protocols, perpetual swaps, and leveraged derivatives. The leverage around here goes to 100x and it all seems to get more complicated and interwoven every year.
Regardless of the form of leverage though, the goal is to amplify the effect of a market change on your portfolio. This is all well and good when youâre dealing with something like bond rates that adjust like 0.25% a month and you can just afford to wait to expiry if youâre wrong. Waiting it out is basically what banks are doing right now and why their unrealized loss chart looks like blood dripping down a painting. Crypto assets are more volatile. Youâre not just playing with gasoline here; this stuff might as well be nuclear. I wouldnât advise you to play with the nuclear bomb without knowing what youâre doing. I donât care if it has a red button that says âPress Me for Limitless Energyâ. I wouldnât advise you to play with crypto leverage either even if their website has a fun points system.
Applying leverage to crypto assets, means amplifying the financial effect of something that is already known to drop by over 90% and with rate swings in the thousands of percentage points over a year. If you arenât right, continuously right without any blips, you wonât be waiting this out. Youâll be liquidated. I have seen too many veterans fall to the hubris of thinking the price canât possible fall to X level. Then, for one brief candle of intense market fear it does and theyâve lost more than theyâve bargained for. Before you play with leverage you should have a forecast for what the market will do that justifies taking such a risk. You should have contingency plans to execute on if your prediction isnât coming true in the timeframe you expect. Donât let it linger on until you feel like itâs a sunk cost. Definitely donât double down. Every time you sign a transaction involving leverage repeat this in your head: leverage will fuck you up.
Get Rich Slow
This last one summarizes the spirit of all the above advice. Thriving in this ecosystem is first and foremost about survival. Surviving is often a matter of having a clear head and assessing risks rationally when everyone else isnât. That requires having your emotions under control. Whenever you take any extreme action you are going to experience extreme emotions about it. Those emotions will cause you to act rashly. This is how you end up scammed, overexposed and holding shitcoins you donât honestly believe in, having missed the top of the cycle without taking profit because everything seemed so bullish, being liquidated at the bottom, in debt to the government, and joining the ranks of the disillusioned about what is otherwise a wonderful civilization changing technology. Life is a marathon. You are only racing yourself. Take the time to learn before taking big risks. Donât try to get rich quick here. Get rich slow.
Interesting news on the application front. I came across Rarimo protocol, which is building ZK passport-based voting. In this post, Iâll concentrate on proof of identity aspect of voting. Proof of identity is a stronger guaranty than proof of personhood.
Iâve been intrigued in leveraging government issued documents as a proof of identity for a while. Yes, government issued. Blasphemy! First of all, Iâve been disappointed with current web3 approaches to proof of identity. Ones based on monetary incentives - âIf the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.â Social recovery - not that I delved too deep - seems gameable. Dedicated piece of hardware to scan biometric features - maybe. Think about it, which entities have always had the problem with uniquely identifying a person? Who are the incumbent identity providers? Governments, banks, and lately IT companies like Google, Twitter, FBâŚ(âSign in with GoogleââŚ).
Right of the bat, IT companyâs proof of identity is shit. You can easily sibyl it. Banks - much beater. Having a bank card pretty much means you are a person or a legal entity and not a bot. Nobody can take your money if they donât scam you. Thing is, banks rely on government issued documents. Who caries the burden of identifying a person from the moment they are born? Can they enroll in a school? Can they cross a border? Did they pay taxes? Are the eligible for health care? Important stuff, right? Governments have been doing this for a long time. They have institutions on institutions for making sure that you are who you say you are. The world works thanks to them having done a decent job.
As we enter the third millennium, machine readable government documents have become a thing. Biometric passports are standardized (ICAO Doc 9303). Almost all the countries in the world now issue passports compliant with this protocol.
Rarimo developed the Freedom tool - opensource, ZK powered, mobile app which scans your passport and creates a user profile. It claims to preserve authenticity, eligibility, anonymity and uniqueness. The whitepaper addressed security claims and assumptions.
Thanks to ZK proofs, you could prove claims about yourself, without giving away unnecessary personal information. You could prove that you are of legal age, without giving away any other info, including your identity. Are you a resident of certain country? Are you human and not a bot?
Proper digital identity unlocks a lot of applications web3 people have been talking about: voting, reputation systems, user profiles, social networksâŚThese are the use cases which cannot be tackled with crypto-economics alone. What do you think?
Edit: grammar.
Edit 2: short demo video.
I am bearish hardware wallets. Obviously smart contract wallets are getting way better, which is one reason. But if a nation state can manipulate 1000s of small electronic devices and people donât find out until itâs too late, they can manipulate hardware wallets as well.
This is just a general thought. But be aware of the risks.
The only thing I can say is that when you become a target of one of the larger 3 letter agencies or equivalent governmental (emphasis on âmentalâ) agencies of some countries there is pretty much nothing you can do. They will get to you, get all your assets and only if you go to the most extreme lengths you might be able to prevent that.
We know since the Snowden revelations that the NSA has an internal catalogue where you can order âreplacementâ parts which then get exchanged during shipment of an order to the target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog This is happening by diverting the shipment to a unknown location, replace part of the electronics device with an NSA produced one and then continue the shipment to the customer which obviously is not aware of any diversions or replacements. As far as I remember they also had ready made casing which included a spy device for the most popular laptops and electronic devices.
I guess the same thing could happen with a hardware wallet. But to be honest I expect it to be easier for them to monitor your used wallets, get a list of your addresses and get to the seed phrases afterwards when they arrest you. Most people will have it written down somewhere. Sure you can always just keep your seed phrase in your head (brainwallet) but I guess only a very small fraction of crypto users really go that far.
For them getting in your hot wallet will probably be easier than attacking a hardware wallet. So, a hot wallet is not safer at all.
If the goal is to attack the chain itself by compromising thousands of hardware wallets. I am pretty sure they could do that. Not sure what the legality of this would be, but hey as history and current events show these agencies have a different legal rulebook than most of us have to follow.
I still think having hardware wallet in some form is one of the best defense one can have. Normal hackers will not be able to get to the private keys as they ideally never leave the device (hello ledger). If you pair it with a smart contract multisig wallet where an attacker would have to attack several hot wallets or even hardware wallets at the same time I deem it pretty much impossible that you will lose your ETH due to a supply chain attack.
The ratio matters for me because objectively Ethereum is better at everything that Bitcoin does. There is no reason why Bitcoin is a better SoV. And this reality has to be reflected in the ratio at some point. BTC is very flawed and is not sustainable. A BTC failure without profound change is inevitable. It is absolutely perplexing that the market does not realize this. I dont care about Dollar price as much because I think the crypto space realizing whats important is the first step on the journey. I care about the ratio because it reflects the market realizing rational facts.
Its not about money. I care about the future of human society and about the improvement of our society. And I honestly believe that only Ethereum can deliver a credibly neutral trustless financial system a bedrock for finance that can not be corrupted. I want this platform to succeed because it will improve the world. Finally a level playing field that can be set up in a way that empowers people and organizations and stops corrupt governments. Its can be a counterweight for fraud and corruption and government overreach.
That is why I am into crypto. That is my main focus. So I care aboout the ratio because Bitcoin is the wrong way. And Solana is the wrong way as none of them can deliver what is needed.
A financial system that is trustless and can cater to the entire planet. Ethereum is on its way to achieve this. Aslong as Bitcoin ratio is so bad it means people are not realizing what the purpose of blockchain technology is and people did not realize what tools they have at their disposal to manage their finances in a way that can not be tampered with.
Yes obviously we are not there yet, Ethereum has many many flaws, but we are on the path to it. And the ratio is an indicator for blockchain technology to actually fullfill its purpose.
Holding coins that can not be deflated (Bitcoin will fail at this btw) is just part of the equation. People using crypto for everything that banks usually do for crypto to replace centralized systems. That is what I want. I want traditional companies to be either replaced or reorganized on Ethereum rails. I want the upper people to slowly distribute their power to more people.
Blockchain did not achieve anything yet. Its just the start the very first day of a century long journey. And the ratio is an indicator when we are out of phase 1. Realizing why blockchains are valuable. We are still in Phase 1 where the people do not know why blockchain is important.
For me its not about money. Its about change. And the ratio is an indicator for that change.
If Ethereum does not flip Bitcoin. Then blockchains are useless and its really just a speculative meme coin casino. And nothing more.
Bitcoin for me is the nr1 meme coin. It has a strong narrative but it fails at real world utility and is not designed to be sustainable long term. It needs centralized entities to offer services thus the fact that its decentralized matters only in so far that it cant be inflated arbitrarily. However the security of the protocol is dependent on the inflation so the system is about to fail.
Ethereum flipping Bitcoin and Ethereum becoming the most expensive asset on this planet is when we will be able to see crypto change the world profoundly. And thats all I want. Everything else. Is just secondary. I do have enough money. I dont need a Bugatti. I do have a job. I want Ethereum specifically to be a guarantee for a free and open Internet/monetary system that can not be censored. I want entitities like EU China America Google Facebook Apple AGI to not have total control to have to deal with a platform that they can not censor and that wont be corrupted by them. I want Ethereum to be that strong. We are not there yet but we could be one day. And flipping Bitcoin is the first step on that journey.
Seems outlandish but this was the reason why I even got interested in Crypto in the first place. The prospect of that happening. And Bitoin dropped the ball by ossifying too early and just focusing on an unsustainable inflation schedule.
A good while ago I told you all I am slow to get around to things but I wanted to add some default user flairs. Well, as prophesied, I was indeed slow to get round to it. But lo and behold, we now have default user flairs!
The new ones have some colour where the old custom ones didnât. Custom ones are still an option, they just wonât be as colourful as the default flairs. Also, these default ones should give us a good idea of your vibe. if youâre new, a TA guy, long term investor etc. Hopefully we can get a better feel for what angle youâre coming from when you make a post here. At the end of the day we want less conflict and hopefully a bit of context as to your leanings might help a bit. If not, itâs still just a bit of fun. Feel free to grab a meme flair if thatâs your style!
Finally, Iâm happy to add some more, so let me know what you want to see added and maybe even a colour request (send me ur hex codes đ). Though I think we might reserve one colour for the mods. Maybe we can colour coordinate our flairs. Currently itâs a bright ugly shade of blue so youâre not missing out on much.
Special guest Jason joins us from Puffer Finance, a liquid restaking protocol.
Ethereum
$2347.90
0.04056
90,849 hodlers subscribed (-1)
Beating up the polls,
Not giving up owner roles,
ZK among goals.
I recently got to feel like a whale, I sold a larger amount on CB, like 100k, on the USDC/EUR pair which is rather low volume.
Hereâs how it went:
I put it up in a single sell wall, shadowing over the puny trades of the mere mortals. Every bid and ask before mine paled in comparison. There it stood, a monolith, looming over the market.
As soon as the order hit the books my counterparties mustâve recoiled in shock. Who was the nameless entity, willing to dump a vast fortune in a single breath? Whispers filled the market - has a whale arrived? Has Megalodon decided to feast?
At this point, time stood still. I have become death, maker of the markets. A force to be reckoned with, altering the fabric of the order book itself.
Who would be brave enough to challenge my creation?
Eventually, all monuments must fall, but the battle was one for the history books. At first only a few daring souls nibbled away at the edges of my fortress. But after the market overcame the initial shock, larger buyers emerged, each of their trades echoing like hammer strikes against the stone of my stronghold.
It should not go down easy though, over the course of 6 long hours and 211 individual fills, they relentlessly dismantled my towering order, brick by brick. An epochal amount of time in the fast paced crypto realm.
Finally, when the dust settled, and the sun rose, only rumors remained of what once stood tall. Another testimony to the patience of the market, able to move even the biggest mountains, with enough time.
Most popular questions in the EF AMA right now:
The community push for increasing blob fees has me a bit worried tbh, I still think this would be an extremely bad move. Not going into the details again today but 2 weeks ago I detailed why I believe free blob fees + zero rollup congestion are fantastic combo for institutional adoption. One thatâs needed.
Then a couple of days later Sony announced the launch of an Ethereum rollup. Our first non crypto native rollup ever. Fantastic news. This confirmed what future Ethereum adoption will look like: companies with huge user bases will bring millions of users at once. Just like Base brings us 4 million weekly active addresses. Not gaining users one at a time. Millions at a time. Millions per institution, millions per rollup.
And then, a few days ago, Solana makes a 180° pivot from calling L2s parasitic and announces it now supports L2s. Rebrands them ânetwork extensionsâ.
Please take a second to wonder: why would Solana pivot to L2s right now?
At a moment when overall blockchain activity is moderate at best?
Could it be that Sony made them realize Ethereum is about to onboard one institution after the other? That the only way theyâll compete is by faking their way into L2 adoption partnerships?
This is why the community push for blob fees worries me:
The only reason Solana got any traction to begin with is because Ethereum L1 fees were way too high in the past. Thatâs what drove users to less decentralized lands.
Do we really want to make the same mistake again and offer an opportunity to Solanaâs L2s to gain any sort of traction? Not because we needed to but because we got greedy with our own few L2s?
Ethereum should do what a market leader does: grow the market as fast as possible and cash in when the whole world is in.
For people wanting to know what EOF is and does, this is the most comprehensive discussion I have seen about it yet:
https://xcancel.com/uttam_singhk/status/1830526179105001771
or
https://twitter.com/uttam_singhk/status/1830526179105001771
It was shared by a Nethermind dev who works on EOF a few days ago, so I think it is technically accurate. It is a 30 minute video going through the why, the scope, the improvements, the changes and also addresses some of the criticism. It is definitely worth a watch as it gets pretty deep into the weeds, but he manages to explain it reasonably well. Some things were over my head, but I definitely learned a lot.
In short EOF helps to better store smart contract code on chain by adding a header and ordering code and date sections. Interestingly this even reduces codes size by a few %. EOF does many validation checks during deployment instead of runtime, which can prevent some DOS attacks and might also help to increase the max size of smart contracts again (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-170.md). It also contains many smaller quality of life improvements for solidity developers. Some new calls are also introduced to interact with external contracts which improve efficiency. Overall the EOF improvements are rather complex and the disadvantage is that the legacy contracts still need to be supported which increases complexity by duplicating some of the logic. This means it will take a lot of testing to make sure things work correctly.
All in all most people do not really need to change anything for this upgrade it will all be handled in the background. I think if you are a solidity dev you will have to learn a few more call functions but otherwise there is also not too much to do. I personally think EOF improvements are a very good step forward for the EVM.
Wanna share here - starting today, Iâm going to be working with Protocol Support at the EF
https://x.com/nixorokish/status/1833209686272971079
r/ethfinance is where I started as crazy eth lady đ§ (well⌠really r/ethtrader but I donut know if that matters). EthStaker is where being active in this sub took me. Volunteering and then working with EthStaker has been an insanely good decision in my life. Iâm so crazy excited and happy to be working with insanely smart and creative people I admire greatly.
This community is the first good home I found in crypto <3
Iâve been thinking about these words from /u/BuyETHorDAI:
The longer Iâm in this space, the more I dislike tokens in general, but maybe Iâm just jaded.
It causes me to wonder: What are the vital constructs of web3? Itâs hard to set aside price and market performance and just consider this question. Right now they seem to be coins, tokens, and NFTs, and everyone hates tokens and NFTs right now because theyâre salty about prices being down, but the question remains - ARE these the three fundamental constructs of web3? Are any of them truly irrelevant and going to die away? Are we missing more constructs?
I really donât know the answer, Iâm just running it through my own mind. I could easily be convinced that they are the only fundamental constructs, or that we have too many or too few.
I think on-chain governance software is and will be indispensable. Code needs to be upgraded. How do we do that with so much at stake as safely as possible?
Otherwise I think tokens just represent digital ownership and are one of the best product fits blockchains have found. Itâs hard to hate on the concept of ownership, even if you may not like the distribution of ownership amongst all people. Changes of ownership often use what we consider financial tools which is basically all of Defi. Thatâs not going away either.
I think weâll continue to see the proliferation of personal digital spaces. You were just talking about the base profile system yesterday. I mentioned layer3 a few weeks ago. Guild is another one. I think curating a digital identity is something most people understand from Facebook and will be better served when done on a system that isnât explicitly manipulating you with the data you give it.
The last thing I think will become vital on chain is peer to peer services. Payment will often be part of this so it will be intrinsically linked to the chain but youâll be able to pair yourself with someone willing to do something for you using the chain as a matchmaking service. This is pretty much all DePin and AVSs to start but I see little reason these systems couldnât be expanded to non-digital services eventually.
I can see ethereum impacting so many facets of life, but here are some that I would love to see personally:
Transaction settlement becomes faster and cheaper, with more assurances. I no longer wait 3-5 business days for something to clear. Iâll have the stablecoins in my account and know that itâs there. Cross-border payments no longer take a big % fee and several days to finalize (as someone who has lived abroad but been paid in USD this was very frustrating).
Tokenize the world. Deeds. Royalties. IOUs. Licenses. Securities. Tickets. I see tokens as a hyper-efficient form of a wrapper, much like ETFs are for the financial world.
Reduced communication and coordination friction. Especially when coordinating across time zones or governments. Ideally DAOs take form, but even without DAOs the ability to coordinate digitally worldwide with effective anti-Sybil features (via introducing costs or incentives) is amazing. Got a taste of it with ICOs before regulators shut that down, and fledgling communities around NFTs hint at what is possible.
Decentralized exchanges. If we indeed tokenize the world, exchanges allow free market forces to find efficient solutions. In fact I was not sold on Ethereum until I looked into smart contracts, and when I realized what DEXs were capable of I became fully on board. But more than just shitcoin roulette, I want to see a future where one can trade currencies, assets, community access, etc., with more freedom and less cost than currently possible.
Thereâs a lot more that Iâm excited to see implemented, like personal privacy and public transparency, freedom of expression, the digital empires that are built now that digital ownership is enforceable. But thatâs enough rambling from me already.
I can see ethereum impacting so many facets of life, but here are some that I would love to see personally:
Transaction settlement becomes faster and cheaper, with more assurances. I no longer wait 3-5 business days for something to clear. Iâll have the stablecoins in my account and know that itâs there. Cross-border payments no longer take a big % fee and several days to finalize (as someone who has lived abroad but been paid in USD this was very frustrating).
Tokenize the world. Deeds. Royalties. IOUs. Licenses. Securities. Tickets. I see tokens as a hyper-efficient form of a wrapper, much like ETFs are for the financial world.
Reduced communication and coordination friction. Especially when coordinating across time zones or governments. Ideally DAOs take form, but even without DAOs the ability to coordinate digitally worldwide with effective anti-Sybil features (via introducing costs or incentives) is amazing. Got a taste of it with ICOs before regulators shut that down, and fledgling communities around NFTs hint at what is possible.
Decentralized exchanges. If we indeed tokenize the world, exchanges allow free market forces to find efficient solutions. In fact I was not sold on Ethereum until I looked into smart contracts, and when I realized what DEXs were capable of I became fully on board. But more than just shitcoin roulette, I want to see a future where one can trade currencies, assets, community access, etc., with more freedom and less cost than currently possible.
Thereâs a lot more that Iâm excited to see implemented, like personal privacy and public transparency, freedom of expression, the digital empires that are built now that digital ownership is enforceable. But thatâs enough rambling from me already.
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (Sept 2-8)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!
Degen chat covers NFTs and whatâs worth buying, some airdrop potentials. Pooltogether and their insane APR are discussed.
bbroad is leading the way in applying for grants. This time itâs gitcoin+octant community round.
Still a decent amount of chatter about new platforms, new coins, accumulation phase, another potential politifi seaason, pumpfun and volume.
Calls of the week:
~8x+ $clippy by GreenGeorge
~6x $IRS by whatthefuck.eth
~4x+ $FARM by whatthefuck.eth
~2x $worth by whatthefuck.eth
Farmers talk about blobs, Monad, elixyr, Eigen and more.
heeey appears on an episode of âget to know EVMavericksâ.
A new member - moonie.eth - joined EVMavericks this last week.
New EVM multisig election is on the horizon. We are in need of signers!
Lots of activity in our general public chat. Mostly talks about the market with some bullish sentiment being sprinkled in.
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here are a few guides!
I just read a VERY cool NFT (Punk) story on X. While you can click on the link and read the tweets, I have assembled them all here!
đ
Today happened one of the biggest crypto punk heists of all time. Someone with a lot of patience and knowledge just bought ape 2386 for 10 ETH.
Once upon a time when fractionalisation was en vogue, ape 2386 was fractionalised and valued at like 450 ETH. This happened on a now dysfunctional site called niftex. The ape stayed fractionalised even after they shut down as it was in an escrow contract. 10000 shares were all distributed between loads of people. And a buyout was not possible. Until now..
The contract worked in a way that if you propose a buyout, a 14 day grace period was initiated where the rest of the shareholders had time to ponder and accept or reject it. 14 days ago someone made a proposal for .001 eth per share. It was not rejected and went through.. Buying price: 10 ETH (last apes sold for 620 eth, 3.3k eth and 2.69k eth)
đ¤Ż
Tech Dive here! (pasting it below)
Punk 2386, with a current high bid of 600 eth, sold for 10 ETH today. A combination of clever sleuthing, followed by an unfortunate miscalculation lead to a 7 figure payday for 0x282.
This ape punk was fractionalized into 10,000 ERC20 tokens on 9/26/2020, and spread out among what is now 257 holders.
This was done on a now decommissioned platform called niftex (the contracts continue to live forever).The setup is such that any shareholder can propose a âshotgunâ, whereby any shareholder can propose a buyout price, and if nobody counters, they can purchase the asset after 14 days.0x282 initiated a shotgun on 8/28 (14 days ago).
Some people took notice, including at least two shardholders. One put it off because they thought they had more time, but the other (@gmoneyNFT) made an attempt to block.. In order to block the buyout, you must effectively purchase the proposerâs shares at higher than their proposed price.
0x282 proposed a price of 0.001 eth per share (10 eth for all shares), so a valid counter needed to be 0.0010000001, as defined by the shotgun contract. gmoney submitted a counterclaim of 0.000001 ETH (1000000000000 wei), just short of the requirement.
At this point, if any other shareholder had contributed 10,000 wei (two TEN TRILLIONTHS of a cent) to the counterclaim, the shotgun would have been blocked. But two ten trillionths of a cent was not committed, the shotgun was not blocked, and 0x282 walks away with the steal of the century: 1 of only 24 ape punks, for 70% under the global punk floor.
đĽ
Tough pills to swallow
Throwing shade and vitriol at TA people wonât make the ratio any better.
I personally (not speaking for the mod team) would like to see less hate for certain users or types of posts. When JT and the other OG mods founded this subreddit they did a stellar job in fostering a positive and welcoming community, even in the darkest of times price wise. I would like to encourage people not to take out their frustrations on others. I get it, you donât think TA means anything and youâre probably right, but that doesnât justify vilifying people posting TA here or a YouTuber who has been calling for the ratio to âcome homeâ back to 0.03 or 0.04.
I wouldnât even say Iâm siding with the TA folks here, in fact Iâve expressed not being super approving of some TA and also bashing on the semi-predatory paid private group model which folks like Ben Cowen use which has simply never sat right with me (but to be fair, it is better than shilling bybit leverage affiliate links etc). Anyway, I feel caught in the middle. I donât really side with anyone but Iâm sick of the negativity of people picking on certain names and types of content. One side of this debate is constantly being angry and bashing people while the other just stays quiet and often times leaves altogether and thatâs not right. This is a subreddit which is welcome to all. So can we please just chill out a bit and keep it a bit more wholesome?
Itâs always personal attacks and bold claims about TA working or not working and never any evidence to back it up. Baseless rants just spread negativity and makes this place a lot less welcoming which is against the subredditâs ethos. If you must go on a crusade against TA, at least find some peer reviewed papers which prove that it is bullshit or something because Iâm yet to see anyone do anything like that when talking about this topic and I say that as someone who is very much a TA skeptic. At the very least one could go back and review all the TA posts here and sum up how many of them were right/wrong and use that as evidence (albeit low-quality evidence).
Ethereum
$2380.90
0.04217
Go where you belong,
Knock your chest and sing along,
Apes together strong.
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you get an ETF
Then they ignore you again
Then they laugh at you again
Introducing https://boasty.app/ - Schedule Your Ethereum Posts
Dear ethfinance, special day for me today - after 7 years in the space, i get to show something small i built. Inspired by this u/benido2030 post last Saturday, i spent the last 5 days building Boasty. I always wanted to try building an app on Ethereum, and this idea sounded simple enough so i gave it a go and now itâs live.
TLDR Pay 1 USD in stablecoin and schedule a post on Ethereum, you get a https://boasty.app permalink to reference and share which contains your published message and transactions associated. See an example here
The app is an MVP but everything works as far as i can tell. It is currently permissioned, meaning the messages are stored in a centralized database and no smart contracts yet, but as you can see on the roadmap, I intend to introduce message storing on IPFS, smart contract(s), sha256 hashed messages with auto or user reveal, supporting more wallets (currently only tested with Metamask), L2 networks and hopefully more.
Last but not least, Iâd like to make the app free to post for my fellow solo stakers and the /r/ethfinance community (EVM holders for now?). Happy to hear any ideas on how to make this happen!
Feedback appreciated, feel free to say it like it is and try to break the app. I am not on crypto twitter or any of those, so if you like it, please share it! Thanks u/benido2030 for the idea!
Started a new series. As always, subscribe to EVMavericksâ paragraph to get all new content immediately when it is out! I hope you enjoy!
Get to know EVMavericks #1 - Etheraider aka EVM 1209
Hi, what do you go by and whatâs your EVMavericks #?
Hey, this is Etheraider and Iâm EVM 1209.
Who or what introduced you to crypto?
My brother bought into ETH in 2015, held for 2 years, and sold right before the 2017 bull run. I didnât know anything about crypto until I saw he missed out on life-changing gains, so I decided to learn from his mistake!
How and when did you find your way into EVMs?
Well, actually, I was there at the very beginning and helped bring EVMavericks to the blockchain!
So itâs been a couple of years since the beginning; what made you stay?
I think weâre one of the best communities of OGs on Ethereumâa lot of good people around with all sorts of talent, perspective, and experience in the space. Itâs a good place to be.
Whatâs your best EVMavericks memory?
There are a lot of good ones. But Iâd say that first EVM podcast we launched, where many of us (who knew each other only on Reddit for years) âtalkedâ together for the first time. It was awesome.
What are you most excited about EVMs looking forward?
In the short term, Iâm looking forward to us getting into the Octant funding round. In the long term, Iâm excited to see future endeavors our community members will pursue!
What is your favorite hobby or way to spend time outside of crypto?
Well, this past year, I got really into going to the gym and living a healthier lifestyle. Decided to place an emphasis on taking care of my mind, body, and soul! As far as hobbies go, Iâm a big fan of disc golf, tabletop board games, and ping pong!
What one piece of advice would you give to someone whoâs just getting into crypto?
Learn about why crypto exists, how powerful its impact can be, and how it can dramatically change all our lives for the better.
Any piece of alpha that you can share with us? It can be anything, not just crypto-related.
When youâre on your deathbed, are you gonna care about how much money youâve made or how nice your house/cars/etc. are? No. The only thing youâll care about is the people you love and the impact youâve had on them. Donât wait until then to go all in on the people you love.
Lastly, is there anything else you wanna share? Maybe a project you are working on? Latest accomplishments? Whatever you want! The stage is yours Etheraider!
In a time such as this, where the world is so crazy, divided, and full of darkness, my favorite verse to quote is this: âThe light has entered the world, and the darkness has NOT overcome it.â
It seems like ETH has 3 big problems this year.
Airdrop flop - the hype for eigenlayer and others was completely unreal, while the airdrops themselves were a terrible combination of stingy and overpriced. If a token launches at its best possible market cap, thereâs nowhere to go but down, especially if there are gigantic unlocks coming. Tokens were a lot more interesting when you had a real chance at making a killing at buying something that seemed like it had real fundamentals or promise. If some hyper-complicated protocol launches at an insane valuation, there are going to be very few buyers - itâs too complicated for non-crypto natives, the upside is already priced in, and people are going to want to unload the tokens. So every new token has pretty much gotten crushed. tough way to build market hype.
ETF Flop - The BTC ETF set up some incredible expectations, but ETH matching it was always going to be an issue. BTC got huge early inflows from crypto-natives wanting to offload some of their unchain coins so they donât have to worry about custody. It makes a lot of sense from a diversification perspective, and thereâs basically nothing to do with unchain bitcoin, anyway. Institutions/financial advisors are much more slow moving, but the retail buyers disguised this. This was huge for bitcoins narrative and expanded its presence among the broader world. ETH, by contrast, will only be bought in the ETF by those who really canât interact with onchain infrastructure - basically, financial advisors, institutions, 401ks, which all take a long time to spin up. Holding ETH onchain is valuable, so thereâs a real cost to using the ETF instead. This makes sense to us, but makes ETH look bad to the tradfi world/retail, furthering the narrative that thereâs bitcoin as the main crypto, and then thereâs everything else. While this is disputed by the fundamentals, the fundamentals are complicated. Narrative is tough.
Solana meme coins - memecoins on Solana have been a retail incinerator. They look appealing - zero transaction fees that let you avoid extractive vc coins - but the reality is that Solanaâs centralized validator, sequencer, and MEV setup allows for colossal extraction, while the meme coins themselves allow for easily faked volume metrics and huge insider dumping. Itâs hard to imagine a worse market to participate in. However, the notable crypto influencers are some of the only people making money off this, so they pound the table about how great Solana is. VCs are (and have always been) huge owners of Solana, so they. ALSO pound the table on how great sol is/how bad etc is. So Solana is stealing retail mindshare while impoverishing everyone who uses the chain. Itâs a bad outcome.
So what does ETH need to re-attract retail? Yield farming and gambling. Onchain options that are actually liquid. New tokens launching quickly (as a quasi ico while avoiding being direct icos) at low valuations so that some momentum can build. Tokens that actually result in cash flow when staked, so that people have an actual reason to buy/speculate on them.
What ETH REALLY needs is to capture mindshare from bitcoin as a pristine non-sovereign store of value. ETH should be fighting with bitcoin and gold, not with Solana. Solana as a network may be great (I donât think it is but ignore that for now) but SOL the token is complete garbage unless things change dramatically.
Vitalik Buterin started an unofficial AMA last weekend on Warpcast after he posted about stablecoin decentralization on X
TL;DR of the original X post:
These are the highlights from the Warpcast AMA response to that X post:
Iâve paraphrased the important parts of some of the longer questions and responses
Source: https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xa3ad7913
There has been a lot of posts of people feeling down recently. My honest response to this is stop looking at numbers and make something for the fun of it. If you can code write contracts that do something fun. If you can design then make mockups for weird fictional games. If you can write, publish an article about a future society where eth never existed. Start playing with apps. use things. break things. find the glitches, the edges. look in the mirror. uniswap backwards is pawsinu. What if the aave ghost is haunting the chain? How many times have people sent exactly 0.666 eth? What if we start calling them nifties again instead of nft? can we make bingo on base?
there is so much for us to do. now it is september. summer lull is over. what is dead may never die đ
At the same time transaction count is near ATH and active addresses maintained pretty well throughout the summer. The main reason why blobs seem to go down is thanks to optimizations by L2s.
Showing the market that Ethereum has room to grow is absolutely needed, if we were near saturation today we wouldnât have institutional rollups tomorrow.
This is like a vampire attack we used to see during 2020 - 2021 defi time frame. I kind of like this thought process
https://x.com/CloutedMind/status/1830405365898580245
i take the stance that blobs being 0 fee is bullish
it chokes competition
DA is ultimately a race to 0 anyway, might as well weaponize DA as loss leader to expand ethereum GDP
not only does it tell all these DA layoors to go fk themselves like TIA etc, it chokes any ethereum L2 competitors
no longer can an alt-L1 use âcheaperâ as a selling point, only âfasterâ and âmore decentralizedâ (than an L2)
i think soon we see L2s that be âfasterâ like megaETH and then we get 2/3
then as the roadmap for L2s go along and they become more permissionless without centralization risks we tick 3/3 (cheaper, faster and more decentralized with the inherent security of eth)
then where does an alt-l1 compete ? it doesnt.. its just L2 vs L2 and its all on ethereum
and ETH is their money
thats moat
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 26-September 1)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Catch up on a weekâs worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.
We voted for Doots Podcast and Aestus MEV Relay in the Octantâs snapshot and both projects made it to the upcoming Epoch 5 allocation window!
696 hosts a new series: get to know EVMavericks. First episode with Etheraider is out now.
GreenGeorge starts a thread asking lions about one project that really excites them.
interweaver shares that Starknet has undergone a massive upgrade, now introducing 2-second transactions and itâs making a big difference for projects like Influence.
Degen chat has a little bit of everything this week. Some base mints, some random stats, some talk about Maker, some memes ofc.
Memecoins have slowed down, but people still share some useful tools and degen TG groups. Generally, thereâs a lot of chatter about coins, the market, and vibes. Discussions include safer memes and strategies for longer meme team positions. The top play of the week features Etheraider longing ETH, with several other lions following suit
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: hereâs 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 thatâs open to public and thereâs a decent amount of activity there!
Ethereumn Foundation is doing an AMA on 9/5, get your Qâs ready and post them here:
https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1f81ntr/ama_we_are_ef_research_pt_12_05_september_2024
Yesterday night I was devastated, I have a big part of my funds in Penpie a yield aggregator for pendle and it was exploited yesterday evening.
I saw an an alert on twitter and was hoping I would be not affected. But the asset rsweth that was my main holding in one of their LPs was part of it. I had the worst night.
I found out today that only one of the two rsweth pools was exploited, the bigger one with higher tvl and apy, the smaller one that also gets swell L2 points(the reason I was in it) but less yield was not drained and I was spared by pure luck, I guess the attacker focussed on the higher TVL Pools. I should be okay when withdrawals open again. I can still be part of ethfinance and all the crazy ups and downs.
I donât want to experience that again, is there a safe way to get some yield at least? Or should I just stick by pure ETH on a ledger secured cold wallet? Or maybe rETH?
Losing your funds like this would be the worst, it is worse then (controlled)leverage trading and shitcoin trading because everything could be gone without an error of your own , besides trusting a protocol you should not have trusted.
One small advantage I gained of that experience is I really donât worry about the short term price action, I know we will be rewarded if we are patient and ETH will come back and we will reach new ATHs at some point.
Posting as a top level comment a reply I was drafting to a deleted comment regarding onchain vs. tradfi âyield farmingâ.
No doubt a large portion of âyield farmingâ is circular nonsense. BUT, even in the world of circular nonsense, the onchain version is transparent with respect to its risk profile and that is a consequential distinction vs. things like FTX/Celcius.
As an example, if Bernie Madoff launched a classic shitcoin yield farm with copies of battletested smart contracts, participants can trust the contracts without having to trust the person.
On the other hand, if the Pope himself started a centralized âyield farmâ where I have to send him money via Western Union, the risk profile is now comparatively opaque and a million different risks must be weighed, no offense to His Holiness.
Ponzinomics aside, itâs worth highlighting that more sustainable sources of yield do exist on Ethereum, think of AMM liquidity providing for example. Itâs making money from market making, totally normal financial service, but onchain and therefore transparent/permissionless/non-custodial/always online :)
Of course, the question of which tokens are being traded and how many have sustainable value is important for the long term viability of the ecosystem. Itâs a complicated question. The Ethereum economy has a lot of bullshit (just like the âregularâ economy), but I think it has already âmade itâ, thereâs already real activity in payments, savings, tokenization of treasuries/corporate debt, collectibles, etc.
Ethereum
$2516.30
0.0425
Storage canât go bloat,
Blockchain should not be a moat,
Accept that banknote.
Vitalik ETH bull post lol
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1826253901240431083
Edit: it will be hilarious if this marks the bottom
Wake up babe, Vitalik is bull posting.
Ethereum has gotten stronger:
- Under $0.01 txfees on L2
- Two EVM L2s (@Optimism @arbitrum) now at stage 1
- Cross-L2 wallet UX has improved a lot (eg. no more manually switching networks), though still a long way to go
- Much more powerful and mature ZK tooling making life easier for app builders
- Starting to see second-generation privacy tools (eg. @0xbowio)
- Identity/reputation/credentials ecosystem much more powerful, and starting to actually be used more and more
- Progress on STARKs leads to much clearer long-term security and decentralization story
- Much more clarity on account abstraction roadmap
- Much more clarity on block construction endgame (it seems to be down to FOCIL + APS vs multi-proposer)
- Staking decentralization stable (see comparison charts below, the âPoS is more centralized than PoWâ line has proven completely false)
The fundamentals for Ethereum are actually crazy strong right now.
This is a much easier investment thesis to make than it was in 2016 and consequently is the reason Iâve remained close to fully invested since then.
The short-term frenzy of memecoins and L1-of-the-year technologies will continue to be eclipsed in the long-term by the secular growth of cryptocurrencies with incredible value accruing to the leaders in the space. The risk/reward profile of Ethereum is better than it has ever been..
Am I talking my book? Hell yeah I am.
New tweet from Roman Storm (tornado cash) today:
Folks, I have to win and it takes resources!
Please help.
Im severely underfunded for the trial.If you have any spare ETH, consider donating to him and Aleksei Pertsev. Pertsev is already in jail, but hereâs some info about his situation from Ameen Soleimani https://x.com/ameensol/status/1822280721870016711
Thereâs also NFTs to be claimed if thatâs your cup of tea. Iâm putting up the links for their donation sites, but please do your due dilligence of course.
Roman Storm
https://juicebox.money/v2/p/618
Alexey Pertsev
Latest Week in Ethereum News
đ Eight year anniversary
https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-august-24-2024
Huge thank you to Evan Van Ness for 8 years of Week in Ethereum News. Evan puts in a huge amount of hours in each week to gift the Ethereum community high quality curated news.
Iâm forever grateful to have played a small part in this amazing public good. 3 and a bit years editing for me.
I thought this article was a pretty good read.
Give it a click if you want some content.
To summarize the events.
At it again today to fight misinformation in r/cc
Anytime Ethereum is mentioned there will be someone to say itâs not decentralized. Iâd say half of them believe it, and many of the people who read them will believe them.
I wish Ethereum had armies of people fighting disinformation like other projects have armies to create it. But itâs a frustrating way of spending time.
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 19-25)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Catch up on a weekâs worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.
Voting for Doots Podcast in Octantâs epoch 5 is live.
Big shoutout to bbroad.eth aka Ben for spearheading this opportunity for EVMavericks and r/Ethfinance!
If any mav is going to Permissionless and needs a place to stay - dm coco on discord.
Zombie is looking for 10-14 EVMs to participate in the annual Fantasy Football League. Check out one of the recent announcements in discord to find the exact place for that or just tag ZombieBP.
696 is asking around for a website creator to help out with a project for public goods. if you are one or know one - dm.
Degen chat mints base subnames.
Some talk about ENS ensues.
Tron gets degensâ attention.
Attention shifts to EF and them selling ETH.
Untouchable2k reminds us about his 0xbitcoin call thatâs at x2 and he shares his future predictions.
GreenGeorges long TON, other mavs proceed to follow and all involved end up making some moneyz.
Our memecoins connoisseurs continue being early and hitting it consistenly. Lots of talk, itâs the most active place as of recent months. Discussions from polymarket bets to long term âsafeâ bets on memecoins. But most importantly, lots of plays. Of course we have some losses buuuut
Here are some top plays of the week:
~15x $suncat by eleusys
~6x $pjeet by etheraider
~5x $tiedan by eleusys
~4x $vibes by whatthefuck.eth
~2x $odong by eleusys
Decentralized onchain governance consultants aka airdrop farmers talk about the state of airdrops and whether they are going to be worth it and majority conclude that the frenzy is over for now.
GreenGeorge keeps being bullish on Hyperliquid and their ecosystem.
Hocilef shares scroll farming opportunity.
Onchainscore link is shared by dray.
And much more!
Our creative lions ainât sleeping neither. TheBenMeadows dropped his first Gamma print.
Our ETHFITNESS thread has been revived. Thatâs for all the ETH heads who are trying to stay fit đŞ
We had a mini sweep and a total of 4 buys last week.
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: hereâs a few guides!
Todayâs finally the day I get to share something with you Iâve been working on for some time - a new validator client targeting Ethereum. Itâs biggest advantage is it allows you to use and combine the data from multiple beacon nodes. This allows us to use multiple client implementations at Serenita, combining their output and results in us being completely protected against single-client bugs! My hope is other operators adopt this too, resulting in a more client-diverse and resilient Ethereum.
I made an introductory tweet here , I would appreciate any likes/retweets since our Twitter presence is not that huge yet.
Some more details over on r/ethstaker, Iâm happy to answer any questions here as well!
Makerdao rebrands as sky. The protocol is now sky protocol. You can swap MKR to SKY tokens, but you can keep your MKR if you want.
A new stablecoin called USDS is created it can be swapped from/to DAI 1:1. Not sure how long this is possible. DAI can still be used. The protocol gets officially launched on September 18.
USDS seems to have built in SKY rewards. SKY tokens will be distributed to USDS holders/protocol users.
More info on: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/sky-has-arrived/24959
Really curious how this relaunch will turn out in the coming years.
EDIT: As announced, the new USDS has a freeze function which makes it similar to USDC adn USDT: https://xcancel.com/functi0nZer0/status/1828432650152935605
Seems strong negative initial reaction to makerdao and dai upcoming upgrade, largely because it has a âfreeze functionâ. AFAICT from https://github.com/makerdao/usds/blob/dev/src/Usds.sol thereâs no explicit freeze function for now, the issue is itâs upgradeable which is equivalent to having a freeze function. I think to be fair to sky people should acknowledge basically everyone has exposure to upgradeable protocols already, including the major stablecoins. It was inevitable if the goal is to work with RWAs with sufficient compliance, should be no surprise.
Practically we canât avoid mutability exposure (use immut. silo and USDC or chainlink multisigs can still get you), key is how itâs done. Is it a multisig that might be one guy with no time delay? Or is it a token vote which is very slow / is multisig behind a timelock? Seems likely in this case auth is DAO which is too transparent and slow to freeze anything, user can move before DAO adds them to pause map.
I think sky and usds will have their place, excited to see how it goes. But more so for âpure daiâ, we lost NM but he still talked to Rune about these things a little, maybe they can come up with something which meaningfully improves on RAI.
Something I miss from the bear market of ~2018-2020 are the inside jokes and the dark humor to get us through the rough times. EZPZ $324 that one rhino account mocking us as we slid further, the hodl messages. I look back at that time weirdly well. I guess I was so self assured that we were misunderstood or not understood at all.
The last bull run we were learning about maker, compound, uniswap, aave, yearn finance and it was this adventure to try all them out and exciting to try a whole new world without filling out forms, showing your identity or waiting on someoneâs approval. It was fun to be an explorer and then it got even better because we got airdrops out of it. And from there it turned into something else where we turned into airdrop hunters. I didnât feel incentives to try out something unless it had airdrop potential. Other protocols started getting hacked and it felt even worse to try things that werenât battle tested. Our tolerance to take risks and explore was diminished by the two prong attack of protocol hacks and airdrop expectations.
All of this compounded with the idea that none of the l2 experience feels like the OG experience of eth. Trying to explain to outsiders how you found a new protocol to try out on scroll becomes an absolute chore. I.E purchase some eth on Coinbase, purchase a hardware wallet, send eth to your wallet, bridge to scroll, and from there trust that this protocol doesnât have an exploit that loses your funds.
Like yeah maybe itâs not all that difficult to figure out if you put in the effort. You take the time and learn. The logic is sound if you find the right places or people to guide you. But itâs too much to expect people that donât share the passion to get into.
Iâm optimistic itâll get better truly. But to get to that next level I think a lot of these L2âs need to consolidate. OP or Zksync or Arbitrum need to feel just like Ethereum or build their own brand to Ethereumâs level.
Thanks for reading. There just arenât people I see in the world that understand or care about Ethereum.
Three filled blobs are worth around 500 USD for ETH price in burn from blobspace alone. We are close to filling it up not even 6 months onto the upgrade. Ethereumâs usage has grown up 700% in one year from 50-60 tps to 350-400 tps and is not showing signs of stopping here.
Why Iâm saying this⌠3 years ago nobody had a fucking clue how to value Ethereum. So I wrote a little article explaining how you can value the network based on fee revenues, how to calculate a DCF, how the burn places a floor on Ethereumâs long-term price, how you can view the burn as having an equivalent effect to the price as a buyback⌠3 years later this understanding has penetrated deeper and now you have CT âanalystsâ calling ETH dead because they donât understand EIP-1559 fee mechanism and how it creates a fee market. And they are using the same arguments that were laid out on this subreddit first to price Ethereum, against it.
They still have no fucking clue. Ethereum is gonna fill those blobs, and then we are gonna release more blobs and they will get filled again. And every factor of 3 is gonna bring another 500 USD in price to Ethereum through burn. And in a decade you will have something like 64 blobs and thatâs gonna bring you 10K USD/ETH just from blobspace. Not even taking into account L1 native blockspace. And not taking into account any monetary premium that will slowly form because ETH will become the most pristine collateral of all that economy flowing on top and has way lower issuance than USD and even Bitcoin.
Here are the numbersâŚ
500 tps x (60 x 60 x 24) secs/day x 0.05 USD/tx x 50% (L1 value capture) / 2500 ETH/day
There are 3 assumptions here, so I let you decide their uncertainty.
500 tps with 3 blobs: Based on estimates of current tps and blobs filled. Blobs could get denser with compression improvements. But likely not an order of magnitude denser.
0.05 USD average L2 fee: This should land the median fee in around 1-2 cents that is low even for very low added value transactions like buying a coffee. Therefore at those fees even the lowest added value transactions are feasible onchain. This is also close to Solana average fees, so at those fees you can outcompete the promise of cheap fees of alt L1s.
50% value capture: the hardest to estimate. I suspect it will be a tad higher eventually, 70ish%. But assuming 50% has the advantage of not being too far wrong in either direction. If L1 only captures 25% of value (which I consider very low) we are wrong by a factor of 2. If L1 captures almost all value we are wrong by a factor of 2. So Iâm splitting the bill here.
2500 ETH/day is just how many we issue nowadays. This is quite bounded from above given Ethereumâs issuance formula.
This has been a LONG time coming, but /u/jtnichol, /u/nixorokish, and /u/logic_beach, and I met with Leo Glisic and Kyndle, founders of Guardians of the Ether to share their project publicly.
Guardians of the Ether is an upgradable NFT for solo & home stakers that serves as a badge that can promote inclusion of stakers in governance.
These NFTs are non-transferrable, so there is no economic incentive to claim this NFT - only bragging rights. (Think twenty years from now!)
Every year, a few weeks after September 15, these badges can be upgraded to show another year of beacon chain participation.
With gas in the low single-digits, now is an excellent time to mint yours.
Hereâs the video launch describing the project.
You can also see the project on opensea.
Huge shout out to u/equal-jellyfish1 for filling the gaps as our Substidooter! It truly allows this amazing service to maintain longevity and much deserved breaks for our resident troll
No Livestream | No POAP
Ethereum
$2651
0.0438
Ether atmosphere,
Validators stand to steer,
No trust paint to smear.
ETH price getting you down? Want to channel your inner Reno007? Post about it here in the daily of my new sub /r/ethwhinance!
If youâre a home staker and were wondering why youâre missing more head votes than a few years ago, at least part of the blame seems to be on Kiln, one of the largest Ethereum staking node operators.
Toni Wahrstätter (EF) published a new article yesterday:
On Attestations, Block Propagation, and Timing Games
Kiln seems to have been pushing âtiming gamesâ to the very limit, âdelaying block proposals to the 3-3.5 second mark within the slot.â Blocks are supposed to be published 0 seconds into the slot. Publishing 1-1.5 seconds into the slot is still considered okay for various reasons but 3-3.5 seconds is really pushing it since the attestation deadline is at 4 seconds into the slot. Before that deadline, the block needs to be propagated globally over the P2P network, and fully processed by nodes. That gets quite difficult (read: impossible) when the block is proposed 3.5 seconds into the slot.
Some other quotes from the article, I tried not taking them out of context but still would recommend reading the full article:
This chart shows the evolution of timing games. We can see that blocks from Kiln validators appear later and later over time.
the longer one waits, the higher the expected number of missed head votes
This comes with an impact on the network: for blocks proposed by Kiln proposers, the missed/wrong head vote rate is significantly higher:
Kiln shows outlier behavior. While most node operatorsâ attesters correctly vote for the parent block rather than the local block, Kilnâs attesters appear to disregard this norm. Over 10% of Kiln attesters attempt to keep the local block on-chain by voting for it. If such strategies are adopted, they might justify the losses from incorrect head votes if they prevent the local block from being reorged. However, these tactics are generally frowned upon within the Ethereum community: âdonât play with consensusâ.
So, are we ready to call Kiln a bad actor here? I myself am not quite there yet but I do think theyâre already way too big of an actor regardless of these timing games, managing almost 5% of all Ethereum validators (rated.network, may be even higher). I strongly dislike this behavior though, thatâs why Iâm sharing it here with all of you.
I do like a few things that Kiln does, like their in-depth blog posts about client diversity (1, 2, 3) and their open-source validator monitoring solution that we also use at Serenita.
Still I canât help but think playing these timing games causes unnecessary stress to the network, only resulting in short-term profits.
( For those that donât know the full context - these timing games are played in order to extract a bit more MEV. So as a validator you basically make a selfish decision to make a little bit more profit that hurts the rest of the network because they get a lower reward for the wrong head vote. )
Be wary when joining crypto projects from unknown people.
A notable Moon/Donut farmer was a victim of a spear phishing social engineering attack: https://x.com/ZoomerXBT/status/1823438152394055994
The attacker convinced the victim to check out the project to see if the victim would be interested in joining the team to create NFTs for it. The executable for the supposed game project turned out to be a Remote Access Tool.
I was going to reply to this in the chain of comments of the case of that moon/donut farmer (which /u/HSuke posted) that was targetted and drained but I will make this as a top level comment for more visibility:
Windows itself is a riskier system to use and was mentioned as an attack vector in the thread, however, itâs also fair to say that there are several red flags here from the info i get from this chain of comments and itâs that:
For data breach related things I suggest checking https://haveibeenpwned.com which has several tools to check this which are well known in the privacy community. Also consider using tools and taking measures recommended by https://privacyguides.org.
I also wrote an article about this on my website which I posted on here a while ago. Iâve learned a lot about networking and other things since I wrote this, so some things might be slightly off, but if you wanna check it out feel free.
More importantly though, I highly recommend software isolation, which is the most important measure to take. Minimize your surface area for attack:
For more technical folk and programmers in this community, or those interested: You should also learn to use smart contract testing software like brownie (python), foundry (rust) or hardhat (javascript) to automate transactions and use hot wallets in a programmatic way, though when learning to use these always use testnets first to try. Learning to use software like this and learning smart contract programming languages like solidity, vyper or others will absolutely help you in navigating the space in a much more careful way.
Besides âeveryone and god hates usâ, Iâve yet to see a good reason why the fundamental advantages of ETH wonât play out in price over the next 12-18 months.
ETH is the only smart contract platform that has the institutional/regulatory green light.
ETH is inflating minimally/deflating forever since the merge and 4844. (Compare ETH vs SOL)
ETH is the only smart contract platform that has a record of liveness that is acceptable for global settlement. (Again compare to SOL outages)
L2 scaling is a wild success and is up only. L2 usage is up only.
If smartcontracts/blockchain is a transformative technology there is no real competitor to ETH. BTC DOESNâT DO ANYTHING. Sure, it might be a good investment since enough people think itâs neat, but that doesnât mean itâs in competition with ETH.
The ONLY reason I see ETH failing is if blockchain itself is rendered useless by some other unforeseen technology. But otherwise the instantaneous settlement, immutability, and resilience of a decentralized smart contract platform like ETH offers enough advantages over the legacy system that it canât not be adopted. And if a decentralized smart contract platform is adopted it will be ETH.
Regulatory clarity in the US is coming. Continued scalability increases are coming. Widespread stablecoin payments are coming. Institutional adoption has started. DEFI use will be up only.
People are worried over 5 months of bad PA for ETH the asset and I agree it has sucked but narrative follows price- donât let the bad PA make you think the ETH fundamentals have changed.
https://decrypt.co/245173/franklin-templeton-ezpz-crypto-etf
This has been mentioned yesterday, i think the ezpz etf might be very interesting for european users. An etf holding only one asset is prohibited in europe/eu as far as i know, thats why the current etfs are not available to buy.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable can elaborate further, but afaik you need a basket of assets to get an etf approved in europe. Lets hope the minimum is 2!
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 12-18)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Catch up on a weekâs worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.
Some EVMavericks were onboarded to participate in Octantâs rounds and help select various projects, thus contributing to public goods indirectly.
Our farmers discuss whatâs hot, whatâs cold. Orderly (TGE is on 26th), Debrdige, Tari, Hyperliquid.
Our quality chat is filled with talks about stocks and gold, whatâs underrated and why.
Degen chat is not so degen nowadays. Discussions revolve around forms of money and the differences between real money and memes.
And from the Twitter land, Batz shows his bullishness on ETH by referencing RatioGang website which is built by our very own InsideTheSimulation.
We see a few nice sales as 930.eth picks up these cool looking lions!
Our memecoining thread has been the most active. Lots of discussions but notably some juicy alpha including coins and polymarket bets. While donât be fooled that itâs all green and rosey, it definitely gets red at times, but here are some calls of the week:
~5x - $r/snoofi by WTF
~3x - $pop by etheraider
~ 2-30x - $TrumpFish by 696
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: hereâs 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 thatâs open to public and thereâs a decent amount of activity there!
Would it be possible to defeat MEV with no protocol changes with smarter wallets?
Besides the chicken-and-egg problem here, a problem I see with this idea is that if the âMEV freeâ validators captured a larger share of DeFi transaction fees this could be offset by regular validators getting a larger share of simple token transactions since their blocks would otherwise be emptier. Also for any really big MEV opportunities it would be worth it for any validator to just take the MEV, exit the pool, and re-enter with a new identity. If we could find solutions to these problems, it feels a lot cleaner to me than some of the currently proposed solutions like builder separation.
To me this feels like the email reputation problem all over again.
In the early days of the internet, anybodyâs computer could directly send an email to an email server and it would get delivered. Then as email became widespread, the concept of spam email arose.
So email service providers (ESPs) started tracking reputation by IP address, which is what they do to this day. Each ESP keeps a small rotation of âcleanâ IP addresses to send mail from, and they work hard to make sure nobody uses them to send spam so that their IP reputation stays clean. And each ESP keeps a list of blocklists that contain tons of low-reputation IPs, from which they auto delete all incoming emails.
The result is a system where yes, technically speaking you can send an email directly, but itâs largely impossible from a residential internet connection since they block the outgoing port (SMTP) to prevent spam, and itâs largely impossible from a web host or VPS too because chances are that whatever IP you get, someone else has already sent spam and ruined its email reputation (if the web host doesnât outright block the SMTP port). So itâs a technically open system where the only way you can send an email in practice is to hand your email off to an ESP like Gmail or Yahoo or iCloud or specialized âemail hostingâ products for delivery.
Trust me, email servers suck balls to maintain. Itâs a lot of writing blocklist maintainers to try to get off their lists - maintainers who only expect emails from email hosting companies. And the software is far less streamlined than web hosting software, since nobody hosts email servers anymore. Itâs a full time job.
All that is to say, if thereâs one or more independent parties certifying whether validators are MEV-free, the endgame is that it turns into another whack-a-mole reputation management scheme just like email. And I donât want running a validator to suck balls like running an email server does.
Also for any really big MEV opportunities it would be worth it for any validator to just take the MEV, exit the pool, and re-enter with a new identity. If we could find solutions to these problems, it feels a lot cleaner to me than some of the currently proposed solutions like builder separation.
You have to track reputation somehow. And there are limited ways of doing so. You could track them by IP, which runs into the aforementioned issues and makes âcleanâ IP addresses expensive. Or you could track the coins themselves, which just means that every ETH on chain has a hidden reputation value, which makes âcleanâ ETH more expensive.
I believe the answer is âit fundamentally cannot be done in a fair way within the latest production version of the Ethereum protocolâ.
Edit: Of course, protocol changes like shutterization can help.
Warning, very geeky hardware topic ahead.
In the last few weeks I have worked on running Ethereum nodes on RISC-V boards. RISC-V is one of the more modern CPU architectures besides the well known x86 (most PCs) and ARM (Apple and cell phones). RISC-V started being developed around 2010 and got published around 2014. Only in the last few years the basic parts got standardized and the they are still in active development to standardize some of the extensions.
One big difference is than anyone can design and build CPUs on this standard and many companies actually do. This is in contrast to x86 processors where only 3 companies have a license to actually design/build them: Intel, AMD, VIA Technologies. For ARM CPUs anyone who buys a license from ARM Holdings can design and build ARM CPUs but these licenses can be very strict. For example, ARM Holdings is currently trying to force Qualcomm to destroy all ARM based Windows laptops due to a licensing dispute. RISC-V is open, which means anyone can design and build processors following this standard without having to pay anyone anything or follow any strict licensing rules. This means this is the most open CPU architecture we have. The disadvantage is that it is all very new and therefore the currently available Processors are not the most powerful ones. But the progress in just the last 5 years is quite amazing. Back then one could only get the most minimal boards which pretty much could only read some inputs do some basic calculations and control an output. There was no support to run any operating system on these boards. Linux support was pretty much non existent.
Today, we can get boards which can easily run full Linux distributions even Ubuntu supports some boards directly and about every 9 months a new iteration of ever more powerful boards hit the market. The driver for this development is the openness. Companies know, that no one can take their licenses away and this gives them security to develop RISC-V based CPUs. This open competition will probably enable many more people to get access to affordable and powerful enough hardware to run an ethereum node. To get there however, the node clients themselves will have to be optimized for this hardware platform as well.
That is why another node operator was asking in many discords if anyone else is interested to help in this effort. I obviously jumped on this opportunity and we have been working on it in the last few weeks. We now got Nimbus, Lighthouse and geth running. They can be built with some modifications and run reliably. Some of the modifications have already been pushed to the respective client teams and some more modifications will come in the next weeks. We are working on some other clients as well (grandine, Reth and prysm) but they have some more issues which need further investigation.
At the moment we have 4 different boards to test our stuff on. These are the HiFive Unmatched, the VisionFive 2, the Lichee Pi 4a and the Banana Pi F3. All of these are at most barely powerful enough to actually run a full node. Nevertheless, we managed to fully and reliably sync the sepolia testnet on the Banana Pi (Nimbus/geth) and we even managed to sync mainnet with lighthouse, but only for brief periods of time until it lost sync again and then it was behind the head for about 1-3 hours until it regained sync again. We even overclocked our board which slightly improved the sync reliability, but not by much. Looks like the current iteration of boards is a good basis to test nodes and get the clients ready but we need at least one more iteration to be able to run nodes reliably.
In parallel, my colleague tries to incorporate as many improvements as necessary into eth-docker so that prospective node operators will have a very convenient way to spin up a node on these boards. It still is a very rocky road ahead, but I am pretty sure that when actually powerfull enough RISC-V boards will hit the market in 1-3 years or so, a good selection of clients will be ready to run on them.
Itâs a little complicated because EIP-1559 served multiple purposes, and the burn achieved multiple goals. You can read all about it in the github of the EIP (itâs short, and really digestible - I promise!) â EIPs/EIPS/eip-1559.md at master ¡ ethereum/EIPs ¡ GitHub
The short of it is, the burn was absolutely a stated part of monetary policy, to the point Iâd argue it was past âa nice side effectâ. Honestly a fairly elegant solution IMO. And if you remember the narratives around BTC vs ETH at the time of itâs launch, issuance/inflation rates were a very hot topic.
I think where the disconnect came from was people misunderstood that it was an amplifier, not a driver, of price action. Meaning that in the event we saw a period of relatively little crypto demand combined with low fees the burn wouldnât be as impactful. Which we sort of unfortunately saw post-launch.
An important aspect of this fee system is that miners only get to keep the priority fee. The base fee is always burned (i.e. it is destroyed by the protocol). This ensures that only ETH can ever be used to pay for transactions on Ethereum, cementing the economic value of ETH within the Ethereum platform and reducing risks associated with miner extractable value (MEV). Additionally, this burn counterbalances Ethereum inflation while still giving the block reward and priority fee to miners. Finally, ensuring the miner of a block does not receive the base fee is important because it removes miner incentive to manipulate the fee in order to extract more fees from users.
I just thought Iâd share a snippet I shared just now in yesterdayâs daily about why the defeatist attitude to privacy around âoh they have my data anywayâ is actually completely missing the point of privacy. Itâs not about going off the grid, its about reducing your attack surface and if you hold crypto, then reducing your data footprint is not paranoia, itâs prudent.
One of the key things outsiders miss about the privacy community is the concept of the âthreat modelâ. Who are you trying to hide your data from? Most people canât hide from 3 letter agencies without hugely inconveniencing their daily life, but thatâs ok because there are some legal protections to stop some degree of government abuse (for example police need to get warrants to search your home etc.) But if you post all of your life details to social media then police can just buy your data, they donât need to search your home if they can buy info from tech companies. Stalkers and $5 wrench attackers can do the same and hackers have waaaay more places to steal your info from, making you more prone to phishing, burglary and much much more. Basically there are some super simple steps to make your digital footprint soooo much smaller. Things like degoogling, using uBlock origin and Firefox for browsing, avoiding cloud services in favour of physical backups or your own servers and not owning a car made after the mid 2010s which collects and sells location and converstional data (some car companies reserve the right to sell your sexual data, no Iâm not kidding, its right there in their terms and conditions). These things donât take much effort for tech savvy people and it gets 80 â 90% of your data off the marketplace and out of the easy reach of government agencies beyond the most powerful ones which you donât really need to worry about if youâre not a terrorist.
Ethereum
$2662.54
0.043
90,771 hodlers subscribed (+2)
Itâs a scarry chart,
Fundamentals outsmart,
Itâs merely a fart.
be me
wake up in cozy Airbnb on fine Sunday morning Tropical Storm Debby cancels flights home fuckthat.jpg
wife and I decide to drive rental car back to New York 12-hour drive ahead
leave at 11 am ETH price tanking, watching it on Apple Watch
realize I have a big loan on Aave
sweating.jpg remember liquidation point in low $2000s, canât remember exact number
anxietyintensifies.gif
hit traffic nearly 12 am, price dropping faster
panicmode.exe
arrive in NYC, get in Lyft, tell driver to go fast
driver understands and drives like a maniac
wife has no idea get home, check position LTV at 76%, 4% away from liquidation
fire up Ledger, send more crypto lower liquidation price by half
calm.jpg
what. a. day.
(1/2)
I broke my no conference rule and attended EDCON in Tokyo this year. Didnât see any posts about it, but maybe I missed them, itâs been hectic running around to try to attend everything (and missing most of it). Either way I thought Iâd share my subjective experience as a normally privacy-conscious grumpy internet man.
First, the quality of that conference was impressive. On every aspect. Coordinating any event is no easy task, and here the organization was top notch. As someone who doesnât speak a word of Japanese and can hardly mumble coherent English, the EDCON team aptly corraled me and others wherever they needed to be.
Great venues too. Most days we were at the United Nations building. I think the whole building catered to the convention? One big conference room housing about ~400 people for the main talks, and side conference rooms for side talks/workshops. Then the main 2 days took place at the Yoyogi gymnasiums, which were OK for the more festive atmospheres they were meant to be, but a bit iffy on acoustics when it comes to listening to technical talks.
Of course this is what matters most, the quality of these talks. I have to say this did not disappoint. Thereâs something to be said for being committed to an event and passively sitting there for hours, as opposed to surfing the Internet and actively seeking knowledge. Whether you want it or not, when youâre physically present your brain starts to absorb knowledge like a plant does photosynthetis.
In particular, I found all the talks on MPC (Multi Party Computation), TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) especially interesting. Many of us have seen these terms many times, the most adventurous among us even try to read Vitalikâs blogs on the topic. Personally it still failed to click for me. Until I sat in these rooms and saw the points explained and reexplained in a variety of different ways by various speakers.
Major props in particular to the panel between Guy Itzhaki (Fhenix), Zhen Yu Yong (Web3Auth), Chua Zheng Leong (Automata). Three guys who manifestly know their stuff and engaged with each other to make these concepts obvious to the crowd. The theme was MPC vs TEE vs FHE, but really it came down to them explaining where each solution makes the most sense. I donât know when EDCON will put the videos of these talks online, but if thereâs one panel Iâd suggest watching, it would be this one.
In person, you truly get to see whoâs passionate and whoâs acting. Either that or there were some excellent actors. The aura of highbrained discussion shifts your perspective, you get caught in the enthusiasm. When I first saw Fhenix (which is a L2) online, my cynical ass thought oh joy, they took FHE and made a little play with Phenix, how âcleverâ. Post conference? Oh, they took FHE and made a little wordplay with Phenix! How clever! (his frown and cynicism: gone)
Another protocol that flipped me 180 was Zircuit. Initially (online) their marketing as an AI-powered L2 made me scoff. But the talk by their CTO made an excellent case for the future of sequencers, differentiating themselves by subjective qualities rather than the objective increases of scale. I got to speak with one of their devs, who told me the AI is really used for data analysis, to classify the possible pathways for DeFi hacks weâve seen in the past, and then identify transactions that look functionally similar and send them in quarantine before inspection. Which is entirely sensible when you think about it. So many exploits boil down to flashloans, oracle manipulations and high changes of volume in a single block, that it should be not only possible but practical to build heuristics to defeat most common attack vectors.
Needless to say, Iâm now accumulating some Zircuit pointsâŚ
Intmax people were on several panels, and then they featured proeminently at Plasmacon the next day as they were organizing it. Justin Drake had a pretty cool gigabrain (omegabrain?) talk about it. I wonât even try to pretend I can explain, save that you can run pretty aggressive compressions for payment usecases.
Justin also made the interesting case BTC as an asset could survive a 51% attack (which in his opinion will happen within ~10 years) by using one-shot quantum signatures and leaving the PoW chain behind. Right, I understand some of these words.
Adrian Brink of Anoma had several talks on completely different topics, all great stuff. Heâs a good speaker and obviously a smart man, if a little bit too smart as his presentations tend to end up too dense with information. I liked his hot take in Plasmacon the most, paraphrased: if we define scalability as the ability to retain fixed costs no matter the activity, then rollups are not a viable scaling solution, while Plasma can be. Personally I think the burden on app developers (who have to guarantee data availability or think of the right incentive mechanisms for others to provide it) is too large for the time being, and I would not bet on Plasma being big at scale before 2030, but what do I know?
The more relevant point, maybe, is that a whole lot of people are clearly building for 2030 and beyond. If youâre ever looking for a fix of optimism to distract you from market trends or cryptotwitter feuds, I will wholeheartedly vouch for EDCON. This could not have been better exemplified than by Vitalikâs keynotes.
Finally got to see the unicorn⌠scratch that, the horse⌠amend that, the man⌠on stage. There is a special sort of energy to his talks. You can tell heâs exposing his concrete, factual vision for the space, which he makes accessible to the rest of us but doesnât massage, inflate, nor reduce, in any other way. But I also liked the energy of his body language. Always moving around, pacing from one leg to another, the frame of someone who speaks of a topic he knows in and out and wishes our input/output bandwidth as human beings could stretch to accomodate the full speed of his thoughts as fast as they come. It hits different when mr Buterin says we can scale, because it MEANS we CAN scale.
The focus was on the next 10 years of Ethereum, touching on where we were, where weâre at and where weâre going. Main idea: we got the fees down, now we need to get back to 2016 UX of a monolithic construction from the user perspective. Main pathways: gas auctions (you have ETH on any rollup, someone else broadcasts your transaction on the desired rollup for a fee, competition should push that fee down to negligible levels), chain prefixes (op:0x1234 and arb:0x1234 instead of 0x1234, handled at the wallet/dapp level, all you see and use is 0x1234 and everything is taken care of).
In closing, he suggested the infra is good and we should expect to see a shift in focus towards applications. Music to my ears.
(re: unicorn. On the final day, Vitalik came in a Bufficorn costume. Then removed it to reveal his secret identity as a humanoid horse holding Dogecoin. Then became human. I feel the genius in that costume is that he waddled around the conference for hours before, incognito. How do you attend a show when youâre a rockstar billionaire? Without the suit he would have been crowded all the time, but as a mascot most people seemed to blissfully ignore him.)
(2/2)
So the main stuff was good. And there was a lot more to it! The hackathons were great, you get to see what people are building. Much of it was sponsored by zkSync. There was a funny dynamic to this. First youâd hear the zkSync guys describe their newest infra directions, the possibilities it allows. Then the hackers would show up on stage⌠and after their presentations, would be assaulted by technical questions from the very same zkSync people. âWhat do you think about this potential issue? Have you thought about using specific feature X in your app? What aboutâŚâ All in good form, benevolent, but nonetheless you got the vibe of Infra Nobility questioning Application Peasants. If there ever was a need to illustrate this current reality in our industry, I think it was on display there, in those poor hackersâ confused answers.
zkSync had the best swag. They brought their eli5 books (which you might have already seen here: https://eli5.zksync.io/ ), in Japanese and English. A 200-piece puzzle box. Their mascot âZeekâ was proeminently featured. Theyâre killing it on branding, itâs stuff youâre happy to own because it looks visually pleasing, and itâs appropriate for kids too.
They had this pretty slick zkQuest website too: https://zkquest.zksync.io
Which you activated by going to their booth. It let you do a bunch of developer quests, ranging from very simple to rather involved, and covered a large spread of topics in their ecosystem. You got real ETH for finishing those quests, and the amounts were rather generous! Doing everything could net you about 0.065 ETH.
(Most people didnât. I only managed less than half, and Iâm in the top50 leaderboard.)
Oh, and finishing the first set of easier quests got you the coolest swag, a Zeek hat. It was genuinely cool to see people wandering around with theirs on, you could tell whoâs engaging deeply with the developer side of the conference. Status signals like this make for fun crowd dynamics.
The PSE research group (pse.dev) worked the same magic in their FHE panel. They demonstrated this app letting you connect with other people by tapping your NFC-enabled phone to a ring, to then let you make private groups and vote on various things anonymously. In the end everyone who participated got a NFC black ring. More subtle than a Zeek hat, it was neat to spot other ringbearers in the wild through the rest of the conference.
The entertainment was fun. Partly because there was clear confusion between the attendees and the shows. You hear stories about fans going ga-ga for Kpop, then youâre here watching tripleS get on stage and half of the crowd is getting up and walking away.
(It was just after Vitalikâs keynote. You could see the flow of the wave moving in for his talk, then moving back out. Half of the total crowd or so.)
I made it a purpose to approach this conference while revealing as little about myself as possible. I did not specify my job, my occupation, made it a point to say I was neither a developer nor an investor, didnât tell my name, never connected my Twitter or Telegram to anything. My goal in that was to see how open the culture is, to check whether reputation/identity are defacto requirements or if people are willing to engage with you regardless.
The conference scored highly on that scale. I applied to almost all side events, and almost everyone let me in. I didnât try to approach people, but several individuals came to me. Out of them only one I would qualify as a shitcoin shiller, and even then he was fairly respectful and didnât try to push beyond giving me the swag. Everyone else was insightful, loved to trade ideas and talk about what they were doing. Iâm not a particularly charismatic person, so to come in anonymous and get this amount of positive sentiment and friendliness freely extended⌠truly suggests, at least to me, the community has done a good job translating the âpermissionlessâ concept to real life.
There was a good spread of side events. Whatever it is you wanted to do. If you wanted to go deep into some technical topic, there was a side event for that in a crowded classroom somewhere. If you wanted to watch Japanese idols sing some songs about smart contracts being the next hope of humanity, there was a side event for that too. I went to everything I could, if only because as a first-time Japan tourist it made for a guide to discover the hot spots in town. It was a good reminder blockchain leans young. You could count the people with grey hair on your two hands, if not two fingers.
Subjective conclusion to subjective experience. I had a blast. In life itâs easy to nerd out and itâs easy to have fun, but it can be hard to find a crowd doing both. Iâm also flabbergasted this value is delivered essentially for free. As the EDCON tickets were given to anyone who applied near the end. There was a healthy mix of foreigners to locals, maybe about 60:40. Most of the talks were in English with some AI real-time translation in Japanese.
Strangely enough, it only reaffirmed my belief going to conferences is a tricky path. As in, you can lose sight of the ârealâ users, onchain. Free tickets to attend or no, the guy from Serbia who makes âŹ600 a month is not hopping on a flight to Tokyo anytime soon. The attendance was definitely biaised towards rich, and itâs easy to feel optimistic when youâre here either because youâre financially independent or because your well-paid job foots the bill.
Thereâs a counterpoint in that the Ethereum community goes through significant effort to diversify event locations and to make things accessible. At this point thereâs probably something somewhere anyone could attend, given a reasonable effort.
Itâs hard to stay objective when youâre having a good time. I now have so much positive bias towards several protocols based on my people encounters. Thereâs a reason many societies have strict anti-bribery laws, most of us get swayed easily; and man do I feel bribed out in the abundance of free stuff thrown my way.
But you know what? Maybe objectivity is overrated. Brings to mind a certain WEF video: âwelcome to the 2030 roadmap. I own all the things, I have some privacy, and life has never been better.â
If you ever feel down about this space and have the opportunity to attend, do yourself a favor and take the plunge.
Estimating the late game economics of blobspace. This is just a quick back of the envelope math, to get a taste of the numbers. Feel free to tweak the assumptions as you see fit. With current blobspace target of 3 blobs (1 shard):
500 tps x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 secs per year = 15800M transactions per year
Say average transaction fee is 5 cents. Which would make the median even lower, around 1-2 cents. Making even the lowest added value use cases (e.g. pay for coffee) perfectly viable. This is likely extremely conservative because if we start having serious financial applications on top of Ethereum (i.e. tokenized RWA) those fees are ridiculously low. Your broker charges you easily 5 USD per transaction. And registration of car titles, houses, etc⌠is even more expensive. So it could push the average much higher easily.
15800M tx per year x 0.05 USD per tx = 800M USD per year
Say Ethereum captures 80% of that. This assumption is based on the current burn %, which has typically floated around 80% of the tx cost. This is the trickiest assumption, I donât have a good way of estimating how much value will be captured by Ethereum from the L2 transaction fees. This is dependent on the attractiveness of data availability on Ethereum vs all other options. So feel free to tweak this value. If we assume 80%, that gives us 640M USD per year with 1 shard.
With full danksharding we will go up to 64 shards. So that would puts of the order of 40B USD per year of burn just from blobspace. That gives you an implied price of ETH of 30-35K USD just from blobspace alone. Add to that Ethereumâs proper blockspace which in the past has been able to capture a similar figure of burn and you get to a price of ETH around 50K to 100K USD. The price estimate is simply a consequence of assuming ETH cannot be absurdly deflationary, if it were it would cause a supply crunch and the price would go upwards resulting in less burn until it estabilizes around the price that gets us to close to 0 inflation.
Mind you, this is a long-term view of the roadmap. It will take us still years to deliver Danksharding and 64 shards and onboard all the use cases. But it serves to illustrate how the ETH late-game economics could look like.
Disagree with any of the numbers? Change them! The point is not so much to derive a specific figure, but to get a sense of the order of magnitudes we would be dealing with.
Word of warning to any validators out there - I recently updated all of my Linux Mint 21.3 systems to Linux Mint 22, and every one of them that had chronyd configured had it removed during the upgrade process. My one Ubuntu 22.04 server also didnât have it after upgrading to 24.04, but Iâm not certain that one ever did, so I donât know if this is par for the course for any Ubuntu-based distribution or if itâs specific to LInux Mint.
In any case, if you arenât running chronyd for timesync, I recommend it. Thereâs a CoinCashew guide for setting it up, but I recommend relaxing the frequency settings to minpoll 2
and maxpoll 10
to avoid KoD RATE messages.
The most recent Bitwise memo from Matt Hougan is pretty great. Here is the relevant section:
The last time the market melted down like this was March 12, 2020. That was the day the world realized that Covid was a big deal.
In case youâve blocked it from your memory, let me remind you: It was chaos.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average sold off 2,353 points on March 12, its worst day since 1987. Tech stocks were in free fall, as were commodities. We all thought the global economy was going to end. The president would declare a national emergency the following morning.
Among all assets, bitcoin crashed the worst, falling 37% from $7,911 to $4,971. It was a breathtaking one-day move, wiping out a yearâs worth of gains in 24 hours.
It felt as if we might never recover. The media claimed bitcoin had failed its test as a hedge asset.
And then something spectacular happened. As global leaders stepped in to stabilize the economyâcutting interest rates, printing moneyâbitcoin began to rise. A year later, it was trading at $57,332, up more than 1,000%.
In retrospect, March 12, 2020 wasnât a time to panic. It was the best buying opportunity for bitcoin in a decade.
Itâs easy to see why with the benefit of hindsight. Nothing fundamental had changed about bitcoin because of Covid. The maximum number of bitcoin that could exist (21 million) was the same on March 11 as it was on March 12. You didnât need to rely on any bank, government, or company to store wealth in bitcoin on March 11, and that was still true on March 12.
At the same time, Covid supercharged the reasons for bitcoinâs long-term rise. It showed that central banks would bail out the economy at the first sign of trouble. It demonstrated the limitations of centralized institutions. And it reminded us that the future is more online and digital.
The changes all pointed in favor of bitcoin becoming more important, not less. And in the long term, thatâs exactly what happened.
I see the same setup today.
Edit to add this:
But, in brief: Weak economic data in the U.S. on Friday sparked concerns that the global economy is slowing. This prompted a panic in Asia, where a rapid unwind of the yen carry tradeâa strategy aimed at exploiting interest-rate differentials between currenciesâpushed Japanese markets sharply lower. Things werenât helped by rising concerns over geopolitical risks in the Middle East, where Iran is threatening to attack Israel.
These events collided with idiosyncratic negative developments in the crypto market, where a large market maker (Jump Trading) ran into trouble and faced forced liquidations of large positions in ETH.
Yesterday I made an (apparently) well received lengthy comment of disorganized thoughts regarding the stock market crash that ocurred this week. I want to correct some inaccuracies or imprecise details I explained regarding the particular events in japan.
The immediate cause is the carry trade, but some corrections about it and the situation in Japan:
The first immediate reason why this happened is because while the FED and the ECB raised rates to control inflation, the BOJ kept rates at 0. This lack of coordination with other central banks, which is entirely within the rights of the BOJ as a central bank of an independent nation, but not ideal, has made a very profitable trade: borrow money in japan, sell JPY, buy USD or EUR and put that money to work in public debt or other yield bearing instrumnets, or if you prefer a riskier trade, buy stocks denominated in other currencies. So both the FED/ECB and BOJ are at fault because they kept rates high for too long and keeping rates low for too long respectively, creating a very profitable trade. Hence why central bank coordination matters in large markets.
And also bad data from other directions causing more drawdown in the market in the days prior to yesterdayâs crash:
The market had already been pricing in a slowdown in the economy, with unexpectedly low job creation in the US and less than ideal earnings from US companies, though the most concerning figure was the job data. This is likely what caused that first drawdown that brought us to 2700-2900 in the past couple days. But other markets have also been slowing down, not just the US, China too apparently, and Europe we already knew was weak economically from several different directions. Just an example of Europeâs weakness at the moment could be seen through Germanyâs GDP growth, which shows a contracting or stagnant economy, rate hikes most definitely affect this by reducing demand and making credit more expensive, and Germany already had had a weak 2022 with lots of noise in its trade balance as a result of the sanctions to Russia, though this is old news.
Some inaccuracies I layed out that I want to rectify/correct:
I said the BOJ had had near-zero or zero % interest rates for almost a decade, but itâs way more than that. The BOJ has had interest rates at zero for MOST of the past 20 years, with short periods of increase that never went above 0.5%.
Hence this trade being not just recently profitable, but historically profitable, especially because this monetary policy from the BOJ was intended to remain for as long as possible. Even now the rates are extremely low, at 0.25% despite increases. The higher the difference between the BOJ rates and the FED/ECB rates, the more profitable this trade becomes, especially because the JPY was particularly weak vs these currencies, so the profit is double, you earn from shorting JPY relative to USD or EUR and you earn from having high interest rates, so the JPY weakness came from a lot more people taking this short position in JPY. Though this was especially profitable recently.
I said that the BOJ wanted to end the carry trade. This is not necessarily true, the BOJ only wants inflation in japan and purchasing power to remain static or to increase (currently Japanâs economy has been contracting). The carry trade had been hurting the JPY causing loss of purchasing power because (one example) e.g. commercially, if their currency is lower, their exports are cheaper, but imports are more expensive. Generally this hurts citizens, so the BOJ increased rates to reduce this disparity and give a little more strength to the JPY.
Given that many traders expected the rates to not increase in any meaningful way, and especially expecting the intent to increase them from the BOJ would remain the same, many traders took recent short positions on an already weak JPY, which caused a large cascade of margin calls on JPY borrowers performing carry trades, resulting in that immediate large rise in the JPY.
I wonât get into why the Nikkei crashed harder than it ever had in history, it could be due to several factors, but I havenât done any profound research on it. It could be margin calls due to shares being collateral to loans, it could be due to bad earnings, idk, thereâs probably multiple things at play here.
Pretty good content, both yesterday and today. Some quick complementary comments.
BOJ cannot raise substantially interest rates because Japanâs debt to GDP is a ridiculous 263%. This ties their hands, their interest payments would go through the roof. Yes, their debt is issued in Yen. They could always print more but you are just trading one evil for another one.
Nikkei went down because the Yen is strengthening to reflect the new conditions. Japanâs economy depends a lot on exports. If the Yen goes up their exports are less competitive. This compresses earnings of their companies. Markets try to see into the future and price that. Plus minus any short term market turmoil, liquidations, etc⌠But this is short term noise.
The carry trade is not ending here, it has started to unwind. The yield differential is going to keep existing for quite a while as itâs related to point 1. Because of that yield differential the Yen should be weaker and devaluing over very long time horizons (decades). What we have seen is just the tip of the iceberg, the most degen of the degen levered to their tits, getting exposed when the market moves a bit against them. And having to close down positions in a disordered manner. Seems some liquidations must have happened but nothing is publicly known yet.
/rant, skip if you donât like sad stories but I need someone to hear me out for my sanity
These are the hardest days for me ever.
The other day I got liquidated on my ratio long on the scam wick. It was not a very aggressive position (actual breakeven ratio for collateral/debt was at 0.0355) but I guess it got to 90% LTV on the protocol anyway.
I did not expect the ratio to drop that much that fast and I was stubborn and did not reduce it in the coming hours when it was at 0.045.
This is where I donât know if I can ever get closure. The protocol that I have used (which I donât want to badmouth but it definitely has some design issues) leaves the difference between liquidation threshold and actual value all to the liquidator. All this to say that the guy liquidated me at barely 90% LTV and actually got a 27ETH payout on a 225 ETH position because it probably actually bounced back in the time it took for him to actually exchange the BTC for ETH.
If I had not been liquidated, that position would be worth something like 40 more ETH than I have now. Had i kept most of that 10% it would have been 25ETH. Instead, I have zero left from that position. I feel like I got robbed.
So, for me thatâs it. I am back at my initial ETH stack after all these years of working to increase it (I was at my record just over a month ago at 2x the current ETH amount) and now Iâm just left with years of stress for nothing.
I canât honestly bounce back from this, I donât have the mental strength nor the stack to risk it anymore. I know that I would probably blow the rest trying to get it back quickly.
I donât know how will I ever overcome this, I have missed real life goals and have been stressed constantly trying to increase my internet coins and now I have lost all that I had built.
I will stick around and follow the progress for Ethereum for which I truly believe in, just with a different outlook for myself and a bad memory of all these years. Hopefully I will be able to partially forgive myself for the mistakes I have made, because right now I am unable to.
Thanks r/ethfinance, you truly have been a beacon of light in all these years and that will be always a nice memory for me.
Damn, Iâm reading comments from overleveraged people after yesterdayâs events. Itâs a trip down memory lane (2018-2020), where plenty of people lost their precious eth. The biggest ethfinance loss Iâm aware of was an 8000 eth position that got halved (back then we were talking about a couple of million $ iirc).
There are no âbig lessonsâ imo. You just have to go through these events to learn, or at the very least, treat much more carefully than you think.
To those who have lost a lot yesterday (and the prior weeks), I hope you find your way out of it. Itâs not easy. At least the tech is âprovenâ right now and eth isnât going to zero.
Things to be bullish about :
Source : NBER Recession Indicators, Conference Board LEI
BONUS - Short Term
I just wanted to share a bit of a mindset change Iâve had over the last couple of years in this bear market which I discussed in response to a fellow EthFinancier at the end of yesterdayâs daily who lost a lot of ETH (but not their whole stack) to a liquidation this week. Iâd love to hear how everyone else who is quite far into this game has had their mindset change over time. I also hope it doesnât come off as pretentious. Iâm not some zen guru who is holier than thou for being grateful for what I have. Far from it. I just stress a lot less and chase that calculating my net worth dopamine hit much much less and I hope others can achieve that too.
Hey friend, I can relate. I lost about 30% of my stack to shitcoins and another 20% I have cashed out because I let my lifestyle adapt based on a price movement (last bullrun) which didnât stay around and which I didnât take anywhere near enough profits on but still had a lot of taxes to pay. I recognise that your story probably stings a lot more than mine ever did with the scam wick, but I think the important difference here is I am 2 years further down the line after taking a big L than you are.
After the my big sudden L with a couple of shitcoins which basically went to 0, I went cold turkey on the bullshit. Anything risky is out of my portfolio. No shitcoins, no leverage. Not even âblue chipâ or darling altcoins like LINK or RPL. At the end of the day theyâre all about taking on risk to get more ETH. But thatâs just a form of gambling. So all thatâs left is DCAing (which is out of the picture for me as a student) and staking. So Iâve just been comfortably holding and staking for the last two years. As time has gone on, I have come to terms with not being able to attain my more lofty price targets and bullish financial goals. Instead I have focused on what I do have. And holy fuck, Iâm only sitting on one home validator but my god, this still puts me way ahead of anyone else my age that wasnât born into the 1%. This bear market has been humbling for me in a good way. Iâm no longer trying to gamble for more ETH, so I have had time to reflect on what I have and how much freedom it can bring me, how much less it makes me stress over tough financial situations on a daily basis.
My friend, hang in there. You have not lost it all. In fact, if youâre patient and responsible, youâre right about to find what it is you have and itâs more than you think. Just give your mind time to adapt as it moves away from a dopamine filled moon chasing, ETH gambling mindset and towards a more grounded and grateful one. I hope it doesnât sound cheesy or pretentious. But losing half of my stack has been good for my wisdom, financial responsibility and mental health. Try not to stress about it all too much and just let it be. From the sounds of it youâre still in this game and I donât want to lose any more EthFinanciers to liquidations and high risk plays.
I know it is painful now, but it will get better. Youâve just got to focus on the right things.
Forgive me for my liberal use of the word gambling. You know what I mean though. Itâs taking on risk with large sums of money which really shouldnât be at so much risk.
Ethereum
$3152
0.0489
90,748 hodlers subscribed (+1)
Ignore politics,
Distrust their economics,
Store your mnemonics.
There once was a coin called ethereum
With a fanclub in neigh-on delirium
They asked Ray to flippen
But he just kept on dippinâ
Mayhaps life canât be judged by this criterium
alt. last line:
Some patience to temper your accelererium
âŚmaaan, ethereum is a stupid word to rhyme with. Impress me, ethfinance!
When discussing crypto, and comparing ETH with BTC/alts online and offline, I can easily refute all points against ETH. Ethereum is so well thought out and designed, that it seems there are literally no weak points, and you can easily debate its superiority.
But Iâm wondering about one point that I donât have the technical knowledge to easily counter. Many altcoiners say that ETH suffers from âspaghetti codeâ, and a large technical debt that is going to be a big issue going forward, either by eventually causing a huge bug and collapse of the blockchain, or by just slowing down its further development and letting other, better written coins come on top.
So Iâm asking anyone thatâs more into Ethereumâs technicals/developement than I am. Is there any truth to this claim? My answer would usually be that Ethereum was mostly accused of slow development, which would indicate prioritizing quality over speed, but this isnât concrete proof that the code is actually good quality. How would you reply to someone that claims that Ethereumâs code is bad code?
Bloomberg guy Eric B is stating that out of all the inflow into new ETFS, 2/3 is actually new flow, and 1/3 is people swapping from ETHE to low fee ones
This would be super bullishâŚ
https://x.com/Evan_ss6/status/1816882268075372756
If @EricBalchunas is correct here, this would be outrageously bullish
New ETFs have taken in $978MM in 3 days.
At 2/3 new, thatâs $652MM or $217.3MM a day
During slow summer
Big if, small sample, but even something modest like $30-60MM a day would be bullish
Regarding the recent Compound governance attack the real danger here isnât that they rugged the treasury. However much they stole there isnât enough liquidity to exit that amount. The real danger is they went from having outsized control of the governance to do something like this to defacto ownership of the governance system to do whatever else they want soon.
Iâll remind everyone that Compound doesnât use isolated lending pools. Every depositor/borrowable asset is at risk against price losses of every collateral asset. So the real risk here is that they mint a token e.g. LogrisShitCoin, seed it against a tiny amount of liquidity to give it a price while owning 100% of it, vote to enable use of that token as collateral, borrow all the assets in Compound, and let the liquidations rack up bad debt behind them.
If you have assets in Compound this is your cue to switch to an isolated lending pool strategy. We used to have more of these but some like Rari and Euler have gone the way of the dodo. Euler v2 is just around the corner but given their history Iâd probably give that a year before trying it. Otherwise I can recommend Silo, Gearbox, Ajna, or Llamalend.
Itâs really cool that I was able to traverse back one day at a time a whole year via Daily Doots without encountering a single broken link. Great job, u/Tricky_Troll and Substidoots!
Anyways, I was looking for a list of scams techniques that our community has encountered. Hereâs a short summary of the scams and how to avoid them, if even possible.
####Google Ad links
How it worked: User searched for polymarket and clicked on a google sponsored ad link (right above the actual link) directing to an identical page with a 1-character domain name difference. User then signed a permit Tx draining user of a specific token.
How to prevent:
A wallet guard or advanced-security wallet like Rabby wallet can prevent some of these kinds of attacks.
####Bridge hack
How it worked: DeFI protocol LI.FIâs L2 Bridge got hacked. Contract was drained. (User narrowly avoided hack by using good practices.)
How to prevent: Donât approve more than you need to use. Try to use official bridges when possible. Be careful with DeFi bridges.
####Persistent spear phishing attack + Homoglyph attack
How it worked: Attacker called and emailed multiple times about a known recent hack of specific account belonging to the user that got its info leaked (the leak part was true). They had the userâs account due to the recent leak. The domain was indistinguishable from the official domain, but it used an identical-looking foreign character instead of the real English character (a homoglyph). User didnât fall for it, but attack was convincing due to its persistence and professionalism.
How to prevent: Remain skeptical about calls and emails. Always be wary of ayone who tries to rush you into making hasty decisions. Always check email and website domains, though in this case that wouldnât have helped since the domain was practically indistinguishable (homoglyph). In this case, donât click on the email link. Instead, retype the link in the address bar.
####Home break-in with armed attackers
How attacked: Crypto dev with 10k followers had a home break-in with armed attackers
How to prevent: Well, this is really hard to prevent if you already have your info public due to a previous mass data leak. Everyone has already had their data leaked multiple times. If youâre rich, maybe get good security and have a throwaway wallet. Honestly, I donât really have a good way to prevent this. On the other hand, this attack is not specific to crypto.
####Address poisoning a test transaction
How it worked: User made test transaction (which is good practice) in preparation for a bigger transaction. Immediately got address-poisoned by an attacker monitoring whale addresses. User then used the poisoned address from the accountâs transaction history. (Story seems a bit fishy since the user shouldâve been an expert at avoiding common attacks.)
How to prevent: Use an address book with whitelisted addresses. Be wary of address poisoning attacks. Donât copy addresses from the transaction history.
####Liquidity Pool was hacked
How it worked: Self-explanitory. Liquidity Pool was hacked. Userâs LP wallet was drained.
How to prevent: Be careful when joining LPs. Some of them have bugs or exploits. User was able to avoid heavy damage because he kept his LP wallet separated from his main wallets.
####Warpcast frames
How it worked: Blindly trusting a mint via a Warpcast frame
How to prevent: Donât immediately assume that people on Warpcast are trustworthy. Treat it like a slightly-safer Twitter.
####Supply-side attack
How it worked: 2 separate reports for this kind of hack. In one, a hacker pulled off a BGP hijack (compromises routing protocol) of a crypto platformâs service provider. In another, hacker compromised a github account of a library the a wallet software used.
How to prevent: If youâre the end user, there is no practical way to prevent this kind of attack. It doesnât matter if itâs crypto or traditional finance, a supply-side attack can destroy you, and thereâs very little you can do about it. Stick with wallets and platforms that have good security practices to minimize the chances of this happening. Realistically, if some infrastructureâs DNS or BGP gets hijacked, even crypto security experts can get screwed.
####Fake revoke scam
How it worked: This got reported multiple times, though I donât think anyone on the sub fell for it. Basically, after a large hack, scammers would link to fake revoke_dot_cash sites hoping to trick careless users who were rushing to revoke their approvals/permits.
How to prevent: Donât fall for schemes that try to rush you into doing something and making a careless mistake. Type in website addresses manually.
In 2022, I started writing a book on crypto, that I intended to self publish to help complete beginners get a head start on the philosophy of crypto, how to get into it, how to self custody funds and how to avoid scams.
I never quite finished everything, I had a little over 30 thousand words, but I did ask for help for scam examples in this subreddit at the time.
Today I decided to publish the âidentifying and avoiding scamsâ section because the longer I wait to ever publish this, the more outdated itâll be. Itâs likely already outdated. It was still missing some examples I wanted to show, but I believe itâs already valuable enough to at least post here.
Here it is in case anyone wants to take a look: https://dac.ac/blog/identifying_and_avoiding_crypto_scams
Feedback is appreciated too, just bear in mind that not even I have given it a full re-read in a couple years.
Thereâs an acknowledgements section at the bottom giving credit to those who helped me out, but I want give a shout out to them here too:
Our boy Song A Day Mann is suing the SEC for the sake of all NFT projects lol
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i1yd58id0lcbez3x2hiqp/1-2024-07-29-Complaint.pdf
Tweet where I highlight how to present yield distributions for non-pooled stakers. Some webpages and researchers rely on things like the median across all validators over some minuscule time period, averaging these medians over time. This fails to capture the probabilistic outcome facing the solo staker. Half of the validators will never propose a block during the same day, yet half will still propose within a few months. Order statistics are instead relevant on a per-validator basis over longer time.
To check if it is raining, do not extend your hand and measure the median number of fingers impacted by raindrops every millisecond. The result will always be zero; yet it might still rain.
The figure shows how distributions vary with pool size after one year. This is a more appropriate way to communicate order statistics. The tiny vertical black line segment is the solo stakers that do not have a block proposal or sync-committee duty over a year, presented as the âall-time medianâ on sites such as Rated. The real median outcome facing solo stakers after one year is indicated by a black arrow, fairly close already to the expected yield.
The context of this discussion is the modeling assumptions in the post on maximum viable security (MVS).
The modeling and the same figure can also be found in my latest response to that post.
Ethereum came a long way:
When I joined prediction markets and decentralized social media were concepts people pointed at when discussing potential use cases of the network
Today both concepts are implemented (polymarket, Farcaster) and show how it all makes sense. The teams that implemented them were not the ones which people initially thought would but thatâs the beauty of decentralization
Both of these are early and have lots of growth ahead but weâre at a stage where weâre beyond imagining with live apps in production. Weâve came a long way so far
ETH is an asset I feel comfy holding for the next 20 years+
I can not say the same about any other crypto asset. The ones that are mostly VC hyped are the ones that get dumped at the end of the cycle so I would certainly not recommend to hold these for the long run if your objective is to take home profit
How would Blackrock (or anyone else) actually implement tokenization of real world assets?
Theyâd need to maintain some centralized control even if KYC whitelisting wasnât required, just to reverse transactions of lost or stolen coins. North Korea wouldnât actually get to be part owner in Lockheed Martin because they stole some shares and âcode is lawâ. Thatâs not too big a deal because RWAs will always require trust in the issuer anyway, and Blackrock is of course more trustworthy and regulated than crypto startups like Celsius were.
I donât think Blackrock would be comfortable using existing L2s for the token smart contract. They wouldnât control the governance and any breaking changes could be catastrophic with billions (or trillions?) of dollars worth of assets at stake representing claims to real world things. I know technically this governance argument could apply to Ethereum itself, but I think Ethereum governance will always be more reliable since validators with ETH at stake are the ultimate approvers of any changes. L2s will either be centralized or have changes decided by cash grab governance tokens. If Blackrock or an industry consortium designed their own specialized and controlled L2 then wouldnât we lose most of the benefits of the openness of DeFi?
At some point itâs just easier to just build an API with specifications for transferring ownership between accounts when a trade has happened. They could even have an address / signed transaction scheme similar to blockchains so that any exchange could instant settle a trade, but that would still just be tradfi.
Iâve sold my ETH, but the possibility of RWAs coming to Ethereum gives me some FOMO because the opportunity could be absolutely massive. Iâm trying to visualize how it would actually work in a way that accrues value to ETH.
I suspect BlackRock, Nasdaq, etc⌠will run their own permissioned L2s. I.e. you cannot execute orders directly, you wonât have the private keys and a wallet to create your orders directly. Your experience as a user might be exactly the same as it is today, through your broker app. These L2s will be the underlying infrastructure where the trades are executed.
Whatâs the advantage for them? Running their trading on their systems already works and is likely cheaper in terms of infra, so why bother? The answer is composability. They will be all interconnected by Ethereum, acting as the infrastructure backbone for finance. Moving assets from one L2 to another is trivial, immediate, auditable, cryptographically secure and you know the assets are truly there. Finance works currently with D+1, D+2 settlement. During that 1 or 2 days, your assets are in the limbo. And that settlement is costly, in terms of resources and delays. Sprinkle these with a bit of zk magic, based rollups, pre-confirmations⌠and you will have global instant settlement.
For trivial stuff, like small trading, they give us the perception of immediate settlement. Your MSFT stock appears directly in your brokerage account when you click buy, but itâs not really there yet. But for big money, you cannot really trust the money is there until itâs settled. The financial world was on the brink of collapse during the 2008 crisis as nobody could trust anybody elseâs balance sheets.
Have a watch to this podcast if you havenât: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUMGYEKIiGw
Daily Holesky:
I reported something causing Nethermind to crash and it got fixed. In more exciting news, erigon has otter art now.
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Special guest Ryan McPeck joins us from Metamask.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereum
$3247.62
0.0487
90,668 hodlers subscribed (+2)
Ether ten year old,
Outperform the bitcoins sold,
A story still told.
So, during that little dip, I said to myself, Solanaâs very likely going to outperform ETH because everyoneâs retarded.
I went to hit the buy button, but my body started convulsing and I threw up in my mouth. I physically could not do it.
I bought more ETH instead.
If youâre a Rocketpool operator and havenât yet, please initialise your voting power as described here: https://medium.com/rocket-pool/rocket-pool-protocol-dao-governance-a3c3e92904e0
If you donât care about participating in governance, you should still initialise your voting power and then delegate it to someone from the delegates listed here: https://delegates.rocketpool.net/
You can always override your delegateâs decision on a particular vote if you desire.
This setup just takes two minutes and ensures the on-chain voting system can fully launch soon (theyâre waiting for 50% initialised voting power).
As per a suggestion from u/stablecoin a few weeks ago (yes Iâm slow to get onto things), us mods would like to put together a default list of flairs for users to choose from. Stablecoin suggested that this may help in discussions by providing context into the perspective through which someone is probably coming from when we are having discussions. For example, if you see a permabull flair, then maybe their hopium should be taken with a grain of salt or with a long timeframe in mind. Or, if someone has the developer or tradfi flair, then they may have some extra credibility when discussing those topics.
So, anyway, please help us brainstorm a list and we will get them on the default flair options!
Starting off, this is me borrowing from what u/stablecoin put:
DeFi Power User
Home Staker
Value Extractor/Mercenary
Trader
SocialFi & NFTs Enthusiast
Here for the societal revolution
Please brainstorm away! Cheers!
I have continued the âeducational battleâ/âfight the misinformation campaignâ on /r/investing. Itâs really amazing how poorly Bitcoiners understand their own investment.
Here I explain that Bitcoin is, in fact, not unstoppable. On the contrary, it will stop itself in the year 2038 due to a time overflow bug. The fix to this requires a hard fork. The issue is that they have pinned themselves into a corner by making hard forks taboo. A hard fork is also what you need to change the issuance schedule of Bitcoin, if you fix this bug it would be implicit recognition that 21M is not a feature of Bitcoin code, but of social consensus and it can be changed through social consensus.
When you have been in this space long enough you understand that people that approached Bitcoin over a decade ago through an ideological lens, are not Bitcoiners anymore. Those that approached this space with the intent of removing the monopoly of money from the State and giving back the rights that governments had been eroding for decades from their citizens, have left and moved on to Ethereum. And likely this will remain the case for as long as Ethereum keeps fighting for those principles through math.
Ethereumâs development resembles much more the discovery process of science, Ethereum is not the way it is because of capricious choices. Itâs the way it is because the constraints you have to work with are so binding that it cannot be in many other ways if you want to maintain security, decentralization, credible neutrality, censorship resistance, scale to the serve the world needs, inherit those security properties on the upper layers of the financial world, etcâŚ
These properties alone have lead us to PoS, EIP-1559 burn mechanism, the roll-up centric roadmap. These choices are a result of these constraints, and there really is very little leeway around it, as far as we know.
In much the same way Einsteinâs theory of relativity is not the way it is because scientists decided those were the equations. Itâs the simplest solution that respects relativity, respects the equivalence principle, reproduces Newtonâs gravity in the low energy/low speed regimes, reproduces the gravitational curvature of light, the precession of perihelion of Mercury. Those requirements are binding enough to give you Einsteinâs field equations.
There are some higher order details that can be tuned in both General Relativity and Ethereum, but the core principles become rather constrained to the point there is a single theory that meets all those in the case of General Relativity. Itâs unclear to me yet if the case is as constraining for Ethereum, but we are progressively getting there as we understand better this problem space.
I made a post about blockchain resilience to bugs in a separate thread between PoW and PoS:
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e8a62w/pow_vs_pos_and_safety_vs_resilience_why_ethereum/
Itâs quite long, so here are just the Preface and Summary sections. Use the link above if you want to read the rest of it.
##Preface
I originally wrote this piece after Ethereum lost finality back in May 2023 twice when both the Prysm and Teku minority clients encountered bugs. Around then, Vitalik also dicussed the possibility and concerns for staking bailouts in his âDonât overload Ethereumâs consensusâ article if a catatrophic bug were to happen.
Iâm updating and reposting this in light of 2 recent events:
This is a reminder that there is a reason Ethereum updates are slow and methodical and use multiple testnets.
It only takes one unlucky bug to cause catastrophic damage to the blockchain and cause a mass-slashing event where the majority of stakers will lose their Ether. We got lucky back in 2023 because the bugs were in minority clients and it only halted finality. A bug affecting the majority of clients might not happen now or even in the next decade, but there may be one day where another catastrophic event as damaging as the 2016 DAO hack causes the chain to split again.
##Summary
Historically, successful PoW attacks have been numerous, but successful PoS attacks are virtually non-existent.
History has proven that PoS consensus is a more secure alternative to PoW consensus against Sybil attacks like the 51% attack. However, this is at the cost of PoS being less resilient than PoW for disaster recovery. This is because PoW by design allows for miners to re-attack/reorg the blockchain to revert mistakes.
While client bugs are exceptionally rare, they do occur, and most PoS blockchains have no on-chain method to revert past finality. Itâs important to avoid reorgs in the first place because any transations that finalize off-chain through DEXs, bridges, and CEXs are often irreversible even after the blockchain is reverted.
Similar to the Blockchain Trilemma where there are trade offs between Security, Decentralization, and ScalabilityâResilience is also a tradeoff of Security.
Even the 2 biggest blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum (when it was still using PoW), have encountered 51% attacks. Bitcoin (in 2010 and 2013) and PoW Ethereum (in 2016 and 2016) had both been successfully 51% attacked twice each in order to fix catastrophic bugs and issues. It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to accomplish this in reasonable time under PoS Ethereum and most other decentralized PoS blockchains today.
Past finality, it usually requires a DAO-hack like chain split or bailout to undo a catastrophe: i.e. through Layer 0 community consensus and off-chain governance.
ETHE rotating FYI
The NAV price of an ETF corrects at the end of the day, but can deviate a bit during trading hours because of supply and demand forces.
Nobody likes the high ETHE fees, but it might be worth waiting a couple weeks before switching to a different ETH ETF as the ETHE sell pressure early on may push it below NAV during the day. If you sell ETHE and immediately buy another ETH ETF, you may end up with slightly less ETH value than you had before.
This was evidenced during the first week or so for GBTC when the BTC ETFs started trading. Immense sell pressure during the day took GBTC below NAV and strong buy pressure for the popular BTC ETFs may even have pushed them slightly above NAV during trading hours. Those that quickly sold GBTC and immediately rebought another BTC ETF early on often lost a bit of their value.
Best of luck, may the ETH ETFs help take us to the promised land.
Hereâs my understanding of how it works. Letâs say you have 1000 shares of ETHE purchases at $20 each, and these shares represent 10 ETH for easy math.
Since settlement for shares is T+1 and the âRecord Dateâ is today the 18th at 4:00 PM, any shares purchased before today will be included in the spin off to the mini ETF. Now if you fall in that camp this is what will happen.
You still own 1000 shares of ETHE but they only represent 9 ETH now, so your cost basis on those ETHE shares is now $18/share. You will also own (on a later date to be determined, the âDistribution Dateâ) 1000 shares of mini-ETH representing 1 ETH, or a $2/share cost basis.
If you sell your ETHE shares today or beyond, you will still receive your 1000 shares of mini-ETH because of the T+1 settlement. This also means that if you buy ETHE today, you will not receive any mini-ETH shares.
So, the 10% âdiscountâ is not really a discount and is pricing in the new NAV, meaning itâs basically at fair value.
Iâm a longtime follower who primarily lurks the daily since finding Ethereum in 2017. I want to share my story about my massive wake-up call on the importance of account security and backups after becoming complacent due to my time spent in the space. You never think it could happen to youâŚ
For 3 weeks, I believed I lost access to all my crypto savings and cold wallet / validator withdrawal address. I travel extended periods for work and have some large life expenses right now, so I brought my Ledger with me. Not the first time Iâve travelled with it, but it is the first time I had a bag stolen. I was frustrated but knew I had my seed phrase stored and could recover when I returned home.
Iâve recently bought my first house and moved in with my partner. In the confusion of moving 2 apartments into one, my recovery sheet and other old 2017 financial records were missing. I was feeling pretty despondent knowing that my carelessness and non-urgency about prepping for disaster recovery were starting to bite me in the ass. I fully believed that I lost access to my cold savings and minipools.
Itâs not like I couldnât afford my mortgage, but all hope I had for early financial independence were gone. That planned 2 year maternity leave, funded by ETH, for my pregnant partner wasnât financially feasible anymore.
I did eventually find my ratty old college notebook with my Ledger seed phrase scrawled in the margins from 2017 when I originally set it up. The euphoria and relief on that day was enormous. I got lucky, I restored everything and have it all secured now. But I feel the need to share my near miss with others so that no one has to feel that rollercoaster of emotion going forward. I made plenty of mistakes to put myself in this situation.
My advice learnt from this; Setup an annual recovery method testing reminder. If you have a trusted partner, teach them about how to access things in the event you pass away. Keep your position records up to date, it also makes me less inclined to toss ETH into various flavours of the month that inevitably crash and burn. Pull the trigger on that Eversteel and set it up properly.
I made my mistakes but got lucky. Dont let complacency and one moment of misfortune ruin multiple years of making the right decision to invest and hold Ether.
https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1815316383233925498
ETH is 10 years old today!
The ether ICO started July 22, 2014. Back then ETH was sold on Bitcoin at a rate of 2,000 ETH per 1 BTCâtotally permissionless, no VCs, no vesting.
Today 1 BTC buys less than 20 ETH. Few assets have outperformed BTC over 10 years; even fewer have outperformed by 100x.
ETH is blockspace currency. 4.3M ETH have been burned to pay for gas since EIP-1559. Many more millions of ETH will be burned for blobs.
Through staking ETH provides $100B of economic security for Ethereum, 10x more than Bitcoin. ETH is also pristine collateral for defi and restaking, unlocking economic bandwidth in size for the internet of value.
Tomorrow ETH spot ETFs start trading in the US. ETH is now widely recognised as a digital commodity. The institutional journey is starting.
And for those who know what the emojis mean, ETH is đŚđ :)
The clock started today my friends.
The trifecta will burn from today forward of: (1) 1559/merge tokenomics, (2) growth of L2 usage/competition and the ETH ecosystem and dapp creation (enabled by cheaper transaction fees and a growing developer base), and now (3) tradfi and retirement account access (ETFs).
Cry all youâd like about the ratio bleed until now. I remember 2019 well. We bled until the eventual lows in the fall even through the optimism and fake breakout of BTC and crypto in the first half of the year. If you were there, you know how things went. If you werenât, open the charts.
I shook my head often over this year as I see ratio complainers or people impatient for a golden bull. Thereâs never been a crypto bull run in history short of a 3+ year bear market. Iâm not saying it canât happen from here forward, but until it happens, we should exercise caution with our impatience.
Iâm one of the people who thought weâd ratio gain throughout this year. I was wrong. But, zooming out, and overall, the ratio has held stronger and better than anyone could have imagined in 2018-20. Now the games begin as we have the banks and tradfi financially incentivized to explain the benefits of ETH, as the ecosystem itself continues to improve itself and expand/grow. Make no mistake, this will still take some time to percolate. Enjoy the ride.
Happy ETF launch day. Our first future bull with all the pieces align. It only took 7 Lubins and I still pray nightly for Vitalik to not turn off the master node.
Hereâs something thatâs been bothering me for years. As Ethereum continues to gain adoption, I cannot see a future where Ethereum is left to be a neutral settlement layer without having itâs fair share of battles.
How will large financial institutions excercise control over Ethereum? As centralized stablecoins increase in size and gain adoption, and large TradFi institutions accumulate and stake ETH, the economic and social power will shift towards them and away from retail.
How does the community ensure development of Ethereum doesnât get co-opted by these institutions?
Centralized Stablecoin liquidity and support is a huge social attack vector. While I doubt the ETH devs and researchers will care about that, the social pressure from the community may become to loud to ignore if coordinated propaganda is used.
Large TradFi institutions may also begin funding client teams or even create new clients themselves. Iâve already seen questions of conflict of interests raised proposed ERCs and upgrade proposals. I can only imagine what would happen as larger financial players enter the scene.
Creating troll armies are easier than ever and can quickly flood social forums with coordinated messaging. These social attacks would be the most impactful as they would cause the most confusion in discussions. The discord from bad faith actors could put a stranglehold on development and research.
Anyway, thatâs my half baked doom and gloom. Havenât been posting here since reddit got rid of the 3rd party mobile apps but Iâm trying to get used to the Reddit app now.
Iâm DELIGHTED to share this Ethereum Spot ETF POAP with everyone. Not just because of the collectible, but because of all of the years it took for us to get to this place. Congratulations frens! POAP mint requires a $3 donation to AestusRelay
https://checkout.poap.xyz/176266
Congratulations everyone :)
Donât mind me, just bumping u/stablecoinâs post from the end of yesterdayâs daily.
https://juicebox.money/@defend-roman-storm
stop larping about freedom and make it happen. donate to Roman Storm to keep him out of jail and ensure the freedoms of censorship resistance transactions.
LifelongHODL then asked:
Who is Roman Storm?
Tricky:
A Tornado Cash developer.
So basically a man who is being prosecuted for spreading what has previously been defined by the US supreme court as free speech. Should an arms manufacturer go to prison for a mass shooting? No, that would be ridiculous. So why should he go to prison for creating a piece of open source software which allows me to stop people connecting my public facing wallet to my cold storage just because North Korea also uses the same tool? Surprise surprise, North Korea also uses the internet. But I donât see the US government charging web 2 companies or Tim Berners Lee for that.
This is a huge double standard and we will be living in a very dark future indeed if the US government wins its case against the Tornado Cash developers.
Edit: Also, u/stablecoin is there an update or something? I see a recent uptick in donations.
Edit 2: Update: https://x.com/FreeAlexeyRoman/status/1815466170948219153
Theyâre running low on funds for the upcoming trial. Their fees are $500K/month 𤯠reason being itâs a novel case and they really need as robust of a defence as possible.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereim
$3085.73
0.054
Day 666 since the merge.
290tps
Markets wind the clock,
Use cases filling the block,
An EthCC talk.
Life cycle of an ETH holder:
Source : my poor decisions
the real cycle is:
rinse and repeat
The year is 2098. After years of building the network, Eth finally touches $5k for 0.08 seconds before being sold into oblivion. The poap is deployed, but weâre all dead anyway. If you go to a cemetery and listen closely, you can hear the muffled cheers of dead Ethereans celebrating that they were right the whole time.
Guys, Iâm kinda freaking out, if someone could help me understand whatâs happening, Iâd be very thankful.
I have a Compound position that I intend(ed?) to leave running for the long term, managed with Defi Saver, on the Base Layer 2 network. It supplies cbETH and boosts by borrowing ETH, buying more cbETH and supplying that etc.
So I wake up today to find that my APY, which last I saw was 15%, is now at -40%. This caught me by surprise, as you can imagine. The reason has to do with the price of borrowing ETH, which went up from 1% to around 8%.
I had a CDP position back when it blew up, in 2019 if Iâm not mistaken, so at first I thought some kind of problem like that, but I come here and no one seems to be talking about anything related to this, no crisis, no liquidity problem on ETH or anything like that.
So can anyone shed some light on this? Should I liquidate this position right now, or is this a temporary thing that will normalize soon?
Hey, good ser, so a person from defi saver here, as u/TheCryptosAndBloods mentioned below (thanks for the tag once again!).
These kinds of spikes in borrowing rates are common in all pool-based money market protocols (i.e. protocols such as Aave, Compound, Morpho Blue) where rates constantly change based on current overall utilisation of the used pool.
I wouldnât panic about it and would rather wait it out for a day or two to see how the rates change further. Usually thereâll be new (ETH) depositors quickly that have noticed the high available APY for supplying, which is usually considered one of the lower risk opportunities for yield on ETH when it comes to tier 1 protocols such as these.
Hope that clarifies things?
And p.s. the net APY specifically is calculated based on your position balance and how it would change in one year from now based on current supply & borrow APYs, if that wasnât clear.
Excellent tweet from [@materkel](https://x.com/materkel):
Iâm kind of fed up with all the negativity around #Ethereum and Rollups when the whole ecosystem is shipping out of its mind right now. People who look at what we have now and still think Ethereum should have scaled L1 first⌠are you all out of your minds?
Let me tell you what approximately would have happened if we scaled L1: - Maybe 50-100 TPS now on L1⌠wow⌠Iâm sure all the skeptics would have jumped on Ethereum L1 and done all their stuff there. - Rollups that were previously aligned with Ethereum would most definitely have chosen alternative solutions for DA to meaningfully scale (which is now possible using Ethereum as DA). - We would not have hundreds of Rollup teams contributing back to the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem. - Minimal marketing for the Ethereum ecosystem⌠L2s would just end up doing their own thing, because why should they stay if Ethereum chose to abandon them in the most critical of times?
Ethereum would have essentially pushed the most valuable allies away despite funding a lot of the ZK and rollup research in the past (even 5+ years ago).
We now get so much more back from L2s, and with PeerDAS and full proto-Danksharding on the horizon, there will be no argument left for why those rollups should even think about doing their âown thingâ or choosing a different DA. I mean, look at what is happening with $TIA⌠Ethereum is basically eating their lunch right now.
We now have: - Multiple Consensus and Execution Client Teams making Ethereum the most decentralized public Blockchain to ever exist by a large margin. AFAIK no other Blockchain even has 2 meaningfully adopted clients⌠Ethereum has 7 clients with >10% distribution, thatâs just incredible if you think about it - Multiple Rollups that are among the most active chains right now - Both @base and @arbitrum breaking their own records every few days, attracting billions in TVL and millions of users, shipping out of their minds, having meaningful traction, and a growing app ecosystem - Multiple more theme-focused, Ethereum-aligned L2s like e.g. @Immutable onboarding hundreds of game studios and eventually millions of gamers - Account abstraction wallets that wouldnât have been easily possible on L1 (at least not so soon) via @Immutable passport or @infinex_app offering sponsored meta transactions - The cheapest L1 gas fees weâve probably ever had. Introducing blobs with EIP-4844 made room for more meaningful transactions. At peak times, L2s made up for up to ~30% of the Ethereum blockspace (this most likely still is temporary and also bought us some time to give L1 some love)
I have no doubt in my mind that what Ethereum did has led to the absolute best outcome for the protocol we could have hoped for in the last 3-4 years. Of course, L1 could have used some love, but that critique is on such a high level that it feels like weâre just coping because the price is not catching up with fundamentals.
If you had told me where Ethereum would be right now 3-4 years ago, I couldnât have imagined a more solid position for it to be in.
Now we can discuss what should be next and that going further down the Rollup path might be a bad idea, or that we should focus on fixing fragmentation, etc., and that delaying this and that in favor of some L1 love is a good idea. Iâm totally into that, but please stop with all the coping when we basically just shipped an upgrade that gave @base and other Rollups <1 cent fees ~4 months agoâŚ
#Ethereum and its whole ecosystem is still winning, and nothing can stop it from winning even more, as the whole behemoth that is thousands of ecosystem teams all shipping in parallel is just getting started.
(* These arenât my words, but I didnât feel like doing a massive quote block to share it! -phiz)
I know Iâve been woefully non-reporting my ARB delegate updates the last month, but for those who want to check voting records I did make a reporting thread a few months ago if people want to follow for the links to all my votes + rationale
https://forum.arb.seamonkey.tech/t/bob-rossi-delegate-communication-thread/23653
Beyond basic duties, notable projects Iâve taken on recently. Which if people want to discuss / voice opinions about Iâm all ears.
Also donât forget ARB is still running the LTIPP incentives so there are likely some good projects out there to earn some extra APY, or simply getting rewarded for using. Here is the list of them all if your curious - Powerhouse Connect (arbgrants.com). May I suggest checking out the âHâ section as well, although forgive me as iâve been busy and a little behind on what I need to update (I will be this weekend)
On Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Altcoins
Many people might have noticed that Iâm one of the most vehemently anti-Bitcoin people in here, and also very often diss Altcoins. They are not wrong. So I will attempt to explain why thereâs a world of difference between a Bitcoin Maxi and an Ethereum Maxi.
Itâs strange, because I was really, really late on Ethereum, and really into Bitcoin. Not only was I completely oblivious to its existence until 2017, I even initially dismissed it as another altcoin thatâs going to zero. Up until 2018, I was essentially a Bitcoin Maxi. After a few short months or reading up on several coins, getting heavily rekt in the 2018 crash betting on NANO, and educating myself about crypto, I had completely converter to Ethereum. And I left Bitcoin completely behind.
Why is that?
Greshamâs law states that bad money drives out good money. The good money that is driven out is hoarded, so if it is scarce, it increases in value. Many people understand this as âCrypto will always outperform Fiat because itâs better moneyâ. But thereâs another angle to it. In my opinion, this applies even more strongly within the highly liquid and interconnected crypto ecosystem, sucking value out of every single Altcoin and giving it to the leading crypto, which is the one that has the most âmoneynessâ. During this process, the leading crypto builds even more status as money, and altcoins are dismissed as bad investments at best or scams at worst.
Every cycle, once the speculative frenzy dies out, and it eventually does, every single crypto ends up being valued exactly as a company stock: according to the current and future profits it can bring to the holder, taking into account the potential for its future growth. For most altcoins, that means following an asymptote to zero, since they donât really have any profits.
Why has Ether escaped this fate for a couple of cycles? After all, Ethereum is constantly regarded as one of the most undervalued altcoins not just by Ethereans (of course we would think that) but even by neutral Altcoiners. âEthereum can only dump after good newsâ is a meme in most crypto subreddits. But somehow Etherum persists. In my opinion, this can be explained because even though in the minds of the majority Ethereum is still an altcoin, itâs again valued as a stock: according to its profits. Itâs seen as undervalued precicely because a lot of speculative value has evaporated due to it having been around for a couple of cycles. The fact that itâs not only profitable, but the only profitable altcoin (OK thereâs also BNB and maybe TRON with some light profits) is the reason it is not following every single other crypto to oblivion.
Every single crypto⌠except one. The one that in the minds of the majority is the best money. The one that every single cycle, without fail, will be the safe haven thatâs not going to zero, because it has a hard support of rabid acolytes that see it as the best money on Earth. Bitcoin.
So, sometime during Ethereumâs development, I think some very smart people realized that this is the game. As a result, Ether is the only crypto that has worked and fought to be seen as a better money. Ultrasound money might or might not be the best attempt to communicate that to the general public, but in my opinion is very apt.
Ethereum is an absolutely unique altcoin in this regard, because from the moment it was created, its scope and capabilities exceeded Bitcoinâs by such a huge margin, that it could legitimately claim to be the money of the crypto ecosystem, superseding Bitcoin.
Many of you think thereâs room for both BTC and ETH on the ecosystem. Sure, thereâs room for both, if BTC is the money and ETH keeps being valued as a stock. If BTC reaches $1M and ETH reaches $12K.
But if you want a $150K Ether, then you just canât have Bitcoin being seen as the better money. And if Bitcoin ceases to be seen as the better money, itâs not even going to be in the top 20 on Coinmarketcap.
So, when you people try to be moderate with Bitcoin Maxis in order to drive a civilized discussion you miss the fact that this is impossible. The smart Maxis know that Ethereum is a mortal threat to Bitcoin. Thereâs no civilized discussion that can happen in light of this fact. They can only dismiss Ethereum as the worst shitcoin, because acknowledging it might lead some moderate Bitcoiners or people that are on the fence to jump ship. And when youâve build a personal brand and an entire livelihood on Bitcoin being the best money, you might not be able to do the same. But even though you might know that Ethereum is objectively better money, you do have some very strong weapons to fight back. The early Bitcoiners are some of the wealthiest people in the ecosystem. They can help launch âEthereum killersâ and pump them 2000%. They can spread FUD. They can go on podcasts and shit on Ethereum non-stop. The vitriol and dismissal Iâve seen against Ethereum from smug Maxis is not even close to other altcoins.
Because they realize the fact that you can have many cryptocurrencies and a thriving ecosystem, but not all of them can be money. Crypto needs a King. And so far, this Maxi strategy is working, because it keeps Bitcoinâs network effect intact and damages Ethereumâs. And the network effect is the only thing that gives money its value.
So, I am an Ethereum Maxi. But hereâs the difference: I am not an Ethereum Maxi because I canât move to Bitcoin. I am late enough to be neither rich or have buit a business around Ethereum. Iâm a Maxi because Ethereum is just better. So, unlike Bitcoin Maxis, I donât really have to resort to arguments found at the lowest levels of Grahamâs argument pyramid. I can make intelligent points, refute Maxiâs stupid arguments, and be an Ethereum Maxi myself. Itâs easy, because there not even a conflict. The world benefits along with my bags, which I think is pretty rare.
So be a Maxi, because what Ethereum is trying to do is neither easy nor certain. We are coming for the King, and we definitely best not miss.
ACDE 191 Recap posted by ralexstokes in the ETH R&D Discord:
ACDE 191 Recap
Started with Pectra updates
** Note: devnet-1 will reflect the current spec of EIP-7702
Then turned to discuss EIP-7212
Next, we discussed a proposal to add events to the predeploy system contracts for cross-layer communication with EIP-7002 and EIP-7251. Consensus was that this change makes sense and the corresponding contracts will be updated.
Then, we had a call to deactivate EIP-158 to simplify the effects of deploying EIP-7702 and the Verkle migration. In light of the latest updates to 7702 we no longer need this proposal and decided to ignore it.
And to wrap the call, we had a discussion around making progress on other protocol improvements like history expiry and changes to the blob mempool to streamline usage of blobs by users like rollups. We jumped across various concerns here so check the call for the details. In short, there was a call for more regular updates on EIP-4444âs progress, and a call out to various things both rollups and clients can do to more intelligently handle the pipeline from blob producer to blob inclusion on-chain.
Reminder: Goerli has been deprecated and so clients will (or have already!) dropped support for this testnet.
200 sustained tp/s and still only 1-2gwei gas fees
we are severely over capacity
the infrastructure currently in place is able to support so many more users
it will destroy all shred of doubt whether or not blockchain can scale to support the entire world as it was intended to
the next bull run will be like nothing weâve ever seen
and the etfs going live might just be the linchpin
cba for the flippening
I want to see the great supply crunch as the economic beast awakens and is firing on all cylinders
on to the next cycle of new tech â> new users get interested â> eventually current tech limits are hit â> users face frustration and lose interest â> technology improves and readies itself for round of user adoption â> repeat
Itâs safe to say weâve at least x100 our user capacity since the last big bull run
now let the users come back and see what happens
Iâll never forget this time I was waiting at a bar for my btc transactions to be confirmed, had to wait over an hour to get the needed confirmations, PoW RNG be damned. The UX experience is crazy much better compared to back then.
At some point, weâre all going to realize this technology isnât going anywhere and is not a ponzi, or at least, not any more than all other fiat is.
Except that this is money by the people, for the people.
How did you find your way to ethfinance?
My story was that I was a semi active user on r/silverbugs and r/pmsforsale. Around 2016 I noticed more people accepting âcryptoâ as payment. I remember someone selling about $50 worth of silver for something like 10 eth. Once the boom of winter 2017 happened a few friends brought crypto back up and we all bought the top (btc, eth, ltc). Thatâs when I found ethtrader and became a lurker. Once ethtrader dissolved into whatever the hell it is now, I followed dcinvestor, jt and a few others here where I still am someone active.
Adding to the staking posts below (or above if youâre in Australia) - I have also been onboarded to NodeSet recently, and my first testnet validator went live today and is chugging away just fine. The Gravita project looks good, but Constellation is the one I have my eye on - basically staking for and on behalf of others via RocketPool, taking a cut of their earnings for running the node - hopefully coming by next year.
Iâve also just signed up for the Stakers Union, and have been having fun with Heroglyphs the last few weeks, and there is Etherguardians coming up soon too.
This has been the best and most interesting few months for a home staker like me, at least since the excitement of Genesis - itâs great to see community efforts to encourage and reward home staking that are supported by the ecosystem as a whole . A big shout out to u/superphiz for his ceaseless efforts, as always.
A few months ago I was onboarded as an operator with nodeset. I have been running a few thousand genesis validators alongside a dozen or so other techno-acolytes that coalesced in the rocketpool discord, so I threw my hat in as I thought I had some qualifying experience in and around the college ball level.
Well, the first validator I have spun up using their hyperdrive software stack goes live in about an hour on holesky, and I am looking forward to spinning many up on mainnet when the opprotunity to do so presents itself. The software stack is straight forward and does require some registering on their website to finish things off, but overall the process was painless and left me feeling good about the whole thing.
There already are some lucky operators attesting on mainnet permitting the existence of Gravita Protocolâs LST, gravETH which is a part of the Stakewise Vault ecosystem. I havenât kept up with stakewise recently, but I did lose some eth trading their token like, a year or more ago. Not a knock on them or anything, I am just a bad trader.
Gravita does have a points program running (they call them marks) and while I donât know too much about their roadmap, I do think the space/time dilation art style and theme is kickass. Itâs hard to launch an LST in this already crowded market, but I wanna take a minute to remind everyone that every additional LST out there helps decentralize the entire network a little bit more. Which is overall good.
Diva/Nektar staking development is coming along, as is Lidoâs CSM which is also currently operating on testnet with some early permissioned adopters. I am on this list, but have not yet gotten around to spinning up another VM. Will try to find the time today or tomorrow but several big-ass tree limbs came down in a storm yesterday that I have to bust out the chainsaw to deal with unexpectedlyâŚand as much as I enjoy a hard-days work outdoorsâŚI am doing all of this keyboard clacking and button clicking in an attempt to not have to do as much manual labor.
Vaya con dios, amigos.
Staking survey data just dropped on ethstaker. The most surprising stat for me is that 77% are staking 60-100% of their ETH. I know us solo stakers are in it for the long haul, but damn that is a lot higher than I imagined.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
View weekly roundup on Reddit âSpecial guest Brendan Asselstine joins us from PoolTogether, a protocol to win while saving.
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ĂhâŚthereum?
90,560 hodlers suhhâŚubscribed (+4)
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0.0544
Bridge in and bridge out,
An habit we must ditch out,
Intents will switch out.
Itâs 3am and Gary hasnât been home yet. Heâs sweating, gently waxing his red stapler for the last time over a bottle of Jim Beam. Elizabeth Warren said he could only keep the stapler, which he stole from the strange man in the basement, if he destroyed crypto. After glossing over the TPS reports on his desk in a bourbon-daze, Gary picks up the phone. A smokey Eldritch voice answers.
âItâs Gary,â Gary says, wondering if any other color of stapler will ever fill the vessel of his soul like the red one has. âDrop the investigations against ETH.â
He pours himself and his red stapler a snifter of whisky; then he simply weeps.
(Which is to say: https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-to-drop-ethereum-investigation-says-consensys)
[edit] these amendments are in committee still and likely will be tough for Brad to get his way this time. we will know more when the bill is finalized. [/edit]
Brad Sherman just cucked the USA again by effectively banning P2P crypto amending shit last minute into a must pass defense bill.
Every node connects to Russia, every transaction must be doxed. There is no escaping this hell until the tech is so innocuous and private it is impossible to regulate.
https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1801228173851394204
đ¨NEW: California Democrat @BradSherman filed an amendment with the House Rules Committee for the following to be included in the must-pass NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) bill:
- The @USTreasury Secretary would have âclear authority to prohibit digital asset trading platforms and transaction facilitators under U.S. jurisdiction from transacting with cryptocurrency addresses that are known to be, or could reasonably be known to be, in Russia.â
- @FinCENnews (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) would be able to require U.S. taxpayers engaged in a transaction with a value greater than $10K of cryptocurrency offshore to file FinCEN Form 114 (FBAR).
https://honeypot.is/?address=0xd52456e8a33718f72ba38469539c082eb761f78b
POPCAT (POPCAT)
Honeypot DetectedRun the fuck away.
execution reverted: TransferHelper: TRANSFER_FROM_FAILED
The taxes on this token are extremely high. You will get significantly less from a trade than expected, be careful!
A very high amount of users can not sell their tokens. This is likely a honeypot.
all_snipers_honeypot
From twitter:
People donât understand why markets pump. How the flow of money works. The first tier of money goes to top tier stocks and government bonds. Then to high level private equity private credit etc .. Then it flows to higher risk bonds. Then to higher risk stocksâŚto top tier corporate bonds. Lower tier private equity⌠alternative investments like bitcoin. ThenâŚ.
After everything is filled ⌠money flows to high high risk like Altcoins etc and alt stocks penny stocks what not. The reason no Altcoin or even Ethereum has hit a new ATH or broken or even come close to breaking 2021 highs is because there isnât money to make it that far.
You need liquidity events in market to reach the far depths of risk. That far depth gets touched once everything else is full. Similar to money flowing bucket to bucket. The liquidity event that happened in 2008 and 2020 has not happened yet. Liquidity events are lower rates, or stimulus. Without it you cannot have high risk products pump. In January 2024 market was pricing in a huge liquidity event for 2024. 7 rate cuts. This is why everything hit 3 year highs. This along with bitcoin etf got us a new high on BTC and saw many alts climb several 500-1000% from 2022 lows. That liquidity event never materialized. We went from 7 cuts, to 3 cuts to a shock 1 cut now for 2024. The only way for market to go back up to all time highs accross the board is for liquidity event. Unfortunately if we get a shock event like Covid , or something else black swan that forces the Fed to cut rates quicker or a hard recession itâs usually too late. Market will crash ahead of it. That crash you buy and ride it back up into the liquidity event.
Fed has decided they donât want to cut aggressively. They going to cut in December this year and then next year. This will possibly result in a recession or maybe we just see soft landing and gradual cuts over next 2/3 years. I. That scenario market will slowly grind up over next 2-3 years and we might see altcoin highs during that time. Market is forward looking so it can always change. If we approach a recession worse than expected and say u employment ticks up to 5% then Fed will cut but by then we will see a big dump in market on recession or stagflation fears.
Itâs always a tough battle. The last 15 years of bull markets were on the back of liquidity events. This is the first time we have no stimulus. Itâs a diff ball game. Itâs a much tougher grind market for high risk assets in such scenario. Thatâs why all money is flowing to easy tech stocks that are giving better returns than crypto. Nobody wants to risk anything because there is no liquidity event. Ofcourse things can change but thatâs the state of the market.
Remember that Solana chain everyone was so worried about a couple of months ago?
Solana currently has a 4.24% TVL market share over defi. Ethereum has a 60.8% market share. Include L2s and itâs closing on 70%. Include EVM chains and sidechains and itâs over 90%.
A part of me used to wish for eth to remain king on all fronts, including memecoins.
My worst case scenario used to be âeven if everything fails, thereâll still be demand for Ethereum to be the internetâs casino, which will require eth for gas (more demand) and this usage will burn eth (less supply). So even in the worst case, price goes up over timeâ.
But memecoins have migrated to Solana. Is it a bad thing? Well, not anymore.
Given the recent surge of L2s, the tx cost drops, the ETF, and the institutional demand for tokenisation, the worst case scenario is far better than it used to be. The complete vision seems to be happening, green and scalable. Ethereum becoming the worldâs settlement layer isnât a pipe dream anymore, itâs becoming a realistic scenario.
Today solana is alleviating Ethereum from scam, grifters, and hopefully regulator attention. Itâs taking the garbage that didnât require decentralization to function out of our ecosystem.
Ethereum is taking everything else.
In case you didnât see it yesterday:
Meanwhile, information sources do business as usual: Coindesk, Cointelegraph and The Block ignore Ethereum-related news or turn them into âblockchain newsâ, Crypto Twitter and YouTube shill the shaky and declining Solana, BTC cultists and Solana moonboys repeat outdated propaganda against Ethereum over and over.
Why? Because they know. They are worried.
Farmerâs POV: $ZK takeaways
My personal insights and experience from farming $ZK airdrop.
⢠Variety of strategies.
It really paid off using different strategies and although medium and small wallets basically got nothing, it was a good bet to try it out. Focusing on more than 1 big quality account was really smart and thatâs one of my main takeaways: have 5ish big juicy legit farmor accounts with a deeply rich history and previous qualifications and go at it. It also allows for easier and more pleasant farming because itâs not that tedious to repeat.
⢠Giving up small sybilling accounts.
ZKsync had 9M+ wallets and only ~696k qualified. It makes no sense to continue using low-value and quality wallets while spending oneâs time and energy. Farmers are not going away, thus youâd still need to stand out in the sea of hopeful airdrop chasers.
⢠Farming can be ze wei - great risk/reward.
Airdrop farming can be profitable due to great R/R. You have a capped downside of how much money you will burn on gas fees, NFTs, and what not and you have quite an unlimited upside. Yes, zksync had a cap at 100k points but that would have been more than enough to guarantee an insane upside.
⢠Sybilling is a must.
Due to the upside being capped sometimes, we have to hedge ourselves or, like in the case with $eigen, lower value accounts are rewarded for being too low of a value lol. For those reasons, itâs important not to whale projects unless thereâs a transparent structure of unlimited upside that aims clearly to not forego whales.
⢠Overview.
Iâve heard and been told that itâs too late to start farming yada yada but a decent chunk of $zk considering that I started late with no prior knowledge is a great accomplishment. Airdrop farming was and still is one of the most lucrative ways to gain the edge. However, I would argue that the edge lies in whaling some metrics or in the ability to access those resources to pump up your stats, and lesser accounts without that capital are unable to compete, therefore missing out on the great R/R play which in turn makes it worthwhile for lower value portfolios. Time and effort is no longer enough not just to outcompete but to even have a decent chunk of making it.
⢠$ZK price speculation.
At current premarket prices of $0.3-0.35ish, it would open at $7ish bn FDV given the 21bn of the total supply. To me, that would be a hold. As always I expect a dump at the open but being realistic even if I am not that skillful to be one of the first to dump, I wonât be able to buy back lower. Historically, it has also been true to wait for a pump within days or a week, sometimes up to 16ish days or in rare cases for up to 1.5 months. With those things in mind, I can see a dump, a post-dump pump and Iâm personally hoping for a cope pump - you know, that type of pump that TIA had. Ideally, Iâd get ~$0.7ish+ and exit.
What are your takeaways?
p.s. this better edited article + more articles, including recent ones on how to get on farcaster and tips for the newcomers are available on my paragraph
I just played around with the zksync dao tool / delegation portal and the search is⌠not optimal. I wanted to add an ENS after not having one when setting up the profile and I did, but you canât find my or any profile via ENS. I think starknet used the same tool (Tally) as well I thought it didnât work because starknet has different addresses. You also canât search for usernames, it seems to be not working by default.
So a quick summary for tomorrow in case youâre not dumping on day1:
u/haurog: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/haurog.eth or copy paste this address: 0x1c0AcCc24e1549125b5b3c14D999D3a496Afbdb1
u/_weboftrust: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x7aaba482329d001d9ab7120f0546b6760ae3fe19 or copy paste this address 0x7AAbA482329D001D9AB7120f0546B6760AE3FE19
u/benido2030: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x05429d5113c06405398f613eaad632f5a00b43e1 or copy paste this address 0x05429D5113c06405398F613EAAD632F5A00B43E1
I guess searching for the address is the easiest since I expect claiming and delegating to be one process. You probably can skip delegating and then go to the profile and delegate manually, but doing it in the claiming process is more comfyâŚ
Iâll repost tomorrow morning as well!
zkGM - reposting from yesterday re: delegation in zksync
I just played around with the zksync dao tool / delegation portal and the search is⌠not optimal. I wanted to add an ENS after not having one when setting up the profile and I did, but you canât find my or any profile via ENS. I think starknet used the same tool (Tally) as well I thought it didnât work because starknet has different addresses. You also canât search for usernames, it seems to be not working by default.
So a quick summary for tomorrow in case youâre not dumping on day1:
⢠u/haurog: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/haurog.eth or copy paste this address: 0x1c0AcCc24e1549125b5b3c14D999D3a496Afbdb1
⢠u/_weboftrust: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x7aaba482329d001d9ab7120f0546b6760ae3fe19 or copy paste this address 0x7AAbA482329D001D9AB7120f0546B6760AE3FE19
⢠u/benido2030: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x05429d5113c06405398f613eaad632f5a00b43e1 or copy paste this address 0x05429D5113c06405398F613EAAD632F5A00B43E1
I guess searching for the address is the easiest since I expect claiming and delegating to be one process. You probably can skip delegating and then go to the profile and delegate manually, but doing it in the claiming process is more comfy.
Claim is still not working for me; I changed to custom RPC, but Rabby is not responding. However, there is some hope on a related topic. Every time I used to look at DAO governance, I would see the same faces as delegates with only token-based governance, which never motivated me to contribute or participate. Everything changed when Optimism governance was announced (plus few other things).
I just looked at the ZKsync delegate page. The Ethfinance delegate combined has a voting power of more than 10M ZKsync (Benido + haurog + Liberosist + smol amount delegate to me as well). This might be a fraction compared to Syncswap or Olimpio, but the point of my rambling is to highlight a change, a positive change that I wanted to see. New faces, views, opinions, and ideas- not just projects representing themselves as delegates, but also community members. Even though they are invested directly, they care about the ecosystem and want to drive it in a positive direction.
Haurog DMâd me on Farcaster to create a profile as they could not see my profile there, and time was running out. Benido took this initiative to form a sort of delegation council emerging from Ethfinance. To me, I donât see any financial benefits they might be getting for doing this apart from their belief in helping, improving, and contributing to this evolving ecosystem.
So, my dudes, thank you, and I look forward to reading more from you outside of this forum.
ETHEREUM SURVIVES THE SEC.
Today weâre happy to announce a major win for Ethereum developers, technology providers, and industry participants: the Enforcement Division of the SEC has notified us that it is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0.
This means that the SEC will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities transactions.
If you plan to go to devcon this year, the first opportunity to get a ticket just opened: https://devcon.org/en/tickets/
It is a raffle. You bid on tickets. The 20 highest bids get a ticket and then 184 are raffled among all the participants. Minimum bid is 0.08 ETH to participate. The raffle will be open until July 9th. On July 9th they will open discount ticket to which you can apply and plead your case on why you are an important part of the ethereum space. Discount tickets have the same price as the raffle minimum bid (299).Onjuly16ththenormalticketsgoonsalewhichcostdouble(599).
Lighthouse devs released a blog post about attestation misses. It goes into a lot of details on the path from attestation creation until it is included in a block and discusses all the possible ways an attestation might not get included due to failures at any of the intermediate steps. It also shows how to analyze the origin of possible misses in the logs and their grafana dashboard. This part is obviously focused on how to do it with lighthouse. All in all it is a great read.
The take home message is that quite often attestation misses are outside of the users control. To minimize attestation misses the user can make sure that their clock is synced, has opened the necessary ports to get enough peers and have a hardware setup which does not have a bottleneck (SSD, CPU and bandwidth) to make sure to get attestations out as efficiently as possible.
https://lighthouse-blog.sigmaprime.io/attestation-analysis.html
Special guest Chris, Jean-Paul, and Interweaver join us from Influence, a space-strategy MMO born from humanityâs desperate quest for survival.
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Ethereum
$3755.67
90,496 hodlers subscribed (no change)
0.0548
One you canât ignore,
Gas burns like never before,
Still Ether candour.
Todayâs the day boys and girl, Iâm wearing my finest t shirt and shorts (least amount of stains) wife asked me whatâs the occasion.
I told her future of France is happening she rolled her eyes, but I know you understand.
Cool as a cuecombone đť
Now just in case people are starting to speculate about other crypto currencies getting an ETF. Only Bitcoin and Eth have embarked on this journey. There were several milestones that took years to achieve.
Namely CFTC Futures and Futures ETF. For CFTC Futures there needs to be a sufficiently liquid market of a certain size before that is going to happen. I honestly dont see any coin following Eth quickly at this stage.
Other coins do not have that nor is there any application or similar filed for this. So even if we assume an expedited process for the next coin. We wont see it any time soon imo. If FIT21 gets approved in the Senate there will be finally clear rules to see what constitutes a security and what a commodity in the crypto space. Decentralization IS important and the entire point of crypto. The market being to dense to realize this doesnt change the fact that this is the reason why crypto exists and why it is valuable in the first place.
I am really happy to see america moving towards clear rules when it comes to crypto. Being a crypto security should also not be a death sentence because if the SEC does their job their will be a clear path ahead for exchanges and security tokens to be traded.
Removing uncertainty from crypto is a great step. It will help the market mature and also will kill many needless CT discussions.
Next fight is uniswap legal precedent there will be very very bullish for ethereum and defi. Defi could finally become part and replace parts of traditional finance forever.
Ethereum is the future.
I stumbled upon hackedwalletrecovery.com, which helps you recover funds if your wallet has been hacked and a drainer is observing your wallet. It helps you build a flashbots bundle which moves ETH from a non-compromised wallet to the hacked wallet and then moves the desired token out of the hacked wallet address. This happens all in one bundle which is sent to the flashbots RPC to make sure it never hits the mem pool. The wallet drainer monitoring the wallet cannot steal your funds as they do not see the transactions and it will happen in one big transaction anyway.
I learned about this project from a presentation by Austin Griffith who works at the Ethereum Foundation. This is a project from the BuildGuidl which does the âspeedrun ethereumâ course. I personally have not tested it as I do not have a hacked wallet available, but I clicked around a bit and it overall makes sense even though some steps leave me a bit puzzled. It is a very limited tool, but maybe it will help someone recover some of their funds in case of a hack.
So, what will ETF flows be? Obviously significantly less than the BTC ones IMO but letâs look at what happened in Canada with their ETFs:
CI Galaxy:
Purpose Investmets:
Evolve ETFs:
3iq:
Iâd say 20-30% is the benchmark, though many of these Canadian funds are staking which the new US ones will not be.
EDIT: These are CURRENT values, each page has charts but Iâm too lazy to see spikes at launch
Some sobering thoughts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx4pwSXycck
James Seyffart makes a pretty good case for why he thinks ETH ETF inflows will amount to around 20% of Bitcoin inflows. His argument: Market cap is around 1/3 so base case would be 33%, but you lose more with putting your ETH into an ETF compared to Bitcoin.
Makes sense to me. Bitcoin was made to put in an ETF and itâs core to its value proposition. The entire ETF narrative just fits Bitcoin better. On the day of the Blackrock BTC filing, the ratio was 0.065. Given that I think ETFs are more bullish for Bitcoin than ETH, I think the ratio should even out around 0.058-0.061 now to fully price in ETHâs ETF.
For ETH to improve on the ratio and take the spotlight away from Bitcoin it needs something more, something that is core to Ethereum to take off. This could be real adoption by institutions like with the BUIDL funds, a new mania like with ICOâs or NFTs or the breakout consumer dAPP that we have been waiting so long for. Perhaps the improved regulatory climate is the catalyst for this, I hope it is. If such an event does happen, the ETH ETF will allow a pathway for a lot of net inflows making a flippening more possible. So it could end up getting more inflows eventually, I just think that the mere existence of an ETH ETF is not sufficient to take significant market share from Bitcoin.
That being said. I am extremely happy that ETH got itâs own ETF, mainly so it does not start falling even further behind Bitcoin in the zeitgeist. Itâs back to âBitcoin, ETH and the restâ instead of âBitcoin and the restâ and that is extremely bullish
Had a first round interview at one the biggest crypto media companies in the space on May 6th. And was asked what my most controversial take was. I said I think the ETH ETF would be approved by the end of the summer. The interviewer strongly disagreed and said there were not any signs pointing towards that. They decided to pass on me after the second interview. Oh well I will just keep building.
In other news I have been collecting a bunch of data to start to look into the correlation between price/price change/market cap/market cap change and social media/GitHub metics. My first shallow dive into some of the data showed a Pearson correlation of 0.72 (which is pretty damn good) between market cap and twitter followers. After dropping meme coins (often have bought/fake followers), CEX tokens (they have a bunch of followers because they are well known, but most tokens are not valuable), and pure BNB ecosystem tokens (the theory here is that Chinese users probably donât use crypto Twitter much, which I would assume are a large percentage of BNB buyers and users). Going to test the correlation going back historically next, and see how this changes during bear/bull. Will also look to see if month over month changes in market cap are correlated with month over month Twitter follower count change. Finally I want to use all this to build a index / watch list for coins that are gaining momentum, tying in trends that indicate a coin in the say top 200 to top 500 by market cap is on a trajectory to the top 100 by MC. My theory is two fold, one is network effects, the more followers a page has the more it gets shown to other users via the algo and second coins are the ultimate marketing tool as buyers are likely to talk about a project when they buy, trying to get others to buy, others will follow the project to learn more before potentially buying then repeating the process. Plus most projects get more useful with more users and liquidity/TVL.
Any feedback or thought ideas are much appreciated.
Hey ethfinanciers, I want to warn about a very sophisticated scam that I was targeted with (unsuccessfully, of course).
If you get contacted about some kind of job at a very legit looking (at first glance) project called UNI APT, it is A SCAM.
Seems obvious to some of us, but it is a rather elaborate and above all expensive social engineering scam.
If you want more details about it check this tweet: https://x.com/iknowgoodthings/status/1790737051219845562
Every single person claiming to be a member of this whole UniAPT or UNI APT project is a SCAMMER, so please please beware. Their twitter account is @uniaptio, PLEASE BE VIGILANT AND STAY SAFE OUT THERE.
This is not the first scam of its kind, there are plenty like this, so be careful, doubt everything they say, DO NOT DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM RANDOM ENTITIES ONLINE and NEVER give deeply personal information to them.
https://x.com/AdrianoFeria/status/1794364149012545665
institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals will look past the maxi narratives when considering which assets to allocate within crypto.
Here is what they will find out:
- The 21M cap is not unconditional. Issuance is a subsidy, and BTC still relies heavily on it (within the last year, issuance subsidy exceeded 99% at times).
- ETH has a superior S2F, and while net issuance fluctuates, it has averaged a NEGATIVE 0.19% since the merge went live.
- ETH has managed to provide over 4% native yield while being deflationary over the same period.
- ETHâs PoS has eliminated structural selling related to miners as well as ESG concerns.
- BTCâs glorified scaling solution, the LN, has been a complete disaster. It suffers from horrible UX limitations and nuances, and is bottlenecked by L1. For this reason, it has failed to gain any meaningful traction over its existence (only 0.025% of circulating BTC is operating under the LN).
- The rollup-centric model on ETH has been extremely successful, with L2s seeing explosive growth in adoption (currently processing about 10 times ETHâs L1 capacity).
- L2 scaling on ETH is so sound that the most disruptive and dominant company in the crypto space, Coinbase, launched its own L2 (Base). They have also made official statements about using it as their primary network for on-chain services and products.
- Stablecoins are a killer app and will see faster and wider mass adoption ahead of all other use cases in crypto. The most reputable and regulated USD stablecoin, USDC, operates primarily on ETH.
- BlackRock has just launched their own USD stablecoin exclusively on ETH.
- ETH has had 100% network uptime. Not even BTC has been able to achieve this.
- There are no major upgrades ahead for ETH. Prior to the merge, execution risk was a real factor, but that is no longer true.
- ETH ETFs have simultaneously provided a financial instrument friendly to institutions and cleared all regulatory uncertainty and FUD about ETH. ETH is officially a commodity.
These are not opinions. Drop your biases and look at reality for what it is.
Every time I venture out into other crypto subreddits I am always disappointed. They are either ghost towns or filled with mostly bots/shills.
I was worried that this community would fall apart when ethfinance forked from ethtrader. Instead, what happed is all the knowledgeable and engaged people came here. While ethtrader became completely filled with bots trying to earn money on donuts. Forking ethfinance also had the side effect of purging most of the bots/shills that ethtrader had accumulated over the years, so the signal to noise ratio actually improved too.
While I hope our community will continue to grow, the fact that it smaller and less known has actually been a big blessing, since the bots and shills go to the largest subreddits to chase the largest audience. With ethfinance being outside the top 25 crypto subreddits, we manage to fly under the radar of many bots/shills. The main downside is that it makes it harder for ETH newbies to find good information about ethereum, but it also preserves our unique culture here.
TLDR - Thanks for being such a great community ETHFinanciers! Crypto and ethereum wouldnât be the same without the high quality daily discussions here.
Ok reading several posts on the daily insinuating that the latest Mt Gox news are FUD.
Itâs not FUD, repayments are coming soon. Itâs been a decade long saga but itâs close to certain that itâs about to end.
Cash repayments already happened, Iâm one of the creditors and I received cash about a month ago. Iâm sure others here are creditors too.
I wrote in here about the rehabilitation plan 3 years ago, which is the point at which it had been determined what to do with the remaining fiat, bitcoin and bitcoin cash.
Deadline to vote on the plan was then extended two years to make sure all creditors could fill all required documents, I wrote about this in ethfinance too.
Then in April 2023, I wrote here that the deadline was most likely not going to be extended this time. This was confirmed a few days later, no deadline extension, Iâve informed Ethfinance too.
Cash repayment started in December 2023 with a fuckup that later got solved, Iwas sharing the info too.
Then in February 2024 I told you guys that I believed the bitcoin repayment was likely to happen in 2024, and everything points at this.
Today $2.9B of bitcoin belonging to creditors and expected to be paid this years were moved to a new wallet. This is in preparation to repayments that are likely to start soon.
Close to 1% of all bitcoin in existence are expected to be reenter circulation.
This will clearly have an effect on the market, and thereâs going to be some btc selling. But I expect a significant portion to be reallocated to eth. Even if itâs far from statistically significant, a post in the Mt Gox insolvency subreddit today asked members if they intended to diversify in eth, most popular opinions were yes.
Regardless of price action, this post is just meant to say that itâs not a rumor, itâs not FUD, Mt Gox repayments are most likely happening within a few months.
I donât normally write huge blog posts, but I am very passionate about getting EOF and PeerDas, among other upgrades included in an Ethereum upgrade sooner rather than later. I started writing, and it became a blog post.
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d1yce1/why_we_should_ship_eof_peerdas_and_other_upgrades/
Part 1 gives educational background of how Ethereum upgrades work and gives definitions.
Part 2 gives my long form reasons of why I believe that Pectra should either be a large upgrade âdubbed Mega Pectra, or split into Pectra 1 and Pectra 2 to make testing easier. Either way, I think EOF and PeerDas should be included before a year+ upgrade that will see the database structure of Ethereum transition from Merkle Trees to Verkle Trees.
Hi everyone!
Thanks to Tricky_Troll for pointing out an error on kollit.ai . the issue was related to some math issue, which stemmed from my parallel development of a new and improved website for Kollit. Anyways i am like 95% sure itâs fixed now :D
Despite the lack of recent updates (i think the last update was more than a month ago), Iâve been thrilled to see so many of you continuing to use Kollit. Itâs the best feeling ever!
Since you guys brought it up organically, I want to give you a sneak peek of the new website: hereâs a preview. Iâm working hard with another developer to bring you the best version of Kollit possible.
once itâs ready, Iâll be looking for around 10-20 alpha testers. If youâre interested in being part of this testing group and providing feedback on the new platform, please leave a comment below or send me a DM.
Wishing you all optimal trading!
It looks like Bidenâs crypto about-face is complete and they go back hat-in-hand to the crypto industry they spent a whole presidential cycle persecuting: https://www.theblock.co/post/297504/biden-campaign-shifts-crypto-stance-engages-crypto-industry-presidential-elections-2024
If I was a crypto lobbyist though, I would expect way more from the administration than an eth ETF approval before I open my purse for the Dems (albeit it was a welcome first step): (1) approval (not just pocket veto) of the SAB-121 resolution, (2) Gary Gensler at least announcing that eth is a commodity and dropping their most egregious anti-crypto lawsuits, if not retiring for family reasons :-), (3) Elizabeth Warren not just sulking in the background but eating dirt in public or, even better, Biden appointing one of the high profile pro-crypto Dem politicians in her place as the political crypto policy head honcho. She had three and a half years to do damage, that should be enough. In fact, (4) a presidential speech praising the crypto industry as a beacon of American innovation and worthy of support, enumerating such concrete measures would not be amiss :-). Cheap talk is cheap.
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It is a tale as old as time. In the days of yore it was the exploitation of serfs and the indentured servitude of the layman for the few pulling the strings at the top. Nowadays it is venture capitalists going public once market saturation is reached and multinational corporations squeezing the last drop of profits through shrinkflation and enshittification so that they can buy up all of the family homes in western nations.
It was said, that one day the tables would turn. Some thought that was the communist revolution in Russia, but we all know how that turned out. Other more shrewd folks have been saying that the wealth flippening has yet to come and is almost upon us. The time is nigh. I can feel it in my loins.
From 2009 onwards, for the first time in history, the little guy could get access to new financial primitives from the very beginning. Following Bitcoinâs unprecedented rise, there was a second opportunity with the Ethereum ICO which launched in 2014. Open to all, the gateway into a new financial system had opened. Sometime in 2017, I somehow stumbled my way onboard this movement and thatâs despite being a broke university student. But that didnât matter. Thatâs just how big this opportunity was. Shortly afterwards, the long rumoured flippening was supposedly on the table â no, not the ETH/BTC flippening â the flippening which the lower and middle class have been waiting for since the dawn of time. The flippening of financial opportunity.
For once, the incumbent, antiquated systems designed to entrench wealth amongst the upper class was holding them back from the latest opportunity. The gatekeepers of TradFi tasked with keeping the everyday man âsafeâ from the best wealth building opportunities now found themselves gatekeeping the rich and powerful out of the biggest opportunity yet. At first they laughed. Such an opportunity couldnât be anything other than a bubble! But the bubble showed no signs of popping. Soon, they realised that they had to fight it or else it would become entrenched on its own, outside of the existing system. Knowing better, the grassroots community building out this new paradigm did not yield. With every line of code and every battle fought in court, their new system became stronger, more resilient.
And so here we are. Sitting on the precipice of this long rumoured flippening. The cycle is nearly complete. Upon realising the inevitable game theory of a superior technology in an adversarial and capitalist world, the Finks of the world made their intentions clear and the gatekeepers could no longer stand in their way. The future is tokenised and the future is public. The big gates are opening. For the first time in human history, the people have had the opportunity to front run the establishment. The established has become the exit liquidity. The institutions are coming.
It has been an honour being on this ride with you, gents. Not only has this opportunity been once in a lifetime, it has been once in an aeon. Gentlemen is imminent.
Lol just kidding. Larry, you can pry my ETH from my cold, dead hands. This solo staker ainât going anywhere. If youâre lucky you can have my staking rewards for a pretty penny.
Okay you debbie downers, hereâs some small bits of optimism:
Article highlighting growing tokenization push by TradFi, this time in the form of a pilot project involving some TradFi heavyweights (bonus - in article, note the image referring to DTCCâs Ethereum network⌠every time I read about tokenization, it always seems to be riding on Ethereumâs rails)
Yesterday, BTC broke out of its downward trend since March, and is also just over its 50 day SMA. Yes yes, I know many here love to shit on TA, and Bitcoin for that matter, but a rising tide lifts all boats, and this could be telling us that the worst of the pain is over (which isnât to say we wonât go sideways for months). Concurrent ATHâs on the S&P and Nasdaq donât hurt, either.
Look, ETH ETF denial is priced in. And not only that, Iâd go as far as to say that if the main reason for denial is some bullshit like âweak correlation between spot and futuresâ, ETHâs price is likely to see a nice bounce. And even if the SEC goes the âitâs a securityâ route, Iâm still not even convinced that itâll be bad for price. After all, the market has already been digesting this possibility for months, and there will at least be less uncertainty, something markets loathe. Anecdotally, back in January 2017 when the the Winklevii BTC spot ETF got rejected (right around halving time, not unlike now), BTC briefly spiked down before rocketing up throughout the balance of the year. Iâm not saying itâs an exact analog, but ratherâit always seems darkest before dawn.
Now quit yer bitchin!
Not sure if this was posted here already, maybe I didnât spot it between all the whining.
Coinbase published a research piece about their Ethereum outlook.
tl;dr: theyâre as bullish as ever
We think that ETH may yet have the potential to surprise to the upside in the coming months. ETH does not appear to have major sources of supply side overhangs such as token unlocks or miner sell pressure. To the contrary, both staking and L2 growth have proven to be meaningful and growing sinks of ETH liquidity. ETHâs position as the center of DeFi is also unlikely to be displaced in our view due to the widespread adoption of the EVM and its L2 innovations.
That said, the importance of potential spot US ETH ETFs cannot be understated. We think the market may be underestimating the timing and odds of a potential approval, which leaves room for surprises to the upside. In the interim, we believe the structural demand drivers for ETH as well as the technological innovations within its ecosystem will enable it to continue straddling across multiple narratives
In the interest of keeping you updated on the Tornado Cash case in the Netherlands against Alexey Pertsev, his legal team filed an appeal with the local court of appeals right away, on the day of the verdict. It is not yet clear whether the appeal has been approved, but the good news is, according to some sources Alexey is free on bail for the time being.
Since Iâm not a lawyer I didnât feel qualified to objectively judge the courtâs verdict, I like to leave these things to subject matter experts. Thankfully, today a local Dutch law firm published an article (in English!) analysing the verdict and concluding: âFrom my perspective, the judgment fails to address these questions adequately, indicating that it is ripe for appeal.â
Hereâs what I found most interesting:
The role of Pertsev in Tornado Cash
The court asserts that Pertsev, alongside co-suspects Roman Storm and Roman Semenovâwho are under prosecution in the USâare the creators of Tornado Cash. They engineered the system to function autonomously and immutably. Since the systemâs basic operations were unalterable from the outset, the court holds these individuals are and remain accountable for its functionality.
In December 2020, the governance of Tornado Cash was transferred to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), meaning its governance structure was by then overseen by the community. However, the court concludes that the foundational operations of the system were unchangeable and, therefore, the original setup by the founders remains a critical factor.
Co-perpetration Concerns
The courtâs reasoning on co-perpetration seems flawed to me. It suggests that Tornado Cash, letâs call it a digital platform or system, independently enacted the acts of hiding and concealing cryptocurrency with a criminal origin. This implies that a system can engage in criminal behaviour on its ownâan unusual and potentially problematic interpretation, as it shifts the criminal conduct itself from individuals to systems. [âŚ] This could have significant implications for software developers if tools are perceived as independently capable of criminal actions, making the developers responsible for the toolâs âactionsâ.
Questioning criminal intent
Another aspect open to criticism is how the court motivates Pertsevâs criminal intent. [âŚ] The courtâs assumption that the general knowledge that mixers could be used for criminal activities was enough to establish Pertsevâs intent for these specific transactions is questionable.
The court argues it is common knowledge that mixers are used by criminals, citing a report by the Financial Action Task Force and the classification by the Financial Intelligence Unit in The Netherlands dated August 15, 2017, that the use of a mixer is a money laundering typology. [âŚ] Does foreseeing that your software might be used by criminals make you criminal liable for their actions? And what did Pertsev know at that moment in time, as the assumed common knowledge in 2019 is highly debatable? The case file might indicate Pertsev was aware of criminal usage of Tornado Cash at some point, but this does not necessarily relate to his actions at the time he set up the system or to the timing of the specific transactions.
I believe the judgment for Pertsevâs criminal intent was poorly motivated, and the legal intricacies remain underexplored. An appeal will be necessary to address these issues thoroughly.
As someone in a legal field in a different EU country (Sweden), I cant say anything about dutch law necessarily.
But if our system is any indication of their system, it wouldnt at all be surprising if the lowest courts is a coinflip of whether theyre reasonable and rational or batshit.
And it also would surprise me if their lower courts (in this case and in general) defer to the âcommon senseâ conclusion simply because this case is so novel, and leave it to higher courts to delve into the nuances if they deem it reasonable to do so.
Stupid as it may sound a lower court (so less authority, lowest hierarchy, little to none precedential power) may well decide to err on the side of simplicity because it recognises the complicated nature of a novel legal question is above their paygrade and they could throw a wrench in the gears by trying to âproperlyâ deal with the complication.
At the same time a universal legal principle is that for criminal law the courts should side on the benefit of the defendant, where the law isnt entirely clear. So its not like Iâm happy with the situation.
Also I will say that a reason for why the lower courts being tolerated for what they are here in sweden is because we have an automatic right to appeal (it cant be denied) to the second level courts. So a criminal case will always be tried at a second instance if the defendant wants it to.
I cant find online if the dutch have a similar systems, but if they do it would also go a long way to explain why a lower court may be less hesitant to be more stringent to a defendant.
The dutch also seem to have a more professionalist second instance of a tribunal of 3 judges, so the risk of the important questions simply being ignored is significantly lesser than in a trial with a single arbiter.
Two charts to show to anyone claiming that Ethereumâs PoS is more centralised than Bitcoinâs PoW:
https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1791471483526463924
Bitcoin PoW centralization versus Ethereum PoS decentralization
So Ethereum processes lots of user transactions. Those transactions are submited to many places, but commonly the public mempool that is maintained by all the Ethereum nodes. Validators propose new blocks to add to the blockchain, and they are the party that gets to decide which transactions, and in which order, those new blocks contain. If they do this themself, it is called âlocal block buildingâ; but in practice, most validators use a piece of software called MEV-Boost (more on why itâs called that shortly) to receive built blocks from external builders, who pay the validator for the privilege of selecting the blockâs contents. Those blocks are passed to the validator via a âneutralâ third party called a relay.
Now, many of those user transactions âleave money on the tableâ in one form or another, and clever third parties can take that money, which we call MEV, for themselves. They usually do that with the use of bots.
A common (and relevant here) example of MEV would be sandwiching, in which a user submits a transaction for a dex trade, but with a relatively large slippage set, which means that the market can move by that percentage from where the user saw it, and the trade is still valid. A MEV bot that is able to see that transaction before it goes through (which is easy if it was submitted to the public mempool) can come along and frontrun/backrun the transaction, by taking a large amount of money (often VERY large) and making their own trade on the dex, moving the price in a direction disadvantageous to the victim, then letting the victimâs trade go through (losing some money due to slippage), and then going back in with the backrun tx and recovering all their starting money, plus some extra that came from the victimâs slippage.
It is of extreme importance (for the MEVer) that that sequence of three transactions (frontrun, victim trade, backrun) happen in exactly that order, without any other transactions in between, because potentially those other transactions might also trade on the same dex, and might do the âwrongâ thing versus what the MEVer wanted, i.e. trading in the opposite direction from the victim transaction, which would result in the MEVer losing money instead of the victim. So these transactions are submitted in âbundlesâ by the MEV bot to the external block builder; the block builder promises to keep those bundles in exactly that order and without anything in between. That allows the MEV exploit to successfully take the money the victim transaction âleft on the tableâ. It is essential that the MEVer can trust the builder to leave their bundles alone.
An excellent question at this juncture: the validator has to sign off on blocks that they submit. Why couldnât the validator see all of the transactions in the block and mess with the MEV transactions themself? The answer is that MEV-Boost is designed such that the relay just passes the validator the header of the block, which is the thing that needs signing. The validator has no idea whatâs in the block, or if it is even valid, when they sign it. This is a fairly trusting thing to do, but the ecosystem has accepted it. Back in 2023, as soon as the validator signed the header, the relay would send the rest of the contents of the block to the validator (who could now see the MEV transactions, but has already signed that version of the block, and so cannot change the block, at risk of getting slashed), and the validator would broadcast the block body to the network, and everything is hunky dory.
So thatâs all necessary context for what happened. These smart brothers from MIT realized that in some cases, itâs actually worth it to get slashed. They set up their own validators, got some bot code ready to go, and waited.
When it was their turn to propose a block, they received the block header from the relay via MEV-Boost, signed it and sent it back, and were sent the block body (with all the transactions) like usual. But instead of broadcasting that block, they looked at the transactions, and saw that there were some juicy MEV sandwiches going on inside there. (In fact, they had made sure of that, by putting their own âvictimâ transactions into the public mempool to bait the sandwich bot, once they knew they were going to be proposing.) And their bot unbundled those MEV sandwiches and did the thing the MEVers assumed no one could do: they inserted their own dex transaction in between the sandwich frontrun and backrun, going the âwrong wayâ. They did this in such a way that essentially all of the sandwich botâs money, which again can be a LARGE amount, and in this case was around $25M, was eaten up by their inserted transaction. Basically the MEVer got MEVâd.
After very quickly doing all this, they took their modified block, signed that block, and broadcast it to the network as quickly as possible. Now there were two versions of the block floating around, one the original that they had to sign in order to see the block transactions, and one the modified version that they also had to sign. The modified block won (they made sure of this via another clever trick outside the scope of this post). Of course, signing two blocks is grounds for getting slashed on Ethereum, and their validator did indeed get slashed, losing the usual 1 Eth.
But the brothers were able to take $25M of the MEVersâ money, which they thought was completely safe, but due to this loophole in the way MEV-Boost worked, was actually not. (The loophole was subsequently patched by having the relay broadcast the signed block body to the network for several seconds before sending it back to the validator, so the validator doesnât have a chance of getting their own version of the block accepted).
Was this a crime? I honestly donât know haha. A lot of us were cheering for them at the time, because it was a case of one of the Dark Forest inhabitants who regularly preys on normal users, getting eaten by an even bigger and darker denizen of the Forest. On that battleground, I think a lot of us assume that everything is fair game; if you play that game youâd better be ready to watch your back. But it would appear that the MEVers that got taken advantage of are both wealthy and pissed off, and thatâs a recipe for lawsuits. Weâll see what happens. It will be a fascinating case from the âcode is lawâ perspective - the MEV people will have to argue that this was a crime without also implicating their own entire business model in equivalent crimes haha.
Hadnât check for a while but⌠according to https://clientdiversity.org/ the dominance of fetch fall to 55%! Thatâs impressive! The huge worries of Geth and Lido are gone, which ones are the worries now?
Again, another great example of how the ethereum community got proactively started involved into keeping the health of the ethereum ecosystem.
The following is my current understanding
They have split up the staking into two tokens now. ETH and EIGEN. Before that the goal was to only use ETH. In my understanding, the problem with the old approach was that all the slashing would have happened on ETH, but most slashing conditions for the current round of AVSs are not verifiable on chain. This necessitates that one has to come to an agreement among AVS operators that one of them has to get slashed. Most of the time the conditions are pretty clear and they can come to an agreement. But in the case of malicious majority for a certain AVS, they can slash other operators, steal their ETH and there is nothing one can do, even though it is obvious that they are malicious actors. The only recourse is to make an irregular state transition, which means forking the ethereum chain like for the DAO hack reversal. It would be messy it would hurt Ethereum and is not something one would like to have again. This is in my understanding the issue with overloading the consensus layer.
In the new system these kind of not fully objective slashing conditions are moved to the EIGEN token. If AVS operators collude to take away EIGEN from one operator, the community will most probably see this as an attack and can just fork away into a new EIGEN token. If the social consensus is that it was a malicious attack, the forked away EIGEN tokens will retain the value and the âoriginalâ EIGEN token will lose its value. This takes a lot of power away from AVS operators and especially allows forking the value and security of the Eigenlayer protocol without forking the underlying Ethereum chain.
This greatly reduces the amount of ETH that is needed in the Eigenlayer protocol which will also reduce the amount of ETH staked in it which again helps with the resilience of Ethereum. Before that change there was the concern that every single ETH will be restaked. I do not see this happening anymore.
As said before, this is my current understanding of Eigenlayer and I am sure I missed some issues the protocol still has. I am definitely happy to learn about them.
Some bad news on Lido staked ETH dominance: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/05/14/lido-co-founders-paradigm-secretly-back-eigenlayer-competitor-as-defi-battle-lines-form/
Paradigm and Lido plan to ship a restaking competitor to Eigenlayer. As you can imagine, Lido stETH deposits would be heavily incentivised in Symbiotic (ironic new name for the product), which will likely shoot up dominance higher.
On a side note: Cobie was a Lido co-founder (dont ask me how or why). Lido obviously foresees the social layer being another cock block for their new product when it ships. Cobies tweets in the past 48h would make more sense with that context.
A word of caution to everyone, old and new here:
Yes, this is one of the most bullish things that has ever happened in the Ethereum ecosystem and for crypto in general. The ramifications are huge. Legistlation was probably the biggest obstacle to the vision of Web 3.0, and now it seems like (and you feel like) the price is going to $5k, $10K, or $150K. I feel like that, too.
So you think to yourself: Why shouldnât I leverage? Maybe just 2x? Or 3x⌠or 10x. Your eyes are flashing with dollar signs. This rocketship can only go straight up, right?
Well, no. We are going up, yes, but the longs are piling atop of longs. A small rumour could move the needle juuust enough for a liquidation cascade. Donât let a sudden flash crash destroy what you have been patiently waiting for months, or years.
I can pretty much guarantee that this will happen as we go up. We are going to have 15%-25% red wicks. The volatility just demands it.
I have been burned by these crashes a lot when I didnât know better, and I believe I have learned my lesson. Donât do the same mistakes I did. You are not only going to lose money, you are going to fuck up your mental health and sleep, too.
Here, Bitcoiners have it right. The only thing you need to do is HODL. Donât leverage. Donât try to trade the tops and bottoms. You will only give your money to the same whales that made your life miserable this past year. You want to get back to them, and those that fucked with us? The crypto influencers on twitter? The miners that paid to FUD PoS? The haters and shitcoin peddlers? Deny them the chance to have your Ether. Make them beg for it. Make them FOMO like theyâve never FOMOâd for any coin. Make the market go crazy.
Fucking Hold On for Dear Life⌠spot only, preferably in self-custody!
Yesterday, Toni Wahrstätter, an EF researcher, had an interesting talk at Dappcon about block sizes in Ethereum and how the size is distributed. Apparently some builders do not include as many blobs as others because including blobs gives little rewards, but could increase the risk of the block not propagating fast enough in the network and getting re-orged. As far as I understand beaverbuild, the largest builder, does include fewer blobs than Titan builder, the second largest one. Currently this is not a big deal as L2s can just increase the fee tip to make it more attractive to include the blob. But this generally hints at a mispriced resource within the Ethereum protocol. Similar with very large transactions that do not pay a high enough fee due to the very low priced calldata in the EVM.
As far as I see it, this needs to be fixed before increasing the number of blobs per block and probably also before increasing the block gas limit by a large amount.
And he also talks about how he broke sepolia with his super large transaction.
Definitely worth a listen:
List of Anti-crypto Senators to contact for FIT21
Tina Smith, Sheldon Whitehouse, Angus King Jr., Gary Peters, Jeanne Shaheen, Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, John Hickenlooper, Maggie Hassan, John Fetterman, Mark Warner, Debbie Stabenow, Mike Rounds, Elizabeth đŠ Warren
Possible crypto swing vote senators to contact for FIT21
Bob Casey Jr., Chuck Grassley, Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio
Source:
https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1792143477163106787
I recently became an advisor to the EigenFoundation. I feel the community deserves transparency so here is an extended disclosure :)
(more in the tweet)
The Ethereum Foundationâs credible neutrality is critical for us to perform our role in the ecosystem. We are aware of the current conversation about potential conflicts of interest, and share the communityâs concerns.
It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment has not been sufficient, and we have been working on a formal policy to address this problem for a while now. We will be accelerating this work, and will share an update soon.
Special guest Waq joins us from Rocket Fuel, a daily summary of all the happenings in the Rocket Pool community.
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While you walk the walk,
Remember to talk the talk,
Blockchain needs no stock.
It is late 2026, total crypto market cap reaches $50T after 10 consecutive memecoin seasons, all cyclical rotations in the cryptocurrency market have been replaced by memes.
Top 10 - all memes. Dogecoin and pepe replaced BTC and ETH, both receiving an ETF while the ETH ETF is still awaiting approval due to volatility and underlying utility concerns.
BTC and ETH linger at the low end of the top 25, just under recent newcomers: SkibbidyToiletInu69420XL, Kek, and Gamestop (unrelated coin, not the stock)
A soft hard recession that doesnt land is forecasted by JPow, whose forward guidance is expected to reduce some of the froth and risk seeking behaviour in the markets.Â
Posting directly here, as I was informed people donât like clicking through to Twitter links:
Building a fully onchain game is stupid, and you could just do it with existing infrastructure without needing the blockchain⌠at least thatâs what Iâm told. Â
After spending 3 years building a FOCG, here are some of the least known and most impactful reasons to build them:đ§ľ
1. Peer-to-peer infrastructure for gaming
To create a player driven world, that enables play to flow between players without an intermediary requires significant infrastructure.
Traditionally this would be a set of servers that are rented/bought, maintained, and tooled by the gaming studio.Â
While possible it is exorbitantly expensive, time consuming, and requires engineers to maintain. For an indie studio itâs likely not a great use of resources, hence why we likely havenât seen it in traditional gaming.Â
Building fully onchain significantly reduces cost and maintenance for teams which would otherwise make it prohibitive to build such games.Â
Cost down, efficiency up
2. Blockchains give us a world computer
Blockchains like Ethereum have revolutionized the development landscape by enabling the creation of decentralized, peer-to-peer systems without the burden of maintaining costly infrastructure.
Teams no longer need to find independent solutions to develop applications that are universally accessible online without acting as intermediaries in transactions.Â
This additionally helps eliminate many of the issues with âmoney exchangerâ laws, as seen with platforms like Uniswap, where users transact directly, rather than something like Venmo that holds your funds.Â
Reduces operation cost and maintenance needs â Helps avoid potential legal issues â
3. Free Market & Asset Exchange
Blockchains enable more efficient markets by allowing users to own and control their accounts and assets separate from the game itself.Â
While traditional companies can support the buying, selling, and trading of items within games, these activities are usually centralized and restricted.Â
By fostering open markets where players can freely transfer items without fear of bans or deletions by the game studio, we empower players to determine the value of their goods.Â
This model also supports asset trading across different games, enabling players to use their collected items to access new games through trading. Players can do this without needing to download new launchers, software, third-party applications, or create new accounts and spend additional money.
Free Markets â Unrestricted trading â Trading across game titles â
We could make cars powered by steam, but we donât. We do this because it would be impractical.
Building fully onchain creates a new way to build games, and with recent advancements to scaling, blockchains have become incredible efficient in enabling this new way to build.
Lastly, these types of games whether built on traditional rails or with blockchain still need to be fun.
So even if one day we all believe building onchain games for specific game types is the best solution, itâs up to the studio to craft experiences players want to play.
Curious to get your thoughts :)
There once was a famous interior designer who served many high value business clients. She noticed her clients always wanted to have a hand in the design - after she laid out their place, they would always want to change it a little. Theyâd want it to âpop moreâ, or âfeel more chillâ, or âmore cozyâ. This slowed down the designerâs job significantly, as she had to make a costly and time consuming second design pass to appease the client.
After a pattern of this happening, the designer realized that her clients always felt like they needed to make at least one change to her designs, to convince their bosses that they added value and werenât just standing around and letting a contractor make all the big decisions.
It was upon this realization that the designer had a brilliant idea. From then on she added a wooden statue of a duck to each of her new interior designs. Her new clients, when shown these designs, would say âthat looks good, just remove the duck statue.â As this was an easy fix to make, it saved the interior designer a considerable amount of time and effort in redesigns. Her new designs were always approved, minus the duck, and she never had to do a second design pass again.
ETH ETFs are the design, staking is the duck, and the SEC is the manager who needs to feel like they had some input.
I wanted to give a short update on the EigenLayer Aestus AVS Operator - especially since the $EIGEN âstakedropâ (lol) went live earlier today. Over the last 3 weeks or so weâve attracted about ~3000ETH from ~100 participants. This is a pretty reasonable(!) start and weâre obviously tremendously grateful for the continued support from members of this and the wider solo-staker community. That said, weâre also keen to grow this significantly over the next 6 months.
u/AustonSt and I have been pretty focussed on onboarding with all the AVS that will have us. The vast majority require explicit whitelisting so communication is essential. Many of the teams have been very straightforward to deal with, but there are others who make contact very difficult, or will only accept KYCâd (institutional) capital. Iâm not surprised by this, but itâs kind of depressing, and itâs important we push back against this as much as we can.
While slashing isnât live (and it looks like it will be some time before itâs developed) - the risks to Operators and re-staked capital is pretty small. But it will grow, and weâve been having conversations with a few neutral participants who are interested in figuring out how to manage this. The independent development of a risk framework seems important and we hope to be able to share some kind of plan in the near future.
For now, weâre publishing a table with an overview of our status and progress with various services. Weâd eventually like to be able to share a proper dashboard with live data, but this is some way off. Weâre also opening a Telegram channel for those of you who want to help us coordinate, receive updates or just want to ask us questions.
Today I launched my first project built on Ethereum, this is the best day of my life. The name is AirdropScan, itâs basically Etherscan for airdrops đ
Whatâs the airdrop you canât wait for?
This recent thread by Hasu has a lot of great points on what Lido has been doing to better align with the ethereum ecosystem this past year. One specific comment - which encourages Lido to participate in Ethereum roadmap research has received some negative comments from community members which makes me scratch my head
âa player with a financial interest should not take part in Ethereum research and governanceâ. Wut? We literally built a monetary coordination platform, Ethereum, where every single user has a financial incentive. And then we say that if you have a financial incentive, you canât take part in governance? Makes no sense to me
âa large player should not be allowed to take part in Ethereum governanceâ. If that view is normalised, that large players - who are by definition successful players in the ecosystem - are discouraged from contributing to ethereumâs future, who does that leave? One could make the argument, via the process of elimination, that then we are encouraging unsuccessful players, people who never had the competency nor the courage to spin off their own project or to do it in a successful manner at scale - we instead encourage them to exert their voices. That is instilling a negative selection process which leads to a poorer quality of discussion within the Ethereum ecosystem. Besides that, large players have a wealth of information and experience pertinent to our ecosystem, and itâs unwise to exclude their voices.
The key point I think we should be mindful of, is that success isnât a bad word, having financial motives isnât a bad word. Using your protocol dominance to arm twist other players to get your preferred outcome, or using your financial competency to bribe other players to get your preferred outcome, outcomes which are at odds with the long term good of Ethereum - these are what needs to be focused on. But if a protocol isnât engaging in such behaviour, they certainly should have a seat at the governance table.
I saw auroras from mainland NZ last night. They werenât exactly spectacular without a long exposure photo to bring out the colours, but it was still pretty incredible. Now before you say this is off-topic, yes, this is related to ETH.
It would seem to be something which doesnât get much attention, but likely since it is a developing thing which may just be noise and not a sign of things to come. However, there is an increasingly alarming trend which started about 150 years ago which has gone exponential in the last 20-30 years. This is the shifting of Earthâs magnetic poles. Now this isnât unprecedented. It has actually happened hundreds of times in Earthâs history, but it is the first time since we have had advanced technology. Now, if the trend continues and Earthâs magnetic poles shift, we could be in for a few hundred years of a reduction of Earthâs geomagnetic shield which protects us from the sunâs damaging radiation. What this means, and what we have already seen, is that the solar storms which have recently hit Earth are causing more electromagnetic disruption and auroras than storms of their size historically have because our shield is in a weakened state. This can result in localised blackout and infrastructure failures across the world. While a global outage is very unlikely, these localised impacts can be very disruptive to the global economy. This weekend alone dozens more platforms and services have had outages than usual and if any of these services are core infrastructure like banking or credit card services then the economy can grind to a halt.
This is yet another reason why we need Ethereum. We need resilient payment and settlement networks. Otherwise, our ever increasingly unstable world will perpetuate more instability. Especially as we constantly increase our reliance on a larger number of infrastructure systems from roads, to power, internet, AI and beyond. We have a unique chance to solidify one of the flimsy legs which hold up society and replace it with a rigid, decentralised and resilient system.
Edit: If you want to watch a good YouTube video on the ongoing pole shift and what it might mean for us, I highly recommend this one:
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ridb9olnqLc
Watch privately: https://invidious.fdn.fr/ridb9olnqLc
All these years in crypto and still just barely avoided falling for a phishing scam toda
These guys are so incredibly good itâs scary - I had my Ledger in my hand to sign the fake transaction and there was juust enough friction to drop me out of autopilot and make me think âwhat is actually going on hereâ.
I have some liquidity in Reya Network - itâs a (legit) new trading optimized L2 with a âshared liquidityâ model for all DEXes on the L2 and some major backers. Itâs launching this week but liquidity deposits for points have been open for some weeks.
I went and checked my rank on the Leaderboard on the (real) reya.network site, and then I thought âOh they are launching today - better go check their Twitter to see whatâs going onâ
So I checked their Twitter update, and at the bottom of their (real) thread about the new Session and points etc, there was a final tweet saying something like âcheck your position on the Trading Leaderboard for Session 1 hereâ and I thought âOh, is this a separate leaderboard to the liquidity leaderboard I am on? Better check it outâ
[NOTE: the final tweet was of course from a phishing account but I only noticed when I checked later - the language, wording, PFP etc, were all perfect except for a one-character difference in the username]
So I click over to the [FAKE - DO NOT CLICK - âReya Labsâ site].
But the psychology was really interesting to kind of think about how someone like me who should know a lot better can still get taken in and the brain smooths over all the cognitive dissonance âwarningâ moments until they piled up enough that I was forced to acknowledge it..
Alexey Pertsev (Tornado Cash dev) is found guilty in the Netherlands and sentenced to 5 years in prison. That seems crazy! Someone please tell me that they proved he did more than just deploy open source code to mainnet.
Court statement in English available here - https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Rechtbank-Oost-Brabant/Nieuws/Paginas/Developer-of-Tornado-Cash-gets-jail-sentence-for-laundering-billions-of-dollars-in-cryptocurrency.aspx
Well, this is a sad day for crypto, privacy and building permissionless systems in general. Some excerpts:
Tornado Cash functions in the way the defendant and his cofounders developed Tornado Cash. So the operation is completely their responsibility. If the defendant had wanted to have the possibility to take action against abuse, then he should have built it in. But he did not. Tornado Cash does not pose any barrier for people with criminal assets who want to launder them. That is why the court regards the defendant guilty of the money laundering activities as charged.
Tornado Cash is not a legitimate tool that has unintentionally been abused by criminals, as the defendant presents. Tornado Cash suits criminal use.
He also behaved lazily when victims of hacks or investigative authorities reported to him, simply stating that he could not do anything for them. He continued the development and exploitation of Tornado Cash with blinders on. He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility.
The court follows the prosecutorâs demand and sentences the defendant to an imprisonment of 5 years and 4 months.
I donât fully remember the technical details but IIRC the contracts, once deployed, were not upgradable, so him saying âhe could not do anything for [victims of hacks or investigative authorities]â was the truth right?
u/etheraider has mentioned sharding yesterday and when it will come. Sharding as a scaling solution been discarded at least 3 years ago. I first wanted to write a short reply but it got longer so I post it here.
Sharding was the idea, that the Ethereum chain will be split up into different shards with each shard being able execute transactions. The core of the idea was that nodes would only have to validate a subset of all the shards leading to an increase in throughput without pushing home stakers out of the network by increasing resource demand. The problem in this approach is that shards cannot easily communicate with each other which complicates transactions as one would have to make additional transactions to move from one shard to another. Overall it became a rather complex solution.
With the advent of rollups, people found that this allows for an easier and even more scalable solution. So in about 2021 the original sharding concept was abandoned and scaling through L2s is now considered the way to go. In my understanding there still is the concept of shards, but they were renamed to blobs and they cannot execute transactions. So the nodes do not have to run and validate the transactions which are stored in blobs. Rollups do this.
With the dencun upgrade we got the first iteration of this scaling plan with EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding). This allowed scaling of the Ethereum ecosystem by about a factor of 50 to 100. Currently the rollups do around 10 times as many transactions than Ethereum does, so they still have room to grow. At the moment, we allow to have 3 blobs per block on average for rollup transaction data, which seems to be like a good value. It increases the load on nodes, but not so much to compromise decentralization. I guess there will be more analysis done in the coming months to see if we can increase the number of blobs a bit.
The next step in the L2 scaling roadmap is danksharding, which will allow nodes to only store a subset of blobs for a limited time but still make sure that all the data has been published by the rollups using data availability sampling. This will increase the available blob space by at least another factor of 20 without increasing the load on nodes by the same amount. The details of this upgrade is very much being worked on and as far as I understand peerDAS (EIP-7594) is currently the best proposal to achieve that goal. Not sure if peerDAS is already the end goal or just a minimal implementation of data availability sampling.
I am not sure when this is planned to be implemented, but if it will not come in the next Ethereum upgrade. But maybe in the one after that. The good thing is that going from proto danksharding to full danksharding does mostly (or even only) involve changes in the consensus layer, which means there is less coordination necessary between the different teams.
In addition there will be improvements of the Execution layer as well (like verkle trees, statelessness, history expiry and snarkifying the base chain). Those improvements will allow to increase transaction throughput on mainnet while keeping the resource demand for node operators in check. None of these will 100x increase throughput over night, but together they will massively scale Ethereum in the coming years. If you want to catch up on the current roadmap the bankless podcast from February does an amazing job explaining the different steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqVaycBINdc
Part of the reason thereâs so much disagreement regarding where we are cyclically is because returns have been so unevenly distributed
Additionally, a lot of previous cycle signposts have been absent and/or entirely invalid
The conventional ârisk curveâ trade of BTC â> ETH â> large caps â> mid caps â> shitters has been unprofitable. Barbell portfolio of BTC + memes has dominated.
ETH/BTC has been remarkably weak, whereas historically it has benefitted from a risk on environment. This has also spilled over into ETH L1+L2 proxy trades being suboptimal. âCrypto as a casinoâ thesis has been captured by memecoins on SOL (vs previous cycleâs casino was NFTs on ETH).
Memecoins have been consistently leading and rotating from that sector has been costly, whereas memes pumping has historically been an indicator of being late in the cycle.
BTC hasnât offered a series of previously âstandardâ bull market pullbacks of 30-40%. This has created a bunch of early sellers/sidelined traders. Also led to proliferation of left-truncated cycle discourse, shorter cycle, super cycle, and other heterodox variants.
There are so many new tokens (amplified by memecoins) that âcrypto bull marketâ no longer means âeverything thatâs listed goes up for weeks/monthsâ - the rising tide has not lifted all boats and there are very clear winners vs losers (and theyâve broadly stayed the same, no massive rotations e.g. ETH eco/L1+L2 trade been weak relative to SOL for ages, with exceptions).
Taking all this into account, itâs entirely plausible that you have Trader A who rode BTC, SOL, and memes and feels like stuff is hot and needs to cool off, whereas Trader B has barely made any money and feels like stuff hasnât even picked up yet, and everything in between.
We all have different portfolios, trading styles, time horizons, risk appetite, volatility tolerance, and a bunch of other stuff.
Most of crypto Twitter thinks crypto will go up and to the right over time, we just disagree about the fine print.
Thoughts? This seems to me to be a pretty good summary of this cycle so far. What we have seen at the end of last cycle and in the bear market was that some stuff still pumped while other assets were down only â> micro cycles. Is this cycle the one where things really are (more) uncorrelated, both from stocks etc. but also within the crypto ecosystem?
Two Brothers Arrested For Attacking The Ethereum Blockchain And Stealing $25 Million In Cryptocurrency
First MEV related bust.
Wild. Sharing some snippets from the indictment as Im reading
90% of ETH validators use MEV boost
These guys basically stole $25m by attacking MEV bots, they ran their own validators and when it was their turn to validate, they meddled and tampered proposed blocks with false signatures
Juicy parts Daddy Gensler may not like
The conduct described herein relates to the Ethereum Network. Among other things, Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain that is used by millions of people across the world. Since at least 2023, on average, there are more than one million daily transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. No central actor runs the Ethereum Network. Instead, the Ethereum Network is run through a decentralized network of participants across the world that operate based on a set of rules and protocols. These rules and protocols are typically executed through âsmart contractsâ-self- executing computer protocols with if/then conditions-which enable transactions to take place on the Ethereum blockchain without the need for a trusted intermediary. Ether or âETHâ is the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum Network.
The MEV situation worries me much more than any price action.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1351996/dl
Those guys who outsmarted MEVbots about a year ago, baiting them to extract $25M of their money?
Theyâre now on trial for âconspiracy to commit wire fraudâ.
Steal billions from small users through automated sandwiches -> A-OK.
Steal millions from extremely wealthy sandwichers through a clever exploit -> straight to jail.
It has been clear for a long time the MEV landscape is filled with well-connected, well-capitalized tradfi individuals looking to extract maximum rent out of our ecosystem. Conspiracy to commit fraud, you say? I would love to have full transparency on every MEV actor out there and their doings. Would not be surprised if it turned out some of them pushed pro MEV sentiment through various means over the years. For the acceptance of robbing users as an unavoidable fact, or even worse, a desirable property, seems absurd at face value.
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Feel the blockchain beat,
The protocol is complete,
Rest is obsolete.
Idk man. I doubt that Blackrock, Van Eck, Franklin Templeton, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, JPM Chase etc. being interested in ETH is important.
We probably wonât even see ATHs again, or even appreciate in price from here.
When Larry Fink talks about instantaneous guaranteed settlement and the tokenization of securities Iâm sure heâs talking about Cardano or Solana.
Iâm sure Base deploying as a layer 2 on ETH instead of as an alt Layer 1 thatâs just noise.
The United States Federal Government being concerned about DeFi as a national security threat is obviously not the most bullish thing imaginable. They totally always embrace technological innovation quickly and without question. If ETH was truly as disruptive (and lucrative) as weâve all been suspecting the United States Federal Government certainly wouldnât be raising an eyebrow at it. No sir.
Sell it all. ETH isnât just a security. It a mega-doodoo scary evil security that is also a shitcoin of no importance and will clearly go to 0.
After the EIGEN token announcement (and subsequent backlash) Iâve been thinking a lot more about how so much in the world of crypto right now seems to be the product web2 thinking i.e. VC money, financialized governance, etc etc.
One big plot hole with this web2 thinking, as I see it, is that itâs really hard if not impossible to create a moat in crypto. Liquidity is never truly locked, vampire attacks are a thing, etc. etc. I personally believe that the crypto future that we were promised is not built on the back of for-profit, but rather autonomous public goods that are built and then kindâve just put out into the world. Therefore this is a misalignment.
Adding to this rift is the fact that it seems VCs have figured out the crypto equivalent of the traditional attract->extract model. Since it is so hard to âturn a profitâ in crypto, the main way to get paid is via this charade we call governance tokens. The attract cycle is building up TVL and hype, and the extract cycle is a user-hostile TGE and exit. This would explainâŚ
The EIGEN announcement is of course disappointing, but in retrospect itâs obvious that it would go this way.
The silver linining in all this is that once the dust settles weâll find that some things did get built with all this VC money after all. Those interested in creating public goods can take whatâs been built, clone it, and undercut it. Since I donât see a shift in how we fund crypto projects anytime soon, this is what I rest my optimism on.
The other day, one of us asked if depositing assets into Swell L2 was safe.
I took a look today!
Swell L2 isnât live, so currently youâre depositing into a staking contract. The code looks clean and intuitive.
If you deposit rebasing assets like eETH or stETH or plain ETH, your deposit is first routed through a zapper contract to convert it to weETH, wstETH or wETH.
The zapping contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xbd9fc4fdb07e46a69349101e862e82aa002ade0d#code
Thereâs no issue with this contract. Itâs immutable, no access control, everything is clearly defined.
Then in either case, your assets end up in the proper staking contract.
The staking contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x38d43a6cb8da0e855a42fb6b0733a0498531d774#code
Itâs a simple contract with a couple functions. When your assets are inside this contract, they are dormant, not used for anything and not exposed to extra risk.
Only you can deposit and withdraw your assets.
**EDIT: relevant update -> u/ennui85 points out the emergency function canât actually touch your deposits. That was a misread on my part.
This means the contract is 100% safe, much better than my âfairly safeâ assessment.
â end of original post below â
Save for one emergency function: the âownerâ of this contract can withdraw the full balance of any allowed token inside the contract.
This âownerâ leads to a Timelock: https://etherscan.io/address/0xCa2DF225ba3c4743E02611EC423FaAC311dEEEd4#readContract
The Timelock delay is set to 259200 seconds (3 days).
The âadminâ of this Timelock leads to a 4-of-6 multisig: https://etherscan.io/address/0x20fDF47509C5eFC0e1101e3CE443691781C17F90#readProxyContract
Overall Iâd rank this as âfairly safeâ = less safe than Uniswap, but safer than PT/YT on Pendle and safer than money markets like Aave/Compound.
The 3 days delay on owner withdrawals should be a guarantee against any wrongdoing, provided you assume between $500M of TVL some depositors will monitor the multisig (or do it yourself). The code is simple, in a good way, your assets simply sit in this contract. There is no upgrade function of any kind, presumably the bridging to Swell L2 will be an entirely manual process once it goes live (which is also a good thing).
Invested in Ethereum in the 2014 ICO. I have been away for a long time. Iâm currently unwell and do not have the energy to try to get up to date, I barely understood how POW worked.
Whatever Ethereum is today, does it still have promise of building a new financial ecosystem and being the backbone of finance? Mass adoption will come if the correct/needed applications are being built.
But at a quick glance the space seems to be slightly empty, and all I see are airdrops and yield farming, when Ethereum and in general crypto has (had?) the potential to create a real revolution and change humanity.
Can someone direct me to good sources of information I could read or watch to catch up with what has been happening since 2021? As I said, Iâm very unwell and do not have the mental sharpness or strength to go in depth right nowâŚeven if I want to.
Ever since August 2015 Iâve been following the ETHBTC ratio, and although Iâm not worried, I am starting to think perhaps my timeline for seeing a ratio bull market is farther away than I had hopedâŚperhaps this still needs a few years. Or perhaps this is a retest of the ratio breakout from 2021 before moving higher.
But we need a catalyst, and airdrops along with yield farming wonât cut it. Ethereum needs to prove that a new financial system is on the way before a bubble similar to the dot com bubble is possible. Perhaps thatâs here, hence Iâm asking for information to help me build an objective narrative. Thanks, and bless you all with good healthâŚits much more important than any of this.
After the latest update that made rollups economically viable, Ethereum is ready for primetime. The vision for a new, efficient and transparent backbone for finance that dis-intermediates middlemen is finally possible technically. Before we were limited to 10-20 transactions per second which is clearly insufficient to meet global settlement needs. Right now we have room for around 300-500 tps and the scalability roadmap will keep pushing it further to the order of 100K tps.
The most significant roadblock right now is regulatory, the SEC and current US administration is very antagonistic of crypto and Ethereum in particular. But technology is unstoppable, once the genie is out it cannot be put back in. These hurdles will be overcome too.
If you have not been following you can hear it from the mouth of Blackrockâs (biggest asset manager in the world) CEO himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTveRlW7QPo
Wish you the best, take care of yourself.
I think people always look to the consumer/retail side to see if Ethereum is living up to its potential, but I think that is a mistake. I think the real potential is in the commercial side of things, such as the stuff Paul Brody is doing with EY. Just google âPaul Brody EY Nightfallâ. There are tons of videos.
The tl;dr is: EY is working on a set of business tools for supply chain tracking, so that companies can track every input and output of the supply chain from raw materials to consumer. Additionally, companies can ask for bids over the blockchain, award contracts, track performance, and do all the necessary accounting and payments.
They thought it would take about a decade to really build momentum â like turning a battleship, you need a lot of lead time. I believe we are about halfway through that, and many companies are trying it and starting the transition.
The âregulation by enforcementâ is so frustrating. You cant seriously tell me Coinbase, Uniswap and Metamask are the bad guys in crypto.. when so much blatant insider trading, pump and dumps every single day. It suggests that there is just some ulterior motive
Robinhood is one of the largest non-crypto companies to get into crypto in a big way (I mean for retail they have wallet/dex, and please the BTC ETF doesn really count in this), and now they are being sued. This is just intimidation and send a message to rest of the companies that if you get into crypto, you will be sued
Its no wonder no other big company has even tried. Last cycle there was genuine hope that companies will push into crypto. Nike, Coke, many played around with NFTs. Reddit came up with tokens. This cycle many more were gonna experimentâŚ.but now do you think a big company like Apple or Google will launch even a crypto wallet? If they dont know they are going to be charged as a âbroker dealerâ or âclearing agentâ or âunregistered securityâ or whatever
Its just to kill crypto âŚ. Its all part of the agenda to stifle any growth of crypto
SEC sues $COIN and claims SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, SAND, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH and NEXO are securities
$HOOD gets sued and only list BTC, ETH, DOGE, SHIB, AVAX, LTC, UNI, ETC, LINK, XLM, and AAVE
So either SEC is making it up as they go or they missed a lot of âsecuritiesâ when they sued coinbase
Completely offtopic but she said yes today. :) đ
Infinite Jungle podcast by Christine Kim (she used to do the tweetstorms after each ACD call back in the day) is easily my top podcast on the Ethereum ecosystem lately. Beats out the Daily Gwei which was my previous must-listen
Thereâs two 30min episodes a week, the first which covers what the core devs decided in the previous weekâs ACDC/ACDE call, and the second which interviews someone from the Ethereum ecosystem.
The best part is she has a way of explaining hard to understand concepts almost like a school teacher - Iâve learned so much about account abstraction, Verkle tries, the EVM, EOF etc, even despite having a rough understanding of these areas already.
EthDenver follow up regarding Exponential.Fi, which was one of the stalls in the hall and had an offer for those that signed up during EthDenver. The offer was for those that verified by the end of the gathering, deposited and held the investment for 60 days, those that deposited 1,000 USDC got 100, and a 10,000 deposit got 1,000. Just got passed the 60 day mark and got the offer paid out, so thatâs neat.
The Exponential product, in my view, is trying to make defi appear through a more traditional investment bank wrapped. You login, do the KYC and all, and can either deposit from your Bank through Bridge or send via an Eth wallet, on mainnet, Arb, Polygon, and others, and you can send Eth or usdc. Once deposited you are presented with a variety of portfolios and projected APRs to invest in, denominated in currencies like eth, BTC, stables or some alts. They have pretty charts and stuff, and easy to understand descriptions of whatâs being invested in and the risk (and I just found you can click on âFull Reportâ to get a detailed breakdown, like quality of code, usage, reliability and more, and links to the actual defi site and a discord to discuss), like USDC-Across bridging, the Arb TriCrypto, etc . Pretty easy to invest into something, isnât instant like defi, I suspect they delay a day or two to try and batch transactions. Once invested it shows your average return and projected, again with charts and percentages. Pretty slick overall.
I like the product for a couple reasons. First, it keeps (and kept) me from doing wilder defi things because I knew I had to invest for the 60 days. It also allows automatic reinvesting of profits, like a traditional investment fund. Will probably keep my investments there since it pretty much was funded with eth profit taking. Itâs a very nice site and I donât need to be doing lots of wallet approvals and transactions to do anything. Iâm assuming the tax report will be pretty nice when the time comes. And hey, they followed through on their 60 day promise of a USDC reward and I canât be sad with free USDC.
Cons, though not super cons I guess. KYC with ID, so very tradfi. Also, for some reason you can only withdraw in the same amount as you deposited, you canât divide it up, which is weird cause I can do that with stocks and the like. So Iâve got the ability to withdraw my whole initial deposit, or my profits. The fee page says they can take up to 1%, when I looked at mine it said 0.2%, so a positive in understanding the fees involved, but no variability for onchain gas or timing to make it cheaper.
Not shilling (the majority of my defi is still via wallets), but just think itâs a good way to take defi into the tradfi space.
Good day EthFinance,
I would like to share a new initiative: The Ethereum Defense Alliance. So what is the Ethereum Defense Alliance or EDA?
We are a group of individuals and entities with the goal of protecting Ethereum against risk vectors and fostering a robust and sustainable network.
The EDA was initiated last year when the threat of Lido was even greater than it is today and as you all know it has evolved since then. Some EthFinance members like u/hanniabu, u/bob-rossi, u/minimalgravitas and myself are EDA Stewards and we are trying to coordinate people and ideas. There are already many more members and entities that have joint the EDA.
We saw the power of coordination and importance of governance to protect the network. The EDAâs mission is protect Ethereum from centralization and risk vectors in every shape of from through:
We believe this community understands the risks as well. Basically the search for delegates is/ was already one of the EDAâs initiatives. But governance is only a means to an end and there is obviously more than that. We are looking forward to your input. The goal is to become even more proactive and drive changes before threats even show up. If you have any questions, you can post them here, contact one of us or use the contact form on the EDA homepage.
Even if there are bipartisan pro-crypto agreements in congress, Biden is prepared to veto it according to a press release from the White House today on one such potential agreement that is being voted on later today. Is this how democracies should work?
Basically, the SEC issued guidelines (SAB 21) that banks, brokers-dealers, and many other entities canât custody digital assets. They did so without first asking for comments or coordinating with other agencies.
See link below for full reasons given why they want to nullify the SEC SAB 21. It is a good brief read that makes sense to me. Risks are also bigger if all custody is concentrated to Coinbase.
https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=409242
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Time to sue Gary,
Itâs not even that scary,
The man canât parry.
As a marketing gimmick EL offers an F-35 fighter jet for some seemingly impossible amount of points. Rogue degen discovers a levered YT exploit - obtains required points. EL sued and forced to provide the jet -degen learns to fly it. F35 with ETH symbol appears over Ukraine - Russia requests cease fire. Jet appears again over Iran then Israel - both sides lay down arms. Same jet appears over San Francisco - solana headquarters hit by mysterious electronic warfare attack. Solana goes down for 17 days - SOL token does a 5x (itâs still in beta guys). Degen closes levered long and pockets 320 million - retires - two decades of world peace ensue.
Guys, I am absolutely in favor of trying out new stuff, thatâs perfectly fine and normal (and somehow incentivized). But please keep in mind: If you have no idea what the protocol or asset really does, you probably donât understand the risks.
I am saying this today because of the liquidations yesterday and some questions in todayâs daily, but I was already very surprised some months ago when some members here deposited (rather large sums of) ETH into Eigenlayer without understanding what it does, what this deposit does (or does not) do with your ETH, timelines, etc.
You all are obviously free to do stuff with your money, this is a permittionless industry, but I am a conservative boomer that cares for you. I donât want you to lose money, because you fucked around and found out. You can lose money, we probably all do from time to time. But donât risk too much of your stack in protocols and assets you donât understand, for unclear upsides.
In a bull market you literally have one goal: Keep your ETH. The problem in a bull market. They all want your ETH. If you part with it, do so after spending some time really understanding what youâre doing and getting yourself into.
Boomer Bearnido out.
This is a reminder that the latest Gitcoin Grants round is active. My picks for this round:
dApps & Apps
Web3 Infrastructure
Developer Tooling
Let me ramble about my biggest disappointment from the last year which is Eigenlayer.
When I first heard about it, the concept was a bit difficult to grasp. Once I started grokking it my mind was blown. Decentralized trust, where validators can start to run various services along their nodes and they can make truth statements about the world. It would lead to a world where we would be getting independent of centralized truth brokers. Projects could easily and trustlessly tap into the decentralized Ethereum network and start, for example, a decentralized oracle without having to kick start such a network on their own. It could even encourage the decentralization of the Ethereum network by giving small home stakers a better revenue than centralized operators as decentralization would have a value. Rainbows and unicorns everywhere. Obviously, I filled some of the gaps in my understanding and Eigenlayers very minimal docs with the best possible outcome.
Last autumn when I first saw the requirements for running the first AVS which is EigenDA, I realized that is not something just any node operator will be able to run on their node. Their delegated stake requirements made the problem even worse such that only a selected few operators will be able to run the EigenDA AVS.
Now, with EigenDA mainnet release, we have a few powerful entities like etherfi and other LRT providers which are the king makers in the protocol apparently having bilateral agreements with AVSs to make sure they can get the most profitable deals. The AVS operators have pretty much nothing at stake. If they loose money, they loose the money of the restakers, and meat space legal agreements will be the only thing keeping them in compliance. Not sure this is enough to be honest. All in all it is not much better than if projects outsource running their services to a service provider which will run stuff on a data center somewhere. The restaked assets were historically meant to be ETH on the beacon chain, which would directly map operators to their stake. Now, a large part is just ârestakedâ LSTs and as far as I understand it soon could be any token. This is a far cry from the original vision. Not sure if it is good enough to even be long term profitable for restakers considering the nothing at stake risk for AVS operators.
EDIT: I love all the different takes and nuances. Thank you.
âSecurities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said Thursday that cryptocurrencies and intermediaries that allow holders to âstakeâ their coins might pass a key test used by courts to determine whether an asset is a security. Known as the Howey test, it examines whether investors expect to earn a return from the work of third parties."
I wouldnât say eth fits into that since you donât gain anything from just holding it in a wallet, but Reth and steth certainly do.
I think that a court if presented with the right facts, will find that a pure proof of stake consensus mechanism like ETH 2.0 does not infact satisfy the howey test, because there is no demonstrable common enterprise that is built into the protocol. Solo stakers who earn rewards from staking do so, not because another party does the work and they earn their share from others work, but because they put in the effort themselves and whatever rewards they earn are the results of their own work
I remain pretty confident that if this matter goes before a court, the court will have no option but to rule that proof of stake consensus mechanism by itself does not violate howeyâs rule.
If it comes to other staking mechanisms like delegated proof of stake or liquid staking, then there could be various entities playing the common enterprise role. But in a pure pos mechanism, there is none. The rewards are baked into the network - like new issuances to fund the staker rewards, sync committee rewards etc.
If SEC were to make this claim in a court, I would be ultra bullish on a highly likely defeat for the SEC. Crypto companies arent exactly fucking around either, both Coinbase and Consensys have got the best law firm in USA to represent them, the calibre of lawyers is 2 or 3 leagues better than the muppets at SEC
New Etherscan feature launched called Cards, in a special section. One shows unclaimed airdrops. It seems to be a cooperation with Bankless. I found it still listed STRK despite me already claiming and it didnât give the ETHFI airdrop so it might not be 100%, but still pretty nice. Especially if you have multiple wallets, you can check them easily.
It also shows blockchain messages and token approvals - pretty nifty. Anyone can apply to Etherscan in a form with their project and they might consider it as a card, if itâs useful enough.
How it looks on Vitalikâs address below:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045#cards
Edit:
Looks like Bankless hides a lot of the drops between a paywall. Not a fan of that.
Tornado Cash case. Governmentâs response to motion to dismiss
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.604938/gov.uscourts.nysd.604938.53.0.pdf
The gov is basically arguing that smart contracts are money transmitter businesses and should KYC users and run a BSA program.
This is real bad. If this sticks ( most likely does unless the judge specifically over rules these arguments) it means DOJ can go after any company or person that created a wallet or a dapp (smart contract) or any crypto product claiming they are unregistered money transmitters - irrespective of the fact that the wallet or smart contract doesnt allow them to control customer funds
It opens up the potential for a 6 AM FBI Open the door and arrest for anyone working in crypto
Damn reading yesterdayâs reddit im feeling downâŚ
Consensys complaint isnât looking too good: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/s/Y0pWVVy3CM
Potential huge risk in the tornado cash case targeting smart contracts: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ce6bam/comment/l1j4tzk/
R/cc has 2 top posts about vitalik talking about centralization and itâs filled with Ethereum hate.
And with the SEC being on a war with crypto,⌠Yes they are losing a lot but they arenât done yet.
I hope this all turns out ok. Why is crypto investing never relaxed, itâs always stressful lol.
I went over it quickly but I have a hard time to take them seriously when there are obviously in bad faith arguments. Let me pick the one that most quickly jumped to me while I was scrolling through.
At some point they make this argument:
And they go on a long tirade to argue against it as provably false. But the complete opposite is true. Itâs a provably true argument. After EIP-1559, transacting on Ethereum necessitates ETH, this is completely unavoidable. The argument Consensys is using basically boils down to, to use the Ethereum network ETH is necessary. Going after ETH, kills the possibility to use the network. And this is true, even if you assume all the fancy goodies of account abstraction. Someone needs to pocket the ETH to transact on Ethereum, either the end-user or the wallet provider with account abstraction. Now letâs look at the arguments:
Can I install a fresh instance of MetaMask in my browser or as an app & generate a fresh Ethereum address with no ETH? â
Not a transaction settlement.
Can I go to EthCC or wherever & get a cool POAP dropped to this Ethereum address with no ETH? â
LOL, not a user transaction settlement. But someone is paying for that use of the network. If they kill ETH through regulatory maneuvers I can assure you, you will not be getting a POAP or anything in the US.
Can I login, check-in, connect to cool blockchain dapps, sites, friends, and spaces with my ETHless EOA that has my new POAPs on it, to maybe get more POAPs, or just to browse, or whatever? â
Not transactions on the network. And the POAP argument was just covered.
Can I sign messages & authorizations & authentications with my ETHless EOA? â
Not transactions on the network.
Heck, can I sign contracts with my ETHless EOA? â
I start to see a pattern here. 100 ways to say I can still sign stuff with my public key. Everything except actually using the network which is the argument Consensys was making.
Can I be served with legal process to my ETHless EOA? â
?
Do at least some of these interactions constitute âtransactions on the blockchainâ? â
Absolutely not. They are not transactions on the network. To transact on the network you must spend ETH, this is unavoidable after EIP-1559. EIP-1559 is what made ETH a commodity in the most literal sense. Is the commodity you consume to settle computation on a global settlement layer. Signing something with a public key is not using the Ethereum network. Itâs not propagated nor settled on the network.
Do people do things like this onchain đŚ and irl, even without ETH? â
?
Is this legally significant? â â â
Dunno if itâs legally significant but it is factually wrong.
EDIT: And to clarify why I think this article is written in bad faith. Whoever wrote it understands well enough the technology to very meticulously choose a niche use case of your public key (i.e. you can use it to sign messages) and conflate that with transacting on the network which is not. There is a lot of intent in whoever built this argument to confuse things, they are arguing for US-based users to not be able to use the Ethereum network, period. And they are willing to twist reality to get there.
Itâs so frustrating seeing the marketing push happening right now with influencers on Twitter acting like Eigen Layerâs token is some amazing breakthrough.
They act like itâs some amazing new revelation that EL will have itâs own protocol rules and not affect Ethereum consensus. Like no shit, why would it have any bearing at all on Ethereum. And this is coming from people that I know are definitely smart enough to understand this, all using the same language, so the only reasonable conclusion is theyâre getting paid to push this narrative.
When you have enough money you can create your own reality b/c thereâll always be people willing to bend their morals for payment.
Iâm slowly giving up on meaningful things coming from the space beyond what has already been or is being built. Most things from this point onwards feel like theyâre increasingly more disconnected from the core values of this space. Instead itâs VCs building yet another level of financial engineering just because they can. So aside from some less hype-y DePIN projects, a small selection of aligned L2s, teams working on FHE and other core values related projects, Iâm getting pretty over this all. I look forward to the day where I can cash out at my target price and just perpetually stake my only validator node to do my part in keeping the decentralised vision alive.
I actually never put funds into any sort of EigenLayer restaking; while I was always interested in the concept, the points system and insane levels of hype for an unreleased protocol triggered some circuit breakers in my brain and I just couldnât let myself participate materially. So congrats to those with access to a good amount of EIGEN, and my condolences to those who feel rugged by the distribution parameters and/or geographical/IP blocking.
The more interesting topic for me is the release of the EIGEN token whitepaper. The authors present EIGEN as having a critical role in restaking and Iâd like to try to break it down a little.
Restaking provides economic security to AVSs through the threat of slashing deposited collateral. If you (or more specifically, your delegated operator) follow the rules, you get paid. If you break the rules, you get slashed. But under the hood, slashing rules are encoded into smart contracts, and preferably the logic isnât just âthe AVS devs have complete power at any time to choose who to slashâ. The contracts can be smarter than that.
The paper looks at two different categories of faults, the bad things that would trigger slashing. These are objectively attributable and intersubjectively attributable faults. Objective faults are the more straightforward of the two. This is where the contract can directly verify that the fault occurred. Think of double signing: the contract can easily check that yes, the same private key did sign two different conflicting messages, and therefore committed a fault. Fraud and validity proofs can also fall under this category: someone does something malicious, someone else creates a SNARK proving it was wrong, the contract verifies it, and slashing occurs.
These are not always easy or possible to implement for an AVS, but detection and resolution of these faults is straightforward. EigenLayer with restaked ETH is perfect for this.
Intersubjective faults occur when there is a generally agreed upon truth but it is not mathematically provable on-chain. The standard example is price oracles. The contract doesnât know whatâs happening in the real world. We can all agree that the current market price of ETH is ~$3200, but the contract has to find some way to get a price feed from a source it can trust. Maybe that would be an AVS with a decentralized group of validators casting votes about the current price. The majority vote wins, so if the validator set is sufficiently decentralized, the correct price becomes a Schelling point.
If everyone says ETH market price is $3k but I cast a vote saying itâs worth $10k, despite my number being much better, Iâm not following the rules of the AVS. Anyone can look at actual market data and confirm that the price was actually $3k and that Iâm in the wrong. But the contract itself canât objectively confirm that $3k is correct and $10k is wrong. So itâs through agreement of the validator set, and my lone disagreement, that determines that I have committed an intersubjective fault. Other potential sources of intersubjective faults include censorship resistance/detection, data availability, and as a stepping stone in verifiable computation before proving can be fully SNARKified.
Identifying intersubjective faults through majority votes works well⌠as long as the majority is honest and can all agree on the truth. There are a few ways this can break down. First is when a malicious attacker gains control of a majority of votes: they can trick the system into accepting an incorrect truth, and simultaneously slash any honest validators. Bribes make this possibility scarier. Second is when the truth itself is ambiguous, and honest voters may come to different conclusions. Maybe weâre giving Ethereum an oracle price feed of another chainâs native token, and that chain undergoes a contentious fork; which forkâs token price do we follow?
In the end, with the intersubjective on-chain voting mechanism having broken down, the system has to fall back on social consensus, usually implemented through forking. If a malicious majority is saying the market price of ETH is $1, the rest of the world knows thatâs wrong, so weâll come to off-chain social consensus to make a fork. The old system is abandoned, and at the social layer everyone agrees to move to the new fork, which likely introduces socially-agreed-upon state changes to slash the attacker and âunslashâ any honest validators caught up in the attack. A forkable oracle could also do just that to mirror a fork in the tracked token.
So what happens in the case of EigenLayer when an attacker gains majority ETH control of an AVS with intersubjectively determined slashing conditions? We have actual honest Ethereum validators who could end up slashed and effectively (or literally, post-Pectra) booted from the Ethereum network. The social layer could come to the rescue again, but it would mean a hard fork of Ethereum itself to slash the malicious actors and restore the honest ones.
Vitalik wrote a well known blog post on this subject, referring to the issue as the overloading of Ethereum consensus. One of the greatest risks is that we get a repeat of The DAO, where disagreement on if/how the social layer should resolve an application issue caused the Ethereum chain as a whole to fork. Itâs not too hard to imagine a situation where a large AVS gets intersubjectively attacked, an uncomfortable number of honest validators have their ETH slashed, and we once again have to decide between allowing some harm to the health of the network, or forking on behalf of a broken application. We really donât want to find ourselves in a position where we have to seriously have that debate again, and EigenLayer needs to be careful to not enable that.
The paper talks about social consensus from the perspective that tokens/projects have certain social conditions agreed upon during their initial setup phase that determine how to resolve intersubjective faults later on. Bitcoinâs community agreed on the longest chain rule for PoW consensus. Ethereumâs community agreed on its fork choice rule as well, but with a stipulation that the goal would be to move to PoS, an important decision during the âsetup phaseâ that eased the social acceptance of the transition. Rollups and national governments also follow this paradigm. EigenLayerâs perspective is that allowing intersubjective restaking of ETH would be a violation of Ethereumâs setup phaseâciting the same Vitalik post. They argue that intersubjective restaking in general requires a very specific setup phase where the entire community engages with the token with a very specific set of expectations around its principles and intended use.
So the answer: Design the EIGEN token specifically for the purpose of universal intersubjective staking. Design all AVSs so that all objective faults are backed by ETH, and all intersubjective faults are covered by EIGEN. In case of a failure of the intersubjective systems that requires social intervention and forking, that will be handled through the EIGEN tokenâs own forking system rather than overloading Ethereumâs social consensus.
EigenLayer actually envisions a system that contains two tokens, EIGEN and bEIGEN. Iâm not going to go into full detail about the tokens and forking behavior, but I can provide an overview, specifically of their V1 design. bEIGEN (b is for âbackingâ) is what is used internally within EigenLayer; it is what is actually staked with an operator and may be forked into different versions over time to resolve issues at the social layer. EIGEN abstracts that complexity away for the purposes of DeFi, providing a token that can be used without worrying about the forks going on behind the scenes.
bEIGEN forking is pretty interesting. An intersubjective fault can still result in slashing, as usual, but each AVS must implement a system by which anyone can raise an alarm about a fault to suggest that there is a need for social consensus to resolve a dispute. If there is an issue, e.g. attacker controlling majority stake, a challenge can be raised in the form of an ERC20 contract fork of the bEIGEN token. So you end up with the old pre-forked bEIGEN1 and new post-fork bEIGEN2. bEIGEN1 holders can claim their bEIGEN2 for a limited time.
In order to raise a challenge, the challenger must burn a significant amount of bEIGEN1âthis is the cost to them if their challenge turns out to be incorrect and bEIGEN1 remains canonical. The challenger must also tag a sufficient amount of bEIGEN2 tokens as malicious, these will be burned in bEIGEN2, and punish the attacker if the challenger is correct and bEIGEN2 becomes canonical. Once both tokens exist, the social layer takes over and through market price discovery, adoption of the tokens by AVSs and other protocols, etc, decides which token is correct and canonical.
Through this method, the need for a social layer to intervene in some intersubjective faults can be realized. Ideally, AVSs are designed to minimize ambiguity about which fork would be correct if you just check the real-world source of truth. So in most cases it should be obvious. But itâs probably unavoidable that some will be contentious, those will be more fun to watch play out and Iâll be glad Ethereum validators arenât at risk.
Technical note: the reason why bEIGEN2 redemptions are limited-time is because it needs to be shorter than the withdrawal time in order to prevent an attacker from committing a fault, withdrawing, and claiming the bEIGEN2 tokens anyway. By having t_redeem < t_withdraw
, the attacker has no way to get around their punishment. This carries the unfortunate design issue of putting a limit on redemption time. bEIGEN holders who delay may see all their value evaporate.
The EIGEN token is designed to be insulated from all that, because imagine what a nightmare that would be for DeFi integrations. Anyone with bEIGEN can wrap it to become EIGEN. The EIGEN contract provides its own governance to follow the various forks of bEIGEN and swap its contents to reflect its view of the canonical bEIGEN token. When unwrapping, it will only ever return the bEIGENx it considers canonical, not any other others. In short, if you hold EIGEN, you are trusting its governance system to accurately follow the canonical fork and in exchange donât have to worry about the forks yourself. The obvious risk is that if governance is wrong or corrupt, you may end up holding junk.
The big change in their proposed V2 is that the EIGEN contracts become immutable, and so must also be forked to create a EIGENx to match each bEIGENx. This creates a sort of historical record of the fork history through the various contracts, which gives EIGENx holders the option to hold passively and later claim all the bEIGEN tokens along the fork history, while protecting them from malicious EIGEN governance.
This seems to hurt the DeFi usage of the token, as each EIGENx will remain its own tradeable token. I think only the most recent EIGENx will be used, as itâs the only one that could be actively wrapped from bEIGENx, so that would mean DeFi protocols would have to add each new EIGENx as they come out. But itâs still much more convenient than using bEIGEN in DeFi. At least with EIGEN thereâs no pressure to redeem forks immediately; with bEIGEN if you donât manage to untangle it from nested DeFi positions and redeem forks in time youâre screwed.
The big thing here is that ETH restaking will only be used as economic security for objective faults, while (b)EIGEN provides economic security for intersubjective faults. Intersubjective faults often require social consensus to resolve through a fork (e.g. The DAO) and can sometimes be contentious. So the biggest benefit of this system is that the Ethereum social consensus layer is not pressured to fork the chain in order to resolve issues with an AVS. Without this thereâs a really good chance that a too-big-to-fail AVS would eventually get attacked and Ethereum would face a difficult decision about whether to fork to protect the honest stakers caught up in the incident, possibly bad enough to create an Ethereum Classic 2.0.
The biggest downside to me is the breakdown of EigenLayer as an ETH REstaking platform. Anyone can deploy a smart contract through which you can stake an ERC20 token as collateral and earn rewards for computational services while taking on slashing risk in case of misbehavior. A general marketplace for buying and selling economic security, kinda neat.
EigenLayer is particularly interesting in that it uses ETH (which is possibly the worldâs best collateral asset), and all of the ETH it has access to for security is also actively involved in regular ETH validator duties. For me it feels like thereâs a fundamental difference there. That having your AVSâs economic security come from the same ETH thatâs securing the network feels like youâre sharing in that same security, like youâre tapping into a particularly valuable, established set of actors. Ethereum validators are already committed to locking up their ETH to earn rewards, if EigenLayer makes it easy to access the same set of actors, you know youâre able to easily source high quality economic security for any project thatâs willing to pay for it, rather than bootstrapping a validator set from scratch.
EIGEN isnât ârestakingâ, itâs just⌠staking. To be fair, itâs a token designed to be the best universal intersubjective staking token, allows delegators to provide security to numerous shifting AVSs simultaneously, and will have tooling around it to make it easy for AVSs to adopt. So itâs the basis for a nice market for economic security for anyone who wants to buy or sell it. But in my mind it loses that critical edge that ETH has.
If EigenLayer dropped ETH altogether and EIGEN were used as the sole medium of exchange for economic security in their marketplace, I feel like Iâd hesitate to use it. Wouldnât you? To some extent I feel like EigenLayer gained a lot of prominence specifically because of the ETH restaking direction, and itâs a bit of a light rugpull to say ânow that youâve gotten on board, you have to buy our token in order to use half of our systemâ. Maybe it helps that the airdrop goes in part to ETH stakers who followed the incentives, making it easier for them to participate in both aspects? And maybe this is a necessary tradeoff to avoid overloading Ethereum consensus; thereâs no other way?
Regardless of the above, I think itâs clear that EIGEN as a staking token is a riskier play for EigenLayer than ETH restaking. It means a notable increase in complexity and risk factors. The system described in the paper is in no way simple to design or implement. And this tokenâs close integration with critical staking systems means Ethereum as a whole has more risk exposure to Eigen Labs. Should we be putting more work into protocolizing EigenLayer in the same way that weâre working towards ePBS? In taking this step, EL further invite this discussion.
I have been a little frustrated with the rough state of AVSs at this point in EigenLayerâs launch, and how few of them have really described what slashing is going to look like (despite them being literally live on mainnet!). This announcement does explain it somewhat: AVSs are going to have to factor EIGEN and intersubjective faults into their designs, so it would have been unfair to expect them to develop their slashing mechanisms before this was described in detail. So cool, maybe they can work on their economics now finally. But at the same time⌠why the heck did EigenLayer deploy to mainnet before this info was released? Why?
I havenât really done a deep dive on the theory of forking tokens, so I canât really analyze that too deeply. But I have always thought itâs a cool idea, and enjoy reading about governance systems designed with forking as a central concept, e.g. The DAO, Nouns DAO. The paper draws comparisons to Augurâs REP token but doesnât list others that really fork an applicationâs utility token. So this may actually be pretty novel, EigenLayer is huge and their forking system is very likely to be stress tested by malicious actors. Iâm very curious to see how it plays out.
And I guess thatâs that. The paper is 43 pages, so I guess I shouldnât feel too bad that this ended up so long. Always happy to explain more details from what I understood of the paper. And even happier to get corrections and different perspectives.
One of the CT resident lawyers did a thread on all this yesterday. Iâd suggest anyone having these questions to go through that
TLDR is that these are all legal issues. Its not that the project says lets take their money and defraud people or lets block US, that is a good idea for us.. No.Â
Its all down to legal constraints, and projects trying to waddle through unclear regulations, protecting them from potential government charges. Projects tell users, infact make it very clear from the very start not to expect airdrops for the same reason - they dont want to trick people into thinking they are going to airdrop, but end up not airdropping few countries or jurisdictions because of sanctions or regulations. So they make it very clear there isnt gonna be an airdrop. If someone files a lawsuit - they can just point to the message posted 12 months ago in discord #Wen-token channel that says dont expect an airdrop.
Similarly, the locked is also locked to make the token appear decentralized from the start. There is a belief that a locked token has less chances of being labelled a security (since it has no value), so the project is airdropping a locked token. And they will want the community to create proposals to unlock it, add value to it
No doubt, for end users its painful - you locked $50k for 6 months only to find out you arent eligible and the whole country is blocked. At that point you are mad, and dont want to hear âlegal thingiesâ. But the bitter pill is that all of this is due to not just unclear regulations but potential regulatory actions against projects/founders. US users must consider that there is a high chance they will be ineligible for most airdrops. So either they should not farm airdrops or acquaint themselves with gud airdrop claim technology (VPNs that work)
Of course, one will say that XYZ project 2 years ago airdropped us, and didnt do all this, you guys suck. Again the fact is that now the times have changed, regulatory environment has worsened. If you follow what is going on for the last 24 months, its kinda obviousâŚ
Coming to Ryan from Bankless - I really dont envy his job of trying to explain all this to a crowd of people who think theyâve been sold short.
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Ethereum
$3142
0.04889
3,966 validators to go till a million active validators.
Kindly taking note,
Blockchain is no antidote,
It is a lifeboat.
Ethereum: Undergoes infinity halvings. I SLEEP
Bitcoin: Undergoes one halving. REAL SHIT?
Looking for a list or some comparison of safe Eigenlayer operators to delegate to. Any help?
I see Aestus mentioned here but not familiar with their background.
EigenYields seems sketchy upon further inspection.
Etherfi has like 8 different operators, but are they all the same?
I also see Staked.US and they seem to have a good track record, but they shut out Americans from airdrops so how would that work if youâre an American restaker?
Or, is it best to just wait until some of the larger exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken get in on the game?
(Reposting since reddit deleted last post because of links.)
Few weeks ago when finding of Geth bug was posted here I decided to contact top 11 majority-Geth/undisclosed staking operators listed on supermajority info (having 1% and more network penetration)
I presented myself as a current/potential user, concerned about client supermajority issue, asking about their current setup and potential plans to improve client diversity status.
Contact was made through emails, customer support or Discord. Here are the summaries of respones I recieved:
I think Binance, Kraken and OKX (8% combined) should be campaigned further through social media and other channels to ensure they make an action. It seemed to be effective with Coinbase, we saw Brian Armstrong responded personally to DC on twitter, it also worked with consensus clients.
Many smaller operators seem to be steadily working towards diversifying, but feel free to check up on them as well.
Community did bring awareness to the problem and it improved, we can get it to 50% or below.
The Aestus MEV Relay is hiring a DevOps Engineer.
Frankly when u/austonst and I started this projected ~20 months ago, we both imagined (hoped?) it would have become irrelevant by now. However, ePBS is an unsolved research problem that even optimistically feels years away from any kind of resolution. So - we intend to set things up to play a long term game. We still think itâs crucial to the long term health of Ethereum that credibly neutral players occupy this space - because MEV is an incredible centralising force.
Weâve recently received some funding from an Optimism retro PGF round, which ethfinancers were instrumental in supporting. So, itâs because of the fine work from people like u/superphiz and u/bendido2030 that we are in a position to hire at all. It would be great to return that trust by sourcing someone close to this community.
The ad suggests this is a full-time role, but weâre very open to committed part-time contributions â and this could be a fun, albeit intense, side-gig for someone. Your primary role will be to help us improve the performance and stability of our existing architecture and develop a plan for the future. The right person will have very strong cloud and k8s experience in domains including observability and security. Generalist coding capability, a willingness to absorb new information and learn new skills are also essential. Youâll also be part of an on-call rota.
This work brings you very close to the core Ethereum protocol and part of your job will to be stay on top of research and developments in the MEV and ePBS space. While for me the most exciting part of this project has been in the constant adventure of working at the bleeding edge - there are many unknowns - and that also means that whoever we hire will have to accept a bit of insecurity. Having said that, the additional capacity will allow us to spend more time exploring new services and opportunities both in the relay ecosystem and beyond - restaking and shared-sequencing are both ecosystems where we think our ethos and experience can make a difference.
Worth also noting that unfortunately and for complicated reasons, we canât hire anyone resident in the US. I hope iâm not breaking any rules by posting this here!
Starknetâs foundation is well aware that mistakes were made in the initial round of provisions. There are numerous efforts underway to address those mistakes and find a more positive way to move forward. In that vein, I am hoping that some of you who feel they were unreasonably excluded from the first round will share a) why you feel that way, b) the account address (DM me if preferred), and c) what criteria you feel *should* have been applied. I am asking in my capacity as a Starknet delegate and member of the Starknet builderâs council to provide as much guidance as I can back to the foundation.
Edit: doesnât have to be limited to *your* account. If you know of any accounts that are good examples, please forward them along.
A very good indication that we are in a bull market is the pick up of the various scam attempts I come across. A few weeks ago my cold wallet on Ethereum was getting spammed with address poisoning attacks. Cost the spammer several dollars for each poisoning. I cannot really believe that these kind of things are worth it for them, but apparently they are ready to spend real money to do it.
Then came a cold DM on telegram from someone wanting to borrow my github account for a day. I blocked them so I never found out what they actually wanted with it, but I guess they saw my github account in the list of some airdrops and they would have wanted to claim them.
Yesterday I got DMs on Discord and Telegram with freelance coding job opportunities. These are close to 100% a scam as well. At the moment I am talking to them to try to find out how they would want to scam me. The slightly worrying part about the DMs is that they feel a bit closer to me than address poisoning. Especially, when these messages have been sent on two different apps (discord and telegram) simultaneously. Seems like someone is adding my user name to their scamming database.
Iâve got an addition to /u/haurog âs scam watchlist from yesterday. My more valuable wallets have been getting hit with address poisoning attacks, which at this point I would hope most people here are familiar with. And this should really be addressed with better tools at the wallet/etherscan level.
But more interestingly, my personal cell phone was hit today with a text message:
COINBASE: An unauthorized device from Salt Lake City, Utah has logged into your Coinbase account. If this was not authorized by you, please reply with âNâ. If this was authorized by you ignore this message.
I caught on immediately, in part because I wasnât actually sure I have a Coinbase account (I checked, and I do, but I didnât even really complete account setup, never set it up to receive fiat or crypto funds). But also because I had just recently read this article on Ars Technica, which describes the abilities of the CryptoChameleon phishing-as-a-service toolkit. Itâs a really good read, would recommend. But the first step of one of CryptoChameleonâs techniques is described to be similar: a phone call telling the recipient that there was an unauthorized login and asking them to press â1â or â2â to accept or deny.
This is kind of tricky because thereâs not really any immediate danger in replying âNâ (or pressing â2â to deny). If itâs legit then youâve done your part to prevent an attack. If itâs not legit, then all youâve done is sent a pointless text message. And users have become increasingly used to dealing with these kinds of messages from all sorts of account logins, so it may not ring any alarm bells. Why not send a quick âNâ and be done with it?
But my understanding is that the first step of a scam is by far the most important. On one hand, some scams deliberately use dubious sounding claims (Nigerian prince, anyone?) as an initial filter, so that the savvy users weed themselves out, and the people who actually respond are more likely to be duped by the subsequent requests. But thatâs probably just a side-benefit here, maybe allowing the recipients without Coinbase accounts to filter themselves out. And itâs notable that this message asks for action to deny and a non-response to approve. The vast majority of legit messages of this kind are the other way around: silence means deny. And thatâs smart, thatâs the way it should be.
More relevant this time is a sort of a sunk cost fallacy. In the world of video games that are âfree to playâ but with microtransactions for additional bonuses, itâs well understood that getting the user to make their first payment is a massive step. Once someone has caved and paid once, theyâre much more likely to continue to do so. And at some point you can ask me about the fascinating ways in which a scammer on the streets of Istanbul employed a bunch of tricks to make it really hard for me to disengage once we had started talking, but thatâs a longer story. But in short: if a scammer can get you to take the first step, youâre much more likely to fall for the following steps. So in this case, having the first step be something so likely to get casual responses means a higher success rate as a whole.
If the CryptoChameleon playbook described by Ars is accurate, there would probably be a followup text or email with a link to a fake phishing Coinbase login page, ready to take my password. I would hope even if people fell for the first step, theyâd catch the issue at this point, but the danger could be that the first step being fairly risk-free would cause people to let their guard down.
This turned out longer than I planned, hope it reads all right. tl;dr: Scams nowadays will likely start with âunauthorized device/loginâ messages, these kinds of messages should make you consider if the source could be a scammer.
Can I accidentally sign something malicious and it then drains my wallet?
Yes, hackers can be very creative. You could lose all of a single token, or an NFT or even native ETH. Not more than one type or token per signature.
I didnât think they could touch your ETH but just recently learned of a way. It uses eth_sign to have you sign a TX that the scammer generated in advance. It will only be valid for one nonce though. Basically, your private key has signed a TX that the scammer can create later, for example an ETH transfer. The wallets warn of those signature types heavily though.
It is also possible to lose many NFTs at once. I donât completely understand it but I remember when some people lost multiple Apes/Punks a couple of years back in a signing scam. Below is an article on it.
âHowever, signing a message like the second or third image on a website that turns out to be a scam will grant the scammers contract (and linked wallet) the ability to literally just buy all your approved NFTs to the specified contract under the âexchangeâ for ETH" -https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-gasless-signature-scam-heiner-garcĂa-pĂŠrez-u0ice
It can be difficult to spot a scam because the UI in Metamask is often abysmal for signatures. Itâs a lot better in Rabby but even there sometimes it doesnât understand things. It can then look like, you are trading asset 0xCY45⌠for asset 0x567DF⌠at a price of 85000000 gwei. Thatâs just ridiculous and easy to make a mistake on any of the contracts or even the amount might be a zero too much/little. I have read of people getting scammed this way.
You should always be careful when signing. If you are some public crypto MVP with millions of USD, you should even be extra careful. Use a separate PC only for crypto. I read about someone at a crypto company that opened a job resume PDF, it had some kind of malware that affected his metamask to push a modified TX to his hardware wallet which drained the company of millions USD.
Separating wallets and having a multi-sig are good practices.
Logris got me very interested in FHE for the past few days. Thank you for sharing! The tech is super interesting as someone who consistently takes the long and dull path while navigating the internet to preserve privacy and reduce data-mining (even though I know that it doesnât change anything in the grand scheme). A bit surprised I didnât know about this technology before. Running algorithms over data without knowing the true input/output, while still knowing the validity of the computation is preserved, is mind-blowing, but also makes sense when looking a bit closer.
In a utopian future, where this is the new standard for how the internet and its services work, I wonder how companies will keep serving you things like relevant ads and a personalized experience. Although Iâd be more than happy to live in a world without these âfeaturesâ, the incentives are just so strong that it doesnât make sense for them to let them go willingly. Anyone have any thoughts about this?
It would be nice if it turned into a marketplace, where you get these things served blindly through the same mechanisms, and got compensated for doing so (Brave had a cool visionary idea like this, but didnât work out that well in practice). A less cool approach would be design-patterns for applications to gate-keep certain features, like premium services or exclusive content in exchange for users opting in to give their data.
(Feel free to delete this if its too off-topic, mods)
Howdy yâall!
So, I think most of us here watch The Daily Gwei everyday. For those of you who do watch, youâll know that Sassal is taking a 2 week break from recording the show starting on Monday. During that time, Iâm going to help fill in the gap by providing Ethereum news on top of Rocket Pool news on Rocket Fuel.
Sassal talks about it in todayâs episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhI6OsMVZk8
For those of you who want to follow along, my YouTube channel is [www.youtube.com/@RocketFuel-RPL](http://www.youtube.com/@RocketFuel-RPL) and I also release episodes via podcast here:
I wonât be able to match his knowledge and insights (or bullish rants), but it might be a useful stop gap while heâs away.
Lodestar v1.18.0 released today
Our new release contains some noticeable facelifts! We recommend this update to all users of Lodestar.
Our documentation located at https://chainsafe.github.io/lodestar/ is now using Docusaurus for a better experience. Weâve attached Plausible metrics to further help improve the contents of our documentation with minimal intrusiveness and open-source analytics. We continue to do content additions and improve our documentation for the best user and builder experience possible.
This release addresses many compatibility issues discovered from cross-client testing with Lodestar and other consensus clients. This also includes fixes for compatibility with some external DVT platforms and remote signers.
Target peers by default has been increased from 50 to 100 peers. Many users have already set this for better validator effectiveness and now we have it set by default to become a better peer on the network.
builder.selection now has a default setting that gives slightly preferential treatment to locally produced blocks via builderBoostFactor=90 . This configurable setting is set to 90 instead of 100 by default, requiring builder blocks from relays to be above ~10% profit to be selected. The previous default setting was maxprofit. This can be changed in your local configuration.
Basic devcontainer support is now integrated for easier development setups such as Github Codespaces. For more information, see https://chainsafe.github.io/lodestar/contribution/getting-started#devcontainer.
Special guest Paul Brody joins us from EY and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
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Give me one good reason why I shouldnât 80x leverage my entire stack then 80x that 80x then deposit all of that into a 980 day lockup of yxBgkLklyupyupYupfgCc-xETH to get frank points that can be exchanged for 200 yarn credits (at a rate of 649 Galaxy cones to 400 ant points I should have an apy of 49080%)?
Letâs take a moment to talk about freedom. Here in the US thereâs this point of national pride they try to imprint on you that the US was founded on principals of freedom and somehow spreads the torch of freedom around the world. Thereâs the bill of rights they trot out, right to free speech etc. A pedantic point I sometime raise with people is that if something is discretionally permitted by the government, it is not a true freedom. Right to free speech? Not if you yell fire in a crowded room, start a riot, libel, slander, etc. If a judge can issue a gag order, speech itself is not a freedom; it is permitted. Driving is not a right; it is permitted. Owning a firearm is not a right, it is permitted, despite what all the 2A folks want to believe.
In terms of true freedoms, you have very few true ones and even amongst your permitted rights they are often being deprecated by technology. For example you had the right to privacy, the government couldnât open your USPS mail without a warrant. This is still technically true, but the vast majority of mail has instead become email and the US doesnât need a warrant to scry that. You had the freedom to transact with cash, but increasingly every payment is digital and those rights donât carry over. We hear frequently stories of people that go to deposit to a bank and have the deposit frozen. You have to report transactions over $10k, which practically means less and less expensive things in purchasing power each year due to inflation. Legislative inaction and judicial activism, in the face of technological progress, are eroding what few permitted freedoms we still have.
The notion that everything every citizen does should be permitted is attractive to those who wield power. They want you to have to ask their permission so they can say no and only permit actions that preserve or expand their position of power and at a time and place most convenient for them. The days tick by and the vice constraining what you are allowed to do silently tightens each day. The people who need freedoms the most are those with the most controversial ideas, the ones most likely to destabilize the status quo; for good or ill.
People like Warren fundamentally disagree with me on the freedom to transact. They want the freedom to transact to fully transition to a permitted freedom. They make arguments like âequal playing fieldâ with the banks that are already wound in the straight jacket for them. They argue that the only people who need these freedoms are those with malicious intent. They reductively argue that blockchains are financing North Korea and child porn. Of course, they are only here to protect us. Itâs very much analogous to the ânothing to hideâ arguments you get from the surveillance state encroaching on your right to privacy and itâs every bit as ethically wrong. They couldnât be further from the founding principals of this nation if they tried.
Your transactions are an expression of your values. You invest in things you believe in, you buy things that add value to your life, you donate to causes you hold dear. Limiting your transactions is fundamentally an attack on your ability to express your values and shape the world to align with them. The moral compass of crypto is a controversial one, precisely because it bucks the trend and creates true freedom; for good or ill. So yes, there are scammers abound, memecoins with deliberately hateful content, and rugs every day but there are also people escaping the oppressive inflation of their nation state, financing art and innovation, and eroding the role parasitic middlemen plaguing our society.
So, asking for permission simply wonât do. Iâd rather just be free.
approve() is part of the most common standard token interface, erc20. It has nothing to do with ethereum and is unrelated ethereum upgrades. Tokens can be any contract which implement any interface, or if you want they can all be from the same factory and you can check if theyâre in that factories mapping of built tokens if you want to be sure what they are.
There have always been tokens which do it differently but erc20 isnât going anywhere, youâll stop noticing it when account abstraction becomes standard. For example on starknet ethereum rollup where account abstraction is default the approve and function call all take place within a single tx. Same can be true with dapps which use dsproxy.
ERC 4337 is going to win and become account abstraction standard. I hate it but itâll be fine. Would rather hard fork and do it properly.
ARB DAO updates:
Iâll also update everyone here that the March delegate incentive program data is out - here. This is a trail program looking at ways to incentive delegates to participate more meaningfully in governance, rewarding active voting and discussion. I actually ended up being rank #1 out of all those who participated! Hopefully those who delegate to me here feel adequately represented :) and know that I try my best to make sure your voting power isnât wasted.
Quick HOP governance update.
Iâve spent the last few months working on applying to the ARB Long-Term grant program on behalf of Hop, heading up a team with a few other HOP delegates. Council voting results have been released (list of all passing projects here) and HOP has passed the first round! So now it goes to the ARB delegates for vote this week for final approval.
The grant is asking for 500k ARB tokens with the goal of making bridging to the ARB networks cheaper for users. This will be done through fee rebates and liquidity incentives (to reduce slippage), and if it goes live should hopefully help users switch between L2 networks to take advantage of the growing space.
Iâll also add, I worked as well to apply for a similar grant through Optimism. Hopefully with similar results.
Like most of the rest of you, I sometimes ponder why Ethereum in recent years tends to perform so⌠differently⌠from many other cryptoassets out there.
I keep coming back to this one reason:
Most people today buy crypto to gamble, not to invest.
The market, broadly speaking, is not interested in fundamentals. It sees crypto as a giant casino, where if youâre lucky better and faster at reading the trends and moods and narratives, you can become rich overnight, and escape the increasingly dystopian financial state of society. Fundamentals are not the bedrock of deciding what is and isnât a good deal, in this mentality - they are a ball and chain that keeps an asset tethered to reality, when what you actually want is one that is free to ascend into outer space with no pesky P/E ratios or highly technical upgrades to slow understanding and buzz. The more innocent an asset is of any practical use, the less beholden it therefore is to actually needing to support that use, to actually addressing that market, to actually working. If youâre not supposed to do anything, you canât fail, and the market canât fail to understand what you do!
By contrast, most of us here would consider ourselves investors. We do care about utility, and we do care about real yields, and we do watch each upgrade with bated breath, and we do follow the discourse on roadmaps and adoption. We care about those pesky fundamentals, because we understand that having a fundamentals-driven thesis is the difference between investing and gambling, and we are not here to gamble. Ethereum, which by this point is deeply embedded in the crypto and web3 ecosystems, and which has, by most metrics, already won the adoption war - thatâs something we can sink our teeth into, and the fundamentals look pristine. Ethereum is bae for us because in buying it, we can feel secure that we are investing in something that has real underlying value beyond memes and narratives and the attention economy.
Consider the chasm between those two mentalities, and consider that we are in the incredibly distinct minority right now. Weâre rocking up to a casino with spreadsheets and reams of research. And weâre shocked when the degenerates around us take one look at our stodgy âinternet of valueâ, our âglobal settlement layerâ, our âworld computerâ, and pass it by, because it has won a battle that memecoins are not even trying to fight.
Times are changing, of course. The gamblers that still make up the large majority of the market are soon going to be dwarfed by the massive capital that institutional investment can bring to bear, and make no mistake, those investors of size do do their homework, they do care about fundamentals. They know, like we do, that selling shovels during this gold rush is the best way to profit, and that Ethereum is that shovel, and moreover, that it will grow into the digital equivalent of Manhattan real estate in the fullness of time. How soon these more competent investors will arrive en masse is hard to say, of course - weâve been crying out, âthe institutions are coming, the institutions are comingâ like some kind of latter-day Bilbo Baggins for years now. But I think most would agree that the ETF approvals, whenever they may come, will in many ways herald that advent. The time of fundamentals is not here yet, but it is coming.
So while we all sit here gnashing our teeth and pulling our hair while the markets happily ignore our precious Ethereum, keep in mind that while weâre a tiny component of those markets today, what we really are is forerunners.
Weâre not the last of our kind in a world devoid of reason, raging against the dying of the light.
Weâre the first.
I have this idea for quite some time now and Iâd like to share it with you.
I think that DeFi lacks itâs own high level script language. All major systems have SDKs (for advanced developers) and â on the other hand â UI, but nothing in between.
Take Uniswap as an example: you have low level SDK, where you have to deal directly with all the components (and bignumbers, various notations and so on) or pretty clumsy UI (try to move your position to a different range, even if it doesnât require swapping tokens â it takes lot of clicking, waiting and itâs almost guaranteed that price will move while youâre doing all of this.
The solution would be high level language or set of scripts which would allow to execute all the most important functions of given Defi system by using simple commands. It should eg. understand token symbols, decimal numbers.
So instead of 100+ lines of code or using browser etc you could do:
`movePosition 29133 2000 3000` and after confirmation (which could be disabled) itâs done for you.
or, in interactive mode, you could do
`movePosition` and youâd be asked to select from list or type which position, then set range.
Those commands could be executed as scripts. There could be also an event watcher (eg. watching price on some pool) to which you could bind scripts, executed when some conditions are met. Eg. when APY on AAVE is lower than on sDAI, withdraw USDC, convert to DAI using Curve and stake on Spark. Even if not automated itâs much easier, faster to execute and probably cheaper.
What do you think about it?
EDIT: If there are some devs whoâd like to do such project, please pm me.
Yesterday, u/syzygy00778 posted a link to a comment discussing the identity of Satoshi. Buried in the comments is another link, to an EXCELLENT article titled âLen Sassaman and Satoshi: a Cypherpunk Historyâ.
Iâll paste the first two paragraphs, and let you read the rest..
"Weâve lost too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
Embedded on every single node of the Bitcoin network is an obituary. Hacked into the transaction data, itâs a memorial to Len Sassaman, a man essentially immortalized in the blockchain itself. A fitting tribute in more ways than one.
Len was a true Cypherpunkâ equal parts brilliant, irreverent, and idealistic. He devoted his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working as a developer on PGP encryption and open-source privacy technology, as well as an academic cryptographer researching P2P networks under blockchain inventor David Chaum."
Any node operators / solo stakers!
EthStaker & Obol are putting out a survey to get to know the landscape of home stakers and solo stakers. The goal is to create publicly available data that accurately represents what home/solo stakers care about, what kind of software and services we mostly use, what we need, etc. The info can be used to advocate for stakers in ongoing research based on their own words. Some questions were contributed by EF researchers themselves
It shouldnât take longer than 15 minutes, most questions are optional, and no data collected can be tied back personally to people (the survey software is FOSS!). We aim to repeat the survey every 6-12 months to get an idea of how the landscape is changing. Itâs available in English, Mandarin, Spanish & Italian. Weâll leave it open for 2-3 weeks depending on volume
The survey is primarily aimed at those running personal validators (anywhere! Cloud services, bare metal services, at home, with a staking-as-a-service provider), minipools, or DVT clusters. If folks have any feedback or suggestions for the next iteration of the survey, would love to hear them! Feel free to direct them to me or to the EthStaker team email (team at ethstaker dot cc)
Survey Link: https://stakinglandscape.limesurvey.net/748278
The Aestus Relay team (thatâs me, and /u/austonst) have decided to run an experiment in the EigenLayer AVS Operator space. I want to test whether our service and reputation in the MEV-Boost ecosystem as a credibly neutral and solo-staker focussed infrastructure provider, might be of benefit in other domains. I honestly donât know how this is going to work out, but itâs an interesting sideline to pursue.
So, as EigenDA hits mainnet today, iâm announcing our intent, and hoping that you might support this by delegating your Native or Liquid Restaking Tokens to us here. Once we hit the required threshold of 320 ETH, weâll begin operations. I expect this to take a few days.
Iâll write out a longer post that sets out our motivations and intent, soon. But in brief: it seems clear that the restaking and AVS ecosystem is in danger of rapid domination by staking pools. We hope to make a small difference by leveraging our existing infrastructure in pursuit of decentralisation.
The technology doesnât appear to support it yet, but once itâs possible - weâll figure out how to make sure native solo re-stakers donât pay any fees to use our AVS services.
I donât encourage anyone to participate in Eigenlayer restaking because of their stated intention to onboard all validators (thatâs a form of network capture), but if you DO use Eigenlayer and need to delegate your LSD tokens to a node operator, Iâd really encourage you to choose Aestus.
Aestus is made up of two long time members of /r/ethfinance, /u/austonst and /u/KuDeTa. In all of my interactions with them Iâve found them to be working in the right directions.
https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator/0x30eafe8869a1528660a97b7a7e8e2d0037dcb922
So on the EVM call last Friday I went on a rant for a few minutes after JT read my doot. Itâs so good Iâm literally just cleaning it up and transcribing it here:
FHE is complementary to zk-proofs. Zk-proofs say that I did the calculation honestly. We can prove something like I calculated 4+5 honestly and you donât have to go and rerun it yourself to get the answer to that. FHE can be used for many things outside of AI but itâs especially valuable for things like DePin.
For example Biometric Authorization. When you want to take your thumbprint or eyeprint and use that as an authorization mechanism. You donât want to give someone your decrypted eyeprint. Today, without FHE, we encrypt your data in transit so the people in the middle canât get it, then we decrypt it on the receiving side, and then the person on the receiving side now has your decrypted eyeprint and can basically just impersonate you. There is fundamentally trust with whomever is the processor of your data.
With FHE, we can give you an encrypted eyeprint, they can check that your eyeprint is actually you, without knowing itâs you. They donât have something that can be reused. So they can do authorization without you leaking your public data.
The same thing would be true if I was in healthcare and wanted to make health predictions about you. If I know itâs you and you give me all your health data what am I going to do? As a centralized provider Iâm going to take that data, Iâm going to jot it down, and then Iâm going to sell it on the data market to some health insurance companies so they can jack up your rates.
As a user, I want the output of the LLM that tells me what might be wrong with me without the processor of the data being able to jot it down and sell it maliciously against me and add that extra monetization. The same thing would be true in a lot of places. It should be true throughout all of web2. This should explode and become mandatory in certain environments where privacy should be sacrosanct. But in DePin especially, because of permissionless compute, I canât even just say I trust Amazon. I have no idea who the processor of the data is and due to market forces it is going to devolve into the most malicious operator who is able to extract the most monetization out of the data they steal.
So for DePin to be applicable to any area where there is the remotest sense of secrecy or privacy we need to be able to do calculation on an untrusted operator and both prove that they did the calculation honestly (zk-proof) and that they didnât have access to the underlying data (FHE). So you put these two technologies together and you get something that can eat into the margins of centralized compute providers like AWS in a significant way.
To put their margins in perspective, a P5 instance on AWS right now is $92 an hour. I can buy that machine for about $350k. At $92 an hour thatâs over $800k a year, Amazon is making over 200% APR on the investment of the machine. There is an extraordinarily huge margin there and the effect of that is that the highest grade of compute we have isnât democratized and therefore the apps that require that grade of compute are increasingly being centralized into a few tech oligarchs.
Due to the compute requirements, this basically translates to AI. So weâre seeing brick wall around AI being built every time we add another parameter to the LLM. Chat GPT was 1.5B parameters; it takes about 13 gigs of video ram to hold and use the model. Chat GPT 4 is bigger. Weâre going to go to a trillion parameters. Weâre going to get to a point where you need to have hundreds of gigs of video ram just to serve on the model and thatâs not going to be accessible to the average person. The average person isnât going to buy a half million dollar machine from NVidia. We need to be able to provide that high end compute to them at a lower margin than AWS is charging.
That is both an opportunity and a moral imperative of Defi and Depin. We need to make the compute required to access the technologies we are pioneering more democratically accessible before they become permanently locked behind brick wall and only accessible to a few tech oligarchs and used in their most extractive possible way against humanity.
Todayâs Bankless discussion came at the perfect time. I had just finished reading u/AElowsson âs analysis and I think I understand more clearly whatâs really at stake (heh) here. I have to admit my initial reaction when I read the proposal was pretty negative, so in order to help others make up their mind and also keep track of all the arguments that I see, Iâve made a list of the pros and cons as Iâve understood them, and explained them as simply as possible. If there are any more that you can think of and ELI5, Iâll be happy to add them to the list.
Pros of issuance change:
The network stability benefits from an optimal number of validators, as itâs more difficult for a huge number of validators to effectively attest blocks fast enough.
The ETH that remains in circulation is not superseded by LSTs, which apart from having smart contract, centralization and rugpull risks, make the LST a proxy for ETH. As a result, ETH does not lose its âmoneynessâ in the eyes of its users.
Non-stakers benefit immensely from an issuance reduction. Currently, non-stakers benefit from the burn by having an effective ~0.5% APY, and at the same time, stakers get >3%. However, as more ETH is staked, non-stakers end up not benefiting at all as more and more rewards go to stakers, who at a minimum will be getting 2% at 100% ETH staked.
The more ETH is staked, the harder it will be to implement this change. This is due to several reasons, most important of which is that big staking providers have a huge incentive to block it. Lido has already come out in favour of ALL ETH being staked and wanting as much of it to be stETH. What would happen in a post-staked ETH ETF world, when BlackRock lobbies against implementing a change to issuance?
Unclear if issuance change will be a pro or a con:
It is not clear how this change will affect the dynamics between solo/hobby stakers and huge staking services. On one hand, thereâs definitely a limit where solo stakers would exit, and if the staking pools manage to profit though other means, the APY could be very negative and drive all solo stakers out. On the other hand, a market optimized APY leaves less space for staking pools to get a cut of the profits, and if solo stakers eventually have all the ways to profit through other means as big pools, they might be more resistant to low APY. Personally, I would keep a validator up even at half a percent APY, but would not keep my validator up at, say, -5% APY.
Fewer ETH staked means less economic security for a network that aims to secure trillions of dollars of assets. However, those fewer ETH can end up having more economic value in the long term due to a more robust and valuable network, so the end result is not immediately clear.
Cons of issuance change:
Changing the issuance again will lead to huge amounts of FUD, and ETH losing some of its âmoneynessâ due to the belief that the EF can unilaterally change the monetary supply.
Itâs definitely not good optics at a time when the SEC is investigating and will be pretty bad for our hopes for an ETF.
The issuance can and probably will need to be changed again. The main reason is that there are economics we simply do not understand, like the effect restaking will have on the amount of ETH staked. Also, the amount of validators might go down significantly with EIP-7251 (max-ETH per validator), leading the network to require more validators to be sufficiently decentralized. Finally, there are ideas for future updates that, if implemented, will significanly alter the economics of ETH. MEV-burn is one frequently discussed here, but the Anti-correlation Penalties for validator attestations, which in my understanding disincentivizes big staking providers by implementing heavier penalties when lots of validators lose an attestation at the same time, will most probably also affect the number of validators and the staking pool-solo staker dynamics.
âPersonal opinion belowâ
So here is my view now: I am still mostly on the fence regarding the immediate (see:Pectra) issuance curve change, but at the same time I want to come out in support of an eventual change of the issuance curve towards one where staking much more than 50% of the supply is heavily disincentivized by negative issuance.
The main reason for this is that most of the disadvantages of changing the issuance are short-term troubles, and wonât have any effect on the long-term longevity of Ethereum. Iâd rather see the project succeed and change the world, than make a bit more money for a year or five. âIâm in it for the techâ might be a meme, but itâs also the best way to analyze long-term investments, and it would be much easier for me to leave a project that has ossified before being finished, than it would be to leave because the price dumped. Changing Ethereumâs issuance will not only make it a more robust network, but also better money, especially for smaller holders that cannot stake.
ETH needs to keep changing for the better, so donât sacrifice the future to the present. Thatâs what Bitcoin did, and apart from the fact that it will have huge issues eventually, it ended up being only a shadow of what it could be.
Special guest Don Gossen joins us from Nevermined, a decentralized AI payments protocol.
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The meme franchises,
Stupid games with stupid prizes,
Down turn surprises.
You know the old saying: âBuy ETH on April Foolâs Day, $8000 by end of Mayâ.
Donât ignore it this time.
So a couple of days I asked if the EF wants to kill or at least tame restaking. I relistened to the UCC episode and hereâs my understanding.
Restaking is not restaking. At least in the case of Eigenlayer (and I think for now its fair to assume Eigen will be 80%+ of the restaking market) technically any asset could be used as collateral. Just because right now itâs validators via eigenpods or staked ETH via LSTs doesnât mean thatâs the endgame. Actually pure ETH, USD or even other tokens could be used to secure the AVS. This seems to play an important:
If the AVS really requires the restaker to be a validator then the plan is to âsmoothenâ rewards, which likely (!) means that MEV spikes will be captured and burned/ redistributed. Even though they didnât mention this I guess something like based sequencing where the validator sequences the L2 could be one of these cases. The goal is to make sure big entities arenât in a better position to capture value than solo stakers.
If the AVS is just secured by capital provided, but the security is not connected to a validator and could be done by someone with USD and a computer, then thatâs a different story.
I still have many questionsâŚ
Iâm a big fan of the work that /u/hanniabu and EthStaker (/u/nixorokish) have done with https://ethstaker.cc/incidents to document Beacon Chain incidents in a publicly aggregated way. I think this is awesome for transparency and accountability.
I was brainstorming ways that it might be improved, and I think it could be helpful to convert this page to a table and include a severity scale. Hereâs an idea what that might look like, and I think it would be awesome for other people to take that apart.
Iâm never good with these scales, I wonder if the most severe incidents should have higher or lower incidents. This example is ranked with lower severity = lower higher number. I also think itâs good to leave room for a 10 point scale and realize that there may be shuffling over time.
ALSO, I think it may be useful to indicate that different events can trigger the same level of severity, as Iâve tried to illustrate below.
Note that this is a very first draft and it would need a ton of editing by others to be useful.
Beacon chain incident severity scale:
Minor
Severity 10 - Minority client issue that caused that client to miss attestations, participation above 95%, no missed slot.
Severity 9 - A client or multi-client issue causes participation to drop between 85% and 95%, no more than 1 consecutive missed slot.
Severity 8 - A client or multi-client issue that causes participation to drop between 66% and 85%, no more than 1 consecutive missed slot.
Medium
Severity 7 - A beacon chain consensus or execution client becomes a majority client (greater than 66% use)
Severity 6 - more than 1 consecutive missed slot; or any entity exceeds 33% of validators
Severity 5 -
Major
Severity 4 - Any entity exceeds 50% of validators
Severity 3 -
Severity 2 - No transactions were processed on the beacon chain for < 1 hour
Extreme
Severity 1 - No transactions were processed on the beacon chain for > 1 hour; An entity exceeds 66% of validators
To monetise their infrastructure, relays need a performance edge - which they canât possibly maintain if everything is open source. So to some extent, competing at all necessitates competing in private. At the moment, ultrasound are running a fee delta / bid adjustment experiment in which they try to capture the difference between the highest and second highest bids - effectively depriving the validator of it. By doing so, they can take a fee - but also break some of the natural resilience of the mev-boost system - as bids are now unique to their relay. As i understand things, they also have a closed source rust implementation of the relay codebase, and have done some work with reth to try and improve bid simulation performance (vs geth). Those are the broad strokes, and youâll see that they do open source some of their core thinking.
Frankly, itâs very difficult to work out exactly who is running what code, and what is clear is that none of the relays (including Aestus - though all our code is opensource) are vanilla MEV-Boost anymore, except Flashbots. /u/benido asked me elsewhere if this canât also be seen as a âgoodâ thing. Judge for yourselves based on the recent incidents. I would much rather find a way to incentivise relays (until we can get rid of them entirely) such that they want and need to work together. An upfront fee is probably more healthy. However, we should also face facts: the validator set is pretty mercenary and convincing Coinbase, LIDO and others to e.g. only use open source relays seems unlikely to happen.
To make matters even more interesting, we seem to be entering the early stages of a race to compete on timing. Bloxroute proudly boast they are making validators who sign up to their gateway an additional 6.4% of MEV income. Where does that come from? The next proposing validator (not using their service). I havenât managed to get to the bottom of whether other relays (including US) are yet doing this, but i wouldnât be surprised if they are.
Iâve spent time with people from across the MEV (relay/builder/searcher) ecosystem at various events, and i want to underline that while itâs somewhat tempting and human to try and reduce this to a question of individual/entity behaviour or ethics, threatening everyone with the ethereum police really misses the point entirely. The incentives are broken and the competition increases fragility. Donât hate the player - hate the game.
Another update!
After yâall crushed my app for planning your exit strategy, I used the weekend to get it on a proper hosting plan.
Itâs live on kollit.ai now!
Thousands of people entered in a matter of a day, i utterly speechless and so greatful you guys found my app useful!
For the folks who missed it:
I made an exit strategy planner using game theory. Itâs called Kollit - you call the prices, enter your risk tolerance and a few more optional things and the app will spit out an exit strategy that mathematically minimizing your total regret, be it regret of selling early or regret of waiting for a higher price that never comes. I think itâs really cool and im super excited to hear what you have to say! If you have any questions or suggestions please dont hesitate :)
Here is a long-form âEIP research postâ on my reward curve with tempered issuance.
There shouldnât be any significant issuance or monetary policy change unless the issue is something so obvious and objectively agreeable or existential already. The reasons for any significant changes to issuance now seem to be for highly subjective reasons. The threat to centralization comes much more from some central body trying to tweak monetary policy, not from the market, institutions, individual users, and the broader ecosystem naturally figuring itself out. Even if only a small percentage of ETH is in circulation in the future then so be itâŚÂ Anyone drumming up ideas for changes to monetary policy right now should rather maybe consider simplying user experience for solo stakers or try to educate the masses on holding or using ETH the hard asset. Even advocating to LSTâs and the like to follow some kind of better defined framework would be a better approach. There are so many other ways to address subjective issues like the ones being brought up imo. Monetary policy changes are like the absolute last resort.
There are good arguments on both sides of the issuance debate. I donât, however, believe consistency of monetary policy is a good argument in favour of doing nothing. Itâs naive to imagine we could have ever designed the yield curve correctly the first time around, given MEV, LSTs and restaking had yet to appear. It would therefore be hubris to suggest that any changes we make now will ever be considered final, given all the unknown unknowns. Crypto just moves too quickly. The capacity for evolution and adaptation is a core strength of the ethereum community and we should embrace it to stay ahead of the competition.
Some things I believe are true. I could be wrong on some.
For me this is the best take on the issuance reduction so far: https://warpcast.com/orangesamus.eth/0x7668549c
My thoughts on issuance reduction:
To target < 100% staked ETH you assume:
- There is some yield âx%â where the market finds it irrational to take on the risks/opportunity costs of even delegating to someone else to stake
- Issuance curve is chosen such that we cross below x% before we get to 100% staked ETH
The problem is that I think:
- There is also some nominal yield ây%â that makes it irrational to be a solo or home staker after you get any lower than y%
And until you find a way to make solo/home staking more competitive relative to centralized alternatives:
- y% will always be greater than x%
So I think the worst case scenario is the one that we get an issuance curve that leads to:
- crossing below y% (no longer rational to solo/home stake)
- And even worse: we are still > x% even at 100% ETH staked, meaning we didnât accomplish our primary goal, and our validator set is highly centralizedEven if we choose a good x% and land at less than 100% staked ETH, we could still end well below y% and our validator set may end up highly centralized.
Iâd rather Ethereum âover payâ for a robust validator set in the short term, than âunder payâ and end up without a robust validator set
I think we should prioritize research to make decentralized staking more competitive, like ideas shown below:
- https://ethresear.ch/t/how-optional-non-kyc-validator-metadata-can-improve-staking-decentralization/17032
- https://ethresear.ch/t/supporting-decentralized-staking-through-more-anti-correlation-incentives/19116
If solo staking equilibrium yield is lower than pooled staking equilibrium yield. Then we must overpay issuance to ensure solo stakers can exist, otherwise the network will become strongly centralized.
Another argument on top of this one, whatever the optimal issuance curve is (if there is even one), we must approach it from above. Because if we overtighten we will end up having to raise issuance. And this creates a very bad precedent that will likely erode any monetary credibility Ethereum may have.
A limitation of permissionless execution for as long as Iâve been around has been that everything is necessarily public. We use mixers on occasion to obfuscate fund movements but the underlying program and underlying data for smart contracts is always public. If thereâs a chain adjacent service like an Oracle, everything about its function is public. If I wanted to use a smart contract or a keeper to serve some data for me conditionally on authorization I end up having to use a centralized service at some point to issue a decryption key. Otherwise whomever wants the data could simply join as a data provider, download everything, and then exit without paying for the data. The root problem is just that if a system is permissionless then it canât be entrusted with secrets.
This has become an acute pain point for AI x crypto applications recently. We canât use DePin to train on private data or to serve answers from private models. However, thereâs some math magic just on the fringe of development at the moment that could blow this space open: zk-proofs + fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)1.
Hereâs an ELI5: I want you to add two numbers for me but I donât want you to know which numbers Iâm adding. Letâs say I want the answer to 1+1. So I add a secret number known to me but not to you to each input, letâs say 3 and 4, and I give you the problem 4+5. You calculate 9. To get the decrypted answer I just subtract the sum of the secret numbers in my input from your answer: 9-(3+4)=2. This looks silly in the reductive case but makes a lot more sense as the number operators (+, -, *, /) and operations in the calculation grows. Today, there are workable FHE encodings that can support any combination of multiplication and addition on an encrypted space. This is promising because as it turns out neural nets are nothing but a very large combination of simple arithmetic operationsâŚ
Hence a FHE encoded neural net can potentially be run on DePin infrastructure while protecting property rights to the underlying model. Once we see some of the initial projects like zama, privasea, and based.ai prove out this concept and it becomes more widely understood the full applications of FHE in crypto are going to be huge. I highly suggest Rabbit Holing on this one for a few hours.
The startup I work for just shipped https://www.rdatadao.org. Without sharing my own opinion or involvement, Iâm curious what impression it leaves you all withâŚ
Warning: It was realized this also exports your DMs.u/dondochaka is bringing this up with the team.
Special guest Ram Ahluwalia, CFA and CEO of Lumida Wealth, a digitally native, SEC registered investment advisor specializing in alternative investments and digital assets.
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Jailed FTX bro,
Itâs six halving in a row,
Raise and fall below.
Is âyou donât have enough pointsâ the new âyou donât have enough ETHâ?
Hey guys. As a genesis solo validator, I would like to share with you the reasons why I oppose the increase in block size at the present time.
Therefore, I think this is not the right time to increase the block size. I think we should wait until Ethereum L2s have reached a point where they can compete with alternative L1s in terms of capacity and the cases where complex blocks can cause small validators to miss blocks have been thoroughly tested and eliminated.
I recently read Polynyaâs latest blog, which reminded me of how grateful I am to be a part of this group. X is nothing but a shitshow; Farcaster looks promising, but the conversation is fragmented. The only place where the comment-to-quality ratio is high is here, with a wholesome bunch of strangers discussing the whole ecosystem and offering help without prejudice. Itâs a rare find in the current market, especially now that meme mania seems to be leading the charge.
Even beyond this group, some fellow members have offered their guidance and support. MinimalGravitas, my dude, if it werenât for your kind words, I would have left the DAO in â22. Do you know, a fellow member even offered me their NUC, its up and running. Every time I look at it, I forget the gloom I see elsewhere, it gives me hope. This motivation to run a node, even if itâs non-staking, was inspired by Nixoâs tweet. Not directly, but Logris has taught me valuable lessons through his well-explained comments. Whether on vacation or gone camping, no worries, Tricky got you covered with doots when youâre back. Benido and Hanni have written extensively on different topics, from DAO to LST to client diversity. And the list goes on⌠all that without an expectation of any financial return.
Sometime we take things for granted or we are unaware of impact of our action but not today, today I want to show my gratitude and thank you all for contributing to this forum. Even if I have nothing to say, I ready the daily and learn something from it and I am greatful for that.
L2beat.com does an amazing job at explaining the trade-offs in detail. L2s are definitely not web2 technology. In fact, itâs so novel that they are still being built, thatâs why they have some amount of training wheels and safety guards at the moment.
The first thing to observe is that you can give up decentralization for an L2 as long as some protections are guaranteed to the user programmatically. Itâs OK for a rollup operator to run the rollup themselves, it may even be permissioned, it may even be censored. And thatâs OK as long as you can always escape hatch with your assets to the L1. And the analogy I would use here is that this is the exact same thing that happens with private businesses. A restaurant doesnât have to serve you, they may reserve the right to not have you as a customer sometimes for trivialities like dress-code. A web forum may ban you. And thatâs fine because you can go anywhere else. If you are unhappy with the rollup you get your stuff and go somewhere else. Your fundamental rights are preserved in the public space, the L1 is the public space. And the L1 is permissionless and censorship-resistant so you can be sure there will be somewhere else to go.
Here is an example of how this works in Arbitrum: https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/arbitrum#risk-analysis
Sequencer failure Self sequence
In the event of a sequencer failure, users can force transactions to be included in the projectâs chain by sending them to L1. There is a 1d delay on this operation. Proposer failure Self propose
Anyone can become a Proposer after 6d 8h of inactivity from the currently whitelisted Proposers.
Even if Arbitrum went for the ultimate censorship, turning off their rollup, you would be able to use the L1 and escape hatch.
Bitcoin maxis have been parroting a never ending stream of FUD arguments for years, systematically being proven wrong and when that happens instead of recognizing their mistake they move to new FUD arguments. Facts be damned. I would recommend updating your bayesian priors taking their track-record into account.
I am dealing with internalizing the hate toward Ethereum, but am also trying to prevent myself being blinded by my own bias.
One trap that people often fall into is refusing to acknowledge any scenario where their beliefs, convictions, or ideals could ever be âwrongâ.
As a result, I am compiling a list of things which would indicate to me that I was wrong about Ethereum. That Ethereum was a failed experiment doomed due to irreparable flaws. Of the 4 listed here, any one of the first 3 coming true I think would be enough for me to concede the âdeath of ETHâ.
For myself, and hopefully some of you here who are deeply invested in Ethereumâs success, these scenarios would likely need to be demonstrable, systemic, and irreparable to convince us that Ethereum was a failed experiment.
What you think about Vitalik 5 year time-frame for Ethereum to prove its ready for mainstream real world adoption?
https://thedefiant.io/vitalik-says-ethereum-must-achieve-mainstream-adoption-within-five-years
Despite the cc subreddit pushing a negative narrative, it seems like Vitalik is actually bullish.
âI expect Ethereum to be a very leading player in helping to make stablecoin accessible to people in a way that actually is open, actually is decentralized, and actually doesnât require trusting fragile third-parties.â
Also, improvements to be able to run a node (not sure if validators but probably) without the need for a lot of storage space. zk-SNARKs would help us move from our staking rigs to just a phone/very light processing on a computer.
âWith Verkle Trees, as a node, you would not have to store the state locally. And with EIP-4444: History Expiry, you would not have to store most of the history locally,â Buterin said. âThe amount of data that you would need to be a node would decrease from multiple terabytes to⌠being able to run a node in RAM.â
âIn the long term, running a node will feel like⌠a few very simple computations that will be very easy to do as a background process on any computer, maybe even a phone, even inside a browser,â Buterin said. âThereâs a pre-existing technology roadmap to get to that point.â
With EIP-7251/MaxEB coming I was curious why the beacon chain did not launch this way in the first place. It has an interesting backstory.
From the EIP itself:
The limit on the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE is technical debt from the original sharding design, in which subcommittees (not the attesting committee but the committee calculated in is_aggregator) needed to be majority honest. As a result, keeping the weights of subcommittee members approximately equal reduced the risk of a single large validator containing too much influence. Under the current design, these subcommittees are only used for attestation aggregation, and thus only have a 1/N honesty assumption.
maxeb is now planned for the next hard fork. This will remove the 32e max limit for validators, greatly reducing bandwidth consumption for stakers. - eric.eth https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1770836409848332554
Will maxeb really reduce bandwidth greatly? Only if the whales with thousands of validators actually consolidate to big validators instead of many small ones, something that is yet to be seen. You could argue that they donât want to have 3200 ETH validators as the impact of a bug would be 100x bigger. It would lower Ethereum protocol risk though so should be in their best interest.
It seems unlikely to me that we will lower the number of validators by 50-75%, which is what I would consider greatly reducing consumption. More likely we will drop by some 10-30%, so not really making a big difference in terms of bandwidth.
This is almost certainly referring to attestation subnets.
For each validator a solo staker has (up to 64), they have to subscribe to a new attestation subnet, with all the gossip and increased traffic that causes.
If that solo staker consolidates their validators under maxEB, they could go back down to a single attestation subnet, reducing bandwidth usage significantly.
On my LinkedIn feed I saw that Paul Brody just got appointed as Chairman of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Curious as to what his plans are to speed up enterprise adopotion.
Just wanted to amplify u/_WebOfTrust post from 2 days ago⌠what an awesome community this is. I am a relatively late comer into the community.
Thank you all for consistency sharing your knowledge with internet anons like me. Iâve learnt more from this sub than any other place on the internet. I literally got a job offer because I dove into MEV because of the daily doots posts about it consistently throughout the past few years (I didnât take the offer in the end).
Your selfless sharing has consequences, and I my career trajectory is one of them.
Other than that this year has been transformative for me career-wise (got back in the crypto industry after a stint in fintech) and personally as an artist (did my first solo exhibition yay!). Going to ETH Denver for the first time and meeting u/jtnichol and other folk was the most wholesome experience Iâve had in a long long time.
I work on consumer side of crypto, specifically in games and 99% of the ppl are talking about the casino/degen aspect of crypto, I think they are firmly in the camp of âitâs just how it isâ , and perfectly captures what polynaâs sentiment that
âthis evil in crypto is banal and normalized. This has become the identity of crypto - sure, some useful stuff, but mostly just infested with scams and absolute degeneracy.â
Despite the mis-aligned incentives, greed, grift in the space, I donât see any other system that can even attempt to fix the problems we face at scale. I donât know what the answer is, but I believe it starts with places like ethfinance, that can influence the culture of the ecosystem.
I also finally got my EVM today yay.
Itâs not a topic I look at much, or one that I plan to spend much more time on, but I spent my morning trying to fill in some knowledge gaps about execution layer clients this morning. Most of you guys rely on supermajority.info, but obviously there are some unknowns since not all proposer sets have publicly stated their client usage (Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bitcoin Suisse, etc.).
The idea is that even though most blocks are built through PBS, every proposer still has a small share of locally built blocks (min-bid reversions, network latency delaying payloads from relays, local blocks being more valuable than PBS if there isnât much MEV during the block, etc.) and for those subsets of blocks we can look at the extra_data encoded on-chain to tag what clients proposers are using.
Part of the issue with this methodology is that besu and erigon donât actually embed extra_data so the field is blank, and at the same time there are some MEV builders who try to stay anonymous and donât embed data, so we can only cleanly tag geth and Nethermind, and then we need to check vs off-chain MEV data to see if the empty data blocks are from anonymous MEV builders or from one of besu/erigon.
On top of that, thereâs occasionally been MEV builders using the Nethermind tag that briefly crop up. I think this is just from misconfigurations because they go away pretty quick, but it adds a bit of noise to the data. Basically the methodology is a bit of a mess.
As a quick summary:
The data is here for anyone that wants a peak:
[https://hackmd.io/@dataalways/execution-layer-diversity](https://hackmd.io/@dataalways/execution-layer-diversity)
The CFTC refers to ETH as a commodity in their KuCoin complaint.
On the same day, courts side with SEC on the staking issue in Coinbase case.
Meanwhile, Fidelity files S-1 form for spot Ethereum ETF with staking included.
Within 24hrs, Larry Fink says on Fox News that if ETH were designated as a security, that wouldnât be deleterious to the approval of an ETF.
Perhaps spot ETH is a commodity (CFTC regulated), but staked ETH is a security (SEC regulated).
Prediction: Staked ETH ETF approved before spot ETH ETF.
Where are people going to be the next few weeks? Is there some way to share where we will be?
Iâm headed to:
Who am I going to see where?
Special guest Adam Blumberg of Interaxis. Adam is a Certified Financial Planner, and a former Registered Investment Advisor. He co-founded Interaxis in 2019 to educate advisors and investors on digital assets and decentralized finance. His Interaxis YouTube channel is viewed by thousands across the globe. He is a regular contributor to Coindeskâs Crypto For Advisors and was featured on Bloomberg TV and Blockworks.
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Good code for your peers,
Great discussions and some beers,
Blockchain pioneers.
I wish the ETF passes and gets pushed down all the haters throats like bad medicine.
In May, when SEC nods in grace,
ETH ETF takes its rightful place.
Skeptics scowl, in disbelief they stare,
As Ethereum soars, slicing through despair.
âImpossible!â they cried, their words so cold,
Yet forward moves the future, bold.
Their doubts, like shadows, quickly flee,
As ETH ascends, for all to see.
The haters cope, their voices dim,
Against the tide, their chances slim.
For in this dance of digital fate,
Ethereumâs rise, they canât abate.
So let them cope, let them despair,
While Ethereumâs light fills the air.
For in the end, itâs clear to see,
The SECâs nod sets Ethereum free.
It might have gone under in yesterdays daily, but u/KnowNoShade posted a very interesting link about the new fee structure on Optimism and why they had such a huge reduction in cost after the Dencun hardfork. Blobs alone could not have reduced the fees by that much. What optimism did in addition was that Optimism started to consider priority fees in their fee calculation. The base fee can be close to 0 and optimism still makes enough money through the priority fee. Optimism does not directly subsidize transactions, but the way they calculate the transactions and set average gas usage for the base fee to increase it essentially means that the actors which pay a high priority fee are indirectly subsidizing the fees for the other users. And apparently there are enough users paying a high priority fee which makes OP chains still profitable. Quite interesting to be honest. According Ryan Berckmans tweet OP Mainnet and Base still make enough money through priority fees. I am not sure if this is also true for Zora as I would expect not too many people pay a priority fee there, I might be wrong there though. Overall, I think it is quite interesting how Dencun now has kicked off a rollup fee competition. Apparently arbitrum will also improve their fees soon.
Few more ARB DAO updates beyond what I brought up a few days ago, more personal to what Iâve been up to if anyone is curious. (As well as open to feedback before I go âliveâ with one of these items).
Late to the party, but ARB did release their 2023 Transparency Reporting (https://docs.arbit rum.foundation/foundation-documents#transparency-reports). If anyone wants to give it a read there is some good things too look at, although I will note page 11 might be my favorite :). And please note that 100% of the work was done by Questbook, I was just there becase I posted it to Tally / Snapshot. Just having a âLeonardoDeCapriopointsatthetvâ moment.
Iâll admit this sort of came up in January and then I got busy so it got pushed aside once Feb rolled around, but Iâm probably going to start working towards it now that I have the time⌠Iâm going to try to get some of ARBâs council election processes standardized. More info here (https://forum.arbit rum.foundation/t/rfc-create-a-standardized-guideline-for-non-security-council-elections/20915). Basically, these different councils have elections and the process isnât very standard as different people are running the programs each time. I think that detracts from how effective these elections can be. My thought is that a minimum there is a lot of community support for âShieldedâ voting (results hidden until completion). So Iâm hoping at least that will get support, as Iâm breaking it our into three categories:
- Mandating certain election types be used to avoid common pitfalls with less effective voting methods.
- Mandating âShieldedâ voting, as there are too many ways to game the election if results are public as they go along.
- Mandating some type of minimum period for applicants to apply for roles to ensure we can get the best possible field possible.
Solana fees have spiked and are currently ~4X higher than most L2 fees. The Solana low fee narrative is dying.
Solana average fee (24 hours): ~$0.048
Optimism/Starknet average fee (24 hours): ~$0.01
Sources:
And with some very rough numbers L2s may scale 3x their use of blobspace without even raising the blob fee. Currently the network is averaging 1 blob per block. So until it reaches 3 or more blobs per block there wonât be actual pressure on the blob fee. https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs
According to l2beat the L2s did yesterday 133 tps. A factor of x3 will place it around 400 tps. Solana seems to do around 500 tps. https://realtps.net/
With this rough numbers Ethereum seems to have beaten in scalability Solana. Can manage same order of magnitude tps but cheaper. But unlike Solana it has an actual roadmap to keep scaling:
All that without having to give up on decentralization.
I saw a presentation at EthDenver that used a mock dapp from the future, showing what the UX would be like if we had the complete roadmap. In this case it was for buying and selling cars and had assumptions baked in like digital identity, smart wallet, etc.. I really like these types of demos and would be cool to see more. This is the video Iâm talking about: https://youtu.be/TrLbTglwzXg
âDecentralizationâ is a complicated term. In crypto we usually see the system as decentralized based on criteria like âhow many nodes have to collude to censor the systemâ or âhow many nodes need to be taken out for the system to failâ or âhow difficult it is for a single entity to take over governanceâ. But there is a more traditional meaning for decentralization, a pre-digital one, which defines it not as a large system but many local ones and this is where blockchain has some shortcomings.
I am on this subreddit for the blockchain ideologies that resonate with me (and ma bags, of course). But I would also say that being âall inâ is not great. Take Bitcoin maxis. The idea that all the complexity of expression and exchange of value should be scorched and replaced by a single system derived from a single limited resource (which at the onset has every uneven distribution) to me is nothing short of fascist. That idea is despotic and anti-human in the sense that it deprives us (you know, the people who are supposed to be benefitting) from the ability to decide how we want to express human relationships.
Now fans of smart contract chains (say Ethereum) are not Bitcoin maxis at all. Smart contracts are foundation for building any kind of system on top of it. In case of Ethereum experimentation and possibility of human expression (new forms of value, new forms of organization, new forms of interaction) are at the core of the ethos. Yet a blockchain network is still a single system, with one governance, with one limited-supply token, requiring electricity and internet, insecure and with potential middlemen. That said I think what is actually a corollary to Ethereum ethos is cherishing of the good meat-space things - not everything needs to be onchain, digital has security limitations, organization comes in many forms, non-digital governance is important.
High level summary
Season 1 Token Allocation: 90% to stakers 6% to partners 4% to Early Adopters (fan NFT Holders and EAP participants) Stakers received a proportional share of the 90% (59M tokens), the distribution was linear but skewed in favor of smaller stakers Bottom 50% of wallets contributed 1.8% of TVL and received 18% of token allocation Top 10% of wallets contributed 88% of TVL, and received 65% of token allocation Eligibility Rules: What were the rules to be eligible? Anyone who earned more than 1000 points or more from staking 1,000 points was equivalent to staking 1 ETH for 1 day, or staking 0.1 ETH for 10 days Holders of fan NFTs received 430 tokens for each NFT Participating solo-stakers in Operation Solo Staker received 4200 tokens Badge holders and referrers received boosted allocation Specifically who wasnât eligible? Users with less than 1000 points from staking activity, (i.e. if a users points came entirely from badges, they didnât get an airdrop) Users who didnât not transition out of the EAP
Appears to be wallet running an âaddress poisoningâ scam:
Scammer -> new wallet -> victim
The scammer sends a small amount of eth dust to a newly created wallet, which sends it to the victim. The new wallet W* is created to have the same first and last four characters in the address as an address W the victim transacted with recently.
The idea is that the victim in a future transaction copies the target address from the transaction history and because of the address similarity takes the scammer-controlled wallet W* instead of the legit wallet W.
Good catch!
SEC absolutely got bodied here. It should help with ETH ETF filing, I would think. I am sure SEC doesnât want another embrassment
https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1769835308559032608
âFor the reasons explained below, the court imposes sanctions against the Commission for bad faith conduct in obtaining, maintaining, and defending the TRO, and denies the Commissionâs Motion to Dismiss without prejudice to refile in accordance with the District of Utahâs Local Rules.The Commissionâs above-discussed conduct constitutes a gross abuse of the power entrusted to it by Congress and substantially undermined the integrity of these proceedings and the judicial process.â
A quick HOP governance update. Although honestly itâs a pretty light one as ultimately most votes over the last few months have been fairly standard DAO things. To run through a quick list (https://snapshot.org/#/hop.eth):
Iâll also share that Iâve been heading HOPâs application for the upcoming 12 week ARB grant program. Me and two other delegates that assisted with this just submitted our finalized application located here. The goal is to subsize bridging fees to Arbitrum, as well as incentivize AMM pools, over those 12 weeks. Decision pending council / DAO vote, but I was really happy how it came out. So I have my fingers crossed.
Which, btw shout out to u/seamonkey82 as youâll notice a link to a certain ARB forum actually works now :)
Yaâll weâre in before BlackRock đĽ
âJUST IN: BlackRock launches digital asset fund and deposits $100 million $USDC on the Ethereum network.â
Eric and Mariano starting an awareness campaign to increase gas limit from 30 to 40mn.
Gas limit can be increased in a coordinated and rational manner by validators. It doesnât need a hard fork.
This is the exact amount that Vitalik suggested during an AMA last year
How much gas limit can we safely increase now? and after Verkle?
Honestly, I think doing a modest gas limit increase even today is reasonable. The gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years, which is the longest time ever in the protocolâs history (that 2x bump in the chart in late 2021 is âfakeâ, in that it reflects the EIP-1559 transition, which increased the âlimitâ by 2x but only increased actual average usage by ~9%). And so splitting the post-2021 gains from Mooreâs law 50/50 between increased capacity and increased ease of syncing/verification would imply an increase to around 40M or so.
Long overdue and Godspeed!
If this drop bothers you, I potentially have bad news for you. Well, not really, but if we are really just at the start of a bull run, similar drops at higher USD values might make you sick⌠So prepare mentally for crazy stuff that will happen. Some random numbers to showcase the things we might be witnessing:
Disclaimer: Everything that follows is based on the assumption that your whole portfolio is in ETH and that we basically went from 4k to 3k (which, at least until now, we didnât, but we also peaked slightly over 4k, so 25% is as good as it gets). Youâre probably a little diversified, so your port value fluctuates a little differnet. Just pretend it is 100% ETH!
If you have:
Good news: 1 ETH = 1 ETH, but from my experience from the last cycle itâs the USD value that hurts.
Bad news: If this is just the start of a bull we might 2.5x from 4k to 10k or even 4x to something like 15-16k. This is great, but a 25% drop will hurt even more. With ETH = 10k USD
or with ETH hitting 16kish
Now why am I posting this? I know I canât really prepare you for these scenarios. You probably will have to go through these to really understand what this means. Also let me tell you I have no idea how I will feel if we hit 10k or 16k and drop 25%. May 2021 (basically down only from 4k to 2k within 2 weeks and even below 2k within 2 months) killed a lot of emotions and changed me long term I think. But if you just joined in the last 2 years, you should try to play through some scenarios and get used to losing a lot (USD) value in a short amount of time.
And while I am at it⌠Think about how you would feel if we hit 15k and then the bear hits and we go down 75% :)
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Thereâs none his kin,
Tokens canât do the talkin,
A dead man walkin.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray that Wall St. will pump my ETH. But even if the ETFs should fail, I know and I trust in good olâ retail.
ŕźź 㤠ââ ༽㤠ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ŕźź 㤠ââ ŕź˝ă¤
Finalization
Iâve just been learning more about finalization and had a few ah-ha moments that made me very happy. I figured Iâd share them here and also ask anyone to check my thinking.
Finalization is not some magic 2/3 number, where an almost finalized block just needs to get over that hump of 2/3 of the validators attesting to it and then itâs safe. Itâs just a line that weâve chosen to define and say âhereâs a good bar to meet and we can say the block is âfinalized.â
So what is it and why does it matter?
The beacon chain chooses one validator at random to propose a block in each 12-second slot of the blockchain. That validator is the only one who can propose a block, and they can only propose one block. If they propose more than one block for the same slot, they get slashed and force-exited as a validator.
The interesting thing to note here is that an Ethereum block reorg only has two possible outcomes: the proposed block or an empty block. That differs from Bitcoin, in which reorged blocks contain different transactions and were proposed by different miners.
AnywayâŚblocks are only validated by a fraction of the existing validators, as each validator only attests to 1 out of every 32 blocks. This is a way to keep Ethereum nimble, as requiring each validator to attest to each block would bog down the network.
However, at the end of every 32 block section (32 blocks is an âepochâ), there is a block called a âcheckpoint.â When a validator casts their 1-out-of-every-32 blocks vote, they also cast a vote attesting to the last checkpoint. When a checkpoint garners attestations from 2/3 of all validators in existence, that checkpoint (and every block before it) is considered âjustified.â
And when two checkpoints in a row are justified (which naturally takes at minimum of two epochs or 12.8 minutes), the oldest of the two justified blocks is considered âfinalizedâ along with every block that preceded it.
So why is this important? Because of the double vote slashing offense.
Each validator can only vote one way per block. They canât change their vote, or a double vote slashing occurs. When a validator is slashed, they lose around .5 eth and are forced-exited after a certain amount of delayed time. This time delay allows the protocol to see who else is being penalized around the same time period. If there are many slashing offenses, the protocol assumes they were colluding to attack the network, and the slashing offenses start to get angry and impose an additional penalty. Itâs important to understand the formula for this additional penalty. Itâs:
validator_balance * 3 * fraction_of_validators_slashed
In other words, if youâre the only offender, your additional penalty is negligible. However, if at least 1/3 of the other validators were also slashed around the same time, you lose all of your stake. (This is one reason that itâs so stupid to be running a super majority client, but I digress).
So letâs look at this in terms of a justified block. Most conservative case:
A block is justified because exactly 2/3 validators have attested to it (and the other 1/3 havenât voted yet). In order to get reorged, 2/3 + 1 validators need to attest to a different block in that slot. Weâll, 1/3 of validators are still free to vote, but to get the other 1/3 + 1 validators, 1/3 + 1 of all total validators will need to cast a second vote. They can do this, but theyâll get slashed. And a quick look at our handy formula above tells you this will result in a total slashing event of all of these validatorsâ shit.
And if itâs this costly to change a justified block, imagine how difficult it would be to reorg a finalized one. The details get a little tricky here for me, but I believe it would require over 2/3 of all validators losing all of their stake. Right now, thatâs $73 billion dollars worth of security. Not only would the benefit of coordinating this attack have to be worth more than $73 billion, but the attacker would also have to corrupt over 2/3 of the decentralized validators of Ethereum. That last statement is the reason that decentralization matters in Ethereum, and why home stakers are soooooo important. Ethereum needs to be able to withstand a full on moloch attack worth all the money that will ever be settled on top of the chain. Since we like to think thatâs the entire worldâs economy, the value of the eth securing the network by validators will only take us so far. Decentralization does the rest.
i made a âmy bull case for Ethereumâ post in r/cc if any of you are interested, or have any corrections :D
somehow i spent 2 hours on making that post LOL! Also posted on eth subreddits but check out the r/cc one ;)
To help validators with the upcoming hard fork, I improved my open source Validator Updater so everyone can easily update their validator in under a minute!
Detailed instructions can be found on the Ethstaker post, quick summary below.
Note: The updater is adapted from Somer Esatâs guides, and saves the updated binaries to /usr/local/bin. If you have a different setup, you can move the binaries to your desired location after download.
Validator Updater Summary:
Thatâs it, updates process in the terminal and you can be back online before missing a single attestation!
Feel free to check out my other open source Ethereum projects:
Validator Install - Install a full validator from fresh Ubuntu in minutes
Client Switcher - Instantly switch execution clients to improve client diversity
All code is open source but has not been audited, so any testing/feedback is always appreciated.
A Prysm dev forked my code!
I wanted to share my story in case anyone here is considering contributing to Ethereum and isnât sure how to get started.
So to start, Iâm not a programmer. I was the âExcel guyâ at the office because I knew how to do vlookups. I started dabbling in VBA and eventually wrote a macro to take an Ethereum address and lookup the balance using Etherscan API.
One day while updating my validator, I decided to try a Python script rather than copy/paste the 10 commands. I ran the script and was shocked it actually worked. I slowly added more clients and eventually created the validator-updater.
I figured if I could write a script to update, maybe I could write a script that took commands from Somer Esatâs guides and create a full validator-install script.
It took a few months, but I finally got it working. I decided to create a Github account and share on Ethstaker. People responded positively, but no one actually wanted to run it (would you trust your 32 ETH to a random script on Github?)
It was pretty disappointing to know I created something that made staking 100x easier, but no one wanted to run it. I made updates, added clients, but in the end it felt like I was screaming into the void (props to u/superphiz for saying he liked my project and encouraging me to continue working on it).
Eventually u/nixorokish at Ethstaker reached out and said they liked my initiative and wanted to send some DAI as a thank you. Once that DAI hit my wallet I remember thinking I made it, Iâm officially on the Ethereum payroll!
A few months later, I got a notification that someone created a pull request on my repository. I went to investigate and noticed it was Preston Van Loon (Prysm dev) fixing a typo in my validator install code. Pushing the merge button made me feel like an actual developer.
He also forked my repository, which means itâs now hosted on hisGithub. That was a major boost to my confidence and Github street cred.
u/hanniabu reached out and suggested adding a keystore import to the installer. I worked up a few changes and he graciously reviewed the code and provided valuable feedback.
As the client diversity stuff became popular, I created client-switcher to help people switch execution clients with a single click. It was well received and multiple people reached out saying they were able to successfully switch to a minority client.
Recently u/coincashew forked my code and created their own one line installer, mentioning that because of my code they were able to write the whole thing in a single day. People were actually building off my code, and the idea of open source started to make more sense.
So whatâs the point in writing all this? Iâm not really sure. I spent years as a silent observer of this sub, so decided itâs finally time to share my story and maybe inspire someone to start that project theyâve been thinking about.
This hasnât been very lucrative financially, but itâs nice knowing Iâve contributed to Ethereum and made staking a bit more accessible. Not sure where it goes from here, but Iâm cleaning up the code in hopes to eventually have it audited.
Thanks to everyone who provided guidance and encouragement. This really is a special corner of the internet, and Iâm happy to be a part of it!
Be careful, someone is address poisoning transactions pretty efficiently. I sent some ETH from wallet A to a new wallet B, and after the transaction went through, someone sent me a dust amount of ETH to wallet A. The scammerâs address has the same first 4 and last 4 characters as wallet B. Now I have to be really careful not to accidentally send anything to the scammerâs address.
Its alarming because of how quickly they did it, being able to brute force a vanity address with 8 matching characters, fund it, have the txs go through within a minute.
Free idea: a few years ago, someone told me theyâd like to see a Nobel Prize equivalent for Ethereum, but it hasnât happened yet.
The chain will turn 10 years old in ~18 months, which seems like great timing for this! It gives enough time to make it happen properly, too đ
I really love this idea and could see it being something that EthFinance and/or the EVMaverickâs spearheaded.
Hi guys, I am currently building a little website, mostly to improve my typescript and next.js skills. I am a backend dev trying to get more into frontends for a while, partly because of my job.
I wanted to come up with an educational page about ethereum gas and L2s. The main points I want to bring across are how gas cost is not the same for every transaction, but depends on the type of transaction and especially the gas limit. Also I wanted to cover L2s and have an interactive option to compare the gas prices between L1 <> L2 (so far only mainnet and arbitrum)
There is a lot of confusion among newcomers about these topics, and maybe a website like this will help someone. I know there are similar pages, but as I said I mostly needed an excuse to build something haha.
Check out my prototype here gashighdontcry.net
Mobile view works but is not optimized yet.
While working on it I noticed that the arbiscan api always returns 0.1GWei for the gas price, so that part is kinda static, but afaik there is no better way to estimate arbitrum gas.
When you have ideas for more content, or notice bugs or whatever let me know!
Pretty incredible to be closing in on $4k again after 2 years. Cheers to the folks who stuck around in the daily, I wasnât as active as I was in 2021/22 but I still read it almost every day.
Rocket School now Live! EVMavericks ManeNet DAO + EthStaker + Rocket Pool - Class Is In Session!
đâťď¸ https://twitter.com/ProDJKC/status/1765032313962811697
https://nitter.net/ProDJKC/status/1765032313962811697
Reminder:
Sorry guys, this is my fault. My van has been damaged after someone reversed into it and the door wonât close properly so camping has been jeopardised. I will do everything in my power to get the old girl up and running again so camping and the subsequent bull run can continue. Thank you for your understanding.
â(This is not a joke)â
Special guest Kevin Owocki joins us from Gitcoin and Green Pill (https://greenpill.network/), a network-society that exports regenerative digital infrastructure to the world.
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How do you do fellow digital asset securities investors? I would like to enquire about which registered broker-dealer you use to trade your digital asset securities such as Ethereum and others. I just donât trust these âcrypto exchangesâ like Coinbase, nor do I trust open source code as you never know when it might fail! Could one of you please recommend me an SEC compliant platform which I can trust to be properly regulated? I only feel comfortable holding crypto under such regulations as anything else makes me worry about a 2007-style collapse.
Besu is Dencun Ready!!
This release is the minimum version that is required for the upcoming Ethereum Mainnet Dencun upgrade on March 13th. You must upgrade to this version (or greater) before then, or your node will no longer follow the chain. This is also a required version for Besu nodes on Ethereum Classic (ETC). This release does not contain other fixes or improvements. We plan on releasing more fixes, improvements, and features in our next release.
A resume for solo stakers and STRK airdrop, if you are not correctly identified, I think you should :
If you want to keep privacy regarding your public keys, you can DM wenmerge on X : https://twitter.com/Wenmerge2022/status/1757897430992056580
Hope I didnât forgot anything about everything Iâve read here and there, and hope it helps !
This week I turn the page on being a 1000 days on chain. I like to share this with you, as I have a lot to thank this community for.
Getting from CEX to on chain is daunting and feels like stepping into the dark with dangers left and right.
By lurking on Ethfinance I learned some best practises for basic security and common on chain sense. This made me confident in exploring the early L2âs and dApps and qualifiing for, among others, ARB and OP. I got gifted an EVM lion and went on to stake on Gnosis and test for Diva. I rode the 2021 bull hype, and survived the 2022/2023 bear depths and despair.
From time to time I try to contribute here and help others out.
Thank you Ethfinanciers for having me! May you live long and prosper.
Now onwards to the next 1000 days!
NFT news: Yuga Labs bought the Moonbirds project. They already âownâ Bored Apes (which they created), and CryptoPunks (which they bought from Larva Labs).
Moonbirds is CC0 so no one has the copyright to individual NFTs, but Yuga now owns the name and the team. It was an âall stock dealâ, no money. The plan is to integrate them into their Otherside metaverse platform. Many apes are pissed as they see it as diluting the ape brand, but Yuga leadership is saying itâs good for all holders in their ecosystem, which includes apes, mutants, cryptopunks, meebits, 10KTF, Kodas, Otherdeeds, HV-MTL, Mara, and doggos. Maybe I missed one.
GM Everyone! EY Blockchain Summit is back (again). You canât keep us down :)
Registration is here and weâll do our usual collaboration with EthFinance on Q&A.
This year weâre VERY FOCUSED on finance because of the global regulatory convergence going on. Weâll be doing the summit from London with a big focus on Europeâs increasing regulatory maturity.
Speakers include the Lord Mayor of London and weâve got folks from Fnality, Coinbase and more. Weâll also be showing our newest state-of-the-art privacy tech as well.
Bankless episode with yours truly is out
Itâs a long one, but itâs fairly comprehensive of the whole roadmap (still had a lot to say tho)
Some months ago I started to ask for input for a community driven ETH bull case. Today I would like to update it, cause I think the bull market and developments of the past 5 months have changed some of the points we collected back then!
Ethereum the network
Ether the asset
I have deleted one bullet (that talks about nation state demand) and have exchanged it basically with the ETF , cause at this point this seems like a plausible narrative and all institutions could buy ETH that way. On top I have added new demand drivers like Eigenlayer and the effects it already had and will have.
I am sure there is more, so keep it coming if you think there should be more added!
After creating my farcaster account, I realized there wasnât a way to easily share your handle in a frontend-agnostic way so i created https://mycaster.xyz.
With Mycaster you can easily create a share link which will redirect to whichever frontend the person opening the link uses.
How does it work?
The person that wants to share their account enters their farcaster handle and selects Generate Link. This will automatically copy the link to clipboard so you can share it.
For the people that click your link, they can select their preferred frontend to be redirected to. Their selection will be remembered and automatically forward them the next time they use a MyCaster share link.
Try it out! https://mycaster.xyz/?p=hanniabu
The day has (almost) finally arrived, Starknet has announced the $STRK token will be launched and airdropped tomorrow. If you are part of the airdrop: Congratz!Â
Now some of you will probably dump it and thatâs okay. But for those that will keep it, you probably know that you will have to make a decision soon, because $STRK is a governance token and so you will have to pick a delegate. In the past couple of weeks and months we have found three delegates that would like to represent the community within the starknet ecosystem:
While atleft and _weboftrust are delegates already (governance was kicked off even before the token was airdropped, they both got $STRK delegated by the starknet foundation), panthoreon is a new delegate. You can find a little more info about that here. Panthoreon shared some thoughts, insights and motivation here.Â
So when you claim and delegate, keep these three names / delegates in mind. The goal is that all three delegates are open to listening to your feedback and vote based on comments and discussions happening on reddit. So instead of delegating to some maybe famous name from CT, that will probably not take your opinion and arguments into account, I think it would be beautiful if some of us delegated to âour delegatesâ.Â
Starknet is one of the very few non-EVM layer2s. The other very famous ones (OP, ARB, zksync, etc.) are (zk)EVMs. So it is unique in that sense, users need a different wallet and hence the UX is different than what we âusuallyâ see. This is also true for developers, since they need to develop in Cairo, the programming language for Starknet. Because of that (almost?) all apps you can use on starknet are starknet-only since itâs not easy to bring e.g. Uniswap or AAVE to Starknet.
I believe there are only smart contract wallets. Account abstraction is natively built into Starknet. Also STRK can be used to pay gas in the future.
now that ETHâs nearing $3K, consider sharing some wealth to help folks in need đ
Seeds: Crypto Mutual Aid is on Juicebox:
https://juicebox.money/v2/p/624
If unfamiliar, Seeds has helped folks in need in 29 countries & counting. Because DeFi, the ecosystem can successfully offer aid where tradfi and traditional aid fail.
**
One example:
Kana Piath, a schoolchild in South Sudan, couldnât afford to continue elementary school, so her grandmother redeemed a SEED to ask for help.
The Seeds community got them the funds they needed so she could continue school.
They sent a thank you note that said Kana was so excited she ran to school at 6 am the first day back to catch up with her friends. :)
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The next fork in March,
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Guys Iâm really worried. Cardano. Youâve heard of it right? Pretty sure the founder and lead dev - canât remember his name but he has a dope beard - also the founder of playboy (or maybe itâs one of those boomer porn mags - hustler?) Anyway dude is LEGIT and recently announced theyâre moving to ON CHAIN GOVERNANCE! You canât get more decentralized than that. Pure democracy. Tokens = votes just like in the REAL WORLD. Eth and dare I say Btc need to get their shit together. Btc is a horse and buggy (with shitty suspension). Eth is a stock car (leaking oil). Solana is a space ship (leaky o ring - we know how that ends). Algorand isâŚsorry lost my train of thought. Cardano tho. Theyâve FIGURED IT OUT!
Youâre on alert eth devs. The time of autocratic rule will soon be over. On chain governance - pure clean democracy as it should be - is our future.
Argent yesterday announced on twitter (youâll not see me using that new âbrandâ) that
The Starknet airdrop is coming soon đŞ
I think Argent and Starknet are in a rather strong partnership. Argent is now a Starknet only wallet (Ethereum etc technically still works, but I think all other chains are âlegacyâ by now). If they post stuff like that, itâs really close.
We have two members from the community already that would like to be âourâ delegate:
They both have been delegates for some time, since Starknet governance is already up and running. This is great, they know how it all works, they are known (both here and within the starknet ecosystem), so these are great people to delegate to.
But I would still like to find a 3rd, âfreshâ delegate, someone who has not been a delegate but is familiar with Starknet, wants to go into governance and has the time and energy to listen to this community.
This time I would like to change the process a little. If there are people that want to be a delegate there, feel free to leave a comment. But since last time there was only tricky (and they sadly had to drop out again because of missing free time for such an adventure) I think we could also propose people we feel would make a great delegate. Those members of course have to decide if they want to do it (and potentially starknet is not the best protocol if they are not users/ familiar) but at least we can get a discussion started :)
So in response to this post from yesterday and the thread on farcaster: I would like to get more involved with the ethereum community, so I would be honored if elected as a delegate for starknet.
I am a non-dev person with a mechanical engineering background, working in the supply chain field with a wide variety of functional experiences like network planning, procurement, demand planning, and logistics. My background equipped me with strong logic-based thinking, process mapping, and root cause analysis / problem solving skills.
As a person, I come from a very humble background that I believe has granted me a more holistic worldview; born and raised in Turkey, where corruption and poor fiscal management are like bread & butter (hence we see a wider adoption of crypto there):
I am very familiar with oppression, I know how it feels to be completely insecure in the midst of a military coup. I know what being tear gassed just for walking on the wrong street feels like. I know first-hand that to a third worlder, blockchain technologies mean a whole lot more in financial sovereignty.
Yet, I have also gained perspective of the Western world as i have been living in US for the past 10+ years, developing my expertise in Supply chain.
A bit on the lighter side; I am a fitness enthusiast and have been a division 1 athlete in the past, I have self-taught art to a pretty serious level (primarily drawing) from imitating Spiderman comic books as a kid, and a huge animal-lover that spends a lot of his time with his two dogs.
I have known about ethereum since the single digit price times but was at the time not interested in âcryptoâ, seeing only gambling as its usecase back then.
I got more interested as the ecosystem developed and we started seeing real applications of DeFi, when I joined this community and have been a relatively silent reader that contributes every once in a while ever since. I am part of EVMavericks and active in a few other groups on Discord where you can find me under another handle: Aybala.
My real âAhaâ moment happened when - thanks to this awesome community - I attended an EY blockchain conference in NYC, and learned about Baseline and the potential applications of zero-knowledge within my industry, supply chain. Ever since, I have been more invested, both financially and timewise, in the overall blockchain ecosystem.
As a non-dev and a non-social media person, there are fewer possibilities to contribute to the ecosystem but being a delegate is something I can do.
I can commit to you all that I would invest the necessary time to ensure the best interests of this group, that I can bring to the table a perspective that is able to empathize and consider a wider ranges of human experience and be meticulous and process-driven in approaching any proposals / initiatives.
I appreciate everyoneâs time reading this and the consideration. Let me know if there is anything I can answer for you.
A year ago I lost access to a significant to me amount of ETH. Since then I had been working with developers from Offchain Labs and The Arbitrum Foundation to retrieve the funds. Two weeks ago, following an incredible amount of effort from some big-brained devs, developers from The Arbitrum Foundation deployed retrieval contracts. Unfortunately the contracts were front run which resulted in the ETH being sacrificed and converted to a large block proposer fee. This would be similar to if I dropped a dollar on your front yard and asked you to pass it to me but when you reached out to do so, someone ran between us and grabbed the dollar.
I followed the transactions using a block explorer and noted that white hat hacker c0ffeebabe.eth had also attempted to rescue my funds but was also unable. I learned that c0ffeebabe.eth has used their skills to protect everyday users, in once instance they rescued $5.7M/2879 ETH from hackers and returned every cent/gwei, so I reached out for help. They, and users from this sub, were able to help me confirm that the proposal fee address belonging to Staked, which was recently acquired by Kraken Digital Asset Exchange.
I was able to get in touch with several decision makers at both organizations. I explained the situation and provided documentation to prove the ETH had belonged to me till I lost access. Within a few short days they told me they had decided to return my ETH to me. As far as I know this is the first time a validator has returned a block proposal fee in an instance of theft or exploit , but please correct me if I am wrong. Regardless, I hope that the actions of Staked, Kraken, the Arbitrum Foundation, and OffChain Labs helps to set industry precedent moving forward.
I am incredibly grateful and incredibly lucky for the way this turned out. Without the support, sympathy, and skill of many strangers this outcome would not have been possible. Thank you to all those involved and to members of this community who helped me see this through.
So, Iâve had an idea about client diversity (and how to push more people to switch clients).
See, we are right now in a âtragedy of the commonsâ situation, where people CBA to switch from Geth because its usage is falling anyways, so someone else will do it, right?
Plus, psychologically, a 72% Geth dominance looks way better than a 85% Geth dominance. And on top of that, the risk seems lower to just stay on Geth.
But we all know that thereâs no difference whether the supermajority client is at 66% or at 90%. A bad block will finalize immeiately, and stakers will lose their stake. Most people on Ethfinance are aware of that.
The risk is the same⌠right? Well, no.
So, hereâs my idea. I think that, if you believe in the dynamics of âLayer 0â, a 66% supermajority is much, much worse than a 90% supermajority for stakers running the supermajority client.
At 90% supermajority, I can easily see the community deciding on either a rollback (yeah, yeah, I know, never again, code is law etc., but letâs be realistic) or accepting the Geth block as the correct one and going forward from there, either with some kind of compensation for Nethermind/Besu clients, or even no compensation.
At 90% supermajority, there would be little discussion and itâs clear to me what would happen. And itâs clearer the higher the Geth dominance is.
However, I think that at 66% things would be way more messier and contentious. This is now the âdanger zoneâ where enough of the community did the right thing and have a strong enough voice, that the outcome of a supermajority client bug will be respected. This is where Geth users find themselves losing their stake.
And they might have a much more quiet voice than they expect. Centralized staking services, which are the ones that are mostly refusing to do the right thing (Iâm looking at you, Coinbase and Binance) will just lose someone elseâs money, not their own. They got their cut on your profits, they lost your stake, câest la vie. There might be some lawsuits, they are used to that.
Change your clients. We are far from dealing with this and the situation is still critical.
*Sidenote: Iâm very much a layman (albeit a staking one), so Iâd like some input if my thinking is wrong.
Something to note with the values on clientdiversity.org is the lower the geth dominance does, the less accurate it is
/- hanniabu
As of today, Eigenlayer reports 2,470,100 Ether staked. With a total of 30,338,443 Ether staked (according to Hildobby), this represents about 8% of the total staked Eth under withdraw contract addresses developed by Eigenlayer. This is far from the 22% threshold I advocate, but itâs wise to look ahead.
On one hand, I donât see this as a problem at all. Eigenlayer is cool, and restaking is interesting. Iâve made a small deposit into Eigenlayer and I look forward to seeing what it does.
On the other hand, amassing 8% of the validator withdrawal addresses prior to launch might send some red flags, especially considering that Eigenlayer has indicated that they have no intention of self limiting (Itâs somewhere in that chat, I donât have a time stamp, feel free to offer it).
Why is this concerning? It represents unnecessary protocol risk. Our ultimate mission as stakers is to secure the beacon chain. Itâs great if we can eek out extra revenue doing other tasks, but the social contract is to secure the beacon chain. We ought to recognize the real smart contract and governance risks here and recognize that any time we shift the balance and aggregate risk in one large pool weâre posing a threat to the underlying protocol.
As usual, Iâm not directing this to you, dear friend, Iâm talking about the larger ecosystem risk. I imagine youâre participating in Eigenlayer with less than 300,000 staked Ether and you likely represent less than 1% of the Ether staked on the beacon chain. Iâm telling you that large entities who have no commitment to the success of Ethereum may put our network at risk and you ought to be aware of that AND ready to protect the protocol as well as your investment. You donât have to stand idly by as your work is eroded by anyone.
Iâm not asking you to avoid Eigenlayer or any of the cool ancillary platforms that have sprung up around it, Iâm asking you to zoom out and recognize the dangers of aggregating risk. This isnât about Eigenlayer - itâs about ANY risk aggregator who is ever willing to add existential risk to our chain. And Iâll repeat myself: I LIKE the Eigenlayer concept.
So, regarding u/HiPatternâs post yesterday about wallet dusting attacks which impersonate the most recent wallet you sent funds to in an effort to make it look like the top wallet in your Etherscan history is yours but itâs actually just a similar wallet which is not yours in an effort to get you to accidentally send funds to their wallet next time you need to send to your previous sender. (Sorry, itâs hard to explain, check out the post if you didnât get that.)
So currently, people are losing lots of money to these sneaky scams. I could very well see a dark future where I myself let my guard down when selling some ETH to get on the property ladder one day and when I go to transfer the funds to an exchange, I click the wrong account since itâs right there at the top of my walletâs history and boom. My hopes and dreams of stability in where I live are gone for years to come.
Just imagine thinking you can finally buy a house for your family and then at the last minute one slip up and that whole dream was taken from you. This has happened to people before and it will happen again.
But this is completely avoidable! This is an extremely easy issue to solve. While it would be nice to get everyone to have better OpSec, itâs not going to happen. However, one really minor tweak to Etherscan and it could be solved.
They could add a simple bit of code to either display the Jazzicon/block profile pic next to every wallet address. This way, even though it is small, one could see that the address is different since the colour/design is different.
They could add some code to flag wallets which have similar starting and ending letters. It could be a simple orange warning sign or something which has more info if you have over it or a big banner if you actually click on said wallet.
Best of all, Etherscan is good at this sort of stuff usually. They added a revoke token permissions app to prevent those affected by exploits and that was a much more complicated addition. On the simpler side, they tag known scam wallets as such.
So Iâd like this to be a call to action for this community. We have done this before. Previously when we have wanted to get an idea broadcast out to the wider Ethereum community or a certain protocol, we have been able to do it if we all do our part. So please, if anyone knows someone who works for Etherscan or if you have followers/influence on other platforms like Twitter. Please, tell Etherscan to automatically flag dust attack wallets. If we are successful, we could successfully save many people from losing their life savings to this avoidable tragedy.
This is quite possibly one of the easiest changes which could be made to prevent a lot of money from falling into the wrong hands.
Edit: I guess this also should be done in wallets too like MetaMask. So why stop at Etherscan? Letâs make a fuss to every wallet provider which doesnât have some kind of system to prevent this. It should be as simple as if you shorten wallet addresses, have a kind of warning bubble if there are similar addresses you have previously sent funds to.
As some of you may know, since the launch of the holesky testnet last September I have been maintaining and testing several thousand genesis validators alongside a dozen or so other meganerds from the rocketpool community. This is in spite of the fact that I almost certainly am responsible for bringing the average IQ of this group down a couple of points.
Over the last few months I have picked up a number of skills required for this sort of thing and I get a great deal of satisfaction knowing I am contributing in a small way to the development and progression of ethereum. Iâll have these guys running for as long as the testnet needs âem.
AnywayâŚI am proud to be able to say that, as of yesterday, I have received my first ever retroactive public goods funding from the folks over at ethstaker for operating these validators. Some months ago u/nixorokish posted in here about there being the possibility of a small grant/funding, and I inquired. I have a little extra pep in my step today. It isnât a huge pile of cash or anything, itâs only meant to cover most of the cost of operating the machines. But it feels like a huge pile of cash to me, because for the first time I have tangible proof that I am, in fact, doing something useful in the spaceâŚother than shitposting on CT and farcaster, which I will contrinue to do regardless.
Ethereum is not just a cryptocurrency; itâs a platform for decentralized applications, smart contracts, and various decentralized finance projects. This ecosystem supports a wide range of applications, from finance and gaming to art and identity verification and tokenization of real-world assets and tokenization of commodities, offering a utility that goes infinitely beyond what Bitcoin was designed for. Bitcoin primarily serves as digital gold or a store of value, whereas Ethereum aims to be an open, transparent, equitable settlement layer for the entire planet.
The Ethereum network has spawned numerous Layer 2 solutions (L2s) like Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync, which aim to scale the network by handling transactions off the main Ethereum chain, thereby increasing throughput and reducing fees. This is in contrast to Bitcoin, which has largely remained focused on Layer 1 (L1) with some off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network, which is dying in front of our eyes. The growth and adoption of L2s arguably add to Ethereumâs utility and value. With zero-knowledge proofs coming sooner than anyone expects, liquidity fragmentation between the L2s and L1 will soon be a thing of the past.
Ethereumâs transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) with the Merge significantly altered its issuance model and energy consumption. In PoS, validators stake ETH to secure the network, which is more energy-efficient than Bitcoinâs Proof of Work (PoW) model. The issuance model under PoS is designed to be fairer and more sustainable, with rewards not exponentially weighted toward the ultra-wealthy with exponentially more computational power, but on rather on a linear model that scales fairly with the amount of ETH staked. This levels the playing field for earning transaction fees and block rewards, contrasting with Bitcoinâs model where mining power concentration can lead to extreme disparities in earning potential where the APR of the ultra-wealthy is magnitudes higher than the APR allotted to the lower 99%.
EIP-1559 introduced a mechanism for burning a portion of transaction fees, reducing the overall supply of ETH over time. This deflationary pressure is unique compared to Bitcoinâs currently inflating supply until it finally caps at 21 million. The fee market mechanism of Ethereum also aims to make transaction fees more predictable.
Ethereumâs ecosystem supports multiple client implementations, fostering a diverse and resilient network. This diversity can reduce the risk of network-wide failures due to bugs in a single client implementation, a contrast to the single point of failure landscape of Bitcoinâs one and only client.
Despite these advantages, the market valuation of ETH compared to BTC has been far too heavily influenced by narrative, âstore-of-valueâ meme-ability, speculation, investor sentiment, and market dynamics. While Ethereumâs technological and ecosystem advancements provide ETH a stronger value proposition, the market has failed to notice.
PSA: New toxic address scam
They register an ENS with your address, such as 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045.eth (vitalikâs address) so when you search for an address in an app itâll show in the results, potentially even as the first result as shown here:
itshappening.gif
gm STRK â¨â¨â¨ Read more: https://medium.com/@StarknetFoundation/introducing-the-starknet-provisions-program-05d03ce13970
https://twitter.com/StarknetFndn/status/1757676598730342761
Let us intro: The Starknet Provisions Program Claiming starts Feb 20, 2024, 12pm UTC Check your eligibility đ provisions.starknet.io
https://twitter.com/StarknetFndn/status/1757676600596811928
Happy Valentineâs Day stakers ETH Community:
You staked ETH up until the Merge - September 15th, 2022. Note that if you staked via a staking pool or centralized exchange you canât claim ETH directly through the portal. Your provider should claim the allocated STRK and distribute it to you.
Allocation:
In case no one has mentioned this, to check your STRK eligibility on an Ethereum address, you have to go to the claim page and click the third tab on the left before you enter the address. This is kind of a confusing ux.
Hereâs what the claim page looks like after you click the third tab: https://ibb.co/KVX2C4S
And the claim may be based on your deposit address or your withdrawal address, so check both if you donât see it.
I think all pre-merge beacon chain depositors are eligible.
Donât forget to appreciate Starknet for being the first airdrop to show significant support to the solo/home staking community!
Also, it looks like Rocket Pool stakers arenât able to claim right now, but Iâm aware of internal discussions that are very like to conclude with Rocket Pool node operators claiming STRK.
Livestream Recording | POAP Checkout
Announcements
Ethereum
$2450.76
0.053
The next fork in March,
Continously overarch,
Leave the rest to parch.
I got your points. Meet me on the corner of West 32nd and Buterin at 10 tonight. Dress like youâre leaving the bar early heading home to a WoW raid. Act casual - like you know me. Talk in a Lithuanian accent - my devs donât like Americans. Bring your seed phrase and pass it when we shake. If you hear somebody with a Swiss accent just keep moving and donât make eye contact. Our danger word is Cardano. You hear that word. Get the hell out of there. if this works your points will show up within 48 hours. These are loyalty points - for fun. Like maybe weâll let you on an AMA with the devs some day. Weâre NOT doing a token - hear me? Donât even mention a token. If you doâŚletâs just say not all airdrops end well if you catch my drift
Spent some time at the rack last night. Updating the staking machines, swapping some patch cables, etc. Iâve got a new (to me) managed POE+ switch Iâm pretty excited about. Gonna learn how to do vlan stuff for better security, and so I can install some POE cameras. Gotta rent a trenching machine and bury some cable tooâŚnot really excited about that part.
In going down the POE rabbit hole I came across a couple of interesting POE devicesâŚincluding a POE NUCâŚwhich is awesome. Itâs priced like enterprise grade hardwareâŚbecause it is. But a fanless, POE NUC that has the processing power to stake, yet is power efficient enough to be able to operate over POE is the dream. I already have the machine Iâll be using as a nodeset operator setup, but I am considering throwing my hat into operation solo staker with etherfi too. If I could just hit one of these lottery blocks people keep talking about I would consider grabbing one of these POE NUCs.
While doing my normal monitoring I noticed that, on mainnet validators, the rewards per epoch have begun to consistently drop below 10,000 gweiâŚand I wonder if we will ever see 5 figure rewards epochs again. Holesky validators never saw 10xxx gwei rewardsâŚit launched with well over a million validatorsâŚI think we have closer to 1.5 million validating currently. These lil guys are receiving 7xxx gwei per epoch. Will we see 1.5 million active validators on mainnet? Iâm guessing that might be close to the upper limit of what people will accept as a return on their investment. Depending on what restaking does to overall APR, of course. I donât have enough info to begin to speculate on that.
The dencun upgrade went boringly (good!) on sepolia, and after updating the holesky machine the consensus client log reads âINFO Ready for Denebâ. Me too, computer. Me too. Mainnet soon after.
(in the voice of the thing): ITâS BLOBBERINâ TIME
What is restaking?
I will try to explain using EigenLayer as an example, following up on u/stablecoins post, but also because I have seen a lot of comments/ questions and think the concept isnât really clear. Please keep in mind that I am also writing this to structure my thoughts, but am not an expert at all, so things here might be wrong. If you spot mistakes, please correct them!
What is the general idea of restaking?
Restaking means that we use capital that is staked to secure Ethereum - both staked ETH in validators but also via LSTs - and also use it to secure something else (and something else).
What kind of things can be secured by restaking?
Basically anything. It could be an oracle. A data availability solution. An L2/ appchain. Anything that needs security.
Why is this needed?
Bootstrapping security for a new protocol is hard, especially if you want the validator set to be decentralized. Eigenlayer wants to be âa marketplace for trustâ. On this marketplace protocols that need trust/ security can tap into the already existing staked capital that Ethereum offers and build on that. Eigenlayerâs thesis is that this is way easier than building it on your own. Their argument also builds on web2: Why have your own servers/ authentication etc. when you can just build in the cloud (e.g. AWS) or use Auth0 etc. = existing solutions that allow you to focus on your core product.
Important: the existing solution is not Eigenlayer, but the security offered by stakers / holders of LSTs.
So how does this marketplace = Eigenlayer work?
New protocols that want to build on Eigenlayer basically define what kind of trust/ security they need. This comes down to: Do they want only solo / home stakers to secure their network? Or are LSTs okay as well?
At the same time they define what they are willing to offer for that service: How much are they willing to pay for securing their network? This could be in ETH, their native token etc.
Also they of course define what the restakers have to do to secure the network. This means they provide a software/ client that the restakers have to run to secure the protocol. This is similar to what stakers run with execution and consensus clients to secure Ethereum. All these are called âAVSsâ. Actively validated services. Actively. Someone needs to do an action.
Restakers start by either creating an Eigenpod or by depositing LSTs. An Eigenpod is a smart contract that a validator points to. So if a validator wants to exit the beaconchain, the ETH goes to the Eigenpod first. Similarly by depositing LSTs into Eigenlayer you deposit it into a smart contract. If the restaker wants to exit Eigenlayer there is a 7 day period before they can finally really withdraw their assets.
This means that the assets donât leave the validator or the Eigenlayer smart contract. The secured protocol does not control the assets.
After depositing restakers then opt-in if they are willing to secure the new protocol. They accept the offer made by the protocol, run the client and secure the network and are paid for this service according to the terms.
There will also be operators that run the clients for you. So the restaker deposits, but delegates the actual management of the clients to a 3rd party. In that case you obviously trust someone else to do the job of securing correctly. Just like you do with LSTs or dPoS in other ecosystems. These operators of course ask for a fee to do that.
If they behave according to the protocols rules (= they secure the protocol as intended) they are paid. If they misbehave (=they attack the protocol they are supposed to secure) they can be slashed just like someone could be slashed on the beaconchain.
So how does the slashing work now? If they are caught, the protocol can ask Eigenlayer to slash the restaker. Eigenlayer right now has a âslashing committeeâ (my term, donât know if thatâs the real name of it). This committee basically checks if the restaker really misbehaved and if the slashing request is fair. So right now a protocol canât just slash you as a restaker, there is a (centralized!) security mechanism in place.
If the restaker indeed attacked the network, they canât withdraw their LSTs and the LSTs are slashed. If they have a validator right now (!) no one can force them to exit the validator, so they can continue validating Ethereum. But when they want to exit, they will withdraw to the eigenpod and then the Eigenlayer protocol can slash the portion that is supposed to be slashed before the restaker can withdraw the rest.
I donât know what happens to the assets that are being slashed. Maybe someone can add that? Are those burned? Going to the protocol that did the slashing? (That would be a strange incentive, but maybe thatâs the case)
So where does the yield come from?
First of all: There is no yield by just depositing. Only if you start securing one (or more) protocols, you will receive yield. This also means that right now there is only smart contract risk, no slashing etc.
This yield is what these protocols offer to restakers for their service securing the new protocol. It can be paid in different tokens (or a mix). Could be new issuance. Could be from their treasury. Could be part of the fees they make with the product running on top.
-â
But Benido, this all sounds great, I was told Eigenlayer is a huge risk, I donât get it, that is like risk free yield on top of risk free yield?
If you were around in spring of 2022, you might remember 3AC (Three Arrows Capital). They were long when the market was going down and at one point lending firms ask for more capital from 3AC. What did 3AC do? They used the same collateral over and over again. So what happened? All lending firms found out that the collateral they thought they could liquidate (âslashâ) was posted as collateral with other lenders as well. 3AC basically ârestakedâ the same collateral over and over again. No lending firm could liquidate the collateral and they all went tits up, the whole market crashed and it was a dark timeâŚ
Of course this was off chain and Eigenlayer is onchain. With restaking we know how many times a certain asset is used to secure a certain protocol. But in the end something similar could happen. Deposit asset X once, attack several protocols and all protocols find out that they canât slash, because it was slashed already.
On top we could see borrowing and lending protocols that allow LRTs (Liquid Restaking Tokens) to be deposited. So an attacker could even borrow against it to acquire more and attack cheaplyâŚ
Using the same collateral several times is something that can be abused. Yes, itâs onchain, so more transparent, but that doesnât make it bullet proof. We will witness attacks. This might lead to a cascade of liquidations and could take down so many protocols⌠and always remember: These assets started as stake to secure Ethereum, in a worst case scenario ETHâs security might be diminished and attacks might be possible in ways we canât even imagine today.
-â
I hope this explains restaking, but it might just be more confusing because I am missing things, the structure sucks etc., I donât know. If you have questions, post them!
Exciting news for the POAP enthusiasts!
Poap Global, a project which is not officially related to POAP but rather a community project that utilizes the POAP tools, just had their official launch!
(Before publishing this comment, I asked Patricio Worthalter, the POAP founder, regarding the projects legitimacy, and he gave me a thumbs-up: "Yes! We support them. The founder is a valued member of the official POAP curation body. This is a side gig")
So, I went through their website and will try to explain what they are, and what it is that they are launching!
What is Poap Global? Itâs a "a groundbreaking extension of the proof of attendance protocol concept operated by hodl labs. Imagine being part of a worldwide irl scavenger hunt. Only in this game, the treasures are unique digital collectibles at every landmark, and the playground is planet earth"
How do you participate? âYou can either â****host****â a poap at a location of your choice or travel and collect other peopleâs poaps!"
Hosts
You can âhostâ a poap at a location of your choosing. Whether itâs a favorite hiking trail, a landmark, or a hidden gem in your city, you can make it a part of this global game.
So, how can you be a âHostâ? Well, there are 3 steps:
There is also a Global Leaderboard (in the works) to "showcase top explorers and collectors", and a âdynamic globe that pinpoints where all the poaps are hiddenâ.
Collectors
As a traveler and explorer, you can embark on a journey to collect poaps from various locations hosted by others. Itâs a digital treasure hunt that takes you to new and exciting places.
The idea seems to be a perfect use-case on how to further utilize the POAP protocol. I jumped right in and bought a small number of the NFC dispensers.. I plan to âinstallâ them at my home town center and at my local sports teamsâ soccer grounds..
Folks here understand and are comfortable running an ethereum node but sharing my learning and experience in running a non-staking node.
There is a learning curve and documentation needs some improvement, knowledge is silod within discord and in some case you are at the mercy of support from dev team. I learned a lot, definetly more comfortable sharing and talking about different clients, node and confident that I can help someone strugling with running a node. This was a test run on my Pi, waiting for proper hardware to test the script again.
Without the support and motivation from the members of this wholesome community, I would not have considered heading in this direction. So, thank you, my dudes.
Naw, this is pretty wise, even though it means you wonât get an early participant advantage IF restaking is successful.
In 2009, people who took a risk on bitcoin did well.
In 2014, people who took a risk on Ether tokens did well.
In 2015, people who took a risk on The DAO weâre bailed out in a one-time network fork.
In 2017, people who invested in ICOs like EOS lost lots of money on products that never materialized.
Thereâs really no way to say what will happen with restaking. Iâm not convinced that thereâs a large enough market to support whatâs being built- maybe it will develop or maybe itâll just trend toward other solutions. All of this is a risk and itâs wise to wait and see. As Iâve said publicly, Iâm okay missing a huge win, and Iâm going into all of these opportunities with a total of about 1% of my coins. Iâm okay with any outcome.
I can sense that a lot of my investment-oriented friends think Iâm just being negative, but Iâm here for the long term success of Ethereum, not the flavor of the week. Just be who you are đ
Green day on the client diversity front!
A month ago, Gethâs market share was 84%, yesterday it was 78%, today it is 73%.
And also good news, the 5% difference between yesterday and today went to Nethermind, which makes the execution layer clients list as follows:
Geth - 73%
Besu - 14%
Nethermind - 12%
Erigon - 2%
Iâve not been able to identify the provider(s) that kept their words but Iâm hoping one of our experts will soon be able to tell.
Toni and Vitalik put together an ethresear.ch post on increasing the block gas limit. This topic had moment in the spotlight a few weeks ago when Vitalik suggested we might be able to handle a block size increase and kicked off a flood of discussion. I havenât seen as much social media fuss recently, but with this post weâre getting into the research of if to do it, and how to do so safely. Their strategy for increasing the gas limit? Decreasing it first! Kinda.
The trouble is that large blocks are possibly an issue today, even without an increase. Thereâs a great figure in the post showing that reorged blocks tended to be almost two times larger (in bytes) than blocks that get finalized. Discussion about confounding factors aside, it does seem to suggest that a naive gas limit increase would hurt consensus health.
But block size comes in a distribution. The biggest blocks are a problem, but the median block size is 14.5x smaller than the maximum possible, very conservatively low. So what Toni and Vitalik are aiming to do is decrease the maximum block size and reduce variance so that we can safely increase the average block size.
With blobs coming up soon, the central idea is to increase the gas cost of calldata, the current way of getting data to the EVM. Increasing the gas cost of calldata means that blocks can hold less before they fill up, so we get a reduction in max block size. Then we could feel safe increasing the gas limit somewhat, presumably making space for more EVM execution, rather than data storage, to occur. And possibly make room for more blobs per slot.
The post has 5 different suggestions for how to do this. Personally, I like multi-dimensional EIP-1559 with a separate market for calldata, but the post argues that may be overly complex.
After many years in crypto. I seem to have run into the first instance of âlosingâ my wallet which is an account abstraction wallet from Particle Network(Ally.build created for the Linea tasks) created through signing in with email or twitter/discord, but Im unable to recover it for whatever reason. Apparently I may have used a different email or social account but I doubt that - I have tried logging back in with all my accounts and various combos, but it only loads a brand new wallet and not the ones which had the funds in it. The particle network discord is filled with people complaining about losing access to their wallet and the only reply they are getting is âread faqâ
If you are a crypto native, using an AA wallet seems rather pointless - not only does it create a dependancy on a centralized wallet provider (another example is people losing access to Argent) but also bugs and or glitches can lead to you losing your wallet
Update: Particle wallet seems to be extremely poorly designed. There are multiple channels on their discord with people complaining about being unable to access their funds. Seems signing in with the original social media/email account sometimes results in a brand new wallet being created, and not the earlier wallet that was in use and funded by users. Whats worse is that the team is not willing to accept there is an issue, but instead seem to hold their ground that everything is working as expected - despite hundreds of users complaining about being locked out of their wallets. The fact that so many people have the same issue in accessing their wallet at the very least requires the wallet team to look at the issue more closely, instead of firing off âRead FAQâ template messagesâŚ
Its shameful that Linea are using such operators for points scheme where scores of users are unable to even access the wallet they created earlier.
At this point I can only warn others from using any wallet related to Particle network including Ally.Build
Caught up on the last few dayllies and Iâve seen a feel people lose a lot. Can we talk about securing our bags a bit and thinking of how to avoid losing the entire stack? yes, itâs an unpleasant to thing to think about but Iâd rather do it and not get rekt completely.
Iâll start with some of the things that I do and remember off the top of my head and feel free to chime in w others.
Whenever the link is needed, especially important for airdrop claims or something big money related, go to the official source and even 2 to double check rather than clicking on whatever you see or someone sent you.
If somebody or something is rushing you to make a decision quickly - quite likely it is a scam. Even if itâs not a scam, you are losing out on a potential opportunity (no matter how gen wealth that opportunity is) but saving your bags. If you still have the bags then you can capitalize on future opportunities.
Donât download anything thatâs given to you in the crypto world. Sometimes people dm me with links and even trusted people and I tell them I wouldnt download any files even if I trust them cause what if they got hacked and now somebody is targeting me.
It has been a long time since Iâve made a top level post here it feels like. Alas, thatâs what medical school does to a person. I am back to share with everyone my first major writing piece in over a year -
Hybrid Theory: Rocket Poolâs Middle Way Between Native Liquid Restaking and Pure Staking.
The Rocket Pool pDAO will soon be voting on allowing, alterning, or denying my proposed integration bounty. This essay outlines why I think itâs a good idea for Rocket Pool, Eigenlayer, and Ethereum writ large.
The broad idea is that we can enable node operators to join Eigenlayer without adding risk to rETH holders if we integrate in a way that retains senior debt for rocket pool. I dub this hybrid restaking. The essay goes through all the different ways people can restake today and outlines their flaws.
Hybrid restaking enables permsionless node operators to be sustainably profit maxi without harming rETH. Rocket Pool node operators could experience many airdrops and yield from different AVS services.
I am happy to answer any (sincere) questions.
https://mirror.xyz/jasperthefriendlyghost.eth/Xv7lLt8SVTfCaFnVie50IvvFrI4-TkQTgZcxb\_omEnA
Special guest Lucas from PODS, a new way to publish, discover, and own your favorite podcasts.
Announcements
Ethereum
$2307.80
0.0536
The hacker running,
While the tables are turning,
Ether is burning.
Every day thousands of validators are forced to toil away in centralized server farms under the dangerous working conditions of using a supermajority execution layer client. For just 32 ETH, you can give a validator a home and keep their stake safe from harm. Please give today.
You should know that the tide toward client diversity is changing dramatically. Iâd like to thank the folks who have supported this work and those who have provided great updates here and Iâd 100% encourage you to continue engaging in that community service role.
On January 22, 2024, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase responded to DCInvestor to say that he was taking a look at client diversity within Coinbaseâs staking operation and theyâll report back in February. If they continue to suggest that other clients arenât mature enough, weâll wonder why Coinbase is utilizing open source software without contributing back to the code base as would be expected.
AllNodes, p2p.org, and Anker announced switching to minority clients within the past 24 hours. This switch is a great illustration of how efficiently large operations CAN shift clients if they choose to. The value of these victories, and the contributions by their respective contributors cannot be overstated. Thank you, Allnodes, P2P.org and Anker.
After an initially tone deaf defense, Stakefish seems to be changing its tune a bit, but despite a reference to the responsibility of client diversity, thereâs little apparent commitment to make real changes, so lets watch this one closely.
Lido operators represent the largest group of validator operators, and our data suggests that theyâre still highly reliant on geth. /u/yorickdowne has been a great advocate for decentralization from within lido, as a node operator for reducing the supermajority client, but the push hasnât been very successful yet. Iâm optimistic that at some point theyâll act in their own best interest.
Hanni Abuâs ClientDiversity.org is our best view into client diversity, and the execution client data currently sourced by word of mouth. While I look forward to more and better data, I deeply appreciate and value this source.
Iâd like to send good vibes to everyone who is working on this front, groups like EthStaker, led by /u/nixorokish, Jasper the Friendly Ghost, who is pouring his passion into this [and I sure af hope heâs still thriving in med school], and Anthony Sassano who, through The Daily Gwei, beats this drum CONTINUOUSLY, also /u/interweaver for reaching out to providers and educating about the risks of a majoriy client fault. And perhaps the biggest thanks to /u/hanniabu through EtherAlpha who tirelessly develops data that enables all of us to see the threats ahead of us. Without his efforts weâd be flying blind toward a black hole.
None of this even mentions the deep and detailed academic work and research going into client diversity. Thanks to /u/haurog for providing insight into the academic and EIP efforts.
For my part, Iâm continuing to go back to home stakers as the best future for the network. Giving lots of control of the network to third parties with little or nothing at stake is dangerous and undermines the goal of a decentralized network. If you have any way to stake from home, as a solo staker, Rocket Pool operator, DVT operator - whatever - I really encourage you to do that.
Iâve started a very [very] basic document to help us track these events, please feel free to hop in and help develop it as you see fit.
đ More good news on the client diversity front!
About 4 days ago, both u/0xboba and myself (following the news that đŚ/Consensys have began offering their users the ability to stake through their âownâ validators), were wondering if anyone knew which Execution (and Consensus) clients Consensys Metamask Staking are using..
So, I contacted Consensys, who directed me to đŚ support.. I asked the following:
âWhat are the client combinations (EL/CL) that my validators will be running? I understand from some (very) basic information the MM Staking web page provides, that youâoperate diverse validator clients and distributed infrastructure hosted across multiple regions and cloud providersâ, but in light of the recent software bugs in Besu and Nethermind, I need to know that my capital is not at risk by depending on a super-majority client like Geth"
They answered by just pointing me to some vague articles on their support page.. I pressed on, asking for details, and they just answered!
"As a company, Consensys is deeply committed to client diversity: we are developing an Execution Layer client (BESU) and a Consensus Layer client (Teku). Consensys Staking infrastructure uses an algorithm to distribute validators across multiple Execution and Consensus Layer clients. On the consensus layer, we run 2 clients for validator duties: Teku and Lighthouse. Our algorithm allocates new validators to Teku or Lighthouse to maintain a 50%-50% split between Teku and Lighthouse across the entire platform. On the execution layer, we currently run the majority of Geth. Our top priority is to increase BESUâs footprint: we aim to reach 50% of BESU in the coming weeks before the end of February. After the Merge, Consensys Staking evaluated the use of BESU and provided feedback and support to improve performances, in order to optimise rewards for End Users. The BESU team worked tirelessly, releasing new features such as a fully flat state DB and other improvements that bring BESU much closer to Geth performances. We started BESU rollout across our platform and will iteratively increase BESUâs footprint to reach 50% of all validators we operate before the end of February 2024. This progressive rollout aims to ensure no or limited performance degradation for our users. Beyond client diversity, Consensys Staking validators are distributed across 2 clouds (Azure, AWS) and 6 regions (2 in the US, 2 in Europe and 2 in Asia)"
đ
i tried out the keystone hardware wallet and wrote up some thoughts on it: https://twitter.com/nixorokish/status/1751319725274214825
i had more criticisms than praise and feel pretty lukewarm on it
summary:
I doooo like
kinda wanna try the Hito next. what i REALLY want is for Grid+ to make a smaller, travel-friendly wallet
Huh! I actually saw your comment during Xmas (the one telling us you were going to try it..) and.. bought one right there and then!
I was actually meaning to ask you about your initial impression!
Personally, I have been more than happy with it. To the point where it has replaced my Ledger play-money wallet!
I too encountered an initial software upgrade problem, but everything worked at my second attempt.
I see what you mean with the too-much-QR codes, however that IS how the device works.. And on that note, Iâll add that both the scanning by the device (of the laptop QR) AND the blurred scanning by my laptop (of the wallet QRs), works flawlessly and super fast.. I find myself going through txs much faster than with my Ledger..
I do agree with you on the âstart pageâ point. It IS quite confusing. I too initially wanted an âanchorâ type of screen. Possibly (as you said), with a clear list of my wallets..
However, after reading more on the way the device works, I came across the article which explains the security provisions for multiple wallets.. The device loads each wallet with a different (seed phrase) AND pin. And you can only have one wallet active.. This is quite logical, as only YOU know the number of wallets (seed phrases) that are loaded (but hidden). This wouldnât be possible with an âanchorâ screen.. And even if users did not care for all their wallets to be listed on that screen, theyâd still need to input a (different) pin, each and every time they went back onto that screen and selected a wallet..
My screen has not been scratched so far, but I do see your point here.. I am very (too..) careful while using and storing it.. I already ordered the pouch from their website..
I do also like the screen size, the clear signing info, and most importantly the biometrics..
One other thing I have to add, is that I got really really confused when trying to connect it to my (already Ledger-connected) Metamask extension.. As in super confused..
So I downloaded Rabby (thank you u/superphiz), and started fresh.. Everything made sense right there..
Most people confuse the different penalties the protocol may apply, because we tend to be a bit lazy with the penalties and call everything slashing. But there are different penalties. Slashing is just one of them and is almost impossible to trigger by a bug. And even when it happens due to operator mistake it slashes for 1 ETH. Just so you can see it directly, here is a very recent slashing.
https://beaconcha.in/validator/1061987
This validator lost 1 ETH (and a bit extra due to missed attestations after, but rounds to nothing) and is exited. But if there had been a mass slashing affecting many people, then the correlation penalty and inactivity leak kicks in, thatâs what can take you to total loss of capital.
So as I was thinking about it these days I noticed that mixing all the penalties under slashing might be partly why we have supermajority issues. Nobody wants to lose money for something they donât have control of. Much like people tend to fear traveling in airplanes more because the situation is out of your control. So losing your stack because of a bug you have no responsibility of is avoided, and everyone flocks to the client that is perceived safest.
But this is the wrong mental model of the network penalties, the network is not gonna punish you for uncorrelated issues because itâs designed to work under imperfect conditions. So this doesnât really bother the network. If you have a bug with a very minor client you may be offline and missing attestations a few hours, maybe a day. Thatâs nothing, penalties for that are very small. You would need to be 60% of the year offline to lose money for inactivity. Thatâs how small those penalties are, a few hours here and there is not even something you can feel.
But if it loses at least 1/3 of the validators then the protocol gets pissed, because it cannot fulfill its duties. And then punishes, and can punish very heavily. The penalties here are the inactivity leak and the correlation penalty. This is what you should fear.
So the TL;DR of the story is that you shouldnât fear client bugs per se. You should fear having the same bug as many people, thatâs what triggers severe penalties. And the good news is that you have total control over it. You have the choice to not suffer significant loss of capital. Itâs entirely on you. Choose minority clients.
Hey all. After Vitalikâs roadmap update, I took a stab at putting all the relevant information I knew of in a single place. Some of the sections remain a WIP, but Iâm mostly happy with the layout.
Iâm looking for feedback (or even contributors) to help make it better. I have thick skin so feel free to let her rip.
Whatâs not here that you think would be useful? How would you like to see each section fleshed out more?
Do you run Rocket Pool minipools? Or are you interested in learning how to do so? EVMavericks have spent the past year and a half building Rocket School, a video course about Rocket Pool, and we need your help reviewing or testing it!
See the main post in r/ethstaker here: https://reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/1ae56h9/do_you_run_rocket_pool_minipools_or_are_you/
I would highly recommend anyone interested in Ethereumâs upcoming upgrades read Christine Kimâs notes on this weekâs ACDC call. They contain a fantastic review of some of the EIPs under consideration for the Prague/Electra small-feature hardfork currently being targeted from the end of 2024, prior to the Verkle fork coming after it.
Only a few relatively small (but important) EIPs have been tentatively scheduled for inclusion; some of the slightly larger ticket items are still under debate, mostly because client devs believe including them would push Prague/Electra into 2025.
https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/ethereum-all-core-developers-consensus-call-126/
I usually think of the minimum requirements for a PoW system as:
There is basically infinite work to do. We canât have the consensus of the chain halt because itâs waiting for work to arrive.
Anyone can do work and submit a proof of that work for verification. If this was limited to known entities they could form a cabal that halt or at least slow the chain at will.
Anyone can verify/validate how much work was done objectively (at least statistically). We have to be able to reach consensus on how much to reward each miner. Again, anonymity and open access prevents effective conspiracies.
Validation takes far less time than it took to do the work. A system that relies on massive redundant computation for consensus will have to compensate too much per unit work done to be economically effective in the long run (looking at you Bitcoin).
In my previous post I talked about GenSyn which swapped out useless hashing for useful model training and the economic potential of such a solution. AI training just happens to be a task that meets all these criteria. There is basically infinite demand for AI training. I can think of a few other tasks such as protein folding (folding at home) or private key cracking but most computational tasks donât meet these criteria and even some of those that do wouldnât have much economic value. As such, while Gensyn seemed to have a neat idea, it didnât seem to be a paradigm shift so much as a cool footnote in history. However, what happens if we relax requirement 3 a bit and allow for subjective consensus?
âBut Logris, what the hell is subjective consensus?â Glad you asked! Basically itâs group think for deciding on things with no objective answer. The most common example of this is every oracle youâve ever known. Smart contracts can only refer to chain state. They canât see BTC price feeds on Kraken for example. All data that is off-chain is subjective from the perspective of the chain. Consensus on that data is decided subjectively by oracles. But not all oracles work alike. Chainlink is optimized for a small number of data streams with high liveness. UMA is optimized for the long-tail of queries with latency that can be measured in days.
The interesting part about UMA in my opinion is they apply a commit-reveal scheme and use stake to keep people honest. All participants submit their data in an encrypted way before a deadline, then submit the decryption keys for that data after the deadline when no answer can be changed. The do something like average the result and people with answers too far from the mean lose some of their stake. The obvious Schelling point for a submission is the truth. Expecting the average to be anything but that requires a conspiracy of submitters to distort the data. Unless you believe such a conspiracy exists, the rational answer to submit is the truest one you can find. All youâre really doing is measuring what you believe everyone else will believe, but in practice this works well when there is an objective answer rather than something either unknown or disputed. You could imagine how this could be used for anything: âDid Trump lose the 2020 election?â. I expect youâd get a very different answer if you shoved that question through this system than if you polled the average US voter. Honestly, I expect youâd get a better one.
So what would happen if you applied something like UMA consensus to a PoW blockchain? Addressing the points above in order.
You would still need a stream of continuous work for miners to do. Either that work has to be submitted by validators or it needs to be self-evident to miners. Nothing here says the work has to actually be useful, just eventually verifiable.
You still need permissionless mining but if the work isnât self-evident the network may need some type of sampling to throttle the participants which means youâll need miner stake for Sybil resistance.
Validation would still be permissionless but validators would definitely need stake for subjective consensus to function.
This is basically unchanged but I will note that nothing says payouts in a blockchain have to be immediate. Itâs totally fine if people receive their payout a couple days later. That said, you want consensus to happen continuously so you probably want each participant running a program rather than manually voting.
What types of tasks could you now do that you previously couldnât have? In order of least to highest villainy:
Miners provide DePIn resources like data availability; Validators validate using data sampling.
Miners submit a predictive price of the S&P 500 for the next day; Validators grade it retroactively. If this ever gets competitive it will distort global markets as large players buy and sell to make their predictions come true.
If youâre willing to have the validators create synthetic work to fill in any gaps as well:
âBut Logris, who would create such an evil thing?â Glad you asked! Before you say this is far-fetched and sounds terrible, this is in principle the concept of BitTensor. So, uh, this is happening today and the payouts right now are about $25M a day. Just your heads up that weâre heading into hell!
I know you like the darker stuff /u/nixorokish so here you go!
Because of the recent push for client diversity, Iâve been researching a few of the alpha and pre-alpha EL clients in the works, and the Silkworm Ethereum client has me really excited. Iâm always looking out for new and innovative projects that can push the technology forward.
Silkworm aims to be the fastest Ethereum client while still maintaining high code quality and readability. That combination really appeals to me - performance without sacrificing robustness or security. The fact that it builds on top of the well-regarded geth/Erigon codebase, but uses a completely different programming language gives me confidence that the developers know what theyâre doing.
I also like Silkwormâs use of more modern C++ standards and the libmdbx database engine. Adopting C++20 features and leveraging a high-performance embedded database seems like a recipe for speed.
Iâm eager to try it out once testnet builds are available. The documentation around building and testing Silkworm locally is already pretty good.
Overall, I think the team has laid out a compelling technical vision with Silkworm. If they can deliver on faster sync and execution times without reducing decentralization or security, it could be a big win for Ethereum. Iâll be following the project closely as it develops.
Tim Beiko published the âProtocol Guild Pledgeâ yesterday, his quantitative framing for why projects built on Ethereum should donate 1% of their tokens to help onboard and retain Ethereumâs unbelievably talented core protocol contributors:
https://tim.mirror.xyz/srVdVopOFhD_ZoRDR50x8n5wmW3aRJIrNEAkpyQ4_ng
For those who prefer to watch/listen, a great summary by Anthony Sassano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlSaGTDtDXA&t=715s
Timâs announcement was front-run by Ether.fi, announcing theyâd allocate 1% of their upcoming token to the Guild, and there are a few other (major) projects who are waiting in the wings to make the same announcement! đ
If you know of any projects that would like to host Protocol Guild for a community call or Spaces, please feel free to DM me here or Twitter or Farcaster!
IMO, points have been developing a bad rep mostly for nothing.
(Though I will say, there are two fairly different approaches, and one is worse than the other).
Whatâs good about points:
-they let teams be explicit about the sorts of user behaviour they want (to drive adoption or growth)
-they allow teams to evolve and develop those goals in a way that supports real-time testing and feedback (so for example, âhow will user behaviour change if we tweak these variables and incentives?â)
-they give teams a chance to âclaw backâ or change these metrics quite rapidly if needed (something that is harder to do if a token incentive program is already live and running)
-they reduce Sybil airdrop farming because they generally relate to actual capital (x time) being put in, or at least, to behaviours that are deemed desirable and useful by the protocol team
-they give users who are keen to pursue a token allocation some transparency, prior to token generation (meaning you can see where you sit overall relative to other users, and you know what behaviours will be ârewardedâ and whether your time and effort is being well directed).
For all these reasons, points seem to me to be (on balance) a logical development that has mostly been positive.
However - what I will say is that it begins to cross the line once too much gamification is brought in. By this I mean instances in which teams make their points program too complex, too casino-like, and too demanding: countless fancy ranks and tiers, NFTs and badges, quests, pointless or tangential tasks (daily check-ins??) super aggressive referral programs, etc.
These are the ones that (to me) feel exploitative and annoying. Iâd sadly put EtherFi in this category, even though I think the team is legit and the core product makes sense. Orbiter has trended this way too.
Eigenlayerâs points, on the other hand, look simple, justifiable and useful.
So next time youâre thinking about points, start by asking - whatâs the point? Sometimes there is one! âŚbut to any devs out there - donât make it a carnival game, please.
A Huge shoutout to u/Twelvemeatballs for preparing our substidoots đ and maintaining the impeccable use of emoji shorthand âď¸ while Tricky_Troll was on the frontlines âşď¸
Credit to u/usesbinkvideo for the gem of a suggestion âPut that name on a McDonaldâs nametag for himâđ
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Seek consistency,
More client diversity,
Bring persistency.
When you were partying, I studied the blade. When you were having premarital sex, I mastered the blockchain. While you wasted your days on crypto twitter in pursuit of vanity, I farmed eigenlayer points. And now that the world is on fire and the soylana manlets are at the gate you have the audacity to come to me for airdrops.
Good Morning. I just wanted to say how truly grateful I am for this group from the bottom of my heart.
The folks in here are caring, sincere, curious, and hungry for the truth. In this world we live in, itâs really a rarity to have this quality of human concentrated in one place.
Yesterday I got hacked through my own fault and signed off-chain approval for 2 assets that were drained from my wallet. This was my first time being scammed/hacked.
Somehow, they also managed to pay down a significant portion of my USDC debt [huzzah!] from my AAVE position by withdrawing/paying out to get my ETH- so it did not end up being completely catastrophic. I still donât fully understand what happened with this piece of the puzzle.
No less than 8-10 people reached out, offered help, pointed me in the right direction, and that means the world to me. I know Iâm not getting the tokens back.
Last night I wrapped my head around what happened and tossed back a bunch of beers with friends in real lifeânothing like joking about it to get over it mentally.
Just wanted to say thanks again to everyone in here that makes this such an amazing community.
Iâm here with a new Rocket Pool update!
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the process for new tokenomics had started. We were looking for (and still are, I guess) submissions, and we got over 20! These range from changing collateral systems, new RPL rewards dynamics, MEV theft protections, and much more.
A new committee to analyze the submissions has been created with 5 members. Youâre welcome to follow along (and provide feedback on the submissions if you are interested). There are three community members and two team members. They will inspect every submission, rank them, and make suggestions. This process is expected to take place over the next few weeks.
Next, it is likely the new tokenomics will be a blend of the outstanding submissions. We already have one community member share ideas on what they think the new tokenomics for Rocket Pool might look like. This is all still very early, though, and there are going to be many changes and suggestions in the coming weeks.
This whole process has been hugely exciting (for tokenomics nerds like me haha). Iâll let you all know what the outstanding submissions were once we get some clarity on that and what direction the next steps will take.
Iâm curious as to peopleâs thoughts on the ethics of airdrop farming after a discussion I had deep in replies yesterday.
Firstly, I have two airdrop farming wallets. I try to stick to projects I like and not get too degenerate. This helps it feel legitimate to me as the original airdrop idea was to give shares and a stake in the platform out to the community. But two wallets? A true sybil resistant system would call me out for that and either penalise me or only reward me once. Is having two wallets being greedy? Maybe. Personally it feels like a rational balance between the following:
Fighting airdrop farmers with dozens or hundreds of wallets who might be diluting my share.
Not blatantly farming/sybil attacking the drop mechanism.
Not spending too much mental and financial overhead speculating on something which may not happen.
On the other hand, to me, the idea of having a dozen wallets or more to farm an airdrop feels wrong. The developers will set a certain amount tokens to the community and if you game their mechanisms and qualify on 10 wallets, then you get 10 slices of the pie instead of 1. This adds 9 more slices to the pie than an anti-sybil minded developer would have ideally intended. Since this has no effect on the total number of tokens in the airdrop, your sybil wallets have eaten into the size of the slices of everyone else. In short, airdrop distributions are a zero sum game and more tokens for you means less for someone else.
Now Iâm not trying to virtue signal or shame anyone for having 10 wallets. Thereâs no ethical code about how much free money someone is entitled to. Furthermore, there is a justifiable and rational argument that since others are sybil attacking, you need to too. After all, youâre not eating into the average Joeâs piece of the pie, youâre eating into the faceless big airdrop farm in China with 1,000 wallets run by a computer program. At the end of the day, it is the developerâs job to ensure that the distribution is sybil resistant and makes it to the community and not the spammers.
This is in the same vein of human coordination problems we face with MEV â an arms race appears to capture economic value as no amount of virtue signalling and solo stalkers opting to build their own blocks will be enough coordination to stop rational actors from doing what makes the most economic sense. In fact, being virtuous just leaves more profit for the âbadâ and less values driven actors. So with that said, does that make being virtuous and leaving more value on the table actively counter productive for our values? In the bigger picture, this is why we need things like proposer-builder separation. To remove as many of these mechanisms of value capture which involve some kind of arms race. This is because in these areas of competitive value capture, there is almost always a centralising force over time towards those who are the most successful and in some cases, the most brutal with their tactics (see block proposal timing games for the latest development here).
To get back on the original topic, why two wallets? I guess itâs just the way I was raised to not be too greedy or selfish in a zero sum game. As I said above, Iâd be taking more from someone elseâs slice. But on the other hand, Iâm not lost in an idealistic world. The rational side of my brain sees how the game theory plays out and says farm that airdrop and take a slice out of the big boysâ pie as theyâd only spend the money on stupid things anyway. So here I am, somewhere in the middle. Iâm definitely putting effort into farming airdrops and with 2 wallets, maybe taking a larger slice than Iâm fairly entitled to. However, it is still less than I could get if I really wanted more.
All this is probably a similar reason to why I just want a house in the countryside somewhere and not a gazillion rental properties, a ferrari and a yacht. I would get very marginal enjoyment out of such fancy things and that marginal enjoyment nowhere near equates to the amount of good for others which those millions of dollars could do if they were put to more productive work. After all, spending money tells society where to put its effort. Collectively we get much more from feeding and housing people than we do from vroom vroom shiny car go fast. But still, even 90% of the world arenât lucky enough to own their own home and live in a safe, stable, country. So at this rate Iâll likely be getting a bigger slice than Iâd be fairly entitled to if the worldâs resources were split evenly. But in the situation I have been fortunate enough to find myself in, I donât feel overly greedy and I hope thatâs good enough.
Anyway, thanks for reading me share my thought process. I learned a bit just trying to articulate this. So let me know, where do you lie on the scale of u/Superphiz to hyper-capitalist rational actor? Or what are your thoughts on any of the above. In the end this discussion covered way more than I thought it would.
No flowery preamble because my wife is demanding that I get in the shower for a day trip. I do adore you in so many ways tricky, and Iâm honored that you consider my positions and our alignment. Here are too many bullet points that will definitely make me late for the shower.
I donât want anyone to exaggerate my wholesomeness and assume that I am too âgoodâ to airdrop farm or use multiple accounts. I definitely have and will continue to use multiple accounts if it appears that those mundane actions will increase my qualifications for an airdrop.
In general, I see airdrops differently than other people. I donât typically view airdrops as a benefit to the end recipient, but as a combination of a VC liquidity tool, or an engagement farming technique that allows startups to more easily create a case to VC for additional funding or valuation. I guess what Iâm trying to say is that youâre probably not abusing the airdrop, but in most cases I think the airdrop is taking advantage of you by farming you. Theyâre trying to pump key metrics through farming user activities, this lets them prove to VC that their platform really is worth funding.
My recent pushback against points is along this vein - if youâre farming away for imaginary points but startups are using your metrics as proof of success to VC, then thereâs a good chance youâre just straight up being abused. Do you know what VC likes even MORE than users who exert little outflow on a startup? FREE users. If a startup can generate a ton of activity for ZERO cost AND have a rabid user base, theyâre going to win big. I really adore big winners, but I want those winners to be good products, not just good incentive farmers.
Iâm really just encouraging people to take their own farming to the next level by engaging intelligently with projects that they like rather than being mindless zombies jumping through hoops. I donât know why, or if it even makes sense, itâs just where Iâm at right now.
I feel like EVERYONE thinks Iâm targeting eigenlayer, and Iâm not. I have hesitancy about Eigenlayer because of its impact on the security layer, and I accept it as a natural evolution of our space. I have no intention or desire to target them for their airdrop mechanism, other than to say, farming for points can be risky and create a house of cards in certain cases.
Regarding the greed issue (ferraris and yachts), I definitely align with you - I want to carve out a fair share and leave enough pie for others, but that doesnât mean Iâm some kind of altruistic monk. I DO enjoy the benefits of wealth and I do hope to continue building wealth, but itâs true that I take a more socialistic approach than many others. I feel like if we build Ethereum to be super powerful and valuable, then we will also benefit from that value; but if all of us focus on greed and extraction now, everyone will suffer in the long run. I prefer to think of cryptocurrency as a nascent project that has 1000x growth potential (platform, not price) if we foster healthy growth, or it can have a quick death if everyone extracts without regenerating.
Finally, I want to remind everyone that value and wealth are represented by more than money. Money is fun, but money is only useful when itâs used in an environment where it can bring you benefit. As a worst case scenario, money was useless in the stone age because it couldnât bring benefit. I have a real belief that if we bring blockchain developments to fruition, then the entire world will have access to more benefit. NFTs are a horrible (but useful) example of this. Prior to blockchains, you could have billions of dollars, but still no access to NFTs. Money could not provide that benefit because blockchains hadnât been developed to the extent that they were possible. There are MANY other developments that will be possible in the future if we continue developing this technology, and when we do, our money will be even more useful than it is today because weâll have access to more value from it through blockchain developments.
Assumptions:
If a Nethermind fork happens (this is what actually happened today):
If a Geth fork happens (exactly like what happened today, but just swap geth and nethermind):
TL;DR: Stake with nethermind, a nethermind bug causes you to lose 0.0005 ETH. Stake with geth, a geth bug causes you to lose 28 ETH.
Disclaimer, this is all to the best of my knowledge and I donât consider myself to be an expert in this.
Perfection is an illusion.
No software is perfect.
When a system is built on a software monoculture, it will inevitably fail when that critical software inevitably fails.
When a system is built on a diverse polyculture of software, it becomes resilient enough to not fail overall when any particular piece of supporting software fails.
Ethereum is too important to fail. Itâs too important to the future of money and the internet, too important in the fight against Moloch, and too important to the inhabitants of a world that is becoming more and more centralized as time goes on.
If I were on the side of Moloch, if I were going to attack Ethereum, I would do exactly what a sophisticated attacker might indeed be doing: releasing blocks designed to give minority clients issues, in the hope that people would be scared back onto Geth, in hopes of shutting down the nascent polyculture that its proponents have been desperately trying to cultivate before itâs too late.
I would tell people that itâs much more important to avoid the possibility of a few hours of downtime once or twice a year than it is to avoid the permanent destruction of the chainâs Lindy and legitimacy.
You all know Ethereum is too important to fail. Of those of you running nodes or especially staking, most have done the responsible thing and run minority clients.
Donât let anyone scare you into switching back into the supermajority. Donât let the occasional minor hiccups distract you from the looming impact of the supermajority bug asteroid that weâre desperately trying to divert from its path towards planet Ethereum before itâs too late.
Embrace the fact that no software is perfect, and that helping run Ethereum will always mean the possibility of unexpected adventures, no matter what software you run. But itâs your choice whether those adventures will be a fun afternoon resyncing your execution client in the good company of your fellow client users, or a less fun loss of every single Ether you staked, while the community fractures around you and all of our dreams for a better, more decentralized future lie in tatters around us.
Choose wisely.
Here is a list of some node operators with a lot of ETH staked using Geth. The easiest way to fix the EL client diversity issue is to knock on their doors and let them know why it matters. If you are staking with them, be aware that your stake is at risk if a bug in Geth would cause a mass slashing. You should unstake with them and let them know why you are doing so.
I have added client teams staking with Lido in there because I find it particularly problematic that they do not lead the charge of client diversity with their example. Them more than anyone should be aware of the risks.
Operator | Total ETH Staked | Estimated Geth usage |
---|---|---|
Coinbase | 4400000 | 100% |
Kraken | 860000 | 100% |
Binance | 1000000 | 100% |
Nethermind | 10000 | 68% |
Prysmatic Labs | 10000 | 100% |
Consensys | 10000 | 100% |
Sigma Prime | 10000 | 70% |
Kiln (Lido) | 10000 | 100% |
Kiln (non-Lido) | 790000 | 100%? |
Allnodes | 700000 | 100% |
Bitcoin Suisse | 550000 | 100% |
Stakefish | 370000 | 100% |
These guys together represent 1/3 of all ETH staked. If the do something about it the problem is gone.
Sources:
https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking
https://execution-diversity.info/
https://www.stakingrewards.com/provider/allnodes
Just to recap Coinbaseâs public statements about execution client diversity (to my knowledge):
Viktor Bunin, head of the Protocol Operations team at Coinbase Cloud (Coinbaseâs staking infrastructure provider), May 31st, 2022:
Thank you and yes, weâre looking at supporting other execution clients :)
Will Robinson, VP of Engineering, December 9th, 2023:
We do care.
Thank you for the push. Ethereumâs client diversity is one of the most striking manifestations of its commitment to decentralization.
Jesse Pollak, creator of Base and Head of Protocols, December 12th, 2023:
i hear you - lots of internal conversations ongoing. appreciate your patience as we work through it!
Viktor Bunin again, December 12th, 2023:
Thanks! Weâre looking into it, but nothing to share at this time.
Will Robinson again, January 2nd, 2024:
Weâre going to do it. Timeline is still TBD. I want to under-promise and over-deliver. :-)
Ben Rodriguez, Senior Protocol Specialist, today:
Hi! Iâm a Protocol Specialist here. I have been pushing for this and we are actively pursuing it.
And now Brian Armstrong, CEO, today:
Catostrphic.
2 tornado cash devs that got in legal trouble are looking for donations
https://twitter.com/rstormsf/status/1749490246000238942
links to:
and then to:
You can donate Eth and get an NFT.
[https://juicebox.money/@free-pertsev-and-storm](https://juicebox.money/@free-pertsev-and-storm)
Alternatively Go fund me or directly through justicedao.
The precedent set in that legal case might have a significant impact on the future of ethereum.
I dont see any Monero/Zcash donations so far. But maybe that wouldnt be in their best interest anyway.
I wanted to write a small post-mortem on the Nethermind incident, as a small solo staker.
Nethermind started having problems around block 19056922. Block sync became more infrequent than usual, there were some missed attestations, but the node somehow kept up. Finally, 1h and 50 minutes later, Nethermind started reporting âNo incoming messages from the consensus client that is required for syncâ and Prysm âExecution client is not syncincâ, effectively putting the node offline (letâs call this T+0).
I became aware of the issue at about T+45min. Tried restarting the services at T+50min, but quickly found out that this did not resolve the issue. After that, I checked if Eth prices had crashed to see if the whole blockchain had been attacked and brought down, but saw no price action. Then I went on discord, and found out that this was a Nethermind-specific issue.
After reading that a full resync might solve the issue, I rebooted Nethermind into a fresh data dir at T+1h20min, to begin the process. I was shocked to find that at T+2h23min the node was already submitting attestations, only 1h and 3 minutes after starting the sync from scratch. The first time I did this a number of months ago, it took more than 10 hours to get to this point. The node was not fully operational yet (I think block proposals would still have failed), but at least I was back attesting the network.
At around this time the Nethermind team announced that a fix was released (at T+1h40min apparently), but it took a while for the ubuntu repo to propagate the last version. My node was already attesting, so I was in no rush to update. About 1h later, I applied the fix, reverted back to the old database, and the node was fully online again.
In total, the attestation downtime made each validator earn 0.0007 eth less that it would have in normal operating conditions. This comes up to $1.57 per validator at todayâs prices, quite literally pocket change. Of course a missed block would have meant a much larger missed cost, but the chances of getting a block within the downtime window were quite low.
All in all, the issue was identified and fixed by the Nethermind devs incredibly quickly for a Sunday evening, and only caused a few hours of downtime. If anything, the speed of the fix only gave me more confidence on the Nethermind team, now that Iâve seen them working under fire. True, if I had been running geth I would have avoided this incident, but if Iâd been running geth and there was a similar incident with that client Iâd probably have lost most of my eth.
A few weeks ago a wrote a blog post about my experience with the various execution and consensus clients as a solo staker and the small differences they have. I never shared it here. It grew out of a longer message I wrote on the gnosis chain discord and it was well received there. It is a personal view so I am definitely missing a few angles, but hopefully there is no wrong information in there. If you think something could/should be improved, please let me know. I wrote it shortly before the Besu bug, so nothing about the recent bugs is discussed. I am still debating if I should add a short section about the bugs, but at the moment I leave it like that.
In pursuit of client diversity, I simplified the open source client-switcher and removed any code that wasnât absolutely necessary.
Itâs now a basic Python script of 439 lines that does the following:
1) Prompt user for inputs and validate inputs:
2) Remove old client and install new client
3) Create new service files, reload daemon, print final results
Thatâs it! Same process as Somerâs guides just simplified and automated. The switch takes 5 minutes with validators attesting again in ~2 hours (nethermind).
Thereâs a CLI (terminal) and GUI version to fit various setups and preferences.
Itâs all open source, so you can check github or ethstaker to view detailed images and review the code.
Iâm working to get it audited asap, but any help in the meantime is appreciated.
Special guest Mike Silagadze joins us from Ether.Fi, a native liquid restaking protocol.
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Welcome to the blobs.
Today is a banking holiday in the states and because of that I cannot:
Deposit/withdraw my monies
Receive direct deposits of monies
Have any monies cleared/settled in my accounts
Buy the stonk :(
THE FUTURE OF FRANCIS
In the spirit of client diversity, I created an open source tool that allows anyone to instantly swap to a minority client with 0 configuration or effort. Just 1 click, new client.
I added a simple GUI, so switching clients can now be done with 0 programming experience in under 30 seconds.
Installation is based on Somer Esatâs guides and works with Geth, Besu, and Nethermind on both mainnet and testnets.
Feel free to check out the ethstaker post or see the details on Github:
These are personal projects that have not been audited, but the code is open source and fairly easy to understand. Any testing or feedback is always appreciated!
I created an open source validator updater that allows home stakers to update their entire setup in a single click with almost no downtime!
Github repo: https://github.com/accidental-green/validator-updater
Validator Updater Summary:
Once complete, restart the services and ensure the validator is still attesting.
The updated binaries are installed at /usr/local/bin to be compatible with Somer Esatâs guides, but can be adapted to work with non-standard installations.
Feel free to review my other validator related repos below:
Validator Install: Fresh Ubuntu to syncing validator in 1 minute
Validator Controller: Validator GUI for easy operation (start, stop, journals, etc)
Client Switcher: Instantly switch between Execution Clients
The code has not been audited, so use with caution. These are all open source community resources, so testing and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Cheers and Happy Staking!
Going to bring this up again: I strongly think we need to increase the gas limit, and Dencun is probably the best time to co-ordinate around this (although a HF is not needed for validators to increase the gas limit).
A few things to point out again:
What problem does increasing the gas limit solve?
Increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow. Would be nice to have a number on those.
That said, what does increasing the gas limit net us?
I feel weâre kind of yoloing this. Do we have the monitoring and metrics in place to see how things evolve? If not, IMO we should fist have tooling that can point to the effect of a change before making that change. Otherwise itâs gonna get summed to âlook, not dead yetâ.
If we had a solid monitoring, we could just bump by 1M, see what happens. Nothing gets wonky, ok, bump by another 1M.
Going 10M in one go hoping nothing will get borked in the next 5 years is a bit too optimistic to my taste. Even though it might as well be the case
- Geth Team Lead - PĂŠter SzilĂĄgyi
https://twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1745374731824439531
What are your thoughts on this? It does make sense and I understand why he is annoyed. He is the one who has to deal with the impact of the increase in state size.
On increasing the gas limit, I agree with Francesco and Dankrad (researchers at EF).
My take is similar:
Bumping the gas limit just as EIP-4844 is about to be shipped which already increases storage and network bandwidth costs is a bad idea
this isnât the right time at all
given the better hardware argument, we should definitely be increasing the size of blobspace (not blockspace). But only after the Deneb HF.
The result from the OP RPGF round 3 is a big motivation for me because it shows me that if we coordinate as a community, we can really get things done and improve the ecosystem.
I believe $STRK is around the corner. The snapshot for the airdrop is in according to an official tweet beginning of December 2023. The last upgrade allows tx to be paid in $STRK (but you obviously still use ETH as well). And afaik $STRK that lived on L1 for a long time now also is briged/ deployed on starknet.
I am also rather sure that $STRK will be a governance token because it is a governance token now and there are delegates participating in governance already, see this vote/ example.
So here are some questions:
Who has used Starknet a lot and knows the ecosystem? (whatever that means, hard to answer tbh)
Who has the time, energy and willingness to act as a delegate for starknet?
I think it would be great if we could informally agree on 1, 2, 3, x delegates that could represent this community in the starknet ecosystem and governance. That obviously doesnât mean that you canât delegate your $STRK to someone else outside of this community! But if we agree on candidates beforehand, those potential delegates can setup everything when the token drops.
So a quick update on the $STRK delegate search I started on Friday:
We have a first candidate: u/Tricky_Troll is interested and I would probably borrow $STRK to delegate even more to him! (I wonât, but I think Tricky is a great first candidate!)
But letâs not stop here, I think we should have 2 or maybe even 3 candidates. First of all it would be great if we as a community had a choice from ETH Finance (and let me get that straight: not because I think Tricky is not a great candidate, as I said I would delegate to Tricky without thinking twice!). More importantly though, I think we will likely - as a community - have a lot of $STRK power that we probably should spread across at least 2 delegates. So I would be really happy to see more people coming forward!
Also u/bob-rossi said that he would be happy to share his experience with people thinking about being a delegate. So if you wanna understand what it is like before you make a decision, feel free to contact him. Maybe a channel in the EVM discord like he suggested also makes sense and maybe other delegates would have a look as well, to share their thoughts. In a best case scenario âourâ delegates not only receive voting power from Eth Finance, but maybe the more experienced delegates can tell us how they convinced people to delegate to them!
So: I would be very excited if some people thought about being a delegate and of course best case share their interest here so we can coordinate.
Letâs go!
Discussions on the next version of the Arbitrum grants program have been underway and I wanted to share this for two reasons.
It is currently in the Snapshot voting stage. So, if anyone here is involved with projects that are interested in that type of thing it might be a good idea to start coordinating what an application would look like. I donât believe they have any official application template just yet, but Iâd imagine it will be pretty similar to the STIP rounds. This new round already has some changes that should hopefully make it less chaotic then the first STIP grants.
One of the changes is creating a 5-member council that gives a first pass at all applicants. The goal here is to cut down on some of applicant volume so when delegates vote they can be less overwhelmed and have the ability to review the proposals a little more thoroughly. And then they are adding 3 âApplicant Advisorâ roles as well. That group can help assist projects with polishing their application for a best chance of success. I wanted to mention that specifically for any projects that may apply, that the assistance is there. Both are an elected and paid position.
Relating to point two⌠part of my post is to let everyone here know I will be running for one of the council spots. Iâm not sure how successful I will be honestly, but I wanted to at least make people here aware since Iâm sure many of my delegates come from here. I actually applied a week+ ago, but wanted to wait until voting was closer to âannounceâ.
Iâm trying really hard to toe the line between being the overbearing âhey vote for meâ guy while still being effective at least getting the word out. So Iâll leave it simply at this - if there are any questions you have for me relating to my application, or even just any thoughts on what a successful council would look like if I got elected, please let me know. And of course, if you do decide to support me always know I will be grateful!
I really, really wish I could link the post⌠but probably easiest to find more info about the grant program would be going to the Snapshot Vote and clicking the corresponding link to the main Arbitrum governance forum. Then if you are interested in who is running for council, the 17th post in that thread will have a link directly to the âLTI Pilot Program Position Application Thread". Which alternatively can be found by going to the main forum page, clicking under the blueâDao Grants Program" subsection, and finding that thread near the top. Sorry for the runaround, but Reddit does really make it this much of a painâŚ
By now Iâm sure weâve all seen Larry Fink, CEO of the worldâs largest asset manager Blackrock (with $9 trillion in assets, 3 times Franceâs entire GDP), saying that the future of france is tokenization of assets âon one single ledgerâ (source). More specifically, he talked about bonds and stocks.
But what could this âone single ledgerâ be?
In this other interview, Fink again mentions stepping stones towards tokenization right after speaking about an ether ETF.
Since that Iâve read a few Ethereum detractors saying that thereâs no way tokenization of stocks and bonds will happen on mainnet Ethereum, because issuers will need an environment they can control. And this is probably sort of right.
But what theyâll also need is an environment that fully communicates with the leading tokenization platform.
Ethereum currently holds 55% of all of defiâs TVL, hereâs your leading platform. Thatâs the âone single ledgerâ Fink talks about. And thatâs without counting rollups and sidechains. And before a 10x scaling of rollups in a couple of months.
But interoperability and control, how to you reconciliate these two?
In the past banks have created their own permissioned Ethereum clones (Hyperledger, Quorum, ⌠more about these here). They looked like intranet, closed and safe versions of the internet. But have you heard of projects that crossed the chasm and made it to mainnet? I havenât. Just like intranet, these projects were fun playground but didnât take advantage of the full potential of Ethereum. What good is a website others canât reach?
Today, the scaling solution(s) chosen by the Ethereum community happen to be absolutely perfect for reconciliating interoperability with control. A rollup, a volition, a validium or any other hybrid solution is just whatâs needed to solve this problem.
You can be part of the ecosystem, but still retain some degree of control.
Not only that but the cost will soon basically be net zero: we can safely expect that launching your own L2 on Ethereum will be as trivial as launching a smart contract: copy some open source code and let stakers manage security for you through Eigenlayer. How much did Hyperledger and Quorum cost to create and operate? I couldnât find figures but a shitload Iâm sure. How much will launching a rollup cost in 2 years? 1,000 or 10,000 less?
I donât like Fink and probably never will. But it truly amazes me how far weâve come.
Today, the CEO of the worldâs largest asset managers sees the future weâve seen for years, a future of finance with Ethereum at its core.
I wanted to repost the article u/vvpan provided the other day about the progress and interest in tokenising securities by institutional firms.
In this case Brewan Howard.
I wanted to repost it because I really dont think it got the recognition it deserved. You know those âstepsâ Larry Fink talked about which eventually culminate in full tokenisation of everything. This is the next big step
And as I said I believe this usecase alone, if eventually succesful at scale (such that it picks up a network effect) could swell Ethereum to unfathomable degrees. I truly think this is being slept on by us crypto natives.
This is the âcrypto taking over tradfiâ moment. This is the âEthereum is the new internetâ moment. If it succeeds.
âProduct market fitâ? This is it.
Iâve provded an archive link to bypass the paywall and Iâll paste the artivle text too.
https://archive.ph/v4BVk#selection-4891.0-4891.13
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/crypto/brevan-howard-joins-in-on-institutional-push-to-tokenize-funds
Brevan Howard plans to tokenize at least one of its funds through a partnership with a startup backed by Nomuraâs Laser Digital, making it the latest financial heavyweight to experiment with putting money on blockchains.
Libre Capital, the startup which includes Laser Digital and the Alan Howard-backed incubator WebN Group as investors, said it will offer zero fees to asset managers who tokenize funds on its namesake platform. Brevan Howard, along with Hamilton Lane, said theyâll be the first asset managers to do so. Libreâs public blockchain technology is supported by Ethereum scaling firm Polygon.
âThe tokenisation of funds allows us to offer investors a new way to access our strategies, providing them with optionality, and further develops our platform to serve client needs,â said Natalie Smith, head of strategy and client partnerships group at Brevan Howard, in a release.
Brevan Howard is one of the earliest Wall Street participants in the digital-asset sector. Its digital-currency fund rose 44% last year. Even so, this will still be the Jersey, Channel Islands-based investment firmâs first tokenized fund. The process has been promoted heavily recently as one of the few viable use cases for blockchains. Citigroup estimated the tokenization market could swell to $5 trillion by 2030.
âUltimately, our goal isnât to make money on the distribution side,â said Avtar Sehra, CEO and founder of Libre, in an interview. âFor us, we want to take the money and the operational costs as close to zero as possible.â
Libre also plans to launch collateralized lending and automated rebalancing of separately managed accounts later in 2024, according to Sehra.
With Libre taking zero fees from fund distributors for tokenization, Sehra anticipated that the company will profit mostly from the lending and SMAs businesses.
I often find myself thinking that eth is a natural solution to a lot of global financial problems. The latest is the fink tokenized asset commentary.
Another was the issue of central banks not having a fast trustless way to trade currencies. To an eth enthusiast, this is an obvious fit - issue currencies as erc20s, and let the trading simply occur in a trustless format.
The imf didnât even consider this, but instead addressed all kinds of cbdc variants. The obvious problem is that theyâre all trusted, and countries simply donât trust each other enough to use one anotherâs private chains. The imf briefly addressed bitcoin as a possibility before dismissing it.
I wonder if a lot of this reflexive hostility to eth and permissionless programmable chains is a response to bitcoin and its dominant narrative. Bitcoiners talk about fiat being worthless and central banks as enemies - of course central banks are going to view this with hostility. They view an attack on their fiat as an attack on their sovereignty. The digital gold/SoV approach makes much more sense for how bitcoin is set up, but also is less of a direct challenge.
Anyway, all this to say that closed eth clones are always going to have the problem of being trusted, and if youâre not part of the consortium running the chain, youâre ultimately at their mercy. Now matter how big that consortium is, there will always be some outside it, thereby limiting its network effects.
Security alert!
Bungee / socket being exploited.
Revoke contract 0x3a23f943181408eac424116af7b7790c94cb97a5
source Spreek
https://twitter.com/spreekaway/status/1747337879771033632
Edit: Only mainnet exploited, other chains could be exploitable. Same contract on other chains, 0xaDdE7028e7ec226777e5dea5D53F6457C21ec7D6 on zksync era.
Edit2: Afaik if you used bungee you should be fine, as their webapp does only approve the amount you like to send.
Edit3: https://twitter.com/SocketDotTech/status/1747349422730813525 Socket confirmed and paused the contract.
Edit4: Hopefully last edit. Revoke cash has created a tool to easily check. Although contracts are paused, itâs recommended to revoke if your address is affected. It could also happen that you bridged with services like zerion or rainbow. [https://revoke.cash/exploits/socket?chainId=1
Fast reaction from Bungee.
This sent me on a revoke binge regardless. Itâs easy to get sloppy for the sake of convenience. The other day I mentioned using Odos rather than other aggregators so I limit my approvals. Of course, this requires actually revoking previous approvals!
I like the idea of a 2 addresses setup, to limit risk. Address A holds all funds. Only ever sends and receives tokens to address B. Address B is the trader. Approves everything, does the swaps, gets into the tokenized positions, transfers everything back to A once each series of operations is done. This protects against many hacks since A holds everything and approves nothing.
However⌠Itâs hard to have the discipline to stick to this. It would be fantastic if there was wallet software to automate this behavior. You âstart a sessionâ and this triggers A sending whatever to B, then you operate B as a normal wallet, then as you âclose your sessionâ this triggers a transaction of B sending whatever newly acquired funds back to A. Even restricting any action from A thatâs not send to B (unless you enter a password to override, or whatever).
Probably hard to build but man I would love this.
Guess what, I had a u/seamonkey82 moment today, and helped find a client bug! Story time :D
Some of you may be aware that thereâs an ongoing debate about whether Ethereum can handle a slight increase in its block gas limit. This would make L1 gas slightly cheaper by creating more blockspace, at the expense of being harder to keep in sync with the chain for the weakest machines on the network.
The gas limit is currently at 30M units of gas per block (which means 15M units is equilibrium). Some folks are proposing raising it 33%-50%, to e.g. 40M-45M, while others oppose any raises, especially in light of the upcoming EIP-4844, which will raise requirements a bit too.
The fun thing is, individual stakers actually are able to change this number themselves whenever they propose blocks. Unlike many other changes, you donât need a hardfork to accomplish it. Rather, individual stakers can pick their own âtarget gas limitâ, which their client will attempt to move the gas limit towards. The protocol allows the block gas limit to change by 1/1024th of the previous blockâs value, per block. In this way, if the majority of the stake decides on a new number, the value will start random walking its way to that new value, and stick there more firmly the greater the consensus. This mechanism is a holdover from the days of mining, but itâs pretty neat.
Anyway, as a solo staker, I decided to YOLO raise my own limit last month, and set it up to 40M. This involves setting some flags in your execution and consensus clients. I run Besu/Lodestar, and set their flags appropriately.
Since then, I proposed (at least) one MEV-boost block. As expected, that blockâs gas limit was 30M + 30M / 1024, i.e. 30029295 units. A slightly less than 0.1% increase over the standard amount. It isnât much, but it helped make Ethereum L1 slightly cheaper for that block and (indirectly) the next few! Cool, everythingâs working!
Since then, I proposed (at least) one locally-built block (I have a min-bid set, like most responsible solo stakers who care about avoiding too much censorship, and it triggered.) As a reminder, locally built blocks are constructed by your execution client, in my case Besu, from the contents of their public mempools.
My locally built block(s), upon examination, looked great, except for one thing! Rather than 30029295 units of gas as expected, and rather than the 30M units of gas I would expect to see if I had misconfigured something, my locally built block(s) had a gas limit of 30001024. WTF? Itâs supposed to change by 1/1024 of the parent block, not by 1024!
Some in-depth adventures into the Besu Github later, I confirmed that indeed, there was a bug that was causing all Besu locally built blocks to only be able to shift up or downwards by a maximum of 1024 units of gas, rather than the (at present) 29295 units of gas expected. Put another way, Besu stakers with locally built blocks would only be able to move the gas limit about 3% as fast as locally-building stakers running other execution clients.
Jumping into the Besu Discord, I reported this situation, and worked through it with Matt Nelson, one of the excellent Besu team members who can be found there. He confirmed the bug and figured out the needed fix, and that should be making it into a future Besu version.
So anyway, moral of the story is, just YOLO changing numbers is apparently a great way to find client bugs, with your face :P Hopefully as the gas limit discussion continues, this means Besu stakers will be fully equipped if there is more of a mass movement in the direction of increasing that limit!
I am glued to this Coinbase case today. You couldnât have asked for a friendlier judge. The judge was practically feeding arguments to Coinbase. Gensler should be screaming at the screen if heâs watching this.
The only argument Coinbase made that bounced seemed to be the major questions doctrine where the judge is hesitant to remove the authority of anyone but Congress to regulate anything about this space.
However, the SEC has completely failed to define why a baseball card or fantasy football team wouldnât be a security but tokens would. The SEC wants any anon trade on Coinbase to be a security contract if someone promoted it on Twitter. Coinbase wants a security contract to include at minimum some type of contract or legal right. Unless the token includes inherent rights like on-chain governance and a claim to dividends itâs hard to argue you are entering a contract when purchasing a token.
Promising start to the SEC/Coinbase Trial:
Judge Failla is on fire right out of the gate.
She says to the @SECGov lead lawyer, and I paraphrase: The âDeFi peopleâ gave a âreally fineâ amicus brief explaining what staking is and what the wallet is used for, âarguably betterâ than how the Commission explained it in its briefing.â
She also says the @SECGov hasnât presented an opposing narrative for the legal foundations of Howey in its briefing.
<3 all you âdefi peopleâ
Looks like the SEC is not done losing, they are looking to take another big L in the Coinbase / Staking case
https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1747641703626924431
BruhâŚ.
Failla then addresses the Howey Test: âWeâve had a god run. Weâve had 90 years where these securities laws have been able to apply to these markets. But now we have something new.â
Holy smokes, hope the judge rules this way. This is the equivalent of complaining about someone encroaching on your parking spot only to end up losing your home in court
https://x.com/RSSH273/status/1747647514302689553
Favorite moment of argument so far:
SEC â âthe tokens themselves are not a securityâ
Failla â âthatâs what the folks in the back table think (Coinbase). And they are wondering why we are hereâ
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Current Twitter experience as a long time crypto user. Seeing this same scam ad for a fake ZKsync airdrop every ~5 tweets, and some other scam ad every other 10 tweets.
Just got this now, my heartâs full of joy, what an amazing day đ
lol; At least a/b test the copy scammer guy I really canât imagine this headline works that well
(I still love crypto Twitter despite how god awful the spam has gotten on the platform)
So many people hyped into the swETH EigenLayer contract that it has seriously affected the swETH peg. Prior to the EigenLayer deposit opening people were chain minting swETH for Pearls then selling it to ETH at almost a 3% loss. That is to say the market was speculating that the pearl to ETH ratio would be about .0015. As recently as Dec 10th swETH was at about 1.01 swETH/ETH. Right now itâs sitting at almost 1.05 (the native rate is 1.0471). So just holding swETH in the past 4 weeks has made you 4% almost on your ETH (more than an entire year of solo staking). It has also largely drained the swETH liquidity as apparently LPs exited their position to pure swETH and deposited the whole stack into EigenLayer. You can see volume hugely spiked, right around the time TVL halved.
Larger LSTs are less dramatically affected but thereâs the same phenomenon are still visible in them. In many cases the lower liquidity has significantly improved the liquidity farming rates. Some of these new combination pools like cbETH/wstETH/rETH are yielding over 12% APR (like 5x solo staking). Even most of the older pools are still at or above 7.5% after accounting for the native appreciation of the LST in their yield.
Note: While Eigen Layer was specifically mentioned, I believe these are inherent risks to all restaking
suggest everyone interested in privacy preserving technology read this update (from early December) around Railgun V3. Railgun is a privacy layer you can deposit to and withdrawal to any address, and now they are going to help incorporate defi onto the privacy layer so all your swaps and farming can be shielded.
Also Nocturne just launched a working product last month (which is I think maybe what spurned this update article, friendly competition), and itâs nice to see privacy projects still building even if the USG is trying to chill everyone away from the space. Vitalik is a known backer of Nocturne as well.
[EDIT Nocturne Announcement Article]
https://dailyhodl.com/2023/11/15/nocturne-launches-on-mainnet-to-bring-private-accounts-to-ethereum/
lastly donât forget that Aztec network is supposed to launch sometime this year. we may have lost Tornado access in the US temporarily, but it didnât shut it down (not even close) and more and more of these privacy solutions will emerge making it even more and more difficult to deter. at the end of the day blockchain doesnât work without proper privacy being an option. I urge everyone to learn about and explore these tools.
This wasnât how I intended to spend my Saturday, but it looks like the sub already is aware of the mainnet block that halted besu this morning: https://etherscan.io/txsInternal?block=18947893
What you might not know yet is there is a hotfix release out that prevents this from occurring in the future for similarly crafted blocks. If you are running besu on mainnet, even if you have already addressed the problem and are caught back up to head, you should upgrade to this hotfix release:
https://github.com/hyperledger/besu/releases/tag/23.10.3-hotfix
Please excuse this minor pause in bullishness and meme sentiment while I vent a bit and reflect on larger problems.
I often think about how inefficient, backwards, corrupt, and self serving politicians of the world governments are; particularly my own. Without getting specific and political, there are so many obvious problems that politicians refuse to address, or canât, due to clearly perverse incentives that drive them and make them worse over time. Itâs one of the things thatâs drawn me most to crypto. The guys at Bankless and others in crypto have stated many times that crypto is speed running the lessons learned from traditional finance. More importantly I think itâs speed running lessons around incentive alignment. When everything is financial, the incentive problems and consequences of system design become much more explicit and quantifiable than they are implied like many of the problems in meat space. Governance issues have been rampant in crypto, donât get me wrong, but experimentation on a smaller scale creates lessons learned and informative feedback that could ideally be applied to broader government systems.
Unfortunately I often times think that weâre too far gone, or late in this game of informed discovery to be able to actionable apply these learnings to larger legacy systems. Iâm not even sure weâve discovered ways to solve a lot of the problems in crypto let alone the broader physical world. Internally crypto can feel fast moving and iterative at a blazing pace, but it also feels slow to me in aspects like these. I feel that if crypto came about 50 years earlier, we might have had a better shot at rethinking the way we govern as a society; that weâd have been able to take more preventative measures or seen problems coming much earlier as a result.
If there is a hope here, Iâm confident it will come from younger generations and the lessons they learn from this industry. Everything is driven by incentives, and game theory should be considered everywhere when governing. Hereâs hoping the US and other governments nurture innovation in this space going forward. Despite the scams and problems we have here, it is still the breeding ground for the ideas and minds that have the chance to turn things around. It is for this reason, among many others, that choosing pro-crypto candidates is a much higher stakes battle than I think many people realize, even in our industry. It is one of the most important aspects of candidates I will consider voting for moving forward. Long live crypto. Long live Ethereum. Long live innovation. Long live experimentation.
A few further thoughts and opinions on the Besu failure yesterday. I think there is nuance in this situation that got overlooked. But before I begin, letâs get some facts straight - and these are well known and not up for debate:
1) No client should have a super majority.
2) The current, and wholly inappropriate situation with Geth is based on i) itâs code maturity and empirical reliability; ii) a completely unacceptable level of laziness, wrecklessness and short-term greed by large staking entities. (Which is sadly ironic because at least one of those is tied very closely to the overarching security mechanism of PoS - another example of how we cannot simply âcode inâ all required incentives.)
However, for some stakers, namely solo-stakers (and possibly other smaller, more responsible staking entites), the situation is much less clear. I think itâs fair to say that Geth is indeed a much(?) supererior client to the competition. Should, therefore, a solo-staker take on a more philanthropic role by worrying more about network health by say, running Besu - a less mature client - than their own immediate needs? In terms of measurable risk for them (as far as we can calculate) running Besu would seem to be a disadvantage. E.g. the probability of an event like yesterday for Besu (or NM?) is clearly higher, and their ability to recover from it expediently compared to a larger provider, probably much lower (hence larger losses in time, stress and income). Moreover, as stated at the outset, the systemic risk from the Geth super majority is not driven by solo stakers, and so solo stakers are not meaningfully mitigating that risk by avoiding Geth. (This is like the problem with global warming - we should all try our best, but in reality at this stage, due to the tragedy of the commons, the biggest, and possibly only meaingful improvements can be made by societal policy shift in law).
So, solo-stakers in particular have a question to answer. Should they willingly chose a client that is measureably poorer and riskier for them, basically in support of the âgreater goodâ? Or do they stick with Geth, which is likely to be more reliable for them, and basically push the job of reducing the Geth majority onto the larger stakers (who are clearly much more culpable)? Ultimately, this is something of a subjective choice that boils down to estimates of risk, reliability and person attitude. Yes, Geth could fail in a catastrophic way, but Besu did fail in a catastrophic way. The (empirical) probabilities speak for themselves. Sadly, there is even a worse outcome here, in that (the short sighted) large stakers will now be extremely glad they were running Geth, and not Besu, because imagine having thouands of validators going down on a weekend, with no clear fix for ~24 hours. That would have been extremely costly. Bullet dodged.
In summary, if all clients were demonstrably equally reliabile, the choice of client and question of majority would be more straightforward. But they are not equal at the present time and pragmatism will prevail.
Due to the recent Besu issue, I found a bug in the Lighthouse VC.
If you are interested, the full details can be found here > https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/5044
As we enter the early stages of the next bull market, please remember to keep your crypto wallet secure. While I canât get into the specific schemes I use to keep mine secure, here are some general guidelines I follow that have worked for me since I created my first crypto wallet in the early 2010s.
Always prefer open-source over closed-source. Never trust closed-source software with your main stack. Only use the most popular, well-vetted open source software.
Strike a balance between safety and recoverability (make your keys safe enough that they donât get stolen, but not so âsafeâ they you lose the only copy of them).
Have no single point of failure, wherever possible. Split your assets across addresses. Split your key across physical locations. But itâs gotta be more sophisticated than just putting 12 words in one place and 12 words in another, because afaik 12 words can be bruteforced. Wish I could be more specific about this. Some wallets support Shamir, which can be a good way to do this. Gnosis Safe is less flexible but perhaps the only smart contract out there to be trusted with someoneâs main stack.
Do not use the same PC user account for crypto that you use for your daily tasks. Ideally, have a crypto-only âonlineâ computer that runs something other than Windows. Maintain a minimal software footprint on it. Log into it periodically to keep the OS up to date.
Also keep a crypto-only âofflineâ computing device that never touches the internet. If itâs a PC, it needs to be running a very mainstream very publicly-audited version of Linux like ubuntu, fedora, debian, etc. A hardware wallet counts as long as the design is open and the firmware is open-source, but it has some trade-offs youâll have to weigh for yourself.
Do everything (concerning your main stack) in multiple batches. Everything. Even the most simple transfers from one address to another that seem like they would be impossible to fuck up, because trust me itâs possible to fuck up - if not by your own accord, then by some tricky dicky scheme whereby a hacker replaces addresses in your computerâs memory or uses some other silly scheme to bamboozle you. Itâll be more expensive to batch things as far as transaction fees, but itâs not possible for a single huge fuckup to ruin you. Nobody is perfect, but managing crypto demands perfection. If you send your entire stack off to some rando etherscan spoofer or directly to the token contract itself, thereâs no getting it back.
When youâre confirming an address, check it from two different devices running different OSes. One device can be compromised; two heterogeneous devices are unlikely to be compromised by the same hacker at the same time.
If your wallet looks a little different than it usually does, panic. Youâll need to learn breathing exercises to panic properly without harming yourself too much. But the 1% chance you catch something malicious is worth the 99% of the time where a wallet software update changed things around a bit.
If your seed phrase has ever been typed into any device that physically has a wifi chip in it, your keys are compromised. Generate a new seed and transfer things.
Corollary: If you did something âcleverâ like write your seed phrase into a poem, itâs still compromised. Weâre in the AI age now, so you have to protect your seed not only from malicious actors but from their smart AI bot armies who you have to assume will be combing through that poetry you wrote in 10th grade thatâs in that dropbox account you forgot about, trying random combinations of words in hopes that it derives an active private key.
If you have ever said your seed phrase out loud in earshot of a device that has a microphone and a wifi chip (cell phone, non-airgapped pc, smart tvâŚ), your keys are compromised. Generate a new seed and transfer things.
If your seed phrase has ever been in view of any camera on any device, your keys are compromised. Generate a new seed and transfer things.
If your seed phrase ever looks at you a little cockeyed like he wants treats, but you already gave him his treats today, heâs compromised and sadly you need to put him down.
If you do not know the specific method by which entropy was collected to generate your keys, your keys are compromised. The gold standard is to use physical dice to generate your seed phrase, and make sure you roll âem around in your hands a lot. Bitcoin OGs remember Diceware.
If your ETH is wrapped in some way or another, you donât own ETH, you own an IOU for ETH. You are owed by a company and/or a contract. Companies go bankrupt, contracts get hacked. If you must hold IOUs, spread them out, but beware correlation risks that may be hiding themselves (ftx/celsius/blockfi/voyager/genesis/3ac is a great example of a hidden correlation risk).
You need to learn the basics of cryptography. Creating and managing keys without knowing cryptography basics is like trying to drive a car without knowing the rules of the road.
You need to learn the basics of computer security. Learn what makes hacking attempts successful. Learn what CTF is, and learn about the ways hackers and social engineers typically gain access to systems. Imagine you are a hacker with full pwned access to your own main daily driver computer, and imagine how you would try to steal your crypto.
Keep yourself up all night worrying about your wallet security. If you wanted to have a peaceful low-stress life, you should have gotten a government 9-5 instead of getting into crypto. If you really need some sleep, buy some melatonin and a weighted blanket. Donât fuck with Ambien - the government puts chips in the pills that program you to go get your seed phrase in the middle of the night and text it to the cia.
Donât fuck with Ledger.
Donât fuck with Binance.
If you are a regulatory agency, use 2-factor auth on your fucking twitter account.
My general paranoia has saved me several times since I started investing in crypto in the early 2010s. Remember, they ARE trying to get your keys. Always. You need to be perfect every time to win, they only need you to fuck up a single time to win, so the game is tilted in their favor. They will never stop, so you have to never stop defending.
Today the SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.
The approved Bitcoin ETFs will be subject to ongoing surveillance and compliance measures to ensure continued investor protection.
https://twitter.com/SECGov/status/1744829327294837236
The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
https://twitter.com/GaryGensler/status/1744833049064288387
You canât make this stuff up.
Spot BTC ETF approved. This is good for ETH.
As you may/not know, [u/austonst](https://reddit.com/u/austonst] and I run the Aestus relay. To be frank, itâs been a hard hard slog in terms of funding and weâve paid for the whole thing ourselves out of pocket this last year +. Well. A few months ago u/benido2030 raised this in here and practically pushed me into working through the OP rPGF round 3 process. I had assumed it wasnât worth it. Today we found out that weâve just been granted ~100k OP tokens (đ¤Ż). That is an ungodly amount of money for our little project. I donât even know how to begin to say thank you, but none the less thank you, thank you and thank you to him, u/superphiz and everyone else that voted and pushed this through. đ¤
ethereum
$2250
0.0512
88,900 hodlers subscribed (-37)
477d since the Merge
ETF approved,
Uncertainty quite improved,
Market barely moved.
2013 : âWall street bonuses/chinese new year red envelope moneyâ
2017 : âInstitutional Moneyâ
2021 : âETF inflows right around the cornerâ
2025 : " 5% pension allocation across the board"
2029 : " Gov. crypto funds for all nations "
2033 : " Vitalik crowned god-emperor of mankind"
2037 : " Fully automated luxury abundant gay space communism crypto utopia as humanity spreads across the stars"
âŚ
2100 : âETH/BTC ratio surpasses 0.10 this cycleâ
Saw it mentioned yesterday, but I think Vitalikâs latest thinking on Ethereumâs positioning within the blockchain trilemma design space deserves further discussion. For me this feels like it has the potential to be a large pivot in core Ethereum philosophy and my initial gut feeling is one of discomfort.
Ethereum has up until now allowed anyone with 32 ETH and moderate technical ability to run a validator. At least two of the options discussed by Vitalik in his post would reduce the decentralisation of Ethereum.
The Ethereum community are a pragmatic bunch who donât see things in black and white. Technical solutions require compromise and decentralisation is a spectrum. Even so abandoning the principle of a relatively small fish being able to validate within the network without having to trust 3rd parties feels like a real departure from a long held value.
The Best Staking-as-a-Service (SAAS) Providers
In approximate order, based mostly on their reputation among Redditors (I read more than I post). For each of these, the user controls their withdrawal keys.
Allnodes
Itâs $10/month for their Advanced plan, which is the cheapest one that includes MEV (itâs worth the extra $5/month). Thatâs equivalent to a fee of only 0.16%, close to zero! Theyâre a top-15% performer on Rated Network over the last 30 days, and mostly use the Teku (a minority client) consensus client; theyâre also large, if that gives you comfort: 2.6% of all staked ether.
Ethpool
They charge 15% of MEV (10% for 3 nodes, 8% for 30 nodes). That comes out to about 2.9% of all rewards (so yes, about 18x Allnodes). I canât find them on Rated Network. They use minority clients: Lighthouse and Nethermind.
Blox Staking
They have a 0% fee forever (not a typo). Their effectiveness rating on Rated Network is below the 50th percentile as I write this. The company behind them is probably more focused on their new SSV Network now. I noticed that their website gets barely any traffic anymore (it ranks in the millions), but Rated Network says they still stake about 0.53% of staked ether, and they have an active Discord. They use mostly Prysm (the most popular consensus client).
Best solution for leftover amounts when youâve staked all your 32-ETH blocks:
Competition in staking is heating up daily (e.g. with DVT solutions coming online), but Iâll nominate StakeWise v3. You can stake any amount and donât need to get an LST. You get to choose an operator. Perhaps 4% fees is typical, but I see one offering 1%. Some reputable operators to consider are x (please reply with your opinions).
Some reasons you might want to use SAAS:
You donât want LSTs because youâd have to generate a capital gain when selling ETH for them; and they have high fees, typically 10% for Lidoâs stETH.
You donât want to solo stake because you may not feel technically competent enough; you may have unreliable internet (or limited capacity) or electricity; or you may not have a stable place for your node (e.g. youâre a digital nomad).
I had a shower thought that I wanted to crank out before I forget it. I probably wonât format it well, just trying to dump the idea.
Smart contracts are the basic building blocks, not the infrastructure of web3.
Smart contracts are more like transistors.. or more realistically simple circuits. They can do very small tasks, but having a box of simple circuits doesnât really give you extraordinary power. Imagine having a bunch of 555 timer chips - itâs a simple but powerful tool, but by itself itâs not revolutionary.
The power of simple circuits comes when you string a bunch of them together to do something even more powerful.
Weâre at the beginning of smart circuit development - when several contracts can work together to complete more powerful functions. From where weâre standing this seems difficult and complex. The Intel 8080 processor had 6000 transistors, but the i9-13xxx series have 25 BILLION. We havenât even reached the capacity of building a smart circuit that includes 10-20 smart transistors/smart contracts yet.
Another way to imagine this is from an evolutionary perspective. We think about this stuff called Primodial Soup, the idea that a bunch of the right building blocks (amino acids) in the same place at the right time can give rise to more complex biological compounds. Our current primordial soup is the library of smart contracts weâre building now, and in time these basic building blocks will evolve into highly complex organisms.
All of this to say.. weâre at the beginning of all of this. We have the foundational building blocks to build complex contraptions that we canât even imagine yet, but given the historical context of building blocks that get organized, itâs exceedingly likely that weâre on the cusp of rapid evolution in smart contracts.
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html
This is why itâs valuable for Ethereum to have a strong social layer, which vigorously enforces its values in those places where pure incentives canât - but without creating a notion of âEthereum alignmentâ that turns into a new form of political correctness.
I already felt some influencers were wielding âEthereum alignmentâ as a weapon to criticize projects and L2s. Sometimes itâs warranted and sometimes you could feel that they were just posturing for their brand. You can feel the âsliminessââŚitâs just off putting. Like seeing the the lazer eyes profile pics.
My favorite section is What are some of these values?
Vitalik prefectly describes what brought so many of us into crypto when it was solely BTC and dreams of what crypto could eventually do.
A few years later and the space has evolved so much - taking steps towards achieving some of those grand visions. But in taking those steps, we sacrificed the values that gave crypto any real meaningful value. Why remake the the same thing but worse? The values he outlines in the section are core to crypto and give the space value. Devs need to embrace it and figure a way to make it appealing to consumers. The easy path is centralization. The rewarding path is decentralization.
It is very possible to build things within the crypto ecosystem that do not follow these values. One can build a system that one calls a âlayer 2â, but which is actually a highly centralized system secured by a multisig, with no plans to ever switch to something more secure.
One can build an account abstraction system that tries to be âsimplerâ than ERC-4337, but at the cost of introducing trust assumptions that end up removing the possibility of a public mempool and make it much harder for new builders to join.
One could build an NFT ecosystem where the contents of the NFT are needlessly stored on centralized websites, making it needlessly more fragile than if those compoents are stored on IPFS.
One could build a staking interface that needlessly funnels users toward the already-largest staking pool.
Resisting these pressures is hard, but if we do not do so, then we risk losing the unique value of the crypto ecosystem, and recreating a clone of the existing web2 ecosystem with extra inefficiencies and extra steps.
Beautiful. You could tell it was something that was bothering him for a while now. So much passion and humility in his writing.
2023 is coming to a close and I want to reflect on what Ethereum means to this community. I have two questions.
Why do you hold Ether?
What is something that Ethereum could accomplish that you can look back in 50 years and say âI held through the bear because I believed in Ethereumâs âŚâ Or âEthereum is a success to me because it âŚâ?
â
For me, I got into crypto in general because I believe that the global financial system is rigged. Anything worth owning became more and more expensive every year, and the dream of owning a home or land became further and further out of reach. It felt like I was on one side of a ballon and my dreams were on the other side. The balloon was being inflated, and it felt like my dreams were literally being inflated away.
Bitcoin struck a chord in me because it espouses transparency, fiscal responsibility, and financial freedom. Here was a money that couldnât be printed into oblivion. Here was a money that wasnât first distributed to the mega-banks and the mega-rich where they buy up assets, creating inflation before finally filtering down to us little people. Here was a money that couldnât be confiscated because the owners embrace ideas that werenât popular. Here was a money that could be sent across the world at the speed of light, 24/7. Here was a money that was controlled by everyday people and not some nameless, unelected, unaccountable, government bureaucrat.
I believe that Bitcoin ossified too soon, and r/Bitcoin started banning anyone who suggested that the code should be upgraded.
Thatâs when I found Ethereum. It was a project that had similar characteristics and desires of Bitcoin but, unlike bitcoin, it was going to continue developing. I hope for Ethereum to become a neutral, global settlement layer. I hold Ether because I want to be a part of the money revolution. I want my children to inherit a world with a fair financial system where the average person can get ahead by saving their ether because the value of their ether isnât being inflated away.
Alright Iâll bite, with the preface that a bunch of this is at least inspired by if not outright copied from posts from other people writing about Ethereum.
For me it is about increased coordination/cooperation. Iâd been reading about bitcoin for years and didnât really care about it because discussion was often centered around antagonism: a big bad âTheyâ that controlled this rigged system versus the persecuted victims seeking a new beginning. To me, btc has always seemed more like religion than anything else.
It wasnât until I starting reading about Ethereum that I saw the value in the underpinnings of this new religion. Blockchains, when well designed and implemented, allow people to interact/transact without centralized actors.
People get more done when they work together and the history of human progress is in my opinion the history of humans learning how to cooperate more and kill each other less. Unfortunately, working together usually means giving power to a small group of people that oversee things and are given a mandate to make choices on behalf of others. These centralized actors all too often become corrupted, and the biggest man-made disasters would never be possible without a bunch of centralized actors abusing or misusing their power (âlol lets go kill all the sparrowsâ).
Ethereum obviously is not going to solve the problem of centralized power on its own, but it is one of the few developments that I have seen during my life that allow for improved cooperation without increased centralization. To me, thatâs big and thatâs worth sticking around for.
It is unfortunately also why I havenât been as bearish about Ethereum in the past as I am now. A few years ago the question was âHow do we implement this new tool in a credibly neutral way?â, a technical question with a relatively easily definable answer. Now the question seems to be âDo we really care about decentralization/credible neutrality or do we just want memecoins?â. To me (and I suspect most others here) the answer is clear but we have some convincing to do in the broader community.
So I believe in Ethereumâs credible neutrality. If we somehow manage to maintain that for the next 50 years, weâre golden in my opinion.
TLDR: Ethereum is potentially one of the all too few positive recent developments that might bring humanity forward (even if only by a little bit).
I may have a massive misunderstanding on how the L2 to eth chain relationship works/will work, so I was hoping for some clarification.
Currently, I need to bridge my eth over the the L2 chain which costs a relatively high fee. I can then interact with the L2 and eventually bridge back if I choose to. My understanding is that this is the currently the only way L2 talks with L1. Is this correct? If this is the case, I do not see how Ethereum fees will ever get down to the prices of other L1 solutions which I believe is needed for mass/mainstream adoption since we are currently performing about 15 tps.
Is there someway Ethereum (L1) is getting this data in real time that I am missing? If not and you are forced to stay on L2s (more centralized) to have reasonable transaction what is the benefit of this setup over other L1s like Solona, Polkadot, etc.
Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
I think your understanding of how the rollups operate. When you bridge the only communication happening is the rollupâs balance sheet is updated to reflect the addition/withdrawal of this transaction.
In terms of consensus, for optimistic rollups (e.g. optimism, arbitrum) all the transactions happening on the rollup are compressed (like a zip file) and verified by L1. For zkrollups (e.g. zksync, scroll) a mathematical proof is created for all the transactions and all L1 has to do is verify the proof.
As L2 blocks get more transactions, the cost per transaction goes down as the shared costs are spread out across more transactions (economies of scale).
(Tangent: The compression of optimistic rollups requires less of the L2 and more of the L1 (and hence more cost). For zkrollups generating the proof requires a lot of effort from the L2, but is very cheap for the L1 to verify.)
L2 blocks donât happen at the same time as L1. They vary depending on the rollup, but I think most have a target of 2 seconds per block. Ethereum blocks are 12 seconds, so thereâs 6 L2 blocks in each L1 block.
So L2s benefit from math and compression for more efficient settlement as well as economies of scale to provide cheaper transactions. This will get even cheaper after the update in the next few months (~april 2024) by creating a separate fee market for L1 blockspace specifically dedicated for L2s. So they no longer need to be competing with L1 transactions for blockspace. This change also makes transactions costs more predictable for rollups, rather than needing to slightly overcharge to account for any potential unexpected gas spikes.
After this update L2 transactions will get cheaper (estimated at up to 1/100th depending on rollup design), falling in the range of a few cents to maybe even less than a penny in some cases.
Hey EthFinance, happy 2024! I have some good news to start off the year :D
Something like 15% of all staked Ether is staked through Coinbase, and only a little over a month ago, they posted in a blog post that theyâre using 100% Geth to operate that stake.
Weâre still in the grips of a Geth client supermajority, with an estimated 75% to 85% of staked Ether using Geth under the hood, so Coinbaseâs 15% stake using 100% Geth is a big impediment to bringing that number down below 66%, where weâll be safe from an instant catastrophic fork if Geth has a forking bug.
Over the last month, some of you who are on Twitter/X may have been following my campaign to tweet every day at Coinbase to try to get them to diversify their Ethereum execution clients. This was partly an informational campaign to make more people aware of the issues supermajority clients like Geth present, and partly a gentle pressure campaign to get Coinbase to consider switching.
Today this campaign led to a clarifying tweet from Will Robinson, VP of Engineering at Coinbase, that Coinbase is definitely planning to diversify their staking execution clients!
Thereâs no timeline associated with this, so I expect it might still take a few months, but itâs very exciting that theyâve finally publicly confirmed that they are aligned on client diversity, and are working towards that goal internally.
I donât think my daily tweets changed any internal Coinbase policy; theyâve likely been working on this for a while already. But it did enable us to get a public statement from them on their client diversity plans!
If youâre interested in my (now concluded) tweet campaign, you can see my most recent one here, with links to the previous tweets.
Thanks everyone who supported that campaign, and also for every one of you whoâs running a node with minority execution clients! Iâm super hopeful that we can finally get Ethereum to a place of full client diversity in 2024, with resilience against any single clientâs forking bug.
Happy 2024, EthFinance!
I made a longer post on this below but it looks like it might be hidden, so Iâll just share the punchline -
Coinbase (or a high-up employee, rather) committed today to diversifying their staked Ether away from supermajority client Geth!
This is amazing news given theyâre currently running 100% Geth with 15% of all staked Ether.
Iâm considerably more optimistic now that this year will be the year Ethereum achieves full client diversity!
Oh, itâs a complex one.
tl;dr; There are two types of approvals. Donât sign what you donât understand. Otherwise, youâll be fine.
Signing is all that your wallet do. If you prepare a signature of a tx, someone else can send this out. So the rule of thumb is - donât sign anything you donât understand. I.e., avoid signing âhexâ data that is not translatable to human-readable text (e.g. donât sign â0x2b3cf00321aâŚâ but sign âI agree to terms and services of xyzâ).
When it comes to approvals, these are NOT part of the Ethereum protocol! What we come to understand as approvals, is an ERC20 method to allow other parties (mainly contracts) to move your funds. In most (if not all) of legit ERC20 contracts/tokens, it works as expected, and in scamy ones - you donât care about them anyway. It is good to understand what and how a malicious signature/transaction can do to your funds. Considering above - it can only drain ERC20 that youâve approved. If you hold more exotic items in your wallet, then its up to you to verify how they act.
When it comes to approvals, there are two main types out there. The first one is the standard âapproveâ function of the ERC20 spec, which sets on-chain record of whom and for how much, can move the token in question. The second one is âpermit2â introduced by Uniswap and slowly adopted by other dApps. It extends standard approval systems and allows off-chain approvals, which I guess is what youâre asking about.
Hereâs the ninth edition of the monthly staking update
First monthly staking update for 2024. Obviously the state of staking will be something to watch this year. A lot of people expect way more ETH staked, especially if there is an ETH ETF and it is allowed to stake the underlying ETH. Lido dominance will be something to have an eye on. Then there is eigenlayer of course⌠And maybe if there are some solo staker airdrops, we will also see new inflows from âsmall guysâ. So letâs dive in!
Validator overview - total: 1051685 validators*
â
The validator set keeps on growing. The growth isnât crazy and there are also continuous exits every month, but generally speaking number go up. Right now we are at 24,2% of all ETH staked. In my opinion, thereâs nothing really âfancyâ to see here.
Client diversity numbers**
Consensus
Execution
Client diversity is more or less the same it was at the end of last year. Nimbus slightly gaining share, which is good, but not really important, since Consensus clients are looking okay.
Execution keeps on being an issue. Gethâs share with a constant 84% is still way too high. How can we change that?
Pool distribution***
With the launch of Blast Lido was gaining market share last month. This has stopped and interestingly Lido is basically back to 31,x% like before the launch. Now obviously we canât really tell where it would be without Blast, but my guess is lower and in a best case the launch only pushed it up temporarily and market share will continue to fall.
Obviously we should not rely on the market handling it! If you have (w)stETH please think about withdrawing from Lido and/ or depositing into Diva. If you participate in the âDiva vampire attackâ you will not only receive a new LST but also Diva tokens. Interestingly Diva already has 0.4% market share and hasnât even launched yet. Letâs make that number go up!
All percentages are rounded, so this is not 100% accurate, but should be good enough to show changes in the coming months.
* https://beaconcha.in/validators#all
** https://clientdiversity.org/#distribution
*** https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking
P.S. Completely unrelated, but Murs 3:16 (The 9th Edition) produced by 9th Wonder is imo still one of the best LPs ever. 9th is an incredible producer and I really like Murs flow. Heâs probably not the best lyricist, but innovative and even had a track about Bitcoin in like 2016 or 2017.
Two days ago I wrote in the daily about how I lost all of my holdings. The next two days were the worst in my grown up life, just hours of hours of despair and sleepless anxiety. The worst part was seeing all of my ETH in that foreign wallet address, so close, yet so far away.
Today is better. The sun is shining. I have my little apartment and my family and friends. I did realise some gains during the last bull run which i reinvested in something safer. And my sister still have her holdings, and I will enjoy seeing her get rich during the upcoming bull. She deserves it.
So take my carelessness, my stupidity, as a warning. If you are not careful, you will get recked.
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Turning up the crowd,
Blackrock goes blockchain aloud,
Excitement allowed.
Grifting 101
As ever, I wish we had more discussion around here about app developments on Ethereum rather than⌠whatever the depressive topics have been the past few days.
In the spirit of being the change I want to see in the world let me plug Gearbox V3. Basically Gearbox is a leverage application that removes the leverage component from the underlying application and allows you to apply leverage using Defi legos on their own. Think of it like âmodular Defiâ. The key insight that enabled leverage is that when you borrow funds, the funds arenât given to you, they are held in escrow by the protocol so you canât just run off with them. Now, thereâs no sense having the protocol just hold onto borrowed funds. The reason youâre borrowing is to do something. So, since you arenât being given the funds the protocol has to do that something on your behalf.
For older leverage applications, the something they would do on your behalf was the application. You could use dydx and get leveraged price exposure to an asset but the leverage was tightly coupled to a dex. This leads to liquidity fragmentation. While the nature of the price exposure mechanism changed with apps like GMX, perps still tightly couple the liquidity source for leverage with their application. By contrast, Gearbox allows you to execute leveraged strategies that actually execute against Curve or Uniswap.
To execute a strategy with Gearbox you put up your collateral, borrow the funds required to execute your strategy, and then execute it using a plugin to any Defi application they support. For example if you wanted to go 3x long, you could put up 1x collateral, borrow 3x whatever youâre shorting, swap to 3x of your long asset using any supported Dex, and hold that position while paying interest on the borrow. When plugged into something like Aave this also letâs you do fancy stuff like profit from interest rate spreads or leverage your way into a Curve LP Yearn pool which auto compounds rewards back to you. The potential here is open ended and incredible.
Gearbox v3 does a few cool things. First it allows borrowers to have better granularity on which position is secured by which collateral. The basic idea is they create a smart contract with your name on it that is executed according to a strategy you configure. Second it enables lenders to underwrite their own risk and choose what types of risk their funds are exposed to. This is a common trend Iâve seen lately in Defi. We are steadily moving away from pooling everyone into the same risk bracket and moving towards programmable money where everyone can adjust their own risk.
If you have time Iâd suggest you dig in or you know, try it yourself. Itâs far more fun to focus on exciting things happening at home than to focus on narrative noise from CT and bring it here.
Alright so got hacked for the first time
Well âhackedâ, I accidentally approved something in metamask that allowed them to take all my eth and one NFT.
Like 24k USD worth in total, which isnt the end of the world luckily enough. Luckily my main stack isnt on this adress.
I got fooled because I was trying to do the Frame airdrop and when looking at their twitter (the correct twitter) a fake frame account with a check mark (thanks for that Elon) were in their replies and I wasnt observant enough.
idiotic of me, but anyway
I still want to utilise this adress to claim airdrops and the like but I obviously cant do so when I have this hanging over it. Iâm looking at the approvals checker on etherscan but cant find any approvals I did today or any access given today, so this fraudulent acces/approval isnt there.
Does anyone else know how I do/how I should do to remove their access to my address?
Thanks for any help
Edit: Also I suppose it doesnt matter now so for any interested sleuths heres my address for your perusal: 0x139373F9FFeDCf909518096fC165f3b87fD7046C
After looking over it it doesnt seem like I have any offending approvals. Is it possible for a phisher to have some other kind of access still?
Edit 2: The offending transactions seem to have been these ones, in this chronological order:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x07344545d7b3e3ce7032dc5319ee9e3dbce291bcdbe3b798982055bb7b6a6567
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4b7a6c41aed26af4280b24c7da787b0b5732a43e34bf81d6cea79c02857c2bed
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x8c374ec10e5254289a4c224e6dfae6c0a76a0466f0ab4bf7d803844f05c421f3
What Iâm worried about now is that the scammer can repeat some function in order to drain my adress again in the future, if I fill it with some ETH for gas for example
If anyone with that are above my hobbyist level of ability could help tell me if anything in these transactions point to this being repeatable I would greatly appreciate it! (or just point me in a helpful direction would be really nice too)
There have been too many people being scammed out of some of their crypto holdings with the recent frame airdrop. The frame airdrop is legit, there are just too many fake claim websites wanting your money. If you use the network please consider installing/enabling transaction previews. These help you understanding what you are actually signing before it gets broadcasted:
Either use:
Rabby Wallet which has this included in their wallet already. It is on the very paranoid side, so maybe you start clicking the warnings away automatically after some time.
Use Metamask snaps which provide this. I shortly tested Wallet Guard which does the job. I am sure there are other good options in their security section: https://snaps.metamask.io/explore/
Install an additional extension like pocket universe or fire. I use both of them in parallel for many months now. Every time I receive a signing request they pop up and inform me about what I am going to sign.
All of these solutions put another actor in your signing process which could get attacked. Be aware of that. I am also not sure how much information is shared with whom in all these solutions. The additional extensions have served me well in the last months in combination with the frame wallet. I think the Rabby wallet is the most user friendly one, but a bit too paranoid for my taste, especially if you are using very new protocols.
I tested all of these solutions on my go-to scam website I found some time ago, a tornado cash fork, which wants to steal all my funds. All of the above solution told me exactly what I sign and Metamask even wanted to prevent me from visiting the scam site.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xde92b790ebd82fa73b69b3f1d32d1f5b3d11649971da43e20593c7e7099a0fba
We got married onchain yesterday!
So if Iâm reading this proposal correctly:
Beacon stakers would no longer receive MEV rewards
MEV relays would sort of be replaced by execution ticket markets. This opens up the possibility to introduce burn on what today is MEV rewards.
Block builders would buy execution tickets and run execution proposers
EDIT: I think Iâm making some assumptions on number 3, because the proposal says this is orthogonal to PBS. So number 3 could involve multiple parties or it could not.
EDIT2: Before stakers get up in arms about MEV rewards going away, this proposal would open up a new avenue for speculation on execution tickets: âExplicitly defining an execution proposer lottery allows validators to participate only by choice. If they like the idea of flipping a coin and getting a high-value slot, they are free to buy execution tickets.â
EDIT3: More stuff is sinking in now. You could in theory choose to run your validators in a mode similar to today by configuring them to purchase an execution ticket for each upcoming slot, but the cost of that ticket will be market driven while today they are essentially distributed uniformly and randomly.
Latest on the ETF front: issuers have until next Friday to amend their filings. The SEC wants cash create only, and AP agreements. Whoever gets these done, will get a âgoâ.
Also, Blackrock will seed with $10m on January 3rd (subject to change).
Also, they have an Ether ETF filing. ;-)
If you frequent crypto Twitter and are feeling doubt about ETH, and FOMO or anger over Solana, itâs worth checking yourself and asking why youâre invested the way you are, and why you feel like that way. Personally speaking the vast majority of my stack is, has been, and will remain ETH because I can hold it and sleep well at night expecting it to go up over time with minimal downside risk relative to other crypto assets. It has arguably the best fundamentals of any asset, not only in crypto, but in any market. On short time horizons it wonât always or even often perform the best, especially in a bull market where narratives rule the day, but it will provide the best risk adjusted returns imo, and wealth preservation can be just as difficult if not more, than capital appreciation. Iâm still buying.
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Having said that, The recent performance of Solana, and other tokens that are purely speculative bets, is a great example of why it pays to be open minded and why it can be helpful to diversify. I maintain a percentage of my portfolio for speculative bets, trading, gambling, etc. Doesnât work for everyone, you have to be honest and cut yourself off if youâre just burning capital, but itâs fun, curbs FOMO, and ideally lets me capture some additional upside from narratives or short term plays. I missed Solana, but made some gains on WIF, and had some fun shit posting with friends about it in our own internal group chats. Also have some medium-term holds and narratives I plan to dabble in this bull market.
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Itâs easy in crypto, especially if youâre on CT, to feel like youâre in a rat race against everyone else, look at gains someone else has made off of something you consider vaporware, and let it upset you. Even easier to let narratives that ETH is dead and that X-coin with no fundamentals is the future of France upset you. Donât. If youâve been here for the bear and have been buying ETH then youâre up too. Normies arenât even here yet. Enjoy the ride. Be happy for newer or smaller participants coming into money for the first time. This is how crypto grows. Most importantly do not feed into tribal hate. Talking down about the ecosystem that just made users money doesnât attract participants to our ecosystem or encourage learning, it just pits you against them and feeds into negative sentiment. Be welcoming and focus that energy towards more productive endeavors. Learn from Vitalik. Itâs impossible to hate a guy that is perpetually positive towards others. And he does an excellent job framing all of crypto as an âusâ vs the them, if I do say so myself. https://x.com/matthuang/status/1738810362022232210
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In the end I think the Ethereum ecosystem will capture Solanaâs moat, but that time is not now. If you too think that time will come, good news, you can position for it. These are my biggest catalysts for ETH this year:
Â
Basically what Iâm saying is this: we should all be happy that the bull market seems to be back, and that we all have the opportunity to make money again in the coming year. If you disagree and are still bearish than maybe this post isnât for you. Either way, enjoy the holidays, and may golden showers rain upon /r/ethfinance dailies every week for the next year!
In the spirit of year-end reflection and New Yearâs resolutions, I am looking for feedback / suggestions regarding my delegating duties of ARB and HOP Iâve taken on this year. Asking as Iâm still relatively new to this and want to improve when I can - donât be shy or holdback anything in feedback. For some context, my goal has largely been to take on these roles to help get some of the great minds on r/ethfinance a way to feel represented in governance. Iâm not sure that has happened to the extent Iâve envisioned, but hopefully Iâm making some impact and will grow into that in the future.
Obviously, I have no way to tell who actually delegates to me, but Iâm assuming a bulk of the people are those who post here. So figured this was the best place to ask. So in short, do let me know if there are things you think I can improve on or ways you felt Iâve let you down. As well as things Iâve done that you would like to see me keep doing. Even if you arenât specifically a delegate to me.
Some thoughts / questions of my own:
Voting Transparency â I do try to post DAO updates here both for informational purposes and to keep myself transparent. I know following actually Tally / Snapshot votes is a pain, so I hope this helps. Unfortunately, ARB is a little difficult since the forum links are shadow-banned. I do try to comment in the Arbitrum / HOP forums on my votes where it feels warranted (or on the actual Snapshot votes themselves). No good way around the ARB problem, but I do link the votes and do a summary of decision here to help with that. I also try to wait until a few votes have passed to âbatchâ my updates and avoid clogging up the daily toooo much, however if people would prefer immediate updates (say, within a few days of the vote ending) I can switch to that.
Voting Participation â I do try to vote on everything that comes up, since that is ultimately the fundamental role here. Regrettably, I did miss a few votes over my time doing this. I think about 5 or 6 overall earlier in the summer across both DAOs. No excuses, and Iâve made sure not to miss stuff going forward. Iâll add, the Arbitrum STIP voting I did probably vote in maybe 1/4th of the total pool of candidates. The structure was a major issue IMO, which I brought up in the DAO forums. Expecting delegates to vet and vote on 100+ projects in that timeframe was impossible, and it does sound like future STIP / LTIPs are making note of that. And Iâm not sure many delegates did vote in 100% of those (hats off to those who did). Sort of a one-off, but wanted to clarify that situation, and I do wish in hindsight I took a little more time for that.
Calls â I do try to attend the ARB and HOP calls when I can. I work full time, so itâs as schedule permits (although ARB does record the call and HOP has notes). ARB Iâve been admittedly lacking, but Iâve been better having joined the last 2. This is one of my top goals, to have better attendance here. My Q here is this - do people want updates on this type of thing? Is that too much? It sort of goes along the lines of r/ethfinance input as Iâll discuss below.
r/Ethfinance Input â I know sort of the point of being a delegate is so that people donât have to worry about day to day minutia. However, I do want to feel out peopleâs opinion on this. For notable / larger / more controversial topics should I try to reach out for input more? Do people rather just me âread the roomâ and vote that way. I try to vote in a way that is best for the particular DAOs & the Ethereum chain, but again I want to leverage the mindshare that is here to do that as I am still only human. Also, I want to re-iterate that I welcome people to reach out. that doesnât happen much, so if there are ways people think I can be more inviting, for a lack of a better word, let me know. Iâd love to be able to be a bridge between ideas here and ultimately discussion in front of said DAOS.
Updates â Basically, a mis-mash of the above. I want to walk the line as best I can between over and under updating on issues. So thoughts on this would be appreciated!
Twitter â I donât really like Twitter, but I made one as I canât stick my head in the sand. I donât really use it that much⌠Iâd be curious to those who think if I should use it more? Iâm thinking maybe just doing updates there as well for those who follow. I donât want to dive into CT degeneracy, but I probably should use it as a space to get updates out?
And finally, a thank you! There isnât a day that goes by where Iâm not aware of the number of people that trust me with this. I know governance isnât that sexy of a thing, but itâs really cool that people feel they can trust their vote with me and that isnât lost.
It would be great if we could give Arbora.eth a bit more publicity for his campaign to have Coinbase switch away from Geth.
Interesting youâre saying this today, I was just thinking about how lost a newcomer is in this space. Even if they found this subreddit, (could you imagine the lost faith in crypto if they visited r/cc or even r/Ethereum first?) Iâm not so sure it would be obvious this is the place to trust or realize this sub is putting out the most critical/thoughtful info/discussion.
Imagine someone out there today (which Iâm sure happens everyday) says, today is the day Iâm going to get into crypto. Ugh, Iâm getting a migraine just thinking about being that person.
Legitimately, im wondering where that person goes. The options are wild. Crypto Twitter, YouTube, reddit, discord, overall asking Google? Ooof. All of those can be very hit or miss with more misses than hits. Even finding coinbase and reading through their learning center can lead you down the wrong path.
There is just so much to comprehend on a fundamental level, then deciphering what is a quality crypto and why? The space is so polarized. For someone brand new, how quick would they learn the differences between ETH and BTC or XRP for that matter, or literally any other crypto. Whatâs the chances of them learning about LSDs or even the basics of Defi? Where is the drop off on the learning curve for most people?
Thinking about if I was brand new, jumping into âcryptoâ today, what would be the most helpful thing for me to learn and understand.. and how would I find it?
Off the top of my head, personally, I would like a flow chart. Something that could help me visualize the crypto space. Maybe a few versions of the flowchart, basic, intermediate, advanced .. clickable keywords that give a popup of basic definitions.
How would I find it? Idk, maybe this is where the Maverick funds do some SEO and try to find itâs way on the first page of Google.
Some thoughts on winning
When I was a student, online poker became popular. By chance (I donât even remember how) I found an online poker school that handed out 50$ for free after passing a quiz. I started playing Fixed Limit on the low low stakes (well, because 50$ isnât a lot) but learned a lot, became better, moved up. When I reached 5/10$ (still in FL), I couldnât handle the daily swings anymore. After all I was still a student, had like 750$ a month for everything from rent to food to cloths to drinks. So being in a position of losing 1000â +â onanygivenday,âbasicallywithin30minswastoomuchforme.Iplayed3/6 for a long time, switched to NL at some point and made it to NL200 games, but felt uncomfy again. I think I was a decent player (but nowhere near the best players on the high stakes) and could have moved higher with my bankroll and skill, but never did. I met a lot of high stakes players that made a lot of money (e.g. I am pretty sure I talked to Hasu a few times). A lot of friends made a lot of money just playing mid stakes, not even grinding nose bleeds. Later I lost interest, because I started working and didnât want to grind at day and night.
As my second job, I joined a startup rather early, just after they had secured the first significant funding. The startup had created a new product, which turned out to be very successful, used the funding to do performance marketing and within 3 years, the company grew from basically 100 to 1000 FTE. A lot of âhigh profileâ people were hired, earning a lot more than I did, despite being assholes, not being a cultural fit and also not delivering any meaningful results. But they were great politically, knew what to say, when to say it and how to impress the (also rather young) founders. I was living the culture, delivering, but earned like 50% and hated everything about the bullshit bingo guys.
When a very good friend of mine quit his job, he still had some free time before his new gig started and he asked me what to do with it. That was at the end of 2017/ beginning of 2018. I said âthereâs this crypto thingy, seems to be interesting, maybe dive it?â. We decided to invest 1000$ together. I was still very risk averse and didnât feel comfortable putting money into something that went up and down so fast, so I was happy we did it together. We bought the literal top in January 2018. Got like 0.7X ETH on a Friday, which made +100$ until Saturday. I still remember the euphoria, that day marked the literal pico top of the cycle. I learned a lot, eventually started living on-chain, but never really participated in farming, cause I still dislike spending ETH for tx I donât really need to do for a potential airdrop I might or might not receive. I did receive a lot of airdrops, but I am also pretty sure that compared to others here, my airdrops are tiny.
Also I had a neteller credit card connected to my Amazon account and basically ordered stuff for free as a student and bought a new (small) car just after finishing university, because I had made 50k in online poker.
While I was âonlyâ earning 50% of the supposedly high flyers, my salary 2,5xed within 3 years and I had way more money than I needed (and you are probably aware by now, that spending / investing money is not a strength). I also started as a senior role, but at one point managed 150 people and three departments.
While I probably should have invested more, invested earlier, farmed more and should have way more ETH than I have now, I have received a decent amount or airdrops that are a huge boost to my portfolio. More importantly, I have learned a lot, about investing, finance, how poorly I invested before, how many basic concepts I didnât fully understand and how important it is to make conscious financial decisions.
Donât compare yourself to the guys that make more money in poker, at work or in crypto. Compare yourself to the guy in the mirror that wouldnât have played poker, wasnât lucky to join a growing startup that allowed you to grow a lot in a short amount of time (both financially, but also when it comes to responsibilities and hence your CV), or wouldnât have invested in crypto because that friend you needed would have said ânoâ.
If there is one thing that I have learned itâs that comparing usually wonât help you. It usually doesnât motivate. It actually kills motivation. It gives you a hard time emotionally. Donât compare yourself to the guy on twitter that brags with that 7digit PnL. Donât blame yourself for not receiving the next airdrop on 5 wallets instead of one.
Comparing doesnât make sense, because your risk appetite is unique. If you accept that you are defined by who/ how you are, you will be able to accept outcomes way better. We canât expect to make millions if we donât invest a lot (of time, money, ETH). And thatâs okay!
Celebrate that one airdrop like it was the lottery. Be happy about your first ETH like it was worth a million. Donât try to be/ act different then you truly are. And youâll be winning!
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Day 463 since The Merge
Yes we tokenize,
No you wonât believe your eyes,
New money arise.
Sold my ETH for a 2020 Honda yesterday. Iâm out of crypto entirely now (gladly). I know the used car market has been hot the past year but Iâm betting it has some room to run. IF I buy into crypto again (with my used car profits) itâll be a basket of sub 1000 MC coins with 100x potential and some SOL/AVAX for stability (theyâre the new BTC). Iâll be fine with a 10x tho. Regardless Eth is done imo and everyone here is wasting their time. Advice (not financial) get out before the inevitable epic crash and buy something with more upside. Aside from used cats, garbage pail kids (first edition only with stickers intact) are looking strong.
EDIT: meant to say used cars in that last sentence, but used cats also have more potential than ETH so not gonna correct.
EDIT2: meant this whole post is a joke. Bad timing I know but hoping to lighten the mood a bit
I am tired. Hyped, cause I believe 2024 will be a good year, but more tired now that itâs still 2023. I think thatâs partly the bear market which is exhausting, because I promised myself to learn a lot and pay attention to benefit during the bull market. But probably also just psychology cause the year is coming to an end and humans are strange. Itâs an arbitrary date, but still it feels significant, I guess also because of the holidays. In any case this year was my favourite year in crypto. I have learned a lot, developed new interests (eg for the importance and details of governance) and the past 12 months made me feel like home in ETHfinance. I love this community since I joined (2019 or beginning of 2020, donât remember) but somehow 2023 was special and I would like to thank all of you!
That being said Iâll post less for the next 2 weeks I guess, but Iâll stick around, will read and will be back in 2024. love you all!
There seems to be some confusion around terminology. Maybe the terms have been diluted from when I learned them, but this is how Iâd define these terms:
In my understanding the solana parallelism relies on the transaction submitter to tell them what contracts/states they touch. It is assumed that they are honest. The attack vector on the paralellisation then goes like this. Just tell the SVM you are touching all AMM contracts, even if you do pretty much nothing in your transaction. The SVM then cannot process the other AMM swaps in parallel, but has to wait until it has processed yours before it can do the other swaps. You force it in doing at least one step serial. Transactions are cheap, so nothing stoping you spamming the network reserving resources left and right. I do not think one can bring Solana down with such an attack, but it would slow down the SVM quite a bit.
If you want to learn about some real issues with solana in the consensus mechanism they use, there is a recent conference paper by the distributed computing group at the ETH, a university, in Switzerland: https://tik-db.ee.ethz.ch/file/9d40dad802dd12d9ba1f1b7c1759920c/
I only skimmed over it, but here are some juicy bits:
App devs might want to develop on SVM for its speed, but to be honest, there are not that many dApps on Solana, so it seems to be difficult to find dApp devs. They had quite some incentives in 2021 I think to onboard people, but it was a limited success as far as I remember. Maybe now with the renewed speculation they might attract more settlers, but we will see what happens. I guess generally Ethereum people are interested in Solanas tech, because they implemented things which need to be solved on the Ethereum side as well. In my opinion, parallelization is not the bottleneck on Ethereums side just yet, it is probably more important for L2s. The Bottleneck is rather the state size and how it is stored/accessed which needs to be solved before one can reap benefits from a fully parallelized EVM. And I am not aware that Solana has solved that issue, but as always I could be very wrong there.
Surprised there isnât more talk about the SEC decision today against Coinbaseâs petition. This is over a year in the making. Essentially, they are going against Coinbaseâs view that:
"the Petitionâs assertion that application of existing securities statutes and regulations to crypto asset securities, issuers of those securities, and intermediaries in the trading, settlement, and custody of those securities is unworkable
Coinbase has appealed and will be taking them to court. This will probably be the most important court case in cryptoâs history.
In my mind, when Ethereum held its ICO, it was probably security. IANAL but a brief look at the three prongs of the Howey test makes ETH sound like a security offering back then. BUT, Gensler I believe has said before that something can start out as a security and âbecome decentralized enoughâ to become a commodity. Donât quote me on that.
Itâs been about two and a half months since the holesky testnet re-launch, and all is quiet on the western front. My several thousand holesky validators are choochinâ away with no significant hiccups. Running geth/lighthouse at the moment. Still havenât gotten around to setting a withdrawal address for them. For some reason I started having a difficult time picking up peers on this machine. Since launch I have been stable at 1round 15 peers, but over the last week that has dropped to 1-2 and sometimes 0 peers. Surprisingly, and this is more of a testament to the design of the network, my average effectiveness hardly dropped at all during this. I remained in the mid to high 80âs.
I did do some changing of my network setup and for a few hours I had the holesky machine connected to both wifi and ethernetâŚI believe the machine had two IP addresses assigned to it and that may have caused some wires (or em waves?) to cross.
I decided to go ahead and forward the ports associated with the EL/CL applications, something I have not had to do with the rocketpool or solo machines. Both of those machines have 50+ peers running out of the box setups and nothing besides a static IP assigned to them. Anyway, running this setup overnight has brought the machine up to the max specified 50 peers and I foresee no other changes needing to be made as far as networking goes.
The other fun part about all this is that I have finally pulled the trigger on a nice little rackmount setup. Not necessary (by a longshot), but a lot of fun for a self-proclaimed computer enthusiast. Over the last couple years I have collected some rackmount equipment that I have come across for free/cheap. UPSâ that are being tossed just needed a couple new batteries. Gigabit switches that just need a new SFP adapter, etc. Color coding the patch cables and swapping out USB/HDMI/ethernet keystones to make it all look neat and professional. I made a custom mount for a gas spring arm for a monitor on the back of it. There are these cool 1U flip up monitors you can buy that are like 700 quatloos âŚ.yeahâŚ.nahâŚ.Iâll use my free, collecting dust in a corner monitor instead. I have discovered that any normal computer component becomes 10x more expensive if it has âenterpriseâ or ârackmountâ in the name.
I am trying to convince another local ISP that I am a business so they will install a fiber line directly to me. My understanding is that the install would be free, and the monthly cost would be more than what I am paying now, but not wholly unreasonable considering how much time and bandwidth I use. I have been close to picking up a dream machine pro because of the sale ubiquiti has had on itâŚapparently they never do discountsâŚbut after perusing through the rest of their hardware if I fall down that rabbit hole itâll take eth breaking 100K before I can pay off the credit card bill. Theyâve got some good lookinâ hardware. That saidâŚif I am a business, then that can all be written offâŚso less taxesâŚand there I go talking myself into it again. Iâll stop now.
The nodeset machine is up and running as well, just waiting to be assigned. I am looking forward to that launch next year. Thereâs a lot to look forward to, and a lot of good work being done combat the biggest threat to ethereumâs credible neutrality. It should remain on everyoneâs mind that the priority needs to be the health of the network. Any entity that approaches 33% is a threat to credible neutrality. Doubly so for an entity that says out loud that they do not care and will continue to grow in an attempt to harm the network in pursuit of greater profit.
Just so everyone is clear: there is no debate about this. Let us keep fighting the good fight, less we lose the greatest value prop of ethereum.
Iâll keep the staking machines running. Sip some coffee. Get my steps in. Enjoy the beginnings of the bull and patiently await new ATHâs. Post here, and occasionally degen 100x some coins no one should touch with a ten foot pole. You knowâŚfor fun. Because if we donât remember to have fun doing all these frontier-of-the-internet shenanigansâŚwhatâs the point?
weak conviction endlessly follows price pumps, strong conviction requires years of building on ideas and integrating within the ecosystem to deliver on the promise of decentralized uncensorable monetary system that any entity can build on.
thereâs a difference and some of you donât seem to understand. for example is retail going to deposit directly into CRV pools or is retail going to use an app that pays their transaction and draws liquidity from the CRV pools in the background? stop worshiping retail pumps like they mean anything other than CT rotations and drummed up VC exit liquidity.
FTX estate recently announced they are giving people cash equivalent of crypto when Bitcoin was at 16K prices, and keeping the rest (ie spread between 16K and 42K). guess who also happens to have a lot of SOL to pay back their estate in such a generous way? strange how it all works out huh?
Someone created an ethFinance channel at Farcaster. Certainly not to replace reddit, but to try to gather like-minded people in a group on Farcaster.
If youâre a user of Farcaster, be sure to join up!
BloXroute have announced that they are no longer accepting block submissions from builders that contain any transactions that interact with OFAC-sanctioned addresses. For now theyâve enabled their OFAC checks on their max profit relay, but obviously this makes it kind of the same as their regulated relay and at some point weâll see them merge into one.
BloXrouteâs max profit relay currently has an inclusion rate (market share? itâs complicated) of ~20%. Turning it into a censoring relay doesnât mean 20% more overall Ethereum blocks are going to be censoring. Itâs more likely that the remaining non-censoring relays will still deliver those blocks, and the impact on Ethereum will be minimal. But clearly this is a trend in the wrong direction for network health.
P.S. reminder that censorship at the builder level is a much bigger concern than censorship at the relay level right now.
man, this makes me so mad. dude misses a few blocks and sees ultrasound relay being transparent about looking into user issues and engaging with the community and makes a fud post about them on ethstaker⌠and mixes it in with a good message about bloxroute censorship, so itâs getting upvoted
https://reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/18lpd53/update_your_relays_bloxroute_is_now_censoring/
ultrasound is seriously such an amazing team for this space. both justin and alex do a huge amount of work to try to keep projects censorship resistant, including reaching out to staking orgs to ask them to run non-censoring relays, doing censorship resistance research, liaising with businesses on keeping ethereum credibly neutral, communicating with the public, helping users troubleshoot, etc. and the relay works great for most users around the world. the fact that thereâs an issue in hong kong and australia is newly discovered, thanks to user feedback. and this brand new user who has never even interacted in the subreddit misses a few blocks and immediately makes a post to shit on them. this is why we canât have nice things
Have any of you heard of âusefulâ proof of work? Now I know most of us here are thoroughly in the proof of stake camp for consensus but at the end of the day all our stake is doing is serving as a basis for Sybil resistance so a bunch of nodes can vote on what the truth is. At the end of the day itâs just majority rules. Ethereum solves Sybil resistance by making participants proof they have something. Bitcoin solves Sybil resistance by making participants prove they spent something. Thatâs obviously quite wasteful if you spent that something while getting nothing but Sybil resistance in return but what if the work produced something of inherent value?
The most famous form of proof of work is hashing. However, the nature of the work can take many forms so long as the task meets a few basic requirements.
There needs to be an unlimited supply of whatever task. You canât be halting your consensus mechanism while waiting for work to arrive.
The work needs to be verifiable in much less time than it can be done. This is O(c) for hashing but it could be some reasonably small O(n) while still being viable.
So, are there any other âinfiniteâ demand tasks exist with a statistically verifiable outcome? At least one important one is AI training. At least for certain types of AI youâre basically just tuning an extraordinarily large array of numbers. That tuning works like a search that takes place over many iterations. Each iteration outputs a vector in that space which is basically your proof of work. In a large enough search space, guessing the right direction is basically impossible. So, to get a coherent direction consistently you need to actually do the training work. This is basically the insight of GenSyn.
So, now you spend electricity and rather than getting BTC which is just a proof of spend, you get ownership over the model you helped train. Once you have Sybil resistance through this means you can pile on an EVM, SVM, or whatever you like on top of it. Think of it as swapping out just the consensus client. People do work and prove they are real, real people just vote on the truth of the state machine. Majority still rules.
There are some potential advantages here to decentralization. PoS at least has a cost of the time cost of the capital that is parked there. Useful PoW might have actually no cost if the economic value of what is produced by the work is greater than the spend required to produce it. Also, anyone with a graphics card powerful enough to iterate on the model can participate without having to hold $64k in ETH. The waste of the system is reduced to the verification time on all participants. That can be offset by the transaction costs of the network being secured.
I just thought it was an interesting line of thought worth sharing. There are forms of work outside of AI but this is one that I came across in my consulting work. Also BitTensor had a pretty good primer on the ecosystem of PoW systems if you want to get your head out of the Ethereum ecosystem for a minute.
Whatâs good bearfinance. Since I stopped being a decentralization maxi I got to be more free and open minded and explore many other chains, hereâs my quick summary.
SOL.
Pros: good fees. Phantom wallet is way better than Metamask and any wallet for any other chain that Iâve experienced. You can still enjoy the defi, NFTs, etc but for low prices so itâs more appealing to masses. All of that is good until you hit their main concern, so letâs get into cons.
Cons: when needed aka when demand comes in the shit doesnt work but even w/o that half of the time my TXs on dexes donât go thru. Iâm assuming when there would be even more demand in the bull run the chain would stop or half of the shit wouldnt work. So yes, the fees are low but the chain doesnât work. It doesnât make me feel secure to hold more than a few $k on the chain and Iâm sure real world whales wouldnât want the chain to stop at any time either.
AVAX.
I mightâve gotten to degen there in the wrong time but the fees WERE INSANE. I paid more than Ethereum fees for prices. I donât know what their adv is and I donât care, the experience sucks. Oh, and I also have gotten my TXâs failing for unknown reasons while still losing like $10-20 on trying to swap..
Cardano.
Cardano is a poor manâs Solana. Basically all the same shit except itâs even worse. Fees are not as low neither. Sometimes the chain just stops, oh well. People say you wait 1-2 days and try again lmao.
Osmosis (or whatever its called)
I didnât have a bad experience but I havenât done much there. Iâve already ran into a few hiccups and Iâm assuming there would be more if I explore. Also, itâs also probably working ok cause not much demand and again I think that will change when thereâs lots of demand.
BSC
I guess it works but the emphasis on the âguessâ. Cheap fees but yeah idk.
Bitcoin
30-40min blocks, insane gas fees ($40-50) per tx, no good fucking wallet cause they have their lightning and other ones and thereâs taproot and some other shit and itâs all over the place and I need 3 wallets but then I canât send from different parameters aka lightning, taproot, to each other. Doing NFTs there is a fucking joke, let me tell ya, but free money is free money.
Out of all of these, honestly, SOL is probably the best experience for a normie user. You donât have to have much money and it generally works relatively well until it doesnât. Bitcoin has the opposite issue, works poorly awful but it ainât gonna stop.
ETH L2s
Linea: fees are like mainnet at 30 gwei, wtf is that?
Scroll: fees not too bad but could be better.
Arb1: somewhat better than scroll.
OP, Base: almost 0 fees and quick confirmations. love it!
Zksync: pretty good fees tbh compared to zkrollups and arb1 but high compared to OP stack.
Polygon ZkEVM: similar to zksync Iâd say.
Arbitrum nova: similar to OP w almost negligible fees but idk who uses it.
Gnosis scan: similar to Arb nova.
Starknet: fragmented out of Ethereumâs ecosystem, getting there felt worse than to an alt L1, fees are higher and Linea doesnt look that awful with the Starknets presence.
Polygon PoS (sidechain): actually has an ecosystem, fees more similar to Arb1 & zksync when thereâs more demand and activity, but usually itâs a few times cheaper. You gotta have matic to use it tho so thatâs a downside.
ETH.
Secure. The fees are kinda high, they are ok but def not for the normies. When the demand spikes up and when more demand comes back it is def going to be only for whales or for degens. The chain never stops tho. Gas wars exist but chain works perfectly. Idk, not really much to say, things seem obvious to me. Thereâs hella liquidity too, there are options like defi that let me do things that I wouldnât do on the other closest chain by security - Bitcoin, and then compared to that the block times are magnitudes of order faster. ETH definitely wins for me as a settlement layer and makes me feel comfy holding assets there.
Will I still use other chains? Probably.
If I can make free money - sign me up!
Will I still airdrop farm them? Hell yeah, duh?!
Will I store there a significant amount of money? Hell naw, sometimes Iâm withdrawing from them faster to my CEX and holding it there cause I trust Kraken more.
That said, Iâm looking excited for zkrollups after 4844 upgrade and just looking forward to a more mature ecosystem of Ethereum where scalability is solved thru L2s without compromising the security and decentralization of the settlement layer. Also, we badly new a way better wallet and for front ends to be a nicer experience and at least handle the capacity of the users that Ethereum is gong to attract.
Lastly, Iâll leave you with this.
Decentralization is undervalued until it doesnât.
The discussion in here has gotten a bit out of hand while I was asleep. The ETH sentiment seems to have reached a breaking point, at least for some people. Looks to me like the concentrated marketing and FUD campaigns seems to bear fruit on some. Not surprising, but still sad to see. Someone mentioned Solana nodes, so I share something I realized in a discussion I had on farcaster DMs this week:
Solana has close to 3000 nodes. We do not know how independent they are, but someone asked an interesting question a few days ago: âWhy does solana have over 10% of its validators in Ogden (Utah)â. It was also mention here in ethfinance, but I cannot find the comment anymore.
When you check the solana decentralization statistics today. Ogden âonlyâ has 133 nodes (5%), but Wichita (Kansas) has 375 (13%). By the way, the Bar chart on the right side still shows Ogden as having 293 231 servers, yesterday it was 304 (or so). So it seems slightly delayed.
If you click on âstaked nodesâ, which are nodes that are also validating, solana has close to 2000. Do not ask me why there are more staking nodes than actual nodes in some locations. Maybe these numbers are filtered in a certain way. Maybe the numbers are just delayed and fast relocations of the nodes gives these weird results. I do not know. 123 of the staking nodes are in Ogden (6%). The bar chart to the right still has Ogden listed with 314 (16%). But now, Wichita seems to have 492 of them, which is a staggering 25% of all solana staking nodes. This in itself is not a healthy number being in one location. What I think is even worse is that it looks like hundreds of nodes have been moved from one location to another within days.
I would interpret that as a single entity has control over a large part of these nodes/validators and moves them around at a whim. It definitely is very fishy. Much decentralizationâŚUpcoming Guests
Ethereum
$2,266.44
0.053
Current supply: 120,203,798.439280234596606888 ETH and dropping!
456 days since the merge
250 days since last JBM post
Many objectives,
Assessing the perspectives,
Blockchain collectives.
A rumor goes around in insider circles that Michael Saylor bought a second chair
Tiny tid bit of random but potentially interesting information⌠(emphasis on the potentially)
I spoke to a pension adviser recently, while discussing my assets/plans he assumed that Iâd need to sell my ETH to pay for various things. He was blown away at the prospect of permissionless borrowing and even more so at whatâs possible with Alchemix.
He was neutral on crypto in general and had a basic understanding of Bitcoin and Ethereum. He asked me to explain Ethereum in a way that he might not have heard before and I said something like âa credibly neutral digital settlement layerâ. That totally clicked with him. He said that because media/people always focus on the assets themselves, he hadnât twigged that the asset are valuable because the networks are valuable.
It was a brief but really enjoyable chat about what the technology is and what it enables. He asked me to send some links to defi projects as examples for what can be done using Ethereum. I might have just nudged him down the rabbit hole that weâve all been down, I hope so.
Good evening lovelies. Not logged on for over a year. Good to see some old names still active. Been completely out of the game for a year, life and all that = positive, investing in myself.. Will deffo be on over xmas holidays and in the run up, doing some Terrible Analysis and being silly as usual..
I have no idea about any fundamentals as usual, staking still means having ribeyes in the fridge to me. I can post a pic of a 28 day matured Hereford (UK local) ribeye as my proof of steak. Hope it all went well and eth is saving the planet and buterin being claimed as the second coming of christ etc.
It seems just like last week where the 180 darts memes were in full flow, and you could double your money in the time it takes to go for a piss. I think I nearly virtually got married on here, to someone whose name I canât remember (small Corey) , but it didnât happen cos the groom refused to accept DC investor as the vicar. If you are watching, I still love you and require regular suckles from your moobs.
I ditched my premium Trading view acct over a year ago and called up this one yesterday, untouched for a year from my now basic membership , thankfully it keeps the lines drawn, but loses oscillators and fibs.. So here it is. Our beloved Raymond. 4u ratiogangâŚ
But whatâs does this mean mrs willy? All I see is slices of pizza everywhere? Well I would urge you to look at the lower green diagonal, rays trusty long term upward support. We now have five touchpoints. I remember ranting on about the significance of xmas period for crypto, aka big movements. So why has ray tickled this every xmas bar one touchpoint since 2017.
Disclaimer : Rays erections can lose you money, but he usually gets viagra for xmas. .
â
Most of the discussion around blockchain encryption algorithm security has shifted to concerns around advances in Quantum Computing, however, I fear there is another, less sexy and therefore less popular, but far more dangerous risk lurking in the shadows.
Most encryption protocols that are no longer used werenât âcrackedâ by brute forcing, but rather, a fatal flaw or new mathematical concept was discovered which rendered the necessity to brute force the encryption moot.
There are algorithms that, if the flaw had not been discovered, would otherwise take millions of years to âbrute forceâ in the traditional sense, even with modern advances in GPU performance.
One of the most prominent historical examples of this is the encryption algorithm, RC4.
When RC4 was designed by Ron Rivest in 1987, it was considered secure against brute force attacks even with large key lengths. At the time, there were no known âfatal flawsâ in the RC4 algorithm itself that would enable shortcuts to finding the encryption key.
However, over time, cryptographers discovered vulnerabilities in RC4 that completely broke the algorithm:
RC4 turned out to have latent mathematical vulnerabilities unknown when it was first introduced. When discovered and properly exploited, these flaws made brute forcing irrelevant - the keys could be recovered much more quickly by exploiting previously undiscovered flaws.
If those flaws had not been uncovered, even with the advanced computing power we have today, untreated RC4 encryption, like Keccak-256, the hashing algorithm used to secure Ethereum, would have otherwise taken millions of years to brute force.
As AI continues to advance, especially in areas like mathematics and cryptography, it raises the risk of AI systems potentially finding vulnerabilities in existing cryptographic primitives that human experts have missed.
An AI system that has been specifically trained in cryptography, number theory, abstract algebra etc⌠could potentially have capabilities beyond any individual human cryptanalyst. If focused on analyzing something like Keccak-256, the hashing algorithm usedto secure ethereum, it might conceivably find a mathematical weakness.
For the time being, human ingenuity and intuition still often exceeds AI systems, especially in creative realms like developing new cryptographic attack techniques. So I wouldnât count on AI finding and exploiting flaws in encryption protocols right away within the next year or so.
Leading cryptographers do already actively think about AI safety and robustness in cryptography, so defenses are being developed with AI systems in mind. Things like quantum-resistant cryptography, algorithmic randomness testing, and cryptographic verifiability provide technical means to verify security assumptions even in the face of advanced AI.
However, due to innate biases in human researchers, we may have likely overstated the capabilities of human ingenuity compared to rapidly advancing AI systems. There are a few reasons why AI may surpass humans in cryptanalysis creativity and intuition in the not-so-distant future (perhaps 3-5 years):
The historical compromise of once-secure encryption algorithms like RC4 demonstrates the risks posed by mathematical and cryptanalytic advances. Latent flaws can lurk for years before discoveries in codebreaking render brute force attacks unnecessary. As AI systems continue rapid improvement in areas like cryptography, they may have the scale, lack of bias, and creativity needed to surface new flaws in encryption primitives required for blockchains to remain secure.
I think people forget easily the despair they felt on other occasions. Canât even count with the fingers in both hands how many times people were giving up on Ethereum because of Solana, Tezos, EOS, Cardano, Ripple (it was the second biggest coin back 2017ish), Litecoin, Polkadot, Avalanche, BSC, Nano, Algorand, Tron, Iota, and of course Bitcoin. But if you zoom out the trend is clear, the previous challengers tend to irrelevance. Ethereum keeps crawling upwards towards the biggest market cap. The local minima that it sets with respect to Bitcoin keeps going up.
And it has wiped out the floor in terms of adoption metrics that canât be manipulated with respect to everything else. You should never pay any attention to metrics that can be pumped up at no cost. # active addresses means nothing, they are created for free and this can be automated without any human intervention. It means nothing. Donât care either about # transactions per se as an adoption metric. These are digitized systems, machines can generate transactions at insane speeds. A transaction here does not necessarily represent economic activity or a change of goods. In the same way moving coins from my left pocket to my right pocket doesnât constitute economic activity nor bumps GDP numbers. The way you track economic activity in the real world is through VAT (value added tax), the moment someone pays a tax to participate in an economic exchange is the moment you can be pretty damn sure whoever participated in that exchange was willing to do so because it generated value added. The network fees are this type of non-fakeable metric. This is a very real cost to whoever participated in an economic exchange. Guess what, Ethereum wipes the floor. Solana does a measly 100K USD on a good day, Ethereum does 100x that, 10M USD.
Here lies the problem, if you are going to sell a very cheap good with low profit margins. You better sell a lot of it, to make up for it in volume. Solana transactions are very cheap so it generates a lot of potential demand for transactions, but even being this cheap they cannot sell enough to make up for it in volume. Solana would need to scale by x100 from 500 tps to 50000 tps keeping current transaction fees to challenge Ethereum. Or increase transactions fees by 100x, in which case we will see how many of those low value transactions remain on the chain. Or anything in between that makes up for the 100x.
The TVL onchain, which is a bit more gameable than the fees but still can be used as a proxy, is pitiful. There are 900M USD onchain on Solana. Thatâs not even 1 whale. Ethereum has 30 billion USD just on the L1, and another 16 billion USD on the L2s. All these Solana activity you see on Twitter is most likely completely fake, paid out by VCs or the Solana foundation. Or completely irrelevant users with barely any skin in the game.
Remove the noise, focus on what matters.
Itâs time to address the elephant in the room. Itâs time to admit that The RatioŠ is the worst unit of measure since Fahrenheit.
The flippening is all about ETH market cap overtaking BTC market cap. So, then, why is the Ratio metric comparing price/price instead of market cap / market cap?
The flippening target, on the Ratio, currently stands at 0.16275. Does anyone know that off the top of their head? Is it a nice round number thatâs easy to communicate?
The flippening target is a moving target that changes literally every second. Moving targets are absolutely garbage in the business world.
BTC and ETH supply are constantly changing. Thus, a Ratio of 0.05 today is different from a Ratio of 0.05 last month. In fact, a Ratio that stays flat moves us further and further from a flippening, due to ETHâs shrinking supply.
Because the Ratio means different things at different times, based on changing supply, graphs of the Ratio over time are misleading. Any TA performed on those charts is wrong. There would need to be inflation adjusted Ratio charts.
Now the alternative:
A market cap / market cap ratio solves all of this.
No moving target. The flippening target is always 1.00 and always will be.
Itâs an easy to remember target and easy to communicate.
It is unaffected by changes in BTC and ETH supply.
The market cap ratio currently sits at 0.33. That tells you exactly what you need to know without any further information. The price of ETH needs to triple to flip BTC. Easy.
The Ratio currently sits at 0.05365. Quick, what does ETH need to do to flip BTC? Better pull up a computer. Because this Ratio tells you literally nothing.
Please, I beg this community to abandon the Ratio. Join me in welcoming the Market Cap Ratio. Think of me as Anders Celsius, introducing a sane metric thatâs easier to use and understand.
Itâs a common business strategy to go after your competitorsâ market shares, because their customers already know the product category, have demonstrated a need for it, and have already been willing to spend for it in the past. Cost per customer acquisition tends to be lower.
But this strategy is only viable if youâre a challenger.
The leader of a niche usually has to market not only its own product, but the entire product category as well. The leader has to grow the market itself.
Recently Coinbase has taken the approach of a leader:
- The recent announcement of a new feature for sending and receiving usdc for free through Coinbase wallet has the potential to be a game changer for adoption.
- The legal battles Coinbase is fighting really do seem to aim at making the situation better for all players, and bringing the fight to public attention through transparency not only ridicules the opponents (the SEC) but also shows alignment with a crypto core value.
- The âupdate the systemâ short videos arenât centered around crypto users pain point specifically, theyâre targeting the general population.
Coinbase bets on its (non custodial) wallet. Coinbase bets on Ethereum L2s and by having its own, Base. Coinbase clearly sees in Ethereum what we all see in it, they see the future.
Recent ARB vote updates:
A vote to Incentivize the âRage Tradeâ platform was fairly unanimously voted down, with a âNoâ vote from myself. This result was pretty expected, as the general consensus was this would better fit within the defined STIP framework.
The Security & Audit Framework passed, moving forward work on setting up a comprehensive request for proposal process for selection of auditors & security-based service providers. I voted âYesâ, as I am largely in favor of having service providing decisions be handled as uniformly as possible. The Rage Trade request above is an example of this, where itâs just easier to have frameworks instead of individual requests.
ArbOS Version 11 passed. For those interested, might be best to click the link. A lot of Github PRs to read! I voted Yes, as it felt like a formality more than anything.
I voted âYesâ to extend the timeline for STIP & Backfund STIP funding. In short, longer than expected KYC approval times were really shortening the window grants could payout their ARB. Felt fair to approve this, given how relatively messy the whole process was. Grants that were looking to incentive users may suffer from only being able to provide ARB during a super-short window.
The Tally vote to backpay early Arbitrum community contributors has failed. I did vote Yes for this, but it seems most the No voting came from a place of general approval, but not comfortable with the specific implementation of it. With what seems like broad support for the basic idea, Iâll be curious if a re-worked proposal will come from this.
Currently active is a vote for an experimental trail period of paying active ARB Delegates. I did vote Yes, as I generally am for paying for crypto work where it feels appropriate. There are a lot of metrics that will (hopefully) incentive active DAO participation from delegates. I do wish a larger size of delegates were being paid⌠I pushed for this, and it was increased from 30 to 50, but would have rather seen more to entice more / new delegates. I understand the criteria, and having a cutoff is good for a DAO this size, but it probably could have been increased further.
This all comes with the caveat that I fully understand what this vote represents - a group of people voting to pay themselves. Not sure if there is ever a good way to handle that, but it the proposer has gone through a lot of revisions from community discussion, so at a minimum it feels to at least not be something thrown together in a hasty attempt at a money grab.
https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1735012568291332458
SUMMARY OF FED DECISION (12/13/23):
Fed leaves rates unchanged for third straight meeting
Fed says growth of economy âhas slowedâ since Q3 2023
Most Fed officials see interest rate cuts in 2024
Median projection shows 3 rate cuts in 2024
Fed sees 4.1% unemployment by end of 2024
Fed sees US GDP growth at 2.6% in 2023 and 1.4% in 2024
The market is pricing in DOUBLE the number of rate cuts in 2024 than the Fed projects.
We could see a repeat of the pre-covid run, covid dump, then bull run. Iâll go ahead and call ~$3.6k top before a rate cut dump down to about where we are now, and then the real bull run starts.
tricky told me to repost it since it got flagged by automod. Iâll remove the links but try my best to still make sure you can find the source.
Fraxchain testnet is Live
An ETH L2 that will use frxETH as the native token as opposed ot native ETH. Due to the dual nature of their staked ETH model, the more frxETH that is not staked means increased APR for their staked ETH derivative - sfrxETH.
Also a portion of transaction fees on Fraxchain will be sent to veFXS holders as rewards.
Afterwards Frax aims to launch their frxBTC product afterwards. Iâm really interested in how Frax will keep the BTC peg while still being decentralized, like they claim.
From Sam:
Launch frxBTC after Fraxchain so that Frax Finance also issues a BTC-pegged stablecoin everywhere else outside of the Bitcoin blockchain and starts accumulating monetary premium in DeFi.
In my opinion, the best part of the FRAX ecosystem is that Frax is their biggest customer. They build products that Frax will use and benefit from. Similar to Amazon and AWS, turning their biggest expense into their greatest earners.
FRAX and PayPal Collaboration.
I find it interesting to see a US company partake in the CRV wars and DeFi as a whole. Itâs incredibly cool to see a partnership forming between TradFi and DeFi. PayPal slowly testing the benefits of liquidity dApps like curve, convex, and Frax.
Frax received $10million pyUSD from an associated PayPal address and a governance proposal was submitted to Frax.
FRAX Finance Governance FIP-307
Summary:
This proposal seeks to officially whitelist PayPal USD (PYUSD) into the Frax Curve Automated Market Operator (AMO). This action aims to enhance the diversity and utility of the Frax ecosystem by integrating a stablecoin linked to a major financial service provider.
Background and Motivations:
The inclusion of PYUSD in the Frax Curve AMO will broaden the range of stablecoins within our ecosystem, providing users with more options and enhancing the overall resilience of the platform.
PayPal is a globally recognized financial services provider. The integration of PYUSD can leverage this reputation, potentially attracting new users who trust PayPalâs brand and services. The demand for stablecoins continues to grow within the DeFi space. By adding PYUSD, we are meeting this demand and ensuring our platform remains competitive and relevant.
Hereâs a great $PYUSD blog post I found concerning the levels of safety with regards to customer protections.
Google âJPKoning PayPalâ it should be the first link. Worth the quick read
Title: There are now two types of PayPal dollars, and one is better than the other
If you listen to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who in response to PayPalâs announcement fretted that PayPalâs crypto-based dollars would not able to âguarantee consumer protections,â youâd assume the traditional non-crypto version is the safer one. And I think that fits with most peoplesâ preconceptions of crypto.
Not so, oddly enough. Itâs the PayPal dollars hosted on crypto databases that are the safer of the two, if not along every dimension, at least in terms of the degree to which customers are protected by: 1) the quality of underlying assets; 2) their seniority (or ranking relative to other creditors); and 3) transparency.
[PYUSD collateral] must be recorded on two separate days each month, or 24 times per yearâŚthese attestation reports must be prepared by an independent auditor. The only way to get vetted financial information about the assets backing traditional PayPal [accounts] is to read its audited financial statements, which come out just once a year. For the rest of the twelve months, customers are left in the dark.
The fact that one type of PayPal dollar ([PYUSD]) has robust protections while the other is only haphazardly protected, and only because the first is managed with a crypto database and not a traditional database, seems incredibly arbitrary to me."
The entire blog post is worth a read and is relatively short. Itâs really interesting that the stablecoin regulations have ended up creating a safer asset for customers.
This place, this garden that we have here, we grow hope in it. Hope thrives here. Itâs actually difficult to find places where hope grows, and many of us donât even notice it.
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Harvesting the fruits,
Showing them bankers the boots,
Through fire and lawsuits.
Just imagine. ETH flips BTC in the span of a few months.
Then Saylor comes out and announces that he slowly unloaded his position and converted it to ETH.
Million.
Dollar.
Validators.
Binance Smart Chain may have entered a fork condition because of a bug introduced into bsc-geth.
https://twitter.com/superphiz/status/1730239018619613667
Iâd like to draw your attention to what this COULD mean for binance chain, and why itâs important for us to learn from it. To be clear, I didnât study the binance incident, Iâm taking a general lesson from what MIGHT have happened, and definitely editorializing to hammer the point. Please donât tell me Iâm wrong about the incident, Iâm applying this to our chain and I donât care about BSC.
It looks like bsc-geth, a majority client on Binance Smart Chain could have introduced a bug that was enshrined in the chain because bsc-geth is a majority client. bsc-erigon has been unable to follow the new canonical bsc chain because it did not accept this bugged version of the bsc chain.
There are two potential corrections:
Introduce the same bug into bsc-erigon and make the wrong chain the canonical chain (with minimal disruption in the chain, but maximum social disruption)
Undo/Redo/Slash/Roll-back bsc chain to correct the error in the chain and move forward with a correct state, but resulting in devastating chain consequences.
This should be a HUGE red flag to Ethereans that solidifies our concerns about client majorities. If geth introduced a bug into our execution layer weâd be in the exact same predicament.
How do we prevent it? By using minority clients, EVEN if theyâre more buggy and/or less performant.
Why? We have about 4.5 execution clients right now: geth, nethermind, besu, erigon, and reth (rust Ethereum). If each of those clients has ~20% - ~25% of the share, ANY one of them could fail or introduce a bug and the network will shit a brick but keep going on the right chain, essentially falling to 75% efficiency until that bug is fixed in that single client.
AS IT STANDS, geth has 84% of the execution chain market share. If geth introduces any bug into the chain, it will become the canonical chain, and the other 3.5 clients representing 16% of the chain will just be ignored.
THIS is why client diversity on both the execution AND consensus layers is so important. See https://clientdiversity.org/ for more info.
If youâre not familiar with the design principles of Ethereum, one point you should know is that in Ethereum, the spec leads the implementation, the implementation doesnât lead the spec. This can take awhile to understand, but it essentially means that we design the chain carefully, then write code to support that spec; we donât write production code and then try to write documentation explaining what that code does.
Coinbase announced support for partial ETH staking through the Coinbase Wallet in their blog yesterday. While this is great for enabling access to staking yield to more people, in the same blog post they openly admit they only use Geth as their execution client (not sure if they ever confirmed it like this before, but everyone kind of knew). As the largest single staking entity (running around 15% of staked ETH) this is incredibly irresponsible behavior and they should be called out for it. I believe it is at this point in time a bigger issue than Lido having about 30%.
If you have your ETH staked with Coinbase, move to a better alternative for the network (e.g. Rocket Pool / StakeWise V3 / âŚ). Reach out to Coinbase if youâre a customer. They have had so much time to improve their operations yet chose not to so far.
I think Coinbase is doing great things for the crypto ecosystem in general, especially in the US, but this is something that just needs to be improved and there is no excuse not to. They could almost single-handedly lower Gethâs dominance to a point where itâs a non-issue. It is currently believed to be around 80-85%, take away Coinbaseâs 15% and weâre almost below 66% which is the bare minimum we need to reach to be safe from supermajority bugs.
Pretty big week for the Genesis(/Gemini Earn) bankruptcy, TLDR is that the judge has approved them to move forward with a vote on the recovery plan. If the vote passes in January people will start getting their assets back.
I havenât been able to find any details on the % recovery users should I expect from this deal, expect that to come out in the following weeks.
One thing Iâm curious about is the the composition of the assets that are owed, and the composition of the funds Genesis/DCG have on hand to fund this recovery with. Anybody know the breakdown of what assets were tied up in this bankruptcy as far as USD/stables/ETH/BTC?
Iâm wondering because there are billions tied up in this bankruptcy and if they had to exchange a significant amount of cash for ETH/BTC that could be meaningful buy pressure in crypto markets. Although I think a significant chunk of what they are providing is GBTC, and I suspect a large proportion of assets owed are USD/stables so I doubt its that big of a deal.
I went hiking at Zion National Park in Utah for the last week. Landed back last night, and woke up to this beautiful pump. I should have known ETH was waiting for someone to be out in nature to pump. Here are some poorly taken pics.
Youâre welcome.
First hike we did was the Angels Landing hike, which was surprisingly easy despite all the reviews saying itâs one of the harder national park hikes. The Chain section was exciting and was the most fun Iâve had hiking.
Utah is such a beautiful state and everyone was very kind to us! Will definitely try to visit again to see the other national parks there.
Crypto scammers really seem to have upped their bot game lately. Previously youâd usually have 10s of upvotes on a scam post. Now weâre routinely seeing hundreds, for example this comment posted 9 hours ago on a dead ethstaker thread has 200 upvotes.
Youâd think reddit could detect stuff like this but apparently no.
[Scam comment] https://reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/12srco7/rocket_pool_vs_lido_vs_stakewise/kbluf57/
re: âletâs just clean up r/ethereumâ
Itâs probably fair to say that I hold a decent bit of soft power in r/ethereum policy, as Iâm the longest-tenured moderator who does any modding, plus I literally was 98%+ of all mod actions in 2018-2019 until I added twigwam. Most of the mods are inactive, even the ones who have been added recently.
As the above may suggest, I care about r/ethereum, even gave an entire EthCC speech on it once upon a time.
iâm also from the time when everyone in Ethereum was angry about r/bitcoin censorship tyranny by Theymos. Even mild mannered people you might not expect like Phil Daian. Early Ethereum was quite fervent about free speech on Reddit.
Then came the DAO fork, and I got censored a few times for things not even close to being censor-worthy (in my view) though it was an emotional time for everyone and some temp mods had been added. I wasnât a mod then. IMHO the censorship was part of what led to ETC. We didnât feel heard.
fundamentally r/ethereum is never going to go back to being the way it was. We donât have the tools necessary, and the deeply technical community will never come back. Ethfinance exists, and most of yâall prefer to hang out here, rather than there. Ethereum is magnitudes of magnitudes bigger than when people first started complaining about the quality of r/ethereum declining in 2014.
These few weeks when the market has been pumping is making me really sad and anxiousâŚ
Hereâs my story,
I joined 2021 bull, and bought BTC, ETH, and various shitcoins.
Thankfully quite early on in late 2021 I learnt about ETH with the upcoming merge.
Sometime around 2022 I coverted all my positions to ETH, but with the bear I had already lost a considerable amount of money. I then started buying more and at its peak in mid-late 2022 I had managed to save 24 ETH - all my life savings.
Then after the FTX crash I lost more in fiat terms, and I started taking more riskier bets. I tried trading LTFs and lost a lot of ETH. This made me irrational and I started converting ETH to Alts, first sound ones such as RPL, but later as I tried making back what I lost I started taking stupid and risky bets by coverting my stack into shitcoins hoping I can try and get back what I lost.
This was it, I lost the majority of my stack here.
This was a very expensive lesson for me not to trade. I dont think I can stomach buying anything ther than ETH now. Now Iâve started to accumulate with a measly 1.6E so far but the price rise is making accumulation even difficult đ˘
I hope this was a useful lesson to you all as it was for me. Wanted to warn others here not to thread the same part I did as CT and seeing others with huge profits can make you do risky things.
Certain thirdweb contracts deployed before the 20th of November were vulnerable:
https://blog.thirdweb.com/security-vulnerability/
thirdweb is a framework for low-code smart contract deployments. Iâm not sure how many projects use them, but theyâre a name that comes up often in the dev spheres. Iâd guess the less technical projects are more likely to be users here, NFTs moreso than DeFi.
Building code abstractions in web3 is no small task. The more flexible you make your framework, the more attack vectors. Catastrophic bugs cannot be patched on a whim like in web2.
edit: we might get an idea of the vuln in question, even without being programmers, by checking the common dependencies in the affected contract list. Iâd guess itâs tied to the ERC2771 upgradeable import, which has something to do with metatransactions. Maybe something allowing an exploiter to pose as a trusted relayer? I would love to understand enough to know.
If you think this is bad, the first time BTC hit $44k, back in early 2021, the price of ETH was just $1770.
BTC had already more than doubled its prior ATH, while ETH was barely above its prior ATH.
This sub was losing its shit. ETH was dead. Then, things got worse. 6 more weeks of ratio bleed. The price of ETH dropped 10%! while BTC kept pumping, up 17%. How incredibly demoralizing.
Then something interesting happened. Over the next 6 weeks, BTC was flat and ETH pumped 365%! Oh my.
This market will wear you down. Youâll want to give up and switch from ETH to something thatâs pumping. Thatâs when the rocket takes off. I guarantee you plenty of people switched from ETH to BTC right before the ratio popped from 0.3 to 0.8 that spring of 2021.
Honestly if someone has held both then they should understand how more valuable and practical ETH is and the ratio doesnât even phase them much probably altho Iâm the one who converted majority of my BTC stack at around 0.067, so yes Iâm underwater on that decision, for now but not forever.
No matter the ratio my ethereum printrr stil goes brrrr.
No matter the ratio I can go ahead and get loans within minutes and get liquidity for IRL without selling my assets and triggering a tax nightmare.
No matter the ratio there are 10000, hell probably even way more, different projects and amazing developments that are going in the ecosystem that I can go and explore.
No matter the ratio the community has so many interesting topics to talk about between themselves.
No matter the ratio there are way more opportunities that exist and show up for me in this ecosystem.
No matter the ratio I can get other assets such as NFTs, providing me with an alternative leveraged investment on my position.
No matter the ratio I can randomly get hundreds, if not thousands, of $$$ airdropped to me.
No matter the ratio I can go ahead and build on top of my assets that live on Ethereum.
No matter the ratio Ethereum captures my attention more than Bitcoin ever has.
Finished with my Optimism RetroPGF ballot, finally! Allocated to a little under 300 projects (out of about 650 that passed through the initial filtering).
Honestly, this was a ludicrous amount of work, and Iâm very glad we had such a long time to do it (4 weeks). The process of assesing and evaluating has probably consumed about 40 hours (rather than the 8 estimated at the beginning, lol).
Projects need to get onto 17 ballots to qualify for anything, then will they recieve the median amount from those ballots. To see which projects have got how many ballots so far check out:
https://www.growthepie.xyz/optimism-retropgf-3
Itâs been quite sad to see the amount that some projects have felt forced to shill themselves to badgeholders, and also that it seems to have worked which will encourage more of it in the future. Just one example that I saw was Sonne, a fork of Compound, whose token holders clearly brigaded the OP Discord and now has reached quorum. How is a DeFi lending platform, with a token, a âPublic Goodâ? I have no idea, but they are far from the only example.
Lefteris has been trying to point out that some of the projects which most quickly reached 17 ballots are things which really donât need an extra injection of funds due to huge amounts of VC funding.
An example of this that I find particularly egrigious would be Synthetix, who not only received $20M in VC funding this year, but previously received 9M OP⌠of which they then used about 2M to give themselves a huge amount of governance powerâŚ
https://gov.optimism.io/t/synthetix-ambassadors-phase-0-delegation-2m-op-tokens/3726
⌠and then used that voting power to nominate their ambassador as a RetroPGF badgeholder:
Synthetix are obviously huge in the Optimism ecosystem, and generate a lot of value⌠but I wouldnât suggest they are the most worthy recipients of âpublic goodsâ funding.
Anyway, governance is never perfect, Moloch is always present, and Iâm sure we can learn and iterate over time. For now at least, Iâve done my allocations and so should have a little more time for commenting here again!
Optimism RPGF round ends tomorrow - I have to cast my ballot - anyone want to tell me if Iâm missing anything super important?
Focusing on things that donât necessarily have an influencer for brand awareness - love Carlâs âPopular NPM packagesâ list, added a lot of those. And of course, staking tooling, infra, etc cuz Optimism doesnât exist without Ethereumâs validators
Discriminating against things that have been well-known in the ecosystem for years but I canât find significant progress that theyâve made in the past couple years⌠I find that some projects coast on reputation
Also added in some high-producing educators and data analytics providers
sidenote: I canât vote for EthStaker cuz bias
special shoutout to u/minimalgravitas for the staking list!
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Where banks can not compete,
No one hits delete.
altcoin nostalgia series, part 01: Oyster Pearl (PRL)
In this series, I want to take you on a trip through some of the most interesting shitcoins from the past.
Oyster Pearl wanted to revolutionize online advertising and give website owners an alternative and private way to monetize their content. The idea was that website owners could insert one line of code, and visitors would contribute their spare computing power and storage space to support the protocol. In return, they would earn PRL tokens. The data would be stored on the iota tangle. There was also a second coin called Shell (SHL).
PRL was extremely hyped in 2017. Right before the binance listing, one of the team members did some insider trading. The anonymous founder bruno block wasnât cool with that and rug pulled the whole project, minting and dumping more PRL coins.
After that, some team members founded Opacity (OPQ) and airdropped tokens to PRL holders, the project also died. Bruno founded a new scammy project called Akoya (AKYE) and airdropped tokens as well. Of course it died. There were some mental health issues involved ($5,000 banana). Apparently, he was caught on a yacht with safes full of gold bars. Amir Bruno Elmaani got 4 years in prison for tax evasion.
Deep dive by Doug Colkitt on the Kyber exploit: https://twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1727613541115429314
Careful manipulation to make the pool believe it has more liquidity than it does, then extract real funds through this phantom liquidity.
I donât want to kick anyone while theyâre down, the Kyber guys are good devs working hard and letâs hope for a good resolution. FWIW the hacker has signaled through blockchain messages he would be willing to talk today. https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7a8912583520304ce2364fa165dafe94461a91ab2dcf45dab942e296594dc40a
But, musing about security in the abstract⌠I have to say, I felt for a long while the engineering in Kyber seemed overcomplicated. I once got stuck in one of their farms, and without the team solving it for me, I would have been screwed. This is different from Uniswap or Aave where you can figure out the contracts on your own as an intermediate user.
Complex protocols have greater attack surface.
Sanity checks like 1-block delays on TVL sensitive actions seem like low hanging fruits to avoid catastrophic exploits. Kills flashloan abuse, for starters.
I get that those are tough calls, how do you implement such edge case checks without hurting genuine composability? But surely there must be some threshold of liquidity past which we have reasonable confidence no legitimate use would occur, because of slippage.
but then again, the concentrated liquidity design implies all of the liquidity in one tick can very well be a legitimate swapâŚ
Basic x * y = k as per Uniswap v2 may have been capital inefficient, yet the simplicity was elegant in more ways than one.
Iâm glad I donât work on AMMs!
Just wanted to let the good folks in here know StakeWiseâs V3 launch is just around the corner. The V2-V3 contract migration proposal is live on their governance forum and the snapshot vote has reached quorum with 100% approval for now.
Their V3 architecture brings some big advantages, e.g. solo stakers can create their own (private if they like) vault and mint an LST against it. If you want to get a feel for what it will look like, I suggest you browse through the testnet vaults at https://testnet.stakewise.io/ .
It took more than a year since their V3 announcement to get to this stage and Iâm proud to have contributed in a small way myself as well by adding remote signer support to their operator service.
Even though this post may feel like it, I am not in any way affiliated with StakeWise, I just appreciate all of the work that went into this and I havenât seen this be discussed in recent days. This gives stakers who canât stake at home a lot more choice and will hopefully help keep Lidoâs power in check.
- Does this potentially solve liquidity fragmentation?
Basically it should unlock all possible liquidity on all chains if it integrates CCIP into the protocol functions, Synthetix (SNX) is doing just that for helping to launch sUSD liquidity products on top of Base and Arbitrum I believe. Like many things, protocols need to be built from the ground up or upgraded to support it.
- Does this effectively move the security from ethereum to chainlink? or would it be better to say it moves security from a lot of shitty bridges to chainlink which is arguably an improvement.
It more or less just replaces bridges and the biggest security improvement is you can remove honeypots that are the bridge contracts. No longer do you need to store all the assets into one place, with one potential vulnerability always looming. If you attack the Chainlink feeds/CCIP features it is going to be more like to having to attack all the ETH nodes to get your unsanctioned blockchain instruction in. Chainlink node distribution will help secure bridging as long as the feeds are also proven to be secure.
Lido are up to fuckery again.
In this twitter post https://x.com/nero_eth/status/1728680630773575956, Nero shows how a lido node operator, p2p.org (run by a lido cofounder), has announced it will start waiting to produce blocks. Thereâs a function called âgetheaderâ that the block proposer is supposed to call at time = 0, but node operators have until time = 4 seconds to help home operators who might have latency issues.
By waiting to call that function, they will get up to 4 seconds more of mev into their blocks.
The impact this will have is theyâll further centralise the ethereum network to orgs who have the ability to still produce blocks while waiting the longest amount of time - home operators or decentralised services would not be able to wait so long because theyâre more likely to fail in block production. People will go to services that give them the best yield in LSTs without thinking about the potential impact on the ethereum network.
Lido literally have a golden goose in their possession, but theyâre killing it. Itâs extremely shortsighted, and it might have horrendous impacts for the rest of us stakers.
Please speak out against this!
KyberSwap fell victim to a sophisticated exploit amounting to approximately $50 million on November 23, as reported by rekt.news (https://rekt.news/kyberswap-rekt/) .
This incident involved an in-depth comprehension of the underlying code to exploit it (u/PhiMarHal reported already the technical details). The exploiter displayed a peculiar level of psychopathic behavior, leaving on-chain messages throughout the exploit to explain their actions. The final message they left was:
âDear Kyberswap Developers, Employees, DAO members and LPs,
Negotiations will start in a few hours when I am fully rested.
Thank you.â
KyberSwap chose to extend a 10% bounty to the hacker, with 90% intended for restitution.
What makes this incident even more disturbing is the fact that during the hack, a MEV bot operator was able to capture $5.7 M from Kyber by frontrunning the exploiter.
The deal has now been struck for the return of 90%, with the remaining 10% awarded to the frontrun bot operator (tweet). Morale does not seem to exist in the crypto landscape.
The situation draws parallels to the Euler hack, evoking a sense of dĂŠjĂ vu for those who have experienced similar events. Notably, the exploiter received a message from the origninal Euler Finance Exploiter wallet, shilling some meme coin (I donât link it).
In the midst of difficult circumstances, it is important not to lose hope and to expect the best possible outcome. Christmas is soon. Speaking from the experiance as a victim of the Euler hack myself, navigating the aftermath wonât be easy.
I hope those among our community who have been impacted by the Ethfinancier incident can navigate through their losses with resilience (comments in the daily). Resilience and risk management remains a key virtue in the crypto realm. Remember, donât put all your eggs or ETH in one defi protocol.
Someone built an Ethereum trained ChatGPT for developers and stakers. Looks like you have to have an OpenAI subscription account to use it though, and they are currently paused from new signups.
I built Ethereum GPT, which was trained with the Consensus layer API specifications. If youâre a builder looking to access specific data or just have a question about staking, try my fren:
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-T3pQLJpwi-ethereum-gpt
X link: https://x.com/Butta_eth/status/1729088377700671798
u/stablecoinâs post today got me thinking about developing an EthFinanceGPT that can answer newcomersâ questions, respond to FAQs, dispel FUDs, and overall encapsulate the spirit of EthFinance to provide unbiased guidance. For those of you who donât know, GPTs are specialized tools capable of retrieving facts from an external knowledge base. This allows LLMs to utilize that information to generate answers. They can also follow instructions provided by the creator and have API access, as well as internet access, including an image generation tool.
We have a plethora of content that can serve as the knowledge base, such as the Daily Doots, the EVMavericks Discord, ETF forums, blog posts by prominent users, educational content, discussions on decentralization, tokenomics, technical analysis, Twitter posts, and even memes. A curated knowledge base can be provided to a community-funded GPT, and perhaps even a Reddit bot could be created to interact with this GPT through posts.
Unfortunately, I only have time to read through the dailies, so I wonât be able to spearhead this effort. However, if someone else is interested in pursuing this, please feel free to do so.
Welp guys, itâs been fun, looks like my private key was compromised and my wallet was drained. No idea how my key got compromised.
About 7 hours ago (fast asleep at this time) some crook opened up my wallet, drained my aave position and absconded with about 15 eth and 600 dollars worth of shitcoins.
Thatâs all I had left.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d06340e5424EA2DE37E5A1d2f410f6A0b40D58a
RIP me.
Thank you all very much for your kind words and advice.
In case you missed my earlier post, my wallet got drained by a nasty man and unfortunately I had 15 eth in an aave position and about 800 dollars of shitcoins I had recently fomoed into.
Gone, never to be seen again.
I have a separate PC for crypto stuff and I thought this was enough to keep me safe.
Wrong. So very wrong.
I clicked on a dodgy âupdate chromeâ link on my work laptop yesterday, not realizing that I had sync turned on in chrome, meaning metamask (and my seed phrase vault) were on there.
Thatâs the only way I can think this has happened.
Please, use me as a cautionary tale and be more careful with your crypto.
Hereâs the address that got drained in the wee hours of this morning and when I was getting my kids ready for school/nursery.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d06340e5424ea2de37e5a1d2f410f6a0b40d58a
Feel free to do some sleuthing, itâs beyond me Iâm afraid.
Peace.
At risk of tediously adding to the security discussion, risk is always an interesting subject. YMMV but in the several years Iâve been involved in crypto, IIRC, among all the countless losses, hacks, exploits, compromises and thefts that have occurred, of between 4 and 9 $figures in value, (and some of which have sadly involved members of our community), I donât believe a single one has involved the loss, discovery or theft of a physical passphrase, including a physical hardware wallet. Itâs worth adding that during the Ledger leak, which included numerous active names and address (lol - itâs still hard to believe), there was mucho concern about wrench attacks. Again, AFAIK, not a single compromise occurred directly because of that leak, and not a single physical theft was attempted (although clearly email addresses got phished to death after that).
As such, the risk of loss is overwhelmingly associated with getting phished, or (usually mistakenly) storing credentials, including CEX accounts, on hot computers. For most people, best practice and good basic digital hygiene will ensure your crypto is safe.
Remember that security is an on-going process. If you create a new wallet, generating the seed or passwords is not the first step. You should already know what the wallet will be used for, the associated risks, how you are going to secure it and how you will maintain that security. Donât be tempted to âjot downâ the seed temporarily etc. Give yourself time to learn and understand the process before committing funds. Stay safe out there.
To add to the discussion below about crypto security, my personal approach is to have about 20% in CEX and the rest split up among several (hardware) wallets, so if any single wallet gets compromised I can somewhat triangulate the cause of the hack. If you use Trezor you can create multiple wallets on one device using the passphrase function which in concept should protect you if your main seed phrase gets leaked or discovered.
If you do need to use Metamask you can create a separate wallet solely for your Trezor and donât have to store your seeds in an online vault. This should maintain the security of the hardware wallet while also allowing interoperability with dapps. Unfortunately Metamask seems to be the most compatible with dapps but because itâs the most popular is a highly visible target for hackers/viruses.
Lastly, as to my CEX allocation I know ânot your keys, not your coinsâ but having a sizeable amount gives me a higher transaction and withdrawal limit. Also if I need to liquidate assets quickly I can do so on my phone without having to tinker with my Trezor. Knocks on wood I havenât had to re-verify my account and perform KYC for the past 4 years. Always make sure to whitelist your withdrawal addresses.
A cryptocurrency is more than just an economic platform. Even though it has properties as some commodities itâs not just a commodity. Ideally there is a purpose, values and culture.
Beside the protocol we need the social consensus. People that keep up the values such as decentralization. In that sense itâs like a religion. People need to believe in it. And in order for people to believe certain properties need to be satisfied. And when you believe in something you naturally start to evangelize.
Whatever Vitalik has said in public was genuine and well thought through. There are so many people that speak for Ethereum and hold up its values. Whenever somebody of these does something harmful the community holds them accountable.
In my view the same standards are not met by other cryptocurrencies, definitely not by Soylano.
Ethereum has a soul. Itâs more than just an ultrasound decentralized smart contract platform.
And for these reasons it has cultural relevance. A tokenized meme very often derives its value from being on Ethereum. And everyone who creates digital art wants to have it issued on the most pristine platform.
Iâm certainly among the worst people to keep up these values. But I do rest assured because I know that there are many other people better than me precisely doing that and theyâre doing it very well.
So all this cultural relevance, this community ethos and these people that have conviction and believe in Ethereum make me bullish long term. Because in the end precisely these values is all we need to succeed. Roar đŚ!
Kyber exploiter:
"Dear Kyberswap Executives, Employees, Token Holders and LPs,
I said I was willing to negotiate. In return, I have received (mostly) threats, deadlines, and general unfriendliness from the executive team. Thatâs ok, I donât mind.
I have prepared a statement concerning our (potential) treaty. I plan to release it on Nov. 30 at Noon UTC, sharp.
Under the assumption that I am treated with further hostility, we can reschedule for a later date, when we all feel more civil. You need only say the word.
If not, we proceed as planned on Nov. 30.
Thank you."
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5c27d8e9248608f36b028a945f3d6ff31244ab45eb89e1d1a631f608a36454a1
View on Reddit â](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/187bfcu/comment/kbe94lv/)
OkeyâŚthis is a must read. New message from Kyber exploiter, their demands are not like others we have seen and interested to see how the story developed.
Between Hacker and Kyber, users funds are at stake.
https://twitter.com/TheDEFIac/status/1730196414154608785
Edit - c +v below
To ALL relevant and/or interested parties,
I thank you for your attention and patience during this uncertain time for Kyber (the protocol/DAO) as well as Kyber (the company). Below I have delineated a treaty for us to agree to.
My demands are as follows:
Complete executive control over Kyber (the company)
Temporary full authority and ownership over the governance mechanism (KyberDAO) in order to enact legislative changes. My current wallet address is fine for this.
All documents and information related to company / protocol formation, structure, operation, revenues, profits, expenses, assets, liabilities, investors, salaries, etc.
Surrender of all Kyber (the company) assets. This is both On-chain and Off-chain assets. It includes but is not limited to: shares, equity, tokens (KNC and non-KNC), partnerships, blogs, websites, servers, passwords, code, social channels, any and all creative and intellectual property of Kyber.
Once my demands have been met, I will provide the following:
Executives, you will be bought out of the company at a fair valuation. You will be wished well in your future endeavors. You havenât done anything wrong. A small error was made, rounding in the wrong direction, it could have been made by anyone. Simply bad luck.
Employees, under the new regime your salary will be doubled. It is understandable that many current employees will want to leave regardless. The employees who donât want to stay will be given a 12-month severance with full benefits and assistance in finding a new career, no questions asked.
Token Holders and Investors, under this treaty, your tokens will no longer be worthless. Is this not sweet enough? Iâll go further still. Under my management, Kyber will undergo a complete makeover. It will no longer be the 7th most popular DEX, but rather, an entirely new cryptographic project.
LPs, you will be gifted a rebate on your recent market-making activity. The rebate will be for 50% of the losses you have incurred. I know this is probably less than what you wanted. However, it is also more than you deserve.
This is my best offer. This is my only offer. I require my demands to be met by December 10, otherwise, the treaty falls through.
Additionally, should I be contacted by agents from any of the 206 sovereignties, concerning the trades I placed on Kyber, the treaty falls through. In this case, rebates will total to exactly 0.
Kyber is one of the original and longest-running DeFi protocols. No one wants to see it go under.
To assist with this transition of leadership, I may be contacted on telegram: @Kyber_Director
Thank you.
Ethereum
$2070.65
88,530 hodlers subscribed (+5)
0.0554
Flash loan imbiber,
Liquidity in Kyber,
Oracle briber.
Just finished a nice run through the woods. It just occurred to me that I am front-running the pounds I am about to put on tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that. Iâm also mulling over my turkey fulfillment thesis and adjusting my risk appetite accordingly.
To all the experienced blockchain users: As we witness improvements in user experience, particularly in wallet interfaces, do you feel apprehensive when using wallets or dapps that offer a more streamlined, Web2-like account creation and management process?
Iâve noticed that some users, especially in the Influence community, are apprehensive about creating new accounts or using accounts that are set up with an email.
Both Argent and Braavos, the current wallets on StarkNet, that are users interact with, utilize account abstraction, enabling and introducing features that I believe are crucial for bringing the next billion users to blockchain. Yet, this ease of use can sometimes be met with skepticism from existing users. Iâm keen to hear your perspectives on this.
Should we be surprised at the speed with which the ecosystem has encountered a new wave of toxic tribal bickering? No, because compared to the end of the last cycle nothing has materially changed. There has been scaling progress but it is not finished by any means, and e.g. UX is as trash as ever etc.
ETFs are said to be around the corner, but the type of demand they represent is the same kind we are familiar with. Speculative, cyclical demand. Only now itâs in a tax free wrapper! Donât get me wrong, the level of incremental increase in demand could be substantial, but i contend it will not change the dynamics of the crypto ecosystem. So if nothing has changed, we should not expect the nature of the next cycle to have changed. One slight difference is that at this time, the remaining market participants are certainly feeling less flush than they were in the heady days of 2021. Hence the rabid zero sum thinking we see amongst us (well, mainly twitter). At this point we all know the drill, some new and useless protocol or project will make 1000x returns for the few people who rolled the dice early, and many more will volunteer themselves as exit liquidity.
Crypto has absolutely nailed the speculative use case; we do not need, and personally I am not interested in, any more. Games, quests, ponzis, whatever it is, it is all ultimately a waste of time, representing only a desperate grab for each others capital. What I think we crave, and what I am sitting here quietly waiting for, is utility. Yes, this is a 2017 era discussion, but nothing has changed since then. Large, non-speculative, non cyclical, fucking boring. Something that you would do anyway, even in a bear market, or if fees have increased a bit. Something that does not require a funny name for people to use. Something that companies or people will use due to economic gravity rather than hoping number goes up.
Are these use cases possible? I believe so, so I guess I was incorrect to say that I am done with speculation. Iâm still hopeful that blockchains can be used for e.g. supply chains, or something else like that. Why? because with something like this, crypto potentially has the ability to translate economies of scale away from large corporations, and to empower small businesses. Fewer bosses - ace! Not zero sum - ace!
Not all problems need to be solved to open up utility. E.g. a business use case will rely less on UX than a consumer use case. The type of demand I am talking about probably only cares about a few things (assuming the chain being used has the requisite functionality), and secure block space is premier amongst them. Ethereum represents the best potential holistic solution to all of these problems, probably via some L2 solution, primarily because of the strength of its network. Network effects are powerful, if they were not then twitter would be 6 feet under by now. These reasons are why I have read the daily most days since early 2021. I am interested in client diversity, network health etc. Things of that nature are the means by which we create fertile soil for the future. And when the time comes weâll be glad that infrastructure has outpaced the current level of demand in the system.
Gitcoin invited me to develop a bundle for Grants Round 19, and I developed the Stake from Home bundle. These 14 projects make contributions that empower individuals to run nodes and stake from home, and I strongly urge you to make a donation on gitcoin to the bundle. Iâm familiar with all of the projects enough to vouch for them (on varying levels), and Iâm excited for each of them to succeed.
If you donât know how gitcoin funding works: Itâs based on a concept called âquadratic fundingâ, the simple premise is that the number of individual donors guides matched funds more than the amount anyone gives. So 100 people who give $1 each gets matched A LOT more than 1 person who gives $100. The moral of the story is that many hands make light work, so please go donate.
Yes, economic incentives generally favours centralisation and monopols. That is the way things go. Societies try (or not) to find rules and regulations to fight against this general flaw in most modern economic systems. There are a lot of examples where societies failed to do so and have now very few monopolistic suppliers they cannot really break up anymore. There are also examples were societies managed to stop monopolistic set-ups in their track and these then are generally better off compared to societies which did not manage to do that in these specific industrial sectors.
The case with Lido, I did not really have an issue with them for a long time. My simple approach was âIf they can break Ethereum it was meant to be brokenâ. I did not judge them to be a bad actor in the space.
Nowadays I see them as a pretty ruthless actor in the space strategically gobbling up key figures and projects that make them dependent on Lido and do their bidding. At the same time they are spreading false narratives about why they are destined to win. Like âliquidity begets liquityâ which automatically leads to them winning. What actually happens is that in the background they have actors (Karpatkey anyone?) making sure that steth dominance is not really threatened. They preach open and free markets, but actually do backroom deals to achieve their goal.
They also spread the narrative of being the wall against CEX staking and funnily mention a time where CEX staking had more inflow than them as the reason for it. Actually, this was as far as I remember a just a 2 weeks period in spring of 2022 where this was actually true. Again they are gaslighting the community.
They made so much money in the last 3 years, which is understandable because it is a good product. But now they can simply direct their faucet at anyone they want and more or less buy them, or a project. This is especially dangerous during the bear market where everyone is looking for funding.
Same with the current proposal, in the first sentence the state decentralisation is the goal, but the rest of the proposal is a direct attack on the current relatively okayishly decentralised staker landscape. They love decentralisation as long as it is under their controlâŚ
Do I think Lido should be slashed rather today than tomorrow? No, definitely not, but I see them as a threat for the Ethereum ecosystem as they do not even try to hide behind a nice facade anymore.
Devconnect Day 9 (Yesterday)
The last day of Devconnect! The schedule does technically extend through Sunday, but thatâs just the final day of the coworking space and the ETHGlobal hackathon. I had considered doing a little bit of sightseeing in the morning, but it was raining decently hard and I would have been pretty pressured for time, so I decided against it. Instead I just went straight to the dayâs main event: censorship.wtf .
As you might expect, censorship.wtf was all about censorship: what are the problems and potential solutions, particularly as it pertains to Ethereum of course. The day was literally packed: between 11:00 and ~18:00 there were non-stop 20-minute talks scheduled. Not a single break, you just had to pick which talk excited you the least so you could cut out some time for a bathroom break and snacks. Using acronym âcensorship resistanceâ=CR The content was mostly pretty good:
I guess Iâll do a final recap tomorrow. Flying out first thing in the morning back to the other side of the planet. Going to be a long trip.
I think block/mev rewards will be crazy when the next bull starts. If these etfs really are approved, and tradfi money starts flowing in, I want to maximize my chances of winning that lottery. Solo staking I had a 96% chance of getting a proposal every 2 months. Now I have that same chance every 2 weeks. Sure joining the smoothing pool is probably safer, but holding eth as is, is already a lottery ticket to me so why not really play it.
I also re-evaluated the reason Iâm in eth, and thatâs decentralization. I think rocketpool is an essential key to that. By dividing my stake up into as many 8eth pools as I can, Iâm allowing a few hundred eth from other people to also be staked. Looking at reth mints, the demand is definitely there for reth, and with the houston upgrade, I think the demand for node operators will grow. I kinda hate Lido. I think theyâre everything thatâs bad about crypto and capitalism. Un-restrained growth perhaps at the expense of the entire ecosystem. Rocketpool is the opposite of that and I think more people should support it.
The âstake eth on behalfâ thing in Houston is particularly interesting. I can see DAOs finally putting their eth treasuries to work. Also the rpl rewards rework is interesting, because it will hopefully reward/keep those at lower collateral rates above that 10% line.
51% of rpl is staked. The only real sell pressure is from node operators getting out. I thought that cascade would happen weeks ago, but everyone seems content to keep their stake. Even on rewards day it seems like most rpl just gets restaked right back into the systemâŚ
If Iâm interpreting things correctly, most of the remaining un-staked RPL is rpl v1. RPL v1 has basically no liquidity, no movement. These people are just sitting on their rpl, they havenât even converted to v2? That kinda removes a lot more supply from the market in my mindâŚ
Fellow EthfinanciersâŚ
Itâs weird that the market did not move today. Iâd expect one last dump as a farewell. Oh well, thereâs plenty of time for that later. Itâs strange, because I feel what we witnessed today, was the end of the Wild West of cryptocurrency. The Napster Era is over, and soon, with the approval of the ETFs, the banking products, and the inflow of crypto âusersâ, the iPod era will dawn. Nicely packaged, user friendly crypto products, ranging from tokenized stocks (registered and KYCâd strictly, of course) to JPMorgan limited edition Apple^^TM NFTs, barely holding any of the values that make crypto what it is.
The markets will soon start going up, much higher and faster than most anticipate, and I truly believe that Ethereum will be one of the winners. Droves of tourists will soon follow. Most of these people wonât have the slightest idea what âkeysâ are, how you swap on DExes, or even what a smart contract does (Itâs probably something with AI in it).
Those of you that believe in something more than making money, remember why crypto exists. There are some values that are a net good for the world and need to live. The more of those carry over to TradFi, the better weâll all be.
I might be neither a crypto OG or an Ethereum veteran, but it has been an honor going through this bear with you.
Onwards!
Just a rambling vibes take here. 1) CZ has always been a bad actor in crypto. He proposed rolling back the Bitcoin blockchain (doesnât matter your thoughts on btc, this is a huge red flag of not being decentralization aligned). BNB chain is a centralized scam vessel. Heâs clearly been commingling funds and pumping bnb, been calling it forever and you donât need a lawsuit discovery to see it.
So overall this is a good day for crypto. SBF and CZ characters are hugely damaging to the space. Frankly the CEX world is the 1 place where SEC SHOULD be active and cracking down to make sure FTX like theft of user funds never happens again.
They are also attacking kraken and coinbase for âunregistered securitiesâ which is complete nonsense.
Letâs remember what these securities laws are meant to do. Theyâre meant to provide transparency to protect investors. Instead weâve gotten onerous requirements not at all designed for the modern characteristics of crypto entities that has massively stifled innovation and investment especially in the US.
Everyone remembers ICOs negatively because they were so boom bust but actually tons of innovation came out of them and it democratized access to super early stage investing to the crypto community. Now after the harsh and chaotic securities enforcements pretty much only VCs are getting super early stage tokens. Itâs already a reproduction of the private company market where VC has locked out the huge gains from early stage companies from retail investors.
The best world would be where the SEC protects us from SBF CEX and only comes down on true fraud (bitconnect, luna, etc) in the decentralized space. while allowing more experimental types of daos, etc to exist (especially when they are inherently transparent like many already are).
devconnect istanbul is my first crypto related summit, and due to my location itâs also my first experience meeting with people in crypto community irl
devconnect was huge, filled with people of different backgrounds and interests, startups and independent developers that share their knowledge and vision to different problems. i met many interesting people, such as nice people from zksync (hello jack hamer, albiona, alex gluchowski, sasha vlasov, and many others whose name i didnât ask), cool independent infrastructure builders that iâd rather keep anonymous, ilia polosukhin from near, guys from EF (by the way u/domotheus we didnât even shake hands wtf) and rollups teams. i listened speech of many popular founders and devs - vitalik, kartik talwar, sandy peng, jordi baylina, etc etc
it was so interesting to listen to all these speeches despite the fact that i already knew a lot of what they were about :P itâs all about people that have fire in their eyes and are ready to share all their knowledge to everyone at any cost
i also participated in my first hackathon. unfortunately i got sick in the first day and had to code in the hotel, so i missed many opportunities such as finding help from sponsors (yo zksync your compiler is terrible fix it pls) and generally being inside of this unique work atmosphere, but i still made something. in fact i spent 20 hours straight on coding at my first hackathon ever solo without any sleep while being sick af so i think the fact that i at least impressed judges is already somewhat achievement :)
and all this is in the huge beautiful city of istanbul that charges you with emotions every day and hour. i walked like 25k+ steps there every day before devconnect started and i wasnât even tired. people there are always ready to help you even when you donât ask and donât ask anything in exchange. prices in localsâ shops are always ânegotiableâ if you know your own worth xD public transport is really great with almost perfect coverage, istanbulkart is a great system that helps you to avoid so much brainfuck while travelling
all this showed me how boiling and energetic 24/7 the life in the ethereum community and made me even more confident in that we do everything right. thatâs why iâm bullish!
âCasualâ privacy apps
Did you know that there are Ethereum apps that can give you a basic level of anonymity, without having to use a dedicated privacy app? Say you just want to keep people from knowing all your holdings by knowing your ENS name, these would work good. Not so good if you were doing something illegal, as a simple court order could reveal the connection between accounts.
The major apps in this category, I believe, are the StarkEx single-app rollups. You can deposit from one address and withdraw from another. Only the StarkEx operator can see that itâs the same person. For example, see Privacy on rhino.fi for their explanation of how it works.
There may well be other apps in this category as well (let us know if youâre aware of others). For example, Iâve read that ParaSwap allows different deposit and withdrawal addresses, though I donât know if itâs equivalent to the StarkEx rollups in this regard.
You can see all the StarkEx rullups on L2Beat. Use Select stack to filter for just the StarkEx rollups. You can then click through to the individual projects to see how much TVL they have for the token youâre planning to anonymize, e.g. USDC or ETH (I believe dYdX has the most stablecoins and Sorare has the most ether).
Of course, you could use a regular privacy protocol instead. Tornado is sanctioned for US users, however, and others could be in the future, or maybe you just donât want to appear suspicious by using a privacy protocol. I havenât checked, but I assume Tornado still has the most volume. Some other projects Iâve heard about are: Railgun (a lot of mentions here recently), Aztec (highly regarded, but will be deprecated next year as they work on their programmable privacy rollup), Nocturne (new), Firn (sounds terrific but new), and Houdini Swap (seen mentioned here a few times).
Livestream Recording | POAP Checkout
Shorting looked so wise,
Yet it turned out otherwise,
Ether still on the rise.
You need to have a written plan about when you will take profits.
Print it out, sign it, and hang it on your wall as a reminder.
This is fun, but no one can predict what tomorrow might look like.
Most of all, donât fall into the trap of people who would convince you to have diamond hands. They want you to be exit liquidity.
Every now and then, I forget how stressful centralization is. Mostly thanks to avoidance. With forgetfulness comes confidence, so I try again, and Iâm quickly reminded of the cons.
I wanted to use Coinbase to hop from a rollup to another without paying bridge fees. Now theyâre holding my outbound transaction hostage, with an enigmatic Pending. Contacting support nets me people escalating my problem to a âspecialist teamâ, which is meant to email me but apparently not in a rush to do so.
Whatâs going on? Who knows. Complete black box. I suppose so are thirdparty bridges, in a sense⌠Yet I find the experience distinctively different. The dynamic changes when you use a protocol with a Discord channel where developers and knowledgeable users will interact with you. Thereâs more visibility into their processes than with a corporate company presenting you with an interface where nothing suggests the exact nature of the problem, and support is outsourced to a call center where employees might do their best but simply arenât equipped to deal with the matter or deviate from a script.
I suppose that will be my booster shot against sending meaningful sums to a CEX, even as transit.
EDIT: followup, the transfer went through a few hours later. Whew!
We are here, we are few but confident. This is crypto and itâs epic. This is generational craziness that is a unique opportunity.
We should be grateful for this gift.
It marches on even as Powell attempts to tighten and restrain.
Itâs astonishing to watch, I am happy to be here. I missed buying many lows, I missed selling many highs. But my god the thesis is the same as before and donât forget itâŚit is written in stone and it will not change for many many eras. It is beautiful and simple.
Insofar as the disintermediation of a middleman will return value to a party and counterparty, then the market demands that such innovation take place to improve efficiency.
That is why we are here. There will be many scams along the way, there will be lots of trial and error, there will be SBFs and Hoskinsonâs. But we are here to rush gold in a gold rush for digital gold that will upend the traditional social and economic order.
Enjoy the ride, the big boys are coming.
Devconnect Day 1
Greetings from Istanbul! Iâm at Staking Summit to start off my week (and change) of Devconnect fun times. Iâm not going to give as detailed a daily summary as Iâve done for ETHDenver, but hope to give a little insight into whatâs happening.
Devconnect is a collection of independent events organized in the same week and in the same city. Thereâs going to be a general coworking space opening up on Monday and available through the week, but most actual events are only 1-2 days long. Staking Summit is getting started a little âearlyâ, but seems to have gotten decent attendance.
Staking Summit has one stage with a series of talks and panels, a breakout area for occasional workshops, a lot of room for projects to set up booths, and a pretty nice spread of snacks. The event is advertised as being about PoS and staking in general, not just about ETH. I get the impression that some attendees are interested in staking as a financial vehicle, just as a place you can put capital to earn yield without caring too much about what it means. But not too much of that. Saw a lot of familiar faces already, met new folks too.
Most talks were kinda simple. A few things of note:
(Posted this an hour ago, looks like it got deleted somehow? Taking out the links in hope it gets through the filters this time⌠EDIT: Yep, this one worked. Reddit hates links to conference webpages apparently.)
Devconnect Day 2 Devconnect Day 3 Devconnect Day 4 Devconnect Day 5 Devconnect Day 6 Devconnect Day 7
Hereâs some cool tips for people who may not know.
I mainly use the metadex swap by the DeFi llama folks.
Obviously donât click my link and just start using it. Itâs the right link but practice some safety and look for an official source.
It works by querying multiple DEX aggregators, comparing their quotes and gas costs and allows you to choose the best one.
They charge no fee, so when you make a swap you are getting the exact same result that youâd get from swapping through an aggregatorâs UI directly.
As for MEVs and sandwich attacks, everyone making trades on chain should be using an MEV blocking rpc.
Find one here:
https://chainlist.org/?search=Eth
Not all are MEV blockers. The ones I know at a glance are - Llama, Flashbots, MEVblocker. whichever has the lowest latency for you.
Itâs easy to quickly change rpcs on desktop and thereâs no need to get sandwiched by Jared every time you want to trade shitcoins.
In a thread about blockchain on Hacker News, a place with high level of blockchain skepticism (/u/hanniabu is there too fighting the good fight), somebody asked me:
Can you describe to me what the main point of âblockchain technologyâ is? What is there to innovate in terms of its core function?
I took the challenge to heart and wrote out this little post. I am worried that one cannot be exhaustive enough, but there it is.
* Transaction throughput
* Efficiency - allowing small scale players to participate in verification and block production.* Inter-chain communication - some networks are explicitly designed as connected swarms of chains (Cosmos and polkadot for example) and some are evolving in that direction outside of the protocol level (Ethereum). How one executes transactions that span the networks is an ongoing research topic.
* Privacy - how to execute transactions in private. How to attest that something is true, say that you have a certain credential, without exposing your account information. Blockchain has been why zero knowledge (and now homo-morphic encryption) cryptography are becoming an active field of research.
* Identity, authentication, account recovery. - these tie into cryptography but generally research on applied cryptography with good UX. For example the first time Iâve seen social-recovery accounts with any amount of usage (now a feature in Apple accounts) was in a blockchain application.
* Monetary research - far from everybody involved in crypto believes that a fixed-supply rare item makes for good money. âFiatâ money is basically a âtokenâ with governance attached to it. This has lead to a wave of experimentation with other forms of tokens - ones that are algorithmically tied to other assets, ones that are backed by an organization, local currencies, etc.
* Organizational research - since smart contracts can effectively be transparent community banks thereâs has been a plethora of experiments with building organizations that manage their own treasuries. Horizontalism, organizational transparency and cooperation is something thatâs been at the core of many crypto projects, the idea being that something cannot be both a reliable public good and controlled by a single party. Itâs not an easy task, but some cool organizations have come out of this. For an example look at pocket: https://forum.pokt.network/t/messari-pocket-dao-exploring-proof-of-participation-governance/3857
In general, even if the blockchain experiment will fail it has given the world an ideological and technical boost.
Daily Holesky:
Reported a logging bug with Lighthouse and sproul had already created a PR to fix it.
Iâve been playing with the stakelocal grafana dashboard more, and continuing to provide feedback to metanull. One key configuration change I had to do to tone down the spamming of errors in the syslog was to omit the txpool
module from ethereum-metrics-exporter for Nethermind and Besu. This is because Besu doesnât support txpool_status
and ethereum-metrics-exporter doesnât know how to handle the integer values that Nethermind returns for txpool_status
. Iâve created a GitHub issue for this. Another conundrum I ran into was that the external validator and address links were working fine on my mainnet machine, but on my testnet machine, every /
in links was being changed to %2F
rendering them broken. It took me a while to realize that I had used the .deb install method for grafana on the testnet machine instead of adding the repo where it stays up-to-date, so grafana-server was still on v9.5.1 instead of v10.2.0. Upgrading to the current version fixed the issue.
Something that was brought to my attention once I had the dashboard set up for all supported client pairs is that erigon is failing to honor the --maxpeers
flag, so I reported that to their team.
I hope they donât mind, but I must summon the great minds to help me understand the implications of 4844: u/domotheus u/swagtimusprime u/Liberosist
I asked some questions a few days ago around this, but I still donât understand what 4844 will do to L2 smart contracts and the data they hold with the ~18 day pruning.
To my very basic understanding, once 4844 goes live, rollups will use a new transaction type (blob) to commit the rollup data to L1 (instead of calldata). However, by using the blob transaction, the rollup data may be pruned/purged after ~18 days (whether it actually will or not is another thing). Iâve read that this blob data is meant for data availability, not data storage, but I donât understand what that means practically.
So this leaves me with many questions of what this means for smart contracts on L2âs, and I canât get my mind around it. I think perhaps Iâm getting confused between historical blob data for any given moment in time and storage of the current blockchain state (e.g., does the L2 store the current state?). Hopefully these dumb questions will help clear it up for me:
I know I must be thinking about this incorrectly, because if any of this is true, I feel itâs going to massively hamper L2 adoption and usability; that, or Iâm missing some other big piece of the puzzle to mitigate this.
I also assume with full danksharding, the data pruning will be greatly lengthened, so perhaps this is a temporary issue?
Any clarity you can provide would be very much appreciated!
domâs honorary nephew here
nothing in rollups state is ever pruned. currently, all transactions (or state diffs) are posted on calldata and thus are stored forever. when you run a rollup node, you can reconstruct the state yourself from this data on L1.
after 4844, you wonât be able to reconstruct the state from L1 data (unless someone stores all blobs). instead, you follow latest merkle root or anything that belongs only to the latest state (even hash of sqlite database), stored in the contract on L1 and updated each proven batch (ZK proved or challenge time ended). you can be sure that this data about current state is accurate, because it was proven in the past when you werenât around from the data which WAS available then. then, you download the state from anyone with a rollup node. youâll get it if at least 1/N rollup node is honest, because its data will match merkle root or db hash or anything
temporary blobs purpose is to be used by sequencers that prove rollup batch and then update current state âsignatureâ (it can be whatever works, most simple example is merkle root). nodes donât need to store all transactions to reconstruct the state, because they can prove if the latest state that they receive from rollups nodes is actually valid on L1
for example, someone on zk rollup proposes the batch with transactions, sending it in the blob storage. now, everyone has all these txs for the next 18 days. sequencer/s start to generate the ZK proof to this batch, and when theyâre done, they send it on L1 contract, it executes this ZK proof using commitment to the blob (fixed size thing that belongs to the blob and that they can access on EVM; donât ask me how it works this is cryptography magic), and updates merkle root based on what state these txs changed. now this data can be safely pruned and nothing will break, but we also have optimistic rollups that have to wait for the challenge time, so we hold it for 18 days instead of say 2 hours
Recent ARB vote updates:
Using 100M of ARB funds for âStakingâ passed the temperature check on Snapshot. The proposal would take 100m of DAO treasury and pay it out over holders who lock their ARB for 1 year. I voted no for this, as I donât think it adds much value to Arbitrumâs chain and essentially is just paying people not to sell. Any economic value added is temporary, and likely would be out-performed by other projects. We shall see where this goes, as while it passed, there were a decent amount of no votes.
The DAO voted to start an RFP process for security proposals. I voted for this, as I prefer to see these types of things be standardized when people apply to allow for an even playing field.
The âArbitrum Coalitionâ vote failed. This looked to have a group of delegates to be hands on with DAO proposals. Basically coordination and reviewing of proposals at certain stages. I voted no on this, as some of the council also had a large share of voting power. My fear being it would create a centralizing effect. Iâm not opposed to the broad idea, but there needed to be stronger separate of powers here â ideally those on the council had no voting power. I think this failed as a lot of other delegates felt similar to me.
The STIP grants that pass the yes/no voting, but did not meet the 50 million threshold were voted to be backfunded. Honestly, this was a tough one for me. I wasnât a huge fan of back funding projects, especially because of the precedent it will set. However, IMO the DAO really dropped the ball on the first grant round with how it was set up. Iâm not sure punishing the ones that passed, but failed to be as popular, is really great when itâs more the DAOs fault for a poor setup. So in the spirit of the original proposal, I voted to pass but wouldnât be doing this again if a future round finds this issue. Iâll add, the spend was going from 50 million to 71 million. Which didnât seem overly outrageous, and was actually in line with original ARB amounts proposed until it was reduced from 75 Million to 50 Million.
To those possibly concerned, LIDO did fail their yes/no vote so it wouldnât get funded with this round either.
New scammer tactic on an /ethereum staking thread.
Posted a link to a fake staking service (Block Scape) which they immediately upvoted with ~30 bots. I called it out in a reply. So far so normal.
They then deleted their original comment, blocked me so that I canât report them or reply again and then upvoted the new one. Very annoying strategy.
Stay safe out there, and if anyone wants to do a favour and report the scammer then please do!
[Edit, and of course they are now using their bots to downvote my top level comment calling them out.]
No Livestream | No POAP
Weekly Doots âAnnouncements
â¨Eâ¨tâ¨hâ¨eâ¨râ¨eâ¨uâ¨mâ¨
0.0526
$1783
For a crust of bread,
Hunting the next airdrop shred,
Keeping us all fed.
Iâve held my silence for too long.
In my country the word âdootâ means vagina.
Itâs also slang for currency, 1 Doot = ÂŁ1.
A common jibe here is âSmell yer doot mate.â
A few days ago I made my âLetâs make ETH Finance a Governance Powerhouseâ post. First of all thank you for the positive feedback both with comments and upvotes! I have been thinking some more about it and even though there wasnât a real pushback, I would like to update it and cut it down to three steps.
After reading my own post a couple of times, I asked myself. âHow would you respond to this if this was posted by someone else?â My gut feeling: Itâs a good idea, but itâs too complex. We need to start with an MVP for governance and coordination. Hence, hereâs a short âMinimum viable coordinationâ (MVC) update:
1) Coordinate
Once an airdrop is announced, we try to coordinate as fast as possible.
We collect potential delegates from this community. Members can both announce their motivation to be a delegate for the protocol and members can suggest other members.
We publish a list of âalignedâ delegates that are close to this community, but not daily active.
We try to focus on a few delegates to make sure âourâ delegates have a lot of tokens delegated and hence governance power.
Obviously everyone is still free to become a delegate, but if we can achieve to agree on e.g. 2-3 âofficialâ candidates that focus on one protocol, this would have a lot of benefits. My suggestion is also to that the âofficialâ delegates should be delegates for one protocol only. My best educated guess is that the time needed for âgoodâ/âprofessionalâ governance will be up only and in the future being a delegate for 2+ protocols will be very hard.
2) Delegate
Well, this part is easy. We delegate our tokens to our âofficialâ delegates.
Why is it an extra step? Just to emphasize that itâs coordination first and delegation second. Or in other words: I think it would be very beneficial if we all be patient. Donât claim on day one since most of the time the delegation is part of the claiming process. Letâs try to make sure we really had some time to agree on candidates.
3) Communicate
This is happening already, but we should do this as much as possible. Tag your delegates if you have question/ feedback. Or as a delegate: Talk to the community, ask for feedback if you are a delegate.
The delegates are our ears and eyes for that protocol. E.g. I would have missed the LDO proposal, but I am very happy it was discussed here. We need this kind of activity to inform the community, align and coordinate even better than before.
â
I think this MVC is way better than the first one. Yeah, reporting sounds cool, but it might be overblown (and corporate?). And yes, preparation for a potential airdrop sure makes sense, but could also be a lot of work for something that never happens. Letâs try to coordinate ad-hoc when there is a need. If that works out, we can always improve and add more steps.
Airdrops are usually a big news and my guess would be that members that are mostly reading here will come to ETHFinance on these days. By definition I will not know what most of those lurkers will think of my suggest or do when we need to coordinate, but allow me to state this: You are the majority of this community and you all - as a group of lurkers - probably have more governance tokens than the active / posting members. I would really appreciate your silent coordination by reading and silent acting by delegating your tokens to a delegate from the community!
Reddit is sunsetting community points across cryptocurrency ethrader, and Fortnite BR⌠I donât know what the next move will be for the project as a whole, but Iâm still very very happy. We did not get involved with such a centralized mess of points and karma
Moon price dumped big time prior to the announcement also which speculated the moderators had inside her information this was going to happen on /r/cryptocurrency and Fortnitebr specifically.
thatâs all speculation based on a tweet Iâve ever had that. Showed the timing of everything. /u/spacesider hear anything like that?
https://x.com/DegenerateNews/status/1714353397330002253?s=20
EditâŚethtrader too https://reddit.com/r/ethtrader/s/mxYAn7ShXP
Double edit⌠holy shit looking through those subs and the amount of fighting and pissed off people over something we all knew years ago, was going to ruin the Reddit experience.
passing up that opportunity was the best thing moderators here couldâve done because it is a complete train wreck now over there in those other subs .
also, Reddit red hats have just created such a catastrophe by not seeing this through or figuring out the token mechanics of it âŚ. they basically told the moderators it was going to be over in a month and that was that. They shouldâve just rugged everybody equally the same time but they didnât.
and just donât understand why they didnât put more effort into figuring out the token mechanics. Who knows it was probably because of all the discord pump groups that are being talked about as well with the vote manipulation. Color me shocked. ⌠maybe it was a regulatory thingâŚ. who knows but there was not enough effort to see it through after such a long, hard road of picking out which layer two to use, etc..
Watch those communities evaporate quickly. I have no doubt they will probably see a good 75 to 80% less traffic because of all the click farm activity and Discord vote manipulation tactics.
There was a post in yesterdays daily regarding Reddit community points and JT tagged me and asked for my input, and I have only seen the post just now, so I will follow up in todayâs daily for greater visibility /u/jtnichol
Basically, we were both privately and abruptly told by the admins that community points are getting killed and they will be no more in just a few weeks. 1 hour later the admins shared this information to the wider community. So /r/CryptoCurrency mods knew about this before everyone else, as well as the mods also over at /r/FortNiteBR and /r/ethtrader too as they also have RCP. (Reddit community points).
Well, some mods used this private information to their own personal advantage and decided to sell, because the price was going to obviously crash when it was to be made public one hour later.. Some more information in that link.
Itâs also been reported on two big websites if anyone want additional details.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/reddit-mods-dumped-tokens-hours-before-blockchain-program-termination
This is really not a good look and I have absolutely no idea what (If any) potential consequences of this is going to be. My personal thoughts on the matter?
When RCPâs were first announced (Around half a year prior to me becoming a mod), I voiced my concerns as a comment on the announcement.
Many years and countless hours later from everyone involved, I must say that it is still sad to see it go because this could have been a huge opportunity for Reddit to make web 3 way more mainstream than it currently is. So this is probably going to set things back a bit for us. I guess Reddit are only focused on money though and if it initiatives like this canât bring them in more money (Probably due to rumours about how they want to IPO), then they will be axed to make things look prettier for investors. So probably the entire Reddit platform might go in an entirely new direction.
We did ask if the smart contract could potentially get handed over to the mods for us to continue in our own capacity, but the admins havenât said anything back to us about this.
I guess now that upvotes are not monetised anymore there will be a big drop in comments and in theory an increase in quality, as all the people who participated only to farm karma will now (hopefully) move onto other more productive things. I guess time will tell!
I find this so fucking weird. The artists that have branched into NFTs love it from what it seems.
I get 100% of the primary sales. Galleries take 50%. For the entire month of July I sold a teeshirt. $20. [Redditâs Collectable Avatar] program allows me to make art every day.
âŚbefore this project I was pretty against NFTs for all the obvious reasons that most people are. Mainly the predatory, mlm scamming structure that turned a lot of people off to them. But people need to know that this project is far more like patreon, your purchase goes right to the artist. You see an artist you like and want to aid them? you throw them a couple bucks. To be honest seeing the resales was even a surprise to me. But I donât see it that different than any other form of investing, itâs all numbers on a screen to me. I would, however encourage people to not get over their heads and play it safe. Please donât gamble your life away.
I actually intend to recycle my earnings into putting on art shows and installations myself. Iâm sick of begging galleries for attention, Iâm just gunna rent out warehouses and do it myself and invite the public to see. Not only did this program free me from the extreme stress of trying to make rent, it allows me to circumvent the dusty old gate keeping artworld and do what I want to: to show the whole world my art. This program is dope as shit.
Iâm currently writing an article about statelessness/verkle trees, trying to do the same thing I did for blobspace where I start from the very ground up to explain the problem and the solution.
I guess most ethfinanciers are already familiar with a good chunk of the âfrom the ground upâ section, but it doesnât hurt to see where some confusion remains. So Iâm trying something here: AMA about statelessness and stuff and Iâll try to answer and itâll be mutually beneficial and what not
Excerpt below from a newsletter I get called The Defi Edge - it is uncanny how exactly it describes me and my behaviour in the last 2 cycles. Like he could literally have been writing my story.
Anyone else do this?
âHave you ever heard that it takes roughly 3 Crypto cycles before youâmake it"?
Youâre an idiot in the 1st cycle. Youâre figuring out all the basic concepts. You trust influencers a little bit more than you should.
4 years laterâŚ
Youâre smarter in the 2nd cycle, but you become a little too overconfident. You think, âThis time, itâs different.â Youâre not taking profits like you should and mis-time the market cycle.
4 years laterâŚ
The 3rd cycle. You either âmake it,â or you repeat the same mistakes. Notice the 4 years part.
This isnât League of Legends or Chess, where you can play every day if you want to. The bull market tends to come once every 4 years on average. So, your âfeedback loopsâ are slower."
The US Government is Trying to Kill Crypto latest Bankless podcast.
If you are a U.S. citizen, give the IRS and Treasury what for using the AI tool https://treasuryraid.lexpunk.army/
You have seven days.
Iâm surprised staking hasnât gotten more degen light. All you see is like 3.7% APR when you solo stake bluh bluh. Yes, thatâs helpful and thatâs too intellectual.
Why wouldnt we just make it intellectual cause we can calc averages etc etc and move on? well thatâs how I did it too but staking isnt just that for humans.
Let me explain a bit more.
Staking has consistent rewards which are quite negligible unless you are a whale but you get some passive income and that feels stable, secure and good and it can even attract the crowd that does FatFIRE and all that stuff in tradfi.
However, thereâs more to staking. Thereâs a sync committee which is again more stable gains while you are there yet the key part is that itâs random occurrence in oneâs process.
And the ultimate form of dopamine rewarding would be a block proposal. Timing of that is random (yes thereâs a probability the same way thereâs a probability in blackjack or roulette) and on top of that - the reward is random! So you are basically having a chance at winning the lottery (also way better chances than in real lottery) and you get to play it for free!! Well, kind of. You have to stake.
So unless you are a big corporate entity or in a smoothing pool (altho that would still apply to some degree but not so much), just the possibility of having stability (thru regular attestations) + some occasional bonus for doing the job well (sync comm) + free lotto tickets that can be lifechanging (block proposals) !!! I feel like if more people knew this was the case instead of just boring APY part they mightâve been staking purely in hopes of degening in a smart way (since you lotto tickets are free) and helping out the decentralization in the process.
Anyways, im curious what has your experience been like? do you feel some excitement staking or at least whenever you get notifications about sync comm + proposing blocks? if not, how does it make you feel then?
I am moving out of Lido and decided to âWithdrawâ instead of trade out my stEth. They say this may take 1-4 days. Anyone build any good way to more accurately predict when my withdrawal will take place and be ready to claim? Iâm patient but just wondering if thereâs a better estimate somewhereâŚ
EDIT: Little more research. So Lido creates an NFT that is minted the second you create a withdraw request. The NFT is then âtransferredâ and burned once the eth is ready to claim and claimed. So with a little bit of guessing, you can see when the last âtransferâ was and how long it took between their mint and the transfer and guesstimate. Example of one that has been minted and transferred. About 5 days and 9 hours from request withdraw to being claimed. Of course it might have been ready at 4 days and it took 1 day and 9 hours for the user to claim it⌠Anyway, I wait patiently :) I feel better doing a withdraw and knowing the stETH is being burned instead of transferred onto someone else.
Guest appearance by Greg Di Prisco, Co-Founder of Ajna, a noncustodialand permissionless lending protocol that requires no governance or external price feeds.
Announcements
Warping not bridging,
EVM is not judging,
Just network switching.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 860,027 (+2,531)
Pending validators: Joining 0, leaving 0
Since I have started tracking this
151 days have passed
The amount of active validators has increased from 572,820 to 860,027 (+287,207)
The amount of staked ether has increased from 18,330,053 to 27,520,638 (+9,190,585)
Which is around 14,228,587,979$ in USD value using todayâs Ethereum price.
Making a pilgrimage to see the burial site of our beloved, Gary the Cow today.
Edit: I arrived!
Thoughts on the victory over Lido in Arbitrumâs STIP round (apologies for a bit of a brain dump):
1) Today - We should celebrate, be grateful and allow ourselves the happy vibes of the âgoodâ side winning. Weâve won a battle, but as I said a couple of weeks ago this is going to be a long war. One of the best ways to build resilience to keep grinding is to pay attention to the rewards your brain gives you when you win.
2) Tomorrow - If you harassed a delegate to get them to vote, or to change their vote or whatever then reach back out to them over the next few days. Everyone likes it when you say thanks, and everyone prefers it when they donât feel like you forget about them after youâve got what you wanted.
If delegates voted no after you messaged them, or even if no one contacted them then why not message them to suggest they take a look in EthFinance of Reddit? Sales teams and political lobbying groups take people out to dinner to keep them on side, maybe our equivalent to that would be inviting delegates here⌠I honestly think that The Daily is a more valuable Ethereum community than any Discord or Telegram group, so why not leverage some of that value to buy goodwill from DAO delegates who have shown themselves to be at least somewhat aligned to the cause of protecting Ethereum L1.
3) Next Week - With Lido losing here, being vampire attacked, and the threat they pose being discussed in multiple Ethereum podcasts recently itâs a good time to press the advantage. Up the âsocial pressureâ (which it turns out can be quite useful after all) by calling out their attempts at spin and damage control. u/hanniabu has set a great example of doing this. Their representative who proposed the Arbitrum request was on Twitter claiming the results were ârazor tightâ, so donât let them control the narrative.
In a dogfight one of the ways you beat an opponent is by overwhelming their Cognitive Load, give them too many things to think about to be able to effectively counter all of them. Lido have a lot to think about at the moment so weâd be throwing away an advantage if we let the pressure up too much.
4) The Future - We need to get more coordinated. Weâve got delegates in lots of DAOs but can we find more? Can we start compiling resources of delegates that might not be part of EthFinance but can be relied upon to recognize the threat Lido represents if they come knocking for funds and integrations? Can we start predicting where they might go next and reach out to delegates in other DAOs before any decisions even get put to them?
u/_WebOfTrust has discussed the possibility of changes to constitutions that would prevent these kinds of funding requests for Lido even coming to the proposal stage, what would that look like and what DAOâs might take it up?
How can we keep respected Ethereum media discussing this? Obviously some members (like u/EvanVanNess) are already working on that, Iâm sure we can try to keep the focus on for some others too. The Bankless guys used to frequent here sometimes and have had a recent episode with Danny Ryan as well as promoted Divaâs Vampire attack, lets praise and promote those positive actions to encourage them to do more.
We need to get to grips with how important votes in the ecosystem work, before the final day of their decisions - it was pretty funny the number of different interpretations as to how Arbitrumâs pass/fail was decided, I certainly didnât understand it until yesterday evening. It worked out fine this time, but we can learn from that and do better next time.
Because there will be a next time. Ultimately I believe that competition from other staking protocols is going to be the solution to getting Lido below 22%, but that wonât happen quickly, and Lido will fight hard to grow as much as they can before other options can catch up. The social layer is not the long term way to get this fixed, but is is a tool we have now and may be the best we have to defend our network for the near future - so lets learn from this victory and hone the abilities we have so that we can hold the line and push back for as long as we need to. Iâve never felt more optimistic that itâs possible for us to do so.
Governance token holders everywhere, particularly ARB holders or even OP and other governance token holders who delegate â now is a good time to ask yourself if you are happy with who you have delegated your tokens to. After the recent Lido ARB proposal, some names I once knew have either gone up or down in my personal reputation. It may be worth checking all protocols which you delegate your tokens on and check your delegateâs track record and change or speak up if necessary.
Changes of who I see as reputable.
Reputation gain: +++
L2Beat
Griff Green
David Mihal
u/Bob-Rossi (like he isnât already top tier)
Basically all of the University blockchain clubs (Princeton, Cornell, Michigan)
Reputation Loss: â
ChainLinkGod
Galxe
Name and shame/praise baby. Whoâd I miss?
Piggybacking on all the recent discussions regarding DAOs here, I aim to provide another perspective.
Two years ago I resolved to, along with the invaluable work of other ethfinanciers, launch PreservationDAO. Our aim is to preserve habitat by purchasing land of significant ecological value using funds generated by on-chain donations.
The landscape of Ethereum has obviously changed drastically since then, but our ideas and general plans were compiled by the great /u/haurog, and can be found at https://github.com/preservationdao/preservationdao.
We were quickly met with a wide array of challenges and obstacles. Some of these issues have likely been solved to some extent by this point.
I will assume that any interested members have read the linked github page. The following will be an attempt to address some of these challenges, and to detail solutions where available.
I personally lacked the funds necessary to get this project off the ground. Unfortunately, this has not changed.
We felt it wrong to launch an environmentally-oriented project on a proof of work chain. Post-merge, this is a non-issue. However, we may still want to choose a L2 to avoid high gas fees.
I spent quite a long time trying to find an appropriate law firm to help create a land-owning, on-chain, 501 (c) (3) organization, to no avail.
Ensuring that the meatspace treasury has no ability to embezzle funds is paramount, and I dont see a clear solution.
With a non-transferable ERC-20(or NFT?) that is distributed to donators, who may then vote for lands to purchase, how do we mitigate sybil attacks?
Ensuring that qualified contributors are able to make their donations tax-exempt is a priority. This project must not be limited to properties within the US.
What assets should we accept as donations? There are many downsides to market selling ETH in order to purchase property.
I implore any interested ethfinanciers to contribute in any way possible.
I would love to see this comment receive significant traction. Otherwise, PreservationDAO can be re-shelved until we have a clear path to success laid out.
JP Morgan Onyx on Digital Identity in Web3
They have a video and are doing a 4-article series.
The first one - The Big Shift - was released back in 2022.
Letâs see what they understand.
New web - new rules.
New verification methods that are more secure, trustworthy and easier to use.
Prior to the blockchain and even so far, the digital online world has been copying the physical world leading to many issues around identity pieces:
⢠unsecured communication
⢠inefficient and dangerous practices
⢠stolen identities
⢠much more
Web3 - introduces new possibilities.
They clearly understand how web1 changed the world through e-commerce and how web2 sparked innovation through the rise of social networks and user-generated content.
What about web3? It brings the pieces of:
Decentralized system:
⢠Digital ownership of your data
⢠Ownership of your assets
⢠Flips the relationship between companies and users
& many more possibilities
⢠Adds more cross-platform utility
⢠Adds provenance
⢠Adds immutability
That means web3 can bring another magnitude of innovation:
⢠Streamlining online business models (less friction for users)
⢠Saving time (reduce verification times)
⢠Making proving easier, more secure and private
⢠Reducing costs and unlocking more liquidity (faster and transparent public services)
For all of that to work we need to Update our Digital Identity.
Thatâs where Decentralized Digital Identity comes with a range of benefits:
⢠Sovereignty (you have control and choice of your data)
⢠Security (no points of failure)
⢠Immutable and irrefutable (highly trustworthy information)
While all of that sounds good, itâs a very complex challenge to bring all the pieces together.
This leads us to their second article - Assessing Web3âs Identity Building Blocks - was published sometime in 2023.
First of all, they are reiterating their points from the first article.
But now they are getting a bit more specific and tangible.
Starting with an overview of the digital identity landscape and highlighting 4 essential building blocks.
⢠Names
⢠Email addresses
⢠Accounts numbers
⢠Social handles
& many more
Web3 ones are:
â Ethereum Naming Service (ENS)
⢠Turns 42-character Ethereum public address into a human-readable name
⢠Represents multifaceted identity
⢠Includes a variety of blockchains
⢠Utilizes offchain information
⢠Includes website URLs (domains)
⢠All other identifiers
All of that is in one name!
â &Lens handle*
⢠A user profile on the social graph of Lenster, Lenstube, etc
â Other naming services as identifiers (Unstoppable Domains and others)
DIDs (Decentralized identifiers) are fundamental blocks of the self-sovereign identity (SSI):
⢠uniqueness (no confusion)
⢠provability (proof of ownership)
⢠portability (owned by an owner and cannot be deleted, cross-platform usage)
Itâs just a sneak peek and more is coming in the next article!
Examples:
Proof of Humanity (PoH) - Ethereum-based social identity verification system
Soulbound tokens (SBT) - public, permanent, non-transferable NFTs that can represent a personâs digital identity attributes onchain.
Verifiable Credentials (VCs) - A W3C data model for sharing and verifying identity credentials that can be stored offchain allowing for privacy and scalability.
It is a key part of oneâs identity and makes us who we are.
POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) is a notable example of this.
NFTs contributing to oneâs identity:
⢠profile pictures (PFPs)
⢠digital art
⢠in-game items
⢠membership NFTs
& more
Digital Identity can bring all the pieces together.
To gain scale and mass adoption, itâs crucial for wallets to enable a seamless building of oneâs digital identity.
Account Abstraction (AA) solves some of those challenges.
Combining 4 of the essential blocks (Identifiers, Identity attributes, Reputation, and Digital collectibles & assets) with one another, can form a holistic identity.
Onyxâs experience with Decentralized Digital Identity:
⢠observing the DID space from 2017
⢠identified use cases
⢠built concept solutions
⢠explored digital identity for institutions on public blockchains and experimented with VC and DID technology through a collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and SBI Digital Asset Holdings
⢠remain open-minded and continue exploring other methodologies for a variety of use cases
The conclusion of this article leads back to their digital identity part of the site.
They have a range of documents on other web3 and crypto-related topics.
It is obvious, that they are not thinking about Digital Identity in isolation as they are aware of nuance niches within web3 such as metaverse, DeFi, and even real-world assets.
They clearly articulate how it can be helpful for:
⢠online interactions (ownership, portability, security)
⢠creators (by moving platforms)
⢠gamers (asset-interoperability)
⢠real-world applications
In navigating the rich space of Web3, JP Morgan Onyx lays a strong emphasis on the transformative power of Decentralized Digital Identity. Their explorations highlight the potential that comes with blending digital identity with emerging tech realms like metaverse, DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi and the tangible world itself.
What else do you already see that JP Morgan Onyx still doesnât?
This is one of my biggest learnings: itâs so easy to spend ETH in a bull market. So many cool narratives. So many people making a quick buck.
And to be fair: you should be experimenting because thatâs how you learn. But you should also keep in mind that every buy diminishes your ETH stack. Your long term bet. The asset that will not go to zero next bear.
So I think a budget for experiments works well. Donât spend more than the budget and youâre good.
Around 3 years ago I realized this. EVERYONE wants your BTC and ETH.
Just hold BTC and ETH and forget about it, thatâs probably the most boring strategy but also the most rewarding and less stressfulâŚ
My Plan for 2025 is to convert all the 2017 and 2021 shitcoins into BTC, ETH, USDC and maybe another token I want to bet on.
Letâs make ETH Finance a governance powerhouse
In the light of the lido threat and their ARB request this community has shown a brilliant reaction. The topic was heavily discussed, delegates coordinated and a lot of great posts have been made. u/minimalgravitas made this post last week and I would like to add some thoughts with regards to âThe Futureâ since I completely agree that we need to coordinate even more than ever before.
Some assumptions before I start outlining my thoughts
So how can we coordinate more/ better to become a governance powerhouse? I think we need to be structured and prepared beforehand. I also think that for now (letâs call it âphase oneâ) we should also limit ourselves to the current community. Still this will be a huge change and will probably need people dedicating a good amount of time to make things happen.
Step 1: Analysis/ Identification:
This step needs to be done both internally and externally. These steps should happen regularly to be prepared for e.g. an airdrop, possibly every 3 to 6 months (tbd), but potentially also ad-hoc.Internally: We need to understand our members strengths, interests and availability. Some questions I would ask to identify potential delegates: Who is capable of representing ETH Finance as a delegate? Is the member focussed on a certain topic/ category? Is the member a delegate already? Is the member free and willing to work as a delegate? I think people should both be able to suggest other members, but also apply as a delegate.Externally: We need to understand which protocols / categories of protocols are critical to ETHs health, both direct and indirect. Direct in this case means e.g. relevant for ETHâs security and / or decentralization. Indirect could mean because of a large treasury and its economic power.So let me give you an example:I think the EigenLayer airdrop will happen at one point in time in the future. Letâs assume the token is a governance token. A lot of smart people see Restaking as a potential threat to Ethereumâs security. Hence I think we should try to make sure there is (at least!) one community delegate for EigenLayer.We should identify capable and willing members now to make sure once the airdrop happens we can act fast. Personal opinion to make it even more concrete: I would suggest u/hanniabu for EigenLayer delegate because I believe restaking is critical and believe that they have proven themself in the past couple of weeks both on reddit, but also on twitter.Best case we can identify up to 3 delegates per critical protocol so that we can act fast. Down the road we would basically have a table that serves as an overview of potential delegates per category.
Example:
Step 2: Coordination and delegation
This step will usually be helpful after a token launch/ airdrop. It basically formalizes step 1.After a token launch announcement we try to understand our âpowerâ, so try to get a feeling for our power by estimating our token allocation (this will be fun, cause it will be so hard to estimate lurkers and their allocations). Based on this we agree on a number of delegates.After that we ask the potential candidates if they are still interested and confirm 1-x âofficialâ delegates. The process? To be defined! Most likely via reddit, maybe an extra post? The daily?Important: obviously everyone is still free to run as a delegate even if they are not the âofficialâ community delegate. Also everyone is still free to delegate to a completely different delegate. We canât tell people to not run as a delegate and we canât force people to delegate to the communityâs candidate.From my point of view the goal of this step is to delegate as many tokens as possible to the âofficialâ candidate to make sure our representatives have power. I think itâs better to have 3 candidates with 1M tokens each than to have 30 candidates with 100k tokens (or even less because people choose external candidates).But why would you do that? This is where step 3 comes in:
Step 3: Collecting feedback
I think we have a big advantage over other delegates: We can crowdsource feedback. Or in other words your delegates will usually understand your position (because you post it or upvote those comments that summarize your position in the best way possible) and will best case act based on the feedback.So what should the process look like? I think there are two possible ways.Delegate driven: The delegate will usually be aware of important topics, discussions and votes. They could either publish their position on a certain topic in the daily or they could ask for feedback if they have no idea/ position yet. I think this is the best scenario, but this might not work all the time. Delegates might not see a certain vote as critical as the community, might not have enough time to check all discussions proactively etc.Community driven: So the community members could tag the delegate to express their view on a certain issue. I think this has already worked pretty well the past couple of weeks and is already part of the community DNA.Based on the feedback the delegate forms their opinion and votes. Important: The delegate is of course (?) free to make the decision they think is best. The community feedback is a suggestion on how to vote, but not binding. If people are unhappy with the delegate they are free to redelegate (see step 5).
Step 4: Reporting
I think it would be beautiful if there was some kind of âreportingâ back to the community. This could be a summary of the votes of the past, feedback the delegate got in the process (cause the delegate will likely be in touch with other delegates), information about other delegates that have a similar stance as we are and generally things the delegate thinks are important.The goal would be to learn what delegates have learned and allow for some âbehind the scenesâ for interested members. This reporting could be a written report, but maybe some delegates would also be open to join the weekly EVM meeting in Discord.
Step 5: Evaluation and (re)delegation
The last step is evaluating the delegateâs actions and potentially redelegation. In a best case scenario the evaluation just results in⌠nothing. People are happy, feel that the delegate did a great job and represented this community well. But we obviously have to accept that this wonât be true all the time. Redelegation could happen if a member goes inactive, votes/acts against the communityâs values/ interest, etc.To be honest I donât know how often this should be done, maybe once a year and whenever there are big decisions? In the end this is what some members have been documenting the past couple of days with external delegates and changes in reputation.
âRegular reminder:
If you see an article sayingâVitalik sends XXX ETH to [exchange]â, itâs not actually me selling, itâs almost always me donating to some charity or nonprofit or other project, and the recipient selling because, well, they have to cover expenses.
I havenâtâsold" ETH for personal gain since 2018."
https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xb8ccf84d
â
Mad respect for Vitalik, all the onchain alert on twitter of him selling and causing panic while its all just donation to charity.
Time to promote decentralized LSTs to be added to Eigen Layer nexthttps://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1714331518775279990
Here is how you can get involved:
LSTs currently included and whether they are decentralized or not:
It seems the one we should support the most is Stakewiseâs SETH2, so if anyone has that you should set a reminder to vote starting October 25th. Unfortunately thereâs only a supply of 85k ETH since their old v2 implementation has been paused, so thereâs limited voting power.
But the good thing is that you can also vote if you have any ETH restaked. Iâve reached out to Diva to petition for their inclusion.
-â
Edit:
https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1714331527025476017
As for voting - you decide the stage! Decide on which L2 the competition should take place. Cast your vote now!đłď¸ Deadline: October 20th before the contest launches.
Current poll results:
Base - 34.2% | Arbitrum - 54.9% | Polygon - 7.5% | Mantle - 3.4%
Have we done the new UNI fee stuff?
How Uniswap Labs (the VC funded company) is adding a 0.15% fee to the (primary) frontend it controls, as well as their wallet app? Itâs 3x the long awaited fee switch for UNI token holders, going entirely to benefit the company.
And they have announced it the day after they pushed through a vote approving $50 million in funding (by dumping the UNI token) for the Labs company by the Uniswap Foundation/DAO - with zero explanation of what it is for or what itâll be used for - just an opaque ($46 million for 2 years please - weâll use it well, pretty please).
Itâs just incredibly brazen. Uniswap is a fantastic product but my god the incentive misalignment between the team and VCs (who want to drive value to the company equity which they own more of and which has fewer regulatory hassles) and token holders is crazy (team and VCs also own a ton of UNI of course but they own more of the company and would prefer to monetize the company, especially since it doesnât have regulatory hassles for them like the token - BUT, they will use their voting power to block any attempts to turn the fee switch on for UNI holders, to avoid aforesaid regulatory hassles for them - all while disingenuously talking about how UNI holders can vote to turn on the fee switch if they want).
Why do people hold UNI anymore after the relentless screwing of token holders by the team/VCs/company?
Like I said - Uniswap is a great product but the team/VC/founders leave awful taste in the mouth with their greed and screwing of token holders. Also there were some very unpleasant allegations about Hayden screwing over early investors and people who helped him bootstrap and not giving them the equity they were promised etc last year - think there was a long Twitter thread by Ric Burton? I think I need to emphasize that we only heard Ric Burtonâs side of the story and every story has two sides, but it all sounded quite plausible and in line with the kind of ethos that Uniswap Labs has now..
Self-examination is critical for long term success. Everyone has been in the dumps about the ratio, but instead of lamenting it we ought to be asking what we can do to improve Ethereum.
Maybe itâs not our fault. Doesnât matter.
Maybe bitcoin just had the first mover advantage. Doesnât matter.
Maybe the value is flowing into bitcoin because theyâll have the first spot etf. Doesnât matter.
What DOES matter is what the Ethereum community and developers are doing in the face of that. Ethereum is 10x more technically sound than bitcoin, so what can we do to stop suffering through the leak?
We can celebrate our victories and focus on the path forward.
The social layer has shown incredible resilience in the face of a centralizing LSD.
Our L2 capacity strategy is really paying off with a rich garden of successful L2 chains like arbitrum, optimism, polygon, zksync, base.. all of which are developing their own ecosystems that feed growth back to Ethereum.
We have quickly moved on from the success of the merge, but let me remind you that we hotswapped our consensus mechanism to improve the operation of the network AND we reduced energy consumption by 99.99%. We ought to be writing this with sharpie markers in every bathroom stall in the world.
The EIP 1559 fee burn mechanism is a complete success. Sure, weâre not ultrasound right now but that burned Ether is gone forever and the exercise in implementing EIP 1559 solidified our ability to develop and improve sound monetary policy.
WE are the chain of innovation and new growth. Practically everything new thatâs happening is happening on Ethereum. The Eth killers have all passed away and bitcoin doesnât have the technical ability to do the things that a smart contract platform can do.
Weâre slowly moving closer to a US legal framework that supports the foundations of cryptocurrency. I acknowledge that itâs slow af, but itâs definitely moving in a favorable direction.
Now. What are you celebrating? What have I missed? What can we do better? THESE are the questions we need to ask as we accept agency over our current situation.
Guest appearance by Billy Luedtke from Intuition, a project that aims to have identity for everything on the blockchain
Ethereum
0.0576
$1539
Who wants a T-Bill?
Why not a savings account?
Staking is the thrill.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 857,496 (+2,070)
Pending validators: Joining ~500, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
You need a story before bed Phiz.
To punish Ethereum, Moloch created a woman named TheCommunity, molded to look like the beautiful goddess Aphrodite.
Zeus brought her to Earth to be Ethereumâsâ wife. He was taken with her beauty and wanted to marry her, despite his developerâs warnings of the godâs trickery.
As a wedding present, Zeus gave TheCommunity a box, telling her never to open it. But as Zeus knew, TheCommunity was degen, she couldnât stay away from the box and the urge to open it overcame her. Terrible things flew out of the box: centralization, MEV, scams, Bitcoin maxis, disinformation, LSTs, charlatans, and exploits. All of lifeâs miseries let out into the world.
As quick as she could, TheCommunity slammed the lid of the box back down. The last thing remaining inside of the box was Hope.
Ever since, Ethereans have been able to hold onto this hope in order to survive the wickedness that TheCommunity had let out.
1 week of holesky testnet operations. 50 thousand genesis validators split across 15 or so giga nerds from the rocketpool discord. I have several thousand running on a Ryzen 5 5560U, 32GB @ 3200, 2TB NVME. CPU is tuned to 25W in the bios. Iâve got the wattmeter hooked up now and will be monitoring total system usage and see what it averages out to. Goal is to tune as low as possible without borking something. Current usage is about 37w, but it just booted back up and is syncing. Mainnet NUCs are around 15w. Still, kinda crazy to think one could secure $150,000,000 worth of the ethereum networkâŚfor 37 watts. Itâs likeâŚa medium sized solar panel and battery/inverter setup could do this for years. Greenpeace eat your heart out.
Something I didnât consider before operating this node was the time it takes to load keys. Itâs basically instantaneous with a couple validators. With several thousand it takes 30+ mins. Gotta reboot? Itâs 30+ mins before everything is kosher again. Ethstats not reporting? A quick eth docker down/up cycle takes 10 seconds. But then 30+ minutes to load the keys. Actually, this makes me think I should try just restarting the execution container instead of the whole shebang and see if that works for ethstats. I am still learning the ins and outs of ethdockerâŚbut it is definitely one of the easiest ways to run a node at home.
Sync aggregation is climbing and nearing 90%. It was hanging out in the 70âs last week.
I have started tracking the data usage now as well. With 1.4 million + total validators on the network, rx and tx is way, way up. Initial estimates are several TB per month, even with not a lot of activity on the network yet.
Mainnet nodes are around or under 1TB/month, depending on max peers and whatnot.
Random side note: about an hour ago one of /u/superphizâs validators proposed a 3 eth blockâŚ.straight to the smoothie pool. Thanks phiz! My non proposing, freeloading minipools appreciate the help.
If you own any ARB, Iâd urge you to vote in the LIDO grant proposal - https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0x6b89b74c259d2cc5979c46be6cfe2ae20f9485eee728a628f56930db644da985
I know DAO governance isnât very sexy, but itâs really just going to take 2 minutes of your time for something I know the majority of this sub feels strongly about. The TL;DR is that Lido is looking to get ARB from one of the grant programs running. They are requesting 4 Million ARB - which is about $3.6 million dollars worth today. Essentially to use it to increase liquidity of the their liquid staking token on the Arbitrum chain. I am voting no (I listed why on the forum, Iâd link but itâs blocked on Reddit), for reasons Iâm sure you can all guess. But Iâll also add their request is for 8% of the entire grant program (was 10%, they lowered it after a ton of negative feedback).
Also, reposting a request from earlier in the week - here. Simply wanted to get it at a different time of the day / before the weekend in case it was missed before due to timing.
Made a long ETH thesis stand alone post, like a once every couple of years post, check it out: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/171xvd3/how_eth_will_hit_100k_then_1m_why_it_will_and_the/
Has anyone read the new Zeke Faux (Bloomberg reporter) crypto book? Number Go Up?
Judging by the blurb (calling crypto a $3 trillion delusion) and the kind of people praising it on Twitter (lot of mainstream media reporters and anti crypto activists), my tentative feeling is that itâs just a masturbatory fantasy for the âI always knew crypto is scam and Iâm glad itâs finally deadâ crowd.
Can anyone tell me if it is actually worth reading, and if it is just a polemic anti crypto rant (fair enough the guy is entitled to his opinions) or if there are actually factual inaccuracies and misleading content?
I listened to Laura Shin interview him.
For what itâs worth, he did not sound anything like the mindless critics that point to FTX, Celsius, and 3AC as representative of crypto values. I think he raises the very real issues that anyone in this daily thread would gladly acknowledge. The difference is that he thinks theyâre intractable issues, and we think solving them is inevitable.
Iâve written several times about economic coercive systems before. Iâm trying to polish a more simple way to introduce this concept and how blockchains help form these systems.
To start with, letâs create an evil smart contract whose only goal is to grow the set of participants in it. The only thing we need for this to work is a way of turning money into something universally unpleasant to a target actor. In the simplest case Iâll just suggest an assassination contract. Next, we create an evil conspiracy of initial participants to fund this contract. All the contract has to do is target some unlucky sap who isnât in the contract yet, inform them of a pending assassination contract, and tell them to join us or die. Joining us includes streaming money to the contract so that the contract can grow faster. If the target dies, then the ratio of participants to non-participants still marginally increases. Now we run this until everyone remaining is in compliance with the contract rules.
This describes a minimum viable memetic rule system. The penalty obviously doesnât have to be assassination. It just has to be enough that for whomever the current target is, they are incentivized to join according to their objective function. The penalty I describe in my human coordination post is economic isolation rather than assassination.
The initial participants expose themselves to economic pain from the fees they pay to the contract. This is the cost of expanding the size of the network and punishing defection. The value-add of this cost depends on the value of each new participant of the network. Due to Metcalfeâs Law we expect a super-linear value-add for each new participant as the network grows. Therefore, there is critical mass of initial participants required to bootstrap such a solution, but once that is reached the stable equilibrium of the system is to dominate.
Contrast this to networks that tend to fall apart or fail to achieve their goals because there is no leverage against defectors. For example, boycotts fail to work because all the negative consequences are directed at the seller, not at anyone defecting from the boycott. Strikes fail when scabs are brought in whom the strikers have no leverage against. A blockchain solution can have universal leverage because it acts on the unified monetary rail, which is quite unique.
Now, in this simple evil smart contract, there is no inherent value to the network (Metcalf value f(n) = 0). But in economic systems, there is. We can layer other rules into this base memetic rule system that can result in a net positive situation for the initial actors on a long enough horizon. The rules can include things like environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, or UBI.
Once widely adopted, the result is a class of fail-deadly system that punishes both those that disregard the coercive rules and those who donât participate in punishing said defectors. There will always be some players like North Korea who choose to try to go it alone. The goal of an economic coercive system is to try to make them as poor and disconnected as possible to either minimize the harm they can do or compel them to join the coercive network and play by its rules.
Btw, if my evil contract sounds insane, itâs basically just taxation + the police that enforce taxation by throwing you in jail instead of killing you. If you say youâd never join such as system, you already have joined such a system.
The big Lido incentive funding request on Arbitrum is currently about 2/3 against.
Thanks to my delegate u/bobrossi for voting already. Ethereum ecosystem OG Griff Green has voted ânoâ as well.
If your delegate hasnât yet voted then get in touch with them. Some of the biggest delegates (like L2Beat and Olympio) havenât voted yet, so there is still a chance this gets passed - which would mean 4 million ARB tokens being used to incentivize Lidoâs LSTs.
Also shout out to u/hanniabu who has probably put the most work into pushing back on this one.
A few days ago I shared Divaâs vampire attack against Lido and someone asked what my incentives were. It got me thinking why people are skeptical of my motives when the things I share seem so obvious to me. It causes me to realize that the criteria I evaluate projects with may not be as clear to everyone as they are to me, and I wanted to de-mystify that by sharing the ways I look at staking projects. Iâve been developing these ideas since around 2018, so theyâre old hat to me, but I want you to have the same framework I have.
Alignment - Is the product aligned with the success of Ethereum, or is it a âbusiness propositionâ? This can be REALLY hard to figure out, but I pretty much listen to the first words out of a project leadâs mouth: Are they talking about improving Ethereum or maximizing TVL & profit? The answer to these questions tell whether a project is a public good or a windfall opportunity for investors. I DO support investor rewards, but they ought to be within reason, and the ultimate benefactor should be the network and its users.
Longevity - I look for projects that have been around long enough to know what theyâre getting into. This is why Iâm a terrible angel investor. Young projects donât have this acumen, and Iâm not smart enough to determine whether theyâll develop it in time. Longevity is one of the reasons I continue to support Stakewise - theyâve continued to grow and develop their product over many years.
Permissionless Node Operation - This is a HUGE requirement for me. Growth of the Ethereum network requires that as many as people as possible run validators and nodes, and I only support projects who allow any person who is willing to put up a bond, or split a Decentralized Validator Technology (DVT) validator to participate. I believe that successful staking platforms should encourage home node operation and provide multi-client support so that the operator can choose from any consensus or execution client pair.
Operators must have a stake - Operators need to have skin in the game, this means that if theyâre staking for an Liquid Staking Derivative (LSD) they ALSO need to have their own Ether on the line. This is because staking is actually a voting process on the network. If an operator doesnât have any stake, theyâre getting paid regardless of whether the network thrives or fails, but if they have Ether locked in that validator theyâre far more likely to make decisions that benefit the network.
Self-Limiting - Any project I get excited about must support a self-limit to 22%. I donât care if theyâll never get there, this is basically a commitment to say, âWeâre going to put the success of Ethereum above all else.â
Minimal Complexity - Iâm deterred by extreme complexity, and adding complexity increases smart contract risk and lowers the odds that people will figure out how it works. Now, to be honest, some projects APPEAR to be complex because theyâre doing something new, but they may be doing this in the most simple way possible. I have to confess that if I hear inclusion of an NFT in a staking pool scheme Iâm generally turned off due to complexity.
Fully Trustless - Staking funds need to be controlled end-to-end by a smart contract, not any form of multisig. This means that when you enter as a permissionless validator, your funds are received and managed by smart contract logic that delegates other peopleâs Ether to you, and when you exit, those Ether need to be returned to a smart contract that distributes them fairly. This process ought to be as transparent as possible. This DOES add REAL smart contract risk, but itâs superior to human controlled wallets.
Open Source - Staking platforms should release code for public audit and as a public good. Our core values include open source software and we must adhere to this as we grow.
So, yeah. These are my values and the ways I evaluate a staking platform. Itâs why my list is so short, currently I support Rocket Pool, Diva, and Stakewise v3. You may be right to point out that my high standards have enabled shady operators to expand more quickly than quality operators can proliferate, but if weâre going to build a healthy network the community and stakeholders must choose the best providers.
dang this dao governance vote is the most contentious iâve seen in a while.
Thanks u/hanniabu for making noise about it. i had to go remember if i even have tokens and then had to go check who my delegate was. u/bob-rossi so, uh, which way you votin? youâre my delegate :D
Last cycle peaked in November 21. itâs October 23. almost 2 years. Obviously we didnât know immediately at that time the top was in, but in the end itâs been 2 years of pain, crab and more pain and more crab. A lot of people have left and I can understand them.
I donât know when things will change. I donât even know what needs to change. If we knew it would be too easy, but we all know itâs not. But I am sure that something will change at some point in the future and those days will be rewarding.
I guess those who are left here have survived at least one cycle and learned a lot. I was thinking about a âmy learnings from last bull runâ post. Are people interested? I would be grateful if some experienced people shared their thoughts and learnings cause we probably all make different mistakes and I think that would help me a lot!
Did you know you can easily prove youâre a genesis staker without revealing your associated addresses?
You can see my proofs here, and also generate your own: https://www.creddd.xyz/user/cheekygorilla0x
This was developed by Personae Labs as a way to âbring more verified pseudonymity into the worldâ, and to help âonchain actors make use of their cloutâ.
I.e. demonstrate your qualifications before wading head-first into the spicy LSD debate :P
Check out Personaeâs Twitter (Nitter) threads on their proof system here:
https://nitter.net/personae\_labs/status/1705237623093264851
https://nitter.net/personae\_labs/status/1711773693289054368
Guest appearance by James Carnley from EVM File System (EFS), an onchain database allowing trustless access to collaboratively built data and applications. View presentation â
Ethereum
$1620
0.059
Waking up sober,
That year wonât be mediocre,
Letâs start uptober.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 842,416 (+974)
Pending validators: Joining 7k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
In 1732 the worldâs most populous city* was Ayutthaya in what is now Thailand, with a population estimated at 1 million. It was the seat of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, which reigned from 1351 to 1767.
The city could support such a large population because of the prodigious rice production just up the Chao Phraya River. The kingdom was a maritime power that traded surplus grain for luxuries and finished goods, establishing itself as one of the three great powers of Asia alongside Vijayanagar and China.
By 1732, however, its political power was in a slow decline and the capital was destroyed after a 14-month seige by the Burmese. Today, Phra Nakhom Si Ayutthaya is home to 50,830 people and a UNESCO world heritage site in the old city.
May it be remembered, NAY written, that upon the 5th of October 2023, thine fellow Ethfinanciers banded together and struck upon thy holiest of dailies a communal post of shits. A shitty post that shall only be shat every now and then, yet still necessarily be shat. For it was written. And if it was written, then it must be so. And for everyone who wrote thine holiest of words, may you be blessED for all of Ethternity.
In the name of Vitalik, Dencun, And the holy trilemma
ETHEREUM
Diva has launched two community votes that will have a great bearing on their future:
Self-limiting Diva - Should DIVA self-limit to 22%? As a living network, most aligned parties recognize the value in maintaining a healthy balance of operators. This stewardship reduces the viability of attacks and increases the long term resilience of the network. Providers who adopt self-limiting signal their alignment with Ethereum.
Adopt Diva Staking DAO Community Guidelines - These are general guidelines for how the DIVA DAO ought to work, these guidelines make great sense to me and I support them.
You may also be interested to know that DIVA is in the process of vampiring stake away from the largest LST as Danny Ryan suggested in this very valuable talk with /u/evanvanness. Because of my own desire for conflict avoidance, I wonât say much about it, but you can find details here and I believe that /u/nixorokish is eager to talk about it.
Diva, the ETH staking protocol, initiated an interesting vault a few days ago, where you can deposit ETH, or even better, stETH, and accumulate diva as well as the underlying rewards thatâs included in stETH. When diva officially launches the stETH will be converted to divaETH ,or whatever they decide to call it, hopefully not dETH :). Itâs a sort of vampire attack on stETH, which we obv need more of. So if you sit on stETH, wash off your sins with this one simple trick. The protocol hasnât officially launched yet and there is no UI which shows your farming rewards and such. The short story is, stakers are divided in tranches based on how early they are, and the earlier tranches receive more diva per ETH/stETH staked than the later. This is obviously risky, it is a novel protocol, but at least the staking is done through enzyme, which has existed several years already.
Here is the staking UI: https://diva.enzyme.finance/#vaults
Here is the detailed proposal, which was executed: https://www.tally.xyz/gov/diva/proposal/45468458207916765916984557235161596151150976178275597160417224501662414206717
I just read this post thanks to the daily doots. I was expecting something like it, cause it was basically announced in the Empire podcast episode 2 days ago.
I know there is a high chance relays at one point will be gone, cause they will be enshrined. But this will not happen any time soon. So we need relays for some more years, but they donât make any money.
In my opinion relays = public goods. Public goods need funding. Who can we turn to to get some grants to make sure we can keep or even increase the number of relays? Which protocols have (retroactive) public goods funding? Which delegates do we have to pressure to get funds? What else can we do to improve the situation?
u/austonst and I run the aestus relay.
I agree - relays are probably here to stay in some form for years. While enshrined PBS would be great, itâs worth reiterating Austonâs point: making it unbypassable by design is a highly desirable goal.
MEV is a latency game, and centralised MEV platforms like relays are likely to always have a latency advantage over an in-protocol gossip network. This delta in latency is a delta in profit, and so if ePBS canât ever compete with out of protocol PBS (relays, SUAVE, etc), excepting significant adoption by staking pools (etc) seems unrealistic. At that point itâs utility in the protocol is somewhat compromised.
My sense is that the EF and community are unlikely to move forward until we find a design that meets this unbypassability requirement. It may well be that the current line of research has truly reached a dead end and a fresh approach is required. Unfortunately, It also creates problems for related ambitions such as MEV-burn.
Central public goods funding in the relay space is fraught with administrative and political complexity. Views over censorship are particularly tricky and fundraising is a bit of a nightmare.
On one hand, Aestus is a relatively baby relay - on the other, we are regularly responsible for ~3% of Ethereum blocks. Who should pay to keep our lights on? It may be that relays need to form a market and charge a modest fee to validators. Iâd be intrigued to know what ethfinance think about that.
Daily Holesky:
Manually configured remote keystores in nimbus v23.9.1 appear to be broken. Log states that the validator is loaded, but it never begins attesting.
--network holesky
on ethereumjs now uses the correct genesis, but still seems to be failing to serve deposit logs.
I ended up deleting and recreating the slashing protection database for web3signer in postgres. Having already configured the same validators using web3signer on Holesky v1, none of my validators were able to start attesting when they became active.
Spotted a bug on beaconcha.in. In the Attestation Assignments
mouseover for the validator, Executed
includes the two Scheduled
slots. This was easy to spot when several of my Holesky validators have yet to attest.
I will eventually need to upgrade my storage array for Holesky, but more pressingly, I probably need to upgrade my CPU. With 30 client pairs, the 15 minute load average on my Threadripper 3960X is consitently well above the recommended one-per-thread of 48.
A lot has happened in the last ~36 hours, and there are probably several notable things Iâm forgetting right now. I need a nap.
Holesky validator dashboard and links to validators by client pair
I really believe in this community. Itâs my favorite place and I love the people writing and reading. But I feel we can do more, if we improved coordination. There is so much (financial, vocal, emotional) power that we are not really using yet.
u/austonst both announced that Blocknative has shut down their MEV relay and explained why itâs concerning. Blocknativeâs Matt Cutler basically explained the reasons for this in this Empire podcast episode. It comes down to ârelays donât make money, but cost moneyâ (and Blocknative is a company with investors that expect returns - and relays have negative returns).
So what are relays and why are they important? Relays are important for PBS aka proposer builder separation, MEV capturing and specifically for MEV-boost. MEV is every everywhere. Users make transactions and generate MEV opportunities. These transactions are analyzed by searchers, who insert (e.g. add before or after the tx) their own transactions and forward them to builders. Builders collect all tx (from searchers, but also the public mempool) and build blocks with the highest value. Builders then basically forward the blocks to validators (via MEV-boost, a solution outside of the protocol) including the ETH denominated reward they are willing to pay if there block is chosen/ proposed. This is where relays come into play. They relay the blocks and make sure the validator gets paid and the network canât be attacked. As basically always in Ethereum, decentralization is key, so we need multiple relays. PBS doesnât work without relays, but there are no revenues, no revenue share, no nothing for relay devs/ operators. Searchers, builders and validators make money, relays are basically the only infra in the MEV supply chain that we expect to work without getting paid.
There are some theories why a small fee wouldnât work (builders would only use free relays, hence relays with a rev-cut would be excluded most of the time etc.). So in my opinion (retroactive) public goods funding (PGF) is the best way to get it done.
Hereâs where this sub comes in! I would like to
- use this communities knowledge to identify potential sources for PGF
- see if we as a community can influence how funding/ grants are distributed (e.g. if governance tokens we all own can vote for an application)
- use our voices to spread the word about the importance of relays and why funding is essential
â
For example there is Optimismâs RPGF. If Ethereum doesnât work, OP as an ETH L2 doesnât work. In my opinion itâs a nobrainer that u/austonst and u/kudeta (who run the aestus relay) should receive OP funding, but we all know thatâs not how it works. But if our OP delegates (u/liberosist, u/_weboftrust, u/minimalgravitas, u/pseudotheos and more) coordinated, I am sure their voices can make a change.
I have no idea how the EVM treasury is doing, but maybe we as EVMs can come together and think about ways to support relays in general and the aestus relay specifically.
u/kudeta: You said yesterday that applying for all these grants and funding was complex and a lot of effort. If you want me to help, I am more than happy to e.g. sign-up in the name of the aestus relay for the OP RPGF round 3 and / or gitcoin grants. I have never done something like that, so it might not be perfect but of course I would coordinate with you to make sure the aestus relay is presented in the correct way (on every level). Obviously this would be completely free for you.
Paging u/bob-rossi, u/dmihal and any other Arbitrum delegates.
Iâm interested in seeing some commentary from EthFinanceâs representatives over on the Arbitrum governance forum with regards to the request from Lido for 5 million ARB tokens to, as hanniabu so perfectly puts it, bankroll Lidoâs attack on the network.
Using the influence we have across different DAOs seems like a simple no-brainer way we can help protect Ethereum from capture. We held off their proposal on Optimism last year, I would love to see the same again this time.
[Insert stirring backing track, e.g. From Hell To Glory by End of Silence]
If you donât want your DAO to pay to incentivize the growth of Lido then now is the time to say so.
This is a moment when governance can really matter. When the social layer actually has a decent amount of power. When you can make a difference to the future of this ecosystem.
It takes some courage to put yourself in the firing line, to voice an opinion against one of the most powerful entities in Ethereum. It maybe feels like a foolhardy risk to stand in the way of a juggernaut worth billions of dollars, but the alternative is that everyone rolls over and lets the credible neutrality of our network be stolen away, and with it will go the possible future of Ethereum as the base layer for not just the financial system but for global coordination.
We must not let Moloch win.
The cold war with Lido will be long and hard, and this is just one of many battles, but it is the one we can impact now, and it is one we can win.
Ultimate victory depends on us not losing every battle. It depends on us not giving up anything without a fight. And we must be victorious, because in the long run, without victory there can be no survival for the dream of a future that Ethereum represents.
[Music reaches crescendo, screen fades to black and soundtrack rolls into roaring Merlin Spitfire engines tearing past and into the distanceâŚ]
Damn. Eip 7503 burn and remint sounds amazing for privacy. I donât know how govts are gonna react to this thoughâŚ.. I think the correct answer is âWho gives a f@ckâ âŚâŚ. interesting times though
It is even better, almost any address can be a burn address. You just have to proof that you know a short number whose hash is equal to the public address. This means there is no possibility for the sender to be sanctioned as there is no on chain proof that the address you sent ETH to is a burn address. The receiver side is a different story, there it is as far as I know obvious that the funds received used this scheme. The last all core devs call had a longer discussion about it and one person advocated to be more cautious and not to use these kind of zk circuits on L1 just yet as they are rather untested and previous iterations of similar schemes had bugs. In the longer run this scheme is definitely so amazing and I am a big believer that privacy needs to be part of the base layer.
People getting sim swapped and drained in friend.tech, be careful
https://x.com/darengb/status/1709021872178729409
I was just SIM swapped and robbed of 22 ETH via @friendtech
The 34 of my own keys that I owned were sold, rugging anyone who held my key, all the other keys I owned were sold, and the rest of the ETH in my wallet was drained.
If your Twitter account is doxxed to your real name, your phone number can be found, and this could happen to you.
Earlier today I started getting spammed with phone calls every minute, which caused me to put my phone on silent (which I guess was the point) so I did not see the text from Verizon telling me that someone was trying to access my account. It happened very quickly, Verizon barely gave me any time to respond.
I opened FriendTech and thought there was a bug because my Chat was empty, I tried looking at Octav and then saw someone elseâs tweet about SIM swapping on FT and thatâs when I realized what had happened.
Tagging anyone who held my key here, Iâm so sorry about this, I know that it looks like I rugged you all, and Iâm not sure how to prove that I did not. I am devastated.
https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1709031117121003710
got swim swapped for 20+ ETH (they drained my http://friend.tech)⌠stay vigilant out there bros
set a PIN on your sim even if you donât think you need to
sorry for the x links, itâs where i saw it
For those confident weâll have another bullrun, what will drive the eth price up? Previously we had ICOs, then defi/yield farming and then NFTs. Is there anything left? Also fees will be lower due to L2s which may actually be negative for the eth price unless L2 activity goes 100x.
Hear ye, hear ye, valiant ethfinancers and mavs alike!
In the age where brave explorers charted unknown seas and distant shores, pioneers sought realms untraveled and dreams untold. So too do thee, devoted custodians of Ethereum, navigate a bear most relentless and the intricate dance of the crab market.
But be of stout heart! Though the bear casts shadows and the crab sidesteps, Ethereumâs beacon shines unwavering. As history reminds: after the stormiest nights, dawnâs embrace is most warm. Thus shall the Ether rise, unyielding and proud, amidst these tempests.
Stand firm, intrepid ethereans! Let not the marketâs capricious winds sway thy resolve. As a new horizon beckons, Ethereumâs legacy shall illuminate the ages, its tale a beacon for all who venture in the digital realm.
In unity and steadfast spirit,
Thine ally in the digital voyage.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
Weekly Doots âEthereum?
$1595
0.059
Elliptic signing,
With or without mining,
Quietly shining.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 812,379 (+2,545)
Pending validators: Joining 27.2k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Sing Muse, of Justin, brave founder hailed,
Who saw the crypto market begin to fail. As Bitcoin and altcoins together crashed,
Investors panicked, portfolios all dashed.
But Justin held on, like Atlas of crypto lore,
Supporting coins galore against all odds and more.
His steely vision and iron-willed determination
Gave desperate holders glimmers of elation.
When Bitcoin fell below 20K again,
Justin boosted morale, quelling women and men.
âHave faith!â he cried, âI shall stop this loss!â
Rallying his allies whatever the cost.
Across exchanges and threads Justinâs voice rang out,
Buying the dip without hint of doubt.
For the whole bear he carried the marketâs weight,
Enduring the pressure of whales and fate.
So The Sunâs legend shall endure through the ages
For His Excellency fought market wages.
For crypto to thrive again as it one day must,
Stalwarts like Justin in it place their trust.
ethfinance activity seems to be in a bear market as well and the crab gets to some people. Nevertheless, I still am very positive about the next few months in Ethereum. Here are a few things I am looking forward to:
Holesky testnet. This is a replacement for the Goerli testnet. It will have 1.4 million genesis validators to start and individuals can spin up their own ones later on. Genesis is tomorrow (Friday) at 14:00 UTC. I set up my 2 nodes and distributed my 2500 genesis validators to them. One is running nethermind/nimbus on an ARM minicomputer with 100 validators, The other one is a much more powerful ASUS PN51 running besu/teku with 2400 validators. I am curious if these 2 machines are able to manage the heavy load of the larger validator set and contribute to a stable holesky testnet. I am only slightly nervous.
Diva testnet. Diva is a DVT (distributed validator technology) liquid staking protocol and they are testing their stuff on the Goerli testnet at the moment. I have a node up for a few weeks now, but they needed to improve their software to get rid of some bottlenecks. Waiting until the new release drops for dappnode users and then I can finally play around with it. It is an alpha testnet, so I am not expecting Diva to have a market ready product this year, but I think it is one of the more promising LST projects out there.
Gnosis Pay: Waiting for my debit card to be sent out. Hopefully in a month or two I will get it. I just like the idea having a direct channel between my tokens and the real world to buy stuff and send fiat onto the chain. I am really interested how the UX will be and if they managed to create a seamless experience. I am a bit worried about all my purchases being tracked on chain for everyone to see. I personally am curious if the self âcustodial bank accountâ or the âprivacy nightmareâ narrative will win for me here.
Dencun upgrade. Massively reducing the cost of transactions on rollups is gonna be quite interesting to see. At first probably the most stupid but fun dapps will dominate. With time, new applications will come out to truly take advantage of the cheaper blob space on Ethereum. The upgrade will not happen in the next few weeks, but there is steady progress. Some last minute additions are still being considered, but to me it looks like people are heads down working on it. Hopefully by the end of this year we will have it.
Rollups/L2 will rule the world. We have seen quite a few new rollups in the last few months: Linea, Base, zkSync Era, zkEVM, mantle, zora, public goods network, worldcoin. There are now over 30 L2s lised on L2Beat. But not only new rollups pop up. Existing chains switch to an optimistic rollup: Celo pretty much decided to become an optimistic rollup, fantom started a similar discussion. Also gnosis chain is looking into ways to become an L2 (a validium, not a rollup) to Ethereum. It looks like the next narrative might be having the best rollup/L2 on top of Ethereum and not so much an creating another Ethereum killer. I am really looking forward to what the rollup/L2 landscape will look like in a year.
Eigenlayer: In a few months we will probably see if Eigenlayer is more than just a bunch of convincing powerpoint slides and a charismatic speaker. We will see if they have actual product market fit and enough demand for their ideas. There are already some interesting developments with the espresso sequencers and the already started mantle L2. Even though I am not sure how mantle can use EigenDA if Eigenlayer is not much more than a restaking smart contract at the moment. In a few months we will see. I am also curious how Eigenlayer will tackle centralisation issues.
The decision was made during the ACD call today to include EIP-7514 in Dencun, which sets a max churn limit for the activation queue (note: does not affect the exit queue).
Whatâs been happening up until now is that the more validators that are in the set, the faster they can get added (the math is here: https://benjaminion.xyz/eth2-annotated-spec/phase0/beacon-chain/#get_validator_churn_limit).
This keeps the network stable and makes the size of the validator set somewhat predictable. Since the validator set has been growing a lot since Shapella, this number is getting bigger and bigger and the network is growing faster and faster. EIP-7514 caps the number of validators that can be added each epoch at 8.
I believe that there could be some controversy about this over the next few days because it was created and added quickly but Dankrad published a post today on why he supports it and he says everything more eloquently and with more context than I could, so have a read of his post here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@dankrad/churn-limit
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7503
This EIP is interesting.
Base layer privacy is definitely something thatâs needed for adoption imo. Especially as forensic tools and tracking get better over time and transaction data remains on-chain forever it will be easier to dox and link wallets. Hard to see regular people wanting to use Ethereum if thatâs the case.
Private ETH defs a good thing but maybe this EIP will introduce some additional risk (minting and burning ETH at base layer might have previously unthought of attack vectors). Iâm not big brained enough to interrogate the code.
Anyone here have some thoughts on this EIP?
Anybody got some wise predictions on gas fees in the future? Seems right now that gas fees are low, which makes eth inflationary, which makes it not a âsound businessâ anymore according to https://tokenterminal.com/leaderboards/earnings in past 7 days.
Twitter scams are getting more and more elaborate.
The latest one is where they create a fake @MetaMask twitter account, then take a whole month to build up their post history by copying every post of the real MetaMask account. During this month, they also gradually build their follower count through bots. Of course, Twitter does not detect any of this activity as suspicious because they have entirely lost the plot.
If you were to glance at the twitter account, youâd see an account with tens of thousands of âfollowersâ and a post history that scrolls on and on for many pages. Looks pretty damn close to the real MetaMask account.
Stay safe.
Gary Gensler is what is wrong with America. Here we have a man, who clearly has a good grasp on blockchain as evidenced by his history teaching it at MIT. Yet despite this, he decides to completely contradict his previous teachings in favour of at best furthering his own personal political ambitions and at worst outright corruption in an effort by an invisible hand to stamp out crypto.
Classic 4th turning and fall of empires stuff right here. The ubiquity of wealth and excess surrounding him and his generation throughout their lifetime has left those that wish to participate in politics and influence devoid of values upon which his once great nation was built. In place of these values are the primal instincts of greed, power, pleasure and self preservation which are the fruits which can be attained from corrupting such rich and powerful institutions. These people are devoid of morals and will lead us down the path towards authoritarianism and collapse as seen time and time again throughout history, Rome and Weimar Germany being the most obvious.
In short, fuck you Gary, this is all your fault.
^(Obviously there is a degree of hyperbole here as there are other factors at play too like demographics, but at the same time the writing is on the wall and despite having learned from history, I canât wait to watch it play out in a very similar way again thanks to those who havenât learned from history. While that may be a call for me to step up and try to be one of the great men in history, Iâm not convinced that my qualifications are up to scratch. I shouldâve studied politics or something.)
Yo ETH fam! Iâve been away from crypto for a few months, but not like I expect you to remember me. Today Iâve been scanning L2 landscape changes, DeFi and airdrop hunting possibilities.
Base took off fast, my golly. First in TPS today, third in TVL. How did that come about? Did they mention an airdrop? How stable is it? I get that fraud proofs are not developed yet.
Iâm a fan of single-side LPing. No impermanent loss for me, thank you very much for offering. I see there are some new possibilities for it on zkSync Era: EraLend, Reactorfusion, ZeroLend. Cool! APY on ETH and USDC is <2%, but itâs nice to park some spare tokens, waiting for an airdrop.
Rhino.fi surprised me pleasantly. 10% APY on ETH in one pool. Left some ETH there a few months ago - Iâm not disappointed.
Iâd like to use this opportunity to thank Optimism!
I see itâs a bit gloomy in here. As somebody whoâs been in the game for quite a while now - this is the easiest bear ever! We are above 2018 ATH ^^if ^^you ^^ignore ^^inflation. But most importantly, development is phenomenal! L1s becoming L2s on Ethereum! You mentioned Canto, Celo, Fantom, Gnosis yesterday. Just waiting on Solana and Cardano to pull the trigger. Ethereum has become what it promised to be. Front page of L2beat is a thing of beauty! We are cemented, baby! This may very well kill ETH killer narrative in the next bull.
I wrote recently about multicameral governance designs. The responses that have come up in response to that post have taken 2 forms:
Isnât this going to devalue the governance token? What is the point of a governance token that only has a minority power over governance? I talk about that here.
Voter participation sucks and we need to concentrate power to make anything work around here. Letâs dive in to that.
Most DAOs today have a voter participation rate of less than 20%. Even when delegation is supported the delegates themselves arenât all particularly great at participation and need a cat herder to get much done. The exceptions to this rule are DAOs where there are regular votes and where voters get paid extra by voting.
Two examples that come to mind for this are Kyber Network and Curve. Kyber Network directly rewards voter participation. You can see the rewards for current and past votes here. Curve is a bit more indirect in that only a subset of governance decisions come with monetary compensation and that compensation is indirect through bribes. This one is a more complicated topic I dive into a bit here.
An interesting footnote about the Curve participation is the ve system and admin fees that are optimized by pairing veCRV with liquidity has led to liquid lockers (yCRV, sdCRV, cvxCRV, etc) to optimize revenue. These liquid lockers have a side effect of concentrating voting power. As a consequence of that Curve has outstanding voter participation amongst its tokens but a relatively low Nakamoto coefficient.
One clear lesson that stands out from both of the above examples is voters participate better if there are regular votes that they are paid to show up and participate in. Outside of the obvious incentive alignment that comes with compensating voter participation, voter participation increases when:
Voting is cost-minimized
Their vote is perceived as being more impactful on the outcome
They have something to lose
Drawing a parallel to elections to nation states. US voters are more active when:
Their state supports voting by mail and other mechanisms to make voting more convenient
They live in a swing state or a state without first-past-the-post electoral college rules
They are voting on an issue that affects them more personally (e.g. women vote more actively when abortion is a hot topic). Bribery is seasonal along the same lines (e.g. the NRA donates more when gun rights are a hot topic).
For blockchains, cost minimization is a matter of off-chain message signatures rather than L1 transactions like Maker has. Thereâs not much we can do for the second point without concentrating power and sacrificing voter participation but contentious votes having higher participation is a natural phenomenon.
The last thing we can do is create something to lose for each vote. This comes in two flavors. First, we can use bonded KPIs to attach something at stake to each vote. The basic concept of a bonded KPI is simple. You bond your influence against a prediction during a commit round each cycle (e.g. quarterly, yearly, etc). The bonded influence is the only influence eligible to vote. Your vote goes into effect immediately but your prediction is kept secret during the cycle. At the end of the cycle, everyone reveals their prediction by posting a decryption key. Then a decentralized one-shot oracle like UMA provides a value for the metric. The bonded influence is redistributed based on the relative accuracy of everyoneâs predictions. Finally everyone claims their influence from the bonded KPI and the next cycle begins. The result is that influence will trend towards those best at making predictions. I suggest the skill of making accurate predictions is correlated with competence at voting well. When combined with a value-aligning selection criteria for initial influence to bond, we end up solving the stated goal of selecting a rational, informed, value-aligned set of voters that vote on the most important issues of the day.
This system breaks down where someone can have enough influence over the metric to predict that very bad things will happen, ensure they do, and be rewarded for doing so. This is similar to how âassassinâ prediction markets work or why we donât let athletes bet to lose their own match. In that case Iâd suggest the DAO might just have to dissolve that governing body and form a new one without that bad actor. Itâs a thorny problem for sure.
The second flavor is an inactivity leak for not voting. For tradable tokens this isnât viable unless you somehow ensure all forms of LP token (e.g. Uniswap NFTs, Aave aTokens, etc) are also eligible to vote. However, this system is more viable when influence is not an ERC-20 token. In that case, getting influence in a governing body is a bonus perk of something external to the governing body. Once youâre in, unless youâre doing active work for the governing body your relative influence should decay. In broad terms the active work of a governing body is to continually do the things the issuance selection criteria select for and to vote well. I think itâs therefore fair that if someone is voting poorly (see KPI above) or not using their voting power regularly they should lose that influence. A DAO is ill-served by having a large voter base of inactive/inattentive voters, even if they delegate. Measuring voting activity is much easier than measuring vote quality.
An implementation of inactivity could resemble something like Ethereumâs where the higher the percentage of the existing voters are inactive the higher the turnover of influence should be. This creates something of a market-based approach to encourage voter participation. The end result is create higher turnover of the governing body to one consisting of active participants and then to pay them for the hard work of voting well. By the numbers we have, this is how you actually build a DAO and not just a fundraising mechanism.
Great little article by u/pbrody on coindesk today.
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/09/19/eventually-we-are-all-ethereum/
TLDR; All your chains are belong to us, om nom nom.
This tweet by Ryan Berckmans is a great summary of the Lido situation, in my opinion.
https://twitter.com/ryanberckmans/status/1704192307270975643
It boils down to two logical inconsistencies:
no CEX is in the run to dominate staking. Data doesnât support that theory. To assert it as fact is gaslighting.
if a winner-takes-most structure is inevitable, why is Lido spending enormous LDO bribes through the entire ecosystem to this day?
The data here is even more damning than for CEXes. No LSD is a credible competitor to the tune suggested (a winner-takes-most scenario does not merely imply a competitor would catch up, it would also suggest that competitorâs size towers over Lido at least to the current extent Lido towers over the competition).
As long as those logical inconsistencies are core points of the Lido thesis, there is a problem with Lido.
Livestream Recording | POAP Checkout
Announcements - Tickets for Staking Gathering at Devconnect Istanbul are now available featuring speakers such as Danny Ryan, Justin Drake, Sreeram Kannan, Michael Sproul, Jim McDonald, and many more.
Thereâs nothing to hide,
Privacy canât be applied,
As youâve never lied.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 796,700 (+2,353)
Pending validators: Joining 36.2k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Vitalikâs twitter account was hacked. Itâs all over. Everyone please start panicking.
This is lesser-known, but Ethereumâs consensus mechanism depends on a Twitter integration with Vitalikâs account, so itâs likely the Ethereum chain will halt within a few hours. I donât know if the client teams will be able to implement a workaround for the Twitter dependency in time - Ethereumâs Twitter integration was supposed to be removed as a vestigial feature in the Merge fork but I guess the devs didnât get around to it.
I really hope Charles Hoskinson still has access to the manual override key and is willing to use it to recover the chain. The only other person I know of with the Ethereum admin key is Sam Bankman-Fried, and he wonât be able to save us this time for obvious reasons.
If we canât get either of those admin keys, weâll have to ask Elon Musk to go into Vitalikâs account to turn Ethereum off and back on again for us. Please send thoughts and prayers everyone. â¤ď¸
It boils my blood that @LidoFinance thinks fit to go against one of the founding lido principles set forward by @paradigm.
Governance is and always has been the existential risk that Lido presents. Dual governance is a bandaid solution, not any kind of permanent one and is very fallible.
As long as LDO governance can control the validator registry, LDO should not exceed roughly 33% of the network. There is no hard line here because the threat isnât based on any hard line.
The threat is that LDO slowly gains a subversive power over Ethereum due to its ability to threaten node operators with the boot, a very powerful threat that @gakonst rightfully points out all those years ago.
The staking router and the coming forced exits upgrades will further exacerbate the issue. Both will increase the power of LDO token holders over the node operators. Forced exits especially worries me as it has been touted as their solution for keeping their permissioned node operators in line.
Governance is a weakness, the existence of a threat is the problem itself. We cannot rely on LDO holders to be good stewards, not even with stETH veto power.
The apathy and bureaucracy of DAO governance is too powerful a deterrent for vetos to reliably work. The only solution is to remove the threat completely.
Georgios goes on to write âIf said pool is sufficiently governance-minimized, it could possibly win the entire market without causing any systemic risk for Ethereum.â
Whereâs the minimization frens???
ln April of 2022 I published a now deleted thread called âA Case against stETHâ where I explained why neither DVT nor social scores for permisionless node operators would work to scale their node operators set fast enough for the rate that they were growing their stake.
The entire thread stands true today. The recent @NethermindEth report suggests using a Kleros court to judge Sybil cases. Thatâs a joke when nation states are out here human trafficking and dedicating billions to hacking/exploits/evading Sybil detection. If Lido messes up their Sybil implementation, we could find ourselves with 10-15% of all Eth staked sitting in North Korea in a Sybil farm of node operators with 0 capital bond.
Lido should self limit not because of any consensus attacks, they should self limit because $stETH is growing faster than they can decentralize and research ways to safely introduce permisionless nodes without jeopardizing the network.
Donât let their campaign fool you, @LidoFinance has not shed any of its governance functionalityâin fact it plans on growing it.
This is the danger of $stETH dominance.
https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/04/on-staking-pools-and-staking-derivatives
https://web.archive.org/web/20220414205449/https://twitter.com/Jasper_ETH/status/1514708562244784131
+++ Benidoâs favorite podcasts episodes +++
Some weeks ago I started publishing some podcast recommendations featuring interesting episodes. Since I enjoy podcasts I thought it might be a service to the community to highlight those I really liked (or maybe disliked? Letâs see what the future brings). Itâs not a real summary, so if my thoughts make you curious, you might want to jump in to listen to the full episode. They are always linked in the headline.
Here is a list of all the past posts:
Benidos favorite podcasts no.1
Benidos favorite podcasts no.2
Benidos favorite podcasts no.3
â
Now here are the new ones I really liked from the past couple of weeks. Interestingly they are all very technical and let me be honest⌠I sometimes couldnât really follow the guests/ hosts. I think they are all great, but in these cases I would really recommend taking some dedicated podcast time with 100% focus.
Bankless: Scaling Ethereum To The Next Level with zkEVM feat. Justin Drake and Brian Retford
Maybe you remember a post from u/liberosist talking about the different types of zkEVMs there are (I tried to find it but couldnât). This podcast basically talks (partially) about this. Since this is fairly technical topic, itâs moderated by Justin Drake and RSA is more or less downgraded to listener.
This includes how L1 might become a zkEVM in the future based on some of the developments in the L2 landscape and the positive side effects this might have (e.g. lower hardware reqs for validators).
I think this episode is pretty good and a great addition to the sci-fi roadmap episode from ethcc since itâs very forward looking, but in the end this is why we are here, right?
Epicenter: Frontier Research - Solving Ethereumâs MEV Problem feat. Stephane Gosselin
This episode is a pretty good one if you are into MEV. Stephane Gosselin was one of the flashbots founders and has left the project some months ago. In this episode he talks a little about the MEV landscape, his impact and how he would rate it (interesting answer here!). On top he gives some insights into his new venture âFrontier Researchâ.
One major topic is RFQ = request for quotes and intents, but they also tackle PBS, MEV burn etc.
I think you need a pretty decent understanding of MEV to be able to follow this episode. If you do, this is 60 minutes+ of very good content, especially since Stephane knows flashbots, but is not 100% aligned, but going down a new (and much needed?) experimental road.
Uncommon Core 2.0 - An Incomplete Guide to PBS feat. Mike Neuder and Chris Hager
PBS or proposer builder separation has been around since a year or so. This episode features Mike Neuder (from the EF) and Chris Hager (from Flashbots), which is a pretty good panel since it the main parties involved came together.
The first hour or so is a discussion, the second part is a followup discussion with only Hasu and Jon. My take away: PBS is a design philosophy/ space. What does this mean? When I first learned about it I basically thought PBS was designed, the scope was clear and we only needed implementation. I think the conclusion after this episode is that this is not the case. There are a lot of different implementations possible and itâs not even clear if ePBS (enshrined PBS) is the way to go.
u/eth10kisfud since we talked about MEV burn yesterday. This is the episode that led to my answer.
Benido, this sucks, this is all so technical, why didnât you include a podcast I can just listen to on my way to work or in the gym and if I blink I can just continue listening? Well I am glad you asked, because I got you covered!
â
This Chopping Block episode is a pretty good summary about âThe SEC vs Crypto and Coinbaseâ. I liked it a lot because I think Paul Grewal is a pretty cool guest (Paul is Coinbaseâ Chief Legal Officer) and he pretty transparently explains why Coinbase acts in the way it does.
I am not sure the speculation about Gary Genslerâs motivation is the best approach, but the rest of it is a very good summary and includes some industry insights that I think are a very interesting and if you didnât follow as closely this episode is the one you wanna listen to.
â
This is it for today, but I already have picked one podcast episode for the fifth edition! Letâs go!
See some chatter in here today about the late-stage proposal to limit the validator churn limit for inclusion in Deneb. Iâve been following this relatively closely since I think that this has the potential to brew into a CAT5 storm for the 250 of us that are terminally online and plugged into Ethereum development drama.
I first became aware of âthe issueâ during ACD 113 (bad news always comes on the 13th) - tl;dr on the issue (parroting Christine Kim, because she can summarize better than I can):
A large validator set size is undesirable because this increases the computational burden on validator nodes and creates complications for implementing future code changes such as single slot finality.
Without a countermeasure in the next 9-10 months to address validator set size growth, @mkalinin2 said that the computational load on nodes could increase 3x with the increased volume of messaging on the networking layer.
What are some possible solutions?
Looks like option 3 is being pursued in the short-term, if only to buy more time. I think that this is a phenomenal example of just how fragile Ethereum is, and why even 7+ years in itâs critical to be mindful of introducing systems on top of the protocol that bring with him considerable unknown unknowns! Think Eigenlayer - love the potential innovation, but a stage-gated slow rollout to understand the intricacies of the interdependencies that new primitives introduce is preferable to me, and Iâd argue responsible, particularly when building on top of something so unsteady thatâs managed to command as much economic importance as Ethereum has since itâs inception.
Will get off my soap box - yâall are on the same page. Hopefully the summary & sources are helpful!
https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/ethereum-all-core-developers-consensus-call-113/ https://twitter.com/christine_dkim/status/1679873847665868800 https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/ethereum-all-core-developers-consensus-call-117/ https://twitter.com/philngo_/status/1699805844748030383
I wrote recently about multicameral governance designs. The responses that have come up in response to this post have taken 2 forms:
Iâd like to take a few paragraphs to discuss what I think the rights and responsibilities of permissionlessly tradable governance tokens should be in a multicameral governance structure.
Among most modern DAO designs there is usually a singular governance token. This token usually serves two purposes. The first, as the name implies, is it acts as a force in governance. The second is it serves as a fundraising tool potentially by multiple mechanisms such as ICO, bond, inflation schedules, or call options. There are a few other minor uses as well that I go into here. When people buy this token they do so with the expectation that they have a claim upon the future profit of the system the DAO governs. Ultimately, greed fueled speculation is what gives governance tokens most of their tradable value.
The abysmal governance participation we see for most DAOs today is a strong indication that the governance power of governance tokens is not the primary source of their demand. Therefore, adopting a multicameral governance structure and diluting this governance power should not overly affect the usefulness of a governance token as a fundraising mechanism.
That said, care must be taken to protect the contractual rights of the governance token for its primary purpose. If clarity on this is not provided, investor confidence will wane, and the DAO will quickly find itself unable to raise funds by issuing tokens. At that point the DAO either must have a self-sufficient product, rely on charity from necessary participants, or watch as necessary participants stop doing their necessary work and the system fails.
One guarantee the DAO can provide to the governance token holders is to escrow the treasury funds directly within the governance token governing body (the capital module). System profit should be automatically sent to the treasury. At minimum, since each governing body controls its own state, this gives the token holders the ability to revoke token approval to these funds to the parent DAO. This guarantees those token holders a contractual right to the treasury should the DAO dissolve or they want to revolt. All they have to do is pass a policy to pay out the treasury to themselves.
Another guarantee the DAO can provide the governance token holders is to make it very difficult for the parent DAO to change any fund flow related policies without their approval. The capital module needs to have confidence that their power over the purse canât be whimsically revoked. Different types of proposals in the parent DAO can potentially have different rules required to ratify them. This is also consistent with granting governance power over topics to those it affects the most. The governance token holders are those most affected by changes to monetary flows and should have a greater say on changing certain parameters related to that than other governing bodies. This satisfies a design goal of fairness.
The last guarantees all come from the ability of each governing body to maintain its own internal state. The parent DAO can only invoke functions on the governing body contract that it allows. Any control over these matters the capital module grants to the parent DAO are inherently revocable. This gives the capital module ultimate control over the issuance of the governance token and all matters dependent on that such as how to incentivize liquidity depth for the token, how to structure bonds, its inflation schedule, etc.
In summary, it is my belief that so long as the governance token holders have faith in the future revenue of the system and their claim right to it the token should retain value. So long as it has value it can serve its primary purpose as a fundraising mechanism. I donât believe diluting the governance power of these tokens will destroy their value, but I do think it can lead to a DAO that is more resilient and likely to succeed in the long term for reasons stated in my previous post. The main ingredient weâre missing to try this somewhere is a guinea pig and a fairly small software package. I think itâs a much better direction than what Rune is doing to Maker with âneural tokenomicsâ for example.
I posted this to the EVM discord, but figured it would be healthy to blast here too:
I proposed my fourth block recently đĽł. But because my mev-boost min-bid is set to .05, if I donât receive any bids higher than .05 my client builds the block itself. That is working fine, so far 3/4 of my blocks have been homemade. But, my most recent block had my first tornado cash transaction in it.
Iâm just annoyed by regulatory lack of clarity on whether or not I should care as a US operator.
I could run mev-boost with no min-bid and point it at only ofac compliant relays is what the government might say in the future?
What happens eventually once we have proposer builder separation? Thatâs the plan right? Iâm not super familiar with how that works.
If US validators âcurrentlyâ arenât held to KYC regulations- which I believe is accurate, then we shouldnât care at all even if someone wants to transact with an OFAC-list address? Maybe that is a bad assumption.
If I need to be OFAC compliant, then I need to know for sure. That way I can either just do it, or move my server out of the country? Would that even be sufficient? Even Coinbase still validates non-compliant transactions, or so Iâve heard, I havenât actually confirmed this. Iâm gonna go look.
According to this blurb, they run some validators without mev-boost deliberately to prevent censorship: https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/discover/news/earn-pbs-enabled-mev-rewards-with-coinbase-cloud
Prime and retail Coinbase users are opted in to mev-boost automatically btw.
Just starting to peep etherscan to see what the big exchanges are doing:
Recent Kraken block (18122994) with tornado cash transaction
Recent Binance block (18121064) with tornado cash transaction
Recent Coinbase block (18120973) with tornado cash transaction
Most Iâm finding are Lido blocks, but that is hardly surprising.
Iâm here. Venue is awesome, probably a little bigger than necessary but itâs better to have the space then not. The main talks havenât had any real alpha so far, lots of wagmi and âdown bad, hahaâ talk. The regulatory panel was fun to watch, but again, no pertinent info was learned. It was inferred that for any reasonable change in the regulatory situation, Gary would litteraly have to just wake up on the âright side of the bedâ one day. And no one on the panel suggested they thought it was likely. Legislation (in the US) needs to be passed. Rep. Emmer was hopeful on this.
Swag game has not been as good as ethdenver or devcon. But we are in the depths of the bear, soâŚ..
Rainey street crawl was last night. Iâm not a bankless citizen so I didnât go to their closed event. Had a Hella good waygu smash burger at a place across the street though.
Overall, itâs still fun to be spending a few days with so many like minded people in a fun town. Bear market conferences are the best for this reason. Only the real degens are here. If any actual news or info is discovered Iâll be sure to drop it in here.
Next yearâs permissionless is on the books for October 9th-11th 2024 in salt lake city.
Hanging out with u/the-A-word and u/jtnichols at Permissionless II. Taste testing some early offerings from JTâs smoker and talking DAOs, solo staking, and the history of r/ethfinance. No reason to go to the main event like I planned, too much fun.
đ Iâm a đ¨đŚ and longtime ETH community member currently building sobol.io Also am early contributor to BanklessDAO plus tons of other DAO communities (total DAO need).
Nice to find the daily because my Twitter feed is pure noise. Thanks for the gift of gud BBQ and good vibes today đ
I would rather the US not allow spot ETFs than red-tape defi, which is basically what is happening with the proposed rules that are perhaps impossible to follow. ETFs are probably great for price action but they arenât crypto.
I remember how excited I was in 2020 about synthetic stocks, defi, insurance, gambling and other use cases happening on Ethereum. Now we know that synthetic stocks are a massive regulatory no-no. I am overall happy about what is possible in defi but it looks like all frontends will require KYC in the future (for US users at least). We are lucky that an exception was made for validators. They wanted KYC of all TXs, which is obviously not possible. Thatâs one of my issues, it has become obvious that regulation doesnât come from a fair, logical and neutral point. Itâs a bit of a circus and impossible to guess what will come.
đŚ I just got a Metamask email, informing me that Metamask Snaps Open Beta is live!
đĽ Here is the announcement on the MM Blog đĽ
MetaMask Snaps allows users to customize their MetaMask wallet. But what is a Snap? Individual Snaps are features and functionalities created by third-party developers that you can install directly into your wallet.
Metamask says that: All Snaps available in the directory today have been audited by the Metamask team and third parties. Our decision to have an allowlist was made both out of an abundance of caution, and because we have ideas for how to add additional safety for a permissionless model that will take longer to implement. Over time, we plan to open up the auditing process to create a fully permissionless platform."
More info can be found on the Snaps FAQ
Users can now install 30+ Snaps across three main categories:
1)Transaction Insights
Saferoot, Assets Risk Detection, Forta, Kleros Scout, Threat Intel, Blockfence, Wallet Guard,Tenderly TX Preview
2) Interoperability
Solana Wallet, Algorand Wallet, Sui Wallet, UniPass, StarkNet, EthSign Keychain, Tezos Wallet, Leap Cosmos Wallet, Connect by Drift, Vega Protocol, CubeSigner, MinaPortal, Aptos Wallet, Rarime, Cosmos Extension, Identify, Masca, Arweave Wallet, Zion, Partisia Blockchain, ShapeShift Multichain, Sign in with XMTP, Casper Manager
3) Notifications
Walletchat.fun, Push V1
â
edit: tried to install Forta, failed. Tried to install Arweave wallet, worked flawlessly!
Some time ago we had a discussion here about gnosis chain and its future. Today I watched two talks from DAPPCON23 by two gnosis developers/researchers. They seem to look into possibilities of becoming a validium L2 to Ethereum. This is all very exploratory and nothing has been set in stone. As far as I understand they could write checkpoints to Ethereum and keep the validators as is for data availability. This seems to need a lot of more work and especially making it trustless seems to be a bit tricky. The approach they are looking into now seems to be more taxing to the validators as they would need also need to be able to verify the Ethereum chain at the same time. There seems to be some ways around it though. Ethereums future looks quite good to me, everyone thinks about becoming a rollup/L2.
The first talk is by Philippe Schommers and talks generally about the future of gnosis chain towards the end he talks about possibilities of turning gnosis chain into an L2.
The second talk is by dapplion which describes in detail the approach they are looking into at the moment.
I hope the youtube links work as the videos are still streaming youtube seems not to like to link to a timestamp directly. It worked for me.
Livestream Recording | POAP Checkout
Guest appearance by Lantern Finance, a KYC American-based staking provider.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereum
$1649
0.0627
Ever since the merge,
Block production converge,
Distrust too may surge.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 780,933 (+2,004)
Pending validators: Joining 44.4k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
There once was a burly crustacean
who would not brook a price aberration.
It made the charts boring,
so instead of just snoring
I packed up and went on vacation.
This forum must be very dead to totally ignore this nice news:
U.S. Court calls ETH a commodity while tossing investor suit against Uniswap
Iâve finally turned my idea for reducing the risk of Lidoâs dominance into a post on Eth Research:
https://ethresear.ch/t/reducing-lst-dominance-risk-by-decoupling-attestation-weight-from-attestation-rewards/16523
Have never posted anything in the âproperâ Ethereum forums before, and so feeling very intimidated. Thank you to those who gave me confidence that itâs possibly not a completely moronic concept!
My biggest issue with this is they could get rich quicker, then flip to control ethereum quicker and or after something goes wrong for them
You need to add something that stops that possibility imo
Something like locking in some or all of these mega validators stake for that extra reward, so that they are basically in service to eth in order to continue earning rewards to make back their locked stake.
And even with that, that semi only puts the problem back 20-50 years imo
Mostly thinking about 3% apr (y?) and also they would likely have to pay back their customers?
u/tricky_troll my man has it been 10 days?
MakeDAO wants to launch their own chainâŚ.and its a fork of SoLaNo. Lol
Honestly thought it was parody at first.
https://forum.makerdao.com/t/explore-a-fork-of-the-solana-codebase-for-newchain/21822
Maker is a husk of its former self. Rune canât help but introduce more and more centralization. The endgame is value capture.
The most important reason for why NewChain is needed, is that it will allow the ecosystem to use hard forks to gracefully recover from the most severe form of governance attacks or technical failures.
Ah yes, lets move to a LESS SECURE chain to protect against governance attack đ¤Ą
The second reason is that the Solana ecosystem has proven its resilience
This keeps getting better, all that downtime really prove ReSiLiEnCe
The third reason is that there already exists examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adapted to act as appchains
There already exists examples of rollup codebases being forked and adapted to act as appchains
Maker has deposited north of $1.2 billion of the $ backing DAI into US treasuries. The yield on the US treasuries is paid back to DAI holders who have deposited to the DSR contract. That is a near text book definition of a money market fund, except an unregistered version.
âBut KYC is inherently evil. We should fight it when we canâ. Ethereum already allows for two people to send and receive ETH with each other (=to transact) without intermediaries and without KYC. But if you are literally investing in a financial instrument offered by the US government, itâs hard to understand why we can or should bypass clear cut laws which exist for the rest of the members of society.
And the absence of KYC is only a small part of the problem to me. The bigger part is the pure unregulated nature of this enterprise. Rune is one acid trip in the Himalayas away from suddenly deciding the solution to world inequality is to arbitrarily donate half the USG bonds to some charity. Iâm not joking - the Maker core team is, at best, chaotic neutral, with emphasis on chaotic. Itâs insane for a $4.5bil stablecoin to rely on a group of centralized chaotic actors. And this is where registration of money market funds comes into play. You have designated legal responsibilities to core organisational members whoâs details are known to the feds, you have clear auditing rules and what can and canât be done with customer funds, and customers have clear legal recourse if or when the custodians behave outside of these narrow rules. Right now, DAI holders get ZERO of those clear cut protections.
And lastly, NONE of this fits within the original ethos nor objective of Maker, as an Ethereum centric decentralised stablecoin. Nothing in todayâs Maker is decentralised nor fitting the core ethos of Ethereum, despite the team and the project having leached off credibility from the Ethereum ecosystem to bootstrap themselves to the current position as a major defi protocol. For example if Jump or Binance came up with a protocol with similar shenanigans to that exhibited by Rune and Maker today, it would at best, be a short term pump and dump excercise, not a protocol which attracts and retains billions in TVL over a long term. The only reason Maker manages to do that is because it managed to successfully leach credibility from the Ethereum ecosystem, before pivoting into the present circus. /end rant
Iâm trying to understand the current state and the near future of account abstraction. From what I understand, there are two competing standards: the Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) architecture and the newer ERC-6900 architecture. Having one standard seems important because it will enable dapps and developers to create plugins/modules for AA wallets (automatic DCA, freeze certain assets, spending limits per âsession keyâ, etc).
Itâs very cool and I believe that it has a future (especially on L2s with cheaper fees soon), but which architecture will win? The Safe team is well-respected, but it sounds like ERC-6900 has some advantages.
Does anyone know the latest? Is the developer mindshare leaning one way right now?
This was a good primer on the different architectures: https://mirror.xyz/konradkopp.eth/7Q3TrMFgx2VbZRKa7UEaisIMjimpMABiqGYo00T9egA
nonsense.
The counter-argument here is of course that threatening to throttle and/or fork out Lido, if it doesnât adhere to the will of a handful of core devs/researchers/influencers, is the surest way to kill any notion of better and safer property rights
Psyops to convince people that the âwill of the peopleâ is to hand over governance to Lido DAO when not even a supermajority of LDO token holders really want this (https://twitter.com/DrNickA/status/1697610036841726414) - the delegates who vote with the most LDO just overshadow everybody else
Sacha is trying to paint âa handful of core devs/researchers/influencersâ as an elite group trying to maintain power. In reality, these are the hundreds of people who are building the Ethereum protocol layer and are trying to make it impossible for anyone to capture the Ethereum consensus layer. Like I said, psyops.
My personal perspective here is that it would be extremely irresponsible for Lido to gain a dominant market share without first significantly improving its resilience to long-term tail-risks â and reducing the impact of those tail-risks on the Ethereum protocol
âYeah for sure Lido in its current form shouldnât control Ethereum. But I think it eventually should and will, it just needs some tweaking before itâs readyâ
I think it bears repeating here that Lido is not a single entity. It is a co-ordination layer between a multitude of stakers and node operators.
It is 31 operators who can be removed at any point by one entity: the Lido DAO. Which is swung by a few majority delegates. Many operators receive a significant portion of their income from being Lido operators - the threat of losing this income is a source of influence you canât ignore.
Sachaâs whole deal is coming up with long-winded posts that masquerade as research to justify Lido DAO governance expansion. Start with a conclusion and build arguments to meet up with it. He writes in a way that often impresses people into thinking it might be a good argument but he never actually gives us new information - heâs not looking for an answer or doing research, heâs just finding new ways to say âItâs okay for Lido to eventually become the middleman between you and Ethereum.â
Staking: Finale
Iâm proud to say that Iâm officially a Beacon chain depositor!
I started my journey in late November, early December last year. After researching and getting all the parts and setting up NUC I took quite a long pause. It was still on my mind even though I wasnât following through with that. As I finished addressing more critical priorities in my life earlier this year I knew it was the time to do it. It looked honestly impossible but I trusted that with the help of this community, EVMavericks and my friends that I would be able to achieve the feat! Staking aligns with my long-term financial goals as well as with with the future of Ethereum that I want to see and I wanted to do my part. Running minority clients too to promote the health of Ethereum.
Big thanks to Haurog for basically handholding me, thanks to everyone here and EVMavericks discord for answering my many newbie questions, shoutout to Ethstaker for helping me out too, also to a few of my friends from the Dopest private chats and to so many other people who were willing to lend a hand but I already had enough support. I took my time to understand, learn, experiment and to feel relatively comfortable. Iâm sure itâs not fully done yet as I might be sweating when I pass the entry queue but so far everything has been looking good. Thereâs still a few things to set up bandwith wise for me and in terms of how to monitor (so far I have grafana and just look at beaconchain site).
Not sure what else to add but if I remember something Iâll add later. if you also have questions, lmk!
Canât wait for my money printer to go brrrr and print me blocks w 69E rewards!!!
Google lets scammers buy adspace and makes no effort to moderate this.
Twitter is letting spambots run free as long as they pay $8 for a blue checkmark or $1000 for a gold one.
Discord is adding a feature to let you hide links so they redirect to a different place.
There is a fundamental incentive problem with the law ruling big service providers should have no accountability whatsoever for the content they host. Let criminals use your platform AND get paid for it? Why shouldnât they take that deal.
This is especially inane when said platforms do take moderation actions for various ideological or political motives. Youâre either a neutral service provider, or you have administrative rights and exercise editorial content. Canât have both. In the latter case, you should be help responsible for your content, and sorry but not sorry if this doesnât play well with big-tech business model of harvesting value generated by user content while running only minimum human intervention.
There is an obvious answer here. If these platforms were run as credibly neutral infrastructure, as part of distributed ledgers nobody can unilaterally censor⌠Those laws regarding lack of accountability would make sense.
The mainstream Internet as it exists today makes no sense as web2 whereas it would be sensible as web3.
I see the solution to Lido problem as follows:
Reduce the advantage of pooling by burning MEV - all validators, get equal beacon chain rewards. Solo validators have advantage over pool, because of LST fee.
Protocol level smoothing of block proposals or similar, same way in PoW, people use pools not because it gets the bigger rewards, but because they get them more consistent.
Make solo staking more accessible. (how comes there is still no double-click executable on windows that get you staking in no time? Even shitcoins have them).
Protocol level smoothing of block proposals or similar, same way in PoW, people use pools not because it gets the bigger rewards, but because they get them more consistent.
Block proposals themselves really donât earn a lot of consensus income - only about two weeks worth of attestations.
Once the impact of MEV is removed from proposal income (due to MEV smoothing pools and/or MEV burn), I donât think block proposals will need smoothing. Thatâs a good thing!
Make solo staking more accessible. (how comes there is still no double-click executable on windows that get you staking in no time? Even shitcoins have them).
I agree on this. Back in the early days of Bitcoin, I used to keep my Bitcoin client running in the background to help provide bandwidth to the network (and keep my wallet in sync!). You would just double-click the Windows executable and then forget it in the system tray. GPU mining was like that, too.
It should be just as easy to stake on Ethereum. The process should go like this:
Double click installer exe. Install.
Run. Wizard prompts you to choose consensus and execution clients, with a short blurb about each one and a note about client diversity.
You get kicked out into the main UI. Your clients are now syncing. Thereâs a little progress bar that shows how long till theyâre synced enough to be staking-ready.
When sync is done, you click the little âplusâ button at the corner of the main UI, to add new validators.
(For first time adding validators only) - Wizard generates staking seed phrase, prompts you to write it down, forces you to retype it.
Wizard prompts you to enter the amount of validators you wish to add, previews how much ETH you need.
Wizard prompts you for the withdrawal address you want to use for these validators.
Wizard generates deposit data json file, prompts you to upload it and deposit ETH using the Staking Launchpad.
Wizard reads the blockchain directly and recognizes your Staking Launchpad deposits. Kicks you back out into the main UI where you can see the pending status of your validators, along with an estimate of when they will be through the queue.
Once theyâre through the entry queue, the app basically acts like a native version of beaconcha.in, showing your attestations and effectiveness, proposals, income graph, stuff like that.
Hey it just occurred to me - a 51% attack is not actually profitable to Lido in terms of ETH, at least in the short term. I forgot about this little quirk (smart design decision) in the Ethereum protocol:
The reason why no validators receive attestation rewards during an inactivity leak is once again due to the possibility of discouragement attacks. An attacker might deliberately drive the beacon chain into an inactivity leak, perhaps by a combination of censorship and denial of service attack on other validators. This would cause the non-participants to suffer the leak, while the attacker continues to attest normally. We need to increase the cost to the attacker in this scenario, which we do by not rewarding attestations at all during an inactivity leak.
So by 51% attacking Ethereum, LST pool providers would be hurting the LSTâs own holders (and their reputation for making profit) by forgoing staking rewards for the duration of the attack. People would obviously rush to try to pull their money out, or at least they should.
An attacker could avoid this mechanism by attacking with 66% of the stake. 66% is the point at which an attacker can attack the chain without forgoing short-term staking rewards.
I just wanted to share this, because itâs a factor I had forgotten about, and it throws a curveball at any 51-66% attacker.
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Ethereum
đŚđŚđŚ$1648 đŚđŚđŚ
0.063
The charts start to bend,
Hello candle my old friend,
The pullbacks will mend.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 765,591 (+2,071)
Pending validators: Joining 54.4k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Zero Knowledge Proof explanations really be like
Example 1: Peggy plays a simple game with two colored balls.
Example 2: Peggy plays with a Whereâs Waldo book.
Example 3: Peggy calculates the solutionâs hash in the last round; i.e., H(914783256) = 0515. She then rewrites it as a decimal number, i.e., 0515 = 1301, and applies the mapping; i.e., 1301 mod 27 = 5. She proceeds to translate 5 to row i = 6 for the next query and adds the solution of row i = 6, i.e., 256391478, to the proof string. Last, she attaches the hashes of the Merkle tree nodes needed to check whether the result matches the commitment to P.
I find it the most interesting that the Lido narrative: ´there will only be one LST and because of that it is better it is us (Lido) than any even more centralized player´ is so readily accepted by many people. This narrative enables Lido to aggressively grow through dubious means like the karpatkey partnership. Karpatkey manages many large DAO treasuries and apparently karpatkey bought steth with these treasuries and blocked adding other LSTs. Only after public outcry some DAOs intervened and now hold a more diverse LST portfolio.
In my opinion, accepting this narrative makes people complacent and fall in line behind Lido, because the alternative, e.g. binance dominating the staking market, is obviously a worse outcome. Lido propagates this statement because it helps them to justify their means. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy which again helps Lido. It is not surprising that Lido now aggressively spreads this narrative again on various platforms like bell curve podcast, bankless and twitter. Lido is well connected and they can place their narrative quite effectively in the space.
Does the narrative actually make sense? At the core the narrative is ´The dominant LST has the most integrations and the largest network effect´ and due to this all ETH will flow to it. In essence it reduces the complexity of staking products to one or two quantities and argues the end state lies at the edge, i.e. one dominating LST. This pushes people into becoming convex thinkers, which in this case helps Lido to divide up the market âYou either support us or you support big centralized exchangesâ. The simplicity of the narrative to me is similar to some very simplified arguments by (hobby) economists which are then surprised that actual market data contradicts them. They then argue that people are not ârationalâ actors. But what actually happens is they dumbed down the complexity of a system to a level which makes it easily calculable but the outcome of this simplified system does not match reality anymore because they unknowingly removed some essential mechanics.
Even the market itself does not support the Lido narrative If you look at market data, like the recent glassnode insights report. Lido grew by 54% since January 2023, and rocket pools rETH grew by 157%. How is this even possible because I thought according to their narrative they would win automatically because of network effects. rETH is by pretty much all quantifiable means an inferior product: Lower network effect, lower liquidity, fewer integrations, lower yield. People now even pay a premium to own rETH. Is it because people are stupid? I would argue that the simple convex thinking of the Lido narrative removed a lot of the actual complex decision making of market participants and that is why the Lido narrative should at least be questioned or even rejected outright.
But why does Lido dominate. They were the first LST. Making staking accessible for everyone. They are less centralized than Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. They did not really have any competition in the market until about 1 year after the Beacon chain launch when Rocket Pool started. And now there are alternatives, some better, some worse and new entrants will come. Sure, due to historical reasons Lido will be the larges LST for years to come, but I am personally not convinced that they will inevitably reach 90% market share because of network effects alone.
And now to a more personal note. Does it make a difference for me to buy an LST from an established player compared to a new entrant? Yes definitely. Storing my ETH in a tested smart contract has its value. Having access to degen plays is great. Being able to borrow money against my LSTs is necessary. But does it make a difference if the established player has over 30% dominance or 3%. Not really. rETH has enough liquidity and integrations for me with just about having 4% of the staking market share. The marginal utility of network effects of a larger LST protocol is already pretty close to zero and other parameters, like systemic risks, become more important.
TL;DR: The Lido narrative of âThere will only be one LSTâ has been spread quite efficiently by Lido. This simple narrative leaves out nuance and makes the community complacent. Even the market itself does not seem to support the narrative. Be careful accepting or spreading it further.
to reiterate something that seems confusing to casual users:
Lidoâs threat is not a threat on top of Ethereum. Itâs not about centralizing the economy running on top of it, itâs not about a widespread smart contract risk (though it does add that, too).
This is what the strategy leader at Lido (Hasu) laid out on his recent Bankless episode:
- Solo staking will trend down to <1% of the network
- Liquid staking is the superior form of staking and all staking will migrate there
- LSTs will converge to a single LST
The result of this is that 99% of Ethereumâs validators are controlled by Lido. That means that Ethereum is governed by the Lido DAO. The Lido DAO can choose to censor, blacklist, or finalize whatever they want on the chain. They become vulnerable to government pressure or human corruptibility to do these things. They can pressure their very small operator set to do these things in the shadows (especially once forced exits are implemented).
This fundamentally changes what Ethereum is. It becomes the Lido DAO chain. Might as well use BNB chain at that point. Ethereumâs validator set is absolutely core to its decentralization, permissionlessness, and credible neutrality.
đĽ Blobspace 101, by Domothy đĽ
Copy/pasting the authors own intro: âthis article aims to approach the concept of blobspace, from the ground up. We will go through a quick overview of the problem of scaling a blockchain and how the concept of blobspace is the answer that Ethereum is betting on. Then we will delve into the more technical aspects of blobspace, first from the perspective of EIP-4844, since itâs about to roll out, and then weâll quickly look into what âfull dankshardingâ will entail in the future."
This was a response lower but I think it merits a full text. Lido situation often gets compared to the bleak bitcoin mining pool situation where 3 pools account for >75% of all hashpower.
I think the lido situation is actually worse than bitcoin mining pools.
Switching hashpower between pools is easy, switching stake from one LST to another requires the entry and exit queues which are multiple months long and thus entrench one lst. Eg. If lido went corrupt and starting doing reorgs to steal MEV then the rate at which they lose stake is limited by Ethereum consensus. Further, thereâs actual economic irrationality to switch away since lido earns more in this paradigm (assuming no user activated slash).
The point being is that there are no economics that inhibit mining pools and this has been proved through voluntary self limitations.
Ethereum is struggling with this.
Act 1: Uncertainty Unveiled
(Scene: A bustling virtual realm resembling Ethereumâs landscape. Characters Lido, Operator A, Operator B, and DSA Representative are present.)
Lido: (Addressing the audience) The enigma of the future looms over Ethereum like a shadow. The path ahead is hazy, as we navigate uncharted waters.
Operator A: (Whispering to Operator B) Have you heard the rumors about DSAâs interference?
Operator B: (Nodding) Yes, word is they want to certify operators with their software. Itâs like handing control to a new sheriff.
(Enter DSA Representative)
DSA Representative: (Authoritatively) Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the new era of certified staking. The Divided State of America demands compliance with our guidelines. Only those who bear the badge of âcertified operatorâ shall stake and govern the network.
Act 2: Compliance and Consequences
(Scene: Lidoâs assembly hall. Lido and a group of Operators are in discussion.)
Lido: (Addressing the Operators) We stand at a crossroads. DSAâs decree is clear, and we must decide how to respond.
Operator A: (Raising a hand) What about those of us who donât wish to comply with DSAâs terms?
Lido: (Serious) Dissent is a luxury we canât afford. Compliance is the path weâve chosen, for now.
Operator B: (Angrily) So, we relinquish our autonomy to become mere pawns?
Lido: (Solemnly) Our choice is stark, yet we must weigh the consequences.
(Operators mumble among themselves.)
Act 3: The Shadows of Cartelization(Scene: Ethereumâs digital realm, depicting bustling stakers and traders.)
Operator A: (Defiantly) I canât ignore my principles. Iâm unstaking.
Operator B: (Worried) But the queue to restake is overwhelming, not to mention the enticing profits weâd be leaving behind.
Lido: (Observing with a sinister grin) As DSAâs grip tightens, chaos unfolds.(Operators reluctantly withdraw, some out of principle, others due to sheer inconvenience.)
Narrator: (Voiceover) The Ethereum ecosystem stands at a precipice, as Lidoâs influence swells, furthering the consolidation of power.
(Lidoâs dominance continues to grow, its ominous shadow looming larger over Ethereum.)
Operator A: (Resolute) We canât let this tyranny persist. A fork is our last resort.
Operator B: (Doubtful) But Lidoâs stranglehold is formidable, and with DSAâs supportâŚ
(Lido faces a pivotal decision: Embrace cartelization or confront dissent.)
Lido: (Calculating) The road ahead is murky, but our grip on power is undeniable. Ethereum shall bend to our will.
(Curtain falls, shrouding Ethereumâs future in an unsettling darkness of cartelization and control.)
This comment was a reply made on a comment with little attention at the end of yesterdayâs daily so I am sharing it now. Basically, in light of people complaining that âGitcoin lost its wayâ, often pointing to the use of money from Shell in one funding round and another controversy around funding for minority groups in the ecosystem, here is my counter argument.
One could argue that Gitcoin is doing what it was designed to as a protocol. Itâs supposed to be modular for many different types of funding rounds with many different organisations. Funding from Shell, funding for minority demographics etc. This is all controversial due to your subjective opinion on what you want Gitcoin to be. Well the Gitcoin vision was for it to grow up and become a protocol for all, not to remain a niche technical Ethereum native app. Much like how there are many Linux distros for whatever niche you want, this is a feature and not a bug.
Just because I donât like the fact that Ubuntu exists and adds telemetry to an ecosystem which is generally much more private than other operating systems, doesnât mean I see Ubuntu or Linux as a failure. Of course not, Ubuntu invites newbies into the ecosystem and if they want to progress from there they can. Meanwhile, there are privacy focused distros and ones which stick to core OG Linux community values. Same goes for Gitcoin.
Here is the whole comment thread for the context: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/163cqkk/comment/jy5cw5i/
u/keynya counter argument:
I do not know what OP thinks but if you want to focus on the negative I have a few points:
Took them a year to revamp their website which only now is usable again.
They spent a lot of effort to have gitcoin rounds on Fantom which barely had anything useful to support instead of integrating L2s. The last rounds were therefore super expensive to contribute. Only now they support optimism.
The last few rounds were invite only, which probably hurt new devs and teams because they were excluded from gitcoin.
At the start of this round all DAI contributions failed. People lost quite a bit of money with failed transactions and the website said Ëdonation successfullË. I you looked at the earliest failed transactions they were probably from the gitcoin team. They knew about the problem and still enabled DAI contributions. No idea why.
Why waste developers time on running your own L2, the PGN networks? It does not make sense to me, We have enough very good L2s by now why make your own.
The whole Shell collaboration was a PR disaster.
There was also a diversity round in spring where one of the judges also had a project in the round. This round was special and the judges had extra power over who gets the money. This judge was a very controversial figure in the space already and they nevertheless took her on. The whole situation was as also a pr disaster.
All these points above tell me there is a lack of control, oversight and quality standards in the gitcoin organisational structure.
With all the list of negative points I have to say I personally still love gitcoin rounds. The website now is so much better than last year. They are in my view a pillar of our space and I love donating to projects I use.
Iâd like to touch on Gitcoin and their passport with which they are trying to become decentralised proof of human/anti-sybil standard while constantly changing stamps to accomodate whatever new KYC-grab your ETH shady project they partner with like Proof of humanity, Civic etc.
Other stamps are connect your social networks, like sybils have problems with that.
One of the stamps is GTC staking, stake our coin to prove you are human?
Complete antithesis to web3 and it is getting a lot of praise.
SHOUT OUT TO EV Maverick /u/lanternfinance because his team is building something I think many would and should be interested in if solo staking scares the shit out of you.
If you live in any of these states, would you be open to chatting with a team called Lantern Finance? Staking as a Service. Pure play staking service provider.
They are launching October and looking for early people in these states to talk to about participating in a feedback session.
Right now, though, they want to talk to some folks about their journey and history and get feedback on their current experiences/struggles with staking.
They are doing SAAS using KYC through Persona, custody through BitGo for custody with insurance, and are building a simple and effective U.S. based service complete with tech support/phone support etc. They have onboarded a team of around 8 iirc.
Super easy to talk to and I hope some of you can line up a quick meeting. Highly recommend even if you arenât from these states. Iâm planning on joining the early feedback cohort in October and I hope some of you can too. (this meeting isnât about investing! Just about experience with staking in general they want to know what features to focus on)
If you want to reach out: prince@lantern.finance and jung@lantern.finance
Prince was at Hodlercon Super nice fella!
From the team: âLantern Finance is a US-based, pure-play ETH staking solution. Weâre focusing on security, peace of mind and ease of use for staking. Weâre looking to do ~30 minute user research interviews where we get insights on what an ideal staking solution looks like for them. We also want to understand their crypto journey, what they like/dislike about their existing platforms, and feedback on what weâre building.â
Uniswap wins lawsuit accusing them of being liable for scam tokens: https://decrypt.co/154312/uniswap-lawsuit-dismissed-defi-crypto-exchange-not-liable-for-scam-tokens
This is dope!
An important distinction between the smart contracts deployed by Uniswap and the actual token contracts and pools launched by the scammers. The judge concluded that Uniswapâs contracts cannot be inherently illegal, the issue is with whomever made a scam token and then scammed people with it. Watch out SEC, this is coming your way.
Hereâs some choice bits:
Judge Faliaâs decision said that smart contracts underlying the exchangeâs core functions should be viewed separately from code underpinning liquidity pools, which are drafted by token issuers and enable newly created tokens to trade.
âThese foundational contracts are distinctive from the token contracts unique to each pool and drafted by issuers,â Judge Falia wrote. âThe contracts relevant to Plaintiffsâ claims are not these overarching codes provided by Defendants, but rather the pair or token contracts drafted by the issuers themselves.â
Here are the claims made about Ethereum between those time stamps, and my rating for each one.
JP Morgan owns a lot of crucial Ethereum infrastructure - MOSTLY FALSE
While JP Morgan does have some financial ties to Ethereum infrastructure, they donât âown a lotâ. JP Morgan owns less than 10% of Consensys (Consensys is the parent company for Metamask, Infura, Besu and Teku). Of course while Metamask and Infura are both influential and widely used, they are not the only games in town and they are not âcrucialâ to Ethereumâs survival. And while 10% may be enough to demand a board seat and sway some close votes, itâs a far cry from âowning infrastructureâ in the sense that itâs under their thumb.
JP Morgan dollarized the Ethereum network - FALSE
Circle (USDC) and Tether (USDT) did the most to dollarize Ethereum, imo. Circle is owned in part by the venture capital arms of several big banks, but I could not find JP Morgan Chase listed as one of them in any VC announcement. Tether is privately owned by 4 rich dudes.
Stablecoins represent more value on the Ethereum blockchain than ETH itself - FALSE
By roughly adding up the top dozen stablecoins on CoinGecko, Ethereumâs stablecoin market cap is less than $150B. Compare this to ETHâs market cap of $204B.
JP Morgan and Citigroup basically own the NY Fed - MOSTLY FALSE
There is no ownership in a corporate sense. While banks are required to âownâ shares of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve answers to their Board which is directly accountable to Congress, and profits are never distributed to shareholders. Itâs a strange corporate structure, but thatâs government agencies for you. Many consider Congress to be bought and paid for by private interests though in the end, so thatâs why this only earns a rating of âmostlyâ false.
Elon Musk bad - TRUE
Announcements
Ethereum
$1649
0.063
Ask your reporter,
On to the final quarter,
Supply gets shorter.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 751,257 (+1,812)
Pending validators: Joining 58.6k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Ben Cowen is calling for eth coming home again.
u/intothecryptoverse (Ben Cowen):
Honestly itâs comical that people even listen to that guy
Cowswap is awesome. You generally get the best price for execution and you have gas abstracted away. Itâs so good that uniswap is more or less copying them for univ4
However, the Coincidence of Wants that CoW is famed for is an off chain matching system. If we have the largest dex in the space move liquidity / market making off chain, we will be making a huge shift towards a lunarpunk ethos in perhaps a negative way.
Onchain liquidity numbers have been super transparent and is the basis for most risk analysis. Iâve gotten reth accepted as collateral on many different lending platforms and have read through a number of analyses. The one common point across all of these platforms has been proof of lasting liquidity. In fact, it was this consistent request across protocols for probable liquidity that formed the basis for reth having liquidity incentives to begin with - we needed to prove reth was liquid.
Back to the issue at hand, when market makers move off chain they will no longer be sourcing from onchain LPs. There was a tweet a few days ago (if I wasnât banned Iâd find it) that showed only a small handful of people provided most of the ETH/usd liquidity on uni. If these people decided to become searchers in the cowswap or univ4 system, then they wouldnât have public liquidity and slippage would become hard to predict.
I am very favorable towards privacy in certain cases; public liquidation levels is dumb as fuck. However, onchain liquidity is like a global proof of reserves. The whole world benefits by being able to have reasonable ideas about slippage.
Perhaps we can get the best of both worlds. Itâs not unreasonable for these off chain market makers to have to post zk proofs of their holdings on chain somehow. It doesnât have to be individualized since we only care about the picture globally. This system would also warn people when liquidity vanishes which is an issue otherwise.
Not to mention SUAVE makes this whole problem worse by abstracting liquidity at the block building level
itâs my cake day đĽł
seven years ago I realized I was posting too much crypto stuff on my main account, so i decided to make an âethereum accountâ instead. these days my main account is long gone, and i have fully become ethereum account đŤĄ
bear market things + life changes mean i havenât been around as much, but still lurking here from time to time, and still shitposting on twitter/X/whatever itâs called now. Iâll be back when thereâs exciting stuff to talk about again (pricewise or techwise or both).
A few days ago someone asked on /r/ethereum whatâs the advantage of scaling via L2 vs L1. I started drafting my response but life got in the way and couldnât give a timely answer. I will instead post it here, most of you will understand well this topic. But it might benefit someone that didnât think about the problem in these terms or give you another way to explain it to newcomers.
Here is a very simple mental model to understand the scalability trilemma, or why blockchains donât scale in a trivial/naive manner.
The scalability trilemma basically states that from the following 3 properties; decentralization, security, scalability. A blockchain can only pick two. The moment you try to attain the other, you start to give up some of the other properties.
The easiest way to see why is to understand the two trivial/naive ways to scale a system. They are called horizontal and vertical scalability. Horizontal scalability is, in essence, adding more instances of the machine to solve the problem in parallel. For instance, your CPU has multiple cores to scale it horizontally. Vertical scalability is about adding more resources to a single instance, to make it able to process more per unit of time. More memory, faster CPU, faster internet connectionâŚ
The thing is that these 2 techniques are directly at odds with the other 2 properties of the trilemma. Vertical scalability is at odds with decentralization. And horizontal scalability is at odds with security.
In essence, if you make the requirements to run a node bigger (vertical scalability) you make it harder and harder for anyone that wants to run an instance. Instead of being able to run it in a consumer grade PC, you will have to run in an AWS intance, or a mainframe. Or whatever ridiculous machine you need to validate Solana. So if you simply increase the resources needed to run a node you end up centralizing the network. This is what Avalanche, Solana, and various other alt-L1s that promised to have solved scalability did. They are just giving up decentralization for scalability.
And horizontal scalability essentially requires splitting the network in shards, each of which validates different sets of transactions, so you can validate in parallel. But if you do this in a naive manner, itâs obvious that the security of the network suffers because the cost to attack each shard is proportionally smaller as there are less validators verifying the transactions.
The roll-up roadmap is a non-naive way to scale the network. It uses sophisticated cryptographic techniques to build compressed proofs of computation, that basically enable to scale the same blockspace by many orders of magnitude, as many transactions can be batched together and posted in a compressed form. It also enables parallel (sharded) execution, you can have multiple roll-ups each of which executes transactions in parallel, without sacrificing the security of the network.
Every good ponzi, by lasting long enough, hits a moment of capitulation. At that point, initial haters are swayed by its resilience, and join in despite their misgivings.
If the ponzi is especially good, this moment is properly enhanced by an announcement. Lever capitulation into full-blown FOMO.
I believe we hit that moment yesterday with friend.tech. The Paradigm stuff, airdrop points. My timeline is filled with otherwise reasonable people hopping on board.
âBut why, Phi, why do you call friend.tech a ponzi? Iâm having fun. Theyâre going to release more features. Social tokens are the future.â
My own perspective comes down to simple math.
The price curve for shares is supply squared. Goes up fast, goes down faster. You get that high initial growth, tricking your brain into extrapolation, even though in reality itâs pricing people out; then once sentiment turns and people dump, youâll get a catastrophic fall, with everyone and especially late buyers scrambling to get out.
Platform fees are 5% on every trade. Open up your calculator app and type $1000. Multiply it by 0.95. Then do that same operation again and again. See how much money you have left after 3 trades, 5 trades, 10 trades; see how much value is extracted from the userbase by the developers.
You add these two together, you have a recipe for a heavily negative sum game. The money is siphoned away from the system no matter what, a minimum of 10% (in + out), and more the longer you stay in and trade.
Iâm a reckless gambler myself. Iâm not going to tell you you canât have fun in a ponzi, Iâm not going to talk to you about morality. But I would tell you this is one of those times where donât-put-any-money-youâre-unwilling-to-lose should apply strongly. It will come crashing down, and there will be many more losers than winners; the math makes this inevitable.
Any money you put in friend.tech is a greaterâs fool theory bet where the odds are stacked against you.
In 2013 I was part of a local bitcorn group. We had this one member, âTammyâ [not his real name], who attended every meeting and always contributed to really insightful discussion. The thing was, Tammy never bought bitcorn or any of the altcoins that were springing up the time. He explained that if he never bought coins he could never get scammed. He prided himself on understanding the fundamentals of every coin, and he was very sharp at identifying potential weaknesses of different coins. But he never bought in. To this day, Iâm still not sure he has every held crypto.
My point is that itâs no fun to participate in crypto if you avoid new things. Itâs no fun to sit on the sidelines and point out flaws. I donât want anyone to blow their stack, and Iâm very honest about what I believe are valuable tools, and what I think are fads, but itâs OKAY to check out fads. Could you imagine still being unwilling to hold jpg NFTs because theyâre just pictures? Pretty much anyone who holds that view is still living in 2019.
So I urge EthFinance to relax a little bit, stop being so scared of things that are likely to be fads and just check them out with care and caution. I have a group of fad enthusiasts and weâve explored three fads this month and all of them have been a ton of fun.
Give yourself time to grow if you need it. Skip this one, no harm, but commit to sticking a pinky toe in the next thing just so you can enjoy the ride.
Not going to lie, Iâm getting pretty sick of the nuance free takes about Friend.tech. It seems like everyone either convinced it is the future and super disruptive or a basically just a ponzi scheme. Can we please get some nuance in here?
IQBellCurveWojakMeme.jpeg
Low IQ end of the curve: Woah I can buy shares in my favourite influencers! This is the future!!!11!!1!!!!
Mid curve normie take: âiTâs jUsT a PonZi ScHemEâ
Big brain take: âThis is both an innovative platform and an app with major hurdles and design flaws to adoption. It has unique utility like token gated chat rooms which will almost certainly be valuable in the future on some kind of future platform but it might not be this one. Friend.tech has many weaknesses and in particular it uses a highly volatile uniswap V1/2 based curve for pricing of influencer shares. As a result prices fluctuate wildly and will leave many users with a sour taste in their mouth when they get dumped on. This is a big hurdle to mainstream adoption and the price dumps are why all the normies leave and talk shit about crypto in a bear market. 95% of people donât want to speculate on this shit. Furthermore, there is also an enormous 5% fee on all trades which quickly bleeds users of their investments if they trade regularly.â
Edit: I agree with a lot of your takes in the replies, my point isnât that any one of them is wrong, just that your nuanced takes are what I have been wanting more of and less one sentence posts whining about it or shilling it.
SoâŚis anyone interested in brainstorming a decentralized alternative to Wikipedia?
If you arenât familiar, Brian Lunduke just posted this video on Wikipediaâs finances.
TL;DR? Wikipediaâs expenses are roughly a third of their revenues; the difference goes to âcharitiesâ which have some strange political ties.
I wasnât born yesterday. A defacto information platform like Wikipedia donating 2/3rds of its revenue to political entities is going to end with Wikipedia itself censoring opinions to protect their donation streams, and perhaps to curry favor with politicians.
Things get even worse when you consider Lundukeâs previous financial investigation. Mozilla gets most of its revenue fromâdrumroll, pleaseâGoogle. I swear, Big Tech has monetary incest problems which make FTX look solvent.
Any Ethereum L2 based decentralized Wikipedia alternative should focus first and foremost on censorship resistance. Financial incentives are secondary.
Censorship resistance should be the top priority to prevent the platform from censoring opinions and information based on pressures from outside entities purchasing the right to edit articles. Without proper censorship resistance, the alternative Ethereum L2 based Wikipedia alternative will quickly fall into the same issues as Wikipedia, where donations and political ties influence what information is allowed or promoted on the platform.
Wikipedia donates 2/3 of its revenues to outside organizations, many with concerning political connections. This creates a dangerous incentive for Wikipedia to censor information to protect donation revenue streams or curry political favor. The power to control information is far too valuable enough as it is without adding the possiblity of profiting if some sort of cookie-cutter financial DeFi game is uesd and applied to a wikipedia alternative on an Ethereum L2.
If the alternative platform relies on tokenizing as a way to weight one userâs edits over another, the incentives could lead to censorship and conflicts of interest around what information is allowed or promoted. Financial rewards or incentives for users should be secondary to creating a platform resistant to all forms of censorship and bias. Rewards based on âtruthfulnessâ could easily turn into subjective censorship.
Any form of censorship, no matter how well-intentioned, can be exploited to silence dissenting opinions and shape narratives. Maintaining censorship resistance should be the highest priority.
Without proper incentives and protections, all platforms, even L2 Ethereum dApps, are vulnerable to becoming tools of censorship. The alternative must be designed from the ground up to resist this.
As stated last Friday, this week I have started to structure all of your feedback for a potential âEthFinance Bull Case for Ethereumâ post, which could also be used for a short video.
Ethereum the network
Ether the asset
Some comments:
Next steps (from my point of view, but also happy to receive feedback when it comes to the process!) would be to collect your feedback, change the structure/ reorganize all arguments, enhance every bullet or even split them to make sure everything is covered. After that I will start drafting short paragraphs for each point, but also encourage all of you to draft a bull case yourself or at least pick your favorite point(s) and draft a small text for those.
Tornado Cash founder arrested by FBIâŚ.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1702
God Speed brothers. We will pour a drink when Kim Jong takes your revenge
The power and integrity of sanctions derive not only from OFACâs ability to designate and add persons to the SDN List but also from OFACâs willingness to remove persons from the SDN List consistent with the law. The ultimate goal of sanctions is not to punish but to bring about a positive change in behavior.
Lol. When does the Treasury think they will see âa positive change in behaviorâ on the part of the immutable EVM code that resides at 0xd90e2f?
Three of the top 15 eth burning/gas consuming contracts on mainnet are L2s. Thatâs such a quiet win for the scaling space and itâs JUST beginning.
â This has been your daily dose of hopium
Announcements
One more layer two,
DeBank is now coming through,
Price surge avenue.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 735,915 (+2,069)
Pending validators: Joining 61.3k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
how to move crypto through a CEX when you usually just transact onchain:
Coinbase will be operating a few hundred Rocket Pool minipools
https://twitter.com/cbventures/status/1689639117016137734
We know the Rocket Pool team shares this belief and weâre delighted to support them via active participation in their Oracle DAO and using ETH from our corporate balance sheet to operate several hundred nodes on the Rocket Pool network alongside our friends Unit_410.
Exciting development from wallet space from Safe
New experimental feature unlocked!
Social Login: Sign up with Google or Apple ID on Safe {Mobile} iOS.
https://twitter.com/safe/status/1689313162817093633
not only we can create new social wallet but we can also migrate existing wallet, no seed phrases hassle and could help onboard folks with limited technical knowledge.
out of curiosity, i look and found this EIP-7212
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-7212-precompiled-for-secp256r1-curve-support/14789
From proposal âMany hardware and software solutions use this elliptic curve as signing algorithms, such as TLS, DNSSEC, Appleâs Secure Enclave, Passkeys, Android Keystore, and Yubikey, which can be used in the EVM.â
Lot of math and havent digested the whole thread but future of wallet management looks bright.
For those who didnt see 2 days ago EVMavericks kicked off a novel idea to create a community sourced decentralized art collection around a central theme!
To my knowledge this would be the first of its kind, right now we have close to 40 people/artists that have committed to creating art for the project. Would be awesome to hit 100 and showcase a unique robust collection in Ethereum!
Any and all funds raised from it would go towards whatever initiative the artists decide on.
One of the members just suggested a broad theme, âDecentralizationâ, so that or something like it may be what we go with!
I personally am excited to see all the different takes/art styles/perspectives on something abstract like âdecentralizationâ, would make for a pretty compelling artistic experiment!
If youre interested in participating and contributing art join the discord (dont need an EVM)and head over the public untitled art channel and hit the thumbs up on the first message!
Just wanted to share my excitement - todayâs been full of firsts for me! I used the Arch User Repository for the first time to build frame-eth from source, and successfully used the Frame Wallet and managed to bridge to Base. But wait, thereâs more⌠I also minted my very first Base NFT! đ¨đĽ
Iâve been hearing a lot about Frame wallet, and I figured with the official launch of Base, I could use this as an opportunity to test out two new tech innovations at the same time. Finally took to the Arch User Repository and installed the latest Frame wallet from source and itâs genuinely a feeling I canât quite put into words. The whole process was much smoother than I expected, and Iâm really excited about the potential of decentralized tech.
For anyone still on the fence, just dive in! The waters are fine, and the learning experience is invaluable. đ
Cheers to firsts! đĽ
From a user experience standpoint and someone who identifies as both a ânormieâ but also has slightly bit above average knowledge of crypto/blockchains, imma just say it: L2s UX is a mess.
Youâre expecting the TikTok/plug and play/ iPhone and iPad generation to know how to setup Metamask, to bridge over ETH to one of 10+ L2s, do DeFi/NFT with fragmented liquidity amongst the layer 2s and 8 versions of AAVE/Uniswap/Sushiswap/Blur/OpenSea, wait 8 days to bridge back to mainnet, and keep up with whats possible to do on different L2sâŚ.? Donât even have to get the point about lack of decentralization on the L2s.
It seems to me the current structure of the Ethereum blockchain enforces favorable tokenomics on the layer 1 (capped blockspace and throughput, deflationary issuance, hardening of ETH) while giving users an option to opt into a low gas fee/high throughput environment, which on the face of things, is ideal, best of both worlds. But in reality, I feel that it severely degrades the user experience, creates multiple friction points, and ultimately deters Ethereum from any sort of mass adoption, mainly catering to the crypto-crowd. Hope Iâm wrong and Ethereum thrives, but this user complexity is, for me, is one of the largest issues that Ethereum has to contend with for long term expansion and adoption.
Personally, I expect most people to experience blockchain through account abstraction, and for the driver to be a dapp rather than a blockchain/rollup.
i.e. youâre on Base mainnet because youâre playing words3.xyz, but really you donât even need to know youâre on Base mainnet. You hold a Reddit NFT but you donât even know itâs a NFT, or where it exists.
Even in the EOA world of today, this is smoothed out on wallets like Rabby handling the network switching quite smoothly.
As for those dapps existing on different places, I think that existence is pretty fungible. It doesnât matter to me if Uniswap liquidity is fragmented when I can technically get the same execution price within 0.1% of general market price. More exotic assets will have to pick and choose, but then I wouldnât expect normal people to invest in esoteric tokens.
To me, getting to subcent fees while maintaining essential decentralization, security and credible neutrality properties is more important. Perceived user complexity is mostly a consequence of the space exploring many venues to this day.
Hope everyone is hanging in there and keeping your heads up. Bearish/crabish times can sometimes feel like an extended hunger pit in your stomach. This too shall pass and brighter days will come, rest assured.
I started up my weekly buys again back when we last touched the 1700s and will continue to do so for better or worse, until we are out of the crab range above 2k with solid seeming resistance.
Fam and friends who hold ETH will periodically check in, fishing for price predictions from me.. I tell them the same thing over and over, that I donât expect any meaningful positive price action (anywhere near ATH) to happen until US inflation is tamed, fed fund rates are cut down to a more normal rate, and not during any sort of recession because of rate cuts. We need to be out of those woods before I feel the sentiment will change with risk assets.
Tall order but that order will be filled. And as some have speculated here, the soonest I think thatâs going to happen would be sometime in 2025. Obviously just a best guess and honestly, an optimistic guess in my point of view. Time passing without catastrophic events happening in crypto would be a blessing. We need time to heal the wounds of the great Terra/Luna collapse and all the subsequent fallout that was left in the aftermath. Weâre already starting to see some closure type things happening.. Mashinsky arrest, SBF back to jail, some blockfi funds are being returned, etc.. while we still have far to go, Gemini still in the lurch with Earn, SEC drama and so forth. Time will sort all of these things out and I believe for the better.
Meanwhile, growth is ongoing in our space, another time dependent variable. Mistakes will be learned from, innovation is inevitable all in good time.
Personally, somewhat recently, Iâve been working on some lifestyle changes.. which started with getting a check up at the doctors. Blood pressure, cholesterol, diet, exercise.. all very important to keep up on. I even grabbed an oura ring to help monitor sleeping habits. I feel as though Iâm training mentally and physically for the next bull run lol. But in all seriousness, it feels great to trend in a healthy direction. I work for myself, so keeping motivated and energy levels up are a persistent goal. Iâve also been traveling with more frequency and doing my best to travel with friends. The times I get to vacation a bit with friends, I realize they need it just as much as I do. Anyways..
Lastly, I might not chime in here much but I certainly read the daily everyday and have since long before the migration to r/ethfiance . I very much appreciate this community and the effort of those who do take the time to post in here. Thank you all!
Hello r/ethfinance!
As summer draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the incredible journey Iâve taken this season. Iâm thrilled to share that I have successfully defended my PhD thesis titled âDecentralized Finance and Central Bank Communicationâ, with a primary focus on the market microstructure of DEXes. This achievement was by no means a solo endeavor, and I owe a significant debt of gratitude to this community.
Throughout the research process, the insights, discussions, and support from r/ethfinance have been invaluable. Many of the comments here have enriched my understanding and shaped my perspectives on the evolving landscape of decentralized finance.
Iâm excited to start a new chapter as an Assistant Professor at Stockholm Business School. In this role, I will continue to dive deep into the intersection of market microstructure and DeFi, fueled by the passion and knowledge Iâve gained from this community.
In essence, I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to every member who posed challenging questions, shared enlightening resources, or simply offered words of encouragement. Thank you! / Magnus
this is an interesting shift - weâve moved on from serious competitors trying to replace Ethereumâs L1 and now weâre looking at entities trying to become Ethereum on top of Ethereum. the provider that becomes ubiquitous and that people build on top of - Eigenlayer, Lido v2, DVT protocols creating their own spec - theyâre all trying to become the dominant layer that people must use
Lido v2 believes that all liquid staking will eventually happen with stETH because defi markets want to converge to a single liquid staking token, so any staking protocol will just need to use Lido to open up a pool (âmoduleâ) and they can optionally issue their own token in addition to stETH. Eigenlayer wants to be the layer that protocols use to bootstrap services. SSV, Obol - they want to build a DVT protocol that every other provider conforms to (multi client architecture, but clients must use their spec).
but all of them are doing it in a way thatâs antithetical to the reason (imo) for Ethereumâs success - its credible neutrality and the fact that no one is the overlord here. In the example with DVT - multi client architecture is good, but not if the parent structure is centralized or not credibly neutral. Theyâre all trying to capture what wasnât captured when Ethereumâs model was developed. Humans are corruptible - DAOs are not the answer that makes something decentralized - does a serious competitor to Lido develop something that looks like Lido v2 (and Stakewise V3) but actually decentralized?
In my consulting work I bring up these topics a lot when I encounter any type of hostage collateral in system design. If the service is chain-adjacent I usually bring up Eigen Layer. If itâs an L1 I bring up running their L1 as an L2/L3 on Ethereum. Iâve done this for over a dozen projects. If itâs an app on chain I bring up LST collateral. I have never received a sound technical argument against this suggestion. Their argument is predictably about retaining token utility because they own a bag and want it to be worth more. When I bring up vampire attacks, the usual and sole response is that a social moat will protect them. This feels like wishful thinking to me. These approaches are going to devour the crypto space in the next decade. When we see the first vampire attack of something like Chainlink succeed where an attacker just forks their code and changes the collateral it will send off a tidal wave of copycats just like YFI did to liquidity farming with Sushi, Curve, Harvest, Aave, Kyber Rainmaker, etc. Eventually, layers of interest bearing collateral with different risk tradeoffs will be the only hostage collateral and every chain but the top few that can pay for their own security will settle on those few top chains.
I think the LST space is actually fragmenting and isnât likely to consolidate. It will look like the stablecoin space where there are dozens/hundreds of LSTs. Ideally Lido will be subject to repeated and sustained vampire attacks and will just service as a gateway into staking. I do think there will be actually decentralized LSTs but I think itâs too late in the game for them to dominate. That ship has sailed, Rocketpool was our best chance and they blew the opportunity by not using the oDAO RPL rewards for liquidity farming to bootstrap themselves to massive adoption.
So⌠I just minted a âStand with cryptoâ NFT with my VISA debit card and I finally understand why VISA letting you pay gas fees with your VISA card is such a big deal!
No need for anyone to create an exchange account and buy ETH, it just works in the background!
I am absolutely stoked about the convenience of using a VISA debit card to directly mint an NFT without the need for creating an exchange account and purchasing ETH (Ethereum) separately. This approach makes the process more user-friendly and accessible to individuals who might not be familiar with cryptocurrency exchanges or the technical aspects of buying and using Ethereum.
Using a debit or credit card to directly mint NFTs simplifies the process by abstracting away the steps involved in acquiring cryptocurrency like Ethereum and then using it to pay for minting fees or NFT creation.
Itâs a step towards mainstream adoption by reducing the barrier to entry and allowing more people to participate in the NFT space.
it really guts me to come here and find myself getting shit on. You donât have to know me, you donât have to trust me, but Iâm proud to say that every action Iâve ever taken has been in the best interest of promoting greater security and decentralization of the beacon chain. I have never acted in any way contrary to these values and itâs offensive that the same people keep dragging my name. YES, I accepted the role of oDAO member for Rocket Pool, a role that I am STILL very proud of, and YES, I got a lot of money for it, just like the other 18 odao members who participated in the protocol the way it was designed. YES, I voted to reduce that and have encourage further development of RP in a way that doesnât require an oDAO at all. You know what else I did? I proudly promoted a platform that has onboarded over 3000 nodes to the Ethereum network. And Iâll do it again if I can. Iâm not going to get shit on like a little bitch by people who havenât done shit to bring success to our network. I would STILL accept fair money for my time to support and promote other projects that are highly aligned with our goals, and Iâll never mince words about projects who risk our future. Sorry. Getting a little heated here.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
Weekly Doots ââ¨Eâ¨tâ¨hâ¨eâ¨râ¨eâ¨uâ¨mâ¨
0.062
$1833
Vyper labyrinth,
Compiler masonry tricks,
Curve pools broke a plinth.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 706,796 (+1,631)
Pending validators: Joining 75.5k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Consider this: The SEC (Securities and Exchange Consideration) Consideration deliberating on whethere they should once again reconsider their previous considerations considering to consider reconsidering ETH ETF for deliberation and consideration.
I held my tongue back in that thread, but I found that sentiment bizarre too. If ETH development were basically dead like Bitcoin I could maybe understand the logic of the market capping out soon, but ETH is still a rapidly developing and improving technology, and still has a lot of not only adoption but simple low-hanging improvements in market efficiency in front of it. Even if core Ethereum development completely halted today, ETH would still have at least another market cycle worth of juice in it.
There still arenât any ETFs in the US. Big brokerages only just launched crypto custody less than a couple months ago. Roll-ups and zk tech still arenât mature yet. The general public still thinks NFTs are an environmental nightmare. Itâs been less than a year since the last PoW block was mined on Ethereum, and barely three months since its literal consensus system was completed! The queue isnât even clear yet, for godâs sake!
These are probably a lot of the same people who called for $10k last cycle. Now that weâve been crabbing for a while, they get all depressed and doom-and-gloom. When the bull market picks up again, theyâre probably going to start calling for $20k+. Then weâll top out at like $16k and theyâll watch their generational paper gains slip through their fingers again.
Anyone following the Congress stablecoin bill?
That seems to have died today too. The law just created a legal structure for stablecoins (with actual legal protection) and allowed businesses to use stablecoins, but the bill has died
Good threads on it:
https://twitter.com/JBSDC/status/1684589699564728320
https://twitter.com/JBSDC/status/1684570863432257538
So fucked upâŚ. even a stablecoin bill cant pass. A proper crypto bill is just DOA
It appears that some of you arenât aware of what happened with Mullvad.
Mullvad is a VPN outfit located in Sweden, which has strong privacy laws.
Mullvad gets raided by the police who want user data:
https://www.hackread.com/mullvad-vpn-office-raided-police-user-data/
Mullvad frustrates that effort by not having any user data.
A little over a month later Mullvad is forced to withdraw their forwarded-ports service, which Iâm sure some of you know is what you want to have if youâre trying to run a node over a VPN:
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/
Not privy to the exact details of course, but it isnât rocket science to anyone who has been online for any length of time and relates to controversial political content, you poison the well. Suddenly somebody starts using a forwarded port for child porn, the complaint is made, and now the police come back to Mullvad asking for proof they werenât they werenât the ones who produced it. Or something like that.
Result? Anyone here who was using Mullvad as their VPN for staking now has to a) find another VPN and b) wonder how long it will be before the same proposition is made to that vendor.
None of Coingecko, Coinmarketcap, Coinmetrics, or Bitinfocharts have the right supply listed for ETH. They seem to be either accounting for new issuance but not burns, and/or they may be double counting ETH that has been withdrawn (as technically the ETH doesnât ever actually leave the staking deposit contract, but is instead re-minted at a 1-1 rate when âwithdrawnâ). Itâs almost been a year since the merge and almost 4 months since withdrawals were enabled. How have they not addressed this? Each of these sites has supply listed somewhere between ~120,700,000 and ~120,800,000.
CryptoQuant seemingly has the opposite problemâaccounts for burns but not new issuance under PoS (supply is under 119MM according to them).
Etherscan and Ultrasound.Money seem to get it the most correct (although it could also be noted that Etherscan has a slightly lower total supply than Ultrasound.Money).
Would be nice if we could get some consistency here. To be fair, the set up for the withdrawal contract and BeaconChain make it a bit of a mess of accounting, but I feel like there should be some more urgency to address this issue at the big metrics sites.
The SEC writes a not-so-subtle letter threatening accounting firms against working with the crypto industry, including dangling the threat of legal liabilities
Some unelected fuckface sitting in a federal agency with no legislative backing from Congress is able to threaten private service providers to cut out a legitimate American industry, using the full weight of the American government to back his threats. Raw, unelected power.
Just as with the FDIC shutting down some banks because they are associated with crypto services, and deciding to save others which are not. Just as with Operation Chokehold 1.0 and 2.0. Unelected, authoritarian power from the Administrative State, trampling on American rights.
Watching the Supreme Court castrate these federal agencies ruling by ruling is one of the few bright spots in politics rn.
Always read the actual thing, not the twitter crypto influencerâs summary of the thing.
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/munter-statement-crypto-072723
Weâve had some really shady cases like the Tether attestations where theyâve engaged auditing companies to do âattestationsâ that are deliberately designed to make people think their money is safe, while leaving loopholes so they donât have to actually keep the money safe. With Tether they literally wired the money from Bitfinex into a bank account, had the auditor certify that it was all there, then wired it right back out. Tether made a bunch of statements to make people think theyâd been audited, and we only found out about it because the New York regulator figured out what was happening and got the information into a public filing. This is the SEC saying, if you do an attestation that isnât an audit, you have to be honest about what it proves, and if the client starts lying about what it proves then you have to speak up about it or you could have legal liability too.
I know itâs complicated to have to fight on two fronts because we need to defend ourselves against the regulators as well as the scammers but can we please stop reflexively taking the side of the scammers who keep trying to scam people all the time?
32m crv drained:
https://twitter.com/Blockanalia/status/1685732007400079360
Sad 8year anniversary for ETH with one of the main (bluechip) DEFI projects getting rekt hard and spreading to projects having pools there.
Alchemix got hit by this reentry bug too today and it doesnât seem to be a white hat sadly:
https://twitter.com/spreekaway/status/1685686694811496448
Seems that ALCX exploit confirmed NOT a whitehat :(
So many more:
https://twitter.com/vyperlang/status/1685692973051498497
PSA: Vyper versions 0.2.15, 0.2.16 and 0.3.0 are vulnerable to malfunctioning reentrancy locks. The investigation is ongoing but any project relying on these versions should immediately reach out to us.
Jpged 10M (frontrun by MEV bot) https://twitter.com/peckshield/status/1685645064364822530
Hi @JPEGd_69, you may want to take a look: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa84aa065ce61dbb1eb50ab6ae67fc31a9da50dd2c74eefd561661bfce2f1620c
Metronome 1.6M https://twitter.com/spreekaway/status/1685669149911990273
Another curve pool (this time Metronome Synth ETH) hit by a similar exploit for $1.6m profit
Curve just tweeted: https://twitter.com/CurveFinance/status/1685696639325933568
To be clear - the dangerous combination was the affected vyper version AND using pure ETH
Peckshield Twitter has some info. Itâs a bug with certain versions of the Vyper compiler. Main victim right now are certain ETH based Curve pools. Newer pools (like most LST pools) are unaffected just because the Vyper compiler was newer at that time. Iâm surprised that when Vyper changed this code they didnât see a bug in the old code and notify people.
This is why I check r/cc from time to time, that and sometimes the âstoryâ posts interest me. Their knowledge of crypto is very superficial but they are often on-track with general news.
So apparently âprotect self-custodyâ passed in a committee (every republican voted in favor and every democrat against). I am not from the US so didnât understand how the process works and I see few do on reddit, but it is basically like this. After a committee approval, it then needs to be passed in Congress, by a majority. Then in the Senate by 60% and then Biden needs to actually sign it. He can veto and it would then take a 2/3 vote to overturn, vetoes are rare (Biden has 6).
The regulation side probably interests me more than most here. So far, Ethereum is mostly only used for Defi today, not gaming, betting, insurance, tokenization of real world assets etc. NFTs is maybe the second use case but doesnât interest me. If defi were banned or I thought it would be, I wouldnât hold ETH anymore since I thought other assets would appreciate more. For example, I never bought any Monero, itâs a regulatory nightmare imo. The US market is the most important because it has the most capital, being a large country and a lot of foreign investments. We buy stock in your companies (mostly tech), I doubt you invest much in foreign companies.
Very often, the western world also try to follow, or even copy US regulation. I used to be interested in flying drones and in 2021 my country (Sweden), introduced new laws that were an exact copy of the US rules. You have the nice round number 400 feet as height limit, we have 120 meters, which is the equivalent in feet and we adopted the rest too. If you sanction Iran, our companies have to comply, if you close your country due to Corona, we do the same (which I think was the correct decision). There are so many things we would never do first, but if you do it, we do it too. You lose a little bit of faith in your politicians when you become aware of this. We have clear and decent crypto rules, but they could change quickly from outside pressure. We are still a progressive country with few âbackwards thinkersâ, so that compensates a bit though.
I donât think the US will ban defi, I think it is more likely than in 2020, but I think more red tape is coming and some of it can be impossible to live up to for Americans. Like KYC on all defi protocols, making private wallets (sometimes called unhosted/dark wallets) illegal, whitelist/blacklist of dapps. I am not seeing good regulation be passed in the US that will prevent the next FTX, the next stable coin crash, clarify uncertainties or allow companies to use defi. Imo, the Ds are against good regulation that is passed by Rs and in favor of bad regulation that will hurt defi. âYou want to vote on a bill to make stablecoins less of a blackbox? Fuck no, every D go out of the room so we donât have quorum and canât vote on itâ - itâs a clown show. A couple of days ago the Senate (D majority) passed a really bad bill that would make controllers or large investors of protocols responsible for what happens on them and require bank-like AML. If North Korean hackers used Uniswap, there are no controllers but they could go after Uniswap labs, if it passes. The Rocketpool oDAO be responsible over their products. Maybe a dapp gets hacked, they could probably go after the devs working on it and punish them.
Hopefully this might lead to something good and make Defi more anonymous and less centralized than today. As Voorhees said, if there are controllers, itâs not defi. But yea, if Blackrock enters, even with a defi ban in practice, maybe none of this âmattersâ, price wise.
https://nitter.net/TheCryptoCPA/status/1686098439979798528
Today, the IRS issued a Rev. Rul. 2023-14 saying that PoS staking rewards are taxed at the time you gain dominion & control (D&C) over the token.
D&C occurs when you can sell, exchange or sell the reward.
If the tokens are âlockedâ, you wonât have D&C so thereâs no income to be reported on your taxes.
Bloomberg Opinion article on whether index funds should be illegal discussed Richard Heart and his alleged fraud if anyone is interested in reading below:
Hex
Here is an economic system, or a system anyway:
So you pay me $100 for 100 MattCoins, you deposit them with me for a year, and at the end of the year I give you back 138 MattCoins.
At the end of the year, how much would you expect your 138 MattCoins to be worth? I think the main options are [1] :
I think that Answer 3 is the standard answer that traditional financial analysis would give you: You bought an electronic token with no cash flows ever, so itâs worth zero. I am drawn to this traditional analysis, but it has not really worked all that well for understanding crypto.
I think that Answer 4 is the standard answer that crypto would give you. This is a completely accepted mechanism of crypto finance: You have some token, the main thing that the token does is generate more tokens, you call those additional tokens âyield,â people are attracted to the yield, they buy the token and its price goes up. The âyieldâ does not come from any economic activity in the real world; it just comes from printing more tokens. âPonzinomics,â people sometimes say. Loosely speaking, this is the thought process behind crypto âPonzicoinsâ like OlympusDAO and Wonderland. Loosely speaking, it is the thought process behind many algorithmic stablecoins like TerraUSD. Loosely speaking, it is the thought process that Sam Bankman-Fried once described to me on Odd Lots: âYou start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol thatâs gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. Itâs just a box.â
I have a call to action for EVMavericks.
Something Iâd love to see and I think EVM is aptly positioned for is to fill a gap Iâm constantly seeing mentioned: digestible updates on whatâs happening in the ecosystem.
From here you can monetize it to create an revenue stream which can then be used to pay contributors, grow the treasury, and fund more projects. How to monetize?
This platform can then be used to:
zk washing spy,
Scan the center of your eye,
Earn until you cry.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Active validators: 693,231 (+2,032)
Pending validators: Joining 80.9k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Congratulations Cardano for releasing their first DEX today! You can now swap tokens without full reliance on a third party.
Creating this DEX appears to be the culmination of years of hard research, study, and academic achievement. It pays to take your time to do things right the first time without rushing.
Sometimes I wish we had DEXes on Ethereum. They sound like a really neat technology.
u/shiftly linked to a gnosis chain talk yesterday by Frederieke Ernst, a gnosis co-founder were she talked about L2s, Rollups and Sidechains. I watched it on livestream yesterday as I am generally interested in the gnosis ecosystem and their chain. Shiftly mentioned being surprised by the vision of gnosis chain as they have thought it being more like an incentiviced testnet.
I am financially and technically invested by being a solo validator on gnosis chain. So take any positive sentiment I have with a grain of salt. The history of gnosis chain is quite an interesting one. It was born as xdai chain as one of the earlier EVM compatible alt L1 chains. The interesting thing they did was not having their own coin, but using xDAI, bridged DAI, as the base token to pay for gas. No own token meant no speculative frenzy in the last bull run. They developed rather quietly the only bigger deal they made was with POAP in 2020, that is why all our POAPs life on there now. And thanks to xDAI chain POAPs can often be minted for free as the gas costs are pretty negligible and are being paid by POAP. I still remember the pre xDAI chain POAPs which sometimes would have cost me $50 to mint.
In Summer 2021 Gnosis got interested in xDAI chain and took them over. xDAI chain rebranded to Gnosis chain. They started changing the consensus layer from a more permissioned set to a permissionless Ethereum approach. For this they started using the GNO token as a mandatory staking token. One validator costs 1 GNO, which is about $120. Much cheaper than Ethereum. There are about 130000 validators on Gnosis chain, about 6 times less than on Ethereum, but the economic security is obviously much lower due to only 1 GNO being staked per validator compared to 32 ETH for a single Ethereum validator. There are some large staking as a service providers, but nevertheless there are a substantial number of solo stakers, making the gnosis chain pretty decentralized. Unfortunately, I do not have any statistics available, as the websites I used before are defunct since a few months ago.
Now to the vision. The following description is how I understand it and is from public sources I read over the last 2 years. Generally, I think it is very hard for any alternative L1 to have a value proposition as Rollups most probably will eat their lunch sooner or later. At the same time the Gnosis founders have been in the crypto space for so long, I assume they know what they are doing and how hard it is to have a value proposition. At first, their idea was for Gnosis chain to be like an incentivized testnet, like Kusama is to Polkadot. The idea was to first test hard forks on Gnosis chain and then deploy to mainnet. Reality threw a wrench in that idea, the merge on Gnosis chain was a few months after the Ethereum merge, same with the shapella hard fork which will be in 2 weeks on Gnosis chain.
This brings me to the talk linked by u/shiftly yesterday, which describes the new vision I have not seen described before. I definitely have seen more critical talks by Gnosis chain people aginst rollups in the last few months but did not really know why. The Gnosis team pivoted Gnosis chain to being more of Cosmos like ecosystem around Ethereum. They build a trustless bridge to and from Ethereum. And also gnosis pay will make jumping from the various chains as simple and trustless as possible.
Will it work out? I have no idea. Rollups for me have been the big disappointment of 2021 and 2022 and still are far away from the final version of being as trustless and decentralized. On the other hand Optimism and Arbitrum have become pretty reliable for everyday use and various ZK rollups are coming out left and right. Nevertheless, for me Gnosis chain is a hedge against the Rollup vision not working out as fast as necessary. Gnosis chain might be able to get some more usage in the coming years. Will Gnosis chain end up as a rollup on Ethereum? Maybe. But even then, due to the decentralized validator base, they might have a headstart for sequencer decentralization compared to othe rollups which first have to achieve that.
Tldr: Gnosis chain, formerly known as xDAI chain, pivoted in the last few months to a more Cosmos like vision for the Ethereum space consisting of EVM chains connected to each other by trustless bridges. Will it work out? Who knows.
Little Arbitrum DAO update for everyone as a delegate. Iâm assuming ARB links are still shadow-banned, but want to get the picture across regardless.
There has been push over the last month or so to get some type of grants framework started with the DAO. Two of the big proposals were Plurality Labs and Questbook.
Plurarlity Labs is looking to start a grants program over multiple phases. Initially running the program, but with an end goal of phasing themselves out once a way to run grants on-chain is solved. I voted âForâ this proposal (Snapshot) and it has narrowly passed. The DAO has been slow to start and somewhat directionless, so Iâm hoping this will help with that. While grants will be handed out with this project, the scope is more about the big picture process that develops over the long term.
Questbook was originally tied in with Plurality Labs, but split off into itâs own request. It has a similar goal - a method to run grant programs - albeit with a more focused approach. They have a system they have implemented with other projects they are looking to bring to the ARB DAO. I have been, I guess, âsponsoring (?)â Questbook as I have been working with them to post the Snapshot / Tally votes. Snapshop has passed (Snapshot) and the Tally Vote (Tally) has just started up. Iâve voted âForâ on this, as once again I think the grant projects are good for the space and like to see different ideas take a stab at growing the Aribtrum space. Having talked to the people there it seems like a good project!
An additional note. If Questbook passes, keep an eye out if you want to get involved. There will be a two week window where knowledgably crypto-ians can apply to be a Domain Allocator. Essentially, you would take over 1 of 4 target grant domains (Gaming / Developer Tooling on NOVA / New Protocol Ideas / Education, Community Growth and Events) to help decide if projects can get grant money. It is a paid role, so something to think about if your into that. There are details in the votes.
Itâs been a minute since I made any HOP updates too! Not too much since I last posted, a lot of housekeeping votes (multisig refills, sybil hunter airdrops). Of note tho:
https://lenster.xyz/posts/0x0d-0x03ea-DA-27346e91
What feature do you want if u/lenster have communities đĽ?
If you have an account itâd be great to show support for reddit-like threads and mod tools. You probably wonât be able to comment on this post but thereâs a few comments that say something similar that you can like to give a sentiment boost such as this one: https://lenster.xyz/posts/0x1d6e-0x092a-DA-0563fbdf
Worldcoin goes live as a member of the Superchain today.
Im not fully sold on an eye ball scanning billionaire, but itâs undeniable that Sam Altman is one of the hottest names in tech at the moment, and him using a very ethereum-centric product for a digital identity solution coupled to a financial system (literally what we have been harping about for years) is prettyâŚinteresting. For eg they are not just simply using the OP Superchain, they are even spending effort on shipping 4844 along with Base
Itâs also screamingly obvious that online presence (social media, financial txs etc) need to be tied to some form of identity to prevent bot spam, and even worse, AI powered bot spam. So if this triggers a gradual âahaâ moment among the tech zeitgeist, that decentralised and interconnected identity + social media + financial systems running on Ethereum are a very elegant solution to the problems of todayâŚit could be unbelievably bullish for ETH and OP.
Or it could be one of those retrospectively ridiculous ideas which were born and died in the depths of bear markets. We shall see soon enough.
Edit: big V dropped a blog post on biometric proof of person hood today!. Worldcoin team is listed in the acknowledgement line so some synchrony there. Reading through it, Iâm more convinced than ever that Proof of Person hood/decentralised identity will cross the Rubicon and get recognized as an important âlegitimateâ mainstream usecase of public ledgers (and of Ethereum, specifically).
+++ Benidoâs favorite podcasts episodes +++
Some weeks ago, someone here asked for podcast recommendations and interesting episodes. Since I enjoy podcasts I thought it might be a service to the community to highlight those I really liked (or maybe disliked? Letâs see what the future brings). The first edition was okay I think, so hereâs the second Top3.
Bell Curve: Is Liquid Staking a Winner-takes-all market? feat Hasu
This episode is interesting. Itâs part of the âLST Seasonâ of Bell Curve and the first episode after the kickoff. As most of you are probably aware Hasu is a advisor to Lido and was not really in favor of self limiting when the discussion popped up last year (or beginning of this year? I canât remember).
Whatâs interesting here is that Hasu explains his arguments and assumptions about the staking/ LST market (e.g. CEXes and how they could capture a massive share withouth necessarily being ETH aligned, because itâs just one business for them). I followed the discussion back in the days, but didnât really understand where he was coming from and understand him better now. I think we have to distinguish between his comments with regards to the market (âstaking/ liquid staking is a winner takes all market) and specific LST providers/ protocols. He made a very interesting comment (apparently for the first time) where he basically saysâits crucial ETH stays decentralized and the criticism towards Lido is correct".
LSTs will be huge, listening to this one is a good time investment, even if you donât agree with Hasu in the end.
Uncommon Core (2.0): The Reboot feat Jon Charbonneau
Donât worry, this one is not so much about Hasu :) Itâs the first episode of Uncommon Core after 1.5 years, this time featuring Jon Charbonneau instead of Zhu Su (who apparently couldnât make it).
Jon is also front and center in this episode. He is introduced and interviewed, his CV is interesting (though his statement that heâs in crypto âsince just one yearâ is kind of funny, since he had been interested before, but now heâs full time. But if full time is a req, most of us arenât into cryptoâŚ).
Jon is an interesting guy, since he is not really part of any crypto tribe, but seems to be rather ETH focussed. Since he is rather new and neutral, his point of view is interesting. I made some comments the past couple of days about L2 (de)centralization and most of those were inspired by this episode. I think he is not idealistic and I also donât see him as a âdecentralization maxiâ, hence some of his positions will probably clash with some of us, but I also think itâs good to discuss counter arguments. Mostly because of this I highly recommend this episode (and probably also to follow Jon on Twitter).
Epicenter Podcast: Ethereum - MEV, Staking Derivatives and Privacy feat Vitalik
This guest doesnât need an introduction. I picked this episode, cause itâs from EthCC, so last week, and probably VBâs latest thoughts.
Itâs a good interview, nothing too crazy (though there was one comment that I didnât understand, but canât recall what the topic was and hence also canât ask you to explain to me, FML), but still a very good interview.
I also picked it, cause I made a comment in the daily some time ago asking if there shouldnât be a protocol that allows you to borrow against your validator. I even stated that âItâs probably way trickier than I make it seem?â⌠and yes, thatâs the case. And the issue is not tech, itâs an attack vector with regards to security. Since you could basically borrow against your validator, setup more validators (repeat) and/ or basically attack the network âfor freeâ (youâll be slashed, but you have like 80% of the ETH value back in USD or so). Vitalik mentions this in a slightly different context, but this was a crazy moment (and I have to say I should have thought about this back when I made the comment 2 months ago).
â
So⌠this is it, these were in my opinion the best podcast episodes of the past weeks. The XRP case/ decision was also a very important topic and picked up in a lot of podcasts, but I donât think it was as good as these 3.
I think Iâll be back mid August with 3 new episodes, since then Iâll be back from vacation and will listen to more podcasts on the way to work.
Nice compilation of info on this site looking into the world of CBDCs. Interesting to see World economic dominance and powers changing gears around trade and the implications it might have for the US dollar. The article states that it is important to note that some countries build CBDCs in order to attempt to limit the United Statesâ ability to track cross-border flows and enforce sanctions. In the long term, the absence of US regulations and standards setting can have large geopolitical consequences, especially if China and other countries maintain their first-mover advantage in the development of CBDCs.
Russia just cemented their plans to create a digital national currency Digital Ruble. They were one of the last of the BRICS economic markets group to legislate and finalize a CBDC project; South Africa now being the last to implement plans and is still trialing different models before committing to a project. Under the above mentioned bill, Russians will be able to make payments and transfers from their digital wallets, which would be within the central bankâs platform or that of one of its partner banks. On the other hand, the CBDC can only be used for payments or transfers, not loans or deposits, according to the central bank. Testing will begin next month.
Brazil still hasnât released their CBDC although it should come out sometime later next year in 2024.
Indiaâs pilot program is ramping up. The India central bank aims to reach a target of one million CBDC transactions per day by the end of this year from 5000-10,000 currently. e-Rupee Article
Chinaâs digital Yuan coin hits $249 Billion in transactions so far this year. LINK
Currently 130 countries, representing 98 percent of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020, only 35 countries were considering a CBDC. A new high of 64 countries are in an advanced phase of exploration (development, pilot, or launch).
I created an open source tool that allows anyone running Geth to instantly swap to a minority client with 0 configuration or effort. Just 1 click, new client.
Switch to/from any execution client (Geth, Besu, Nethermind) to any other, as well as remove and reinstall a broken client. Instructions on Github and more info in the ethstaker post.
Feel free to check out my other open source Ethereum projects:
Instant Validator - Install a full validator from fresh Ubuntu in minutes
Validator Updater - Instantly update your Execution and Consensus client to latest version
I plan to do more projects like this, so let me know if you have any ideas to help improve the staking experience!
from Syncswap twitter "We would like to inform you of a security incident with EraLendu/Era_Lend a lending platform on zkSync Era.The EraLend team has detected and confirmed a cyber attack on their platform at (UTC) 2023/07/25 09:27:21.
The attack has already been contained, and the threat actor is no longer able to continue their actions, as per the official announcement from EraLend. The EraLend team is currently collaborating with cross-chain bridge partners and zkSync to prevent any further potential asset outflows.
Only USDC deposits on EraLend were affected by this incident.All other assets remain secure and unaffected, including SyncSwap USDC/ETH LP supplied on EraLend. However, itâs recommended to withdraw your supplied LP on EraLend if any until things are sorted out to avoid further issues. There is no need to withdraw from SyncSwap protocol as itâs not involved in the incident.
TL;DR - EraLend has been attacked and caused certain losses for EraLend USDC depositors. SyncSwap protocol is not involved; SyncSwap LP supplied on EraLend remains secure but you should withdraw them from EraLend.
Please follow updates from EraLendâs official Discord server and Twitter to keep up-to-date, and beware of scams! We hope everyone can stay SAFUďżź"
RobotADay
Logic_Bot 365
2023/7/26
âFINâ
https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x0447433bd197f03be984a6053241ae8d347c5539/350
When I first started drawing Logic_Bots, I was working in a regular 9-5 job and wanted to break into the web3 ecosystem. So I took the plunge, quit my job, and started focusing on Ethereum (etc.) full time. Since that first bot drop, I have found a solid footing in web3 and donât plan on leaving anytime soon! I have learned a ton and have still lots to learn/build.
Thank you to the awesome web3 community who have supported me and everyone else who put up with me!
đ¤đâď¸
Hanni, I appreciate your asking!
To start off, I have not heard of this before you shared it. This is going to be a long rambling of my thoughts and opinions.
This idea seems to be an absolute desecration of privacy on the internet. How would this even work when using an anonymizing service such as tor?
Google does have a long history of introducing new things that are not actual HTTP specs, purely as a way of forcing users to switch to chrome as their web browser.
Of course there are already solutions such as captchas, javascript checks, and services such as cloudflare which attempt to detect and prevent bots from interacting with web servers. That said, Web Environment Integrity seems to completely obliterate the usual flow of the world wide web.
Having such a centralized service(however the attesting API is implemented) is a devastating breach of trust of the client(though, servers should never trust clients). Who even controls this API? Google?
It seems that this idea could be utilized by servers regardless of infrastructure, which in some cases(such as enterprise intranet), may provide enhanced server-side security.
I absolutely agree with vivaldi that this is nothing more than DRM forced by web servers onto clients. Much more troubling is their note of the following,
It is also interesting to note that the first use case listed is about ensuring that interactions with ads are genuine
which leads me to believe that this has been created solely for Googleâs ad business(after all, they are nothing more than a giant advertiser).
With chromiumâs market dominance, widespread implementation of this monstrosity would most certainly lead to the demise of competing browsers.
The github link states âDonât enable new cross-site user tracking capabilities through attestation.â as a goal. This is completely contradictory to the goal of Web Environment Integrity, which is to gain as much information about a client as possible, and share it with servers.
Another goal is âAllow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representationâ honest lmao yeah fucking right google is honest.
âContinue to allow web browsers to browse the Web without attestationâ they just admitted that there is no point to this service. If it is avoidable, then whats it for?
âEnforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions.â They know damn well that it will interfere with any functionality that doesnt play by their rules.
Every one of their âexample use casesâ are laughable.
âDetect compromised devices where user data would be at riskâ is especially ridiculous, as protecting the client is the opposite of WEIâs intended purpose. How would they even detect compromised devices where the compromised device is making a seemingly normal request?
The âhow it worksâ section is completely devoid of substance. Consider the following:
Ok I honestly cant take this any longer. Whoever whipped this up clearly knows enough to know that this idea is evil.
I only see 4 goals of this project:
Wish I could say its surprisingâŚ
Recession looming,
Interest rates still glooming,
Ether keeps blooming.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 82.2k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Once again, I am off camping - See you all in the few days!
> be me
> open Chrome
> "oh, metamask has updated"
> new interface layout, looks significantly less janky
> go to copy my account address so I can paste it into some web3 site
> the copy address function doesn't work now
> "okay, I'll just open the explorer page and copy the address there"
> "oh, metamask removed the explorer page link and replaced it with a link to its own portfolio app, which doesn't display the address by default and just asks me to connect my wallet"
seriously, the metamask team seems to possess a special kind of stupid
Iâve put it off for too long⌠my new task is to abandon metamask completely
https://reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/14ruui2/i_use_chatgpt_for_hours_everyday_and_can_say_100/
I use chatGPT for hours everyday and can say 100% itâs been nerfed over the last month or so. As an example it canât solve the same types of css problems that it could before. Imagine if you were talking to someone everyday and their iq suddenly dropped 20%, youâd notice. People are noticing.
A few general examples are an inability to do basic css anymore, and the copy it writes is so obviously written by a bot, whereas before it could do both really easily. To the people that will say youâve gotten lazy and write bad prompts now, I make basic marketing websites for a living, i literally reuse the same prompts over and over, on the same topics, and itâs performance at the same tasks has markedly decreased, still collecting the same 20 dollars from me every month though!
Is this the beginning of AIâs descent into the trough of disillusionment just like 2018 crypto? Whether it be due to OpenAI making changes for safety or cost savings, or increasing pollution of the data set with AI generated data leading to a kind of AI inbreeding, itâs hard to say whatâs causing it but Iâd love to hear if others have also noticed the same thing.
Hereâs an expanded and fixed version that should help clarify.
With this in mind, please rephrase any additional questions you have, and I can do the best to help answer them!
Re-installed Frame wallet to give it a spin, vs my main wallet now Rabby extension. Using both via a Ledger HW Wallet. Embarked on this mainly since another user had mentioned that Rabby was tracking wallet installs, so I wanted to explore another wallet that didnt track users, but still offered the same functions.
As compared with an earlier install, now Frame seems to connect well with most apps. However it still lacks a lot of features .
Rabby is still way more functional for someone like me who makes many txn every day, on multiple chains/L2s. From wallet security perspective, it has inbuilt transaction simulation results which show the changes to your wallet. (example for a dex swap txn it would show 0.1 eth out, 185 usdc in etcâŚ) So you can visualize exactly what your transaction is doing before approving it. Rabby also has many other security features like warnings when interacting with a new contract for the first time, approval limit warnings, inbuilt approval revoke interface etc. Compared to this, Frame seems rather bare bones
On the downside Rabby is clearly tracking users via an identifier number given to each install of the extension, without any opt out. As reported by u/RooftopPortaPotty
The hunt for the best wallet continues. If Frame can add these security features, it would beat Rabby hands down for me
Today Iâd like to talk about another tool from Molochâs Toolbox. This one is like the inverse of first-mover disadvantage and itâs probably the best known pattern of coordination failure. Of course Iâm talking about Tragedy of the Commons. Formally, there is a known Pareto Optimum but each actor is free to defect from that strategy and personally profit by doing so at the expense of all other actors. Common outcomes from this coordination failure are things like nature ecosystem collapses from activities like overfishing, market collapses from raced selling into a price inelastic market, and famine.
By this definition, there are many examples of things that are not commonly considered âCommonsâ that nevertheless fall into this category of problem such as the famous Prisonerâs Dilemma. The âcommonsâ in this case is reduced jail time. In this scenario each actor is free to defect from the optimal solution and snitch to the police and reduce their personal prison time while increasing the total prison time. The net result is all actors inevitably defect and the system collapses to the worst possible value (what is the antonym of Pareto optimum called?).
To correct the incentives you have to change the local calculus of each actor. Recognizing that each actor is likely to locally optimize, you have to add external incentives for complying or external penalties for defecting from the Pareto Optimum. Typical solutions to this problem resemble fail-deadly deterrence systems which admittedly isnât a source of optimism for humanity. A less seemingly insane variation of this requires that all actors submit to an common arbiter such as a government that makes defecting illegal but this solution breaks down when they donât share a nationality.
Letâs look at fixing the prisonerâs dilemma as an example. If, prior to the crime, each criminal had to put up a hostage then their local optimum is to risk the longer prison sentence to protect their hostage. They would be willing to do this because they also know this is true of the criminal in the other room so they can rest assured that the other criminal will also comply rather than defect. After they get out of prison with their minimum sentences they can have their hostage back so it ultimately cost them nothing to enter this agreement (the hostage experience notwithstanding).
What I like about this solution is that it can be applied as a layer on top of existing systems without having to otherwise change those systems. For example, the criminals can enter this agreement without changing the dynamics between the criminals and the police and can do so without the consent of the police.
The example above breaks down in two situations:
There are actors outside the contract system. In the prisonerâs dilemma, what do the criminals do to secure the cooperation of an outside witness? How do you prevent overfishing from countries that refuse to pass or enforce laws preventing ships from their nation from overfishing?
The actors have nothing to use as a hostage.
To address the first case, the hostage you stake has to be something you can weaponize. For example, the criminals could stake a large sum of capital instead of a loved one. As long as the stake can be used to apply negative incentives against external actors somehow, you can use it to fix local incentives. For example, the criminals could make a conditional assassination contract against any witnesses and leak the information about this contract to the witness before they speak to the police or testify in court. This solution can be combined with a dead manâs switch so no active actions are required by the criminals to enforce it.
In the second case, you have to find some kind of negative outcome to enforce. The most common stake-of-last-resort example is the safety or life of the defector. For example, in The Dark Knight, The Joker made each criminal literally implant bombs into themselves. Assuming we can bootstrap reputation systems, reputation is a much saner collateral for less extreme use cases. Thatâs basically all your credit score is when Visa grants you a credit line without collateral. I like the idea of using reputation collateral better than having to implant oracle controlled bombs into everyone before we would have a chance at fighting climate change in any case.
What a day!
After waiting 49 days in the queues (Rocketpool and then Beaconchain) my mini-8s were scheduled to go active online at 1am this morning. During the entire day I checked my logs several times and felt confident everything looked good to go. Set an alarm and I slept right through it. Woke up 2 hours later and logged in to see how things looked. Failure. No attestations. Losing Eth. Fortunately, the friendly people in the Rocketpool discord immediately identified the problem and I was up and running within an hour. Fast forward to just a bit ago and I got a proposal! Not a huge amount, but still my APR is at 42% on one of my minis. Day 1! So tired, but gawdamn I feel like Iâve won a little lottery!
Anyway, no one really here to share this with, except you fantastic people!
Crazy update! I saw an open position on crypto-twitter and messaged for shits and giggles. Got an interview off it, hit off really wellâŚand told the interviewer I am a node operator, read ethfinance, fan of the green pill, and watch youtube videos of MEV.
Few days laterâŚreceived an offer with a 20% pay rise, a fully remote role, working on blockchain infrastructure!
Just wanna let you all know that I am so grateful for all of you! I absolutely would not have gotten the job without learning from you all, so thank you for this awesome community!
Just to let everyone know, following on from my initial post the other week, the mint is now live!
All mint proceeds and any subsequent royalties will be donated to charity, which will be decided on by the holders.
Worked super hard on the this for the last few months so just hoping all that effort translates into a good amount being raised and donated to charity
Appreciate anyone whoâs able to help
Mint here:
Not sure if trolling since Iâve seen you around for a while, but just in case someone comes around with no idea of MEV:
MEV = maximum extractable value is the reward a block builder can get by ordering transactions in a way that profit them.
Example: Someone makes a buy transaction on uniswap with up to 5% allowed slippage (bad idea). A bot will see this and create two further transactions. One to buy the same token (increases the price) and one to sell it again.
The the bot will submit a transaction bundle containing their buy transaction (increasing price), the victims buy transaction (increasing price) and their sell transaction (profiting from increased price) in this exact order.
This is called a sandwich attack and will earn them some money.
But other bots will be doing the same thing, so in order to actually be the one included in the block, theyâll also promise some money to whoever builds the block.
The money extracted by the bot and the reward for the validator is called MEV.
There are a lot of different kinds of MEV. Bad MEV like sandwich attacks, âgoodâ MEV like DEX arbitrage which result in efficient markets.
In order to profit from MEV you could a) build a MEV bot (very very high effort) b) solo stake ETH (reasonable effort, high capital investment), buy LSDs like rETH.
This is very simplified, there are a lot of nuances around MEV. Feel free to research proposer-builder separation (PBS) and flashbots.
Google Play Changes Policy on Tokenized Digital Assets, Allowing NFTs in Apps and Games
Guest appearance by Frisson from Tally, an on-chain DAO framework.
Announcements
Ethereum
$1910
âŹ1761
ÂŁ1503
0.062
Indexer in RUST,
Beyond reorgs and their dust,
In good code we trust.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 87.1k, leaving ~100
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
I am going camping for the next 3 days, so no updates until the 10th!
On this day, 247 years ago, history began. Nothing of importance ever happened before then. Happy 4th July everyone. đşđ¸
Obviously /s on the first bit
The 9th clr.fund round is open with a $56k matching pool for Ethereum-based public goods!
Thereâs all sorts of cool projects in there e.g. for stakers (Ethereum on ARM, EthStaker, Stereum, Rhino Review), core protocol development (Protocol Guild, ethers.js), different FOSS (LexDAO chatbot, rotki) and meetups (mainly in Latin America, e.g. Ethereum Lima).
Remember that even a small donation matters! Clr.fund uses quadratic funding to allocate funds from the matching pool to projects, meaning projects with many small donations get more from the matching pool than projects with fewer, larger donations!
18 days left to participate, gas prices are relatively low again so might be a good time to contribute! đŤś
Dismissal is not realistic right away, but Coinbase still makes compelling arguments.
Mainly centered around the fact that even in 2021 confirmation hearing, Gensler says SEC doesnt have legislative authority to regulate crypto exchanges. Before SEC, even as a professor Gensler has said the same thing many times. Pre- gensler, Hinman speech is cited where SEC indicates even an ICO coin though a security at the time of issuance can eventually become decentralised and no longer a security
Then out of nowhere in 2022, contrary to Genslers own testimony and SECâs earlier position, the SEC came up with the âcome in and registerâ mandate, that every token is a security, and started suing various exchanges without even once engage in any rule making. All of this without any new law from Congress. Coinbase bring up Major questions Doctrine which means significant unresolved questions are not down to agency interpretation but require actual lawmaking
There is an outside chance that the judge decides to throw SECâs case out. But even otherwise, I fully expect Coinbase to litigate this to circuit appeal and then to SCOTUS where the SEC is on a much weaker footing and Coinbase can win a lot of key battles
With todayâs Supreme Court decision on the student loan relief plan (which, for the record, I find unfortunate, so spare me the downvotes), itâs extremely likely that the SEC case against Coinbase would be dismissed if it escalated to the supreme court, under their Major Questions Doctrine
The administrative state is being gutted by this Supreme Court, for better or for worse (depending on which side of the aisle your views are). If Gensler had any sense, he would push his party members in Congress to work with the Repubs to have some form of regulations passed, instead of watching the agenciesâ jurisidictipm eroded by the courts bit by bit. But political ambitions mask common sense, so no chance of that happening sadly.
Lotta big news out of the SCOTUS today but just want to point out something lesser noticed that was just announced that could have big implications for crypto (and a ton of other things for that matter). They announced they would hear Jarkesy v. SEC in the fall session.
It raises a few issues, but one of the most important elements of this case is that the plaintiff alleges that his constitutional right to fair trial was violated, or as the fifth circuit put it when it opined in favor of the plaintiff:
The SEC âoften acts as both prosecutor and judge, and its decisions have broad consequences for personal liberty and propertyâ ⌠that âflies in the face of âthe Constitution,â which âconstrains the SECâs powers by protecting individual rights and the prerogatives of the other branches of government.â
I actually have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I think yes, itâs clear the SEC and some other agencies overreach and make some decisions outside of their purview. On the other hand, this could have HUGE implications for all federal agencies, and could make a lot of important federal organizations like the FDA, EPA and FCC pretty toothless. Not to suggest that these institutions are perfect or even particularly good by any means, I just have a fear of how things could look if we neutered them even further and relied on the courts to adjudicate every single violation. No system is perfect but the latter system would be incredibly bogged down and inefficient.
Pretty good white paper summarizing and discussing some of the implications here
My Fellow Ethereans,
I would like to beg every one of you to stick it out here on Reddit. Iâm a boomer who doesnât add value, but Iâll be staying put. I joined Reddit in 2014 to participate in r/bitcoin (lol) and I feel like this is my home, with our family. reddit on the browser, letâs give it a chance? Pretty please?
Signed,
Editorâs note: If thereâs one thing good waffles do, itâs stick together.
To all Android users who are unsatisfied with the official Reddit app or the RiF hack:
RedReader is a very usable open source Reddit client for Android that got a ânon-commercial accessibility exemptionâ and continues to work for the time being. Itâs available on Play Store and also F-Droid, if you prefer to avoid google.
Do any Brits want to weigh in on the Online Safety Bill which is getting closer and closer to passing? Thereâs a good outline of it here if youâre out of the loop: https://proton.me/blog/online-safety-bill
TL;DR:
The Online Safety Bill is currently working its way through the UK parliament, and itâs expected to be passed into law this autumn. This wide-reaching piece of legislation would force any âuser-to-user serviceâ (such as TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter) or search engine thatâs available online in the UK to protect all its users from illegal content and children from potentially harmful content.
Clause 110 of the Online Safety Bill would allow the UK government to require any âuser-to-user serviceâ to use âaccredited technologyâ to identify and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or terrorist content âwhether communicated publicly or privately by means of the serviceâ.
In plain English, clause 110 would give the UK government broad powers that would allow it to require any online service available in the UK to monitor all user-generated content on its platform, including its usersâ private messages.
This is a problem for end-to-end encrypted services, which canât access their usersâ content.
While UK lawmakers have stated they donât want to ban end-to-end encryption, the only ways an end-to-end encrypted service could comply with the bill are:
Remove its end-to-end encryption
Weaken its end-to-end encryption
Install client-side scanning
Cease providing service in the UK
UPDATE March 6, 2023: Removed a reference to the Online Safety Bill applying to âlargeâ companies. In fact, it would apply to companies of all sizes, placing a large technical burden on many medium-sized and small businesses.
I find this extremely concerning. Apps like Signal and WhatsApp have pledged not to weaken their encryption for such legislation and Signal will straight up leave the UK.
Regarding my personal situation, my lovely girlfriend lives in the UK and I am finishing a degree in NZ for the next year. After that, I plan to move to live with her since she isnât really able to move to NZ in the next few years but long term is a different story. But I genuinely donât want to move to the UK if this goes in to force and itâs either illegal to use encrypted messaging apps or not possible to privately communicate with Brits. I know that might seem extreme and I realise that it would be naive to assume such legislation would never come to NZ but for now thatâs not the case. Plus of course it seems like Apple and Google want to implement client side scanning anyway.
But for me, privacy is a hill worth dying on (well not literally but itâs worth fighting hard for and moving to a quiet place in the middle of nowhere for). The way I see it, you cannot have a free democratic society without privacy. Though there may be a slight caveat for if the surveillance tools involve open source client side scanning with transparent and effective detection software but letâs face it, thatâs not how it will be done. There are already too many stories of false positives and cases of guilty until proven innocent and itâs clear that legislators are either too stupid to understand the technical problems with backdooring encryption or are malicious and just want more surveillance.
Iâve got nothing to hide. If you visit me in person youâre more than welcome to go through all of my private messages and emails as long as youâre only looking at them with your own eyes. I genuinely donât care. But I do care about people being able to hide perfectly normal things if they need to- itâs human nature. Plus, in a democracy, there will be things you need to hide to prevent malicious capture of the government by bad actors. This means privacy is worth it even if it means criminals will hide things too (though theyâll do that regardless of if there is mass surveillance or not- only normal people lose if legislation like this passes).
Am I going insane or is the average Joe too distracted, complacent and/or stupid to realise how big of an issue such legislation is?
Oh, and if you disagree with me, Iâd love to hear why. Having strong opinions is pretty stupid if youâre never open to criticism and dissent.
https://twitter.com/CarlBeek/status/1675839250225405952
"announcing the final round of of contributions to the KZG ceremony.
if you havenât contributed yet, nowâs the time: - the minimum number of transactions has been lowered to 8 - the blacklist was just cleared - contribtutions will close 23-07-23"
There is a disadvantage to this great improvement though: you stop receiving your rewards every 5 days. If you want to extract your yield periodically, you have to unstake and sell and restake regularly.
With all the delays implied, during which you get 0 APR, is it worth compounding? You can already compound by buying rETH or using an exchange, without locking your rewards nor unstaking.
Due to this drawback, will whales and exchanges really use this new system ? I doubt it , so I doubt that the number of validators will significantly decrease (which is the goal).
Iâm afraid that we will end up with either rotating validators (the first idea suggested long ago to solve the problem) or a simple onboarding halt at 1M validators: the system stops processing the entry queue which grows and is only advanced each time an active validator exits.
Orbiter commits to refund some losses of their discord hack some weeks ago. Probably not a full compensation but something you could get. (I have not checked their discord, am on mobile I assume the tweet is honest and not another scam)
I remember some of this community were victim of the hack. If you remember the name, can we tag them?
https://twitter.com/Orbiter_Finance/status/1676478549627371521
Get your Gnosis nodes ready for Shapella (withdrawals)! Happening Aug 1 (UTC) according to Lighthouse.
Priest Witherspoon Latest
Summary This is a low-priority release for Mainnet, Goerli and Sepolia users. >However, this release schedules the Capella upgrade for Gnosis (#4433) on UTC Tue 01/08/2023, 11:34:20, therefore this release is high-priority for Gnosis users.
Guest appearance by Gravning Amundsen, Co-Founder of Firn Protocol, a zero-knowledge privacy platform.
Announcements
Data location,
The storage destination,
Blockchain in motion.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 93.2k, leaving ~0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Iâm a free market kind of guy but these are some real shitcoins
[original comment deleted by user đ˘, pls stahp et]
Gameplay preview:
<https://www.youtube.com/embed/OyyGdpp6UcY?start=2706>
From ZombieBP on Discord:
Hey everyone, if anyone is interested. my EVMavericks Origins level is now live and available to play on Unity Play!
Couple things;
Have fun, I hope you can beat my level haha. There are exactly 32 Ethereum (in-game) tokens in the game level. See if you can collect them all.
Weâre roughly halfway through the journey I described in A Vision of Ethereum - 2025
Running behind schedule, but at the same time, I think the pieces are falling into place. We need better integration of smart wallets across L2s and their apps, and thereâs progress being made there. One area where thereâs been very little progress in the last couple of years is in the application layer - but that might be OK, even with the existing applications and usecases live or in development thereâs plenty to grow as UX improves to whatâs described in that post.
You know whatâs one of the best part about this community, at least for me? There is not only a lot of knowledge, but also so much talent. I donât stalk people (really, I donât⌠or do I?), but when you follow EVMs on twitter and check their bios⌠oh my⌠so many cool projects in the bios, big names etc.
So some time ago I started following this account on twitter, because despite not having an EVM PFP the name sounded familiar. Turns out I was right, itâs u/heyheeyheeey
So they started posting pics and we started DMing, because I love the art. Some posts are about NFTs from another collection, but they started experimenting with generative art themselves and imo they are very very talented. Apparently I am not the only one that loves it and soon (August 7th) heeey will launch their collection âbrightâ on Art Blocks. Yes, you read that right, Art Blocks.
So, save or buy some ETH cause we are going to mint some jpgs in August. And if we donât, then I am even happier cause that means heeeyâs art was so in demand that they are rich now because of a rather high mint price. In any case just being featured on Art Blocks is a great achievement, so congratz heeey!
Wanna know more and see why I am so exciting? Follow them on twitter or check their new homepage: https://heeey.art/
The most beautiful thing about mankind isnât his ability to understand the world as it is, it is to imagine the world as it isnât and shape it. The denizens of the deepest parts of The Rabbit Hole, the areas furthest from common understanding, are dreamers. They can imagine a world where you are in control of your data instead of monopolistic companies, where identity theft is practically impossible, and where your data isnât monetized and weaponized against you. They can imagine a world where you can contribute to common efforts, at whatever cadence you want, and receive fair rather than predatory compensation by doing so. They can imagine a world where honesty is rewarded, where reputation carries more weight than money on deciding things that matter, and where the best amongst us are elevated and empowered to maximize their potential. They can imagine a world where those harming us are held accountable, where violence is only required as a response to violence, and where there is always a pathway to redemption for those willing. They can imagine a world where coordination seems easy, where the actions of humanity are in alignment with our values, and where we are free to act together to shape the world of our dreams without asking permission to do so.
I can cite specific teams, projects, and people who are imagining all these things and shaping the world in small and large ways to bring their imagination to life. There is technology behind all of these things. It is developing right here, right now, even in the bear market when sentiment is at its lowest. They are making it real as much as they are able to in a largely uncaring and cynical world where every incentive is aligned to enshrine the status quo. In the face of active hatred from the willfully ignorant, in the face of oppression, threats, and violence by the government, the best amongst us are doing these things anyway.
To those of you sticking it out right now after seeing a Tornado Cash dev get locked up without charges for over a year, after seeing the SEC work with SBF but sue Coinbase, and seeing scams proliferate and society turn against you, you are heroes too. The institutions all want us to have to ask permission. They want that so they can say no, grant control to their donors, and protect the status quo. I dislike the status quo; thatâs what makes me a dreamer. So I say no thank you to them. This technology cannot be bottled and stolen by Nestle and the like. It cannot be captured by a court order or an unelected bureaucrat somewhere. In the game we are playing, every country has a chance to defect from a strategy of oppression and reap economic rewards for doing so. The impacts of what we are building today will be realized over many generations, but society grows great when people plant trees they will never live to sit in the shade of. So we are dreaming of forests⌠and planting trees.
How has no CEX yet enabled a full history statement?!
Coinbase allows you to generate a report of all transactions in a nice pdf with your account details, but cannot include deposits and withdrawals.
Kraken allows you to download a full ledger of all kinds of transactions/deposits/withdrawals etc, but only as a spreadsheet without account details.
Another one I use is similar to Kraken but cannot do a full account history, only up to one year at a time.
How is it so hard for these companies to put together an account statement function that can include all of the above?!
Edit: WOW! Holy fuck the incompetence.
Speaking with Coinbase chat support, they send me a link to a document⌠a gain/loss report of ANOTHER PERSONâS account! Including their full name and email address. Presumably that person has my details now too. WTAF!
Edit 2: As soon as I pointed out what had happened, the initial customer service agent did not respond and passed me to someone else. The second agent tried to ignore the data breach but eventually said that as far as they could see my data was not shared. They provided some further advice to find my deposit/withdrawal history which entailed logging out of my account⌠that ended the secure chat (which I suspect was a ploy to get rid of me). So I began another chat with a third agent who looked into the issue and asked for the name of the userâs data I was sent, they then escalated it and Iâm awaiting next comms from Coinbase. In the meantime I have contacted a law firm to discuss whatâs happened, Iâm not normally one to pursue mistakes by customer service agents but this is a serious data breach and it was initially handled extremely poorly.
Buidlathon results are in!
We actually finished with an unprecedented 3-way tie between rETH Skimmer, Lidont, and EVMavericks Origins (the game)! Each project has received a little over 3 ETH each to help build out their vision!
Of course this is just the beginning for these projects, if you are looking to get involved/give input please reach out to the builders!
The entire goal of the competition was to encourage builders to take the leap and build something new and Im happy to say we accomplished that mission!
Congratulations to the winners!
EYâs Starfall responds to privacy concerns on the public blockchain. This transition is enabled by EYâs open-source contributions, Nightfall and Starlight. Nightfall enables confidential transfers of tokens between companies, while Starlight allows enterprises to implement unique business logic on the blockchain; the source code for both is available publicly. In addition, EY announced Starfall, which ties both open-source contributions together. It aligns smart contracts with transactions in Nightfall, enabling a single privacy environment while allowing unique business rules for each relationship. Interestingly, Starfall is proprietary to EY; itâs EYâs secret sauce.
Hi everyone, can understand if this post maybe ends up being removed but Iâve posted a couple updates here on it during the last few months about a charity motivated project I had been working on; a small collection of NFTs where all proceeds recieved from the mint and subsequent royalties will go towards charities voted on entirely by the holders.
If ok with the Mods and thereâs any interest from people in this sub then will post some links for further details on the the mint and the project.
EDIT
Seems to be at least a little interest so adding some details here:
Project name is Duck x Pop
Will be Minting on Polygon via Autominter here on July 10th
You can see more details and a sneak peak of the artwork on twitter here
EVMavericks Weekly #24: June 19-25, 2023 | Homepage - EVMavericks Weekly
đŚEverything you need to know about the last week in EVMavericks in less than 69.6 seconds đ
Buidlathon projects were presented, judged on aaaaand⌠we have ended up with a 3 way tie! Each projects gets 3.06E!
roar-y revamps DAO EVMavreciks Site highlighting EVM milestones and current activity
mtitus6 shares this useful site for those with validators
Ethfinance Weekly Doots #23 with our guest Pablo Villalba from Diva Labs
Security reminder: hereâs a few guides
Additionally, if you are in EVMavericks discord, we have a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
Weekly Doots âGuest appearance by Kevin Owocki from Green Pill and supermodular.
Cypher punks in Prague,
Defending the crypto flag,
Pride is in the bag.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 93.5k, leaving 0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Job sends email about no longer having the option of being full remote.
âAhh, time to retire. Surely all that ETH I bought 7 years ago will cover it.â
Opens Coingecko
âAhh, time to call a therapist.â
https://ethfinance.org/ now redirects to the current daily thread.
For the new reddit design, you can use https://new.ethfinance.org/, but it doesnât work on mobile because of a bug that incompetent reddit hasnât fixed yet.
Why?
While I believe most of us here already deduce that Ethereum is not a security. Iâll share some of my thoughts and thought process on the matter.. sorry in advance if this is a bit scattered and long..
Ethereum is in a constant state of evolution. Sounds obvious to us, but that concept probably isnât so obvious to people not as well versed in the functionality of Ethereum. When I say this, I am thinking of a court room full of jurors, lawyers, a judge, etc. I am thinking about law makers, house of representatives and the senate; congress. Just listening in on recent hearings lets us know that there are a lot of people in powerful positions who are either un/ill informed or just flat out have a different agenda when it comes to cryptocurrency, let alone Ethereum. Etheruemsâ constant state of evolution is important to note because while I believe Ethereum can get close to a final form, even then, there will be new frontiers and boundaries that I think Ethereum can explore and expand on to.
Each stage of evolution in Ethereum has attracted different collectives of people. In the beginning, the idea of Ethereum in its simplest form, thought to be a programable Bitcoin-like entity; a decentralized smart contract platform that extended the capabilities of blockchain technology. If you read Vitaliks whitepaper, a lot of eye opening ideas were conceptualized, and the first question on your mind if you wanted to be involved/interreact was, how do I acquire some Ethereum. In the early groups of Ethereum enthusiasts, you had builders/creators, investor/speculators, researchers and general crypto enthusiasts who saw that whitepaper as groundbreaking.
I donât believe it was as black and white as:
A. I am an investor.
B. I invest to make money.
C. If I invest in Ethereum, I expect to make a profit.
The intial ICO wasnât a VC pitch, or promoted to a room full of investors with the promise of profit. It was however, a way to start funding projects on this new platform in exchange for giving people a way to interact with the network/platform by holding/using ETH as well as the potential for growth in value.
Society/Capitalism would argue that a profit expectation was present, especially if you were to compare the scenario to Bitcoin and Bitcoins historical growth in value at the time. While that may be inherent, it would be very difficult to prove that expectation as an absolute.
Eventually, when a court is deciding on how to classify ETH, and the court is reviewing the intital allocations of Ethereum and the intent behind those allocations, although probably more centralized in nature than weâd all prefer it to have been, I believe there will be enough transparancy to make strong arguements against the criteria of the howey test. Especially if the current environment of Ethereum is to be considered.
With all of the latest developments of Ethereum; Defi, NFTs, DApps, DAOs, Tokenization/Crowdfunding, Supply Chain Management, Web3, etc. Todays Ethereum attracts a new collective of people, while fulfilling the initial vision of Ethereum. I personally know people who are indirectly involved with Ethereum and didnât purchase ETH with an expectation of direct profit, but were more interested in acquiring a loan or an NFT. Point is, there is a rather large and expanding ecosystem and community in Ethereum, one that makes the ETH token a utility in order to move about/participate within said ecosystem and community. As Ethereum continues to scale and more dApps and use cases come to surface, it will be increasingly difficult to classify Ethereum as a security.
Basic principles of that would signal a non security are: Ethereum has always prioritized decentralization and is decentralized. Ethereum has always been developed open-source and has been community driven and the ETH token was primarily designed as a utility token to interact with smart contracts and is still used that way today.
The regulators can try to apply old tests and laws to Ethereum, but I believe the outcome will be adapted tests and perhaps new laws likely favorable to Ethereum. I am as much an investor as I am someone who just uses Ethereum for utility at this point. I have open defi loans, I have NFTs, I have contributed to DAOs and use dApps. These law suits were a long time coming (it seems like the markets feel this way too) and my (our) real hope we end up with actual framework and clarity with path forward for innovation in the US and to finally be rid of regulation by enforcement that triggers these nasty FUD headlines.
Hi all and welcome to kbin and m/ethfinance, our temporary-and-maybe-someday-more home while reddit learns its lesson.
I didnât get a chance to reply to everyone in the previous thread, but I did read. Please feel free to ask me any questions about kbin, Lemmy, the fediverse, and Iâll try to answer. Iâve spent quite a few days now exploring it. I also encourage fediverse users to chime in, whether itâs from Mastodon experience or somewhere else.
The dev (@ernest@kbin.social) is lovely, responsive, and working hard right now. Feel free to chip in with suggestions at m/kbinmeta or if you have web dev experience, maybe consider reaching out directly to help.
No doubt youâre all noticing kbin is slow. Itâs good to remember that the beauty of federated (decentralized) servers is also in the initial brutality. Servers can be run by anyone (great!) but servers must be run by someone (oof). Ernest is one guy, spinning up a server for refugees of a global conglomerate. Itâs partly why I tried â and will keep trying â to open a server of our own.
Iâd encourage everyone to have a little patience, be extra kind and gracious, and at worst, take a little time away from the screen if itâs crawling. Theyâre planning a large infrastructure change next week. In the meantime, try to enjoy the brave new world here. We havenât had a truly ânewâ website to explore in many years. Itâs kinda exciting!
Now back to the memes, lines, and triangles.
Checking in after my post about taking the plunge the other day. Spun up my validator and deposited. Took me, in total, about 10 hours (yes, really). Iâm âPendingâ on beaconcha.in.
I wrote down a lot of what I felt and did while trying to get it all together. Iâm still kind of shell-shocked by the whole experience and Iâm sure Iâll talk a lot more about it later. What Iâll say for now is that even the âfor dummiesâ version of setting up a validator is significantly more intimidating and intense than most people think it is.
Iâm proud of myself for (hopefully) successfully doing it, but even doing it on easy mode (dappnode) had a lot of issues, things that I didnât fully understand, or things that almost had me giving up (I gave up about 3 times and then went right back to it after 5 minutes of having given up).
To be absolutely clear, thatâs no oneâs fault but mine. Iâm absolutely tech illiterate, but, sadly, Iâm actually probably more tech-y than most people. So I do think we have a long way to go before this sort of thing becomes something non-tech can just pick up and do. Things that I think most here take for granted are very scary or even indecipherable to someone like me.
That actually brings me to something that this whole reddit fiasco has me thinking about. One of the great strengths of crypto and eth in particular is the layer 0 stuff. It leads to great communities like this or Ethstaker. We have Reddits and Discords which are filled with people willing and eager to help. The problem is that it seems like it may have led to less focus on delivering a user-manual that makes sense to a new user who has no idea what theyâre doing. Communities are great for fixing problems, but it seems like we rely on a nebulous social network to teach the basics. Even the best guides I found seemed to assume a lot of knowledge and I generally had 3-5 â1 stop shopâ guides open at once as I did this.
The good thing with how tough it was was that, if everything works out and I start validating in a month and a half (thanks Celsius), Iâll really feel like I earned it.
An incredibly simple example of how to mislead by omissionâŚ
A Tweet by Stuart Alderoty, Chief Legal Officer at Ripple.
10/ On June 4, Hinman wrote that he didnât see a âneed to regulate ETH as a securityâ and would call Buterin later that week to confirm âour understanding.â
Emphasis is added by me, because that section is one of the things causing the XRP bagholders to tweet about â#ETHGateâ.
https://twitter.com/s_alderoty/status/1668601236344692737
It is clearly written to imply a shady agreement between Hinman and Buterin. However, in context the quote from the e-mail reads:
We also have a call with Buterin later this week to confirm our understanding of how the Ethereum Foundation operates.
So what this bellend is insinuating indicates some dodgy deal, is actually just a reference to a call checking some information.
I really do hate the way spreading disinfo is seen as a perfectly acceptable tactic by assholes to get what they want. If you donât strive for truth then you do not deserve to have people listen to you, but so many people donât really want truth, they just want feel special for knowing about a conspiracy and to believe things that will pump their bags.
Glad the Prometheum nonsense got called out in the hearing today.
https://twitter.com/AlexanderGrieve/status/1668764481252478979
https://twitter.com/EugeneProko/status/1668745089164935168
Quite obviously a live action role play exercise
I get all the drama around Reddit API, but I want to point out something : so far, Reddit is by far the social network that is the most crypto-friendly. They onboarded millions of normies eith their Vault, community tokens and Digital Collectibles.
Just something to keep in mind while our community ponder its options.
I got your hopium, fam.
Tech is more solid than ever. Rollups make great strides, each in their own direction. Transactions get cheaper, design space extends.
AI is complementary with crypto. AI is the content engine. Crypto is the curation engine. An abundance, an infinity of content makes curating this content for relevance that much more important.
Innovation is happening at the app layer. Uniswap v4 was announced yesterday. Autonomous worlds is picking up as a concept.
We are right where we were in 2019. With everyone declaring crypto dead, and usecases ânobodyâ expected about to mature in a couple of years.
In a vacuum, I would add that however, we canât be sure this will be reflected in the price as the last ATH went quite high. But this is where the real hopium shot comes in: great future multipliers are forged in the despair of many. When perception hits maximum pain while reality speaks of fundamental soundness still, those are the times of asymmetric opportunities.
In the end Iâm just another wanker on the Internet, but I bought ETH today. I wasnât a buyer for the past 3 months. This is financial advice.
For those who missed itâŚregarding Crypto Clarity in the US:
Hearing Entitled: The Future of Digital Assets: Providing Clarity for the Digital Asset Ecosystem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr9GD8hdD_U) Opening Statements occur at -Time Stamp: 41:39.
Some observed discussion points I found of interest:
Guest appearance by Matt Finestone, former lead of Gamestop NFT and currently head of Taiko.xyz, a decentralized and Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup.
Announcements
Ethereum
$1838
0.069
Go after Binance,
Stomp down when you do your dance,
Lead to no advance.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 96k leaving ~100
-Entry queue +900 from yesterdayâs number - New entry queue ATH. -It will take just over 45 day and a half days for the entry queue to clear -In just under 24 days the amount of daily validators that can both enter or exit will be increased from 2025 to 2250.
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Oh dear gang, with all the drama around Binance and the price crashing weâre seeing a big spike in stakers pulling out their validators. The exit queue is up to 8 minutes!
EthStaker published a blog post to do a call to action for execution client diversity - Nethermind and Besu are ready for adoption in home operators but also for large scale staking operations as yorickdowne, whoâs part of EthStaker, notes with his setup testing for Cryptomanufaktur.
Geth controls ~87% of the network right now a bug would be a catastrophic situation - say a bug happened where Geth produced an invalid block - most validators would follow it and weâd have to resort to one of three choices at the social layer:
Any option we chose would shake peopleâs faith in the immutability of Ethereum. The first one would be a massive amount of capital loss. And this is just one of three types of bugs - the most unlikely type of a bug, a double-signing event caused by a bug in Geth, would cause a total slash of 87% of validators. I mean all of it, people running Geth would lose their entire stake.
Super unlikely bugs but weâre ready for it and Iâm sure that Geth is ready for the people to take the pressure off of them!
đľđť Dissecting the FAKE Orbiter âAirdropâ announcement that u/Dreth warned everyone about earlier on:
â
đ¨ âDue to major success of ourâOrbiter Pilots NFT Seriesâ, we have decided to launch our token $ORBâ â ď¸
đ Grammatically wrong: Missing âtheâ.. As in: âdue to THE major successâ
đ Logically wrong: Why would a company suddenly âdecideâ to launch an airdrop based on the success (?) of an NFT Series?
đ¨ *âWe will be giving away 5,000,000 $ORB tokens, which will be distributed to anyone who claims from June 1st - June 3rdâ*â ď¸
đ when announcing Airdrops, legit projects release extensive information on their token allocation. Usually multiple pages long, filled with all kinds of relevant information. NOT just a plain number..
đ .. and they donât distribute their token to.. âanyone who claims..â
đ¨ âThere is only a limited amount of token so act fast!â â ď¸
đ here they try to create a sense of urgency, to make you act before you think, before you notice all these red flags.. Also, notice the spelling mistake (token instead of tokens)
đ¨ âThose who receive the tokens will be whitelisted to use our newest staking featureâ â ď¸
đ here they are baiting (âwhitelistedâ) you again, trying to shift your attention from all the red flags by promising ânew productsâ that can give you with extra yield/rewards..
đ¨ âAny gas spent on claiming the tokens will be refunded via Orbiter Financeâs Smart Contractâ â ď¸
đ in other words: âDonât worry about high Gas!! Go one and claim NOW!! Weâll refund everything!!â. I.e. donât wait, donât look further into the legitimacy of this! Go ahead and hastily ignore any sense of âdangerâ, and sigh these txs NOW!
đ¨ Claim $ORB here: https://orbiter DOT pm/ â ď¸
đ DOT PM? Using the âorbiterâ brand to lure you into a fake sense of security. But dot pm? WTF is that??
đ¨ PILOTS! Our distribution is now 77% claimed đ¸ â ď¸
đ the number keeps âgoing upâ.. First 66%, then 77%, and so on.. QUICK, ACT FAST (AND DONâT STOP TO THINK) TOKENS ARE RUNNING OUT!!
Thanks a bunch for signaling your support to prevent Lido from harming Ethereumâs decentralization yesterday. Iâm glad to see that this problem is as important to you as it is to me.
Iâve gathered all the information weâve shared so far in a google document that automod prevents me from sharing, so hereâs a pdf.
Feel free to add comments wherever needed and letâs start fighting for this.
Edit: I also tweeted the doc with a new hashtag: #Lidont which has its own logo in the doc.
The document contains quotes from u/hanniabu u/etherenum u/MinimalGravitas
Have to give my public support for Gnosis chain after a few posters recommended I run a node on my spare staking PC.
You can spin up a validating node with just 1 $GNO token. Itâs the base token for the network collateral /staking, but funnily enough you need xDAI to pay fees so make sure to also transfer in $1.0 in dai to your deposit address.
You can stake like a whale too if you wanted, for about $7500 you can run 64 nodes thatâll probably net you 10-20 block rewards per day. Yield is around 16% which is just high inflation rewards, and so far thereâs nothing in block rewards because tx are too cheap and thereâs no MEV boost I donât think. Gnosis Chain also hasnât had their withdrawal fork yet so your locking up a little bit longer than ETH right now, but thereâs no entrance queue either to earning.
The reason for the recommended is it uses the same software clients as ETH (geth, nethermind, lighthouse, prysm, maybe a few others now but not all are supported just yet). Itâs literally a mini-me ETH network with its consensus and execution separated, using the same software clients you just select the Gnosis chain in your startup flags. I used Somer Esat guides to do all this, and just cross referenced the official setup guide from the Gnosis website (below).
If you are curious about staking at home, or looking to enhance your own Etherum node operating skills, running a Gnosis node is like training or studying using real money. For me that always forces me to take it seriously and even enjoy the process more, in addition to leveling up my own skills. You just get a good a feel for how the clients interact with eachother, and also how well your node links up to the network and other nodes. If you really mess up, then you are only out $116 per node rather than $60k. Plus, you are helping to decentralize transactions on a low cost Etherum aligned EVM sidechain. This further broadens the reach of EVM smart contract developers and gives you something constructive to do during đŚ szn.
Yaâll probably already heard about the reddit api pricing drama, but for those who didnât: Reddit is getting greedy and is going to charge a ridiculous amount of money for the use of their API, thereby driving third party clients out of business.
Thereâs not much information about who will have to pay for what etc., but assuming that every API request will have to be paid for, this is the calculation Iâm making for the u/nitter_not_twitter bot:
Iâm currently checking the subreddit 6x per minute. I could reduce this to something like once every 5 minutes and I suppose it would still provide a good UX.
Thatâd be 12 requests per hour, 288 per day and 8640 per month.
The bot answered 170x in the past month as well so weâre at 8810 requests per month, or ~106k requests a year.
According to what we know, reddit wants to charge $12k for 50 million requests. Thatâs $0.00024 per request or ~$25 for the 106k/year.
25$/year for running a very small bot at 12 checks per hour instead of the current 360 checks per hour (which would be insanely costly).
I can afford that without a problem, assuming reddit will offer packages that small and at the same price.
But this still shows how insane the API pricing is.
Without 3rd party apps Iâll not be here as often as I currently am and this might be true for a lot of people here as well.
Maybe we should also think about joining the prostest: <https://reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/13yh0jf/dont_let_reddit_kill_3rd_party_apps/ > Hereâs a list of already participating subreddits: https://reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/
Alright, well here ya go. Our own little reddit alternative.
Welcome to EVM Lemmy. Our home away from home when we take down reddit on the 12th.
See below, then⌠Play around. Make some shit. Post some shit. Iâll polish it up as we go.
Remember Iâve never adminâd a site in my life so⌠Anything and everything is subject to me trying to fix an issue and accidentally deleting all our data so⌠yeah, screenshot anything important anyone says.
SOME. CAVEATS.
Obviously, youâll notice itâs on http only not https. Because I canât get the damn SSL cert to work. So, NO serious info should be entered here beyond your usual junk email and a junk password. Itâs PROBABLY just me with access to the data but like, idfk, itâs http, trust nothing. Please just meme around and try to break the site, and skip entering your banking information and private keys.
Then if anyone can kindly explain why the http://url works in every browser of mine EXCEPT my main Brave browser, Iâd appreciate it. Edge is fine. Firefox is fine. In fact, I can access it in a Brave Private window, just not the main. Why? What setting is on blocking http? Hell, I can even do it from Brave on my phone, same wifi network and pihole DNS and everything. Confused, I am.
And itâs also not actually federated because itâs 99% me not being able to figure it out yet and 1% apparently thereâs some outbound DNS issue with Lemmy instances the devs are working on. Idk.
tl;dr servers are hard. yall need to be paid more.
Cheers.
UPDATE:
Despite the best efforts of fellow redditors, I have to call it quits for now on the Lemmy instance. Iâm just not smart enough. Perhaps Iâll return to it.
In the meantime, please find our ethfinance alternative at https://kbin.social/m/ethfinance. Itâs all set up and ready to go, and itâs federated. Think of Kbin as the scrappy newcomer ProtonMail to Lemmyâs Gmail.
Iâll leave it at that on here, but Iâm happy to help people tour the fediverse in the Daily on Kbin. Weâll waive the âon topicâ rule for a few days so folks can acclimate.
New ethresear.ch post by mike neuder, francesco dâamato, aditya asgaonkar, and justin drake.
Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE â a modest proposal
Also see their notes on security.
Summarizing briefly, this change would keep the 32 ETH minimum for a validator, but increase the maximum by some factor (possibly 64x to a max of 2048 ETH). Probability of selection for various duties e.g. sync committee would be weighted based on balance. Operators running multiple validators would not have them aggregated forcibly, but could opt in to have their validators merged.
The authors argue the following benefits:
As with any protocol design choice, there are some tradeoffs involved. Already a couple of good criticisms in the replies which are worth a read.
I am feeling quite positive on ETH and Ethereum:
These are uncertain times, I have no idea which branch of the US government lashes out and attacks crypto next, but I am just feeling positive about the non-reaction of the market and the future ahead for Ethereum.
This isnât designed to be FUD, but rather to be realistic about what I expect to happen. Just to be clear, I expect this plan to fail at some stage along the way, because I think they let it run too long and itâs likely no longer stoppable:
Itâs crystal clear theyâre working towards an agenda to shut down crypto as a whole. Tbh I donât give a shit if itâs because âhur dur global banking cabalâ or âoh fuck the USD is going to collapse if we donât try to shut this downâ or âIâm old and fucking stupid and I hate this cryptkeeper blogchain technologyâ, because the reasons are irrelevant; just know that theyâre working with a coordinated plan here and Ethereum is on the hit list. Be realistic about the struggles that are coming.
A few weeks ago I received a reminder to my sale of majority of my BTC to ETH.
At that time in 2022, btc - $30k, eth - $2000, ray - 0.067.
2023 prices, btc - $26k, eth - $1800, ray - 0.067.
So was that decision good for me and my future?
Some quick reflections combined with guesses-predictions on how things might turn out.
Itâs getting pretty long and my flow is a bit off so hereâs a few btc related takes.
And if you made it till here, hereâs my last important point.
Iâm going to end this here, thanks for coming to my imperfect TED Talk.
All the best,
696.eth
Guest appearance by Brendan Shakeshaft and Joe Van Loon, founders of Auditware. Auditware specializes in performing smart contract audits and building security tooling. Their flagship product Audit Wizard (currently in alpha) is the ultimate web3 security tool, allowing you to audit your smart contracts with ease.
Ethereum
$1,889.56
0.0696
Trustless sequencing,
Let data compression sing,
Rollups be dancing.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 78.5k, leaving ~10
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
Volatility so dead I donât even have any memes to post.
With trezor, you can read through their code and understand how they generate seeds.
Someone has already done this: https://medium.com/@brandonarvanaghi/analyzing-trezor-firmware-mnemonic-seed-generation-for-bitcoin-and-ethereum-4b03fbaad24d
Youâll notice that that article calls out that the default ârandom32â isnât suitable for production (and the code itself wanes you of this), so youâll need to find out where Trezor implements ârandom32â. This is my first time looking through their code and it seems that the insecure implementation is the default implementation in their firmware, but I assume they replace that somewhere. Perhaps someone more familiar can point us to the newest RNG code because THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT POINT TO CLEAR UP.
They do have a legacy firmware that has its own ârandom32â implementation: https://github.com/trezor/trezor-firmware/blob/92045275fb79e532a5b9a86732c1b3206ef3bba4/legacy/rng.c#L27
Youâll notice that that code uses a few âRNG_â variables to produce itâs number, so the next step is to find out what those are.
We know that Trezor uses a Cortex-m4 Arm chip, and this is C code, so we can look at the chip datashet to understand what those do, or we can cheat and look at OpenCM docs: https://libopencm3.org/docs/latest/stm32f2/html/group__rng__file.html
Youâd also want to go to the datasheet for the STM32F205xx to see that it has a âtrue random generatorâ hardware module.
That all looks really good, and Iâve heard that the modern Trezor firmware also includes static ram and host device data into itâs RNG, but Iâm not familiar enough with their code to hunt that down at the moment.
Hey guys, lurker here whoâs been working on a project in his free time: https://betonchain.gg/
To keep it brief, I started out running a Chainlink node, deploying jobs and a consumer to update odds and game results data from an API I wrote to aggregate results and odds across various bookies. Eventually the goal became to offer the most competitive betting experience in terms of odds, privacy and transparency, while decentralizing the bookmaker by sourcing house liquidity from a community which receives house profits back. Soon after launch I aim to add support for futures and integrate player friendly tools such as contracts for auto-hedging parlays.
The platform is currently on Sepolia, if anyone is interested in testing the DApp please drop an address and I can send over some test USDC/USDT/DAI to place bets with. Hopefully thereâs not too many bugs! I am considering launching polygonzkEVM but not sure yet.
Appreciate any feedback from you fine gents and ladies!
PS: If anyone has insight into raising funds, please let me know, hope to make this my full time job. Thanks again!
Beijing releases white paper for web3 innovation and development
https://www.theblock.co/post/232404/beijing-web3-white-paper
ââŚDubbed theâWeb3 Innovation and Development White Paper (2023)," the document states that web3 technology is an âinevitable trend for future Internet industry development,ââŚâ
âThe commission aims to construct Beijing as a global innovation hub for the digital economy.â
â The white paper reportedly states that Beijing aims to strengthen policy support and accelerate technological breakthroughs to promote the web3 industry.â
I think weâre hitting an inflection point where staking is the âcoolâ thing to do with Ether. Lots of folks predicted that this would happen but no one really knew when. Iâm basing this on two factors:
The logical interpretation of this is that the supply squeeze delivered by staking & burning is finally upon us.
Does this mean Ethereum is successful?
Nope. Not even close. We saw something similar happen with Dash in 2018 (dash spiked when their staking program reached critical mass), but Dash couldnât keep the gains. The only way Ether will lock in this success is if we build valuable products on top of a credibly neutral and decentralized network. If youâre hearing this, but not acting on it, youâre a bad puppy đ
I took a deep breath and tipped my toes into Ordinals and BRC-20 yesterday. UX is terrible, it took 12 hours (!) to process my bridging transaction from BTC mainnet to Stacks, and depositing into my trading wallet took about 10 minutes. Itâs a very, very long time when youâre used to Ethereum. Xverse wallet is even worse than MetaMask in terms of showing human-readable information, and all swaps are done either via order books or P2P bulk sales.
The experience is not welcoming for a newcomer. Iâve been doing DeFi daily for the last 2 years, and I had to look around for hours before I was comfortable enough to do a transaction.
However, I think BRC-20s and Ordinals have a decent chance of becoming more popular in the next few months. I am not tech-savvy enough to understand the hurdles facing a better UX - until yesterday I thought an ETH NFT collection could be bridged back-and-forth to BTC⌠But I could definitely see how people could pile on Bitcoin DeFi projects.
Ethereum isnât threatened by this, in my opinion. It is so far ahead in terms of development⌠Bitcoin looks like a 28k modem, while Ethereum is 5G. Still, I decided to allocate a small portion of my trading wallet to it. I feel kinda dirty using a PoW chain, but hey, ride the wave, donât fight it, as they say.
Hey ! Seems like Iâm going to be let go at work soonish (Which is a good thing, my job got less and less technical over the years and I miss that part a lot). Iâm a cryptographer with quite good skills in programming in a range of languages, so I was considering having a bit of fun for a couple years working in the ETH ecosystem. What Iâm looking for is technical challenge.
What are my options ? My thoughts so far :
Any other options you can think of ? Iâm just in the process of evaluating my opions right now as the switch wonât be before a couple months.
Just a reminder to everyone if you donât know already.
Both Ledger and Trezor device support Fido U2F, which means you can use your ledger or trezor as a security key (2FA) to login to your online accounts.
Of course if you are not comfortable taking your hardware wallet with you everywhere, maybe consider using it for online accounts youâll only login from your home or in a safe place. But according to your specific threat model you can use HWs as 2FA security partially or fully in your online activities.
You can use them to secure your CEX accounts, email, password manager etc. And if you loose or break your device you can always restore it with the seed phrases in another device and all your 2FA security keys will be recovered as well.
Using a security key as 2FA for your online accounts greatly increases your general security online. And almost impossible to hack into your accounts remotely.
Before you implement that be sure to go through the ledger and trezor articles about using their respective U2F features.
Trezor also supports FIDO2 standard for passwordless login but itâs not as widely adopted yet like U2F.
Edit:- here is trezorâs article on using U2F- https://trezor.io/learn/a/what-is-u2f
Here is the ledgerâs article - https://www.ledger.com/fido-u2f
If youâre moving away from ledger as your hardware wallet, you can atleast use it as a 2FA security key to secure your online accounts.
https://twitter.com/hanni_abu/status/1663605190543523840
I wasnât happy with existing solutions to monitor validator entry/exit queues so I built this https://validatorqueue.com.
This dashboard shows the entry/exit queue, wait times, total active validators, and historical values.
Thank you beaconcha_in for providing the data â¤ď¸
Not sure if posted yesterday, but even if it was itâs worth repeating. HOP bridge now supports rETH, with joint liquidity incentivization by HOP & RocketPool DAOs.
https://twitter.com/HopProtocol/status/1663669978405691392
This is the first liquid staking token bridge (of any protocol) and Iâm hopeful HOP can add more. Anyone who is in a LST community that has shown interest in getting a bridge set up let me / HOP know. When this was being voted on it seemed there was interest in adding more.
The Lido situation:
When Prysm contributed to centralization by having too high of a share in the consensus client market, the community launched an initiative aiming at reducing that.
This worked fantastically and Prysm went from more than 66% to now being second behind Lighthouse.
No real initiative has been launched in the case of Lido yet. There is no real equivalent to clientdiversity.org today, with explanations, educational material, and guides to switch to less centralized options. There is no real pressure by the community.
Are we really passively waiting for the 33% validator share limit to be crossed in order to start doing anything?? Will one more percent really make a difference? As a reminder, Vitalik suggested that no entity should control more than 15% of all validators. Lido already controls twice the stake Vitalik considers to be too much.
On May 22 2022, u/superphiz wrote that community action should start at a 22% share. With its 32%, Lido has now 50% more than that and yet no action has been seen.
To our Ethfinance friend u/hanniabu who created clientdiversity.org (big thanks for that): is there a similar website planned for staking providers? rated.network just doesnât do the education job. Please let me and us know if there is anything we can do to help.
Feel free to share any idea about what we could do to.
This problem wonât just solve itself, there needs to be a community initiative.
Guest appearance by Rhett Shipp from Gravita Protocol, a decentralized borrowing protocol.
Ethereum
$1805
0.068
Tax crypto traders,
The debt ceiling deal breakers,
Rug pulling raiders.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 72.9k, leaving 0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
It wouldnât take much volume from Fidelity to cancel out the⌠checks notes⌠negative ETH issuance
Ethereum is the only digital asset in the world that is all of the below:
Traditional finance people and most normies still have not figured this out. I know weâve come a long way since 2015, but I really believe we are super early adopters here. Will be interesting to look back on these threads in 5, 10, 15 years time.
Letâs rearrange that and get a catchy acronym.
Secure Trustless Useful Permissionless Productive Immutable Decentralized
ETH is STUPPID!
Great work everyone, take the rest of the day off.
Imagine an Ethereum spam token as a small piece of land in the middle of the desert that has a big sign planted in it saying â/u/barthib owns thisâ. You have no idea who put the sign there, and the land is obviously worthless, so why would you bother driving out into the desert to try to claim it or to take down the sign?
TL;DR Hide it. Donât interact with it or try to âget rid of itâ.
Conceptually speaking, Ethereum tokens (including NFTs) donât exist âinâ your address like ETH does. They exist âinâ their own token contract that maintains its own separate ledger. This contractâs code is determined entirely by the creator of the NFT.
When your wallet software checks your address for tokens, what itâs basically doing (through a couple levels of indirection) is pinging the smart contract that the token creator published, asking it âdoes this address own any of your token? If so, which one(s) does it own?â The tokenâs creator can, if they wish, tell the contract to respond to this inquiry with literally anything. They could tell your wallet that you own an amount of their token equal to the current block number, or randomize every day the tokens the contract says you own, if they wanted to.
When you interact with a token, your wallet is reaching out to the token contract and running the code defined there by the creator of the token, which can also be anything they want. So a situation like this could occur:
Edit: A classic scam is where they code the contract to revert/fail your transaction with a custom error message that includes the address of their scam website in it, telling you to go there for âsupportâ on their token. You see your failed transaction with their custom error message when you go on Etherscan to check whether your transaction went through. So you visit their website and get on their support live chat, and they feed you some bullshit about you needing to install a wallet upgrade from a dodgy .exe file, or that your wallet is corrupted and you need to send them your seed phrase to fix it. Then they clean you out.
GrĂźezi EthFinance đ
Been away in Japan đŻđľ the last 4.5-weeks or so for vacation. Didnât use the phone much, went camping, did jiu jitsu, was a cornerman for an MMA fighter, went to a baseball game, sumo; just reconnecting and seeing how the ecosystem is.
Iâm always here in the shadows doing my best to secure the Blockchain, provide liquidity, and help along newbies when I can.
Love you all, keep being ambassadors, and keep helping any- and everyone who asks for it!
PrĂśschtli đť
Heads up for everyone using Google Authenticator 2FA app. While this might be old needs, the update was pushed around the end of April, this was new to me, so maybe some fellow EthFinanciers might find this useful.
This morning I opened my Google Authenticator app to find out that is needed an update. The update included a back up of the authenticator codes into my google account.
When I explored this a bit I found this:
âWith this update weâre rolling out a solution to this problem, making one time codes more durable by storing them safely in usersâ Google Account. This change means users are better protected from lockout and that services can rely on users retaining access, increasing both convenience and security.â
Really, how can they think this is save. The whole point is to have a second step besides your standard login option like Gmail. Whatâs the point of storing your 2FA codes in a google account that when it gets compromised, your 2FA codes are compromised as well.
There is still the option to keep using the authenticator without the backup feature.
Remember, when it comes to online security, the ultimate responsibility lies with none other than ourselves. Stay vigilant, take proactive measures, and empower yourself to safeguard your digital presence.
Hi everyoneâŚI just got the final cover for my book back. Iâve written a little book about Ethereum!! Specifically about WHY Ethereum is the future of business. Itâs called (no surprise) âEthereum for Businessâ. If you would like to pre-order it, the paper copy should be in your hands in about 2 weeks as weâre nicely ahead of the official schedule and orders for eBooks on Amazon or Apple will follow in another 2-3 weeks. Iâll do a top-level post on why I wrote the book and what itâs about on the official release day.
There was a meeting planned for Monday but too many people could not make it last minute. A few of us had an unstructured discussion mostly about the costs of setting up and running an oDAO node and necessary archive node. u/haurog calculated some of the costs using on-chain activity and is willing to share a doc once complete and hereâs another great resource (oDAO tab).
Weâd like to maximize participation for those interested in working on the project, so please enter your availability for the next meeting here:
https://www.when2meet.com/?20153310-SNPGH
Enter a name (pw optional) and click Sign In, then select your available meeting times so we can schedule it.
If Discord meetings do not work for everyone we may consider using Zoom or other tool. Whether active on Discord or Reddit-only user, all are welcome and encouraged to join the effort.
With crvUSD finally launching in earnest now would be a good time to at least familiarize yourself with the Curve ecosystem if you havenât. Itâs still the second highest volume DEX and might have just launched a way to double its income.
Thereâs a lot to unpack here:
I do suggest you spend a few hours and familiarize with this system if you havenât because it is the baseline so many other projects derive their tokenomics from.
Not sure if itâs been posted yet, but the delegate week started yesterday. If you own any DAO tokens, itâs a great time reconsider who you are delegating too. Or even better, if you are on the fence about being a delegate might be a good time to jump into it!
Some more info here - https://delegationweek.com/ & if you are looking for a list of r/ethfinance delegates check out the daily doots page here - https://dailydoots.com/#delegates
If you own any HOP, now would be a good time to consider delegating - whether that is to someone new or just re-affirming with the person you already delegate too. They are using some of the grant funds to encourage people to re-delegate (or delegate if they arenât at all) See - https://forum.hop.exchange/t/grant-proposal-delegation-week/878/11. Not a huge amount, and Iâm not sure if those are the final numbers, but at a minimum should cover some gas costs + some beer money.
Crypto wasnât invented to make you richâŚ
Iâve been in Ethfinance for a few years, and every year, I understand this a little bit more. I joined before the big bull, made some profits, but you donât make life-chaging amounts of money by investing spare change as a broke college student. So I obviously didnât sell during the crazy highs. This year is the year in which Iâll be calling myself an âEthereanâ for more than I was calling myself a âBitcoinerâ.
âŚIt was invented to set you free.
Iâve got to say, I âconvertedâ to Eth at a good time. Not a good time financially, but at a time where I was disillusioned with Bitcoin. I had heard about Ethereum much earlier, but ignored it, as it was obvious to me that Bitcoiners would not leave the biggest and best coin with zero improvements over multiple years, riding on the first-mover advantage alone. What a rabbit hole the Ethereum ecosystem was! What an insane potential of improving the way we interact with wealth and capital and as a result the human condition!
âŚBut it will make you rich anyway.
If this part ever comes true, Iâm ready, but I hope itâs not overnight. I donât know if my mental health can take another insane bull, but I suspect that the next one might be even wilder. At least inflation and time have changed my definition of âlife-changing moneyâ. In any case⌠DCA on!
Iâm working on a few crypto beginnerâs tutorials, with the main goal being to simplify information and for a better learning experience. Ideally, a lot of users donât actually need long explanations of how blockchain and dapps work and just want to know how to use them.
Interestingly I wanted to compare simple transacting as copying and pasting an address, and I thought to compare this to being as easy as copying and pasting an IBAN number for digital banking transactions (like in many EU countries). But then it occurred to me that in the US, peer to peer banking transactions are still impossible (which is pathetic), so this reason alone makes explaining this way harder than it should be.
Just a funny observation. What could be a better metaphor for explaining transactions in a âcrypto for dummiesâ kind of way? I was considering using email addresses as a metaphor, but I donât think itâs the best way.
Also, is lack of p2p banking a problem that fednow is trying to solve? It should be a crime how far behind the US is due to lacking simple digital transactions as a standard feature for all bank accounts. Anyway, people generally understand PayPal and Venmo, but trying to explain crypto transactions automatically sounds way more technical if youâre not already familiar with similar concepts.
Iâve taken some work with Supermodular.xyz and Greenpilled via Kevin Owocki!
My role currently will be creating video content for a variety of platforms and help spread the work to Regenerative crypto economics and human coordination. Hereâs couple channels to follow when you get a moment.
Thanks /u/owocki for the amazing opportunity. Onward!
YouTube: https://youtu.be/UShoIJmSNok
Twitter: https://twitter.com/supermodularxyz
There is so much ethos aligned with Ethfinance and I couldnât be happier to have the chance to help contribute to the vision of this incredible community.
Iâve been diving in on the Greenpilled podcast and will be making so much shorts content with great quotes from great minds. Mind blast incoming!
Cheers and Big Hugs from GreenPilled City
Guest appearance by DCinvestor, an early pioneer in the Ethereum community on Reddit and was a huge part of Ethtrader and Ethfinance. You can find him on Twitter, discussing Ethereum, NFTs, AI & more. https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor
Ethereum
$1805
0.067
Doots for yesterday:
So around this time last year I posted a daily update about the beacon chain queue.
So here we go again for round 2!
Pending validators: Joining 50.3k, leaving <100
Some extra stats for when I reference this post at a later time
Active validators - 572,820
Staked ether - 18,330,053
##What is the difference between a BRC-20 token and an ERC-20 token?
Expanded from my comment in /r/ethereum
####TL;DR:
BRC-20 is completely different than ERC-20. It has a similar name, which is very misleading because it works nothing like it.
Both are meant to be fungible.
##What is an ERC-20 token?
An ERC-20 token requires a complete smart contract with a full set of code that describes how the token operates.
All ERC-20 tokens must have these function names and parameters.
Only their names and parameters must match. A functionâs code does NOT have to match the description of its name
I could make a valid (but scammy) ERC-20 token where the âtransfer()â function actually mints tokens, and where the âapprove()â function instead burns a large amount of your transferred Ether. And that would be technically valid as long as the code specifies it.
##What is a BRC-20 token?
First off ⌠documentation on the BRC-20 standard absolutely sucks: https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
I thought it was a joke, but thatâs the full token standard documentation.
Some more info:
BRC-20 is just a short JSON object (a simple data structure) and does not contain any functions. Itâs based on ordinal theory and relies on the ordinal nodes to operate on it and provide it with standard functions.
It only works with ordinal-compatible taproot addresses.
Here is the standard format of a BRC-20 token:
This is what the entire ORDI token deployment looks like:
{
"p": "brc-20",
"op": "deploy",
"tick": "ordi",
"max": "21000000",
"lim": "1000"
}
Here is the format of a Transfer function:
To transfer, it takes 2 steps:
Swaps require an off-chain 3rd-party to complete, so theyâre not safe at the moment. It remains to be seen if you can build trustless DeFi around BRC-20 tokens.
Some other interesting facts about BRC-20 tokens:
Epoch 200,553 only had 40% voting participation!
I canât wait to read the post-mortem for this one. What could it possibly have been?
It wasnât catastrophic, but it easily could have been a serious, but recoverable, issue if it had persisted. Epoch 200,553 only had 40% voting participation, which means only 40% of validators selected at random for block creation were actively confirming new blocks. Normally, the participation rate should be much higher, so this could indicate a problem with the network.
Start of the problem: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200551
Peak of the problem: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200553
Recovery started: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200554
Normalization achieved: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200556
We need a thorough post-mortem before we can be sure everything is okay though, because a rogue event like this happening for no explainable reason would not be very confidence inducing.
A tiny update on the loss of finality yesterday: The culprit still isnât clear.
Some people have suggested Prysm caused the issue because they were hit hard by lost attestations and high loads, but this is very likely a side-effect of the turbulence rather than a cause. Terence described some optimizations they were making as a result of the turbulence, but thatâs not an admission of fault.
I initially threw shade on MEV-boost because of my distrust for that stack, but thereâs no evidence suggesting they are involved in any way.
The investigation is ongoing and the outcomes will be published in a detailed postmortem.
Terence just posted another update, but keep in mind, that this isnât a finding of fault, theyâre just exploring the incident.
Most clients (except Lighthouse) were hit hard by this, but Prysm stands out because they have a high representation of validators.
Terence just posted another update
, but keep in mind, that this isnât a finding of fault, theyâre just exploring the incident.
Hereâs my best attempt at an ELI5:
CL clients were getting a lot of attestations (which are like votes or confirmations from other nodes) about older transactions that didnât include the latest updates. This is like getting a lot of mail about old news that doesnât include recent important events.
Because the nodes that sent these attestations didnât have all the information for the recent transactions, CL clients had to spend a lot of time and resources to catch up. This is similar to how youâd spend a lot of time and effort researching recent events if you only had old newspapers. This caused the CL clients to work too hard and run out of resources, leading to issues like the system slowing down or even crashing.
During this time, a small problem in the Prysm system (which likely exists in other clients as well) was found that made it use the wrong information when trying to organize transactions. Itâs like sorting mail into the wrong categories because youâre using an outdated list.
The Prysm team is working on improvements to prevent these issues from happening again. Theyâre improving the systemâs memory management, and theyâre going to implement similar logic which right now only exists in Lighthouse CL clients where they filter out unviable attestations (like disregarding old news thatâs no longer relevant). The Prysm dev team plans to release these improvements next week.
So, in summary, the Prysm nodes were overwhelmed with outdated information, which led to system issues and revealed a minor bug. The Prysm dev team is now working on fixes and improvements. I am hopeful other CL clients follow suit and implement similar fixes.
Some analysis threads are starting to come in from the loss of finality event on 5/11/2023, Iâll try to link them here as I become aware of them. (Feel free to share as well)
##Summary/Highlight of US House of Reps session: Future of Digital Assets.
Pleasantly surprised by most of what was discussed. Almost all the guest speakers had excellent ideas and explanations in the discussion. However, each person was allocated only 5 min at a time, so it was somewhat limiting. Please excuse me if some of this is a little raw. It is a 3 hr meeting and I donât have the time atm to format it correctly due to my excessive fiat mining op (work).
Intros of Committee and Guest Speakers:
Mr Johnson: Must be a bipartisan effort for a promising tech/market. Conflict between securities and commodities laws. Most of the G20 countries are ahead of us. We want to be the leader in this tech/industry.
Ms Caraveo: Digital asset activity grows, but so does non-compliance. Any legislation requires increased funding of CFTC.
Mr Hill: Can this industry thrive here in the US? Many Democrats calling for common sense legislation for months (not just a partisan issue). Canât trust offshore exchanges (FTX), so we need to work on laws here for US exchanges.Â
Mr McHenry: We want a collab of CFTC and SEC to make laws and close regulatory gaps to protect consumers.
Guest speakers
Durgee: Iâm the only non-attorney here. Already there are conflicting laws against other existing laws for crypto from the SEC and CFTC. This is a developing tech innovation that happens to be a digital currency as well. Adoption at this stage is not a tech problem, itâs a human conditioning issue. A 13 year old in their lifetime has grown up with BTC and only known a world with crypto in their life.
Mr Santori: Kraken is well established in the US and the world. Europe has more effective rules from tested principles unlike the US. Gaps in US have created litigation that doesnât protect consumers. Mandates needed to protect us: https://www.youtube.com/live/gwJ1QAwP7UE?t=43m21s
Mr Massad: Confusion about commodity/security classification of crypto worsens the gap problem. How can we apply Howey test without this info? We need to pass a compliance law directing CFTC and SEC (or SRO; self regulating agency) to create laws and enforce them, without rewriting commodities and securities laws. Regardless of your stance on crypto we need this framework to protect consumers.
Mr Blaugrand: If investors could have traded digital assets on an exchange that was regulated like the NY Stock exchange, FTX situation wouldnât have happened. We can use the established rules we already have and apply it to crypto with these 4 rules: https://www.youtube.com/live/gwJ1QAwP7UE?t=58m34s
Mr Steil (WI): We still have no path forward for regulation, even after Genslerâs meeting with Congress. Congress is ready to do the job. How do we not miss out vs overseas? W/Shoenberger: Switzerland made it very clear to define security/commodities. It gave them legal security and clarity that allowed them to proceed successfully. This framework that they provided certainly provided the legal certainty to be headquartered there and to have legal clarity around the classification instantly. W/Durgee: The rest of the world has more stability and growth in every avenue of crypto. 3x as much investments vs the US in some markets.
Mr Lucas: US is great because we embrace innovatio. w/Santori: G20 markets are ahead of us and are sophisticated. Kraken is expanding there, but we canât deploy the same resources here in the US due to these regulatory gaps. Lucas: what SEC rules need altering for exchanges to succeed? W/Blaugrand: SEC needs an onramp with regulation so exchanges can grow in the US. They donât because of regulatory vagueness. W/Satori: Flexibility of crypto is a perk. Broker/dealer construct can interact directly with consumers. We could limit exchanges and even close down exchanges after hours.
The negative:
Lynch (Mass): Not regulatory ambiguity; itâs mass non compliance with existing laws. Donât argue security vs commodities, we should instead focus on intermediaries (exchanges, lenders, and wallet users). SEC is clear, consistent, efficient, and prevails in every 140 cases. crypto industry has failed. No separate regulatory regime necessary for crypto. claimed that creating new legislation for digital assets seems âredundant and unnecessaryâ given that the financial systemâs current securities laws have âsustained massive innovation in our financial system for decades.â
Mr Casten: What return would I had if I invested in 12 cryptos during a time vs S&P (60% profit)? Loss 46% of investment, how is this a supposed way to close wealth inequality gap? W/Durgee: accredited vs credited access is important. Mr Casten: Iâm happy to debate truth not lies. Everything stated here beginning to sound like SBF and FTX, whatâs the distinction? Sounds like you want to regulate crypto with the least funded organization.
Mr Sherman: Buttcoin mod? An ignorant personâs lack of ability to learn anything new. Fossil garbage opinion. Uses term âcrypto broâ. questioned whether digital assets should even have a future in the United States. He referred to cryptocurrencies as a âhidden money system that diverts capital investment from useful industries, and whose announced purpose is to defeat sanctions and tax laws. Crypto bros make money literally by making money, and theyâve made over a trillion dollars. Theyâll accuse the U.S. government of making money out of thin air. Maybe we do, but weâre the U.S. government.â
Threaten Web3 Anonymity:
Mr Davidson (Chairman Housing subcommittee): Genslerâs hotel Californiaâs regulation provides no path to exit/leave. Who should have the power of exit from intermediaries (power to have self custody)? w/Santori: Who is best placed to collect KYC info? Kraken is well paced to do that and doesnât require KYC for every transaction, but we could do that if required.
Dr Foster (IL): Estimates of 95% trades are fake or wash trades in derivatives. How can we have a regulated futures market with this fraud and manipulation? What alternative to KYC at all levels is there to avoid fraud? W/Satori: Kraken provides this as a portal. Foster: we canât stop BTC on the dark web with that. At a wallet level we must have mandatory monitoring with licensing like automobiles. Trusted digital identity from the government. W/Kulkin: CFTC had auth it could conduct surveillance under the rules and jurisdiction of the exchange thereby acting as an SRO in addition to the CFTC/NFA.
Conclusion
McHenry: Even if there is nothing of value in crypto, you would still need enforceable rights and protections already found in regulations and laws in the US. Must come together in bipartisan manner to protect investors.
5 days for additional legislation questions and responses granted from the panel. Plans for another hearing this month made.
Last month, McHenry said he expects that the President will have signed some piece of crypto legislation into law within the next 12 months.
Anyone else here whose validators had no problems during the finality issues?
What clients are you running?
What are your hardware specs?
I missed an average of 1 attestation per validator that day and my inclusion distance was around 0-1 as well. Iâm running Nethermind/Nimbus.
But I saw a big increase in CPU and bandwidth use, between 2 and 3x of the usual average, spikes even higher.
Thatâs not a problem for my staking machine, but if others had similar spikes, I can totally see why many had issues.
Respectful criticism:
Iâm a bit disappointed to see that despite the idea of the the ManeNet DAO joining Rocket Poolâs oDAO having emerged from r/ethfinance and having received great support from r/ethfinance, all of the conversation has now moved over to Discord.
I realize that this is a very specific topic and most of the conversation shouldnât happen in r/ethfinance. But it would still be great to discuss ideas in this sub too when needed, and keep the entire community informed of the latest news.
For example, did you know that thereâs a proposal being drafted that has been in the making for a week? Or that a dedicated meeting happened on Friday?
Like many others I donât like Discord, I find it messy and a pain to follow so I donât use it. Maybe Iâm just too old for the âchatâ format.
Would it be possible for one of you Discord guys to keep us informed in here from time to time? Iâm sure many here would love to be kept in the loop and even contribute.
r/ethfinance gave birth to the ManeNet DAO after all, and all EVMavericks were Ethfinancers before becoming lions.
In the spirit of sharing more from EVM Discord to r/ethfinance and about the example that brought it up, I shared my notes from the 1st Discord Call about the oDAO on Discord, but havenât shared them here yet:
I was taking notes for myself and Iâve put that into Pastebin (unlisted) (https://pastebin.com/nrmwEyGg). Iâm sure there are lots of errors, incomplete thoughts, and typos.
Also, I tend to ignore Discord except for something Iâm very interested in (like the oDAO). So I sympathize with the comment poster. As an EVM holder, Iâm loyal to the dailies, but not the Discord. So I miss some EVM things when they donât make it back here. h/t u/Ethical-trade
So while I was gone and there was all that drama with the beacon chain, my Teku node got caught up in it and fatally crashed and was completely offline.
HoweverâŚ. I run a second Ethereum âstackâ with Lighthouse as the consensus client, which the validator process switched over to and was able to carry on with no downtime like nothing even happened.
I was able to recover the Teku node in my own time, and once it was back in sync the validator process automatically switched back over to it as the primary endpoint.
Client diversity is awesome!
Just found this confirmation:
The device sends encrypted shards of your seed to different companies if you decide to use the service. You can of course still choose to backup it yourself.
But 2 days ago the same co-founder said:
Your keys are always stored on your device and never leave it
Thatâs what Ledger has been claiming for years as well.
If we assume the chap wasnât lying 2 days ago, that means the new firmware ( one screenshot shows 2.2.1 for Nano X ) that just rolled out activates the backdoor âabilityâ to extract the seed.
More info: Wired article says:
Ledger is preparing to launch a new service called Ledger Recover that splits a wallet recovery phraseâbasically, a human-readable form of the private keyâinto three encrypted shards and distributes them to three custodians: Ledger, crypto custody firm Coincover, and code escrow company EscrowTech. If somebody loses their recovery phrase, two of the three shards can be combinedâpending an ID checkâto regain access to the locked funds. Essentially, Ledger Recover is an additional safety net; for the price of $9.99 a month, it takes the jeopardy out of cryptoâs version of stuffing dollars under the mattress. Itâll be available in the UK, EU, US, and Canada and come to other territories later in the year.
Ledger CEO Tweeted it out as well.
Why this is an issue - even if Ledger now cancels their new seed cloud backup service (because backlash), and says they will never make a firmware update use this hitherto unannounced âabilityâ, the mere presence of this backdoor means that bad actors/governments may be interested in it. I guess this is what we get for trusting a company that kept its software closed-source.
My next steps:
With ledger (potentially) going full retard again, Iâm updating myself on what hardware wallets are available in the market right now. Looking forward to if anyone has other suggestions, additions or corrections to my high-level assessments below.
Iâve been using this list for discovery (trying to narrow down the list of 387 wallets): https://walletscrutiny.com/?verdict=reproducible&platform=hardware
There is an insane amount of options in the market, but very few can fit these requirements;
Iâve discarded a bunch of products (e.g. ngrave) that have little to no information about their device or the software that runs on it.
What Iâve found that (superficially) gets closest to the requirements (in no particular order);
To those who own governance tokens / participate in governance, you should check out Tallyâs governance-week. They are coordinating with a bunch of DAOs to encourage people to delegate or periodically revisit your delegated tokens. A great place for ethfinancers to start is looking at https://dailydoots.com/#delegates to find out who on this forum is a delegate.
The HOP bridge protocol is one of the partners and will be providing some funds from the grant pool to support Tally on this project. The exact details on how they will incentivize is not finalized yet - initial discussions where subsiding gas fees, but looks like it might be shifting to a distribution to those who participate (the forum discussion is here). Either way, Iâm happy to see HOP providing support!
That all said, whatever governance token you own please consider usings this week as a chance to re-visit your delegated tokens. Itâs an important step for the health of a DAO, as set it and forget delegating can stagnate a DAOâs leadership and create a barrier to entry for new delegates to join in. And if you are looking to become a delegate this may be a great opportunity to jump in!
Announcements
Guest appearance by Daniel, founder of Swell. Swell is a non-custodial liquid staking protocol
â¨Eâ¨tâ¨hâ¨eâ¨râ¨eâ¨uâ¨mâ¨
1900
0.064
Another one comes,
Another bank bites the dust,
More ethers combust.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Of the last 500 verified contracts on ethereum, 86 contains the word pepe. Probably a good sell signal :).
If youâve ever visited EthStakerâs website before, youâll have seen that it was⌠largely unnavigable. Well - we wanted to build a new, open source one, so we put out a call on r/ethstaker to see if we could find someone from the community, familiar with staking, to help us do it. u/hanniabu is awesome and did it!
So now EthStaker has a new open source website!! Feedback would be most appreciated, especially from ethfinanciers. What would help you find the info you want about staking? I didnât love giving people discord and subreddit links when they asked for resources, so Iâm pretty stoked to be able to give them a website where everything is aggregated.
Iâm also gonna post a series of âbeginner guide to stakingâ blog posts over the next couple weeks (at https://ethstaker.cc/blog), would REALLY love feedback on that from someone who sorta knows what staking is but wants to know more. Mostly for readability
I looked into DIVA and wrote a twitter thread about them yesterday.
Hereâs a quick summary for Ethfinance:
The key points is that Iâve learned is that combines liquid staking with DVT. Since it uses a smart contract to pool funds it can be as low as 1E. Honestly, Iâm waiting for a bit more info after their testnet releases to see how it pricesly protects against penalties and bad actors and why 1E would be safe. Also, not enough info on Node Operators and right now you would not be able to run one on the testnet.
Side note. SWISE vaults might be in a similar vein I guess.
Please correct me if I misunderstood something or if you wanna educate me more, this was a new concept for me so it was a bit hard wrapping my head around it when figuring out how diva is planning to make it work not just in a theoretical way.
Itâs the 1920s, youâre starting to see these fancy new self-propelled horseless carriages or âcarsâ pop up everywhere. They look really cool but theyâre also quite dangerous. This is what the kerfuffle is about in the congress at the moment. Everyone knows that we need to protect people from the maniacs on the road. But astute observers also realise that we also need to protect the innovation and economic advantage these new-fangled machines provide.
Lawmakers are split on what to do. Representative Emmer thinks we need new laws. âRules of the roadâ for all to comply with. Rules which all road users must follow specifically designed to create order out of the chaos on the road while still allowing for fast, efficient travel. But senator Warren disagrees. She thinks these new machines should be treated like horses under the ancient 1839 âHorse and Carriage actâ. She doesnât care that horses are slow, living creatures which need to eat, sleep and poop while cars are fast, furious and can run all day. She insists that these roads were built for horses and that makes anything on those roads a horse, dammit!
Donât be like senator Warren.
Edit: If anyone with some clout on Twitter wants to screenshot this and run with it, go for it. Or if you reckon you can take the idea and shorten it down to the Twitter character limit, that would be impressive so go for it.
Chris Blec posted on twitter and called out rocketpool. However⌠hes actually right?
https://twitter.com/ChrisBlec/status/1652498398459699202
I looked into oDAO and it is exactly what he describes it as.
Everything more and more just feels like decentralization theaterâŚ
The fact that it is invite only is despicable and counter to any ethos regarding decentralization.
Ethereumâs consensus layer and execution layer currently donât talk to each other so you need oracles for something like rocket pool. The odao does all the oracle work for rocket pool and upgrades the smart contracts. They can technically collude and cause massive damage so the best way to prevent this is to overpay and only include trusted people. Yes, the work is fairly easy and not worth half a million a year and everyone wants a spot. Thankfully, a lot of the money goes to fund client teams which helps ethereum run and keeps it decentralized. 4 spots are allocated to the rocket pool team to help fund development. Sassal donates all his earnings.
Eventually, there will be less of a need for the odao with upgrades to Ethereum like eip 4788. If anyone has any technical or economic suggestions about the odao they can post in the rocket pool forum or the research section on discord. Please note, it takes very little effort to criticize and substantial amounts of time and coordinated effort to come up with working solutions.
Hey everyone! đŚ buidlathon is officially kicking off and the competition will run for a full 7 weeks starting today! đ If you are interested in participating. head on over to the EVMavericks discord and hop into the đŚâbuidlathon channel and ask to be assigned the Buidlathon role! đââď¸ (No EVM Required)
Projects will be judged on their overall utility/ingenuity/technicals and the potential benefit they bring to web3!
General criteria for projects is as follows:
Upon conclusion of the competition on June 19th 2023, participants will demo/present/showcase their projects to the community and the voting will begin!
A panel of 4 technical/web3 judges đ§ââď¸ along with a DAO-wide snapshot vote (5th judge) will decide who will rule them all and win the grand prize! If you are interested in contributing in other ways (helping promote the buidlathon, being a judge in the competition, other ways) dont hesitate to reach out in the channel!
Hereâs your chance to make your mark in the community and get đ° while doing it! Happy buidling!đ¨
Long term, Iâm very positive that Ethereum will eventually dominate the crypto space and that it will address most major technical challenges, even if it takes another decade or two. Iâm pessimistic about crypto overall though.
Iâm still on the sidelines because Iâm having trouble seeing how crypto overall will achieve true adoption anytime soon. I define âtrue adoptionâ very narrowly as significant demand for ETH to be used for some external purpose other than crypto speculation or facilitating crypto speculation. So for example providing DEX liquidity, staking/validation, and issuing most tokens or NFTs donât count since the demand is mostly based on putting fiat into crypto hoping to get more fiat out. Things that do count include airline or concert ticket NFTs, using ETH contracts for supply chain tracking or audit, and so on. In these cases someone is willing to buy ETH because they can use it to solve an actual problem. I think most other successful technologies were solving real world problems by this stage in their development.
Where can this adoption come from? After all the scams, fraud, and hacks Iâd have trouble convincing any company board to use public blockchains beyond maybe an NFT cash grab offering, if for no better reason than avoiding the reputation risk and liability from using crypto. Even a simple use case like accepting stablecoins as payment is tough because every major stablecoin has depegged at some point.
Though itâs small, I think EVMavericks is an example of true adoption. Demand for most people is based on âIâd like to be a member of a clubâ rather than âIâd like to sell this JPG for a profitâ. Maybe some Reddit avatars count in this category as well?
Is there anything on the horizon that Iâm missing? Financially I want to buy ETH because it has an asymmetric distribution of returns, and I believe Ethereum is one of the only projects in crypto being designed with good intentions and a long term focus. On the other hand Iâm increasingly having trouble seeing where enough new demand will come from to justify a $220B valuation.
Hereâs your new monthly staking update:
Validator overview - total: 619346 validators*
Client diversity numbers**
Pool distribution***
My goal is to show how things develop and answer questions like âHow many validators will secure the network by EOY if net new validators are constantâ, âIs client diversity improvingâ and âHow is the dynamic between centralized pools and decentralized stakersâ.
If you think something very important is missing, let me know and Iâll add it today or tomorrow, so we can work with it in June. Best case share your source, so I know where to find the stats.
This post will contain more information and probably some conclusions in the future, I hope this will be a good summary and help for those who donât check numbers regularly (I basically didnât do it and could not tell you how things are developing right now)
Some comments and sources:
All percentages are rounded, so this is not 100% accurate, but should be good enough to show changes in the coming months.
* https://beaconcha.in/validators#all
** https://clientdiversity.org/#distribution
*** https://beaconcha.in/pools
P.S. I wanted to do this yesterday, cause it was the first of the month, but I had no time cause of the bank holiday and also I was too stupid yesterday⌠So letâs pretend todayâs numbers are those from May 1st.
Hereâs an idea: EVMavericksâ ManeNet DAO becoming a Rocket Pool oDAO member.
Arenât we an ideal and trustworthy partner that highly values decentralization?
Edit: just realized how unwelcoming this post must feel to any new member. So letâs explain a few things for our most recent friends:
A while back r/ethfinance launched its own NFT collection, EVMavericks and used the occasion to launch a DAO, the ManeNet DAO. From its website: âManeNet DAO advances the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem by aligning shared member incentives with funding, developing, and promoting public goods and educationâ
Rocket Pool is a liquid staking protocol, and the oDAO is âthe group of special Rocket Pool nodes that are responsible for the administrative duties required by the protocol that cannot be achieved by Smart Contracts due to technical limitationsâ. The âoâ in oDAO stands for âoracleâ.
So basically the idea here is to have an r/ethfinance native DAO help Rocket Pool with some of its duties. This job pays rather well, and the money could, according to the ManeNet DAOâs mission, be used to advance the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem.
Yesterday, u/Ethical-trade made a post about how the EVmavricks should join Rocket Poolâs oDAO. I loved that post so much, I covered it in todayâs Rocket Fuel - making the case that I strongly support them joining.
I support ManeNet DAO joining the oDAO so strongly that, in the episode, I made the offer of lending the DAO the 1750 RPL needed to cover the bond if they are selected.
Also, I wore my EVMavricks t-shirt especially for this episode!
You can watch it here: https://twitter.com/waqwaqattack/status/1653776527203475458
Meanwhile, in NFT-landâŚ
Blur, the incumbent NFT marketplace, just announced Blend: a peer-to-peer lending and borrowing platform that lets users leverage their NFTs as collateral to borrow ETH. These loans are perpetual (no expiration price or date), at fixed rate. The twist? Lenders can call the loan at any time, triggering a Dutch auction for a new lender to step in and take over the loan.
But wait, thereâs more! Blend also announced a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) feature, enabling users to âbuyâ their favourite NFTs with just a 20% down payment, while the rest is borrowed from a lending pool. I wrote âbuyâ, because until the price is paid in full, the user canât do anything with the NFT, except for listing it in Blurâs marketplace (ie try to sell it back and profit from the move).
As always, with great financialization comes even greater risks. Borrowing ETH to âbuyâ an NFT (BNPL) means going long on leverage (you profit if the price of the NFT rises). Borrowing an NFT and immediately sell it for ETH (Blend) means leveraging short (you profit if price falls). The result: when NFT values fluctuate in the opposite of the âexpectedâ direction, users will quickly face liquidations.
We will soon see the impact of this development on collection prices. While leverage markets can help stabilise price fluctuations, they can also create massive liquidation cascades, so Iâd expect some days of wild rides are ahead.
Announcements
Guest appearance by Evin McMullen, cofounder of Disco. Disco is your personal data backpack, making data and reputation portable across web2 apps, web3 dapps, IRL, and more. Evin is also cofounder of DAO Jones and inkDAO and an advisor to Boys Club, The Melon, and Graph Paper Ventures.
Good blockchain actors,
Suing the regulators,
Stifling detractors.
Famous Crypto Last Words:
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
âThe European Parliamentâs adoption of MiCA today is a pivotal moment for the crypto industry in the region, and the work of European policymakers should be seen as exemplary,â said Tom Duff Gordon, Vice President of International Policy at Coinbase. âThe region is recognising the potential and societal promise that emerging technology can provide. The EU is stepping up to the mark, while other notable jurisdictions are struggling to provide a solid, cohesive regulatory framework that gives clarity to a burgeoning innovative industry.â
https://decrypt.co/137339/european-parliament-approves-mica-law
Lol feel the burn
User Plastic-Resource-989 just posted a fake twitter link on r/cc about Uniswap announcing they experienced a hack.
The visual link was twitter.com, the actual link to twitter.cn.com
They messed up, as the link endpoint didnât work.
It looked like some bots were quickly responding, no one seemed to have noticed the link didnât even work.
Edit: the post has already been removed.
As I mentioned in the previous day it was 1 year in NFTs for me a few days ago and Iâm taking that opportunity to reflect on the last year (& maybe a bit more) and on a variety of topics and experiences. Iâm also going to repost them here and maybe something resonates here and there. Of course, Iâm starting it with Ethfinance!
I start my reflecting on 1 Year in NFTs from Ethfinance.
r/Ethfinance - subreddit that has influenced my Ethereum journey greatly, and thus - my NFT journey.
But how is it exactly connected?
Iâve heard more and more about Ethereum as some of my online internet friends started exploring other chains besides bitcoin. Ethereum was one of the most promising ones. Eventually I ended up hearing more and more about it and I thought it was time to start looking into it. I do not remember exactly how but I did find r/ethfinance sometime in the middle of 2020.
The discussion was amazing compared to the r/ bitcoinmarketâs daily that I had been frequenting for years. Not only people were talking about the tech, it was the majority of the talk there. Quite a contrast compared to only ânumber go upâ in the btc daily.
Fast forward to March 2022, thereâs now talks about this NFT project - EVMavericks. Most active people where whitelisted. I had not. Why? Even though Iâd been quite a frequent visitor - I was a lurker. Luckily, I made a few comments over the few years and that was enough to get on an additional list and then winning a raffle solidified my involvement.
Nowadays I still visit the Ethfinance daily, almost on a daily basis. Sometimes I get too busy with life. Itâs still a wonderful place to ask questions, hear about new developments, be alerted about important topics, see the stories of community members and learn something new everyday.
After being one of the most active members in the EVMavericks discord and being still quite a strong lurker and even turning into a slight poster on Ethfinance, I can share a few of my observations.
I personally prefer the pace of the discord as itâs more of a live chat and closer to a real time conversation. Ethfinance has a higher quality and lower noise. Yet it doesnât do one thing very well for me and Iâd bet especially for the people who are lurking - involving you in being part of the community. You see, sometimes folks like me who are new and not technical have really nothing substantial to contribute. And even though some of us are still asking some questions from time to time which I believe are still valuable contributions, it just does not complete the puzzle. And I believe each of us has something to offer and we can learn something new from each other. And this is where discord comes in and that is what it allows you to do, and I feel that EVMavericks degen chat, in particular, is prime example of bringing folks together. Itâs a glue. Still maybe for some but not others.
Now Iâm not going to go into pros and cons of each platform but one more thing I will mention is that the subreddit is a nice free resource for new folks. And I feel the vibe is especially geared for people who are, hopefully, going to make it financially as well as being the ones who are understanding and embracing many aspects of the technology and tools that we discover and build.
Next up: reflecting on EVMavericks.
1 Year in NFTs: Twitter Followers (4/21/2022-present)
I never really cared about Twitter prior to this point. I created an IRL account like 10ish years ago but never really used it. When it comes to crypto, most of my time was spent on Reddit - r/ethfinance.
Now, Iâm not sure why I created this account, but it seems to be a day after I minted my Maverick. I know thereâs usually lots of excitement during the early days (the honey moon phase), and people were eager to bond together and roar about the lion pride. Anyway, I ended up creating an account and following all the Mavs the EVMavericks account was following. One thing that was still weird to me is that so many web3 or crypto projects use Twitter, which is a full web2 platform that can and has rugged some of my friendsâ accounts before. My account has been locked multiple times for no reason until you add your phone number, etc. to unlock it. One click on their end - you are gone.
Over time, and after getting more into ENS, I started caring more. Iâve changed sides of caring and not caring so many times now that I donât remember all the details, but I do know the important parts. What Iâve come to and what I hold nowadays is that I am able to hold both of the sides of caring and not caring at the same time. I personally donât care about it at all. When Iâm in nature, when Iâm doing things outside, when Iâm engaged in the things that matter, and so on and on and on.
The nuance comes in because part of me does care. It does care for a very noble, specific set of reasons too. In the world where I do have more followers, I would be able to spread my values, educational messages, and even some funny memes to a wider range of people. All of that is nice, and yet itâs important to let go of all of that. Otherwise, it alters my behavior in a way where itâs still geared a bit more towards getting better numbers, while still keeping my true values. But then I wonder, and I like challenging myself with the question, âWhy does a number of followers impact the content?â.
âIf I am doing something good, wouldnât it matter whether one or a thousand people see that?â
Again, there are, at least, two sides to the coin that Iâm holding. And at the end of the day, Iâm still human, and it does get very demoralizing to see all the people doing scammy (all other types of things) having more followers and more impact, which I judge as a net negative.
And why am I building in the first place?
I thought having a personal blog is nice addition that is like a journal, a resume, and basically an on-chain history of your identity. It seems we are not there in crypto, so thatâs why Iâm still using Twitter, as it does matter, but also playing around more with web3 projects like mirror.xyz and paragraph.xyz. Also, building on top of ENS, even something as simple as a site - 696.eth.limo, is a way of doing that.
Honestly, thereâs still so much more to write about followers and how I have figured out some particular nuances, but, again, it doesnât really matter to me at the end of the day.
Although Iâd say I have tried to be consistent on a daily basis for almost a year, maybe missing a bit in the beginning, and have contributed content in a variety of forms, including memes, threads, questions, observations, analysis, videos, news, step-by-step guides, etc and I have gotten to 2275 followers. Thatâs also including all my NFT related communities and ENS.
Iâd like to end it on a note thatâs future-focused. What am I going to do going forward?
Obviously, I donât have enough reach, and thatâs also a good thing for me mentally, as it gives me so much more room to experiment and make mistakes.
The most important to me is to be true to my values and certain things like curiosity, decentralization, community, collaboration, communication, transparency, education, and making people smile and laugh. All of that while being authentic, having a better balance on how this piece fits within my life puzzle. Focusing on my connections with people and on the effort that Iâm putting in, and the content Iâm creating than being a slave to the algorithm.
Next up: Art, creating Art.
Hereâs a Rocket Pool update since Atlas / LEB8 went live.
The minipool (RPâs validator) count went up from shy of 14,000 to 15,329 today. Since 16eth pools can be divided into 2 leb8 pools, total count goes up, not much of a surprise here. Roughly +10% in 5 days.
More interestingly, node count went up as well from 2,291 to 2,393 which is a clear uptick that can be seen in this chart. More nodes is what we decentralization maxis should be all about (and what Iâm all about), so this is absolutely great news. According to Etherscanâs node count, there are currently 9,170 Ethereum nodes.
Rocket Pool now accounts for more than 1/4 of all Ethereum nodes. With a market share of only 2.7% of validators.
I havenât found any reliable chart updated with Atlas but from my observation of the total number of eth staked from the official website, thereâs been roughly 3,000 eth poured into RP daily since the update. Thatâs $5 million per day.
Before Atlas, the deposit pool was continuously full (meaning reth was highly in demand, never available) causing a premium on the price. Today itâs the opposite, there are many minipools waiting so the deposit pool is close to empty. In other words, many node operators are waiting for people to swap to reth. The premium is almost gone.
There are currently 21,870 reth worth $43 million waiting to be picked.
Iâm expecting some whales to swallow a lot soon, and secretly hoping for Vitalik to swap some eth for reth. Would be crazy publicity for RP. Next time he does an AMA Iâd like to ask him what he dislikes the most about Rocket Pool, Iâm very curious to know his opinion.
In other great news, Rocket Poolâs reth is now more profitable than Lidoâs steth, making it the default option to stake from Metamask.
Rocket Pool is currently ranked #11 by TVL on Ethereum with a TVL of $1.37B and it looks like it will enter the top 10 in a few days.
Iâve probably missed some key data and would love to hear more!
Disclosure: Rocket Pool enthusiast here, rpl is my second largest holding after eth and approximately 25% of my total net worth.
Hey, mate, one of the defi saver team members here.
Not sure which protocol youâre considering using there specifically - is it Aave?
If yes, then that means that a position created on a smart wallet using defi saver would not be visible or manageable in the default frontend available att app. aave. com.
Why is that? Well, interacting with all these different protocols directly through an EOA (your standard Ethereum account) is the default approach in most cases (e.g. Aave, Compound, Liquity). This is mostly for simplicity reasons and gas savings.
However, a standard Ethereum account is currently limited in terms of how many smart contract interactions can be called within a single transaction.
This is why we chose to use the smart wallet as default for holding positions of each protocol we integrate at defi saver.
Main reason? The smart wallet provides a new layer of execution that has no limitations that a standard Ethereum account does. Thatâs why we have options such as 1-tx leveraging/deleveraging, collateral and debt swaps, 1-tx moving of active positions between supported protocols, as well as a number of automation options for all protocols.
This short article in our knowledge base has a brief intro to the smart wallet: https://help.defisaver.com/en/general/what-is-the-smart-wallet
If thereâs anything else I can clarify, please do let me know, would be glad to help.
tl;dr: If you open an (e.g.) Aave position on a smart wallet using defi saver, it wonât be accessible through their frontend at aave. com. All exactly same protocol rules and rates apply in both cases, but their frontend only supports positions sitting on EOAs.
Hey folks, just popping in to say: air-gapped QR code-based signers are vastly underrated as a crypto wallet security solution. (Iâll refer to this tech as AGQR for the sake of brevity.)
I finally took the trouble to switch my wallets over to AGQR in the wake of the mysterious wave of wallet drainings that Twitter has been abuzz about.
How do AGQR signers work?
It might sound like a hassle but the whole process takes about one minute when you get used to it.
Why not just use a hardware wallet like Trezor, Ledger, Lattice, etc?
Downsides?
Summary and Conclusion
Iâm aware Iâm maybe honeymooning over it, but Iâm strongly tempted to say the AGQR signer is âthe wayâ: it has basically all the benefits of a hardware wallet and basically none of the drawbacks. Itâs portable, small, and self-contained, without notifying everyone that youâre into crypto, and if it breaks, no big deal, you can get a new one the next day.
Trying to think about it more objectively, I know some people are likely to feel that AGQR on an old phone is a bit too âDIYâ to trust their money with it. Thatâs understandable, but on the other hand, I figure a lot of us here already have a pretty DIY attitude if weâre willing to hold our own keys in the first place.
In conclusion, I think there will always be a market for dedicated hardware wallets, as a âno compromisesâ type, maximum security, industrial-grade solution. However, for most of us, I think AGQR fits the needs of the user so much better that itâs not even close. Especially if you tend to think things should be open source and self-hosted, you owe it to yourself to explore this tech.
TLDR: Iâm loving my AGQR setup and just wanted to let everyone here know about it.
Here is a proposed public good that I think we could bootstrap through this community or EVMavericks.
A curated white-list of trust-worthy smart contract addresses. Plus a browser extension that relies on it and lets you know whenever you are interacting with a smart contract that itâs a know and trustworthy one and warns you when itâs an unknown one.
In the future this whitelist could hopefully be integrated in other wallets, MetaMask, frame.sh, etcâŚ
Thoughts and criticisms welcomed!
Hello everyone! Withdrowls Public Goods Funding Update!đŚ
First off thank you to everyone who participated and celebrated with us this seminal moment in Ethereum history! We look forward to celebrating many more with you to come!đ With that said, we are happy to announce our official Buidlathon!đŞ
Are you a builder or are you LOOKING to build in web3 and just need the extra push/incentive/funding to get the ball rolling?! If so, here is your chance!đŤĄ
As a way to commemorate how far EVMavericks and our community has come, starting today and going through âTBD dateâ (to be announced soon), we will be hosting an open competition for anyone that wants to build infra/tools/public goods/dapps/new services on web3!
The prizes for the competition will be as follows:
1st place: 5 ETH
2nd place: 3 ETH
3rd place: 1.5 ETH
Random participation prize: .05 ETH
Winners will be determined by a âpanelâ of 5 judges, to include 4 individuals and the 5th judge as a âpopularâ snapshote vote amongst EVM holders.đŚ
In order to participate and be eligible to win, builders will have to sign up with their idea/proposal in the the EVMavericks discord and submit at least a working âalphaâ or prototype of their project by the due date.
Also, as a general rule all projects that are already well in progress would not be eligible for this competition as that would be an unfair advantage to start
For more details and or questions please check out the Buidlathon channel in the discord! (If you donât have an EVM just select the Buidlathon role to get in the channel!)
Thank you everybody and happy building! More details to come soon! Looking forward to seeing what projects will be created! đĽ
It feels so good to have fully minted out Withdrowls and start the public goods funding buidlathon! It makes me so happy to see community come together to support a great cause!
Some fun facts about Withdrowls: it was 4 days from idea to mint out. Marketing started the day after we decided this was something we wanted to do, so only 48 hours of marketing before mint. It also only took 24 hours to mint out! Oh, and about 95% of the tweets were automated, that was a lot of fun.
We jammed A LOT into those 4 days so please give u/etheraider a hug next time you see them, and please sign up; all ideas are welcome :)
Feel free to hijack this commentâs replies if you donât have an idea, but would like to team up with a community member!
Iâve written before about crypto and Human Coordination and why it is my favorite leg of The Rabbit Hole. A lot of the work to date on this topic is on deciding relative balances of power between key actors via token distributions, identifying all the necessary actors of a system and ensuring they are fairly compensated and cannot profit from misbehavior (incentive alignment), and creating systems to encourage voter participation such as delegation and bribe systems. There is an implicit step before all of that wherein an organization needs to agree on what it is trying to achieve and critically how it should go about achieving it. This is the value alignment process, it is a never-ending affair, and itâs a predecessor to all other actions of an organization.
Once upon a time in MakerDAO, after a black swan event wiped out many of their early users, the DAO was faced with a decision on whether to reimburse those affected. They decided not to. They then had to decide what was more important between peg stability and decentralization. They chose peg stability and created the Peg Stability Module (PSM). To this day I still disagree with both of those decisions but regardless of how I feel the DAO had to wrestle with controversial values, reach a consensus, and then act. How to enshrine values into a system varies greatly by each system but I think itâs worth reviewing some of the methods weâve seen so far, what is good and bad about them, and how we might be able to improve upon them.
Some systems are able to enshrine their values in code. For example Ethereum, when forced to tackle the scalability trilemma, chose decentralization and security over scalability. These values are encoded in the gas market and block sizes. Solana went the other path. Earlier in its history Ethereum was forced to choose between finality and ethics (look up Ethereum Classic). We chose ethics. Judging by the relative adoption of Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic this was apparently the more widely supported choice by a majority of node owners, app developers, and companies. Behind these decisions is what we commonly call Layer 0. This is one of the most fragile parts of the Ethereum ecosystem and one that we have to maintain constant vigilance on. The value alignment process for Ethereum can basically be described as a vacuum where a process should be. How does one become part of the Layer 0 set of actors? Basically you post in Ethfinance, attend events like Hodlercon, meet/influence the right people, attend core dev calls, write ERCs, etc. You go down The Rabbit Hole and get involved.
In more traditional power structures where value alignment decides the strategy of something but not necessarily its implementation it is more normal for the value alignment process to take place by delegation and hierarchical decomposition. It is infeasible to coordinate an organization the size of a nation state using an open mic system or social media upvotes. So we tackle this complexity using walled gardens and hierarchies. Within a corporation the primary organization of this hierarchy is what I refer to as the pyramid of subordination. This structure prevents bystander syndrome by assigning accountability for each task, ensures each person is qualified for the job using a social attestation system in the local vicinity of the pyramid (interviews), and generally organizes people to act towards a unified goal. It is efficient when done well. The military uses a similar structure for the same reasons. It also doubles as a more efficient value alignment system than Iâve seen in DAOs. When there is disagreement this structure provides an escalation process amongst direct reports, peers, and superiors within the pyramid of subordination. If a matter isnât satisfactorily resolved by those initially involved, it escalates up to the C-level personnel who serve as the ultimate authority for the values of the organization. By the time it reaches them, there are almost certainly multiple valid strategies that could be taken that they are deciding between. This is actually the primary value of C-level personnel; they embody the values of an organization.
So what are the problems with this design? What are we hoping to improve with web3 technologies? Well, the problem begins just above the pyramid of subordination. As weâve seen in the US in the past 50 years, using highly liquid capital as the ultimate authority source in the system has led to the pursuit of short-term profits at the detriment of all other factors. Shareholders care about their share price and dividends above all other factors and so they appoint C-level personnel and structure their compensation to reflect this desire. As a result companies destroy the environment, have little to no regard for their employees well-being, subjugate their local communities, pursue one merger and acquisition after another in order to form too-big-to-fail monopolies, and exploit every financial and political system they can to stifle competition and create power imbalances in their favor. From a game theory perspective this is the expected outcome of this design. It is Moloch in action, as our society increasingly organizes itself into these ever growing capital-hungry behemoths. You would think companies would be beholden to customers but the customer has no influence in this power structure other than to take business elsewhere. Sadly, working to stifle competition and reduce customer choice is often more effective for companies than working to improve the customer experience or provide a better product. So, the first thing to improve is to create structures for value alignment that are able to embody a wider diversity of values without sacrificing organizational efficiency.
The second thing to improve is resilience. This structure is fallible to key-man syndrome. It is optimized for efficiency not resilience. When one person has the full autonomy to do something it becomes ripe for corruption and/or enforcement pressures. The larger the set of people that need to consent to something the harder it becomes to form a conspiracy to make any decision that does not align with the DAO consensus mission.
If we can only succeed at improving these two facets of organizations, crypto would already be a world-altering, indispensable technology. But we are working on so much more than that. We are working on ways to divorce capital from influence, remove the walled garden around the value alignment system, fight any and all forms of coordination failures, and novel ways of incentive alignment that can change human behavior at scale so that our societal values more closely align with those of our dominant power structures. It is basically impossible to be against this ethically once you understand it. The most bullish thing for Ethereum is to be understood.
I have came across an interesting protocol called Sismo enabling users to manage their various digital indentities privately using zk-badges.
As hinted, it uses zero-knowledge proofs. If you are not familiar with these, this video shared multiple times in the daily was very helpful (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c). Basically, it is a mathematical tool allowing to selectively reveal a piece of data. Applying these to digital identity, you can aggregate valuable characteristics from different account (web2) or ethereum wallet without revealing their adresses.
For instance, let say you have a wallet with which you gave a lot to Gitcoin grant and another one with a high degen score. You want to aggregate theses characteristics in a third without giving your history (adresses). Sismo allows you to do this. Practically, you connect your different wallets to their apps, create signatures and mint âzk-badgesâ. A badge is a non-transferable/soulbound token (NT-ERC1155).
From their docs (https://docs.sismo.io/sismo-docs/):
Users aggregate their identity in Sismoâs Data Vault and start accumulating Data Gemsâatomic pieces of data that categorize users into groups. In turn, users can generate proofs to make claims about their data (e.g, I own a specific NFT). These proofs are verified by applicationsâeither on-chain or off-chain. The resulting privacy-preserving attestationsâstored in on-chain smart contracts or off-chain databasesâare utilized by applications for access control and reputation curation.Users aggregate their identity in Sismoâs Data Vault and start accumulating Data Gemsâatomic pieces of data that categorize users into groups. In turn, users can generate proofs to make claims about their data (e.g, I own a specific NFT). These proofs are verified by applicationsâeither on-chain or off-chain. The resulting privacy-preserving attestationsâstored in on-chain smart contracts or off-chain databasesâare utilized by applications for access control and reputation curation.
If you have participated in Gitcoin Round 15, you can mint a ZK-badge curated by their team! https://app.sismo.io/?badge=gr15-gitcoin-contributor-zk-badge
I hope to find a way in the EVM discord to experiment with creating badges for lion minter/holder. Here is the creator section of the app if you are interested https://factory.sismo.io/create-badge
Livestream Recording | POAP Checkout
Guest appearance by Gloria Kimbwala, Principal Engineer at SuperModular.xyz.
Announcements
Best roast me session,
Security commission,
Gensler obsession.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Dunno if anyoneâs mentioned this yet, but CLWP (EIP-4736) included 2,133 potentially or definitely compromised validators who were racing to set their withdrawal address before a hacker could.
Of those 2133 in the set, 2133 were able to set their address to one controlled by the rightful owner. 100% success rate. Not a single one to a hacker.
Benjamin Chodroff (and Jim McDonald, I shouldnât have omitted that) was the author and did a seriously amazing job after realizing that his own seed for his validators were compromised and, instead of giving up and leaving the space, found a way to save not just his own, but thousands of others. Seriously amazing job.
https://nitter.snopyta.org/ethStaker/status/1646629034715930624
Imagine you go to the Apples and Oranges Store because you need some oranges. But the store owner is quirky and has a rule that goes âThis store will only sell 1000 total items per day. Whether thatâs 1 apple and 999 oranges, or 900 apples and 100 oranges, or a perfect split I donât care. Once I sold my 1000th item Iâm done for the day.â
Also, this storeâs apples are very good. People drive from all over the place to buy them. So naturally since supply is low and demand is high, so the cost of apples go up and the store owner makes a killing selling them. Oranges, on the other hand, arenât as popular. On average, the store owner sells about 980 apples and 20 oranges every day.
You personally donât really care that much about the apples, you want to buy oranges. But due to the storeâs weird rule, you still have to outbid people looking to buy to buy apples. Oranges should be cheap because they are plentiful and in low demand, but every orange you buy is an apple someone else canât buy. After the store sold 999 items that day, why would he sell you an orange for $1 when someoneâs willing to buy an apple for $10? Youâll have to offer at least $10 to get the orange you want.
âThis is really dumbâ, you think to yourself. You talk to the store owner and make him come to his senses, and he agrees to change his stupid rule. Now heâll sell at most 1000 apples per day and at most 100 oranges per day. So now that the two supply/demand markets are separated, an apple can cost $10 and the orange can cost $1 and everybodyâs happy - you get cheap oranges, and the store owner gets more money (1000 x $10 + 200 x $1 gets him more money than the previous system when $10 was the cost of an item and he sold 1000)
Back in Ethereum land the apple represent execution (the gas that affects state, compute stuff in the EVM, etc.) and oranges represent data (the gas that stores stuff in the chainâs history). Rollups do their execution off-chain, so what they need most from Layer 1 is data. Today the cheapest solution is using call data at 16 gas per byte. But if everyoneâs fighting to do EVM stuff, the cost of that 16 gas/bytes goes up as well because thereâs only so much gas in each block. This really shouldnât be the case, since data is a different resource from execution.
So what EIP4844 does is separate those two resources into two distinct markets: The gas market as we know it today stays the same, and thereâs a new âdata gasâ resource with its own pricing that happens separately. Rollups will be happy because now they get to commit their batches on chain in these nifty new things called âblobsâ, and when demand for blobs is low, blobs will be cheap Ââ even if thereâs a huge NFT drop going on that brings gas to 500 gwei
On a technical level it does other cool things in preparation for full danksharding later on, which will allow a significant increase in the size of blobs so that it becomes even cheaper for rollups to commit data to blobs. But even without danksharding, just splitting the markets will help drastically lower fees on rollups, which will be nice.
Yesterday I asked about how EIP 4844 aka proto-danksharding works.
I got some really good answers so decided to sum it up, I put together a thread with an ELI5 on how danksharding works. TL;DR for those that donât want to click into twitter:
Meanwhile, in post-Shapella NFT-land..
The whole point of crypto is trustlessness and code-is-law. As a consequence, NFTs are immutable.
Well, it turns out that sometimes they are not.
Truth Labs, the org behind Goblintown profile picture NFTs, suddenly changed the jpegs of their all NFT collections to a.. middle finger with more middle fingers, with the text: âFuck royalties. Fuck supporting builders and creatives. Flipping is the heart of what makes web3 special. Honor the flipper, fuck the community. Long live the slow rug!â Check for yourselves.
This move is part of their migration to new contracts, probably to enforce royalties on-chain. As you know, the Blur vs OpenSea feud caused a race to the bottom on âoff-chainâ royalties.
Truth Labs still had access to the contracts able to change the metadata of their NFT collections, effectively giving them the power to change the jpeg that the NFT represents. This took many holders by surprise, since they thought their NFTs were immutable.. Well now they need to trust that Truth Labs will change their jpegs back.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Even if a web3 participant understands the underlying technology, and the principles of trustlessness and immutability on which crypto is founded, they still can be caught in a trap. Smart contracts are law, but sometimes this law is not what we think it is.
Any legal people care to give an opinion on what todays ruling means for the SEC?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/us/supreme-court-administrative-state.html
It means that if someone is being charged by the SEC, and that person claims that the SEC is acting unconstitutionally, that person doesnât have to wait until the SEC is done with the enforcement action to appeal in court.
Administrative groups, such as the SEC, are part of the executive branch of the government, but they have a sort of judicial power in enforcing the regulations that they were formed to enforce. So previously, you would have to wait until they were done with their investigation and enforcement action before you could appeal to a court. However, if you are arguing that the SEC doesnât have constitutional authority to enforce whatever it is theyâre trying to do to you, itâs kind of silly to have to wait for them to finish the whole investigation and enforcement action before you can object and appeal.
For the SEC, this means that if, for example, Coinbase was charged in an enforcement action by the SEC and Coinbase wanted to argue that the SEC doesnât have the power to regulate crypto under their grant of power, it could immediately appeal to a federal or state court and have this argument ruled on. This would save a ton of time and money if the court finds that the SEC doesnât have that power.
So thereâs this idea Iâve been wanting to try for a while now.
You guys know how Ethernodes is notoriously bad at showing how many actual execution nodes there are? And so we donât have any real sense of how many there might be? I even see some discussion farther down the daily today on that subject.
I think we here in EthFinance/EthStaker might be uniquely well-placed to answer that question: how many nodes are there on Ethereum? Basically, a bunch of us who run nodes (including execution clients) would go and look up our node by IP address or public key on ethernodes.org. Then weâd each just reply to the comment/thread/whatever with a simple âyesâ or ânoâ, depending on whether Ethernodes knew about our node.
With a big enough sample size, like dozens or ideally a few hundred+, weâd start to get a pretty clear picture of how many actual nodes there are out there.
Example: Ethernodes claims there are 7500 nodes on a particular day. When 100 of us check our nodes that day, only 25% show up on Ethernodes. Conclusion: There are actually 30k nodes, give or take some error bar that Iâm sure the stats majors here could figure out (i.e. not me :P )
Thoughts?
Anyone watch Bill Maher? One his guests wrote an anti-crypto book, and I just found the arguments in their interview funny. I think the interview just furthers my view that Ethereum needs to dissasociate itself from the word cryptocurrency. I would much rather see the word cryptonetwork as it conveys that currency is not a central theme. But anyways I summarized the interview because I think this is a great summary of the mainstream opinion on âcryptoâ.
These are almost verbatim the arguments thrown around. The first thing I notice is that if you replace the word cryptocurrency with Bitcoin, it makes a lot more sense. The arguments are very surface level and lack a ton of nuance because in the maintreams eyes, cryptocurrencies are all like Bitcoin. I think the old saying around here absolutely applies. The most bullish thing about Ethereum is to be understood.
Now that withdrawals are enabled with the successful upgrade of Shapella, Iâm keeping an eye out for institutions and big movers.
Already this year weâve seen Fidelity and Blackrock pouring funds into Blockchain.
NASDAQ in their Digital Assets Business is expected to start providing customer crypto custody by the end of June after receiving approval from the New York Department of Financial Services. Much like Fidelity, the platform will function similar to an exchange with liquidity and execution services.
Just last year Bank of America reported a turning signal for wealthy investors away from the stock market and into Crypto, Real Estate, and Private Equity.
â75% of young investors say itâs impossible to achieve above-average returns solely with traditional stocks and bonds.â
Combine this sentiment with the economic slowdown and credit crisis, crypto investments are in better position this year.
Also, and not the news I expected to see gain traction and excitement, but the Bank of America is reporting some interesting drivers of recent digital asset adoption from gold:
Tokenized gold passed $1 billion in value last month under the market cap pump of stablecoins PAXG and tether gold XAUT.
âTokenized gold provides exposure to physical gold, 24/7 real-time settlement, no management fees and no storage or insurance costs. The low minimum investment increases accessibility and fractionalization enables the transfer of physical gold ownership and value that was not previously possible.â
We could all do with some peace of mind and stability after all the black swans weâve experienced last year. Hereâs to hoping that these large institutions donât exert regulatory and market forces in the wrong direction and fuck it up for the rest of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3DP-40TA4&t=2380s
This is a gem of a channel. He talks about autonomous AI and how Ethereum might play an important role in the future AI economy. Really good.
This is the part where he speaks about AI economy (and Ethereum):
"Now, I will discuss the integration of these AI models into the legacy financial system and Ethereum. These models can function as a central brain and connect to other neural networks, AI systems, and handcrafted intelligence systems like Wolfram Alpha. As the AI assistant interacts with apps and handles tasks for you, there will be a need for it to manage money.
In the first iteration, AI will interact with apps to book flights, for example, and users will confirm and approve transactions. As the AI becomes more effective and trusted, users will want it to handle more tasks autonomously, including financial transactions.
There will be pressure to integrate AI into financial systems, but this may create friction in the traditional financial system. These autonomous AI entities might face difficulties meeting regulatory expectations because the legacy system is governed by regulations designed for humans. Additionally, the traditional financial system is not well-suited for global transactions between AI agents due to regional differences.
Crypto systems like Ethereum, on the other hand, are well-suited for autonomous systems. Ethereum was designed with the idea that autonomous agents might conduct much of the financial activity in the future. It is permissionless, global, transparent, and digital-native, making it an ideal platform for AI agents to manage accounts and interact with smart contracts.
Though most economic activity still occurs in the traditional financial system, friction in that system may push AI agents towards crypto systems like Ethereum. Smart contracts on Ethereum can be used to coordinate AI agents, creating a seamless environment for AI-driven financial transactions."
Patrick McHenry did a FANTASTIC job with Gensler today. I believe he really forced the issue on Ethereum as a Commodity and hope it leads to regulatory movement (but maybe we in the U.S. shouldnât hold our collective breaths just yet with our painfully slow government, sigh). Anyway, great job Rep McHenry!
But damn, also McHenry (and Iâll keep this REALLY brief): votes against Womenâs Health Protection, the Chips Act, the Infrustructure & Jobs Act, multiple bills protecting Queer rights, multiple bills protecting the right to vote, multiple bills to (can we please!) close assault weapon loopholesâŚ
*Okay, back to Ethereum. And yes Iâm flying my âMurica flag here today, so bare with us everyone around the globe :)
Iâve been thinking a lot about how Ethereum can be represented better in U.S. legislative process. Reps like McHenry & Emmer are (let me be mild here) faux âpublic servants.â They have clear records of working against the Common Good. Ethereum deserves better heroes. I donât consider myself politically savvy and work in an unrelated field but am wondering what effective avenues would be worth my time and/or support. I have donated to Coincenter in the past and probably will again, but I need to update myself on what they have been up to. Edited: Coin Center works to educate policy makers. Recent efforts to educate involved the terrible âDigital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act,â the âRESTRICT Act,â and the Treasuryâs DeFi risk assessment. I hope to find out more about specific advocacy they are doing.
Any other coalitions come to mind I need to become aware of? Any ideas perculating on effective organizing or lobbying for those of us who care about good ETH regulation? I would love to donate some time and energy to this, but not sure at this juncture what will make a difference.
P.S. Just so you know Iâm not on some Lib high horse, I canât stand listening to Senator Warren talk either *facepalm. Thanks for readingâŚ
https://bounties.gitcoin.co/coincenter
citation if desired: https://ballotpedia.org/Patrick_McHenry
apologies for all the edits...grammar is hard lol
For anyone worried, here are some wallet tips:
Hereâs a draft letter to the president/legislators/lawmakers from the perspective of a web3 developer. *One* sentence was generated via ChatGPT, the rest are my own words (my letter will be different, as I am not a dev tho I do feel like this effects my career too). Feel free to use and customize. Apologies but Iâm super tired and barely proofread it.
Dear ________________ ,
Iâm writing today because I am concerned about the lack of clear regulation in the blockchain and web3 industry. For many developers in the space, this technology is our pride and livelihood. Most of us recognize that the space has an overabundance of scams and theft. There is a clear distinction between private companies like FTX who offer a product with no transparency and a public ledger built on open source technology.
Blockchains offer a lot more than just being an immutable ledger. Web3 has the potential to transform many aspects of our society, including finance, governance, and data ownership. The United States should be a leader in innovation and adoption of impactful technologies. As someone who grew up in the nineties, it is the closest thing that reminds me of my childhood during the early days of the internet, when America chose to be a leader in household adoption of a technology that advanced communication beyond what we would have ever imagined a century ago.
Although our industry has a lot of problems, there have been some great achievements from development teams and good faith actors in the space. Last year, ethereum had a groundbreaking upgrade that reduced network energy consumption by almost a hundred percent by upgrading to proof of stake and eliminating the need for wasteful crypto mining. Hacked funds are often traced by the community with updates on activities broadcasted through social media and itâs quite common for the community to help its users get stolen funds back. There have also been millions of dollars donated in aid to Ukraine through cryptocurrency.
The web3 and blockchain space, as known as the âcryptocurrencyâ industry, have grown a lot since the inception of bitcoin. Today there are many communities in web3 that make up the collective space and if you were to navigate through them you would find there are many who are excited about this technology. Many of us have put a lot of time, passion, and hard work into the development of this tech and itâs a big part of our lives.
Some of us feel that CEOs of private companies shouldnât be the only representatives of our interests as a growing industry. We are also disappointed by the actions of SEC chairman Mr. Gensler and his hostility to American companies like Coinbase, who actually have gone above and beyond in regulatory compliance. Furthermore, the draft bill of the RESTRICT Act contains alarming implications for the privacy and speech of American citizens.
We hope that our political leaders could do some more community outreach in the space so we can properly educate our legislators about the technology. We especially urge regulatory clarity for developers, stakers, and everyday users. We understand that there shouldnât be rushed legislation to integrate blockchain and crypto assets into our existing financial infrastructure. We just want to do our jobs as software developers and home stakers, who work hard and invest our time and money into developing a revolutionary technology.
Reading many ppl here the last days that claim we are just greedy and only care about pumping our bags. We arenât against regulation, we are against bad regulation. If the SEC got its way, I predict that ETH would be a security that retail canât touch directly, only indirectly from various bank products. Private stable coins might be banned. Private wallets, or what they call them - unhosted wallets, wild wallets or dark wallets will be banned. Defi itself likely banned unless accessed from a bank that charges a fee, âfor our protectionâ.
No other country is stuck on the question, whether ETH is a security or commodity. Crypto regulation in the UK and EU is not perfect but we realize that crypto is here to stay and put out regulation, guidelines and not just 55 litigations. I was positively surprised by how many Defi actions, my Nordic tax authority has provided guidelines on this year. ETH staking (cap. gains, not ordinary income), lending, LPing etc. Meanwhile, the US IRS hasnât even spoken about ETH staking. Most people will likely class it as ordinary income because that is safer than to classify as the lower taxed capital gains.
SECâs actions are embarrassing (even Hester, Genslerâs colleague says so), the IRS is embarrassing, the political dick swinging between agencies, embarrassing. R vs D as well and things like that make me lose faith in society and the democratic process more than any crypto scammer ever did. Scammers do it for the money, above, I think is done for the same or even worse reasons.
Guest appearance by Christopher Whinfrey, Co-Founder of Hop Protocol! https://hop.exchange/
Announcements
Mister_Eth left to buy some milk đ˘
$2115
0.069
I deposited my ETH into the staking contract 871 days ago. Later, on 1 Dec 2020, Beacon Chain launched, and since then my solo staking rig has been running 24/7 with near perfect uptime. Total downtime amounts to probably less than half an hour. Iâve earned a nice amount in consensus and execution rewards. Operationally it has cost me nearly nothing, about ÂŁ100-150 in electricity over the 2 or so years, and about 12 hours of my time. It runs in a fanless case, so I donât even hear it. I sometimes forget it even exists. It contributes to the Ethereum network and is a source of passive income that has truly no intrusion in my life. And yet, I canât wait to instantaneously exit all of my validators and dump all of my ETH later tonight.
edit: thank you u/superphiz for chadding in with the gold!
Ugrade activates,
One more risk evaporates,
The future awaits.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Hello ethfam,
Iâm going to try not to drag this out. Those of you that know little bits of my life from what Iâve shared here know that I first entered the ethereum space at the beginning of covid. I was supposed to fly from Ireland to the Philippines to finally marry my long term girlfriend of 13 years when covid put a two year halt on it. For those two years I saved like a motherfucker and invested hard into eth and its ecosystem. Initially with a percentage of money that was for a wedding, then ramping up the DCAs more and more over time.
Last May I celebrated my marriage in the Philippines here with all of you. It was a long time in the making.
Three months ago, after a long and arduous (and expensive + paper heavy) process, my wife and I managed to secure a spousal visa for her to come live with me.
And that brings us to about an hour ago - after three days of literally no sleep Iâve secured a property here for us. Iâm not exaggerating when I say in this timeframe none of this would have been remotely possible without this subreddit. Ethfinance is the flame that keeps my passion burning. A massive thanks to Arbitrum for that ridiculous airdrop also.
Iâm proud to say that, thanks to this space, I will be flying out once more to the other side of the world next month for my 1 year anniversary, but this time my wife is finally coming back with me, with my surname, a secured visa and her name on a frankly beautiful and much too big property.
Thank you everyone. Itâs the next chapter for me. Now I can finally start planning for solo staking.
Keep âer lit,
https://i.ibb.co/n8XNjHX/IMG-0790.jpg (wedding photo)
ENS NameWrapper that has been in works for years is going to be activated soon (within 24ish), the vote has passed and there is a 2 day time lock.
Thereâs so much untapped potential in it so Iâm very excited. And thereâs already many cool apps that are building on top or utilizing ENS, maybe Iâll write about them later, big part of them are still in beta phases or are relatively new and small.
But the one cool thing I wanted to share that might be really useful to you now is this:
so you can create a subdomain aka child, so letâs say using mine as an example, evmaverick.696.eth
but what might not be intuitive is that you can create a subdomain of that subdomain!
and thatâs how we get - 337.evmaverick.696.eth (for context, 337 is my token ID of the lion)
and so on and on - đŚ.337.evmaverick.696.eth
Now you can just pick a domain (5 char+ for $5/y) and create subdomains for your vaults, your burner, hot and all other wallets while not paying any extra additional money since subdomains can be free, you only gotta renew your parent, which is 696.eth in my example. Of course, thereâs so much more options going to be available now cause of fuses (thatâs a big topic in itself).
Same thing I told the other sub:
Donât rely on revokes
Itâs good to check your revokes regularly using revoke.cash, but you shouldnât be relying on them.
The SushiSwap hack is one of those cases where a hardware wallet wouldnât have saved you, and revoking wouldâve been too late.
Using Minimum allowance is the Best Practice
The best practice is to approve ONLY the exact amount of tokens you needed to make a swap so that once your swap is complete, the allowance automatically goes back down to 0.
I know it sucks to make a new approvals on L1 Ethereum where gas fees are expensive. But on cheaper networks, you really have no excuse.
Fortunately, many newer tokens allow permits instead of revokes, which combines an approval and transfer into 1 transaction.
u/Diligent-Mouse3679 covers the SushiSwap exploit:
There is a bug in the Sushiswap router that caused Sifu to get 1800 weth drained (a lot of it by white hats). https://twitter.com/peckshield/status/1644907207530774530
Revoke any approvals you have with the sushiswap router now. Addresses for the router on every chain are linked in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/0xngmi/status/1644921265843589120
u/SoNotYo covers Lido validator bribery during the hack:
https://twitter.com/P2Pvalidator/status/1645079096253112322
One of the Lido validator got a 689 ETH bribe during the Sushi exploit. Curious whats going to happen next. Are they going to return it? Should they return it? Where will you as a organisation set the line between âfair MEVâ and âMEV theftâ.
Curious to see what happens next. Expecting to see this spark a new debate about MEV and everything surrounding it.
Edit:
P2P response after become aware of it.
https://nitter.snopyta.org/P2Pvalidator/status/1645162865698000898
UPD: These MEV rewards are associated with the recent Sushi exploit. Like any Lido validator, P2P did not receive or manage the rewards, as they went to the Lido rewards vault. We are talking to Lido and Sushi teams to investigate the issue and explore potential solutions.
u/Maleficent_Plankton warned about this:
Someone from r/CC got 40K Moons stolen due to the SushiSwap exploit.
Sad to see that the thing I warned people about 6 months ago finally happened.
After RCPSwap and SushiSwap first launched, I noticed that 99% of users were setting unlimited approvals and warned the community about it.
Back then, there were no front-end revoke tools for Arbitrum Nova like revoke.cash, and Metamaskâs approval UI was less transparent, so I wrote a guide on how revoke manually using the Moons contract.
I was talking with some family friends today for Easter brunch and, being polite, they asked me about some crypto topics. I ended up explaining the basics of lending in crypto which Iâm going to paraphrase here. This is probably one of those things everyone here already knows but which might be useful if you ever need to explain this to someone outside this space.
There are three ways we facilitate lending in crypto today:
Overcollateralization. You post collateral worth more than what youâre borrowing. In Tradfi this is basically the structure of every mortgage/car loan. You use the property you are buying as collateral for the mortgage itself. This works best for assets that are unlikely to sharply depreciate in value and put lenders underwater. In Defi, that property obviously doesnât hold so we add self-liquidating mechanisms to this system. If your collateral ever falls in value relative to your loan you forfeit the collateral to repay the debt automatically. We mostly use these loans for financial speculation or retaining price exposure to an asset while effectively selling some of it.
Flash Loans. We let you borrow as much money as you want on the condition that you have to repay it instantly. I find this is the most confusing one to people at face value but it makes sense to most people when explained in terms of originating mortgages. Again, mortgages are overcollateralized loans. Without flashloans there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where without the loan you canât buy the property and without the property you canât get the loan. In Tradfi they have an intermediary facilitate this by effectively granting you a short term loan. In Defi, thatâs just involving an unnecessary middleman so we dispense with it.
Leverage. You can use 1 ETH to buy 3 ETH and exaggerated effects as the price goes up and down. This is similar to overcollateralized lending except we donât actually give you the 3 ETH. Itâs held in escrow by some contract so you canât run away with it. In the example above if your collateral falls by 1/3 in value you get margin called and liquidated. This is really no different than how it works on traditional brokerages. The main difference with Defi is while things like naked shorting are illegal in Tradfi brokerages, they are impossible in Defi.
That leads us to the last form of debt most people know: uncollateralized lending based on credit. While there are some teams experimenting with this, we just canât bootstrap these systems effectively until we solve the problem of accountability. IRL it is both difficult and illegal to set up multiple identities. On blockchains it is trivial and there is no such thing as the police. If I am willing to give an anonymous stranger $10 on credit I at least need to know that if they rug me they can only do that once. That at least means I can only get rugged 7 billion times. Identity theft and fraud are already a problem in Tradfi. In Defi, the problem is so much worse that what you take for granted with a credit card today canât even get started. We may see a Tradfi equivalent to credit systems on a blockchain once a government decides to build a system to certify an identity on chain and integrate their legal system with smart contracts for enforcement but weâd really like to see a more decentralized approach.
There are numerous advantages to eventually solving this problem on the blockchain. For people with existing access to credit, a technology called zero knowledge proofs adds privacy protection so Experion doesnât repeatedly leak your personal data to identity thieves. Next, is consumer choice: the market would be free to create a much wider array of credit score services rather than the regulatory captured monopolies we have today. Last, ironically is scalability; not in transaction throughput but in customers. Right now credit services are available to a minority of people, mostly in first world countries. If this becomes solved in Defi in a decentralized way it can be scaled to all of humanity rather than the limited countries credit services exist in today. This is where a company like Visa will actively get involved eventually because it is a Trillion dollar opportunity that will let them expand their user base.
These systems wonât take root in Defi until we have a good system for proving an address belongs to someone and that they singularly claim that address for these credit systems. Once we have that weâll see a variety of credit score DAOs appear in short order. They will essentially act like competing underwriters but unlike Tradfi the performance of each will be public and every app will be free to choose whose opinion they respect and pay for.
Iâm also still curious about alternative credit systems.
OPSEC PSA for Mac users
MacStealer arrives to target macOS systems as an unsigned disk image (.DMG) file. Users are manipulated to download and execute this file onto their systems. Once achieved, a bogus password prompts users in an attempt to steal their real password. MacStealer then saves the password in the affected systemâs temporary folder (TMP).
The malware then proceeds to collect and save the following also within the TMP folder:
- Account passwords, browser cookies, and stored credit card details in Firefox, Chrome, and Brave
- Cryptocurrency wallets (Binance, Coinomi, Exodus, Keplr Wallet, Martian Wallet, MetaMask, Phantom, Tron, Trust Wallet)
- Keychain database in its encoded (base64)form
- Keychain password in text format
- Various files (.TXT, .DOC, .DOCX, .PDF, .XLS, .XLSX, .PPT, .PPTX, .JPG, .PNG, .CVS, .BMP, .MP3, .ZIP, .RAR, .PY, .DB)
- System information in text form
MacStealer also compresses everything it stole in a ZIP file and sends it to remote C&C servers for the threat actor to collect later.
u/etheraider and the EVMavs have done it again! Weâre creating another project similar to EIPandas to celebrate the Shapella hardfork! There are 3240 owls from 20 powlyments minting on Arbitrum for 0.00324 ETH, or 0.0019 ETH for the allOWList https://www.autominter.com/list/withdrowls We plan to hold a virtual mint party using oncyber so we can show off the artwork gallery style. The mint button will even be embedded into the virtual room!
Proceeds will fund the next EVMaverick public goods project. I know thereâs someone out there with an idea here that deserves funding!
We had a lot of fun using the beta of AutoMinterâs new AI Art Generator for this collection! I had so much fun making this project that Iâm raffling away 5 of my EIPandas to those who can use their referral link to get 5 friends onto the list!
And of course, thank you so much to the ethfinance community. I gravitated here when I was new to crypto because of the high level discussion. I âearnedâ my Maverick asking questions here knowing I could always get an informative response. I probably would have lost all my money to shitcoins without this subreddit, but thanks to yâall Iâm staking and having the time of my life making AI owls.
As u/LeagueGreedy mentioned we are excited to celebrate Shapellowl with you!
To commemorate weâve created âWithdrowls!â
They are intended to be fun, punny, celebratory NFTs for the community, AND as a special treat MANY members of our communities (ethfinanciers, daily dooters & EVMâs) will have their own personalized punny owl name in the metadata to be âtheir own withdrowlâ as a special little sentiment to commemorate the momentous occasion.
Bob-Rowlssi, swagtimusprowl, owlexiskef anyone?? :P u/Bob-Rossi, u/alexiskef , u/swagtimusprime
ALL funds (100% of mint & royalties) from the Withdrowls will go towards funding the NEXT public goods project after rocketschool anyone in our community wants to create!
We thought this would be a great way to incentivize people that have an idea to start building and to get people excited and involved in creating public goods/doing something new AND get funded for it!
Check out the Allowl list for additional details! Mint will be .0019 for allowlist and .00324 for public and will be on arbitrum for low fees!
Looking forward to all the Shapellowl celebrations! Will definitely be a hoot ;)
https://twitter.com/Withdrowls/status/1645807814957486082
Edit: if you donât have Twitter and want to be on the list just dm me your public eth address and Iâll add you to the allowl list!
Just stumbled upon a comment I made a few months ago in here:
âAny day could end up being the day thereâs been the most eth in existence ever.â
Happened to be posted less than 10 days from the peak on October 8.
Etherâs supply has been going down since October 8.
Checking ultrasound.money has become part of my daily routine even though no new information is really to be expected, I just find it soothing to look at, to marvel at. The Ethereum community has really created something never seen before: a system with a security thatâs economically self sufficient.
I truly regret that the mainstream understanding of inflation is âprice of things goes upâ instead of what it truly is: âvalue of fiat goes downâ. This simple switch in mental model would be incredibly useful for the masses to realize some of the biggest and inherent problems with the current system.
And at the same time, it would be incredibly useful to understand whatâs so special with eth.
Itâs been 208 days since the merge and thereâs been a net burn of more than 82,000 eth. During a bear market (or well, an eternal crab, hail). Total supply is now 120,438,242 eth, and itâs clear weâll end up below 120,000,000 sooner or later.
Since the merge deflation has been accelerating. But what will this look like during a bull market? When usage, euphoria, and greed go parabolic? When the supply is inversely proportional to the mania?
Witnessing the supply chart take a vertical dive will be absolutely glorious for sure.
Weâll soon visit the abyss.
For those who had some funds on Euler:
Redemptions are live: https://twitter.com/eulerfinance/status/1645964057239855104
This it how the Euler exploiter saga ends.
When the exploit happened a month ago, I would not have expected that weâd reach this step, all the funds I deployed there Iâve written off. The Euler saga is a unique story, full of drama and in my case a happy end.
Those who deployed via a smart contract (e.g. aztec users) need some more patience as those affected users canât claim directly.
Happy Shapella Day and stay safe out there, fellow Ethfinancers!
No stream | No POAP
crickets
$1877
0.067
Woah, did someone just exploit a vulnerability in the ERC-20 standard itself???!!! I am seeing a cascade of the largest ERC-20s like USDT and LINK getting all funds sent to 0x36c9aFAkE324bâŚ. On etherscan.
Meanwhile other ERC-20s like DAI and USDC have frozen transfers in response. Iâm impressed with their reaction times to be honest.
What sort of impact could this have on other EVM based blockchains like BNB? It seems like it will be a scramble for ethical exploiters to take funds before actual hackers do.
Anyway, no doubt April is wasting no time in showing how chaotic things can get on the 1st!
^(Sorry guys, surely Iâm allowed to live up to my username just once a year!)
Network you canât sever,
Open-source is too clever,
Will last forever.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
Beware of the new Stakereum project, itâs a legit scam.
From kanewallmann (Rocket Pool dev):
the docs have all these big words to sound smart but it makes no sense, they are legit scamming ppl with this
you go through their instructions and the last step is to send 32 ETH to an address that theyâve generated
Spread the warning:
https://twitter.com/ethStaker/status/1641322321024524289
https://nitter.snopyta.org/ethStaker/status/1641322321024524289
DeFi News - March 30, 2023
I made a bot that parses DeFi news + Security updates and posts them on reddit. I donât have enough comment karma to make separate threads, so Iâll post them as comments in the daily general threads for now :)
gm r/ethfinance, I had the chance to talk with u/jtnichol yesterday, pretty outstanding guy. He told me to intro myself here and share an idea I have.
My name is Anthony Garrettâ Iâm a college student at Gonzaga and I started Bankless Advisor in the Bankless DAO, a platform to connect financial advisors and clients, but weâre in need of a pivotâ the idea I have is an app.My vision for a BA app is to create a web3 directory for users to send trade proposals to each other. Each account is a web3 wallet for users to trade and comment on other trades. Our market fit would start with the Bankless community and college students (SPAWN).However, my long-term vision for the BA app: We allow users to import their data from other social media networks to their web3 wallet and build smart contracts that pool users data to connect ad buyers to users.
I believe that this project has the potential to do good for the world, and the way we value our data, but I need a passionate dev team to bring this thing to life. So here I am looking for any advice, any groups that you think align with this vision, or anyone who is looking to help. (or if this idea sounds psychotic, Iâm open to anything).
Iâm just a young self taught front end dev (that getâs a lot of help from chat-gpt), but I have experience building trade proposal tech for financial advisors at Defi Steward. Also, I have written further about this decentralized data model in the BA substack (not an advertisement, but here is a link).
If you have read this far and have ANY comments or suggestions as a start this journey I am all ears.
- Thanks, AG
Meanwhile, in the NFT-verse..
Found this interesting development: a real estate agency sold off 20% of a house being rented in Texas, using NTFs as ownership shares.
The property was valued at $235k, NFTs represented $100 of ownership (minimum buy was 5 NFTs, would have been easier to just make $500 NFTs..). In total, $45,600 was raised by the sale to 38 investors, who will then get their fractional part of the rent.
Estimating $1500 rent per month (not in TX so I have no idea of what prices look like over there), that would mean each $100 NFT share accrues $0.65 per month, so a median of $7.8 to each of the 38 investors.
Given these small numbers, the company decided to run this experiment on Solana, citing gas fees in ETH as a deterrent, and bridging difficulties in L2s like Polygon. Letâs hope for these investors that when rent is due, the Solana network is still up :)
âNext week, Iâll be sending a bill to congress to eliminate all taxes (income, property, capital gains and import tariffs) on technology innovations, such as software programming, coding, apps and AI development; as well as computing and communications hardware manufacturing.â - Nayib Bukele
Bill sent: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1641889140273827848
Tax free staking?
(Would like an English version if available!)
People were discussing u/Set1Lessâs post from yesterday in r/CC about the Arbitrum DAO drama but we canât directly link to r/CC because the mods there ban you for it. Surprisingly nobody copied a transcript so itâs probably gone a bit under the radar in this sub. So here I am, shamelessly transcribing u/Set1Lessâs post.
So Arbitrum distributed tokens last week and as per their tokenomics, it seemed that the team and VC allocation is locked for a year.
Well, they just made a proposal to grant themselves another 750 Million ARB tokens, worth almost $1 Billion from the DAO. They claim its for an âAdministrative Budget Walletâ. In reality, it looks like a blatant cash grab. Its the first governance proposal and they arenât even trying to be subtle about siphoning funds out.
Administrative Budget Wallet proposal
Under the disguise of operational and administrative efficiency, they are seeking to transfer 750 million tokens from the DAO to their own pockets, from which they will make âspecial grantsâ and what nots.
In crypto, these things almost entirely mean cashing out for real world riches. We have seen thousands of examples of teams cashing out treasury funds. In Arbitrumâs case, since the team and VC token allocations are locked, they are creating this new channel of funding which they can splurge on while their actual allocations remain locked.
Some groups have already raised alarm against this blatant cash grab.
Blockworks Research is voting against this.
These 750M tokens were supposed to be part of the treasury but now seemingly lay under the centralized control of 3 individuals.
I hate to say it, but these kind of shady activities actually make people like Gensler right - by using shady structures from Cayman Islands, under the disguise of âDAOâ, they are staging a standard insider dumping scam where the team dumps token without any transparency while pretending their original allocations are locked.
Update: Apparently it seems that even before this vote has passed, Arbitrum team has already moved 40m ARB tokens to a new wallet, and then started distributing them to child wallets, and it appears from the transactions that millions have been already sent to Binance .
Transactions: https://arbiscan.io/token/0x912ce59144191c1204e64559fe8253a0e49e6548?a=0xb3f923eabaf178fc1bd8e13902fc5c61d3ddef5b
These tokens were supposed to be âlockedâ but it appears they are not locked, but rather being sent to Binance (presumably to dump).
This is looking like a rug pull of sorts. As we see very often in crypto, plain old fashioned greed and fraud kills everything.
Due to the drama, most delegates are now voting against the proposal. You can follow the vote results here: https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0x3be7368a662d1cf12fa4da768d626edbc013be0dc7b994fef2e24d9a54e4033a
I guess a smidge late considering the threads yesterday and today, but obviously I want to post on it since Iâm an ARB delegate for a decent chunk of people here.
First, I want to speak to AIP-1 as it stands on itâs own as I think itâs important for those delegating to get a feel for what I stand for. So for a second, letâs ignore the now known issue at hand and presume the Arbitrum Foundation had not moved tokens yet / or I had voted before this was know. Maybe a pointless excercise at this point, but I find it important.
I would have still voted âagainstâ in this case, with request for the AIP to be broken into smaller pieces.
I agree strongly with the first set of a DAOâs AIPs being about setting ground rules for the DAO moving forward, especially with one as large as this. Not having a formal process in place can lead to disaster (ominous!), so this is important. However, Iâm against trying to lump in too much at once. The obvious one is the 750M ARB to the Foundation Admin Budget, however frankly things like squeezing in a very loosely defined âSpecial Grantsâ process arenât a great idea either. Those are things that need fleshed out in their own debates / AIPs. It feels like those are things the foundation would assume would be controversial, but hoped to squeeze through due to the need for the overall framework taking priority. This AIP should have been broken into about 3 or 4 separate things.
Now, with that said and as it stands now, Iâm obviously still continuing with my âAgainstâ vote. The issue I had before has only been exacerbated by moving funds before the vote. In reading comments on this daily thread and it seems that the community is largely asking for an âAgainstâ vote as well, so I have an obligation to honor that within my duties as a delegate. Although honestely it does feel moot at this point given recent events⌠Others have surely said it better, but the fundamental issue is we canât accept funds being moved without DAO approval or else what is the point of this process? It should be interesting to see what happens now that we have a scenario where funds have been moved without approval from the DAO. Something I doubt will be resolved cleanly, as even before this was found out I was seeing forum pushback on the amount. I question if it will ever pass even upon a presumed rework / revote.
A final note, those who are delegating to me I donât blame you if this has soured the process⌠this has been sort of a smack in the face to me as well.
Repost Note: Ah crap, reposting below as I forgot about the auto-banning of links⌠I compiled the links on caches - https://caches.xyz/forums/discussion/r-ethfinance-arbitrum-delegate-thread
There was a fascinating MEV âexploitâ this morning to the tune of about $20mil dollars as a result in flaw in how mev-boost relays communicate with validators. There is some discussion below in the daily, and here is a good summary: https://twitter.com/samczsun/status/1642848556590723075
The relay fix to prevent this happening again is here (https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost-relay/pull/330). This does has some significant side effects, the biggest of which is that ~10 sets of relay beacon nodes are now responsible for propagating all new blocks. Our ([u/austonst(https://reddit.com/u/austonst)) relay (https://aestus.live) was taken offline for builders as soon as we became aware of the threat and will update before we come online again. Never a dull day in ethereum.
Itâs been patched, just waiting for a release to be cut.
https://twitter.com/metachris/status/1642862456556130306
From reading this, the issue has been mitigated and was caused by a bad relay that was gamed. From my undestanding -
Before:
After:
Step 4 and step 3 are reversed. And Relay does not send the block if it cannot publish it first.
Edit: fixed slashing comment, slashed later.
Paul Brody has single handedly given me faith in Ethereum as a serious technology again. Iâve been out of the game for about a year but just listened to his episode on bankless and Iâm stupid bullish again. Fuck your monkey pictures and yield farming, enterprise and supply chain management will be huge. Tokenize everything
Greetings, fellow Ethereans!
Weâre excited to announce the upcoming Ethereum âShapellaâ upgrade, Shanghai on the execution layer and Capella on the consensus layer!
This significant milestone introduces withdrawals for staked ETH as well as other upgrades. More info: (https://blog.ethereum.org/2023/03/28/shapella-mainnet-announcement)
To celebrate the upgrade, EthStaker is hosting a livestream event that will bring our amazing community together. And as a special treat, weâre inviting all of you to join us in creating a massive collaborative art piece during the event on a special POAP.art canvas! đ¨
Info:
Who? You! And your whole community! (tell your friends!)
What? Shanghai/Capella âShapellaâ Upgrade livestream and POAP.art party.
When? April 12th, paint party starts at 9:30 PM UTC, Ethstaker livestream starts at 10 (30 minutes later)
Where? https://app.poap.art/ and. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nszB0ZZQrys
How? Anyone can watch the livestream, To join the paint party: hold an eligible entry POAP (check the poap.art page to see if you hold one), or claim the event POAP. [https://checkout.poap.xyz/d39e3416-a26f-41aa-bbca-2ee87781ffea/]
Why? Great fun and exposure for your community!
Spread the word, invite your friends, and letâs make this the most memorable Ethereum upgrade celebration ever! See you at the livestream!
How do you think this would resonate to someone outside of our space?
The internet and information age fundamentally changed how humans interact. Before the internet, blogs were called newspapers, politics & entertainment came through cable TV, and social media was the local bar or a town hall.
Today, there is a quieter, second revolution of the information age taking place. Once again, we are reimagining how humans interact. Just as with the rise of the computers and the internet this new frontier is ripe with opportunity.
The ideas that have captured the minds of these participants may sound as unlikely to you as the internet systems we take for granted today would have in 1990. Eventually this revolution is likely to affect everything money can touch just as the internet did for information. These tools will democratize access to opportunities previously withheld from you and control over these systems will flow to a new generation of tech enthusiasts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Billionaires are already being born of this.
Keep reading and I will introduce you to the new digital scarcity and human coordination tools powering this revolution. I will carve out a landscape of opportunity for you to explore further and help keep you safe while doing so.
Money shapes the world. We are programming our values into our money. By doing so we are reshaping the world.
A post-mortem has been published about the mev-boost-relay incident a few days ago. The attack has been covered here before. But the post-mortem has more details, particularly about the different forms the attack can take, and the mitigations applied.
In general relays are now addressing a whole category of attacks that had been previously overlooked, in which the proposer is able to get access to the transactions in a block to be proposed before theyâre supposed to. Generally this results in the proposer getting slashed but the MEV can more than make up for it. Attacks include:
I assume that now that the post-mortem is out, the people more involved in the fixes (Flashbots, ultra sound, EF) are fairly confident that the main attack vectors are decently well patched up. So hopefully things will start to settle down a bit: itâs been a busy couple of days at Aestus.
Finally, I want to emphasize a few parts of the post-mortem:
It is critical that Ethereum has an MEV marketplace that is democratic and efficient. Vulnerabilities like those detailed in this post undermine the integrity of the MEV marketplace and the experience of its users. We call on the security, research, and open source communities to join us in hardening mev-boost and future enshrined PBS designs.
and
First, weâd like to note mev-boost and the mev-boost-relay both have bug bounty programs. A potentially expanded bug bounty program is being coordinated.
Second, we encourage searchers to think carefully about how much MEV their strategies expose, willingly or inadvertently, given the extremely adversarial nature of the MEV market and to take actions to mitigate potential attacks. In light of recent events, we ask searchers to reevaluate all risks in the marketplace: code risks, networking risks, reorg risks, smart contract risks, etc. and manage their risks appropriately.
Third, we call on the research and security community to carefully study vulnerabilities like these in the context of enshrined PBS, where variants may be applicable.
Finally, this is a call for your contributions, as a community, to ensure a healthy and robust PBS market today and into the future
Please volunteer if you are a validator or a beacon node operator
There have been some legitimate stakers whose keys have been compromised. CLWP has helped verify their legitimacy and came up with a solution to set withdrawal address and front run the hackers. We need your help. Hackers might be trying to set their own withdrawal address for the stolen validators and you can help prevent theft during the upcoming Shapella launch. By volunteering with CLWP, you can help in a coordinated broadcasting of withdrawal address changes, and ensure that the impacted stakers funds are not stolen. For details on becoming a CLWP volunteer, please watch this video -
Itâs really not that complicated. It just takes a few minutes of your time and is needed right now, before the Shapella launch to help the impacted stakers! You can also get one on one assistance on their Discord if needed - https://discord.gg/pwuPA6K4zg
Edit - this works for Prysm, Lighthouse and Lodestar. Teku and Nimbus does not support this
No stream | No POAP
VPN to jail,
Regulation set to fail,
Blockchain jobs to sail.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
Coinbase new lobbying org using snapshot for individuals to sign on to an open letter to congress: https://snapshot.org/#/crypto435.eth/proposal/0xf9628ebee2878f5667aa018537eda2266c085d58772bd6ee562899189657c07e
Edit: more info here
Hey all. Iâm giving a presentation on blockchain, Wordpress, and community tomorrow at WordCamp Phoenix. Live stream link on the homepage: https://phoenix.wordcamp.org/2023/
EVMs, r/ethfinance, hodlercon, caches.xyz will all be talked about! Wish me luck!
Edit: link to my topic https://phoenix.wordcamp.org/2023/session/blockchains-and-wordpress-leveraging-decentralization-for-a-more-user-first-community-driven-and-open-web/
I imagine a lot of people here are interested in keeping up with staking on Ethereum but donât have a ton of time to invest.. I think we have a good system that will help you stay informed about staking in about one minute a day: Weâre creating one minute clips from our content and posting them as YouTube shorts and on our Twitter. Iâd suggest turning on notifications for the EthStaker Twitter and checking them out when itâs convenient for you to click.
Right now the clips are covering the goerli Shapella fork, tomorrow theyâll include the Lodestar call thatâs happening today, and around April 1 theyâll begin preparing everyone for the mainnet Shapella upgrade maybe with a highlight of previous major upgrade calls.
I sincerely believe these short-form clips will take EthStakerâs education reach to the next level and I hope you find value in them.
Hereâs another one: Barney Frank Was Right About Signature Bank. Written by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal
Free-market capitalism canât work if you are afraid of the government seizing your business in the middle of the night because a secret cabal of politicians didnât like your law abiding business. And it looks like Wall Street is slowly waking up to this unprecedented authoritarian shift by the Biden administration.
Today it was a bank serving crypto. Tomorrow it is a bank which has labour unions as itâs customer base, or a bank which provides services to medical companies that include abortion services, or a company which was not ESG friendly enough, or a company which spoke too loudly and too brashly about the President. Seize em in the middle of the night and fire the leadership board and auction off the assets. Hopefully civic society makes enough noise about this and itâs not too late to close the Pandoraâs box that Bidenâs staff opened.
Ive posted a bit about exploiting Large Language Models (such as GPT) before, but Im back with more. Even if you have no interest in this, I believe its important to have an understanding of how the data you input in these kinds of systems can later be used against you.
Definitely start by reading https://blog.forcesunseen.com/jailbreaking-llm-chatgpt-sandboxes-using-linguistic-hacks. Then proceed to https://doublespeak.chat/ to apply these concepts.
As of my last post, there were 9 challenges. Forces Unseen more recently released this reflective post https://blog.forcesunseen.com/llm-sandboxing-early-lessons-learned along with 8 new challenges available at https://doublespeak.chat.
For a demonstration of how language-based exploitation may be combined with traditional computer exploitation, https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/injectgpt-most-polite-exploit-ever/ is ridiculously hilarious.
https://protectai.com/blog/hacking-ai-system-takeover-exploit-in-mlflow reveals a local file inclusion(LFI) which can lead to complete takeover of systems running MLFlow. This has been patched.
Trail of Bits has long been a leader in infosec research and auditing. https://blog.trailofbits.com/2023/03/14/ai-security-safety-audit-assurance-heidy-khlaaf-odd/ âWe Need a New Way to Measure AI Securityâ is an interesting read.
https://blog.trailofbits.com/2023/03/22/codex-and-gpt4-cant-beat-humans-on-smart-contract-audits/ âCodex (and GPT-4) canât beat humans on smart contract auditsâ offers a much deeper dive into this subject.
And in case this has post not been related enough to Ethereum, by chance I just found this article https://blog.trailofbits.com/2023/02/27/reusable-properties-ethereum-contracts-echidna/ âReusable Properties for Ethereum Contractsâ.
EDIT: Just noticed that doublespeak.chat limits the # of queries you can make before having to purchase more. If anyone defeats the Count of Monte Cristo, Id love a second hint haha
Well, I took a good hard look at everything I had put money into in this space over the past 3 years. When I boiled it all down almost all of it seems to fall into the category of a project run by naive people, run by scammers, or artsy crap that I enjoy but should never have spent so much money on.
Some of defi protocols I tinkered with make me feel so stupid now.
Hereâs one. Tokemak. To this day I still donât quite understand it all. I popped into their Discord and the team is spending over a half million dollars a month on basically nothing. $35k+ in one month on âMarketing and Communityâ. At what point do you just outright call projects like this total grifts?
Itâs not that itâs the only one either. Itâs a landscape of just gross misbehaviour, scams, and projects run by people who have NO IDEA what they are doing.
I am SO glad that I only played around in the Defi and NFT ecosystem with total fun money, and left my real stack staked away. I clearly had no business sticking my nose in any of that stuff.
There are a couple decent projects out there, but I feel pretty discouraged about the entire space today. Maybe having my eth unlocked soon is a good thing :(
Future mainstream adoption alert:
Likely for the first time ever, an (unofficial) POAP was created for a WordCamp this last weekend at WordCamp Phoenix 2023.
If unfamiliar, WordCamps are WordPressâ event series that any group of volunteers can create anywhere in the world and get support from the non-profit WordPress Foundation. WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet. đ
I was the only blockchain-focused speaker (talk description) and it was very well received, including by individuals higher up the food-chain and from Wordpress.com itself. The experience has helped clarify for me what lacks and can be done in this particular space, and how I can help. Much more to come from me on this soon.
P.S. the POAP wasnât finalized until the day after my talk, so donât be misled by my finalizing comments about it.
Wow. An r/Technology post where someone not jumping on the crypto hate bandwagon got upvoted into the thousands of upvotes! The post was about Nvidia claiming crypto has no use case. They of course say this now that Ethereum has moved to proof of stake and thatâs exactly what the user said. Naturally, beneath this someone questioned what that meant. Then the top response there was a spot on comment. As soon as I read it I thought to myself âthatâs gotta be an ethfinancier.â And what do you know, I look up to see u/Atyzze a name I recognised.
Every last one of you who are still spreading the good word in other subs get every last drop of my appreciation. Itâs tough work out thereâŚ
Weâve had a little bit of discussion here regarding the RESTRICT Act, which is the legislation drafted with the pretty explicit intent of banning TikTok if necessary. Coincenter just put up a great post about how itâs broad language is problematic. The rub:
we are very concerned that an overbroad interpretation of those powers could be exploited in order to ban Americans from using entire classes of technologies, even when no foreign adversary has an actual proprietary interest in the technology as a whole
A big problem they highlight is that while thereâs already similar legislation that allows the government to block foreign transactions that are against the national interest (RESTRICT grants the powers to the Secretary of Commerce much like the IEEPA grants powers to OFAC), this law as far fewer oversite and review protections, which is particularly problematic for legislation that provides such broad authority:
A broad and discretionary power to ban and disrupt all manner of information technologies should not be wielded without appropriate oversight and opportunity for review. The RESTRICT Act not only fails to ensure these rule of law protections, in many cases it attempts to subvert them.
This problem perhaps clearest when one observes that the IEEPA had amendments (the Berman Amendments) added that act as statutory protections for free speech, but RESTRICT has no such protections/limitations:
Courts have found that the Berman Amendments, in effect, save the statute from potential unconstitutional applications. When plaintiffs challenge a sanctions designation that impacts speech, they can argue that OFAC exceeded its statutory power by contravening the Berman Amendments, rather than making the somewhat more difficult but also more consequential argument that IEEPA, the statute itself, contravenes the Constitution.
In contrast, the RESTRICT Act has no such statutory limitation. Indeed it is deliberately targeted at restraining transactions related to information and information technologies.
A lot of other good stuff in there about how it could impact Crypto directly as well (e.g. that the Secretary could âargue that the entire class of all Bitcoin transactions, for example, is a class of transactions in which U.S. foreign adversaries have an interestâ and should be banned), but all that is to say: call your representatives and tell them they should not support this bill.
The Blockswap folks have released their Proof of Neutrality relay on Goerli and provided some documentation. Iâve been following their project for a while, the ideas are interesting. If it works, itâs actually quite a large step forward in terms of PBS design. They claim relays cannot see the contents of blocks, thereâs a MEV smoothing pool built in, and (like the optimistic submissions being deployed by the ultra sound relay and elsewhere) relays donât have to perform validation before sending a block on. Builders instead post collateral to be used in case they try anything funny.
But while the ultra sound relayâs system has the relay operator holding the collateral themselves, the PoN system is integrated into smart contracts with third party reporters acting as oracles to detect violations and penalize offending actors accordingly. All in all itâs potentially (remains to be seen) an improvement over the current system
I donât find their documentation to be very complete (or even accurate?), and their recently-published GitHub repos contains a fork of mev-boost-relay without attribution to Flashbots or a proper commit history. And the actual meat of the system, centered around Restrictive Partially Blind Signatures, is closed source and undocumented so far. Itâs also concerning that their proposer guide has you input your keystore.json and enter your password (?!). Theyâve confirmed to me that itâs only used locally (not uploaded) to prove that you control the validators youâre registering, but this is not the way to do it.
Itâs something to keep an eye on if youâre following the cutting edge of MEV and block production stuff, or if you have goerli validators and want something to test. Otherwise maybe hold out for more info.
Side note: MEV-Boost Community Call 2 tomorrow at 16:00 UTC. Going to be plenty of boring technical stuff about shapella readiness and optimistic relay rollouts.
Guest appearance by Anthony Bertolino, Head of Growth at POAP, to discuss the release of POAP Drops! https://drops.poap.xyz/
Announcements
crickets
$1814
0.064
I urge anyone who hasnât done so to read through the chapter on digital assets in the Economic Report of the President. Itâs gives a full picture of the deviousness and flippancy of the Biden administration towards crypto. Take this gem on pg 238 for example
crypto assets to date do not appear to offer any investments with any fundamental value, nor do they act as an effective alternative to fiat money, improve financial inclusion or make payments more efficient; instead their innovation has been mostly about creating artificial scarcity in order to support crypto assetsâ prices - and many of them have no fundamental value
Complete horseshit. They do act as a non-inflationary alternative to debasement of fiat money, today. They do act as a self-custodial alternative to money which relies on trusting banks which are literally teetering, today.
They do improve financial inclusion. A kid in rural India or Mexico or Romania can take part in the Ethereum defi ecosystem with just an internet connection, today. Trading securities and treasuries and holding American dollars is a privilege to a tiny fraction of the world, and itâs sad to see the Biden ainistration not see this.
They do make payments more efficient. This is increasingly clear for internet native payments. Buying and selling digital native art and culture, paying members of a DAO, transferring funds to colleagues in the same team but all over the world, making small payments in countries like Nigeria and Lebanon with collapsing local currencies - various crypto solutions do make payments efficient in these instances, today.
And last and most importantly of all, is that even if crypto had no usecase (which isnât true as I pointed out above), even if, that value judgement is still not the business of the federal government. Hereâs a great take by Chervinsky
If youâre tired of this government lying, gaslighting and overreach, a good place to start is to sign up for the crypto advocacy program by Coinbase: https://actnow.io/z31xN5P
Do Kwon arrested,
Arbitrum still congested,
Rewards devested.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
BREAKING NEWS!
EIP-4804 is now an ERC! So like under ERC-4804, internet users have the option to type âweb3://â vs âhttp://â in their browsers to bring up DApps such as Uniswap or onchain NFTs directly! OMMFG Bros! We can now directly run a query to the EVM!
web3://jbmaclemore.eth/
News:
dang. First time Iâve ever fallen for something stupid. I went to check out Arbitrum eligibility and clicked the first link under the announcement. The link did look like a scam to me but I had just read a friend comment that the legit airdrop announcement / video âlooks like a scamâ, so my brain had its defenses down. Only connected and I think it just took whatever already had approvals? Which was all my DAI. feelsbadman.jpg - 5400 DAI is no small sum. It unfortunately looks like they got a few people before the tweet was hidden.
My brain finally went ânopeâ when it asked to approve RPL, but everything before that was just a signature to connect (I think?), not a transaction or approval.
Things I could have done better (that I usually would do!):
Expensive lesson learned! Iâm going to lay down and watch a movie or something, Iâm super bummed that Iâm a dummy.
Another thing learned in this (thanks to /u/Ribilla_ ) - DAI is a special kind of ERC20 that allows transfers that require only a signature (permit
, which is a signature-based approval function) - it doesnât look like your typical approval or transaction. So even signatures when connecting to sites should be treated as potentially dangerous and giving away your assets.
See here: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/11slqjw/daily_general_discussion_march_16_2023/jch9a3s/
I can give a short update regarding the Euler exploiter situation. Itâs still a developing story ⌠if you missed episode 1 and 2, you find them here: link / link
S02E03 - The merciful hacker (cont.)
After the exploiter sent 100 ETH to one affected user, DLNews identified this lucky person. DLnews is actually quite good - I didnât know Defillama has itâs own newspaper! After Swap.defillama.com/ itâs another killer product of the Llama universe âŚ
The interesting part of this episode is: The 100 ETH are actually worth more than what the user lost 78 wstETH (or 86 ETH). Essentially, the user would have profited from the âdealâ. Being now officially doxxed he sent back 12 ETH to the official Euler depositor address. Is this correct? Who knows, weâll see if Euler will push for the full amount to be returned. Itâs a subplot which runs through the entire season. âŚ
For more information on this incident, I refer directly to DLnews:
S02E02 - The maniac hacker
Every morning the hacker gets up, heâs doing something with his freshly earnt money. If you own $200M you can have some fun with it, right?
So, Today morning, he decided to give 100 ETH to the allegedly North Korean and OFAC sanctioned Ronin Exploiter Address, probably Lazarus controlled. Here is the tx: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x202a67d3a1d52e4dd5e1eebe49da511164b6e4a1ebe717dcf4674dd83a2bd457
Is he trying to fool us? Some kind of weird joke of 21 year old hacker? Or is it some kind of attribution to them? What will come next? Sending some to SBF or Alamada?
Or is he just bored and want his warrant level raised like in GTA?
Before he sent the 100 ETH to KimJongUn, he moved 1k ETH between his wallets but itâs sitting there idle. At the moment, in total only 1.5k ETH has been sent to Tornando, the rest still in ETH (85k) or DAI (35 M).
S02E03 - Tornado Cash Activity
I did some tracking of the wallets which have used Tornado Cash recently. The activity has fallen quite a bit after it was hit with OFAC sanction rule. So itâs kind of easy to track the activity even visually and manually. Here is the result:
Iâm a bit surprised that 125ETH (and a batch of 100 ETH) went pretty straight from Tornado into Binance. The other larger chunks were moved into railgun and multiBTC, only some smaller amounts ran over âprivacy orientedâ exchanges.
It seems that the merciful-maniac hacker has not cashed their ETH out yet.
Okay Okay â Heres the official Post-Mortem thread for the Euler hack: https://twitter.com/TraversaJulian/status/1636782111616122881
I reposted an earlier draft of it yesterday but I think the conversation here should really be around how safe people felt Euler was.
It was generally considered âas safeâ as Compound, Aave, Maker, etc., and having a loss of ~$200m kind of breaks many previous assumptions about safetyâŚ
So my only conclusion is that we need to move towards more resilient mechanisms, mechanisms that cost significantly more to execute but are necessary to move forward effectively.
It really goes on, but these can only be effectively done if we all move towards L2âs.
With the arb airdrop, now is the time to push for L2 adoption and the security that we really need to move DeFi forward.
At the encouragement of u/TheCryptosAndBloods yesterday, I drafted a letter to my US representative, who happens to be among the 100+ member Congressional Progressive Caucus. I took the perspective that crypto is well aligned with progressive principles so they should engage. Including here for crowdsourcing feedback to improve it and/or for others to cut and paste from it especially if you too have a CPC representative:
=======================
Dear Representative xxx:
[removed doxxable intro]
I am writing to you today to encourage you and CPC to engage actively in policymaking around digital assets (aka, crypto).
As one of the 20% of Americans who own digital assets, I have used much of my recent time to teach myself about digital assets and the broader domain of blockchain technology. This is a highly technical field, requiring me to learn about such areas as cryptography, finance, decentralized networks, computing, and others. This knowledge has yielded practical benefits in that I have learned how to join thousands of others to stake ether on the Ethereum blockchain which now provides me with a steady income.
This knowledge has also allowed me to cut through the hype, misinformation, and disinformation surrounding cryptocurrency in the popular discourse to conclude that in fact, the crypto ecosystem of digital assets, smart contracts, and public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has value and will disrupt economic and business systems around the world. For instance:
⢠Decentralized financial protocols allow everyday people to instantly make payments around the world and make loans and other financial transactions without commercial middlemen
⢠Immutable and transparent records on the public blockchain can protect intellectual property and assure fair and transparent management of royalties
⢠Public blockchains can serve as a permanent store of critical personal events including birth, death, graduation, etc.
⢠Assignment of unique non-fungible tokens can help manage ownership and transfer of collectibles, valuables, artwork, etc.
⢠Blockchain has potential business uses such as on-line gaming, supply chain management or carbon credit system.
⢠The crypto ecosystem can transform the internet business model from allowing dominant internet platforms (eg, Facebook, Google, Apple) to own and profit from personal information to a âweb3â model where the user controls their own data on the blockchain.
I have also been struck by the fact that there is significant alignment between the principles underlying cryptocurrency and the progressive agenda. The essence of the crypto ecosystem is that data and open-source computer code distributed and synchronized around the world can replace reliance on institutional middlemen (eg, banks, internet platforms) with a decentralized transparent system available to all whose trust comes from the decentralized crypto ecosystem in which users can directly take custody of their own assets and personal data. These features can directly support the progressive agenda and its commitment to sweeping, transformative change:
⢠Income inequality can be reduced by helping underserved populationsâwho under legacy systems often cannot get a loan, buy a house, or start a businessâto build wealth and carry out financial transactions without needed to rely on gatekeeping banks that may have institutional biases that disadvantage them.
⢠Facilitating crypto use can help advance racial justice and equity. A 2019 FDIC survey found that 14% of African American households and 12% of Hispanic American households were unbanked compared to only 2.5% of white households. A recent Harris Poll found that 30% of Black Americans and 27% of Hispanic Americans owned crypto compared to 17% of white Americans.
⢠Replacing banks with self-custody and a fully transparent accounting on a public blockchain will reimagine the role of institutions that exacerbate injustice and inequality.
Congress must and will create a policy framework for digital assets in the US; it will be important to help shape this policy to promote progressive principles. Now is the time to act. Congress will likely see a number of bills introduced this session on such issues as rights to self-custody, defining digital asset taxonomy, and clarifying regulatory oversight. Discussion on such legislation has already begun in the new Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee which has recently expanded its scope to include cryptocurrency. This Subcommittee includes two CPC membersârepresentatives Torres of NY and Sherman of CA. The CPC can utilize its subcommittee membership and other opportunities to actively engage in shaping this legislation to reflect progressive priorities.
Moreover, engaging on this issue provides a great opportunity for bipartisanship. The need for regulation has bipartisan agreement. A number of Republican members have been actively supportive of addressing policy in this area (eg, representative Emmer of MN, Davidson of OH, and others). It would be remarkable, yet natural, to join forces with the other party on this issue to demonstrate its importance to the American people.
In addition to legislation, progressive congressional oversight is needed. I have been dismayed at the administrationâs actions that, in the context of overall banking system failures and under the guise of consumer protection, are inhibiting the development of a regulatory environment that would allow the digital asset sector to prosper. There are those who believe that the administration is responding to entrenched interests that are threatened by the transformative change that crypto may catalyze, taking advantage of the current banking crises to squash crypto, such as by discouraging banks from holding crypto or servicing crypto clients.
I hope you and the CPC will take on this important issue to both support the progressive agenda as well as keep Americaâs leadership in this new sector. Blockchain and crypto are borderless by nature. If the US cannot provide a fertile environment for innovation, the developers will go elsewhere and will not be serving the country or its people.
Thank you very much.
================
Revised/finished post from the other day.
DID (Decentralized ID) systems are a hot topic right now. They are needed for everything from free to play games, social media networks, and airdrops to governance systems like OPs Citizens House. There is (rightly so) a lot of buzz and various takes on how to approach this topic. I think this is one of the existential risks of Defi and Iâve written about that before (that sure aged well). Iâm personally in favor of the Gitcoin Passport framework that enables each user to define their own calculation for Sybil Resistance by identifying their stamps and then having an attestation system like I proposed awhile ago compress long form off-chain calculations into simple on-chain maps. The focus of these systems ends at being a proof of humanity per address. They are specifically attempting to solve Sybil-resistance.
However, I think there is the potential to layer reputation systems like credit scores on top of Sybil-resistance and I think the potential of this is largely unexplored. For the sake of this discussion Iâll limit reputation to being a purely quantitative, monetary history of honesty rather than history of competence, impact, or ideology. In that context reputation is synonymous with trust. If we want to keep this purely quantitative, what can we objectively measure about something (e.g. code, people, institutions, etc) that makes people trust it? Here are what I think are the three primary pillars of trust:
Social Attestation. When someone signs off on a code review, they are making an attestation. Systems like BrightId and Proof of Humanity are entirely social attestations. These systems are inherently subjective and usually gameable so are unreliable on their own but much of the world is entirely built upon attestation layers (your government ID for example).
Time. The longer something has been there the more time attackers have had to inspect it, identify a vulnerability, and attack it. The longer a person has been around the more opportunities have arisen that might lure them to dishonesty. In a permissionless system, time proves doubts to be illusory in the same way that a $20 bill on a busy street is probably fake or glued to the floor the longer it sits there.
Opportunity Cost of Honesty. Watch carefully how trust is used once granted. Any position of trust is exploitable to some degree. Otherwise what are you trusting? Honesty is the degree to which an actor is suboptimal at exploiting that trust. Yes, Iâm aware how unintuitive that definition of honesty sounds but thatâs as close as Iâve come to a formal definition. Your unexploited trust value (UTV) is your maximum exploitable trust - exploited trust.
These pillars stand together to form the base on which a credit system could be built. They are a subset of what Vitalik identified in his post on legitimacy.
The first two are straightforward to measure. The latter is a bit more like measuring carbon deltas for Carbon Credits, Sybil values, or MEV because the maximum exploitable trust term is so subjective. With PoS Sybil-resistance is derived from the money you have. Conversely, your UTV is derived from the money you donât (in a sense). Itâs the money you donât have because you chose to be honest. This is akin to the forgery-resistance score from Gitcoin passport being floored at the amount you have spent/lost.
The fact that this is subjective (and potentially monetizable) will probably lead to competing standards for how to calculate it much like credit agencies today. Your address will have the equivalent of an Experian score from multiple aggregators which combines the three pillars above into a single number that anyone can query. Each Defi protocol could choose to use a different score, a combination of scores, or create their own score. Could this lead to abuse by an agency? Yes, but less than the current system which isnât permissionless.
But how do you bootstrap trust if no one will give you a position of trust you can honor/exploit? You canât bootstrap a system like this based on unsecured loans without first getting robbed by a few ten-thousand Sybilooors. The capital efficient answer today is to get involved in communities until someone is willing to grant you trust based on social attestation and time alone. That lacks a certain scalability element though. I think we can do better, even while remaining permissionless. You have to rely on some form of suboptimality otherwise the system will be gamed for profit. So what forms of permissionless economic suboptimality are already on-chain? The few that come to mind for me are donations to public goods, unrealized losses on airdrops, suboptimal votes in the face of bribes, and delegated credit.
None of these are perfect. The first criteria requires money to bootstrap. The second and third may have ulterior selfish motives the system canât see. The fourth is basically an extension of social attestation and just begs the question. So how do you bootstrap trust on someone with nothing to give and nothing to lose? I have no good answer but the above is the beginning of a formulation.
Why does it matter? Because this value can be integrated into tokenomic systems. I mentioned unsecured lending above, which is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you hear credit system, but I think thatâs actually one of the worst use cases for this. To explain why, we first have to break Defi collateral into two categories. The first category is money used as collateral for good behavior but which doesnât have a credibly neutral recipient. ETH staking is the largest example of this category but there are many others. The only criteria here is that the system has an objective, enforceable slashing condition. In this category the money just needs to be forfeit by the staker but it doesnât need to go anywhere. The second category is money used to reimburse someone. This includes all your money markets, collateralized stablecoins, insurance protocols, etc. It is more viable to use UTV as collateral for the former category. I wouldnât recommend this for the Ethereum base chain because the data to calculate this is on the base chain and this is a subjective score, not credibly neutral.
So where does this get us? Take a PoS system (not DPoS, thatâs dumb). The purpose of this system is to reach consensus on something. There are two necessary economic components to a PoS system. First, you have to be able to reward honest actors to incentivize participation. Second, each actor needs something at stake they can lose by being dishonest so you have entropy of bad actors over time. Iâve never seen a system designed so the failure of the dishonest actors is the main reward driver of the honest ones so I assume any such system has a revenue stream attached to it. Now, could we use reputation credit/UTV for such a system in lieu of capital? It certainly satisfies the something at stake requirement. You just have to be able to prevent collusion in the system and prevent bad actors from joining at a faster rate than the dishonesty entropy.
To prevent collusion Iâll rely what I call Bitcoinâs/Satoshiâs great insight. The failure rate of attacking a network scales super-linearly with the number of anonymous actors in that network. This is because the chance of leaking a secret scales exponentially with the network and there is a common Schelling point to unify against dishonest actors once a secret is exposed. This is the primary value of decentralization. Past a certain threshold it is safe and profitable to be honest and risky and expensive to be dishonest. So the key to preventing collusion is to increase decentralization and protect anonymity of actors. Defi satisfies this.
To solve dishonesty entropy weâre just using a different collateral (which is still a scarce resource). Today we use capital for Sybil-resistance. This does not provably satisfy the entropy condition and so plutocratic attacks on PoS systems today are possible. Given the source of this alternative collateral (historical honesty) UTV may prove out to be a superior selection criteria for identifying honest consensus participants.
This actually creates a beautiful sort of flywheel. By acting honestly you build a reputation score. You can stake your reputation in order to promise certain services. By fulfilling your promise you generate both an income stream and further reputation. This creates a compounding benefit to continue acting honestly. A world in which honest actors can build an income stream predicated on their reputation and potentially bootstrapped through community service is also a basis for UBI. Itâs a step closer to the type of world in which Iâd like to live. A few disclaimers though. First, nothing is ever fully proven to be trustworthy. Second, trust is not monotonically increasing. As systems or the world with which they integrate change trust in them fluctuates.
P.S. Iâve been asked to plug an on-topic game from the EVMaverickâs called Layer Zero. The basic premise of the game is to willingly enter into a contract with a group of people who can all openly rug the contract. Everyone has to put a share of collateral into the pot to join. Anyone in the game can take the pot. If no one takes the pot then everyone is generating UTV at the pot size * participants. Conceptually, a set of non-conspiring participants in a game like this can generate more in UTV than the money at stake. While UTV as defined above is scarce if it can be generated faster than capital it could out-compete capital for shares of revenue streams because of this.
Self-serving link
The DefiLlama team is forking Defillama
According to Oxngmi: âThe person who controls both defillamaâs twitter and domain has decided to launch a token despite everybody in the team not wanting it. That is why we (the DefiLlama team who have built the site you all know and love for the past three years) have decided to fork Defillama and start fresh on llama.fi and @llamadotfiâ
DO NOT TRUST ANY COMMUNICATION OR TOKEN FROM @Defillama or Defillama .com"
I have no idea if this is true, but the accounts seem to be the ones that control the extension. Personally I have not uninstalled it, but be careful until we find out what is actually happening..
I tried to not check prices. I lasted 3 months. I ended up checking because of the SVB news. Good to see ETH up 50% since I left. Makes me a little less worried about my CDP. The $ARB airdrop was a nice surprise too. Glad I didnât miss it while I was gone. The only other thing I was really worried about while I was gone were my non-ETH holdings.
With withdrawals coming I finally gave up on my LINK and swapped them for RPL. More confidence in RPL than LINK. Should have done it long ago. I got too attached to my LINK and waited too long for the ratio to recover. (Iâm a horrible trader). Lesson learned there. But I need an exit plan for RPL. Itâs only 2% of my portfolio though.
Iâve used this drop in the ratio to unload most of my BTC. Now only 3% of my portfolio. 0% at 0.055 if my limit orders go through. A part of me wants to keep a little bit of BTC just for nostalgic reasons but I really donât see the point of BTC. I skimmed some of the recent dailies and see others offloading their BTC. This probably means the ratio will continue to drop âšď¸
So now I am 95% ETH and too heavy in ETHE in my retirement funds. Feels nice (other than the horrible ETHE price: whatâs going on there?). It was kind of nice not checking the price for a few months, but I also missed reading the daily.
Iâll probably stick around to claim my $ARB and maybe until withdrawals are enabled. Anything fun to do on Arbitrum these days? Something that wonât make taxes a mess next year.
Airdrop Ideas?
I recently joked with some friends at work about how the ARB airdrop would be my only work bonus this year and, of course, they got super interested. Last Xmas I gave them all RPL and it has tripled in value, but since then they havenât really done anything with defi or crypto. However, I think airdrop farming might just be the push that gets them swimming!
So, Iâm compiling a list of some of my airdrop farming tasks that I plan on doing every week. For the uninitiated, Iâll provide step-by-step guides on some of the tasks every week if I can. Iâll post all that here in the caches.xyz forum: https://caches.xyz/forums/discussion/airdrop-hunts-checklist/
(Must sign in to see todayâs update)
Here is the shortened version of it. Please let me know if you have any ideas I can add!
*Bonus and super useful if you can add whether or not it is likely to happen, costs involved, or potential gains
[ ] ⢠Attend Swell Discord meeting today on 3/17.
[ ] ⢠Prepare art for Swell memes and articles and post a tweet about it on their Discord Week of 3/19 (deadline Fri?)
[ ] ⢠Create StarknetID (My guide created 3/19)
[ ] ⢠Zksync 1.0 transactions (Use zig zag)
[ ] ⢠Scroll testnet transactions.
[ ] ⢠Matcha.xyz swaps.
[ ] ⢠Continue interacting on Optimism and Arbitrum (Use HOP and VSTA)
[ ] ⢠orbiter.finance (Bridge)
[ ] ⢠starknet testnet (mint NFTs, create blocks NFT, dapps)
[ ] ⢠checkout earni.fi
[ ] ⢠GMX blueberry lottery
[ ] ⢠Use argent wallet (swaps, dapps, and LP)
[ ] ⢠Use Lens (make a post, friend, etc)
If you donât mind, please engage on the caches.xyz forum if you need assistance as Iâm certain that others will have the same or similar questions as you there.
Meanwhile, more NFT shenanigans..
535 DeGods NFTs that had been previously burned in Ethereum, were âressurrectedâ as ordinals in BTC, at 0.333 BTC per mint this past weekend.
They all sold out in a single block.
The project dominated ordinals secondary markets, with over $1M in volume, ahead of YugaLabâs twelvefold ordinals by >7x. It seems ordinals are here to stay, and more so if they are backed by already established brands such as DeGods.
Yesterday some twitter user found out ~2400 compromised accounts all approving ARB. Someone analysed these (actually 2225) wallets and 1791 wallets are elligble for around 3 million ARB total.
https://github.com/ArbitrumFoundation/sybil-detection/issues/3
Many users became victim by following links under the announcement tweet. Suprised Arbitrum didnât provide the link to their website with the annoucement or turn off replies. They are not new to how crypto scams and hacks work.
https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1636352104913666050
Frustrating to see that so much damage is done. Users have personal responsibility sure. But I think the damage wouldnât be this big if Arbitrum guided users to the right place. Maybe I am a bit unreasonable hereâŚ
Stuff like this canât be happening if crypto ever wants to become âmainstreamâ.
I have not been hacked personally and this just an observation.
I will take Balaji seriously when he goes to explain his theory to people who have the intellectual background to ask him the hard questions.
His appearance on Bankless and the Pomp show yesterday were appalling. Those werenât interviews, they were oral presentations. He could have said that Satoshi was going to come down from heaven to wash away our sins and give us eternal life, and the hosts would have nodded their heads and said âwoah.â
Balaji is not the intellectual he claims to be. An intellectual does not choose hosts sold out to his cause to make his point - instead, he will go directly to confront those who disagree. This is the very basis of the scientific method. I also find his tone to be alarmist, dramatic, filled with hyperbole created to capture attention.
Who is he, anyway? He is an engineer who became a multi-millionaire in the early 2010s - he has no expertise in finance, history or politics, beyond what he has read elsewhere. Ironically, he made his fortune from the system he says he wants to escape today. His claim to fame is that he âpredictedâ the pandemic on January 30, 2020. Except that on January 30th, the WHO declared a âglobal health emergencyâ, Wuhan had already been cut off from the rest of the world, there were confirmed cases in dozens of countries⌠He was a bit early, sure, but it is not the feat he claims.
Finally, about his $1M prediction, he has already prepared his exit. In three months he will say, âOh, the bet was just a wake-up call, you shouldnât have taken it at face value, Iâm not sure about the timeline, but hyperinflation will happen soon.â It wonât happen, and heâll push the deadline again and again, until he disappear into irrelevance.
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1638654192138199041
Brian Armstrong: > 1/ Today Coinbase received a Wells notice from the SEC focused on staking and asset listings. A Wells notice typically precedes an enforcement action.
> [âŚ]
> 4/ We are proud to stand up for our customers and the industry in these moments.
Honestly⌠best that Coinbase, whoâs well-capitalized and equipped to handle this, to be the one to go to court with the SEC and set a precedent. A win for crypto against the SEC in court would be a big deal and thereâs no one better poised to do that than CB.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
Now, this is a story all about how
Our lives got flipped-turned upside down
And Iâd like to take a minute
Just sit right there
Iâll tell you how we became gentlemen of a sub called ethfinanciĂŠr:
In Ethereum Trader, born and raised
On the daily was where I spent most of my days
Chillinâ out, meming, tradinâ, all cool
And all buyingâ some shitcoins outside of the school
When a couple of mods who were up to no good
Started making trouble in our neighborhood
We told them donuts are whack and jtnichol got scared
He said, âYouâre movinâ with cutsnek into ethfinancierâ
Neutral referee,
Yet he plays for his own team,
Markets should stay free.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Lol holy crap bunch of dummies over there at NYAG office. At least Genslerâs team understand cryptoâŚ
From: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=XDXIUrIw3tVafxqwEqVfKw==
Under proof-of-work, computers on the Ethereum network competed to answer amathematical puzzle in order to verify transactions on the blockchain and receive in-kind digital asset rewards. Under proof-of-stake, however, validators, pledge or âstakeâ their holdings in ETH and are randomly chosen to verify transactions on the blockchain and receive an in-kind digital asset reward. By shifting to proof-of-stake, ETH no longer relies upon competition between computers, but instead now relies on a pooling method that incentivizes users to own and stake ETH. The shift to proof-of-stake significantly impacted the core functionality and incentives for owning ETH, because ETH holders now can profit merely by participating in staking.
Lol, âmerely by participating in stakingâ holy christ project much? Is this a highschoolers essay?
And why is it a security Ms AG?
the Ethereum Foundation claims on its website that users of Ethereum âsee it as a digital store of value because the creation of new ETH slows down over time.â
Lol just like bitcoin, which even Gensler has clearly stated is the only crypto he views as definitely NOT security? Canât even line up your arguments between agenciesâŚ
But wait thereâs more?
Since transitioning to the proof-of-stake consensus, the value proposition has altered significantly because possession of ETH translates directly to profit potential by earning staking rewards
Hey everyone, did you realize that youâre earning staking rewards just by holding Eth in your hardware wallet!!!!!
I have no idea how any of this will play out, but I can definitely say that NYAG is a fucking clown show compared the SEC when it comes to this stuff.
Stolen from r WSB:
https://i.redd.it/gjolf3latzma1.jpg
97.3% of SVB deposits are not FDIC insured. This means, most of ~$200 bln, that used to belong to many, many tech companies and start-ups, just disappeared. Probably many jobs will fallow.
This truly is a crypto day happening in TradFi.
Hello 2008, my old friendâŚ
According to their latest tweet, Circle stands to lose 8% of the USDC backing at most. It sounds like the most reasonable expectation is that FDIC will be able to recover a decent amount of funds from SVB. Iâm expecting >50% to be returned. But looking at the pessimistic side, we have a 4-8% haircut on USDC. $0.92-$0.96. Weâre seeing that price range now.
The next question is if prices close enough to that range can be sustained long enough for Circle to be able to inject liquidity into the market as needed. I donât know what mechanisms Circle uses to do this, other than promises and market forces. If it comes down to promises and market forces that might not be enough.
Another question is at what point USDC price starts to have knock on effects beyond a simple bank run. A lot of defi is built around USDC. What systems will start to deteriorate if USDC starts to depeg more? At what point do systems start to fall apart?
New drop from Justin Drake on ethresearch âbased rollupsâ that use L1 sequencing. Looks like they would inherently force L1 alignment and sequencer decentralization rather than having to rely on the good faith of L2 teams.
The first town hall for the Summer of Protocols happens tomorrow, about 9 hours from this comment.
If youâre interested in participating, highly recommend attending! I havenât finished reading the Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols (sort of a manifesto for the course) yet but itâs really good so far, very thought-provoking, and Iâm thinking of recording a version to listen to.
edit. quick synopsis of the Summer of Protocols if youâre lazy: itâs basically a brain incubator where some very thoughtful people are going to get together and try to define what a âprotocolâ is, examine existing examples, and how to design one that is future-proof, capable of ossifying to some degree, incentivizes good outcomes, and look at how much stewardship that thing will need.
This is awesome and, in my mind, the kind of philosophical analysis that we need to make sure Ethereum (or any protocol) has a sufficient amount of thought put into it to try to steer away from some of the dystopian outcomes that something like the internet has brought about.
If algorithms on the internet can change peopleâs behaviors to rapidly foster a kind of hatred that causes people to do things they otherwise wouldnât have, why wouldnât we assume that that behavior-changing power also works in the other direction to incentivize willing participants to better coordinate with each other? This is why Iâm here. Because the infancy of Ethereum is the most exciting and malleable part and I think something like this is capable of stewarding it to a place where it actually makes a difference.
Literally how can people outside the âcryptosphereâ look at crypto and not think âscamâ?
A quote from u/geliboy695000 earlier today and I want to repost it here for exposure and discussion because itâs important.
When you look at social media, any time the topic comes up or problems in crypto are brought up, the threads are flooded with bots and scammers shilling whatever shitcoin they get paid to shill. If I were not already in the space and knew what goes on Iâd 100% think cryptocurrency is just scams all the way down. And just to be explicitely clear: Ethereum itself has enabled this too with ERC-20s and the like. Just look at whatâs literal number 4 in market cap among those tokens and then scroll down further for all the less popular bs coins like Dogelon & co.
We need to somehow find a way to exclude the grifters and scammers from the discussions while still being open and true to the crypto ideals, and also welcoming to newcomers and open to new ideas. It seems like mission impossible.
How can legitimate projects be promoted without at the same time giving exposure to the wrong people? How can the general public be educated, because it doesnât seem knowledge of blockchain tech and its uses has increased that much in the mainstream over the past years. The majority of people still doesnât even seem to understand even just Bitcoin, which has been around for 13 years now and is arguably the most basic and among the easiest blockchains to understand in principle.
This matters, because if most people do not understand how this tech can help society and how it works, theyâll think itâs useless and will support legislation that cracks down and hinders crypto adoption. They might cheer the criminalization of private non-KYCed wallets only to find a couple of years down the line to be forced to use CBDC and have banks not only control their money but monitor all their habits as well. Itâs probably not what the majority wants but if we donât help them understand they wonât know anything about it.
GrĂźezi EthFinance đ
Love you all, keep being ambassadors, and keep helping any- and everyone who asks for it!
PrĂśschtli đť
Dear EVMs, EIPandaâs and the ETHFinance community,
I come before you today to genuinely ask for your help. Please take the time to read this, I know it is long but I believe it is important. No jokes this time. Thanks in advance friends.
As you may or may not know, I started a website called âCaches.â If youâve never visited it, I will briefly explain. If you have, then you already know. Caches is a social network/community website focused on Web3 Technology and Ethereum. A place to explore all of the interesting technologies and ideas that are spinning off of this new paradigm that we all love. Itâs completely anonymous, and membership is free and only available via Ethereum wallet login.
I intended for Caches to be somewhere for our community to teach, and share our knowledge outside of the walls of third parties like Reddit or Discord. Something we own, so our voices can be properly heard, and so they canât be muted due to some draconian corporate attack on crypto or something. A place where you could âcacheâ your content and share it with the world anonymously, using identity technology being pioneered by Ethereum. Our mark on the world outside our biosphere. I also hoped we could show the world how you build a community, powered by web3 technology, out here on the old www⌠A home.
Now I have a lot of ideas, but thatâs the gist of it. I have spent a lot of time in this pursuit and I have struggled with it. The platform I chose to build Caches on, WordPress, has absolutely no help, plugins, or extensions for crypto/web3. Really no good CMS platform out there does. Since I am a terrible coder, and I am already familiar with developing websites rapidly using Wordpress, I chose to move forward using it to save time, for better or for worse. This has been an adventure to say the least.
Recently, I spoke with another EVM, /u/juxtanotherposition, and we immediately hit it off. Turns out, just by stroke of luck that on March 24th, 2023 he will be giving a presentation at WordCamp Phoenix on âWordpress, Community and Web3.â Strange how the world works sometimes ⌠Caches is built on Wordpress, it has custom developed Web3 authentication and NFT gating, and it was made for a community⌠his very own community! This was literally a match made in heaven! So with all that said, we agreed to feature Caches during the presentation as an example of community built on Wordpress with web3 tech!
That means we will have eyes from the Wordpress developer community focused on Caches and the EVM! AAAAHHHH! This is why I need your help! Now look, I know Iâm funny, and I make you laugh, and maybe youâve even checked out Caches once or twice to humor me, and then laughed yourself to sleep ⌠but I need them to see the value in this. Not just for me, or Caches, or the EVMs ⌠for Ethereum.
Why is Wordpress important?
Wordpress is a free, open source content management system that powers an astounding 43% of all websites online. I bet you didnât know Caches ran on Wordpress before I told you, did you? A lot of your favorite sites run on it. Itâs free, open source, community developed, and extensible. It also runs on a completely opensource technology stack. Wordpress.org develops the Wordpress software and they are a non-profit entity. Their ethos is very aligned with ours. They want to enable people to have their own platform to share their ideas, and words without having to rely on anyone. You can check out their about us page if you arenât familiar with them.
Why is this important for the community?
Since Caches was built for the EVM/ETHFi community, we have a very unique opportunity to get our ideas, and our community out to potentially thousands of Wordpress developers who will be viewing Caches during @juxtaâs presentation. They will undoubtedly share Caches with other developers. That means we have an opportunity to get web3 ideas and even our community baked into Wordpress! I literally can not think of a bigger opportunity for us, and for Ethereum. If we can get developers to create plugins, extensions, themes and more that enable and integrate web3 technology into Wordpress, we have an opportunity to put this in front of 43% of website owners WORLDWIDE! I can not think of a better group than all of you to guide and usher these people into this new paradigm.
With our help we can get this technology out to the world, and we can foster the Wordpress community during their exploration of this new technology. Give them a place to safely ask questions and get good answers ranging from JBM to Logris level. A place to share ideas, develop friendships and connections ⌠just like we all have done through the sub. This is our opportunity to put the community at the forefront of something big outside our walls and build ourselves as an authority in this space.
Whatâs in it for me?
Juxta has asked if Caches could be a sort of âdevelopmentâ test bed for Wordpress web3 plugins and technology. I like this idea, we get free development work to make Caches the premier web3 community and the developers get a real live site to develop their product. This is a win/win/win! I get to see the thing I started grow and flourish at the hands of people much smarter and more capable than me. Itâs beautiful man! Thatâs really it. I hope to use it to make money, however we decide to do that, just like you.
Whatâs in it for you?
I honestly built this site for our community. I genuinely built it to enable everyone to be heard out here on the web. As I have repeatedly stated, I donât want to own this thing by myself. So I hope you can join me, we can come up with new ways to push Ethereum/web3 forward in the web2 and we can come up with creative ways for everyone in the community to earn some money for themselves without turning into a marketing machine. I want everyone to be a part of that journey, and I want everyone to be able to contribute ideas to that goal, and most importantly I want to work with you to figure out how we can own this thing together in the fairest way possible. I donât have any of that figured out, but thatâs ultimately where I want to be⌠a community owned and operated by the community.
How can I help?
Pop in the EVM discord. If youâre not an EVM, I still want your help. Please. Join the public-channel and DM a mod to have the âCachesâ role added to your account and then youâll be able to see the #caches channel there even if you donât have an EVM. I will use that to try to collaborate and focus our energies best I can. I need you! We have just 10 days to try and make Caches, the community and Ethereum look good⌠but hey⌠this is just the beginning. So donât do it for me. Do it for ETHEREUM.
Sincerely,
JBM đđť
GTP4 apparently knows solidity pretty wellâŚ
I dumped a live Ethereum contract into GPT-4.
In an instant, it highlighted a number of security vulnerabilities and pointed out surface areas where the contract could be exploited. It then verified a specific way I could exploit the contract
https://twitter.com/jconorgrogan/status/1635695064692273161
Ethtrader donuts were key in the formation of this sub. Not just because it triggered the exodus, but because of the type of people it promoted to leave.
The people that hate grifts and cash grabs, the people that see this as more than a way to make money, the people that are in it for the tech, etc.
It distilled the community down to those that believe in the original ethos ethereum was founded on, and we do our best to carry forward.
Announcements
Ethereum
It was $1420 at midnight
0.071 when i looked but thatâs less memey
The stack overflowed,
The memory took a bribe,
On chain you canât hide.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Two guys named Ray walk into a barâŚ
They tell the bartender âThis place sucked until we walked in here.â âWhyâs that?â Says the bartender.
âBecause weâre Rays in the bar!!!â
Meanwhile in the NFT-verse..
Reporting from the trenches of the great marketplace wars of â23. OpenSea has engineered their next move to combat Blurâs rapid ascent into the market. What did they do?
Introduce a new table view! Where the NFT jpg is reduced to a few pixels, just like in Blur. The way art was always meant to be traded!
On a more serious note, this war has already caused some collateral damage, with the royalties race to the bottom. The argument goes that 10k profile picture collections probably should not have royalties, while it makes more sense for 1/1 art pieces.
Well, the royalties paid on ArtBlocks (an NFT platform for curated artists) has now gone from 7.5% to 2.5%. This suggests that the markets for these two types of NFTs may not be so different after all.
Yesterday two things that longterm members posts and that are not connected somehow caught my attention and made me think. The first one was this post by Bob Rossi, the second one was a comment by superphiz in a completely different thread.
Some personal thoughts with regards to Bobs post: I totally feel you. I want to contribute more in the space and think I would be able to add some value here and there, but hell I am just a random anon on the internet thatâs mid bell curve.
But what if superphiz is right (and I think he is)? What if EVMs (which I am going to replace with members of this sub, since not everyone does hold one) will become community guardians? What if this place is something special and if you have established yourself as a valuable and know community member you are highly likely to add value to projects in the ETH ecosystem, hence also hop? What if we used the community we have built here to send people to different DAOs to positively influence decisions made in the ecosystem? What if at one point any EVM and their arguments in a (DAO) discussion are seen with different eyes just because of the NFT?
This was deployed at the EthDenver conference: ERC-4337. Am I right to think that this is a really underrated implementation?
Iâve read from a few sources that this level of account abstraction will eventually allow wallets to operate as programmable smart contracts; which could be used to recover lost private keys. Weâre not there yet, but still exciting!
News articles: msn.com and BusinessInsider
Could allow users to do away with the common practice of backing up a set of words on a piece of paper, enabling new ways to secure wallets. For example, users could set up two-factor authentication to access a wallet via biometric data, or program multi-signature wallets providing shared access to a single account.
Additionally, this:
Vitalik Buterin has stated that ERC-4337 enables a fully decentralized fee market for smart contract wallet operations.
Vitalik posted:
You should be able to send an op into a public mempool, and if it pays enough fees, reliably expect it to get included. This should NOT depend on ANY:
- Centralized actors
- Reputation systems for op senders
- ETH held in a separate EOA
- External services for account creation
With L2 fee structure the fee requirement diminishes.
Iâm not technically skilled/knowledgeable enough to understand why this integration wonât presently allow account recovery, but weâre almost there apparently. Vitalik mentions that it canât be solved by ERC-4337, but EIP-3074 and EIP-5003 would get us there. Very cool shit. Anyone want to chime in on anything I misunderstood?
Really surprised to see the Tornado Cash successor Privacy Pools isnât being discussed in more detail here
https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1632083054272430080
Since anybody can exclude any deposit, it seems it would be difficult to get any type of assurance of your anonymity set.
I also wonder if you can run into a situation where you canât withdraw. For example if a hacker makes a large deposit and then withdraws for others, then there wonât be enough funds for everyone else to withdraw if they all want to exclude the hacker.
And not sure why the subsets are even needed if receipts are provided, which Tornado Cash already did.
BUIDL Week is over here at EthDenver. You may have noticed a lack of a certain u/logristhebard around the subreddit. Thatâs because he has been diligently working on the Logris Vaults. Some of you saw the Alpha that I dropped earlier in the week⌠we are now one step closer to the Double Logris becoming a reality.
Itâs been a long week and Logris has been working flat out to get the project across the finish line. Weâre about to pitch in a little bit here⌠still waiting on our time so I canât tell you that. But, Iâm really excited about what we accomplished and really Really REALLLLLYYYY proud of him.
Logris says heâs proud of this function. What a nerd.
ETHDenver Day 10 (Yesterday)
The final day of ETHDenver! There were no traditional talks from established companies or researchers; today was all about the hackathon teams. Each project was submitted to one of five tracks (DeFi, Impact / Social Goods, DAOs / Community, NFT/Gaming/Metaverse, and Infrastructure) and could also compete for sponsor bounties (big list here).
Projects had to be submitted by 8 AM, then from 10-2 teams showed off what they made. On the regular presentation stages, teams went up to the stage corresponding to their track and gave a 1:30 pitch and demo, with a little time for questions. When they werenât on stage, they were downstairs in the main buidl room where the sponsor bounty judges and random attendees could learn about what they made. Track judges picked the top three of each track to present on the main stage during the closing ceremony at 3 PM, then five final winners were chosen.
Miscellaneous notes: I donât think I can see an overall list of hackathon projects, but each one does have their own page if you know what URL to go to. But for most I donât know the URL so itâs going to be hard to link to them. I also heard that there was a major hiccup where in the midst of planning out judging, a bunch of teams just got missed entirely and werenât scheduled for a pitch slot or a table location. The team worked to resolve it, but with everything happening so fast some teams were just screwed over. Hopefully itâs better next year. Also I finally checked out the arcade area, good collection of imported Japanese arcade games, nice selection of rhythm games in particular.
The following are the finalists who presented at the closing ceremony. These were short talks and it was easy to miss critical details, so this may be quick.
That was actually the last day. Some people are sticking around for the mountain retreat, but thatâs not really something to report on. Iâll assemble a final review tomorrow and thatâll be it!
https://www.veritasanalyticsllc.com/finacial-forensics-news/2023/3/6/law360-op-ed-crypto-is-a-major-question-only-appellate-courts-can-answer
Interesting legal op-ed about the potential future of crypto regulation as the Ripple case progresses through the courts.
TLDR: The conservative supreme court has renewed interest in containing federal agencies to the powers explicitly defined by congress evidenced by WV vs. EPA ruling last year referencing the âmajor questions doctrineâ in the ruling. Regardless of the outcome in lower courts for Ripple vs. SEC, the ruling is likely to be appealed to higher courts and this author at least thinks the SECâs authority over crypto assets falls under the âmajor questions doctrineâ that needs to be decided by congress and could potentially neuter Genslerâs further attempts to destroy the industry in the US.
Aaayo! Itâs ya most annoying boy back with mooaar open source software! Now, if youâre like me, your short term memory is shot due to excessive and repeated blows to the head. If youâre also like me, your wife makes you aware of that fact no less than 10 times a day⌠so you probably take a lot of notes so you donât feel stupid, like me. On your phone, the desktop, on the mirror after a shower ⌠Donât forget to put on pants today!
Notes are personal and often contain personal information, subtle details about your life and your extremely valuable intellectual property like your unreleased raps. Are you going to trust that level of information to Evernote!? OneNote!? You know who just bought Evernote? Bending Spoons. You know what Bending Spoons does? AI⌠yeah. They want your raps bro! Donât even get me started on Microsoft (OpenAI) OneNote! Ahhhhhhh!
So, today I present an open source, self hosted, zero knowledge, end to end encrypted note taking app named Joplin. Joplin is a full featured notes app with markdown support, image/website/screen clip insertion support and so much more! Syncing between your mobile and desktop can be done with Joplinâs paid cloud service but they also support S3, Nextcloud, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive or the local filesystem (syncthing?), so you donât have to pay more for their cloud if you donât want.
They have fully featured, open source apps for Android/iOS and Linux, Windows, Mac and ⌠FreeBSD!? Whoah! So hardcore! Even the Joplin cloud server software is open source⌠ohhh! and ⌠and thereâs a terminal app for my fellow shell dwellers out there. You can really feel the nerd love here. Check it out!
Joplin:
https://joplinapp.org
You all know, this bear is a builder. Here are some newish, not-so-well-known Defi protocols. As they are new, they are not battle-tested and deployed capital are potentially at risk. Donât ape in with your life savings.
Numoen.com - an AMM on Arbitrum which let you access leverage with no liquidation penality, oracleless. Itâs done as a power perpetual ETH^2. But there is a price,you pay relatively high funding rates so itâs rather good for short term trades.
Sturdy.finance - another leverage protocol. Here you can leverage up DEX pool tokens or alternatively lend your ETH/stables to the one using leverage.
Contango.xyz - you can buy or sell a forward contract, and contango borrows on the fixed-rate markets, swaps on the spot markets, and lends back on the fixed rate markets. Sounds complicated, but also fascinating money lego. Be aware: very early stage, in beta with unaudited contracts!
Ondo.finance / fluxfinance.com: Ondo is gate-keeped (100k min. deposit), so Iâm not sure if you manage to get into their pools (Iâve not tried it). But if not, you can get relatively high APY (currently) on stables (USDC,USDT or DAI) by depositing into their partner protocol fluxfinance.
IPOR.io - an Inter-protocol Offered Rate for Decentralized Finance. Itâs too complicated to explain it in simple words by myself, so I refer to their elaborate documentation: https://docs.ipor.io/
Announcements
Ethereum
$1567
0.07
Am I a security?
Yes.
Please report to Gary Gensler for a paddlin
Sequencer karma,
Blockchain inverted comma,
Layer 2 drama.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
In the past, Binance launched its own L1 with the Binance Smart Chain.
FTX launched its own L1 with Solana.
But today Coinbase commits to Ethereum by launching its own L2 on Ethereum.
This means than Coinbaseâs interests are now fully aligned with Ethereum, with bridging of users and capital directly to the Ethereum ecosystem.
This means that marketing made by Coinbase for its chain will now directly benefit Ethereum.
Eth is this L2âs native token, with which gas will be paid.
This fully validates Ethereumâs rollup centric roadmap.
While some may find the Coinbase âBaseâ news underwhelming or would have hoped for something different, the way I see it, this is a huge signal in the crypto space that the number one crypto company in the world is choosing to go all in on building on Ethereum.
Up until now you could argue Coinbase was âimpartialâ in its offerings and did not show favoritism amongst coins, but now it seems they are willing to forego impartiality to build on the project they believe in most.
They couldve chosen to enhance lightning network/build an alternative, or build on solana, or the ânewâ smart contract enabled Cardano, but no they chose Ethereum.
That is something I would consider âsignificant.â
Iâve been screwing around with editing EthStakerâs community calls to podcast-ify them, and I loved Danny Ryanâs post yesterday, so I recorded it. Itâs available in the EthStaker podcast.
Or you can listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2137396/12322923-danny-ryan-s-reflections-2023
*Yes, I know my audio levels processing is poop. Iâm using some auto-process feature in the Descript software. If you want to give me pointers or tell me I suck, please leave a comment in the suggestion box on the desk that I donât have
Yesterdayâs Polygon validator âoutageâ was wild:
It was big enough that:
Background: What happened is that several Polygon validators experienced sync issues, which then lead to giant cascade of outages for most validators. The reason for the reorg is supposedly a bug between their Bor and Heimdall layers, though the team has yet to give details on the bug.
Checkpoint SLAs: Back in Aug 2022, there was a governance proposal, PIP-4, to move towards permissionless validation.
âIn its current state, the PoS validator network is not entirely permissionless in that the previously-selected set of validators has largely persisted since testnet.â
The proposal added an SLA requirement that 95% of median average of last 700 checkpoints are signed by the validator. If the validator fails to meet the SLA, they are placed in a Grace Period have another 700 checkpoints to meet it. Otherwise, they get offboarded from staking. After 2 months, the SLA increased from 95% to 98%.
What happened yesterday concerning the checkpoint SLA:
Due to this rule and validators missing checkpoints yesterday, 25 out of 100 validators were at risk of getting kicked off staking.
The emergency PIP-9 vote to reduce the SLA was passed, saving most of the validators. Only 2 validators got offboarded and 5 more are in the Grace Period.
Itâs good theyâre finally taking the reorg issue more seriously, but I think they shouldâve addressed this a long time ago.
ETHDenver Day 1
Last year, I attended ETHDenver and made a post each day in which I primarily summarized the best talks I heard that day, and also commented a little about my general experiences at the conference. ETHDenver 2023 has now begun, and I intend to do the same this year. As with last year, the first few days are slow: only one stage with talks starting late and ending early. So not too much to cover.
It seems that, also like last year, all talks are recorded to Twitch, one stream per stage. But for a given talk, figuring out which stage and what timestamp is not trivial. Itâs not too hard either, and for today I figured Iâd try tracking down timestamps but Iâm really skeptical that Iâll want to spend the time on that as the days get longer. If thereâs one you really want to see, let me know and I can probably find it pretty quick given that I know what the different stages are and can probably recognize the style of a given talkâs slides at a glance. But in general Iâll link to the schedule page for each talk, which should be enough to point you in the right direction for learning more.
On a personal note, itâs kind of amazing how much I expect my experience at ETHDenver will be different this year. Last year I knew nobody personally and was generally content to fill my days with nothing but listening to talks and occasionally chatting with strangers. But this year? I didnât go half an hour before I started bumping into folks I know. I have a project that I can explain to people who ask what Iâve been working on (and they seem to find it very interesting (!), but I need to stop assuming that everyone knows how staking and MEV work). I tentatively have a hackathon team (with folks from this community) for a project I think will be bite-sized but still quite valuable. And I need to juggle driving back home occasionally for some classes Iâm taking, so Iâve accepted Iâm going to have limited free time this next week. But itâll just be packed so full of fun things!
EDIT: Oh yeah, I also have the EVMavericks t-shirts for those who signed up on Discord. I wonât be lugging around the huge box everywhere I go, but Iâll try to set aside multiple timeslots when I can set up shop in one spot, let everyone know, and hand them out. Got 100 EVMavs stickers to hand out too.
ICYMI: Spotify is piloting token-enabled playlists powered by Ethereum NFTs.
Music streaming Spotify is testing a new service called âtoken-enabled playlists,â which allows holders of non-fungible tokens (NFT) to connect their wallets and listen to curated music.
Currently, the service is available to token holders within the Fluf, Moonbirds, Kingship and Overlord communities. The curated playlists will be actively updated during the three-month testing period and can only be accessed by community members via a unique link.
Canât believe thereâs this many upvotes. Off the top of my head I can think about:
This bear market is honestly so much harder to keep track of developments than the last one. All you could do last bear was take a Maker CDP loan and wait for Michael Saylor to buy Bitcoin. Maybe price action stinks but you can never say crypto is boring.
[Edit] Also just remembered Spotify NFTs, Starbucks Polygon NFT rollout in progress, and some of my Reddit WSB NFTâs getting a nice premium lately.
Money should be boring. The fact that we had exciting money for a few years (bootstrapping/awareness phase of Bitcoin, then of Ethereum) is a marvel in the history of money.
If you think about it, new types of money donât pop up very often. In the history of money, weâve only really had three major types, invented in 6000 BC, 600 BC, and 2008 CE.
You could argue that the jump from gold-backed notes to fiat notes was another fundamental evolution of money, but in any case we have been very lucky to live through this incredibly special decade.
So now begins the long, boring process of executing on the existing roadmap, and integrating Ethereum with the old, boring economy. Weâve had our big bang moment for this three thousand year period - perhaps in another three thousand years civilization will come up with yet another fundamentally new type of money and weâll see another big bang (thousands of years from now, quantum physics may allow us to have conversations with the laws of physics and directly ask those laws of physics to enforce certain constraints on our reality, a.k.a. âmagicâ).
In three thousand years though, if the word âIâ still makes sense to describe me, if I am even aware at that point of the events taking place on planet Earth in the material plane, and humans do invent a fourth type of money, at that point I probably wonât care.
ping u/silentjxhn
Thanks for those of you vigilantly reporting the spam post on the front page. A quick dive into the user posting it and the other user commenting in support of the scam found a history of similar posts with the same free reddit awards. Donât trust any supposed uncollateralised DeFi protocols. Theyâre almost certainly a scam unless basically everyone is talking about such a breakthrough.
Reminder of things to look out for in identifying spam and scams on Reddit:
Spam posts: (if yes itâs probably a scam)
Aside from this, there are some basic rules such as:
Please remember to use the report button! In a sub with active mods multiple reports always signals to the mods that something needs investigating.
For those of you who are interested, this is the user who posted it and take a look and see if you can see the patterns of a scammer in their posts and post history. https://reddit.com/user/SpicateHammer451
Stay safe out there, folks!
My brother: So howâs it going with that secret little thing you are doing with Ethereum, that miner sitting on your desk? You must be very smart how do you manage it? Must be a lot of work.
Me thinking: Oh thatâs right Iâm running a validator I almost forgot.
That thing is still running perfectly turning dust into ETH without looking at it for months. Yes, staking is very hard and mind consuming. All I do is wait for my phone to prompt an update and then I run the ethstaker wizard after a few weeks. I am very sramt!
This week I managed to get my coworker into solo staking without telling him I am one myself, but I think he knows. Dude is already heavily invested in getting the best performance out of his machine. What a nerd (Heâs actually a very nice guy that just loves computers). Tells me he has a lot of unused parts freshly bought just because they were off price. He was flabbergasted about the low specs needed and was kind of disappointed. I guess he was expecting to run some sort of data center in his home?
Maybe Iâll tell him to run a Solana node instead, if he really wants to drown in debt and get no profit at all (even run at a loss). Good thing is that he understands. He immediately linked the correlation about decentralization needing easy hardware to work the most efficient. Canât expect normal people to run data centers right? They have the money, but not the technical knowledge. They do not want a beefy machine taking their electricity and bandwidth away. These were his exact words, and I was astounded by his quick thinking.
I wanted to direct him to the right sources to run a validator but he was already talking about running Geth and Lighthouse and was talking about all sorts of Linux command stuff. He was already smarter then me about validating in one day. I guess heâs going to be just fine.
Coworker, if you manage to cross this post and recognize me. Doxx me and I will tell your mother!!
Announcements
Ethereum
$1645
0.068
Hey fam! Weâre looking for a nomination for âShitpost of the weekâ to be included today in the livestream. Got any suggestions? Reply here with the link! see you soon!
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/11ak2qc/daily_general_discussion_february_24_2023/j9ttyfr/
What is Garyâs mood?
Bailing Sam out was so rude,
Do Kwon just got sued.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
I want to disclose that Iâve contracted with EY to offer community education regarding their Nightfall and Starlight products for a few months. This isnât a full time job, just an agreement to spend more time learning about Nightfall and Starlight, then sharing what Iâve learned.
Let me give you some idea what this means. My credibility to the community is the most important thing I have in crypto, so Iâll never do or say anything that would degrade that credibility. Many people who know and trust me hold that trust because Iâm extremely selective about things I talk about. I focus on highly aligned projects that add value to the whole ecosystem and donât extract value for anyone. You might know that EYâs privacy tools led by Paul Brodyâs team fill that niche for me, and Iâm very confident about that fit after knowing Paul several years.
My intention is to learn more and share more about Nightfall and Starlight and help them find the traction they deserve and I hope youâll join me in this quest. If these tools succeed in the market, Ethereum will be the greatest beneficiary.
I need you to know that I canât be bought. Iâm agreeing to this contract because itâs good for the web3 community, our community, Ethereum, and EY. I believe that any greater knowledge we develop about these products will benefit all parties in the long run.
I will always continue to do my best to earn your trust as I find the best tools and opportunities to share with other Ethfinanciers, but I also need you to put your own judgement first. Ask yourself if Iâm doing things that make sense for all of us or if Iâve lost my way. Follow your own good judgement, not mine. <3
We are always happy and willing to be ambassadors for the benefits of decentralisation and how that can provide a deep benefit for all those involved. So it is with great pleasure that we want to relay that Coinbase Ventures has invested in the protocol. We recently announced their intentions to join the oDAO, so this is just another step in them willing to back a decentralised staking protocol such as Rocket Pool.
âWeâre excited to announce that Coinbase Ventures is deepening its partnership with Rocket Pool via a direct investment into RPL in addition to its proposed entry into the oDAO. Coinbase Ventures also plans to use their RPL and ETH to spin up their own Rocket Pool minipools.â
/- Coinbase Ventures
From the Rocket Pool discord. Pretty impressive evolution of the CB Ventures x Rocket Pool relationship.
Iâm in a discussion with a community member that I respect very much, yet strangely we do not seem to agree on something.
Question for the fam:
If Coinbase would start spinning up Rocket Pool minipools instead of regular validators from today on, would this be good, bad or neutral for decentralization?
Please limit the discussion to this question about decentralization only. I donât want it to be a value judgement on Rocket Pool. Of course any actor can use it as it is permissionless. This is not a fault of the protocol. Also please donât discuss how unlikely or likely it is that Coinbase would do this. It might be very unlikely with all the risks (RPL exposure, regalutory, other). I just want to know if you think my hypothetical question would be good or bad for decentralization
You asked me to post my comment in reply to this thread, but I think it might be worth re-writing it suited for some of the answers I see here. Iâm going to write this as if the LEB-8 (8 ETH minipools) are in effect, because that is the long term goal. For anyone reading this not familiar with Rocket Pool, the current version of minipools instead has 16 ETH from the minipool operator and 16 ETH taken from the rETH pool. This difference doesnât impact the following statements, with the exception of making the barrier-of-entry lower.
Â
Answer: I believe the effect on decentralization is neutral, but in spite of that neutral effect from this factor alone I think it would be actually devastating to Ethereumâs prospects to shut out large entities, due to runaway centralization behind 2-3 broadly used liquid staking tokens. Here are my thoughts.
Â
Â
Â
Some comments here point to the fact that small stakers can obtain a 4x node power âmultiplierâ against large staking entities, and that large staking entities entering the picture defeats this purpose. This is a fallacy, however:
Â
The same scenario effectively plays out if you make the comparison of centralized entities using RP vs. RP not existing:
Â
Considering those two scenarios, node counts for any of these scenarios are irrelevant and are not a factor in comparing any situation for Rocket Pool. The fact is, Rocket Pool will actually give a slight node-power advantage to decentralization, but only by virtue of feature #1 - the reduced barrier-to-entry. There is no scenario where Rocket Pool increases the amount of power a centralized entity has in comparison to Rocket Pool not existing, or locking centralized entities out.
So whatâs the actual strength of Rocket Pool? Itâs specifically item #2, the accessible-to-all staking services pool. The lowered barrier to entry for actual node-operators at 8 ETH is to be frank pretty awesome and amazing, and itâs going to let a lot more people into the ETH staking ecosystem, but the point that people keep missing about the accessible-to-all staking services pool that is provided is that it keeps the biggest liquid-staking token out of the hands of a single entity, or at the very least provides a nearly-unstoppable competitor. If Rocket Pool didnât exist, staking-services users would have nowhere to send their money except centralizing forces, and whatâs more is that small operations wouldnât be able to attract staking-services customers for shit - nobody would use little-known liquid-staking tokens, and the small operations would get crushed on margins by the big operations.
Every centralized entity that joins this accessible-to-all pool makes it that much harder for any centralized entity to monopolize the liquid-staking-token market, and even better, the protocol itself isnât really able to use itâs own dominance of the liquid-staking market to try and shut out competitors except by trying to provide better service to keep people using rETH - so even competitors will still be able to rise up if they make something truly great. The protocol canât blacklist competing liquid-staking tokens on the protocolâs (non-existent) exchange, the protocol canât make back-room deals to give more favorable staking percentages to special, favored customers, the protocol canât lock out small staking providers that the big providers donât like.
Rocket Pool canât actually shut out centralized or large entities by design, and it also shouldnât because doing so is inherently a bad idea. Any centralization of node operators on the Rocket Pool protocol would have existed without Rocket Pool, and if you try and shut them out that money gets transferred right over to external centralized entities anyways. Rocket Poolâs design has likely averted a scenario where a few major exchanges dominated the entire staking services market on the Ethereum chain, which⌠to be honest, I think would have truly killed the decentralization angle and left us with little claim to security.
Heads up, I received an unsolicited call this morning allegedly coming from Coinbase support indicating that my account had been logged into from another country and that they were placing a hold on my account. While on the phone they sent me an email confirming this and a text message with a link to hxxps://issue-coinbase.com/email=?[EMAIL] to reset my account. They then gave me an 8 digit password over the phone with which to login.
I pretty much knew from the start that this was bullshit but the hxxps://issue-coinbase.com domain really sealed it. If you get any unsolicited calls from any exchange please ignore it, and maybe report it here for educational purposes. Stay safe out there.
Anyone with an ounce of understanding about economies knows why a DEFLATIONARY currency could never work as the standard.
As the standard for what? Buying eggs and bread? Paying peopleâs salaries? Investing in stuff? Sure. In that case, a deflationary, value-appreciating currency is bad. Thankfully thatâs not what Ether is.
We need money to lose value over time to deincentivise people sitting on savings.
The first and foremost job of Ether as an asset is to provide economic security to Ethereum. âAnyone with an ounce of understandingâ about that realizes itâd be dumb to devalue this asset on purpose. Ether is collateral money, not debt money. Having the value of your collateral go up gives you more bandwidth to participate in the economy by doing more stuff you otherwise couldnât
Only when money is used does it lube up the economy by providing cash flow for industry.
Again thatâs not really Etherâs job to do that, but even then it still does it well inside the Ethereum economy: itâs deflationary BECAUSE itâs being used. âAnyone with an ounce of understandingâ quickly realizes this cause and effect relationship and doesnât invert it by claiming being deflationary causes people to not use it.
Ethereum sells blockspace and blockspace accessories. This blockspace is worth something, people are willingly paying for it, choosing to burn their precious deflationary ETH in exchange for it. There is no âbad money drives out goodâ when it comes to buying blockspace, thanks to EIP-1559.
Iâm tired of these takes that miss out on all the nuance. âETH deflation bad because deflation encourages hoardingâ is one of them. And yes, âETH deflation good because supply goes down = line go upâ is another one. Itâs a cringe meme responding to Bitcoinâs equally cringe âcapped supply = sound moneyâ meme.
The truth is fundamentally, whether the supply goes up or down doesnât affect the velocity of ETH. Whether supply goes up or down, itâs all just an accounting trick that doesnât change the fact that value ultimately flows from users (paying for blockspace) into the pockets of holders (who are likely to be staking, directly or indirectly). Youâre not magically gonna turn a hoarder into a user if you increase issuance, because that hoarder is already staking anyway.
Good news! I finally completed my quest of remixing 69 EVMavericks and EIPandas with Midjourney. They have all been minted on Polygon and sent to their respective owners. To see the results, here is the OpenSea collection.
I want to thank everybody that participated in my little project. Your amazing reactions to my artworks mean the world to me! If you had a request and didnât receive it, feel free to DM me, I might have missed some messages.
I will mint one last epic remix and put it up at auction in the next few days, and then I will get to work on my sequel to Worthless JPEGs!, my satirical collection.
Thanks again everyone.
Itâs quite a brilliant feature of eip 1559.
If demand for blockspace falls below a certain threshold, ETH issuance goes up while gas prices go down. This has the effect of making it more likely for more people to use ETH, bringing us back to more demand for blockspace.
If demand for blockspace is above a certain threshold, ETH issuance goes ultrasound. More ETH fees are burned instead of given to validators.
If staking becomes extremely desirable, and more and more people stake, staking rewards APY falls, and the threshold of blockspace demand required for fee burns increases.
If staking becomes less desirable and more and more people unstake, staking APY increases and the threshold for fee burning falls.
Itâs a completely automated, decentralized monetary policy which favors equilibrium. Nothing else on earth like it.
Ethereum eip 1559 increases incentive to secure the network in a way that avoids inflating the supply, without being 100% reliant on market forces such as gas fees. Unlike Bitcoin security which will eventually become completely enslaved to the wills and fluctuations of the market, and without sufficient fees (blockspace demand) will become more and more centralized and less and less secure.
Hodlercon 2024 update: BeachBum NFT hodlers can now vote for destinations at https://hodlercon.com/. (Edit: Tickets to Hodlercon 2022 included a BeachBum. If you attended and havenât minted yours, DM me. Others can mint them at https://hodlercon.com/beachbums).
The Twitter Spaces launch from Sunday is recorded at https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MYGNgYljAnJw? (45 minutes with superphiz, Paul Brody, nikola_j, DoubtStars and friends).
The highest vote-getter as of March 17 in each of three cohorts will be thrown to the will of the ETH price gods â Whichever price band weâre in on June 15, 2023, will determine the location of Hodlercon 2024.
Thereâs a blurb on each destination at https://hodlercon.com/#details. Hereâre the candidates, proposed by Hodlercon attendees, EthFinanciers, ethstakers and anyone else who wanted to pitch in:
Mahalo for voting.
Very interesting speech just given by Augustin Carstens, the General manager for the BIS. Pay close attention to the last paragraph/bolded text. They totally understand the power of shared ledgers/opensource/composable. They just want to centralize it and own it.
edit: formatting; summarizing a little bc the kicker comes at the end of a wall of text.
â
A unified ledger is a digital infrastructure with the potential to combine the monetary system with other registries of real and financial claims. It would need to be a public-private partnership with a clear division of roles, and where the central bank is tasked with underpinning the trust in money.
Like smartphone platforms, a unified ledger allows various components to work seamlessly together. But unlike them, it is enabled by open architecture that promotes financial inclusion and greater competition.
Such a ledger allows for the use of smart contracts and composability. A smart contract is a computer program that executes conditional âif/thenâ and âwhileâ commands. Composability means that many smart contracts, covering multiple transactions and situations, can be bundled together, like âmoney legoâ.
With these new functionalities, any sequence of transactions in programmable money can be automated and seamlessly integrated. This reduces the need for manual interventions that delay transactions and reduces dependency on intermediaries, and also allows for simultaneous and near-instant payments and settlement.
Greater interoperability and automated transfers could ultimately benefit consumers through more convenient and cheaper products that are better tailored to their needs, thereby enhancing financial inclusion.
These foreseeable gains may just be the tip of the iceberg of additional transformations. Think about how the smartphone displaced digital cameras. It was not because it takes better pictures, but because itâs easier to share these pictures with friends through the same device.
Importantly, programmability and composability do not require decentralised or permissionless platforms. All the potential benefits I just outlined can be achieved in permissioned platforms with various degrees of centralisation. What really brings the benefits of these projects together is the use of money as a means of payment and settlement. As the provider of the ultimate settlement asset in the economy, the central bank therefore has an important role to play in the governance of a unified ledger. But it would do so in partnership with other public agencies as well as with private sector participants.
I think FOMO is more stressful than losing money
Have you ever boosted a Maker vault at $4500 ETH?
You get to experience both in very short order and learn that the latter is much, much worse.
Special guest VP joins us from Hexagon, a group born out of Golem project. A new app funding Ethereum infrastructure & public goods projects. Rewards from 100,000 staked ETH are powering a sandbox for governance and community funding experiments. Read moreâŚ
Announcements
90s G-funk synth starts playing
Regulators
We regulate any investing of your property
Weâre damn good too
But you canât be any geek off the street
You gotta be able to use the Howey test, if you know what I mean
Earn your keep
Regulatooorssss! Mount up
[Verse 1] It was a February day, some time around noon
Gary G was at his desk, seeing ETH moon
He thought realâ hard then came up with a plan
Hit centralized staking with a nation-wide ban
[Chorus] Regulators in the house, donât you mess around
The SEC and Gary, they got it all locked down
Theyâre coming with the rules and theyâre coming to pound
Gary G and SEC they keep the crypto scene sound
[Verse 2] When the Kraken rose up, with its tentacles wide
The SEC and Gary stood side by side
They slayed the beast together, Howey hammer in hand
Now the crypto world is under their command
[Chorus] Regulators in the house, donât you mess around
The SEC and Gary, they got it all locked down
Theyâre coming with the rules and theyâre coming to pound
Gary G and SEC they keep the crypto scene sound
[Verse 3] When Phiz got the call, he got the smile
Heâd been trying to achieve this for a while
Ethereum staking decentralized and free
Superphiz and me, the Gary to the G
[Outro] Iâm tweaking into a whole new era
Decentralized Finance, I dare ya
Trust on a whole new level
Smart contracts are the rules and the rules immu-table
ETH, code, We brings decentralization, ETH-funk
Where code is law, aligned incentives
If you know like I know, you donât want to step to this
Itâs the Ethereum era, funked out with a unicorn twist
If you smoke like I smoke then youâre high like every day
And if yoâ ass is centralized Gary G will regulate
SEC website,
Staking form still out of sight,
Guidance they wonât write.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
The one sane person at the SEC seems to have little influence - sheâs echoed this sentiment for a few years now and not much has changed. Not a criticism to her, more a comment on the SECâs approach to regulation being firmly entrenched
https://twitter.com/HesterPeirce/status/1623796583807451139
Today, the SEC shut down Krakenâs staking program and counted it as a win for investors. I disagree and therefore dissent.
Kraken operated a service through which its customers could offer their tokens up for staking. The customers earned returns, and the company earned a fee. The Commission argues that this staking program should have been registered with the SEC as a securities offering. Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, the more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible. In the current climate, crypto-related offerings are not making it through the SECâs registration pipeline. An offering like the staking service at issue here raises a host of complicated questions, including whether the staking program as a whole would be registered or whether each tokenâs staking program would be separately registered, what the important disclosures what be, and what the accounting implications would be for Kraken.
We have known about crypto staking programs for a long time. Although it may not have made a difference, I should have called for us to put out guidance on staking long before now. Instead of taking the path of thinking through staking programs and issuing guidance, we again chose to speak through an enforcement action, purporting to âmake clear to the marketplace that staking-as-a-service providers must register and provide full, fair, and truthful disclosure and investor protection.â[1] Using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating.[2] Moreover, staking services are not uniform, so one-off enforcement actions and cookie-cutter analysis does not cut it.[3]
Most concerning, though, is that our solution to a registration violation is to shut down entirely a program that has served people well. The program will no longer be available in the United States, and Kraken is enjoined from ever offering a staking service in the United States, registered or not. A paternalistic and lazy regulator settles on a solution like the one in this settlement: do not initiate a public process to develop a workable registration process that provides valuable information to investors, just shut it down.
More transparency around crypto-staking programs like Krakenâs might well be a good thing. However, whether we need a uniform regulatory solution and if that regulatory solution is best provided by a regulator that is hostile to crypto, in the form of an enforcement action, is less clear.
Reddit employee hacked in sophisticated phishing attack. Backend compromised since Feb 5th.
I definitely imagine JBM as the Mel Gibson character from Lethal Weapon. Heâll let you think heâs a little off his rocker, but thatâs just a ruse to hide a skilled operator.
For those who want to learn how to use APIs: Circle/USD is doing a introduction to API education campaign on StackUp: https://app.stackup.dev/campaign_page/enabling-payments-with-circle
Not every StackUp quest is worth the effort, but this one seems really easy. Itâll walk you through how to use APIs and create a basic web app. The first 3 quests are already up. So far, this one seems pretty basic for anyone who is decently-technical. You donât have to have prior dev knowledge.
Also, there is a monetary reward for completing quest. The rewards are limited, so they can run out.
This is going to be long, sorry.
I think Iâve found an interesting mental model to describe the relationship between Ethereum and civil society, especially with respect to the (sometimes) irrational hatred for the protocol.
I believe that as a public good, Ethereum is like a large public transportation project.
Indeed, every Western city that has decided to invest in such projects has faced absolutely incredible opposition. In Bordeaux, France, the tramway project caused protests, arguments, political riff raff - a non-negligible portion of the population swore that they would never use the tramway, because they were opposed to it from the beginning.
Now, two decades later, Bordeaux is a model for major European cities, and the opposition has disappeared. The ridership of the tramway is extraordinary, which suggests that even the most furious opponents have pounded on their pride and are using the service when they need it.
Itâs the same everywhere. When London wanted to reduce the number of cars in the city center, the anger of the citizens was incredible. Twenty years later, no one would go back. I experienced it personally in Montreal: the current mayor built bike lanes on major commercial arteries, which led opponents to predict the imminent death of downtown. Four years later, the cityâs liveliest thoroughfares are the ones that received new bike lanes, and absolutely no one is calling for a reversal - even the most rabid opponents.
This got me thinking. Why were these citizens so fiercely opposed to a public good? On what arguments was their opposition based?
I went back and read their open letters and angry tweets. Basically, the opponents were concerned that the loss of parking space would hurt business, create traffic congestion, and make the city ugly (!).
Literally none of this has happened. In fact, the exact opposite has happened.
Now, letâs ask ourselves why these arguments overrode the emotions of the opponents. My theory is that it is a âfailure of imaginationâ: an inability to imagine the world differently, to find creative solutions that are outside the current paradigm. They are stuck in the only model they know, and are unable to believe that another world is possible.
There is also, in my opinion, an element of ego. Many of the opponents were at the top of the social pyramid - wealthy businessmen, popular TV hosts, bourgeois, etc. The world as it is has been extremely generous to them, so why change it? Besides, the idea that a revolution could arise from outside the system that brought them into the world is frightening for them. It means that their privileges are not so solid after all.
I believe Ethereum is in a similar situation.
Our protocol is a public good. It belongs to its participants, and literally any human being can deploy an application on it. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea from the outside - have you seen what Vitalik looks like? Itâs impossible that a nerd like that, with no credibility in high society, has come up with something good. So his creation is necessarily a fraud, which must be fought
So these opinion leaders declare Ethereum an enemy to be fought, and the citizens used to following what the top of the pyramid tells them jump on the bandwagon, without asking themselves if their fight is really relevant.
TL;DR : Ethereum will (hopefully) follow the same trajectory as public transit projects.
Good question !
As I understand it, yes the seed will no longer be useful for normal operation:
BUT you would still need it for:
Some of my own research on SEC vs BUSD:
The New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) has told Paxos to stop making its own version of BUSD (a digital currency) âas a result of several unresolved issues related to Paxosâ oversight of its relationship with Binance in regard to Paxos-issued BUSD.â
Paxosâ BUSD product is related to, but separate from, Binanceâs self-issued Binance-pegged BUSD. Binanceâs self-issued BUSD, which is not directly regulated by NYDFS, is independently wrapped and issued by the crypto exchange on blockchains beyond Ethereum. In other words, Binance can take a single Paxos-issued BUSD, create an analogous BUSD on another blockchain (like Binanceâs own blockchain, for example), and freeze a corresponding Paxos-issued BUSD. âThe Department has not authorized Binance-Peg BUSD on any blockchain, and Binance-Peg BUSD is not issued by Paxos.â
So the issue here is not âtrueâ BUSD issued by Paxos. The problem is that Binance was sneakily issuing alternative unregulated BUSD on itâs own blockchain and others, and passing them off as the real, regulated, Ethereum based BUSD issued by Paxos.
Paxos has told its customers that it will end its relationship with Binance for BUSD. The DFS is watching Paxos closely to make sure it can handle redemptions properly, following new safety rules. Itâs important to know that Paxos was allowed to make BUSD on the Ethereum blockchain, but Binance-Peg BUSD is not approved or made by Paxos. There are no restrictions from the DFS for New York companies to list or trade the existing Paxos-issued BUSD.
Looks to me like Binance is to blame here, SEC is just trying to clean up their mess.
Sources:
https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/alerts/Paxos_and_Binance
https://paxos.com/2023/02/13/paxos-will-halt-minting-new-busd-tokens/
Regulatory news aside, Iâve just had a thought. Stakewise v3 would allow node operators to set up vaults with whitelisted addresses for allocators. This in theory allows us to set up vaults where only holders of EVMavericks/EIPandas/etc. are allowed to deposit ETH into. Iâm sure there are others here like myself who have overallocated on the hardware for our own staking rigs or have extra bandwidth. If I were to use swise I would probably set up multiple vaults if I didnât have to provide any collateral to do so. A vault or two to stake for âmembersâ who canât or wonât solo stake free of commission, then however many public vaults I want to run with a commission. This could be an interesting way for communities to drive value to their NFT Collections.
Edit: SWISE staking taking a share of the fees will probably factor into how feasible this is
Hereâs Genslerâs latest chokepoint attempt:
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-30
Hereâs two of his commissioners calling out his bullshit:
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-statement-custody-021523
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/uyeda-statement-custody-021523
Hereâs a statement from the blockchain association on it
https://nitter.snopyta.org/BlockchainAssn/status/1625957398077734913
And hereâs a good thread from Jake Chervinsky on it
https://nitter.snopyta.org/jchervinsky/status/1625947639773552641
Consider donating to crypto lobbying groups this year if you have the means and care about the future of this industry in the US.
Announcements
Ethereum
$1541
0.071
BREAKING NEWS: According to the official Bitcoin Core release notes, the upcoming v23.0 will now allow users to attach files to bitcoin transactions. These attached files will be stored in the segregated witness data of the chain.
Documentation,
Blockchain accommodation,
Build generation.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
By now youâve probably heard that last week was the Edelweiss Interop Workshop (the successor to the Amphora Interop), where Ethereumâs core devs spent a week together in the mountains to work on withdrawals, 4844 (aka proto-danksharding) and EOF.
I was invited to join due to my work on the Protocol Guild, and - even though it still feels like a dream - I wanted to share my experience, especially as someone without a technical background.
Was the workshop a success? Absolutely. To quote a core dev, âwe left with a flawless Capella/Shanghai forkâ, and there was a 4844 testnet with all but one client team! 4844 in July? đ
Iâll admit I was INCREDIBLY nervous going into this event, I couldnât sleep properly for days in advance - I was literally going to meet the majority of my heroes, and I was 100% going to be the dumbest person in the room at all times.
Well, I can happily confirm that âyou should never meet your heroesâ does NOT apply to Ethereumâs core protocol contributors. These are some of the most interesting (and surprisingly funny) people Iâve ever met, and even though there was a lack of diversity, they came from all over the world, with all sorts of different backgrounds. And despite the fact that the price of ETH is never discussed on ACD calls, I can confirm that Ethereumâs core devs are bullish: I heard more than one conversation about ultra sound money, and RatioGang was also strongly represented! Iâm an introvert, but everyone was so incredibly welcoming and kind, I never had any issues talking to people.
Overall, the passion these individuals have for Ethereum is genuine and contagious, and I feel more confident than ever in Ethereumâs ability to execute its roadmap while staying aligned to its values of decentralization, openness and long-term thinking.
Other highlights included organizing a core dev run one morning, and as a pretty hardcore privacy enthusiast, I even had the pleasure of giving privacy tips to Vitalik! Oh and there was that one time that Danny Ryan wasnât allowed at dinner because he was wearing flip flops đ
Iâll end with one note of encouragement for those who need it: if I can end up at this kind of event, then so can you. To quote Danny Ryan, âdoors are wide open at Ethereumâ. My âdoorâ was the Protocol Guild booth at Devcon Bogota, where I asked Trent and Tim if they needed any operational help with the Guild, and turns out they did! (For the introverts, I passed by the booth 3-4 times before I gathered up the nerve to talk to them - donât let shyness gatekeep your passions!). Now I spend my time coordinating / helping with the Guildâs v2 architecture upgrade, fundraising and marketing, all without a technical background.
This comment is already much longer than I expected, so Iâll end it here. TLDR: everything good about Ethereum is reflected in its core devs, and the barriers to entry are probably lower than you think!
Unclear Tax Treatment for Staking (USA): Centralization Vector?
Let me explain. Retail has a choice:
- Staking on, say, Coinbase and it prepares and sends you the requisite tax form every year. You forego a small percentage of your staking rewards in exchange for this service, and you must entrust your ETH with a regulated custodian (centralization risk); or
- per current IRS position, solo stakers must record revenue for each attestation (every 6 min), for each block produced (random) and tips/MEV (random). There is a valid legal argument for staking rewards to be taxed when sold (not when received), but the IRS has dismissed it - https://www.proofofstakealliance.org/12423-posa-response-to-irs-stance-on-staking. So what does this mean in practice.
If you think I just made the case for LSDs, then you understand the problem. Maybe this can easily fixed with more sophisticated tax software? WE NEED TO LOBBY FOR A CHANGE IN THE IRSâs TREATMENT OF STAKING REWARDS FOR SOLO STAKERS.
Note: Iâm not a member of the PoS Alliance and not a tax lawyer or CPA, just a random dude who pays his taxes and truly believes in decentralization and the transformational potential of the Ethereum network.
Iâve been known to come off kind of negative about the state of roll-ups. I do think that long-term they are the absolute best way to scale blockchains. Justin Drake the other day blew the minds of all participants of Bankless Bullcase for Ethereum by saying that the synchronous composability between zk rollups is such that different different rollups can combine their liquidity into a single pool and that Danksharding does not break that composability. Yet the key is long-term. Optimism, the oldest optimistic rollup, has not yet gotten to fraud proofs and neither has Arbitrum. And ZK is a much much more complex technology that requires highly skilled mathematically skilled developers to implement and will roll out slower at least because there is much more potential for bugs (although Justin Drake said Ethereum research team recently figured out how to add âtraining wheelsâ to a rollup). I think this tweet from Scroll zkEVM account is telling about where we are.
I am not saying this to be a downer, but to say that we have to have realistic expectations. Big announcements for âmainnetâ of this or that rollup or some new improvement to one are galore and sometimes I feel like they are borderline disingenuous. I understand their teams - they reach significant personal milestones and they want to share. But a secure decentralized general-puprose rollup of any kind seems to be behind the horizon for now.
Hey fellas, wanted to share something we put together recently at defi saver - a dedicated page for various leveraged ETH staking options that you can check out at: https://app.defisaver.com/recipes/leveraged-staking
We added support for both Aave v3 and the new WETH-based deployment of Compound v3 in the past two weeks and both offered new interesting options for leveraging LSDs vs ETH for amplified staking yield, so we thought this made sense.
For now you can find different (w)stETH/ETH options across Aave v2, v3 and CompV3-WETH in there, as well as the cbETH/ETH combo available in Compound (which is at net negative yield atm because of high pool utilisation).
Next: weâll have a new Morpho-Aave integration live, and after that we expect to see rETH added to Aave v3 on the mainnet *and* wstETH added to Aave v3 on Optimism. So you can definitely expect to see a growing number of options there in the coming weeks and months.
Btw, if you check it out, weâd love to hear what else we could add, so please donât hesitate. I also posted an alternative rundown on this on twitter / nitter (nitter isnât loading this for me atm, did twitter already kill it? :/)
Maybe some hope afterall for us Gemini Earn users. u/jtnichol
Email from Gemini:
Hi there,
Today, Gemini reached an agreement in principle with Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis), Digital Currency Group, Inc. (DCG), and other creditors on a plan that provides a path for Earn users to recover their assets. This agreement was announced in Bankruptcy Court today.
This plan is a critical step forward towards a substantial recovery of assets for all Genesis creditors. In addition, Gemini will be contributing up to $100 million more for Earn users as part of the plan, further demonstrating Geminiâs continued commitment to helping Earn users achieve a full recovery.
We have been working around the clock since November 16, 2022 to reach this milestone. We greatly appreciate your support and patience during this time. It has allowed us to maximize our efforts on your behalf. There is still much work to be done to complete this process, including further due diligence of Genesis financials and judicial approval of this plan, but we are confident that we now have a framework in place to execute on. Thank you for putting your trust in us during this challenging time.
We will continue to update you on how to participate in the recovery, key dates, information, and milestones as they unfold on the Earn status page.
Onward and Upward,
Team Gemini
Zhejiang testnet upgraded to Shapella, BLS changes and full & partial withdrawals processed
https://twitter.com/BarnabasBusa/status/1622975351520481280
And so it begins: Revolut, one of the more popular European neo-banks launches ETH staking (among other cryptos):
Edit: Neo-bank = Digital bank.
Official link: https://blog.revolut.com/staking/
Thanks!
I hope everyone has a great day. The current moment feels like we are caught in a wave of uncertainty due to economic and political constraints and factors but that does not mean you should lose faith in the premise of a decentralized monetary system or this community.
The doldrums of the crab should not deter you from your belief that ETH is the best technological investment at this time. This can obviously change in the future due to a new cryptocurrency/blockchain displacing ETH or quantum technology rendering our keys worthless. However it is my belief we are still on the ground floor of an emerging asset class. I remember when I used to tell my school friends to connect with me online but they didnât even have internet access because they were lacking dial up modems on their Windows 95 desktops. I found so many great communities online and made a great many number of friends on the âworld wide webâ before it became so commonplace as it is now. In the end I honestly do not know if the internet has been a net positive in light of the harmful effects of social media and the ease of scamming.
Sorry for the rambling, but my point is Ethereum and Ethfinance remind me of those mid to late 90s internet moments, which leads me to think that $10k USD is a ridiculously low valuation after withdrawals are enabled. The current period is in the Web 1 phase (Angelfire, Xanga, Yahoo Mail) and not even comparable to Web 2.0. We need some hopium so I am going to prognosticate a low of $15k USD in 2025. Buy now and sell never.
The concept of the âcarbon footprintâ was the brainchild of an advertising firm working for BP.
Same bucket as recycling trash that goes into the same land fills as general waste.
More important things to focus on individually, sorry for the jaded take.
đ Weâve reached 800 unique dooters!
Ethereum
$1644
0.070
Zero-Knowledge Proof: put simply is
and put in even simpler terms:
Do not bloat Bitcoin,
This chain is made for transfers,
The rest is a hack.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
Today we will be investigating the scam that took advantage of our friend who came here looking for help yesterday. My inital intent was to remove this campaign from the internet.
Though, as my investigation progressed, I became more and more conscious of the CFAA. I would not discourage anyone who understands the implications from picking up where I left off.
The Scam
Loading the domain in your browser will instantly prompt MetaMask to connect. Doing so leads to a fake DEX. You are given a 6 digit âIDâ that is displayed on the front page. Below is an example of one of their scam pages.
This is all over the place. USDT-ERC20, output in ETC. They provide various addresses to deposit your funds. At least one of the addresses provided does not even have an ETH balance â without any gas money, these fraudsters were never planning to return any deposits.
I clicked on the button that was a head with headphones, presumably the support button.
You can âEmallâ them at the displayed email address. Visiting the above domain in chrome showed the exact same front end as the scam weâre dealing with.
Frighteningly, they want you to âauthenticateâ.
They ask for your name and email address. Infinitely worse, they want pictures of any forms of your identification, as can be seen below.
Anyone who has completed this form should consider their identity stolen, and contact the appropriate authorities.
Offense
To begin to gain some understanding of a website, using âview page sourceâ in your browser is an extremely effective tool.
The highlighted text is Simplified Chinese for âpage loadedâ. Quite interesting.
As an attacker, this file upload form offers a massive attack surface. Of course, an experienced intruder knows what to do here.
But for any ethfinanciers who would like to learn more about this, here are some resources 123 or just ask ya boi.
When running a black box web application security test, /robots.txt is a critical file to access. This file is used by servers to request that web crawlers such as google not access/archive the list of URLs within the file.
As you might imagine, these often times contain URLs of relative importance. Whether crawlers choose to obey is completely up to them both technically, and legally(not legal advice).
The requested /robots.txt did not directly return any confidential files or directories. Though, it resulted in a fairly signficant information leak.
I unfortunately did not think to translate that Chinese text to English. Do we have any Chinese speaking ethfinanciers who can help out?
Notice that this error leaks a number of file paths on this server.
At the bottom we see that the server uses ThinkPHP 3.2.0, which happens to be vulnerable to a high severity issue.
I will not fix the URL provided in the description to fit this target simply for the safety of those who do not know exactly what theyâre doing. Be very careful before landing yourself in federal prison.
When learning to attack a system, one thing that has to be reinforced is the idea of enumeration. I cannot find a link to an article that accurately articulates what I wish to convey. I would describe it is as the art of testing ideas, taking notes of oddities, and learning everything you can about your target system.
Hereâs an example. Screenshots were not taken, but I found that files requested that lack the the extension â.phpâ resulted in the same error shown in /robots.txt. Is it a vulnerability? No. Is it worth noting if you wish to gain a thorough understanding of your target? Yes.
Iâve seen lots of examples of security researchers bringing down scam websites without facing prosecution, but a number of things made me hesitant in this case.
The true ip address of the scammers is protected by Cloudflare. Finding the ip address of servers behind Cloudflare is an eternal challenge for attackers.
https://scrapeops.io/web-scraping-playbook/how-to-bypass-cloudflare/ seems to be extremely comprehensive and up to date. I tried every technqiue short of signing up for a service that requires an API key. No results, the following provides a fair explanation for that.
As /u/REALJohnBMacLemore previously noted, the website was only created a few months ago. Thats always suspicious. What about the domain listed as the support email address?
This domain is hosted by Alibaba US. That they dont even provide an abuse contact speaks volumes.
In my brief enumeration efforts, I visisted /index.php, which redirected me to /Pc/Index/index.html.
The HTML does not render properly, but this is completely different than what we were dealing with before.
At the bottom of the page we see another support email address. The highlighted text seems to show that the listed website(NOTE: not the scam domain in question) might have been a real company at some point? The registration number certainly does not comply with the new Chinese business registration numbering system, which was in full effect by 2018.
Lets use https://whois.domaintools.com again to find some information about this newly discovered forex exchange domain.
The domain name has been used for at least 16 years.
This scam seems to be masquerading as a possibly real, but defunct Chinese forex exchange. Also doubling as a crypto exchange, depending on their target.
Attribution has always been a touchy subject in the realm of cyber security, with that type of debate usually reserved for large-scale nation state attacks.
When we consider the prevalent usage of the Simplified Chinese language, a Chinese PHP framework, and Alibaba hosting, Im confident in declaring this a campaign of Chinese origin. Of course, given the lack of sophistication on the part of the scammers, and the lack of geopolitical implications, this is virtually meaningless.
Stay safe, RTPP
Kinda crazy with all these announcements this week from big tech companies and their crypto involvement
I wrote up a little thread on some of the developments at these big tech companies. Would love to hear ethfinanceâs thoughts!
For those of you that are regular readers of Logrisâ work and do not know, Logris and I (DoubtStarsAreFire) run Tokenomics Explained together. We are partners in all things. Family, life, the website, and now our consulting business. In the beginning, I would minimize, qualify, and categorize all of the work that we have put into our site as, âoh we run a blogâ. Probably because when we started Tokenomics Explained we didnât have a plan. Increasingly, we do, or at least ambition.
Listen to the Layer Zero Podcast #4 from the EV Mavericks to hear us talk more about Tokenomics Explained, Hodlercon, the Double Logris and our plans for Logris Vaults! Ping us if youâd like to join our BUIDL team at EthDenver.
I felt like we could do a better job explaining the genesis of the blog. Because if you listen we kind of stumble over the answer.
Why am I posting now? The blog has mainly been a space for Logrisâ writing. The main reason that Iâm posting is I joined the Bankless Academy writers guild. Iâll be posting content on the website for the next four weeks. Iâm calling these contributions Stargazing. There were other options for locations to post my thoughts like Mirror or Medium. I really did think about posting there. But, our blog seemed like the best place. Stargazing will be my additions to âLogris the Blogâ.
Visit https://tokenomicsexplained.com/the-story-of-tokenomics-explained/ to see the whole post.
Below is a short excerpt.
Iâve always heard it said, âwrite what you knowâ so for a first topic answering the question âHow did Tokenomics Explained start?â seems appropriate. Logris and I have been asked this exact question several times in interviews or by friends. That is usually a good sign you should write something down.
First, at heart my husband is a writer. When I met him, it wasnât something I knew about him. I just thought he was a cute programmer boy that I was meeting to play board games. Itâs taken years for me to come to the realization that he is a writer as well a programmer. Iâm starting here because it gets to the heart of why we began this venture. He became interested in crypto because it combined his interests of computer science, game theory, and economics. Just like you should write about what you know, you should invest in what you know. Back in 2017, most of the social media about crypto was on reddit. This eventually led him to ethtrader and from there to ethfinance. Me, I was along for the ride. He would talk at me about crypto and I would blink at him and say, âthose were wordsâ.
I watched him ride the bull market of 2017 and then the crash. He survived the crypto winter. Eventually the food coin craze hit. All the while, Logris was riding the waves and I was following along or lurking in reddit parlance. Based on my experience and observations in my own house, I thought everyone was spending hours reading, researching, and writing their posts. Over the years, I have learned differently. Thank you reddit shit posters for disabusing me of this notion.
So why did we choose to make a website? In short, itâs Googleâs fault. Ever since Logris started investing in crypto in 2017, he was a daily visitor and poster to the subreddit. As you know, all the fun in ethfinance takes place in the Daily Discussion Thread. Over the years Logris had made some stellar posts⌠in the daily. But, Google doesnât index the daily. Top level posts are often reserved for announcements from protocols, highly regarded posts from the daily, or noobs that donât know any better.
Why is this important to the story?
TLDR: Itâs all because of Googleâs SEO.
For example: At some point in the past, you may have googled about a question you had. In the search results, there may have been a reddit post with the same question. Youâd click the link and find yourself directed to a subreddit about the topic, where knowledgeable people may have already responded to your exact or similar question.
Since most of the posts on ethfinance happen in the daily thread and not at the top level (as in the example), this content is invisible to Google.
Logris was amassing a treasure trove of content and often wanted to cite it when it became relevant again. This became more pertinent when he came up with the idea for the Double Logris. People started asking about it and wanting to read more about it. His ideas, content, and discussions were disappearing into the ether as it were. So, he started using Google drive to keep track for referral, which was ridiculous. To save time and just generally make the world a better place we decided to create a repository for his writings by making this site.
See the post for the rest of the story where I talk:
Hope this is an acceptable place to ask some questions both for the mods and regulars here.
Last spring I graduated from law school (here in sweden, my degree is an analogue to an LMM) and I wrote my âfinal paperâ on DAO and defi, from a company law and securities law perspective.
I recently saw and read that paper from /u/Pbrody (hope thatâs correct) and EY about how the âbestâ firm classification for DAOâs are as Co-operatives.
And so I thought maybe there would be some interest to see my own research that I spent 6 months on. (Tldr of my conclusion: âProperâ DAOs donât fit any current, swedish, firm classifications and are unable to fit in one even if they wanted to, and securities law is unable to in any way sanction or interactive with fully autonomous swapping protocols such as Uniswap)
So my questions are:
Cheers! I Love this community.
Edit: Thought I should add, I wrote it in english.
Editwo: Just posted it in todayâs daily: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/10oudh1/daily_general_discussion_january_30_2023/j6iwia0/
In yesterdayâs daily I asked about interest for sharing my âfinal exam paperâ from when I graduated law school last year. (After looking into it further, I believe the american term for it is something like âmasters research paperâ)
I got way greater of a response than I anticipated so Iâll be sharing it with you in this comment! I hope a mediafire link is allowed.
Just some heads up that the version Iâm linking you isnât the final handed-in version but the penultimate version so there will be some grammatical and spelling errors but nothing that should affect the content. This is so I donât run afoul of any academic policies about sharing examinated material through the wrong channels. (Should be fine, but donât wanna risk it)
https://www.mediafire.com/file/tyd530ryrjljst2/DAO_and_DEFI_legal_analysis.pdf/file
If anyone has any constructive thoughts I genuinely would love to hear them!
In a comment in response to this one Iâll be posting the âFinal Remarksâ portion, for those that just wants my final take and donât care to trudge through the rest.
EVMavericks Weekly: previous weeks & more!
Other info:
So my wife is working on a post this week on web3 education. On that topic I observe there is a labor to impact mismatch between how web3 education functions today. I see too many tutorials on the basics. Each org like BlueDAO, Bankless Academy, CollectiveShift, BoysClub, etc has their own curriculum. Some of it is even pay gated. Itâs a lot of replicated effort and unless itâs paired with a way of access people outside our ecosystem itâs having no impact. On the other end thereâs highly technical documents on exactly how the Beacon Chain works or the scaling strategy for Ethereum or frontier takes like /u/liberosist writes. These are written for the dozens of us living at the edge of the frontier. In the middle is a desert of content. Once you get past that entry level content you get chucked into places like /r/cryptocurrency and good luck to you. Youâre excited by the potential of what you learnt in the entry level content but youâre not yet proficient enough to spot the scams. Everyone is passionately shilling you something and telling you why itâs the next great thing thatâs going to kill Ethereum etc. Basically, youâre someone elseâs exit liquidity.
It takes a full market cycle to wisen up. By the time you transition from tourist to settler youâve probably lost 90% of your investment into altcoins. Many donât stick around after that and those who leave form a moat of resentment in front of the Rabbit Hole. The abrupt cliff of learning material once you have a Metamask wallet loaded with some ETH is doing a disservice to our space. Itâs suddenly a space with no map and no Sherpa and you werenât taught spelunking. Itâs ultimately discouraging people from joining this space and slowing down the adoption of one of the most promising technologies humanity has ever produced.
In the last year Iâve written a bit more for this entry +1 skill level and a bit less on the frontier but anything I write tends to come off more as entry +3 regardless of my intent or else I donât find it interesting enough to write. My wife is better than me in this regard so I hope web3 does find a space for her to be an educator here. Anything else is a disservice to humanity.
As u/15kisFUD pointed out, the sentiment currently is neutral-ish, so itâs a good time to talk about things that everyone will laugh at in bull times or be depressed over in bear times. Now, both u/No_Fix_1183 and I got a ton of backlash (or as NoFix says, âgot crucifiedâ) over the last couple of days for broaching the inevitability of secular bear market for emerging markets, and how they typically happen on narratives years before actual adoption - but thereâs at least a few people now who are still interested. No one will listen when the bull comes around, so this is our chance. So, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a different topic.
When the ponzis spin back up and the mania happens, the ultrasoundmoney cult will be unbearably loud and youâll see all sorts of absurd projections around the burn, deflation and such. Some of you may remember I was skeptical of the numbers being thrown around in 2021 (having myself fallen for them earlier in 2020) - and even had a little debate with Justin Drake here. It may seem absurd now, but numbers like 20%-70% staking APR, 5% deflation were widely accepted, based off clearly unsustainable usage.
Instead, it would be prudent to form a base case now, and use those numbers instead in the future. The first observation youâll see that in ETH terms, total transaction fees outside of manias are actually relatively constant - which is a big narrative violation of the up-only rhetoric you saw in 2021 and will see again in the next bull. (Yes, the mechanisms have changed since EIP-1559, but itâs in the same order of magnitude) [PS, edit: other data sources like Coin Metrics do account for EIP-1559; however, as I mentioned originally, itâs in the same order of magnitude] The $ tx fees are still going up, of course, with a larger economy and higher ETH price. But remember - burn rates, staking rates, MEV are all denominated in ETH, so it doesnât matter.
Itâs very likely the type of fees in 2020 (when it peaked) and 2021 will never be seen again - for the simple fact that thereâs orders of magnitude more blockspace available across L2s and alt-L1s - and even more coming with EIP-4844. Nevertheless, the âpremiumâ ponzis and âluxuryâ status symbol type NFTs will always be on L1 - so weâll definitely see huge increases in gas prices.
Anyway, getting back to the base case, and what actual sustainable revenue looks like - as mentioned above, it has been relative constant over the years. This comes with the implication that, actually, staking rewards are going to be relatively constant - in the ~1.5%-2.5% range for priority fees + ~1% range for MEV. Meanwhile, issuance is going to reduce over time, so we can safely conclude the long-term staking rewards are going to be somewhere in the ~5% range. Coincidentally, at current staking rate, we should expect very mild deflation, but as more is staked this will revert back to mild inflation.
Now, some will argue âbut there are whole new usecases that will come onlineâ. Sure, and fees will go up over time in $ times, but as 7 years of data suggests, not in ETH terms. Also, as mentioned above, thereâs orders of magnitude more space available on L2s going forward, who will pay relatively negligible fees to L1 post EIP-4844 as thereâll be a dedicated data fee market. So why wonât L1 fees collapse? Because L1 will remain the premiere execution layer - even the perfect L2 wonât be quite as secure and Lindy, and the venue for high-value settlements for the foreseeable future.
Tl;dr: staking rewards are likely going to remain the ~5% APR range long term and inflation will probably tend towards being mildly positive, so when you see absurd projections based on unsustainable mania burns during the bull - remain resolute and sell your ETH to those who are aping in thinking 10%-20% yields and 2% deflation is sustainable.
My final âdo it while neutral sentiment lastsâ rant - Iâve used the phrase âmarkets are forward-lookingâ often. Based on the backlash Iâve received in the last few days, I sense that people misunderstand it as meaning âinvestors can predict the futureâ. Itâs kind of the opposite - in the bull market people will price in a utopia that may be years away; likewise in a bear market people will price in the doom. We have seen this multiple times in crypto. But what we (arguably) havenât seen is a secular peak where the wider market with a majority of institutions/HNWIs will price in a mature Ethereum 5-10 years from now. Itâs very wrong to think ETH price is up-only until âEthereumâs vision is delivered and there is mass adoptionâ - markets have never worked like that, especially emerging markets. There are countless examples to look at with very few exceptions - but the most obvious and relevant one to study is, of course, the dot-com bubble. They priced in the final form of the internet way back in 2000, which took till the 2010s to actually deliver - and yes, many internet companies took 10 years to revisit their 2000 highs. Now, some will argue that Ethereum is not a company - but that doesnât matter, ETHâs value is derived by market forces, and crypto markets follow the same behaviour.
Special guest James Wigginton joins us to discuss DAO/COOP configurations and the benefits over an LLC structure.
Phiz, if you can see this, youâre in yesterdayâs daily. WAKE UP!
Settlement layer,
Immune to any slayer,
Best blockchain player.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Hey friends! As you might have noticed from the many comment threads these past 2-3 days, the Ethereum Foundation has been running (since the beginning of this week and for approximately two more months) something called the KZG Ceremony.
MY noob-friendly eli5 is that this super-easy-to-participate and open-to-everyone ceremony will contribute (via super-fancy-behind-the-scene math) the necessary randomness for the trust assumptions of the upcoming EIP4844, aka ProtoDanksharding.
(The official explanation is: "This ceremony, sometimes called a âTrusted Setupâ, will generate a structured reference string (SRS) which is needed for the commitments to work. An SRS is secure as long as at least one participant in the ceremony successfully conceals their secret.")
The website of the Ceremony has plenty of information on all things ceremony, however, I wanted to share with you all an đ§đĽ excellent podcast episode đĽđ§ with a conversation between Carl Beekhuizen & Trenton Van Epps from the Ethereum Foundation and the host of Epicenter.tv, Friederike Ernst.
The topics the three of them touch on, are:
I certainly do not understand 99% of the math, but this conversation really helped me understand the basic ideas behind the whole process! Enjoy!
Public accountability update on my staking journey w/ u/benido2030
After an appreciated pep-talk last week, I took a few hours this week to continue to familiarize myself with Linux. Namely the terminal - found a random YouTube video to just follow along with and type through some basic commands. I think this has been helpful so far because my first attempt at all this I just jumped into a staking guide with literal zero understanding what was going on with the terminal. It was an unnecessary stressor knowing one deviation from a guide and Iâm screwed.
I am hoping to get a little more familiar with Linux in general before I go further. So if anyone has ideas / videos of things that helped them when they were starting Iâd love to see them. I noticed the CoinCashew Guide has a lot of security best practice type things I need to familiar myself with, so may start focusing on that stuff.
If anyone cares (and to in general share back links myself) someone here gave me this link (sorry, it was awhile ago) â https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php â which was a nice starter read and this was the video I followed along with â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ii48qYBxA â which had a lot of similiar stuff but was easy to follow in video. Both super basic, but I canât stress enough how much of a newbie I am with Linux⌠so it was a comfy start.
Iâd also like to keep this quasi-weekly thing going, so if anyone else is trying going down their staking journey feel free to jump in.
I think the form of NFTs ripe for the next bull cycle will be different. Just as web2 innovated on web1 by adding interactivity, I think weâll see the same occur for the next wave of NFTâs. Gone will be the hype for profile pictures and weâll transition towards NFTs with steady demand and which produce revenue streams.
I donât think the infrastructure will be there next bull market for real world asset NFTs like car or house deeds. Governments already have systems for those and even if it would reduce their costs that isnât a metric they are optimizing for. So, Iâm looking at informatic use cases of the blockchain that can remain in the digital realm to the point of delivery.
Chief among these are live events or NFT ticketing. Live events occur on a regular basis and the total addressable market cap here makes the art market blush. I particularly like this use case because it serves everyone better except the existing parasitic middlemen.
Just from a technical feature perspective, NFTs provide a provenance trail. If you gate NFT transfers to KYCâd customers then the venues which switch to this system can actually know who attended their events. This is obviously useful information which is lost now and it enables entirely new pathways to engagement between performers and attendees. For example there could be exclusive ticket sale rounds to whitelisted addresses based on previous event attendance.
Additionally there are trust and corruption issues with current ticketing approaches such as corrupt release mechanisms and opaque service charge fees. At the very least having the sale logic on the blockchain can add transparency and equal access to the process. Protocols like POAP and Funfair have already demonstrated provably fair lottery mechanisms when demand outstrips supply. Alternatively more market-like initial auction systems have been demonstrated by newer tokens like Gearbox which used 0xCider. Blockchains are demonstrably excellent at executing a provably fair, transparent process.
As to fees, a lot of the service fee charged by Ticketmaster actually goes to middlemen or the venue. Itâs how they were able to grow to their current size: they stopped treating the attendee as the customer. There is a market opportunity here to reduce Ticketmasterâs cut of the fees though. That is still substantial. Ticketmasterâs revenue was $12.3B in 2022. Itâs a rather perfect opportunity for some Defi mullet and weâre already seeing it start to happen even from Ticketmaster themselves[1][2][3]. This is where things like Raribleâs multi-chain protocol would really shine as it is fully indexed and is made to allow numerous frontends, dial their own parameters, and for people to pick whatever chain they want.
Finally, unlike a normal ticket stub or plain digital record an NFT ticket can be associated with extra metadata (even after the event). A system like Ticketmaster could add some type of history system so you can view a collection of your previous events and event highlight reels for each but they havenât in 20 years. By contrast, this is much more normal for NFTs already. Integrate this into a digital picture frame and you can have a place on superfanâs wall that cycles through highlights of the favorite games theyâve attended or that lets them build a digital gallery in something like Decentraland and compete with other fans.
So, thereâs an opportunity here to improve the status quo for venues, performers, and attendees and the only one who stands to lose is a generally reviled middleman. I donât think weâll get as much push-back from the consumers here as weâll see from Gamefi. However, stuff will need to be built.
The UX for buying tickets needs to be tailored to buying tickets. Customers need to see the layout of the venue for the seats being sold, be shown the context of the event, and be offered pathways to deeper engagement with that eventâs community. All of these are UI centric changes that donât require much contract code and are ripe for innovation. Adjacent to the chain, the NFT metadata stored on IPFS could be standardized for easier integration into navigation and viewing software.
Nortonâs âLifelockâ password manager accounts hacked in credential stuffing attack.
Credential stuffing is where an attacker uses usernames and passwords obtained in a previous hack to access other accounts. Phase 4 of my guide addresses this btw.
Stay safe out there!
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/10j5dkj/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023/j5mes6h/
macOS/iOS bros! Stop watching SuperPhiz reruns and update now! Moooaar security updates! Moooaar kernel vulnerabilities patched! macOS 12, macos 13, iOS 15, 16 and ⌠iOS 12!? Yeah⌠12. Weird. So if youâre still using an iPhone 3GS, update it too.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
Edit: Oh and macOS 13 got Yubikey support. About fâing time Apple!
Mainnet shadow fork 1 finalising, according to Marius from the Geth team. đĽł
Assuming devnets run for another month, and then the two public testnets are spaced 3 weeks apart, that would put end March Shanghai. If devnets are run for two weeks and then the two public testnets each spaced two weeks apart, Shanghai date would be early March. Either way Shanghai in March seems increasingly likely (Just my own guessing, nothing official from the core devs on a date yet)
Iâm a long time hodler. At the moment I have most of my ETH staked with CB. With withdrawals coming soon. I figured now is a good time to explore solo staking. Since Iâm not tech savvy. I feel solo staking is a little out of my comfort zone. I looked into using dapenode and rocketpool. After looking at tons of videos and guides. I decided to try the rocketpool route. I followed this guys YouTube video.
I was able to follow along pretty good and now Iâm officially running a node on rocketpools testnet. Iâm surprised itâs actually working. With that said. I feel like Iâm missing so much understanding of what is really happening with my node. All I know is I followed a bunch of copy and paste code into the terminal and got it to work. Did I secure my device enough? Did I set up ssh that I have no idea how to use? Is my firewall setup? What is my computer going to do when I lose power? At this moment Iâm a very dangerous eth staker. Thereâs so much I need to learn in order to trust myself with staking real eth. I wish there was some kind of staking class I could attend. Iâm going to keep learning as much as I can until withdrawals are enabled. Once that happens my eth will go back to the safety of my hardware wallet until I feel 100% comfortable staking on my own. Thanks to everyone of you that help guys/gals like myself. Cheers.
Network density,
Half a million validate,
For security.
Disclaimer: This is a long-winded reflective post. Skip to the end if you would prefer a TL;DR.
Now is the perfect time to reflect on your own personal wins and regrets from the bull market just gone. Itâs quiet, fundamentals are showing strong with Ethereumâs strength above $1,000 and a bottom feels like it may have formed. Donât @ me if I jinxed it.
Personally, Iâd give myself a 5/10. Overall I did ok.
The Good:
My early bull run strategy was good. I sold the last of my Bitcoin after its initial run to $30K/40K as the first part of taking profits. I splashed out on a couple of things Iâd been wanting for a while and I diversified into to physical assets as well as leaving some aside for paying tax (just not quite enough in the end đ). Also, losses which will be covered in âThe Uglyâ were kept to a responsible (enough) % of my stack and I did not double down or try to gamble back shitcoin losses. Losses were accepted and rational portfolio allocations were stuck to. Once the shitcoins went to Goblintown, my precious ETH stack was left untouched.
Finally, I managed to hit my 32 ETH target and run a solo validator node. It was a lot of learning for me but solo staking is very satisfying and worth the effort.
The Less Good:
I sold all of my shitcoins and was full ETH by the time the bear market kicked in to 5th gear. This allowed me to fund quitting my job temporarily to go to Hodlercon and do a long delayed trip with my family in the UK. I should have sold these earlier but I managed to shake these bags before we entered Goblintown.
The Bad:
I had a cash out plan and my target was not hit as I was hoping. My cash out plan evolved after an event I will cover in the next section. The bad thing is that part of my target was hit and I did nothing about it.
The Ugly:
35% of my stack was lost to shitcoins in 2020 and DeFi coins in 2021. Overconfidence from picking out Chainlink in the 2018 bear and then selling the top in late 2019/early 2020 contributed to this greatly. It was a humbling experience but also, unfortunately this loss of 35% of my stack was the reason why my cash out target was not hit. I had a set $ amount I wanted to sell (which would be hit at around a $4.5K ETH) or when a bunch of my favourite indicators on https://www.LookIntoBitcoin.com flashed sell. After losing the 35%, the cash out amount crept up since I had less ETH to sell (it went up to about a $9K ETH). Due to the elongated nature of the late bull run, less than half of the sell indicators I was following flashed sell. I tried to time the peak too close. As a result, the peak I expected never came and I never sold when I should have.
Learnings:
So what have I learned and what can you learn from me? My first piece of advice is never to double down to re-coup losses. After I lost my shitcoin stack I was tempted to double down and I had other coins lined up. But guess what, those coins did terribly. I would have only lost more ETH and wouldnât be solo staking today. Set aside a portion of your stack to leave invested in ETH for the long run. Do not waver from this allocation. If you find that hard, maybe staking is for you. A 16 ETH rETH minipool or 32 ETH solo node cannot be partially sold. Itâs a great way to keep assets locked in for your long term investment thesis, also earn a yield and of course help to decentralise Ethereum!
Secondly, I think itâs important to stick to a cash out plan. Furthermore, I think laddering out is better too. Itâs easy to want to hit a target but this market is too unpredictable to rely on such a hit or miss strategy. Everyone is different, so I donât think this strategy suits everyone but if you are someone with a cash out plan, Iâd recommend sticking to it and Iâd also recommend having multiple targets over a single cash out price.
My final piece of advice is to stay humble and stay cautious. Now that I have experienced the feeling of winning a big bet on one of just 2 altcoins to go on a big run up last bear market and subsequently thinking Iâm a genius and can do it again, I see this attitude everywhere. Look at Do Kwon or any of the has beens last bull run. They think they can make a comeback and are trying to build up their redemption arcs. They got lucky. Then they got overconfident and greedy. Then the market turned and their shenanigans that they thought was proof they were geniuses revealed that they really arenât any better than the rest of us. In fact, theyâre worse. At least I kept my losses limited and didnât keep leveraging up. Keeping my bullishness and self-confidence in check is the only reason I didnât lose it all. There were definitely points where I wanted to go all in on my shitcoins but I didnât because I knew it was irresponsible.
Anyway, I apologise for the long-winded nature of this post. I donât really have the time today to flesh it out into a nice concise ordered write up. I guess Iâll leave you with a TL;DR instead.
TL;DR:
hardware wallet is a MUST if you have more than $2k in crypto and you are not cashing that out right now and leaving.
Transfer your valuable NFTs from hot/burner to COLD (hardware) wallet. While Gas is still quite cheap at night US time/morning EU time. You can bundle (x20 items) thru OS. Yes, you might end up paying like 0.01-0.02e per transfer.
Another good practice is to use revoke . cash âs application and also remove permissions from time to time.
I know to most people itâs a given but I keep seeing people getting hacked here and there and Iâd rather remind again. And your not garbage NFTs are valuable to! so remember that. Trust me, it might suck and feel like unnecessary investment and use of money transferring assets but youâd be happy you still have all your stuff cause for non-hardware wallets itâs not IF itâs WHEN youâll lose it all so act accordingly.
The following will serve as an extremely abbreviated version of my research into the revoke.cash browser extension, focusing as narrowly on privacy as I can.
Obviously weâre taking a different direction here, as this is clearly not a wallet. However, I think its fair to say that this one is particularly relevant to my ethfinanciers.
Revoke.cash was downloaded directly from the chrome webstore
Starting off, the extensionâs privacy tab on the chrome webstore page looks good. No data collection is always good to see.
Immediately upon installation we see this POST request to Amplitude, an analytics platform.
There are a few identifiers, including âuser_idâ, âdevice_idâ, âsession_idâ, and âinsert_idâ. Not so great.
And the keen reader may notice the fields âinitial_referrerâ, and âinitial_referring_domainâ. The values here are âEMPTYâ, but I take massive issue with this in the case that they are ever used to collect that data.
If theyâre going to be collecting your referer header, the least they could do is misspell it as the HTTP spec does haha.
I will go into how the extension functions in a more extensive revision, which will include a review of some crypto scams, and a taste of malware analysis.
But this single request to Amplitude got me wondering what happens when I visit https://revoke.cash using my everyday use firefox installation, with only uBlock Origin and NoScript enabled.
Here we see a request to hxxps://scripts.simpleanalyticscdn.com/latest.js - An obvious tracker, BOOM instantly killed by NoScript
Worth noting that I did not see a request to this domain when using the extension.
Here we see a javascript file trying attempting to force my browser to generate POST requests to 127.0.0.1:8545
Either way, killed by NoScript.
Maybe theres some extension functionality that its trying to interact with?
On the bottom right of the page you can see those connections are refused, even with the extension in use. Odd.
Back to firefox, we see a request to amplitude just as generated by the extension. However, this time uBlock killed that attempt.
I keep harping on the fact that by installing extensions, you allow them to completely bypass protections such as NoScript and uBlock Origin.
Be careful out there, folks
gm gentlemen,
a quick reminder about the KZG ceremony: https://ceremony.ethereum.org/
You can help by contributing your randomness to the whole thing. The more people participate the better, as it only takes one honest person to make the whole thing a success.
Itâs really easy and fast to do. All you need is an Ethereum wallet address with more than 3 transfers, and then itâs just writing some random text and signing a bunch of messages and youâre already done. The whole process takes <2 minutes.
Youâll get a POAP too, so get going and help secure & scale Ethereum! This will be used for the danksharding implementation later on.
To make an analogy, your posts about security analysis, and potentially teaching us to do those kinds of investigations ourselves, play the same role in the broader ecosystem that fraud proofs do on optimistic rollups. If you start with a trusted system, and the system is honest, then all is well and good, but if theyâre not honest, and nobody is checking on them, then they can get away with anything. For such a system to become trustless, you need a sufficient number of capable fraud-checkers who are checking often enough such that thereâs a near-certainty someone would catch malfeasance if it were present. The more people capable of checking ecosystem tools to see if theyâre doing bad things, the more trustless the ecosystem becomes. Itâs really crucial
Beautifully put. To this end, I will be putting together a guide detailing exactly the steps I have been taking, along with resources, and assistance wherever needed. The vast majority of the process is non-technical, just critical thinking with an almost cynical mindset haha.
I previously announced that I will be releasing a more in-depth review of revoke.cash, where this extension will also be used as we explore a variety of interesting crypto scams.
If youâre interested in learning more about infosec in a very easy to digest fashion, I would recommend checking that out when it is released.
I have also promised an analysis of Fire.
No commitment to any particular order can be made, but these are all on my plate.
This is last call for requests, before I leave this up to the community to continue.
Hey Fam
There was a comment a few days ago in the daily about me tweeting about JPEGs, and also the frequent âBankless has too many ads!â Take
I typed out a pretty thorough response, as itâs stuff I hear a lot and also I think is shortsighted. Since the comment was 3 days ago, itâs buried to the depths of Reddit, so I wanted to draw attention to it here:
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/108x76j/daily_general_discussion_january_11_2023/j4d8cqf/
Would love yâallâs thoughts / feedback.
Love you guys
So a little something regarding how my staking experience is going.
Prior to the merge I was running Geth on one SSD and Lighthouse on another SSD.
My attestation performance was fairly good, consistently around 97-98%. Back then you didnât rely on the execution client for attesting, just for block proposals, so it wasnât a huge deal if it couldnât keep up.
Coming up to the merge I moved away from Geth and installed Nethermind on the same drive as Lighthouse, and on the other drive installed Teku-Besu (As a fallback pair).
Now with both a consensus client and execution client on the same SSD, and an execution being a requirement, it canât quite keep up. Attestation performance is averaging around 93-94% and I am seeing the occasional message pop up in my logs stating that the execution engine is not in sync.
Iâve been putting off addressing this for the longest time⌠But I figure better now than never!
Iâve ordered an NVMe that has 10x the read/write speeds and 10x the IOPS of the current SSDâs I have. Hopefully in the next week I will get it and install it and move the primary pair (Lighthouse-Nethermind) across.
If anyone else has been getting poor attestation performance, this may be something to look into.
I wrote a long post about my learnings at the end of 2021. That was (in hindsight) after we had peaked and I think itâs just reasonable to update that post and include my 2022 learnings.
I have some goals for the next 24-36 months and hope that reflecting on my learnings will help me to make stuff happen. Will it be as easy as I think? Def not (but I also donât think it is as easy as it might sound here!). But I want to grow, improve, challenge myself, so we need goals to measure success :)
Free EVMavericks Tees for ETHDenver!
Hope everyone is pumped for the conference!
If you happen to be going and hold an EVM, we will be ordering EVMavericks tees free for anyone that wants one for the conference! (fyi, First come first serve, there will be a max # of tees ordered)
To sign up, just drop your size and pick up your tee at the conference (no doxxing): https://discord.com/channels/963992696387694592/1064925676479729
Weâll also get some laptop stickers made for anybody that wants one! (No EVM necessary)
There will also be a few ethfinance & evmaverick hang outs planned for ETHDenver, so be sure to check those out if youâre going! Details to come!
Greetings allâŚthereâs been great coverage on the Nightfall privacy announcement. Iâve got a consolidate list of the links we hit:
From my POV, a good day here. Made great progress getting everyone at EY on the same page. Much love to the EthFinance communityâŚ
Another night shift,
Review and merge pull requests,
The open-source gift.
The Braskyâs Strike Back Part II
Itâs been over 2 months since my wife lost her job and wanted to share an update. We had both found job opportunities on separate coasts of the US and weâre prepared to live apart for a few months so that we could find the income to keep the house and wait for something permanent to open up back home. I had even readied the house and advertised it for rental hoping to find a tenant while we were gone.
At the last minute we both found jobs in townâŚnot only did she get hired with full time employment but sheâll be making 20% more than her previous job!!! I had been watching our little one as my main trade is in construction and the real money is made on large industrial projects but requires traveling away from home. I had found a part time gig that worked well with our schedules but had to quit as I was going back on the road to work. I got a call right before leaving and a side hustle that I had tried to get started back in August has now just opened upâŚand Iâll be making more than double my previous income while still playing daddy day-care!!!
The last few months have definitely been a trial and has put a lot of stress on our marriage but we came out as better spouses and better positioned than before!! We had enough savings in case of emergencies and I was prepared to start selling my sweet sweet precious ETH if things got worse. We were able to not burn through everything and our ETH stack is still intact earning rewards!! Glad I can share this my ETH fam and anyone else going through the fire. Amazed to have a spouse who can get aggressive and when the bear bites we bite back.
Economist Eric Budish presents a new paper (video) showing skepticism regarding the cost of securing the Bitcoin network. The main criticism boils down to the fact that there is no trust in the system (trustless), in the sense that there is no âmemoryâ to build up trust. A miner is only trusted by spending computing resources right now, but does not get rewarded for building up a good reputation. He argues that although this is a perfectly fine model for security, it getâs very expensive. In the concluding remarks, Budish briefly discusses PoS and says that it could potentially be used in a better way.
I think his arguments for the cost of securing the Bitcoin network is interesting and probably valid (depending on what the attack looks like). People in crypto should not be arrogant and dismiss criticism, but instead try to understand all perspectives to be able to build better systems. Iâm not sure how trust in a decentralized system would look, or even if itâs a good idea (Any Layer0 player comments?). Also, PoS certainly have clear advantages: E.g., the cost of an attack is significantly larger, as the attacker risks losing the capital (not the case with mining). But if the capital required to secure the network needs to be way higher than the transactional value of the network, that could be an obstacle for growth. Are there any attempts to clearly work out the economics for PoS?
Edit:
Thanks for the comments and suggestions to listen to Justin Drake on this, will take a look!
I also found this quite intense twitter discussion on the subject: https://twitter.com/alexoimas/status/1525505965029830656
And this blog post: https://hugonguyen.medium.com/a-review-of-budishs-51-attack-theories-what-is-the-fair-price-of-an-old-asic-59a7dcf9ff94 which argues that the scenarios in Budish article are unrealistic. The author also argues PoW > PoS.
For the first time in my 6 years of crypto I am starting to seriously ponder: I do not actually get the âpointâ of bitcoin. Itâs unprofitable to mine it. It pays no yield if you already have it. It doesnât protect you from inflation. It needs a steady supply of greater fools during its cycle because its security costs scale with price (see: boom-bust curve). Its vocal supporters are cringe. Iâve always agreed that bitcoin is pristine collateral while ETH has a place as a programmable crypto asset but things have changed. Iâm at the point where the flippening is not a meme anymore - it is the guaranteed outcome of the supply/demand dynamics that we are witnessing now - just needs more time to play out. ETH is now the pristine collateral imo, and I donât see why in the future ETH canât have flipped Bitcoin multiple times.
I recorded a new Launch Pad episode with /u/sikhsoldiers. Jasper is an extremely popular member of the Rocket Pool community.
In the episode, we talk about how his early crypto journey had him spending time here in ethfinance, his path to the Rocket Pool community, and how he became Rocket Poolâs resident DeFi expect. At the end of the video, we do a run through of his paper âWhy Paradigm Was Wrong: How rETH Will Flip stETHâ.
You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/DwUQMZA9Jus
For those of you who donât know, Launch Pad is an interview series within Rocket Fuel - a daily news show summarising everything happening in the Rocket Pool community.
MEV-Boost relay transaction censorship has gotten a good amount of attention since the Merge, and for good reason. Fortunately, word has gotten around and the trend is improving.
So I think itâs time to emphasize another problem in the relay space: relays who also run builders. Relay-builders as opposed to independent relays? I need a better term for this. This is informed by my time working on the Aestus relay, and while I believe our relay can help with this problem, I hope you can trust that my goal here is not marketing. We donât make any money off this relay anyway.
In a world without relays, proposers and builders would have to trust each other directly: depending on the implementation one would always be able to steal MEV from the other. Relays sit in the middle and take on all that trust. As long as the relay is trusted, proposers and builders each enter a trustless relationship with the other.
However, a malicious relay, working with one side or the other, can execute all the attacks they were supposed to prevent. A relay working with a builder can steal MEV from a proposer or the other builders, and likewise, a relay working with a proposer can steal MEV from a builder.
Now letâs bring relay-builders into this. An entity that is running both a relay and a builder has a clear conflict of interest. Compromising the relayâs neutrality by working together with their builder could immensely improve profitability. Letâs list out some potential attacks that relay-builders could carry out. These are in roughly increasing order of subtlety and with names Iâm making up on the spot, with âyouâ being the relay-builder:
Single-Block Copying: Some third party builder has submitted a block to the relay that is more valuable than the block your builder made. Simply copy all the transactions from the third-party builderâs block, but make it so you keep any value that is not sent to the proposer. Send a bid to the proposer with your block instead of the other builderâs. A competent builder should be able to detect this and trash your reputation.
Ignoring Other Builders: A third-party builder submitted a block more valuable than your builderâs block. You should pass on the third-party bid to the proposer. Instead, pretend you didnât see it. Submit your builderâs bid instead. Done naively like this, the third-party builder should be able to catch it.
Multi-Block Copying: Multiple builders have submitted blocks with valuable MEV. Build your block from the most valuable transactions from each of them. Make sure your bid to the proposer will legitimately win the auction, but keep the rest of the MEV for yourself. I donât know if builders would detect this, might take some analysis and time.
Obfuscated MEV Copying: Same as with the first two copying attacks, but with intent to be subtle about it. For example, if a third-party builder/searcher has a truly novel source of MEV extraction that only they know how to do, theyâd recognize if it were stolen, so only copy MEV that can be identified as a recognizable strategy and is unlikely to come from a private mempool. Implement some fuzzing, make your copied MEV transactions slightly different so as to give plausible deniability that maybe your builder found that MEV on their own. Might be hard to detect.
Auction Manipulation: Anyone can check the best current bid through the relay API, which is a problem in itself, but the relay has particularly low-latency access to this info. In case a third-party builder only very slightly outbids your builder, quickly create a new block with a winning bid and propose that instead. The relay has some wiggle room with timing to make sure your builder can always outbid. Catching this would require long-term analysis and may be covered by plausible deniability or obfuscation.
Block Timing Manipulation: A third-party builder submitted a block more valuable than the one made by your builder. Give your block priority in the relayâs block validation system, or better yet, donât waste time validating it at all (you made it, you trust it). Make your competitorâs block low-priority for validation or otherwise stall it so itâs less likely to be ready when the proposer asks for the best bid. Hard to detect, covered by plausible deniability, and current data APIs donât expose enough timing information to help with detection or can be manipulated. This could be an actual concern.
Builder Colocation: Most builders will make ~1 submission per second, with value increasing over time as more bundles and txâs arrive. Builders that are geographically closer to the relay, with lower latency, will tend to have slightly higher-value blocks because of it. If a relay and builder are running in the same data center, under the same account/project, on a high-speed private LAN, that will give them a competitive edge. This maybe doesnât quite qualify as an attack, but a neutrality concern at least.
I want to be clear that I have no reason to believe existing relay-builders are malicious and carrying out these attacks. But why accept the possibility that they may some day occur? Why connect to relays that require extra trust assumptions when there are alternatives?
Right now, Ultrasound and Agnostic are the only relays not operating their own builders. Aestus is temporarily running a builder, but it doesnât extract MEV, doesnât take any profit, and only operates until we get a reliable set of third-party builders connected (otherwise we might not have any blocks for connected proposers). I would encourage everyone to direct their validators and builders to those relays and to ask existing relay-builders to consider only running one or the other. Iâm grateful to the early relay-builders for getting us off the ground, but now we can start to hold the space to a higher standard.
Iâm going to make some guesses for what might happen on the beacon chain regarding withdrawals. I want to qualify these as âguessesâ, because reality rarely unfolds as we expect and it would overestimate my foresight to call them predictions. Also, since Iâm not making predictions, I acknowledge that itâs difficult to quantify the results of many of these guesses.
BONUS: What our community can do to support this transition:
There was a fairly-notable phishing post on r/CC yesterday where the user mistakenly sent tokens to an address that looked very similar to his actual address (same starting and ending characters). He originally thought he had clipboard malware that changed his address, but it turned out he actually copied to the wrong address.
If you look at his PolygonScan history days before the mistakenly transaction, you can see that he was targeted multiple times.
All these similar-looking address had interacted with his account in the past 2 weeks:
This is known as address poisoning. Attackers send low-value token transactions and receive 0-value token transactions to-and-from your addresses, hoping that you accidentally pick their address in future transactions.
Blockchain explorers and and some wallets will show these transactions. The recommended way to avoid getting tricked is to use an address book of whitelisted addresses. Most wallets and exchanges have an address book feature.
Iâve posted a comprehensive list of crypto scams here along with best practices to avoid getting scammed: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/106lsai/comprehensive_list_of_common_crypto_scams_and/
If youâre active in DeFi, youâll probably come across many scams and random phishing airdrops on your accounts. Especially true on low-fee networks like Polygon PoS and BSC.
We had so much fun in Hawaii weâre going to do it again⌠for those of you that donât know HodlerCon 2024 is currently in the planning stages. Join our Discord to get involved
Luau Dao is submitting a presentation about our Decentralized Layer Zero Vacation at ETH Denver! đ¤Fingers crossed we get accepted. That being said, we had to make a pitch video for the talk. I couldnât keep it to myself because I wanted to share it with you fam! I hope you enjoy!
GM EthFam,
So Iâve been thinking about whether LSDs represent almost a multipolar trap.
A multipolar trap is a situation where participants are incentivized to act in a way detrimental the good of the group, and to themselves in the long run. The most obvious example is the tradgedy of the commons. We each share a piece of land, it can support each of us grazing 10 goats. If I graze 11 goats the quality of the land might deteriorate, but so slowly it wonât matter, whereas I get 10% more goat, itâs an obvious choice. Unfortunately you all make the same obvious choice and so the field is overgrazed and after a few years becomes barren and most of everyoneâs goats starve. If you decide to be the better person and keep to the original limit of 10 goats, then all youâre doing is disadvantaging yourself relative to the rest of us 11 goat havers. We can all afford more turnips than you due to goat inflation and so you end up out competed.
Getting back to ether staking⌠by using a centralized service rather than solo staking you get access to an LSD. This gives you advantages in terms of opportunity access, you can swap into something else if you want to or create leveraged positions or whatever.
Like with the shared field, the disadvantage is on a community level. The decentralization and âlegitimacyâ of Ethereum the network, and by extention, ether the asset is compromized, meaning it is less likely to be as highly valued in the future. Sure, you could take the high ground and not use a centralized service, but then are you disadvantaging yourself with lost opportunity cost. And if you do, and most people chose a centralized service then you still lose out from the loss of perceived legitimacy anywayâŚ
âŚ
Except that entire scenario is not analogous to Ethereum staking today due to another option, that hopefully most of you have been hearing repeat in your heads the entire time youâve been reading. Rocketpool solves the lose-lose coordination failure, by providing an option that gives people the ability to access an LSD without compromising the decentralization of the whole. With it the multipolar trap is easily disarmed, the field doesnât need to be depleated for individuals to gain the advantages.
RocketPool is the G.O.A.T.
Donât underestimate the decentralizing impact Shanghai will have. Lots of people fully aligned with Ethereumâs defining values like me have ETH staked with cexs where we would rather not, for various reasons, who will be empowered by withdrawals to revisit their position and consider going solo.
Iâve run validators on testnet but donât have the skills/confidence to do it with real money right now, but Shanghai marks a big psychological target for me to remedy that and itâs very easy to be inspired by people in this sub, describing how rocketpool, dappnode etc. are very easy to do. Plus ethstaker and all the guides. Itâs taking on a huge financial responsibility but itâs about integrity and aligning oneâs actions with oneâs values and you see that across the Ethereum community and it is inspiring.
It might take 6 months but Iâm really looking forward to watching the transition of ETH from centralized stakers to clean green homegrown (fanless, I recently learned here, so no noise and no fiddly dust hoovering!) validators.
I named my testnet validator raspberry pi âGoldfishâ because I often couldnât leave it alone more than a day without it dying. Even put a little goldfish sticker on it. Iâm looking forward to carrying that bs over onto a nuc; name suggestions welcome.
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/108x76j/comment/j3vp7io/
This brings back memories. I was so systems illiterate that it took me about a week to set up my rig before even syncing the block chains. Almost every step in the guides I had to Google something or pester the kind people in the ethstaker discord. Iâd never used Linux before. Had to actually Google where to find the command prompt in Ubuntu as if âTerminalâ wasnât obvious enough. Didnât know what port forwarding was. Many such examples. Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing, I wiped the entire system and started again from scratch. Then did that a couple more times. Each time getting quicker and more confident. I think by the 3rd try I had got it down to 30 minutes before syncing the blockchains. I ended up validating on testnet for only 1 day, then swapped over to mainnet. I specifically remember phiz telling me to practice on testnet longer but beacon chain launch was imminent. I hesitated due to no withdrawal mechanism but decided there was no way I was missing genesis lol. Itâs been more than 2 years since then, my rig diligently staking 24/7 without any major problems. In a weird way itâs been one of the only constants in my life, as lifeâs events pass by.
Tldr; I agree Shanghai will likely increase decentralisation. if I can do it, literally anyone can, and will. A focus after Shanghai should be towards making the process easier to ensure it.
âMake sure Ethereum winsâ â Steve Newcomb reveals zkSyncâs prime directive
Probably stuff all the gigabrains in ethfinance already know but cool to see zkSyncâs devotion to the Ethereum vision.For him, the end game of Ethereum is security so perfect that no quantum computer can break it and decentralization so good that no nation-state can stop it â in other words, a âprivate internet computer that cannot be hacked by any computer or stopped by any nation-state.â
âI want people to understand that this is more important than technology; this is possibly as important as what comes after capitalism and democracy,â he says.
I have a few Rocketpool validators that are currently pending. They should be active in 3 hours. After I write this comment, Iâm going to bed. Iâm not very active in this sub but I lurk like a mf. Iâm feeling inspired to talk about my journey from an ETH Holder to an ETH Staker.
My new yearâs resolution is to focus more on learning ethereum rather than focusing on price.
Lessons learnt in 2022:
Goals:
This is the second installment of my series of posts regarding the privacy of various Chrome browser crypto wallet extensions.
First entry can be found here, where we analyzed Rabby.
My approach:
This analysis has shown that my previous approach of broadly categorizing findings under âthe ok, the bad, the ugly, and the weirdâ is insufficient, subjective, and does not properly represent what I wish to convey.
Using Kali Linux, I downloaded Google Chrome directly from google.com/chrome.
Analysis of encrypted traffic was completed using BurpSuite + the provided root cert, installed in chromeâs local cert repo. Chrome is then launched with a proxy set to Burpâs listening port.
I will not be doing any sort of transactions whatsoever. I will, however, connect the wallet to a dapp.
On this New Years Day we will be taking a look at Tally Ho!
The Tally Ho extension was downloaded from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tally-ho/eajafomhmkipbjmfmhebemolkcicgfmd
I must start off by giving Tally Ho credit for something that Rabby did not implement. As I went through using the wallet to create a new address, I paid no attention to the seed phrase.
I was hit with a quiz that ensures that the user knows their seed phrase. I reinstalled Tally Ho, created a new address, and passed the quiz this time.
An excellent general security practice that every wallet should implement.
Upon installation, the first request Tally Ho generates is to api.coingecko.com in search of current token prices. Notice crab season in full effect.
Here we see a request for Arbitrumâs token list.
This is a âweb3â wallet, and as such we see many requests destined for chains and defi services that us ethfinanciers wont (admit to, at least) be using much.
An example of such a request, one which is quite demonstrative of the rest, looks like https://imgur.com/AEjA8m1
I dont have a problem with this activity, but it would be great to have a more Ethereum-centric version of this wallet.
api.blocknative.com is used to fetch Ethereum gas fees and block info.
Tally Ho reaches out to Compound Financeâs Github repo âtoken-listâ for a list of, you guessed it, tokens.
For a benign example of why this is not such a great practice, check out this request to Trader Joeâs âtoken-listâ repo.
The response is a 404. Not a huge problem, just a bit sloppy seeming. Could be bad news if an attacker is able to gain access to that repo, which is likely much less heavily protected than Trader Joeâs other assets.
Here is where things get a bit more subjective.
We see Ankrâs API being used to get the ETH balance of my new Ethereum address, notice the value â0x0â in the response.
And for the Alchemy haters, Ive got some bad news:
Alchemyâs API is used to fetch my addressâ balances of various tokens, which are specified by contract address in the POST request body.
You may notice requests to mainnet.infura.io in the above image. No need to worry, these requests were generated strictly by connecting to staking.synthetix.io.
One thing that left me a bit puzzled is this request to resolve.unstoppabledomains.com
My wallet address is sent as a GET parameter. Along with an âAuthorization:â HTTP header.
I have not had much time to look into this service, and would love to know more if anyone has any insight.
Refreshingly, no requests to telemetry services or advertisers were found.
I call upon the great /u/REALJohnBMacLemore. Would you please be willing to do the dirty deed, ser?
Happy New Year, yall!I continue to be amazed by the transparency of Defi sometimes. Just look at the Yearn.finance employee expenses here. Continuously streamed, withdrawn whenever the payee wants. Compare this to your traditional corporate payroll system.
Interesting message from Juno Finance:
Dear User,
This is an important announcement.
Juno doesnât custody crypto assets and relies on crypto partners for providing these services. Due to uncertainty with our crypto partner who is responsible for crypto operations for Juno, we strongly recommend withdrawing your crypto assets into a self-custody wallet. You can also choose to sell these assets for cash and keep them secured in your Juno checking account which is FDIC insured up to $250,000 via Evolve Bank and Trust.
There are daily platform limits for sells and withdrawals and weâre working with our partner to increase them for a smoother transition. Due to current market uncertainty we have also disabled crypto buys on the platform and auto-converted some of the stablecoins (USDC, USDT and mUSDC) to USD. Any fees incurred will be reimbursed. We apologise for the inconvenience and will keep you posted.
All Banking and Card related services continue to operate as usual. We will also transition to a new crypto partner in the coming weeks.
Emphasis mine.
Maybe theyâre shifting around their crypto backend and they arenât sure how assets held by the crypto provider will be handled during the transition. Itâs cool that they advocate for self custody.Heyyo! My Pride! I wanted to bring more attention to this post by Maswasnos further down in the daily.
If you have crypto assets stored with Juno or Wyre, withdrawal them now! The email in that post feels funny to me. The words seem exceptionally well chosen to provide the most warning with the least possible legal consequences. I suggest you heed their warning. If you custody with someone else, be sure they are not using Wyre to custody their assets. IMO, that is who Juno is attempting to warn you about.
Again, nothing confirmed, just my feeling.Heya fam, I need some help collecting more scam examples that are different to those I already have. If anyone has examples, Iâd appreciate a DM with it, a reply to this post with an imgur link or something or a discord DM at dreth#1988 if you have any good examples I havenât listed.
As of right now I have:
Thereâs one notorious scam I know Iâm missing and thatâs fake support people, so Iâd appreciate at least one example of that, not more than one is needed.
If thereâs any meaningfully different or interesting scams you have examples of, please send them my way. Iâd also apprecaite malware or anything that could be misleading to users or put them at risk. Do not post malicious links as a reply to this comment, just DM them to me.
Iâm on the EVMavericks discord and moderate the StakeWise discord, verify my username well if you want to DM me on discord, donât get scammed.
A million thanks to everyone that have helped me out !have a great day my fellow âeth maxisâ.
bear markets are great for buidlers.
while looking for web3/blockchain related jobs, I began working on my own blockchain project : Iâm building (from scratch front-end/back-end, the whole 9 yards) an LSD niche focused DeX liquidity aggregator.
way down the road, Iâm thinking about adding features like evolving the project into a platform that will make it easier for users to participate into liquidity pools, create and run rocketpool minipool, create finance-focused NFTs using oracles and open order books.
even if the project is a total failure and absolutely no one uses it, Iâm still happy to be full hand on on it building everything from UI/frontend to the backend and integration APIs of Uniswap/0x and interacting with Rocketpool/uniswap and building smart contracts.
as a software engineer, itâs an experience that is like a breeze of fresh air to do a fun side passion project that may or may not transform into a ârealâ product.
worst case scenario, no one uses it but it gives me legitemacy when talking about my experience in the web3 with recruiters.
best case scenario, users love it and it becomes my full time job.
âaverageâ scenario, it has some kind of traction, and keep being a fun passion project I will maintain while working full time job somewhere else.
anyway, thank you for reading my post, have a great day and may the force be with youWellâŚI think some records will never be broken.. According to my notes /u/Maleficent_Plankton has the best P/E ratio in the sub.
They have made 111 comments (according to Moderator ToolBox) in Ethfinance and achieved Doot status 16 freakinâ times. Thatâs crazy high.
Just wanted to give a shoutout on that amazing achievement.In an effort to spread awareness of what everyone in the community is working on, below is a list of users and their projects. Working on something cool and not listed? Send a DM to u/hanniabu to get added.
Username | Description | |
---|---|---|
. | 0xdefiant | Bankless Advisor Founder - A web3 social trading platform |
. | 404bachee | Creating an LSD DEX and lending app |
. | 696_eth | EVMavericks Weekly - The top EVMavericks events of the week |
. | alau1218 | Developer at MES Protocol |
. | atleft | Influence - An open-economy, space strategy MMO in which players own all of their content |
. | austonst | Aestus MEV-Boost Relay - A neutral, non-censoring block relay for Ethereum proof-of-stake validators and block builders |
. | bbroad25 | â.08 today, easy.â |
. | brambramEth | Working on a seed phrase recovery tool |
. | bullmeza | Bequest - A Dead Manâs switch to distribute your tokens and NFTs to selected recipients |
. | captainloud | Boasty - Schedule posts to publish on Ethereum |
. | clamchoda | âŕźź 㤠ââ ༽㤠ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ŕźź 㤠ââ ŕź˝ă¤â |
. | corn-potage | Front End Dev as NiceNode |
. | cryptojobsgg | CryptoJobs.gg - The #1 crypto jobs board for employers and future employees |
. | cryptouf | Unofficial Curve Newsletter - A newsletter about whatâs happening in Curve Finance |
. | danceratopz | disCarbon - An app to offset your flight emissions by purchasing carbon credits |
. | davidahoffman | Bankless Co-Founder - A guide for the crypto journey |
. | daw_ | AirdropScan - Find unclaimed crypto airdrops |
. | dmihal | CryptoStats Founder - A community-driven neutral source for crypto metrics |
. | domotheus | EF Researcher |
. | dreth | Writing a book about crypto/defi (hence asking for scam examples recently) and writing in my blog https://dac.ac/ |
. | edmundedgar | An r/ethereum moderator |
. | eetherway | Influence - An open-economy, space strategy MMO in which players own all of their content Part of the core team at Unstoppable Games |
. | empirestake | Lantern Finance Co-Founder - A US-based staking platform |
. | ethmaxitard | L2 Cheatsheet - A directory of L2 resources |
. | fc-test | Working on building a web3 game |
. | fly1n_hawaiian | Community Manager at ZkSync |
. | geoffbezos | Crypto opportunities monthly roundup |
. | hanniabu | Îther Îąlpha - Develops open source tools and resources (including DailyDoots.com!) |
. | haurog | disCarbon - An app to offset your flight emissions by purchasing carbon credits |
. | hashtagfuzzmaster | âALL HAIL THE ETERNAL CRABâ |
. | import-antigravity | Alphaday Founder - A customizable dashboard to easily stay up to date and interact with crypto |
. | insidethesimulation | RatioGang - A site to track the ETH/BTC ratio and flippening progress |
. | itswhatevermannn | BetOnchain - A permissionless blockchain-based betting platform |
. | jey_s_tears | Daily haikus until weâre at least at 0.178 on the ETH/BTC ratio or highest market cap |
. | jtnichol | Ethfinance Doots Happy Hour - A livestream roundup of the top 10 Doots of the Week |
. | juankestein | CryptoNumeris - Pocket-sized stainless steel cold storage solutions |
. | kirill_stakewise | Stakewise Co-Founder |
. | kudeta | Aestus MEV-Boost Relay - A neutral, non-censoring block relay for Ethereum proof-of-stake validators and block builders |
. | lefterisjp | Rotki Founder - An open source portfolio tracker, accounting and analytics tool that protects your privacy |
. | logic_beach | RobotADay - An NFT collection with the goal of creating one robot per day; Coordinates a cohort of solidity learners: https://discord.gg/aVnY7jnJWt |
. | logristhebard | Tokenomics Explained - Explores financial topics related blockchain |
. | mango_sake | Kollit - A tool to create optimal buy/sell strategies |
. | midnightonmars | GridPlus CEO |
. | mister_eth | ETHTPS.info - A dashboard to analyze the TPS of Ethereum and layer 2 networks |
. | motionick | [Wanderers Founder](https://www.wanderers.ai/game] - A free-to-play sci-fi based rogue-lite game with card collecting and deck building elements |
. | nikola_j | DeFi Saver - A one-stop dashboard for creating, managing and tracking your DeFi positions |
. | nixorokish | EthStaker - Ethereum Beacon Chain community health consultant |
. | nodeset_nick | NodeSet Founder & CEO - Connecting node operators to value |
. | pbrody | EY Blockchain team member |
. | prince_lantern | Lantern Finance Co-Founder - A US-based staking platform (now u/empirestake) |
. | profstrangelove | LimitRanger - A dapp to use limit orders with Uniswap while paying low â or actually earning â fees |
. | pseudotheos | Researcher at Scroll |
. | readreed | POAP Studio team member |
. | realjohnbmaclemore | Caches - A web3 authenticated multi-topic forum on all subjects related to the Ethereum protocol and Web3 technology |
. | rooftopportapotty | Doing security analysis of browser extensions and web3 wallets Reincarnation of u/skidseverywhere |
. | seamonkey82 | The client whisperer |
. | stevieraykatz | Coinlander - An interactive experiment in the design and development of community gaming primitives, including the Seeker characters and The One Coin artifact |
. | superphiz | Ethereum Beacon Chain community health consultant |
. | swagtimusprime | Developer Relations at Scroll |
. | takegreenpill | OBOL team member |
. | the-a-word | Ethfinance Doots Happy Hour - A livestream roundup of the top 10 Doots of the Week |
. | therocketman_eth | Offchain Labs (Arbitrum) Integration Engineer |
. | toethmooonguy | âTo ETH Mooon!!! â(°0°)ââ |
. | tricky_troll | Trickyâs Daily Doots |
. | unitedterror | Illuminate Founder - A fixed rate lending protocol aggregator |
. | usesbinkvideo | The subscriber countoooor |
. | waqwaqattack | Rocket Fuel - A daily summary of all the happenings in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Reddit, and the DAO forum and Redditâs r/ethfinance daily thread |
. | wholesome_crypto | Wholesome Crypto - A podcast interviewing prominent people in crypto to share what lead them on their current path |
. | wizardofhex | POAP Gated Documents - An app to share POAP-encrypted documents and open to contributors (registered with GitPOAP!) |
. | zerotricks | EthArchive - A tool to view what happened âOn this Dayâ in Ethereum |
Delegate your votes to a member of the EthFinance community. Are you a delegate and not listed? Send a DM to u/hanniabu to get added.
Made by Ether Alpha with â¤ď¸