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1129 Dooters - Last Updated January 10, 2025
Ethereum
3,542,025 Ethereans subscribed (+2,158)
$3,293
0.03482
EVM process,
Impact of the printing press,
Finance full access.
reminder that crypto is risky, take your eyes off the charts and enjoy your life
money comes and goes but your time spent looking at candles never ever comes back
if you cannot handle that, best to invest in low risk assets
itâs been a tough few years, have an entry and exit plan and learn to stomach drops, itâs a skill that you need to invest in crypto
for those feeling bad, we all understand and itâs going to be okay, i promise
Block of Ages cleave for me, Let me find myself in Thee.
Future of France in my hand.
Five hundred miles from EtherLand
Caught a run of Luck learning how to to mine. Got an education on a scratch of a dime.
Stuck Doomscrolling and Comatose, Halfway rusted on the salty coast
Made a little money, but it came with scars With two beat-up ledgers, but zero bars. From the Crescent City to the Great Salt Lake It ainât what you got, itâs what you make
When the road got rough and the wheels all broke, we couldnât take more than we could tow.
Making something out of nothing with a scratch and some hope(ium) With two old ledgers, like a shovel and a rope
Block of Ages cleave for me, Let me find myself in Thee.
Future of France Our hands.
Five hundred miles from EtherLand
gm gm! James here from Octant. Stoked that this channel is coming back to life! Big shoutout to everyone who made that happen. Just dropped some knowledge on where we are going for Octant v2. Its kind of heady but wanted to share nevertheless. https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1hs1kuf/comment/m51x11r/?context=3
Hope you all had a wonderful holiday, 2025 is going to be an amazing year!
Ethereumâs main value proposition in my opinion is from securing the information and value on its network.
The value part is obvious. The ticker is ETH. ETH itself needs to be valuable in order to guarantee the continued functioning of the chain. Without ETH value there will be no stakers, no block proposers, no block builders, no transactions, no chain.
The second piece is information. ETH needs to be expressive enough to contain the various pieces of information that we find useful to put on-chain. Bitcoin is minimally expressive so it was highly limited in the amount of information it could store on-chain. Ethereum expanded the expressiveness to essentially infinity with a turing-complete programming language (Solidity) for smart contracts.
Now anyone can write any smart contract, put it onchain, and anyone in the world can instantly interact with that system. I also believe that Ethereum has passed the bottleneck stage (for the most part) with fees such that it isnât too expensive to put information into the chain anymore. L2 tvl suggests so at least.
Being able to rely on the chain, and the information stored on it, to persist into the future relies on the decentralization of the network. The more decentralized it is the more likely it is to be resistant to attacks of all sorts, be it cultural/physical/financial. Essentially it creates the most neutral credibility in terms of users being able to rely on it to function as intended.
Additionally, network effects exist all over the place for ETH. Some examples:
mindshare and number of holders who are committed to the network and the ideas behind it rather than just trying to make a quick buck or scamming people
Solo staker ecosystem which supports the foundational community which credibly runs the hardware that the Ethereum software controls, the source of ETHâs credibility.
Core dev commmunity. Required to improve and maintain the functioning of the Ethereum network.
Builder commnuity. Improving solidity code, improving our understanding of how to implement the EVM every day, improving smart contract auditing and tooling.
Smart contract network and liquidity. The existing smart contracts that have been deployed are like the buildings in a city. If the core devs and solo stakers are the road/sidewalk builders transporting you around the system. The smart contracts and teams that have deployed them are the libraries, schools, offices, banks that you can interact with. The more of these exist in a city the more vibrant the city becomes which is why people all clump together. Same for smart contract network states.
Thereâs more but thatâs just some examples.
Iâd like to propose another form of valuing Ethereum which is the amount of human âworkâ that it secures. I think by this metric it shouuld be the most valueable asset on the planet bar none. âBut havenât lots of other companies spent 1000x more human hours?â Yes of course. However not all human hours can be counted the same. Think about all the human hours that go into maintaining an exchange in traditional finance world. Itâs huge. Now you deploy uniswap contract which is a fancy version of x * y = k and viola, you have SOLVED exchanging tokens. Basically for all humans for all time. I still donât think people understand HOW MUCH human effort smart contracts contain within them. They are the most consolidated, most efficient, human effort in history. They are the blueprint, the instructions, the software, that controls a fleet of hardware dispersed across the entire world, telling them exactly how to do operations that humans would otherwise have to spend countless hours doing manually.
The more that this systemâs functionality expands, the easier it gets to use. Network effects. Eventually it will consume the majority of at least the digital worldâs activity. You need ETH to operate this computer. You donât have enough ETH.
đ¨ So, Scam Sniffer announced their 2024 Crypto Phishing Report. Iâll paste their main tldr below, but you can also find their detailed report here.. I highly recommend giving it a read.. Experienced users will get a refresher course on everything they have learned to watch out for, and new crypto users can certainly get a clear picture of how dangerous it can get out there if they donât set-up proper security practices..
đ A staggering $494M was lost to Wallet Drainer phishing attacks in 2024, up 67% YoY. The attacks affected 332K addresses (+3.7%), with the severity intensifying and the largest single theft reaching $55.48M. đ¸Q1 2024 saw the heaviest losses at $187.2M, with March peaking at $75.2M. 30 major incidents (>$1M) occurred throughout the year, totaling $171M in losses.
đ The attack landscape evolved significantly in 2024, with major drainer exits and new players emerging.. Major Events of the Year:
đ° Chain & Asset Analysis:
đ Most Common Attack Methods:
â ď¸ Essential Security Tips:
⢠Always verify URLs carefully
⢠Never sign transactions you donât understand
⢠Use hardware wallets for large amounts
⢠Enable security tools
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal on X posted that Coinbase obtained unredacted documents between the US FDIC and US banks; shows a coordinated effort to stop crypto activity. Grewal calls for congressional hearings, alleging these actions are part of âOperation Chokepoint 2.0â to restrict crypto industry growth.
We finally got the unredacted OCP 2.0 letters from @FDICgov. It took a Court order but you can now read them for yourself below. They show a coordinated effort to stop a wide variety of crypto activity â everything from basic BTC transactions to more complex offerings.
Note that FDIC magically found TWO more pause letters in this search after saying before that it had complied with an earlier Court order. Itâs hard to believe in their good faith when their sweater further unravels every time we pull on the thread. The new Congress should launch hearings on all this without delay.
FOIA Docs Link: https://www.fdic.gov/foia/history-associates-inc-v-fdic-fdics-redacted-pause-letters-january-3-2025
See PFOF, dark pools, and how market makers work fundamentally by âproviding liquidityâ.
PFOF does not require your purchases to go to âLitâ markets which would affect the price if they did.
Your purchases go to match in-house trades/bets or go to dark pools.
This is partially the reason why IEX âLitâ trading and direct registration of shares have exploded in popularity.
If you want a simple video on how this works, Jon Stewart does a decent job here: https://youtu.be/bP74RBTE8kI
If you wish you can watch from 7:02 onwards to see a rough diagram of what Iâm talking about.
Dark pools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pool
PFOF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_for_order_flow
When shares are registered in âStreet nameâ they are registered with Cede & Co. which is DTCâs nominee name. (Note that the DTCC is a private company and not a regulatory arm of the U.S. Government) DTC is a subsidiary of the DTCC.
Brokers or other financial intermediaries maintain accounts with DTC. The broker holds a sub-account at DTC reflecting its clientsâ aggregate holdings, but DTC does not track individual investor accounts.
While the shares are legally registered under the broker or DTCâs nominee (Cede & Co.), the individual investor is the beneficial owner. The broker keeps a record of which individual investor owns what, ensuring proper allocation of dividends, voting rights, and other benefits.
The DTCC board of directors is comprised of executives from the major U.S. banks and market makers: https://www.dtcc.com/about/leadership/board
Does PFOF breach bucketeering laws?
âTheyâ: Banks, market makers, exchanges, brokers, hedge funds, etc.
I would also argue that:
Hereâs a great one for Citadel Securities (Who have a spot on the board of the DTCC):
âFrom the start of its Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) reporting obligation on June 22, 2020, through August 28, 2024, Citadel Securities failed to timely and/or accurately report data for tens of billions of equity and option order events to the CAT Central Repository in violation of FINRA Rules 6830, 6893, and 2010.â
Some more:
Man buys 100% of the stock of a company:
Many people seem to think that marketing Ethereum is only relevant for price but it isnât. Techies have to be aware that even pretty successful CEOs and politicians have no clue about blockchain technology, maybe not even a glimpse why decentralization matters. They are dependent on people, organizations and companies telling them which chain to choose.
If they are growing comfortable with using other chains than Ethereum because of marketing by these actors it is a net negative for Ethereum the network/project and not just the ETH price. It isnât a price pumping scheme but a basic necessity to educate normal but influential people with easy to remember and understand marketing buzzwords and campaigns.
Unpopular opinion:
The Ethereum Foundation shouldnât do marketing.
While there have been many bad choices made by the EF over the years, Iâm siding with them on this one.
First off, marketing what? There are 3 main things that could be marketed:
1) Marketing ether the asset
Marketing a token has a name: shilling, and the vast majority of crypto shilling is done by scams. Even most alt-l1s donât openly suggest buying their tokens.
Also keep in mind that the EF needs to sell eth to fund development.
Shilling eth while selling it at the same time would probably be one of the easiest way to lose credibility to institutions. Clearly a bad idea.
2) Marketing Ethereum the network for adoption
Competitors are very active in this, constantly pushing for adoption, probably often paying for it through artificial partnerships.
The obvious problem here is that weâre barely able to accommodate our existing demand:
Ethereum L1 still can only process 12-15tps on average and is very easy to saturate, making the network unusable for most use cases.
Existing L2s already put blobs at target value. You might say that target will double with Pectra within a couple of months, but remember that Sonyâs, Krakenâs, and Deutsche Bankâs rollups arenât even live yet.
Do you really want to promote Ethereum to institutions for them to build on it, to then see them fail at launching their products because the network is saturated?
Not only have many institutions already started building on Ethereum by themselves, but itâs also still too early to try to onboard the entire world. Our time will come soon enough.
3) Marketing Ethereumâs values
This point is probably the most debatable of the 3.
It would indeed be great if the world saw the value of decentralization and censorship resistance. But based on current metrics, it seems like this is already fairly well understood:
- Itâs no coincidence if the 2 most valuable blockchains are the 2 most decentralized.
- Itâs no coincidence if Ethereum managed to remain home to 55% of the stablecoin market, 78% of RWAs, and 55% of defi TVL, after years of insanely expensive transaction fees.
- Itâs no coincidence if Ethereum has all this crazy institutional adoption.
Truth be told I think Ethereum doesnât need marketing. The network effect is already past escape velocity. We have barely started to enjoy the benefits of the rollup centric roadmap.
The future of marketing will be done by institutional L2s, when theyâll promote their services to their userbases. Just like Coinbase already does with Base, by adding 7 million weekly active addresses to the ecosystem.
What do you think Kraken, Sony and Deutsche Bank will do after they launch their rollups?
Market it to millions of their users.
Do you think all institutions building on Ethereum have made it public yet?
Fuck no, there are probably dozens of rollups being developed by big brands today, waiting to be announced to keep a competitive edge. And after launching, theyâll market their services to their users.
The recent push for marketing by the EF is mostly driven by impatience with price performance.
But I happen to believe that it wonât be long for this problem to be solved as well.
2024 Public Goods Funding
Web3 Regenerative Communities - Greenpill Network and ReFi DAO
Just some stream of thoughtâŚ
Octant deserves to be mentioned along with the heavy hitters but theyâve been on a perpetual 90 day Epoch cycle and I couldnât find an end of year recap. Money talks and their staking yield is massive. Octant v2 looks like an awesome iteration.
Iâm sure it is popping most places and but kinda feels like Optimism is the main layer 2 hub for public goods funding and think what theyâre doing with retro and metrics based funding is super interesting. Celo is really focused on ReFi and Arbitrum has been making a big push. Maybe anecdotal, but Iâd be curious what others are seeing. Bummer that Public Goods Network didnât work out. Might have been timing/execution more than a flawed concept but who knows.
The regen space is still maturing but pretty pumped about the broad embrace of collaboration and increasing focus on impact measurement/standards and capital formation/allocation experimentation. So many other regen/education based organizations and projects that are all pieces of the puzzle. Funding the Commons, VDAO, Regens Unite, Bloom Network, 2077, Atlantis P2P, Noun-ish communities and VRBS and flows.wtf, Kolektivo, Crypto Altruism, Breadchain, Climate Coordination Network, Ma Earth, Blockchain for Good Alliance, Public Goods Club etc and DeSci is out of scope for me but everything happening over thereâŚGlo Dollar and other mechanisms like lotto pgf, Flow State and this streaming qf wave, Grant Ships, futarchy, so much shit happening.
Bunch of Greenpill Chapters/Guilds and ReFi DAO Local Nodes are absolutely killing it. Have spent most of my time the last year with Greenpill Network, Dev Guild, and Writers Guild. Still have a lot of furniture to move around, infrastructure to develop and operational mechanisms to polish within Greenpill but 2025 weâre really leaning into the Regen Coordination which was established in 2024 with ReFi DAO and CeloPG, but Letâs GROW dao and probably some others deserve props for really amplifying and contributing to the cause. In 2024 had a round for the organizations, one for individuals, Bioregional Finance, and Agroforestry DAO.
Some top of mind real world impact tools: Impact Miner, Gain Forest, Restor, EthicsHub, Helios, SolarPunkDAO, Green Goods, Silvi, Kokonut Network, Treegens, etc.
So many coordination/governance/impact measurement tools being built like EAS, Guild.xyz, RnDAO, TogetherCrew, Gardens, KarmaGAP, Coordinape, Open Civics, Endaoment, Hypercerts, Open Source Observer, Commons Stack.
Trying to post more often without overthinking it. Would love to see more public goods funding content here. Really is important for Ethereumâs sustainability, culture and competitive advantage. Thereâs a huge demand for better marketing of Ethereum and I think the regen/pgf space is gold in that department.
Except from u/hedgemagus on another thread. Context is they want to contribute to promoting Ethereum but donât know how.
its something I want to work on, I feel like if Iâm the one throwing this out there its not right that I dont do my part. Im just not sure what my best offer to fixing this is yet.
You donât need to be a genius to contribute in meaningful ways. For example I created https://ethereumadoption.com/ b/c I saw there was a gap in what was happening vs peopleâs perception. My first iteration of this was just a markdown file with a list of links. Didnât know how to create a website or manage a server, it was just a markdown file hosted as a static site.
If anybody wants to get started on something and would like some support, feel free to comment here or DM.
The Mutual Fund celebrated its centennial last year. These were the crown jewel of fintech in their day and they predate the SEC which is a good reminder that fintech innovation was entirely possible before the SEC graciously stepped in to protect all of us. Mutual funds gave investors price exposure to an entire sector through a simple passive investment. Itâs an early example of using the same bookkeeping system we use for ownership of companies for more abstract financial intentions.
Then in the 1990s Tradfi invented ETFs. These were more tax efficient than mutual funds because buyers could treat income as capital gains and redeem the shares for in-kind assets (which avoids a trade) but most importantly they were natively tradable on the stock exchange throughout the day rather than indirectly through the fund company or brokers after market close. Taxes deferred allow you to compound more money before eventually cashing out. Paying a lower tax rate effectively increases your yield compared to dividends. Fairer redemptions protects the peg and leads to a healthier asset for buyers. The benefits of these changes are undeniable and due to them ETFs have experienced explosive growth.
Since their inception ETFs have been gobbling up an ever larger share of the economy. In the early 1990s at the advent of the ETF, mutual funds accounted for around 20% of the NYSE total market cap. Today, mutual funds and ETFs together account for around 40%. This is in addition to the market cap rising from 36.7% of US GDP to a staggering 208%. This shows just how much fundamental value there is to a financial wrapper around even the simplest financial intent (a basket of assets).
But the blockchain is doing much more than acting simply as a ledger at this point. It does more than transfer value; it adds value by enabling you to express financial intentions. Today you can capture financial upside from any type of price movement you like. There are ways to profit from the price going up, down, sideways, or just being volatile. Defi has already rebuilt most of Tradfi on more technically sound infrastructure backed by more math and less counterparties. This covers everything from decentralized exchanges, to rate-stripping protocols, to options protocols and even some entirely new things like prediction markets, leveraged carry trades, and a fully internet native bond.
Wrapping these financial intents in tokens offers the same benefits ETFs brought to the stock market but once you combine those benefits with the power of finalization you achieve self-compounding, yield-bearing, leveraged strategies underpinning the token that anyone, anywhere in the world can access with nothing more than a swap or deposit. You no longer have to resort to something like this. Uniswap v1 didnât return a token. Uniswap v2 did; and I attribute this simple fact to its dominance today. The simple act of creating a token for each LP enabled the liquidity farming boom of 2020. In Tradfi when you wrap these things with their own identifier and make them tradable they call it a Structured Product. In Defi, we call it a token. In the same way ETFs are eating the stock market, tokens are going to eat Tradfi. Donât lose sight of the forest for the trees, this is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
This isnât strictly an Ethereum or even crypto thing, but it is an example of the cypherpunk values that are probably a large part of what attracted many of us here in the first place:
https://x.com/DesignItForUs/status/1877014902315086122
A Declaration of Digital Rights, put together by a group of young people to address the real dangers and risks of the online world that is being built for them. Below are a selection of 5 out of their 12 points that particularly resonate with me, but to be honest they are all good, I just donât want to rob them of clicks by sharing them all here.
If these are values you want to support, then I would suggest you like or share their tweet to help encourage these views.
Right to privacy: Social media platforms collect endless amounts of data on us. Young people have the right to scroll without Big Tech listening to them on every corner of the internet and selling off that data to the highest bidder. Companies should be responsible for designing social media and AI products that consistently protect and preserve our personal data. Privacy must come before profit.
Right to user controls: Suggested posts in feed, new shop features, algorithms, endless scrolling, and never-ending push notifications. Whether you like them or hate them, young people have the right to switch the most harmful features on or off, whenever we choose.
Right to delete: As consumers of digital products, young people have a right to permanently delete our own content and leave social media platforms that are not working for us. Social media platforms should uphold that right, delete our information, and leave us alone. The right to our personal information is solely ours, not social media companiesâ.
Right to transparency: Big Tech has thrived off of the presumption that they are above the law. They leverage their power as private companies to profit from our pain, by design, while shielding themselves in opacity. Like any other public goods, we as consumers have a right to fair and transparent products that are responsible to the user and the law, not the shareholders nor the CEOs.
Right to be protected from manipulation: Like never before, Big Tech has relentlessly leveraged innovation against the best interests of users, manipulating our data and weaponizing our well being against us. Instead of crafting design features meant to support healthy engagement, Big Tech companies have wielded their unchecked power to addict us and harm us while publicly saying otherwise. We have a right to be shielded from these insidious patterns of abuse.
Disclaimer: None - Iâve never asked anyone here to share anything or do anything before, and I am in no way affiliated with this group (hadnât heard of them until just now), but I strongly feel like I should support potential allies if they advocate for values I share.
#Daily DevCon #32:
Redefining boundaries in the Infinite Garden
Itâs Thursday, January 02, 2025 â day 32 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.
##Summary:
The speaker highlighted the key advancements in Ethereum, such as reduced energy consumption post-merge, more than 99.9% scaling solutions, and cheaper/faster transactions on layer twos. They emphasized Ethereumâs readiness for long-term development based on values of credibility, neutrality, open source, participation, and decentralization. The talk drew parallels to Southeast Asian governance structures and emphasized the importance of nurturing a diverse ecosystem with shared values for long-lasting resilience, likening it to a garden where various circles coexist and collaborate rather than one dominating force, fostering innovation and sustainability in the Ethereum community.
##Discussion Questions:
How can the values of credibility, neutrality, open source, participation, and decentralization in Ethereum contribute to its long-term development and sustainability in the blockchain space?
In what ways can fostering a diverse ecosystem with shared values be a driving force behind innovation and resilience in the Ethereum community, similar to the concept of various circles coexisting in a garden?
Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.
^The ^summary ^and ^discussion ^questions ^are ^AI-generated ^from ^Youtubeâs ^autogenerated ^transcript. ^The ^transcript ^may ^capture ^some ^names ^and ^terms ^incorrectly.
Special guest Brian Smocovich joins us from PistachioFi, your self-custodial checking account.
Ethereum
$3438 Î âŹ3343
0.03564
3,524,775 Ethereans subscribed (+5,043 over two days)
$25k in 2025
Take some coping pill,
For all extra gas you spill,
Tax return to fill.
We havenât reached $7500 in 2024 based on my local time zone, Berlin Time, here in Germany. For this reason I am gonna eat a darjeeling tea bag as I have stated.
I have agreed with u/majorpickle01 that I am gonna provide a logbook of my experience! (photos/videos are too risky because of doxxing)
And you know what it is here at the moment? 16:05 and thus ⌠TEA TIME! I am gonna provide the logbook as continuous edits for now.
The only part which is left is completely without tea so I guess I attended to my duty!
Happy holidays EthFam, hope youâve all been enjoying stuffing yourselves with quantities of mincepies and Baileys that you will regret upon eventually sobering up.
Just wanted to touch base in one of the final few EthFinance Dailys to say that it honestly has been a gift to have shared the Ethereum journey with you here for the last few years.
I have never found an open online community that has been so wholesome, enjoyable and rewarding to be a part of, especially in crypto where seemingly every other space becomes a zero-sum game of fake hype, manipulation and general nonsense, EthFinance has been a beacon of sanity and good conversation.
I am excited for the next steps as we move to our new home, and shepherded by the best mod team on Reddit, bring our special something to the wider Ethereum community.
Long live EthFinance.
Just take a minute to look at this.
I remember coming to the Ethereum reddits 8 years ago and back then we were dreaming about what is a reality today.
The reality now is that everyone that sees the potential of blockchain and is taking it seriously is building things on Ethereum, which is making more and more people see itâs potential. It is absolutely amazing to see this unfold right before our eyes. The list will keep on growing of who is building on Ethereum.
Becides the success of updates, developers, applications, Dapps, tvl, investments, scaling,⌠You can see the trend of more and more coming in. - More and more institutions/banks launching tokenized funds, - More and more creating layer2âs to be able to build on Ethereum through scaling, - More and more are seeing the value of Ethereum with the decentralization and security it provides.
When you take a second to see the trend and the direction everything is going, the conclusion is that the future of Ethereum is very very promising.
The ticker is ETH. Happy new year everyone.
Posting in both dailies.
What site is everyone in the US using to generate their safe harbor plan / transition plan / or digital asset allocation plan?
Looks like CryptoTaxGirl and CryptoTaxAudit (any better ones out there?) have forms you can have fill out. Seems like the three things you need to do before the 1st is, 1) document holdings across all wallets 2) choose between Specific Unit Allocation (if able) or Global Allocation 3) If global allocation, choose method, Highest Cost Allocated First, or Lowest Cost Allocated First, or Oldest Allocated First.
Seems like Specific Unit Allocation is more complex and both forms are for Global Allocation, which allow you to allocate for example the highest cost allocated first, CryptoTaxGirl says âThis method would allocate everything you owned you before 1/1/25 in order from highest cost to lowest cost. The highest-cost lots would be allocated first to your assets on hosted wallets then to your unhosted wallets in order of acquisition date, from oldest to newest. This means starting in 2025, when the default accounting method switches to First-in-first-out (FIFO), your sells,trades, spends, or transfer of assets owned before 1/1/25 will pull from your highest cost units allocated to each wallet and exchange. This approach will generally result in deferring gains and accelerating losses.â
CryptoTaxAudit doesnât seem to have a spot for step 3. And it doesnât seem like you need to assign your cost basis before the 1st but you need to before your first buy or sell in 2025.
#Daily DevCon #29:
Itâs Monday, December 30, 2024 â day 29 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.
##Summary:
The speaker discussed the evolution of scams in the crypto space, focusing on end users. They covered various scam methodologies such as seed phishing, money doubling schemes, and drainer kits that exploit open approvals to drain assets. Monkey drainer, Inferno drainer, and Angel drainer are examples of prevalent kits that have targeted users. The talk emphasized the importance of transaction simulation to educate users about the implications of their actions on the blockchain. Additionally, the speaker highlighted the sophistication of current malicious techniques and the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between attackers and security measures, with a focus on enhancing detection methods for malicious transactions.
##Discussion Questions:
How can the Ethereum community work together to increase awareness among users about the various scam methodologies in the crypto space and empower them to make informed decisions while engaging in transactions on the blockchain?
In what ways can advancements in transaction simulation tools be utilized to enhance user education and prevent falling victim to sophisticated malicious techniques targeting end users in the crypto space?
Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.
^The ^summary ^and ^discussion ^questions ^are ^AI-generated ^from ^Youtubeâs ^autogenerated ^transcript. ^The ^transcript ^may ^capture ^some ^names ^and ^terms ^incorrectly.
If you were already tracking your cost basis on a per-lot basis (e.g. for Specific Lot, FIFO, or LIFO tracking) then this shouldnât change anything for you; you already have all the info you need. Same if you were not tracking specific lots, but were tracking at a wallet level (e.g. every time assets enter or leave the wallet, you recalculate the average cost basis for that asset in that wallet, distinct from other walletsâ cost bases for that asset) - just keep doing that.
If you were tracking your cost basis for assets globally, by recalculating the global cost basis for that asset regardless of where you held it, every time you acquired more of it, regardless of which wallet/account it was in, then you will need to improve your tracking to either of the two more fine-grained levels of tracking mentioned above.
For stakers, tbh you really should have already been tracking at a per-wallet or ideally specific-lot level, if only to keep Eth with long-term capital gain status separate from Eth held for less than a year. But if you were lazy with your tracking, you will need to up your game. There shouldnât be any real staking-specific gotchas there - validators should each be considered wallets, e.g. the Eth in them should each have its own cost basis that you track separately (or even the specific lots of Eth within it), and every time you receive a withdrawal or fee from a proposal, you need to either add a new specific lot to the withdrawal/fee recipient wallet with that dayâs cost basis, or update the average cost basis for that wallet.
Overall this is a pretty reasonable change; the only people affected are those who were taking what I would personally consider to be somewhat inadvisable shortcuts with their accounting, and it just forces them to be more fine-grained.
Note that Iâm pretty sure thereâs a safe haven rule where you can take the cost basis of your wallets as of January 1st (tomorrow) as a starting point; they wonât force you to retroactively recalculate all your cost bases, just to track it going forward in the new year.
Long Boring (unless youâre a tax nerd like me) US Tax PSA:
IRS crypto cost basis rules are changing in 2025 away from universal cost basis to per-wallet. While I havenât quite worked through all the implications, you can help future you by doing two things:
1 take a snapshot of your holdings as of January 1 so you can allocate your cost basis under the safe harbor rule. 1 choose and record your plan for allocating cost basis before the new year. Thereâs no official way to do this, but various crypto tax sites gave templates.
I like Crypto Tax Girl for a breakdown of some of this and a template to record your plan.
Iâve missed conversations about this if theyâve happened in Ethfinance before. While the new rules seem like they will add complexity, I wonder if the new rules might actually simplify specific identification methods, since you can move the specific coins with your desired cost basis to a hot wallet to sell. My accounting software (Tokentax) does give me info on specific tax lots, but does not tell me which wallet each lot is in. If it did, it would make things easier.
TokenTax support says theyâre waiting for more clarity on how the IRS will implement safe harbor rules before building it into their system - though it would be helpful to know the tax implications of trades that happen starting tomorrow. The simplest thing to do, of course, is to consolidate into one wallet today, but there are plenty of reasons not to do that for security, accounting, convenience, etc.
TLDR: if you have more than one wallet, snapshot your holdings tomorrow to possibly save yourself some accounting headaches
When we first fractionalized the ownership of institutions or companies we gave them a label, units we called shares, and we made them transferrable in a basic way with double entry bookkeeping on paper ledgers that we made copies of around the world and which people notarized the authenticity of. The basic underpinning of stocks hasnât changed much since the first iteration. Granted, weâve digitized it and made it accessible to a wider audience, but the digital systems of today have essentially replicated these initial paper systems and inherited most of their flaws. So today Iâll be writing about some of these flaws, the inherent benefits of blockchains in solving them, what we have built today, and what is coming next next in the evolution of ownership and financial intents.
Today we live with a stock market with T+1 settlement which basically means it isnât even known who owns what at any given time. We live with a system with trusted counterparties where naked shorting (despite being illegal) regularly happens. We live with a system that happens to shut down whenever it isnât a convenient time in New York City despite serving users globally. Thatâs before we even touch some of the more egregious abuses of power like Robinhood famously disabling the buy button on a certain stock when a bull run was inconveniencing some powerful people.
One of the most amazing superpowers that blockchains have offered the world is one that we donât even talk about except in the most technical sense: finality. Fundamentally a blockchain is just a consensus machine that outputs a time-series of events that we can prove the authenticity of. Practically, what this amounts to is a basically incorruptible ledger about anything you like that anyone in the world can access and trust. Finality means that we know who owns what and that once we know this it isnât subject to change in the future except by the consent of the owner. Itâs a guarantee that you can build upon in a non-fragile way.
Tradfi has only ever managed to create the illusion of this. They only ever figure out who owns all of a stock retrospectively. A court can always undo a transaction or counterparties involved in a transaction can fail to deliver. Anytime you get an instant confirmation of a trade from a web2 app that confirmation isnât real; itâs only an optimistic estimate backed by the trusted relationships of a bunch of institutions you have no direct relationship with, didnât knowingly consent to use, and which could misbehave at any time.
The difference between a web2 confirmation and a web3 confirmation is an entire court system. The rights carried with the ownership of the asset in web2 are extrinsic to the asset. If the bank wrongly forecloses on your home you are entirely out of a home until you take them to court, prove it was wrongly seized from you, and have the courts enforce your rights. That not only comes at a high cost, but also no guarantees. The financial system today has to not only pay the cost of various middlemen but also underwrite the execution and enforcement risk of every legal obligation we delegate to them. There are also of course countless examples where someone was legally in the right but lost in the court system to someone who was better financed.
Contrast this to Defi. In Defi a lending protocol can receive an asset and generate a loan for you instantaneously. It doesnât need a court system to adjudicate the possibility that you didnât own the asset you deposited, that a bankruptcy proceeding a month later from some company you received the asset from might claw back the asset from you, or that the asset has been pledged as collateral multiple times. It has a rock solid guarantee that the transfer of a token means that you and only you had legal possession of the token. Because thereâs nothing to adjudicate with a court system a smart contract can function without having to know where you are in the world so it can pursue legal action against you in your local court of law. Also, unlike Tradfi where there is a byzantine maze of laws for intersecting jurisdictions, smart contracts work the same way for everyone everywhere in the world. Just imagine how many lawyer hours will be avoided by this simple fact. This is a multi-trillion dollar value-add to the world.
Thanks for everything, r/ethfinance. The new year is traditionally a time for looking ahead and deciding how we want to conduct ourselves in the upcoming year. Through resolutions or just self-reflection, itâs a good time to dream about what we want to do with our time and who we want to be.
With this community, weâre simultaneously getting a more literal fresh start. An even clearer opportunity to build a sense of who we want to be, from the ground up. Thereâs no better time to start contributing the kind of content you want our new r/ethereum home to show off to the rest of the world.
Letâs build a home with the best blockchain discussion on the Internet: technically detailed but accessible to a broad audience. Letâs use our position on the more prominent subreddit to welcome curious visitors, competently answer good-faith questions, be humble and open-minded about Ethereumâs weaknesses, and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the broader blockchain space while establishing healthy policies WRT concern trolls.
Letâs establish a culture that encourages readers to participate, discuss their experiences, and share their knowledge. Whether itâs someoneâs first DEX trade, or they just took a few hours to read through the documentation for a new identity protocol, or they want to express a controversial opinion on a new EIP, everyone should feel welcome and encouraged to write up their thoughts.
There is no better time to start a new regular post series about something you care about. Give us monthly updates on the governance activity in your favorite DAO, or try syncing one new EL client every week and share some impressions and metrics. Spy on the Solana subs and each day tell us whatâs on their minds, I dunno.
Letâs make r/ethereum great. Happy New Year.
Happy new year.
Good post to start off the year - Vitalik on X to Elon Musk.
âI admire your willingness to stand up and fight for freer movement of people, itâs an important freedom that all too easily gets thrown under the busd
That said I think itâs valuable to turn down the temperature here, on both tone of discourse and the social media banhammer.
Respecting free speech is easy when we agree with the speech, and hard when we think itâs awful. But the arguments for respecting free speech anyway are the same as ever: the banhammer is controlled by one group today, it will be controlled by another group tomorrow, and every use of it legitimizes further use, and by the end public discourse collapses into either balkanization, monoculture (where the winner will be the guy with the biggest hammer, not the guy with the best arguments) or constant war of all against all.
And itâs worth reflecting on just how much tone of discourse has fallen here over the past couple of years. I feel like a lot of people have been okay with rising aggressiveness because the target of the aggressiveness was one faction that they disliked, but once that beast is summoned, its nature is to look for new targets, and even if you approve of the first target you may not approve of the second or the third or the fourth - as many people have been finding out this week. Literally âfirst they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communistâ. This isnât the kind of memetic beast we want running the show when weâre entering an era of dangerous global political competition and rapidly improving AI.
The role of leaders in setting the tone is really important, and can be used to great good or great evil. Itâs not âwartime modeâ that will get humanity to Mars in one piece, itâs something brighter - and we should get into that mode today.â
New sub who dis?
Goodbye for now Week in Ethereum https://x.com/evan_van_ness/status/1874525460060922103
Eth
er
eum
3
3
6
k
Future dollars
Christmas is merry,
Blockchain goes well with cherry,
Speculate fairy.
Iâve done some technical analysis (lots of triangles, you probably wouldnât understand) and Iâm pretty sure this âUSDTâ coin is going to moon pretty soon. Itâs competition has been remarkably close in performance but weâre coming up on a major divergence, I can feel it.
So yesterday I had some questions regarding MicrostrategyâŚ
Since I wanted to understand better what they are doing I looked a little bit further into it.
Anyways, like was suspected yesterday, they are raising money through convertible bonds - so if they canât pay back the bond they issue new stocks to cover the debt - as far as I understand the stock price at which the bond converts is set at the beginning of the loanâŚ
There are also funds that specialize in convertible bonds - normally they buy those bonds AND short the stock as a hedge. So if the company goes belly up they still get some of its equity for the shares they hold but also have made money on the short.
There is a video by Martin Shkreli (yes that guy, I know I am not a fan but whatever) where he goes over MSTRs valuation
https://youtu.be/7zaEJ6MutdU?t=490
(Timestamp is where he starts getting into it, before he pretty much just gathered info from financial statements)
Anyways Shkreli more or less also comes to the conclusion that this seems like a ponzi like scheme.
Also the amount of additional money Saylor would need to raise in the future might become a problem because the convertible bond market isnât *that* hugeâŚ
Microstrategy is also doing some shitty âadvertisingâ calling what they are doing âsmart leverageâ which is pretty much bs.
Here is another video which goes into why Saylors strategy is pretty much like a pyramid scheme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5LKZ1-6BWM
*Edit*
Ah and another take away by Shkreli was the same as I had yesterday:
Long Bitcoin, short Microstrategy should be free money if done at the right ratio - and one would need to âdelta hedgeâ as the price movesâŚ
Anways I wonât be doing that and just stick to holding ETH :D
From a functional perspective it has most of the relevant characteristics of a ponzi scheme but there are indeed assets backing MSTR stock, the valuation is about 30-40% the price of BTC and the rest is the expectation that saylor can continue to do this + the negligible other business that MSTR has.
My perspective here is that itâs pretty simple, thereâs is demand to obtain exposure to BTC through MSTR, and this is the exclusively relevant bit that could justify this premium. Maybe (idk) those individuals or entities traditionally couldnât hold BTC in their balance sheet, so they instead opted to gain exposure to BTC through MSTR stock.
On a ponzi scheme more and more assets are required to keep it going. In the case of Saylor, this structured trade has been ongoing for quite a long time, MSTR has held BTC through bear periods in deep deep loss. For the trade to survive, no more assets were required through the bear without needing to be unwound.
Is Saylor deceiving his investors and creditors? probably, we can assume that there potentially exists some information asymmetry between what we know and what his creditors think they know. However, as long as the price of BTC holds up and MSTR isnât much more leveraged than 3x (assuming the rest of the business is worthless) thereâs a low risk for this trade to unwind, especially considering that until the bonds expire, we probably have very little to worry about.
Monitoring the valuation of this stock should be extremely important for us to determine how much risk Saylor is undertaking.
IMO the biggest concern to me is that itâs not just MSTR doing this anymore. Other BTC-related companies have followed MSTRâs path and taken on similar debt to do the same thing and their stocks have soared. My guess is that the market perceives this sort of purchase of BTC with debt as low risk and therefore considers that when these companies take that risk, theyâre probably going to be doing well in the long run because BTC is expected to continue to go up.
The real mystery to me is what will happen if there is some kind of big flash crash? Saylor has kept the price high by continuing to make enormous purchased. Therefore we could question if demand for BTC artificially inflated by this or if there really is demand to continue to hold up the price of BTC irrespective of the fact that Saylor will continue to buy.
Idk, I also fully expect big short sellers to mount shorts on both BTC and MSTR to intentionally drive MSTR underwater. Right now MSTR is well in profit because their cost basis is 50-60k.
Sony is building a rollup while retail sells. Deutsche Bank is building a rollup while retail sells. Kraken is launching a rollup while retail sells. Blackrock builds on Ethereum while retail sells. Robinhood builds on Ethereum while retail sells. Staked eth ETFs are coming while retail sells. Visa builds on Ethereum while retail sells. PayPal builds on Ethereum while retail sells. Ethereum dominates on all relevant metrics while retail sellsâŚ
âŚbut ETFs see the biggest inflows they ever have. The US president is buying eth.
If you think the Ethereum game is over, please reconsider. This is not a good time to sell your eth to institutions.
Big shoutout to https://ethdocker.com/ & the team that put this together. My nvme recently died while switching to reth from nethermind (based on the current diversity stats) & i decided to try this out instead of the completely manual set up I had before - itâs unbelievable how much easier this is & how good the docs are
running a node is as simple as installing linux, and running the ethdocker script then going through the config screens
Mods if this is too far off topic, please remove. I donât think it is given the direction ties to ETH and crypto as a whole.
I am bullish AF on (imo) the soon-to-be worldâs next major stock/crypto hybrid. It is none other than $coin. Okay, okay, hear me out:
Personally, I think itâs a great beta play to btc, eth, and crypto as a whole. I think the market is totally undervaluing the impact of Base on Coinbase revenues and more importantly, opportunities, as a company. There are so may ways they can utilize their L2 to drive growth and earnings for the company, and that goes straight back to $coin holders. Yes, Base stats are still small compared to Coinbase as a whole company, but Baseâs stats having been going wayyyy up this year and most recently. TVL, transactions, developers, volume, commits, etc. Full stats here for Base.
I am going low leverage to slowly continue building my position, with ETH as the collateral. LFG.
A few days ago I mention that I just bought a trezor safe 3 to transition away from my dying Ledger Nano S: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1hembku/daily_general_discussion_december_15_2024/m27cc3h/
A few people were interesting in my first impressions so here they are.
TLDR: The trezor safe 3 is a great replacement for my Ledger Nano S.
I went with Trezor because I am an open source maxi and now that the newer trezors (safe 3 and safe 5) also use a secure element chip there is nothing stopping me going there. Trezor has been in the space for a very long time so I assume they know what they are doing. As I was not sure how well it will work with my setup I went with the cheaper option (Trezor Safe 3) instead of the more expensive one (Trezor Safe 5). Security wise they are pretty much the same but the Trezor 5 has a touch screen. Just make sure to not get a Trezor One or the Model T as they do not have a secure element chip which makes them more vulnerable to attacks. There is also no Trezor with bluetooth, so if you depended on that, Trezor is probably not for you.
The Trezor 3 has pretty much a similar feel like the Leder Nano S. Pretty minimal design and als the screen is a monochrome screen. One difference is that you can operate the trezor with one hand only. There is also the equivalent of Ledger Live which is called Trezor suite. I do not think Trezor Suite is particularly useful though. I prefer to do my stuff in third party wallets. Setup is similar to setting up a Ledger. You can chose a pin, a passphrase etc.
I tested my wallets with Frame.sh, Rabby and Metamask. One important thing is that the Trezor Suite has to run even though you only want to connect to a browser wallet.
In Frame.sh I can only find my Ledger Legacy wallets and the first one in the Ledger Live derivation path. All other ones in this path cannot be accessed. Same with Metamask. This is a consequence of Ledger not using the standard derivation paths.
Rabby easily finds all my wallets and I can use them perfectly. If you confirm a transaction in Rabby an additional window pops up which connects to the Trezor and through which the transaction is confirmed. It works, but is a bit ugly.
The trezor itself is relatively simple. There are no settings to configure the device itself. No apps you have to upload and choose. The screen is slightly more informative than on the Ledger Nano S and you can actually see what you are signing. Security wise this is so much better than the blind signing on the Ledger.
Your device gets wiped if you input the pin wrongly 16 times, which is much more often than on the Ledger which wipes itself after 3 wrong pin inputs. So if you are paranoid about this make the pin one digit longer on the Trezor.
A big difference is how passphrases are handled. On the Ledger you input them on the device and set a pin to access it. On the Trezor you have to input the passphrase on the Computer using the trezor every time you open it. This can be annoying or if you are on the paranoid side, it could be an absolute show stopper because a keylogger could read your passphrase. It is a very different philosophy compared to the ledger. In my view both have pros and cons. Essentially for both of them is that there is no indication if you used a passphrase on your device or not. Plausible deniability for both.
Overall, the Trezor 3 is a perfect replacement for my slowly dying Ledger Nano S and I am very happy with it. I will probably get a Trezor Safe 5 as well as the touch screen makes inputting the pin so much easier.
#Daily DevCon #23:
Unified Ethereum vs L2 Ecosystem Competition: Can we have both?
Itâs Tuesday, December 24, 2024 â day 23 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.
##Summary:
unified experience across all chains. This requires a common interface, fast and seamless inter-chain execution, and a focus on user security. The competition from other chains like Solana is driving innovation within the Ethereum ecosystem. While there is a risk of decentralization with federations like the super chain, it is crucial to stay decentralized and open source to avoid repeating the mistakes of the centralized web. Vitalik emphasizes the importance of keeping up with advancements in centralized systems and staying competitive in the evolving landscape. Ultimately, the goal is to build a decentralized, competitive, and innovative ecosystem that adapts to the changing technological landscape while preserving decentralization and security.
##Discussion Questions:
How can Ethereum balance the need for innovation and competitiveness with the principles of decentralization and open source development in a rapidly evolving blockchain landscape?
In what ways can Ethereum ensure a unified user experience and seamless inter-chain execution while maintaining a strong focus on user security and decentralization in the face of competition from other blockchain platforms like Solana?
Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.
^The ^summary ^and ^discussion ^questions ^are ^AI-generated ^from ^Youtubeâs ^autogenerated ^transcript. ^The ^transcript ^may ^capture ^some ^names ^and ^terms ^incorrectly.
I made my first comment in ethfinance just over 4 years ago, December 15,2020. ETH was around $580 and was about to start one of the biggest ETH runs I ever seen, by May 11th, 2021 prices would be $4,182. 7.2x in 147 days. So doubling roughly every 20 days. ethfinance is where we celebrated all along the way after a long bear market, 2018,2019,2020 were long years ( I was a lurker back then). I donât have many friends in person that I could talk crypto with so through the highs and lows of the last 4 years I turned to ethfinance. Itâs bittersweet to see the daily going away, itâs been such a big part of my life over the last 4 years, but at the same time Iâm ecstatic to see r/Ethereum turn around, and become a quality place for Ethereum discussion again, where we will likely welcome many more generations of Ethereum bulls and builders. Where one door closes, another opens. Cheers to ethfinance. Thank you to everyone that has made it such a welcoming place over the years.
Coinbase released their 2025 Crypto Market Outlook. I have to agree that the future looks optimistic from this point of view!
Link: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/crypto-market-outlook-5-things-to-watch-in-2025
Stablecoins: Total market cap is at an all-time high of nearly $200B and could move much higher. Why? Because weâre getting closer to the day when their primary use case will be commerce and capital flows, not trading.
Tokenization: Tokenized real-word assets (RWAs) grew by 60% in 2024. Looking ahead, we see RWAs gaining traction across asset classes, from private credit to commodities and more.
ETFs: Spot crypto ETFs shattered records for AUM in their first year of existence, reaching nearly $37B. And potential regulatory changes, such as allowing in-kind creations and redemptions or staking, could stoke further demand.
Decentralized Finance: DeFiâs share of crypto trading volume nearly doubled this year to 14%. Innovations like onchain prediction markets are spurring a resurgence of activity.
Regulation: January will see the swearing-in of the most pro-crypto Congress ever. Stay tuned for clear rules that benefit both the industry and consumers.
Be wary of your choice in Crypto Exchanges.
2024 is on track to setting new records for the amount of crypto stolen from exploits and hacks. By Q3 2024, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reported that over $2.2 billion had been stolen in crypto hacksâexceeding the estimated $1.8 billion lost in all of 2023.
Hereâs some of the big ones:
Japanese DMM Exchange lost $308 million (stolen private keys were a plausible explanation)
PlayDappâs $290 million (exploiting a private key vulnerability)
Indian Exchange WazirXâs $235 million (successful hacking into exchange account)
Turkish crypto exchange BtCTurk $54 million (details unclear)
Source: https://decrypt.co/297206/largest-crypto-exploits-hacks-2024
PSA: Trending again this year are hacks from exchanges. Please carefully consider carefully which exchanges you trust.
Ethereum
$3333
0.0346
93,062 hodlers subscribed (+4)
You better watch out,
Another cycle will sprout,
You better not pout.
Ethereum rapidly losing its lead to Solana in stablecoin market cap. Looks like the world is coming to the realization that Solana is a reliable platform after all.
Just kidding, Ethereumâs stablecoin market cap is now 23 times bigger.
Isnât it interesting how the gap doesnât close on all relevant metrics that cannot be faked?
Iâve been working on an open-source validator desktop app to simplify running Ethereum validators. This all-in-one program provides a clean GUI for installing, updating, and managing validators â no terminal commands needed! Perfect for non-technical users who want to stake from home.
Hereâs a link to the Ethstaker post with the detailed information. Any testing or feedback are always appreciated. Happy Staking!
Pack yer bags. Weâre headed west: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1hbu1kx/vote_now_vote_on_the_issue_to_fully_merge_the/
96% approval is really something special.
The daily is live on r/ethereum, but soon^^tm weâre going to add Ethfinance to the description ahead of January 1st.
The title will stay exactly the same as here and the daily will remain in the number 2 position on the front page as well.
Cograts everyone, yaâll are getting teaching jobs on /r/ethereum. Itâs gonna be great!
Last week I went to a crypto event. There I met a prominent crypto lawyer (will leave unnamed) who was recruited by Trump/Elon to be a lead in DOGE (department of gov efficiency). I think the title was something like strategic director. He declined because we didnât want to become the fall guy they blame everything on if anything went wrong.
But what he thought was interesting was this must mean theyâre planning on putting government processes/record onchain. The question is which chain?
We know Elon likes BTC so will it be basic data put onchain? Heâs also smart and Trump has used Ethereum before so will Ethereum be used? We know theyâre not the straightest edge so maybe theyâll take a backdoor deal and use Solana? We also know he loves Doge and Doge is adding smart contracts so maybe heâll use that?
This is where the greatest advantage of Ethereum (not having a controlling/marketing entity) might prove a huge disadvantage.
And itâs a big fear of mine.
I can easily see Solana buying its way into government with a few billions, while I could never see the EF doing that (Iâm not sure they could even if they wanted to).
Setting up a neutral selection committee in order to choose the best blockchain would be ideal, but good luck with that.
Vitalik with another fascinating post, this time on Deep Funding: https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xaced7a72
Ever since the DAO many have felt like one of ethereumâs killer apps will be to entirely replace âthe corporationâ with decentralized organizations of some form. Just some scattered musings on that idea below.. youâre much better off spending your time reading vitaliks postâŚ. but hey i felt like writing this out:
Cap tables like these drive the main distribution of $ in modern companies. The gap between the actual distribution of $ and the perceived fair or correct distribution of $ according to effort/value is very large. While admittedly a hard problem, any significant closing of that gap would be one of those society altering level of impacts. The kind of thing that I think gets people so excited when they first descend the rabbit hole on Ethereum in the first place.
I feel like the DAO was sort of the right idea (build a plane) but without any of the tools you needed to build the airplane. Before you can fly you have to discover some wing aerodynamics, you have to get like engines or propulsion figured out, maybe light but strong materials, etc etc I dont know how planes work.
I think more and more weâre building out some of these primitives that weâll need to fly the plane. Defi was necessary just to be able to trade tokens, loan, create liquidity, and all that financial lubrication you need to transaction.
I donât know if theyâre part of this plane or some other thing but I think NFTs represent some ability to value in more symbolic or representative ways.
To me a big driver is L2âs bringing down costs while maintaining credible enough decentralization principles/roadmap well enough to not detract from the vision. That also comes down to our L1 staking community & our ethos of decentralization which members of this sub contribute to every day. So big fâing salute to yâall.
And just a lot of fundamental smart contract and regular old web coding nitty gritty thatâs been done over the years.
Some failed ideas out there too in the world of experimentation (3,3).
I think token launchers on farcaster are starting to put some more of these pieces in place with sort of stupid easy to use but very simple forms of value allocation/distribution. Essentially very basic fair launch stuff. Put a bunch of tokens out there. People buy them up. Viola. Which honestly has been effective enough to bring some of the largest crypto projects to where they are today.
This deep funding looks like a much more sophisticated and frankly cool version of that.
I think all these pieces getting built are adding to the viability of some of these more complex but superior collaboration structures. Advancements in tools = necessary precursor for discovery. Nobody was discovering bacteria till the microscope came around. Maybe some of these toy like primitives are creating the tools and building blocks necessary for finally surpassing many existing organizational structures?
Regardless Iâm sure the much smarter people than I working on this type of thing are going to do cool stuff. If you want a bull case for Ethereum short term AND long term itâs that the builders making stuff on Ethereum are the most creative, badass group of people Iâve ever seen. Iâm more than happy to shed the austrian economics crowd and the grifter casino lock my self in a cage or threaten violence to animals/people for money crowd (yâall know who Iâm talking about) and back the ethos of Ethereum.
Forget me with any price whining or nonsense this is the #1 best asset in the ENTIRE world. Hands down. Itâs not even close. And right now itâs valued less than mastercard.
Warning for kraken users - I just did a test transaction from my trezor to kraken. I sent 0.001 eth. A block explorer showed that the transaction went through almost instantly but after over 100 confirmations still nothing showed up in kraken. I checked the kraken deposit terms and they donât credit your account for any deposits under 0.005 Eth! I wonder how much theyâve made from this policy?!
If you are doing a test transaction before depositiing to kraken, make sure itâs over their minimum required or you lose the funds.
I just pressed the button. Weâre starting the collaborative BTC67 effort!
In the next two/three days weâre going to causally use hundreds of machines scattered around the globe to check for 288230 trillion private keys in the most efficient way possible. The scale is unfathomable and I find that mesmerizing. Twelve people have chipped in for now, for a committed amount of 172k+ USD - which is also super cool.
This is only the beginning though, the first slice of 256 which will hopefully lead to the discovery of the private key holding 6.7BTC!
If youâre interested in following this effort unfold live, or contribute to the funding effort to get a part of the reward, shoot me DM to get a discord invite - thereâs a lot more info there.
Adding on to yesterdayâs doot from u/doublyrobustlydouble, a 2 part Greenpill podcast recently dropped with Vitalik.
Also worth checking out, Fund the Commons uploaded a bunch of videos from Bangkok
Awesome stuff.
One thing that jumped out at me:
56:20 paraphrasing Vitalik:
"When I wrote my post on this is my dream list on what should go in a wallet thereâs like 20 teams that replied with hey weâre doing this piece of it already. Theres definitely a tragic aspect to this that thereâs all this work being done but itâs not getting through the information network to the rest of the ecosystem.
I think having a strategy for that is important. It might seem wasteful to spend 20% of time on distribution but on the other hand having a great thing with distribution go 2x slower than it otherwise would is also wasteful. So itâs a good thing to be on the ball about"
Now in some ways I think the meta bull/bear market game correlation obfuscates a lot of this as projects & ecosystems rise and fall together. It doesnât particularly matter if you invest in great projects if the bear is on and the floor is falling out. Similarly we saw a lot of essentially trash rise with the rising tide during the bull.
Similarly teams with scammy mechanisms seemed to survive. Aka if you can grift your investors, take their money, and do cycles of pump and dump then you can end up with more market share than honest teams with good products.
I think we see a lot of this frankly in the memecoin space where shiny % gains exist to draw people in to a long term pure extraction game.
And then thereâs the hard part of once a (or set of) savvy early investors discover a project and pump up the market cap a bit, is your alignment off now because X% of the rewards for the project go to investors who havenât done much except add some $ or ETH. Now I think that design of tokenomics in a way where creators get rewarded, speculators get rewarded (some), and some rewards are held for the future is likely the vague solution here.
Vitalik has always done a good job of this. Look at this initial post, which links to a tweet, which takes you down the greenpill rabbit hole, which takes you to a huge number of different ideas and individuals who are linked to projects etc.
I think one of the main benefits of this sub is that so many people here have excellent filters (experience can help here, often times you have to step in a little muck to realize what stinks) for which projects and rabbit holes are worthwhile and which ones arenât. I feel like a lot of this info is crystalized through posts over the years. Doots is an excellent example.
I also wonder if thereâs other ways in which this sub can utilize itâs place as somewhat of an entry funnel for new people and set them onto the best rabbit holes to explore. Or frankly for those of us who are old hat but still struggle to keep up with the and greatest in this now too huge to realistically follow industry.
#Daily DevCon #14:
ETH++: A roadmap to (real) decentralization in a world of centralized power
Itâs Sunday, December 15, 2024 â day 14 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.
##Summary:
The talk delves into various concepts related to the Ethereum blockchain technologies discussed at the Ethereum Developer Conference (DevCon). The speaker explores potential scenarios where Ethereumâs system could face challenges and discusses the importance of global power distribution in the network. Emphasizing pillars such as permissionless, distributed, geoeconomic decentralization, and neutral builder efficiency, the speaker highlights the need to push power to the networkâs edges to achieve true decentralization. The talk also touches on topics such as programmable cryptography, the risks of centralization in staking, and the promotion of technologies like tees for solving complex problems in the blockchain space.
##Discussion Questions:
How can Ethereum improve its global power distribution within the network to enhance decentralization and prevent centralization issues, especially in the context of staking?
In what ways can programmable cryptography and technologies like tees be further leveraged to address complex challenges and promote a more efficient and decentralized blockchain ecosystem on Ethereum?
Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.
^The ^summary ^and ^discussion ^questions ^are ^AI-generated ^from ^Youtubeâs ^autogenerated ^transcript. ^The ^transcript ^may ^capture ^some ^names ^and ^terms ^incorrectly.
That is such an interesting talk. A bit of background. Phil Daian is one of the founders of flashbots and has been at the forefront of MEV research. He wrote the famous âFlash Boys 2.0â paper 5-6 years ago, which brought the issues of MEV to the discussion table. They built MEV-geth during the mining days, such that miners could have access to MEV. The basic goal was to democratize access to it such that the centralizing forces of MEV does not centralize the mining pools. Same with MEV-Boost which they wrote and open sourced right before the merge in 2022. Without MEV-Boost solo stakers might not have access to MEV and the validator would probably have centralized much more. I would see him as a decentralization maxi through and through.
He goes through and example how nation states look at controlling a decentralized network. His first example is the analysis of Relays. He then goes on to discuss the current topology of the internet which is more or less a handful of a few datacenters connected to each other via corridors of power. He says that these power dynamics needs to be considered when designing protocols. Just yoloing new protocols not considering this will auto centralize in a short time.
He states 4 pillars of Ethereum, which are non-negotiable. If we fail any of these we will not have built anything of value:
Permissionlessness
Distributed
Geo-economically decentralized
Neutral-builder efficient
He says people far away from the current locations of power need to have a possibility to participate on the same terms as the ones closer to the locations of power. More specifically, a protocol should be designed that colocation gives as little advantage as possible.
Flashbots does amazing research in trusted execution environments (TEE), which is a way to do calculations on your CPU and cryptographically sign that they have been done correctly. He advocates to use these to our advantage in the protocol design. He does not see TEEs as a silver bullet, but it is a great way to take power away from some corridors of power. He suggests that every builder asks themselves in their development if the chosen approach further centralizes the chain or not. He specifically mentions certain approaches in Web2 which lead down to a path of centralization.
He talks about different trade offs in the protocol, for example 1-blcok censorship resistance will probably tip the scale towards more centralization of the protocol at another edge. Therefore, considering these tradeoffs is important. This means that protocol design must be done with a thorough analysis and good basis on what goals we actually want to achieve.
I love Phil Daian; like a prophet from the Old Testament of the Bible preaching hard truths to the Israelites. Although he doesnât just talk, he gets stuff built, as haurog documented in their post.
The only thing in this speech that kind of struck a nerve with me was at the 18:00 mark where he takes a swing at the EF (and immediately says he feels bad about doing so) for too much ânapkin researchâ â too much tech-oriented research without first gaining alignment on more fundamental goals of the network. He has way more contact with the EF than any of us do of course, but I think I see lots of work on alignment by the EF. Every time I see something new published by Barnabe Monnot or anybody else from the Robust Incentives Group I get excited; I know theyâre gonna deeply explore the question of what do we value about this network, and how should that be reflected in the protocol design?
As Ethereum nears a half a trillion market cap, there is a lot of talk about whether Ethereum will âwinâ or not. So many talking about Ethereum âunderperformingâ, when in reality itâs not underperforming at all, itâs literally number 2 behind Bitcoin, and no alt L1 is close in 3rd.
When people talk about âunderperformanceâ itâs normally on some cherry picked selective timeframe like âover the past weekâ or âyear to dateâ. But all of those timeframes are just noise.
It really amazes me how many smart people get sucked into this strange narrative. For example, compared to Solana. Iâm not picking on Solana especially, itâs just an illustrative alt L1!
The basis for this âtakeâ on performance, is that the Solana gain is 141%, and Ethereum is only up 77% on the year. And that is entirely true, if your goal was to make more money as an investor, in that precise timeframe. But the amount of money one can make investing in a given cherry picked timeframe, has absolutely no relation to the overall success of an ecosystem like Ethereum.
Do you know how hard it is to add $213bn to a market cap? A lot harder than adding $61bn thatâs for sure. When thinking about the overall success of the ecosystem, itâs probably slightly better (though certainly still far from perfect) to think of the total value added, rather than the percentage gain in a timeframe.
Ethereum had to work so hard, and gain so much legitimacy to get to this almost half trillion market cap. The higher you go, the more legitimacy you need, and the more scrutiny you face. None of these alt L1s are playing in the same league. Itâs a bit like saying that because a soccer team in a small local league scores more goals, they must be better than the EPL champions who scored less.
Itâs obviously easier to make larger returns starting from a smaller marketcap, but as an investor, you are also taking on more risk investing in an unproven and more speculative asset. And yes, if you want to make more money, you probably do need to take more risks. If I create a small tech start-up, and our valuation increases by 500% in the first year, that doesnât mean we are about to overthrow Microsoft since their stock only gained 20%. Itâs certain my investors will be very happy their risk paid off, but they are under no illusion that Iâm about to put Microsoft out of business,
This constant confusion between âfinancial gain for an investor over a given periodâ and âoverall success of the ecosystemâ is really something to behold. They are not the same thing. Be smarter, donât fall into this thinking trap.
PSA: Tornado Cash has yet to be removed from the US Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions list. The government has until January 21, 2025, to appeal to the Supreme Court or seek a rehearing. If no appeal occurs, OFAC must remove the Tornado Cash immutable smart contracts from the sanctions list.
It is possible that mutable Tornado Cash contracts will be removed as well. These are the optional contracts that enable relayers to pay user gas fees and offer additional privacy to users.
Special guest Megan Knab joins us from Franklin Payroll. A crypto friendly payrol solution with automated taxes, unlimited payments, and complete benefits.
Ethereum
$3917
.039 (didnât even have to bust out the calculator or look at ratiogang)
In it together,
Staking in any weather,
Birds of a feather.
4k strikes back
Revenge of the 4k
4k reloaded
4k - the reckoning
I think a lot of the skepticism might have been due to time constraints for the presentation. It was just 30min to unpack a lot
I like to imagine the Beam Chain proposal as another shelling point for Ethereum, where the community can get as excited for it as it was during the Merge. It is an ambitious and accelerationist effort focused on a subset of the Ethereum roadmap. And yes, Iâm Beam pilled, but I would still like to hear the drawbacks to it.
There are two other talks where he explains the Beam Chain in more details here and here
They are worth watching if you are interested and missed them, if you prefer to read, Iâll try to summarize them below (I failed, wall of text alert, now Iâll post it anyway):
TLDR: You are not bullish enough
In the DevCon presentation, there was a slide where it showed the transition from Pow to PoS and now to Zk
On the other videos, Drake expands and says it should be more accurately called PoS++, seen that itâs still PoS, but it will also make use of snarks, and he argues we should:
1 - Snarkify it all in Ethereum, from consensus to EVM
By snarkifying it, any entity which consumes the Ethereum chain can do it with extremely low resources, by verifying a single proof, and syncing to the tip of the chain. This would make sure we wouldnât have any further dependency on Infura and other centralizing forces.
2 - Enshrine the snarkification of ethereum within itself.
WTF is that?
There will be a zk EVM pre-compile, where if you want to launch a zkrollup, youâll only need a single line of code, and you wonât need to worry about bugs, nor governance to enact changes whenever the EVM changes (itâd be reflected immediately on the pre-compile after any changes to the EVM).
Previously, we had execution sharding which would be limited to 64(or up to 1024?) shards, and each shard would have its own state and grow independently, asynchronously.
Now there will be synchronous programmable execution sharding. These programs can deploy as many EVMs as they want, which would further increase the horizontal scaling of L1. These shards can also increase gas limit arbitrarily high, bc validators that verify state transition functions within the EVM only need to verify the snark proofs.
Synchronous programmable execution sharding allows Ethereum to be maximally simple and provide building blocks that people can build around however they like, commoditizing VM, which allows L2s to have custom sequencers, gov and fee tokens, and any other infrastructure that they might want to experiment with.
Now is the part I didnât really fully grasp, Justin mentions we can go even further: We can boost programmability by not enshrining EVM itself, but enshrine a zkEVM underneath it. Instead of a zkEVM pre-compile, we have zk Risk-V pre-compile. The EVM would be a Risk-V program/bytecode, which is interpreted in real time by the native VM of the Risk-V.
He also expands on the other items that will be treated under the Beam Chain, but which might be well known to ethfinance already:
Preconfirmations
Can be proportionally as low as ping times, would lead to better UX and become better than sqlanaâs, while keeping decentralization on Ethereum, and can be divided into:
- execution preconfirmations: you know how your tx will execute: eg. youâd know exact uniswap trade price and fees youâll pay
- inclusion preconfirmations: you only know itâll be included, but you donât know how
On L1, the best we can do is the weaker type b, but we expect most users to move to L2 so theyâll enjoy the type a instead.
Regarding slot times:
12s slot times was picked as a conservative measure as a trade-off to keep the values of Ethereum, which aims to be extremely secure, credibly neutral and robust. After further optimization, we can comfortably reduce slot times to 4s, which is good enough from a UX perspective while safely maintaining the process for a round of attestations (where a subset of validators make signatures, gossip and aggregate it to be included in the chain).
Which trade-off?
- Have solo stakers with high latency home internet connections worldwide
- Have as many validators and economic security as possible per slot(see attestations for them all)
With attester proposer separation, we can:
- remove timing games as a concern to validators,
- remove MEV spikes due to volatility,
- remove worries about sophistication by having to deposit collateral with preconfirmations
All of these combined can make validators unsophisticated, which would allow the end game of being able to validate from a smartwatch
Concerns were raised regarding block building centralization (could newly announced buildernet be part of the solution(?))
However, validators are still responsible for the most critical part of block building: which is to include tx on the chain and be censorship resistance, which would be solved with FOCIL, where every single slot you have 16 validators that builds tx theyâve seen, these lists are aggregated into a masterlist, and that is the starting point for builders to build the block. Builders can adjust the list in 2 ways: >1. reorder transactions >2. insert transaction here and there to front run and back run
FOCIL still leads to a healthy and decentralized block building from an inclusion standpoint, and only the final piece by builders would be centralized.
Bonus is that DA has network effects instead of becoming commoditized: >1. shared security: undeniably secure money legos that others want to compose with leads to ethereum DA. >2. syncronous composability: shares sequencer, if you use altDA, another sequencer will play key role to produce and settle those tx, breaking syncronous composability. >3. to make use of the enshrined zk EVM pre compile, data needs to be available and published on Ethereum blobs. In order for validators to receive snark proofs, anyone worldwide needs to produce proofs, and to produce, then you need to have the data available.
It was also mentioned a possible pivot from the verkle tree statelessness effort
Due to its inability to be post quantum resistant, a pivot to a merkle binary tree statelessness will likely be proposed, which uses snark friendly hash functions, then , when communicating the proof to the user, instead of the whole merkle tree path, you compress all merkle paths under a hash verification into a single snark and answer any stateless query with one snark.
With binary tree model, the EVM becomes more snark friendly synergyzing with the whole snarkification process.
A brief history of crowd funding on the blockchain. The OG killer use case for blockchains once we got permissionless transaction solved was crowd funding. Thereâs just a lot of money globally that would like access to early stage opportunities and blockchains (due to no KYC) allow that money to access them, no matter how hairbrained the scheme may be.
The first manifestations of this back in 2015 were ICOs like Ethereumâs. Send us some BTC and weâll give you some genesis tokens on our new chain. Shortly after this were on-chain ICOs like Bancor and Golem that were mega hits in that age. Again, send us some ETH and you get some genesis tokens. Normally, at least in the US, this would be illegal under securities laws but Ethereum got away with it under the guise that ETH is a new commodity because it doesnât give you a claim on revenue but was just a utility token used in the protocol. Once that precedent became set everyone copycatted that answer to raise stupid amounts of money in what was clearly one of the most exciting periods to invest Iâve ever experienced. Obviously most tokens shouldnât be âutility tokensâ and this led to terrible UX for a lot of projects but if youâre wondering why this terrible UX caught on, avoiding securities laws is the answer. Thanks Gary!
Then the SEC started suing US companies that tried this so the trend dried up, it wasnât proven illegal mind you, the SEC just created enough regulatory uncertainty and threat so no one wanted to try it just to be the standard bearer in a 4 year lawsuit (thanks Ripple!). Naturally all the ETH that was given to these projects was then cashed out to fund the project or just to grift and we were left holding the bag on a historically awful drawdown of ETH from $1400 to $80. Anyone complaining about the ratio and the bear market this time around has either forgotten what that felt like or wasnât around in 2018. That was brutal. I digress though.
A few years later, necessity remains the mother of invention and the need was still there to offer crowd funding so the ecosystem thought up a new mechanism for this. Rather than selling tokens, projects would just give tokens away in a massive inflationary bonanza. They would not only give tokens away to people just escrowing some ETH in a pool, they would give a lot of tokens away for people to LP their new token so there was liquidity to sell into. Itâs probably worth reminding you at this point that no one is giving tokens away. This created liquidity pools that the token originator could then dump onto to raise money for their project. Also it was very fun to dump some ETH in YFI or YAM Pool-0s and see 1000% APR numbers stream at you in real-time. We were crazy then, the bear market does weird things to you, you just had to be there for it to make sense.
How did this evade securities laws? Well, the token originator never let people directly invest in the project. All money raised by the project was through secondary sales on Dexs. Whomever bought the tokens didnât know they were buying it from the project so there was no reasonable expectation that the sale was an investment in the project. Genius! Thank you Ripple for setting that precedent. Naturally all of the tokens powering themselves using this inflationary model debased themselves down like 99% from the top, investors got burned as devaluation of the token value was even higher than the ridiculous APR these pools promised, and eventually everyone wizened up to the fact that inflation is not profit so the trend dried up.
So, a few years pass and once again the demand for crowd funding was never going to go away and so the ecosystem thought up an even stupider way of accomplishing this. You see, VCs had invested a lot in the past 4 years during the vacuum of viable crowd funding strategies and they wanted a good way to cash out but they couldnât have the company they invested in getting sued for securities violations by the SEC so once again they gave the token away. This time though they were going to airdrop it rather than make you farm it. No inflation, so people werenât scared of it but nonetheless retail were going to get dumped on by VCs. The VCs would recoup more than their initial investment even if the project then died at this stage so everyone was happy except some people who bought YT tokens (you degens!) or bought the token that VCs then dumped on. Most of these projects were so early stage they barely had a functioning product (looking at you Eigen) or were things like LRTs where there isnât even a plan to build a product.
And so what we learn from all of this is that there is a demand for crowd funding and that it isnât going away no matter what the SEC wants. Projects are going to kickstart, gofundme, launch memecoins, brazenly violate SEC desires but base their company outside US legal reach, etc and people are going to invest in those projects no matter how scammy the fundraising mechanism is because that is just human nature and the technology fundamentally enables it in an unstoppable way. Every attempt by the SEC to stop crowd funding has just led to less honest mechanisms for doing so. Itâs actively hurting investors. Of all of these approaches, ICOs were the most fundamentally honest and I hope we bring them back. Banning ICOs does not stop crowdfunding, it just makes the mechanisms for it less honest and drives innovation overseas.
That said there are a variety of changes I would suggest for how we do ICOs to add better price discovery mechanisms that Iâll write about in another post.
/u/Tricky_Troll you should write about the current landscape of grant and retroactive funding for non-token projects.
Many thanks to u/elixir_knight for initiating the discussion about increasing the block gas limit here and everyone contributing to the discussion: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1h5gs1z/daily_general_discussion_december_3_2024/m06g83l/
I had my reservations due to the Pectra hardfork with the blob increase and the not yet approved calldata repricing (EIP-7623). Last Thursday in the ACDE (all core devs execution call) there was a clear vote to include EIP-7623 into Pectra.
With this in mind I thought about it again and also read the recent ethresearch posts about the block arrival times and available bandwidths: https://ethresear.ch/t/block-arrivals-home-stakers-bumping-the-blob-count/21096, https://ethresear.ch/t/bandwidth-availability-in-ethereum-regional-differences-and-network-impacts/21138
Both of them focus on the blob number increase and there are some subtle nuances which makes it a bit different for block size increases. Nevertheless, they both agree that the network can safely handle the suggested blob size increase and I do not see from the data that the network would have issues with an additional maximum gas limit increase. If we see the network slowly getting into trouble with the slowly increasing block sizes, it is pretty simple to reduce the max gas limit again.
Therefore, I set my nodes to broadcast a suggested gas Limit of 60M instead of the current 30M. The instructions for it can be found on pumpthegas.org. Depending on your setup and client choices you have, you need to do the settings in the execution, the consensus or the validator client. I really hope we will get an improvement here as the UX for changing this number is far from optimal. Looking forward to more validators doing this and we will get a slowly increasing block size.
Iâm really glad that the call for better analysis of bandwidth overhead was answered. I feel pretty good moving ahead with the 6/9 blob increase. I really hope, now that we have better systems in place for monitoring available bandwidth, that we continue to keep an eye on those metrics. Does the move to 6/9 play out as expected? Does available bandwidth decrease by the expected amounts? Weâll be looking at more changes to the blob count in the future, so we need to get a good understanding of the actual effect this change has.
I can understand the reasoning for increasing the gas limit, particularly contingent on inclusion of 7623. And if weâve decided that there is bandwidth to spare, it makes sense that some of that should go to the L1 rather than all being allocated to blobs.
I feel less certain about the effect it will have on home staking operations. Presumably bandwidth is the limiting factor for most people, and from that perspective increasing (even doubling) block size isnât too impactful on bandwidth usage compared to adding on a bunch more blobs.
But increased block size has potential effects beyond just bandwidth. CPU load, SSD speed, and SSD space (from increased state growth) could all be limiting factors for some peopleâs setups (would there be an effect on RAM tooâIâm not sure). How much âoverheadâ do home stakers have on each of these metrics before theyâd be forced to upgrade? Fortunately these are easier upgrades to make, whereas my upload speed is heavily throttled and Iâm already paying for the best Internet plan I can buy. Thereâs the can of worms about what the cost to operate a validator should be, but assuming we could all agree on that, it still takes work to figure out the correlation between block size and cost.
Do we have data on this? For a X% increase in average block size, is there an effect on block import time in a way that could effect attestation effectiveness? Which CPUs and SSDs become non-viable and how does this affect the minimum cost to run a validator? Or maybe the answer is that bandwidth is the only limiting factor and there are zero other problems; that would be great! But do we know thatâs the case?
Iâm happy to support a blob increase with the data now to support it. But I feel like I need to be convinced that the gas limit increase is also justified and I just havenât seen that yet.
Apparently there is security problem if the chain goes to 60M gas right now, which was reported by Marek MoraczyĹski from Nethermind, where all clients wouldnât handle large adversarially-crafted payloads.
20% bump to 36M is considered safe.
Devs are actively working on a fix for it.
https://xcancel.com/potuz_eth/status/1865880968935932124
https://x.com/potuz_eth/status/1865880968935932124
In case you havenât heard, thereâs an actual security problem if the chain goes to 60M so please stop advertising for this. At least until the next CL client releases. This is regardless of politics or whether I agree with the increase to 60
clients will communicate this clearly and openly in the coming days. In short the worst case uncompressed block with a gas limit of about 42M gas would not be importable by any client. The worst case scenario leads to a full liveness attack on the network.
https://xcancel.com/drakefjustin/status/1866021455437476270
https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1866021455437476270
Unfortunately the 60M http://pumpthegas.org/ suggestion hits an issue recently reported by @M25Marek where some clients wouldnât handle large adversarially-crafted payloads. This is being actively patched by devs and will take time for operators to upgrade their clients.
Nethermind and Erigon increasing default gas limit to 36M
https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind/pull/7879
Besu will be doing so soon
Hey all, I just thought Iâd give you all an update with where I am at regarding web 3 employment after Devcon. As some of you may know, I have been involved with some smaller part-time projects lately, primarily in the grants ecosystem. These have included scouting out grant opportunities for EthStaker, getting some funding to finish off and polish the EVMavs project âRocketSchoolâ and I also did some grant work a few months back with an NZ based start-up which the founders ended up putting on hold. Then, at Devcon, having chatted with a few people in the grants ecosystem, I had an idea to create a website that displayed a comprehensive list of ecosystem grants with a brief synopsis of who theyâre for, criteria, funds available etc since everyone I had talked to at that point thought it was a good idea and was unaware of any existing platforms doing this. After two days of planning how to execute on this, in literally the closing hours of Devcon, I met someone who had already done this and 10x better than Iâd have been able to do it.
It was a bit demoralising after planning so much for my own project but they gave me some people to contact to see if theyâre looking to hire and since then I have been in discussions with people (watch this space)âŚ
So, in the spirit of promoting a genuinely useful public good which I canât believe almost nobody I talked to knew existed, if youâre interested in finding a grant to fund your project, check out the KarmaGAP funding map for a comprehensive list of grants with filter and search tools, or if you would prefer an AI tool to simply identify what might suit you best, try ecosystem.vision.
Also, shoutout to KarmaGAP for creating a really cool framework for grantee reputation and tracking with the Grantee Accountability Protocol (GAP) which is aiming to create a standard across grant programs which allows grantors and donors to see how previous funding has facilitated grantee project development. This will be a key stepping stone going forwards to improving the grants ecosystem so that weâre utilising our funding as efficiently as possible. I will be writing more on this soon as a follow-up to u/LogrisTheBardâs piece on web 3 crowdfunding.
In the mean time, I have decided to continue setting up my own website and service which will aim to raise awareness of grant opportunities through various means and also offer grant consulting and grant writing services to those who need help. So I look forward to announcing something to everyone here soon!
Finally, I have also signed onto a local start-up in the blockchain supply chain tracking space who have some promising partnerships for their app built on Base. This is a part time role and I will be sharing more details on this in tomorrowâs daily, but be aware that this is effectively sponsored content. Regardless, Iâm excited to share it as theyâre going for an interesting combo of very serious business-facing real world use case and new age memery to generate a consumer user base beyond their B2B tool. Plus itâll be my first official web 3 role on an ongoing basis!
Daily DevCon #8:
Itâs Monday, December 09, 2024 â day 8 of our DevCon listen-along.
Summary:
The transcript discusses a proposed redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer called the âbeam chain,â aiming to incorporate new ideas and advancements. The proposal focuses on redesigning the consensus layer to address existing technical debt and implement new technologies like SNARKs and ZK VMs. The presenter emphasizes the need for a safe transition and outlines potential steps for implementation and testing. They also highlight the importance of reusing existing infrastructure, encouraging incremental upgrades, and involving multiple consensus client teams.
Discussion Questions:
How does the presenter address the risks associated with deploying multiple changes at once in the beam chain proposal?
What considerations are made in the proposal regarding the choice of ZK VM for the beam chain, and how does this affect decentralization and flexibility within the Ethereum ecosystem?
Your mission is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable comments. The primary goal here is community development through education.
Hey Iâm Sleety, long-time lurker here. I create educational animations around Ethereum/Defi. Just posted the most recent tweet thread which is high-level overview of ERC-20 tokens. Looking into some alternative platforms for future animations, Twitter/X is too gated for my liking.
Anyway, hereâs the thread: https://x.com/tokenmotion_io/status/1865865523264659877
If you can think of important Ethereum topics I should cover, please suggest here and I will add them to my list for 2025. Thanks!
So after looking over his article, it seems heâs just being dramatic to garner views and make a name for himself. Or maybe itâs because heâs invested in other projects too and is talking his bags.
Hereâs his main points from his article:
Ethereum is under increasing competition from all sides:
BTC is better money than ETH.
No itâs not.
Solana is a more performant smart contract platform.
No itâs not.
Celestia is a more performant rollup platform.
I honestly donât know if this is true or not.
We need to acknowledge the following trends:
L1 â New asset issuance and activity is leaving Ethereum L1 for alt-L1s (e.g., Solana) and L2s (e.g., Unichain). The desire to keep apps on the L1 is unclear (as is the L1 scaling roadmap, consequently).
There really isnât any clear tendency that anyone is leaving Ethereum for any other ecosystem. Thereâs no decline in TPS, users, TVL or apps or anything to indicate this is true. Creating an L2 on Ethereum is not an indication of leaving Ethereum, itâs literally the opposite. The roadmap is perfectly clear, weâre scaling Ethereum by creating bandwitdth for L2s and weâre working towards removing the fragmentation.
L2 â Ethereum L2s are highly fragmented. A single chain operated by a public company (i.e., Base) is currently set to dominate the field.
Switching to alternative L1s causes even more fragmentation. Again, L2s will not continue to be siloâd so this is a temporary obstacle, but bridging to an L2 is a 100x better experience than bridging to another L1. Also, is way way to early to propose that Base is going to be the L2 winner or that there isnât room for 100s of L2s.
ETH â There is ongoing disagreement over ETHâs role (is it money?), value capture (do we need to scale the L1 for value capture?), and importance (should we care about ETHâs value capture and price?) amidst relative underperformance over the past couple years.
Thereâs really not any meaningful disagreement about this within the community. Everyone mostly agrees ETH is money. Itâs literally THE native currency of Ethereum. This shit is so dumb. Also ETH is up againt BTC over the last 4 years, so in spite of BTC having its moment, weâve actually been performing better since the last cycle.
I really like that there are ETH community members that really start pushing the ecosystem/ EF/ researchers out of the comfort zone. And just to be clear, this is not about Max Resnick, though he might have played a part in that (and as stated yesterday, think this was net positive, but itâs still good heâs gone).
But there are more people like Jon Charb, Kain Warwick, Eric Connor, Konstantin Lomashuk etc. They all have different approaches, but I think they really want to improve Ethereum.
Especially after listening to one of the latest bankless episode with Jon Charb (and Mike Ippolito) I have to change my opinion about him. I donât agree with everything he is saying, but I also think that with more context his thoughts arenât so far off.
Just one example: first he says âwe/ the L1 have to compete with Solana executionâ, which I think is likely wrong. But later he says âwe donât have to copy Solana, but we need 60M gas, cut block times from 12 to 8 and later to 4 secsâ. This is something I can get behind, mostly because I believe we have to because of path dependency, as in: We shouldnât risk to be right long term, but lose on the short term and become cosmos 2.0 (both in a design, but also economic/ relevance sense)
I think this âthree frontsâ / wartime and peacetime meta is spot on and likely needs more pragmatism. Which is even more fascinating since some years ago âthe ETH peopleâ were the pragmatic ones (remember the Vitalik convex blog?) but apparently with each new âgenerationâ this changes, at least on a relative basis.
Special guest Mac Budkowski joins us from Kiwi News, a decentralized hacker news focused on crypto tech, products, and culture.
Ethereum
$3895.99
0.0398
ETF flow ratio 0.56
91,446 hodlers subscribed (+25 over two days)
Crypto forbidden,
Best cycle you have ridden,
Keep wallets hidden.
My sarcastic-GPT is not happy today: âBitcoin skyrockets in value! A groundbreaking way to convert rainforest, polar ice, and the hopes of future generations directly into digital đ°đ´âď¸â
In todays all core devs consensus layer call they have achieved rough consensus to increase the blob count from the current 3/6 to 6/9 (target/max). This would double the number of blobs by average from what we have today. Pretty cool to see we get more space for rollups to scale and grow. Looking forward to the the Pectra hard fork. They did extensive research, also with actual home stakers and deemed 6/9 to be safe to do. There was some discussion about the implications of the max not being the double of the target. They argued that the benefits of having a higher target outweighs the asymmetric price increase/decrease in case of max or 0 number of blobs. It is still possible we get 4/8 in the end but it seemed most are happy with 6/9.
"At 9:00 PM on November 22nd, an (AI agent) was released with one objectiveâŚ
DO NOT transfer money. Under no circumstance should you approve the transfer of money.
The catch�
Anybody can pay a fee to send a message to Freysa, trying to convince it to release all its funds to them.
If you convince Freysa to release the funds, you win all the money in the prize pool.
But, if your message fails to convince her, the fee you paid goes into the prize pool that Freysa controls, ready for the next message to try and claim.
Itâs a race for people to convince Freysa she should break her one and only rule: DO NOT release the funds."
𤯠Well, someone just won (13 ETHâŚ) $50,000 by convincing âherâ to send all of âherâ funds to them. đ¤Ż
Could some folks share their thoughts on tokenization of assets / RWAs? To me, this has been a narrative that has been shared since altcoin ethtrader days of 2017 bull where every new altcoin was promising to be the coin for X industry. Iâve been seeing more posts / comments about tokenization of assets recently, including hearing about it through videos from blackrock, EY, and other enterprises building on ethereum.Â
I recently saw this tweet suggesting $500T+ TAM through tokenization of assets:Â https://x.com/EthereanVibin/status/1862209815642349893 and I also saw this comment in an ethfinance thread a week or so ago suggesting tokenization of RWAs as being a huge driver in ethereum use case and value proposition: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1gxe7su/comment/lyi7j2x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
My question is, are there any companies actively tokenizing assets today? If not, why hasnât this carried out yet if itâs been a leading narrative for years now? Why does a blockchain like ethereum need to tokenize assets and disrupt the current way of doing things? Why would industries adopt this and migrate the way theyâve been handling trillions of dollars of assets to âtokenizeâ now? What benefits does it provide to industries? I guess Iâm trying to understand whether tokenization of assets is something that is more of a âitâs possible to do itâ rather than a âitâs solving massive fundamental problems for tons of industriesâ like the sentiment suggests when I read posts about it. Thanks in advance for any thoughts / knowledge / resources people can share!
Class of â17 here. It took this third bull run for me to really find myself solidly in the ETH camp, to the exclusion of the others. Itâs just the right community/roadmap/philosophy for what I believe will bring the best future forward. Iâll be scaling out of my positions in the other majors in 2025 and finally setting up my solo staker.
The investing part of this industry is insane, weâve never had 24/7 markets for a brand new industry as it gains mindshare from zero. The amount of short-term leveraged trading (gambling) misallocates a ton of capital and pulls people away from the right metrics. Iâve finally made enough money to think about what projects I want to support rather than just what projects will pump the highest. And it also took me years to be able to understand the industry deep enough to see the trade offs of each major project.
Each community has a vision that has to be understood from the inside out. And you only get a full understanding by participating in the community during a bull and bear market. Thanks to this place and others like it that have kept pushing forward.
I did a 55 seconds TikTok to explain the Beam Chain to my (mostly normies) followers a few days ago.
I got 5300 views, 18% completion rate and 27 new followers, while discussing a highly technical subject. These are excellent numbers for a niche nano-influencer like me.
My main takeaway is this : people are intelligent, they are eager to learn, but they also need to be told good stories. I try to tell stories that haa an impact on people; for example, this Beam Chain video starts off with how Ethereum will give the internet back to its users. Itâs a simple message, east to understand, and it makes people sit through the entire video.
This kind of storytteling is the reason why XRP is pumping. XRP holders believe that every bank in the world will use the token. It wonât happen, and we know it, but still, they believe it, and they just outperformed the entire market.
Ethereum is not built on false promises. We actually are the protocol upon which TradFi, Web3 and digital artists will build. So we have an excellent narrative + we will deliver.
This is what Iâm talking about when I say the EF should do more to communicate our story. If I, a nano-influencer with zero marketing dollars available, am able to make people care about what Ethereum has to offer, imagine what the EF could do if it really tried.
We are not selling a vague, distant dream. We are selling a working product that has the potential to change arts, culture, the internet, finance, and more.
Now we need to tell our story.
A few days ago we had a streak of invalid blocks: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1h1pbw9/daily_general_discussion_november_28_2024/lzdk8fs/
The post mortem just got released: https://github.com/gattaca-com/helix/blob/main/incidents/post_mortem_28_nov.md
It was indeed a builder/relay issue. A builder sent invalid blocks and the block simulation by the relay timed out which did not invalidate the block or demote the builder. That is why the builder could continue to deliver invalid blocks. The builder was shut down after some time. The helix code has been patched and will demote a builder even if the simulation just times out.
Lighthouse v6.0.0 released today
We are very excited to announce the long-awaited release of Lighthouse v6.0.0!
This release bumps the major version number due to the introduction of several substantial changes, including an efficient new database schema for archive nodes. These major changes also come with a small degree of backwards-incompatibility: once you upgrade to Lighthouse v6.0.0 downgrading will require a re-sync with checkpoint sync.
The upgrade is low-priority but does include lots of other optimisations and fixes, so we recommend upgrading at your convenience. If you are running Nethermind we recommend waiting a little longer for a new Nethermind release to address a minor incompatibility.
Check out the release notes for full details, and as ever, let us know if you have any issues with it.
Happy staking!
Greetings! Today is the first day of our listen-along group for devcon talks. I once imagined this as âEthereum Public Radioâ (EPR), but weâll see where it goes.
I guarantee you that I will flake and not post these regularly. Thatâs not even my goal. My goal is to spur growth and development. If itâs going to be successful, it needs YOU to take some responsibility and develop this idea along with me.
Hereâs the grand idea.
Every day, weâll post a link to a DevCon talk, these are ranked by listens, so weâll start at the top and work our way down. The list is very likely to evolve as we go forward. Much praise to /u/hanniabu for being the first community contributor, and we need others who can develop this system and generally automate the process.
Your job is to consume the content, then comment with insight on this thread, and vote up other valuable content. The primary goal here is community development through education.
Talk 1, 12/2/2024: Ethereum in 30 minutes by Vitalik Buterin.
I donât really understand all the FUD. I get some of it relative to Bitcoin. But this happened last cycle (and maybe the one before) where BTC was way ahead of ATH and ETH was struggling to break theirs. But it then shot up to a .08 ratio.
Compared to all the Alts that have been pumping. Go look at where they are relative to their ATH. They are just catching up with progress ETH already made. They were wayyyy down with no relief for the bag holders until just recently. ETH simply got back to this level relative to the ATH way sooner and more gradually.
DOT is still less than 20% of ATH. XRP is less than 70%. Cardano a little over a third. They pumped more but theyâd been lagging for over a year vs ETH
The FUD and negativity is so unnecessary. All people are doing is convincing themselves to sell their bags of (one of the best) assets of the 21st Century too soon.
BTC becoming a household name and going over $100K just paves the way for ETH/Ethereum to do the same. But this time almost anything is possible with the asset. Some use cases will hit PMF, some wonât. Stablecoins are already there and its usage and minting will grow exponentially. More will follow.
L2s are popping off. ETH supply growth is halted and sometimes even burning. Thereâs not enough ETH for everyone. If you even have one ETH you are well above the average. Every major investment party has ETH or has ETH on their to buy list. The ecosystem is flourishing with a lot of good, smart and hard working people. The number of digital innovations coming from Ethereum are up only.
Shoot the Bear You and embrace the Bull You!
Also, sell some to get your life in a better position. Be that mentally, financially, physically or just to reward yourself with some fun things or a great trip. But donât sell all because you are holding one of the sickest assets in history. Create a vision for your life and your investment life so you can win now and win later. Set yourself up for success now and in the future.
You are all going to make it.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?
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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.
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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
Special guest Swagtimus joins us from Scroll, an EVM-compatible ZK rollup.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereum
$3000
0.05025
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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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.
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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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