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889 Dooters - Last Updated June 9, 2023
Guest appearance by Matt Finestone, former lead of Gamestop NFT and currently head of Taiko.xyz, a decentralized and Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup.
Announcements
Ethereum
$1838
0.069
Go after Binance,
Stomp down when you do your dance,
Lead to no advance.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 96k leaving ~100
-Entry queue +900 from yesterdayâs number - New entry queue ATH. -It will take just over 45 day and a half days for the entry queue to clear -In just under 24 days the amount of daily validators that can both enter or exit will be increased from 2025 to 2250.
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
This can also be tracked via https://validatorqueue.com/
Oh dear gang, with all the drama around Binance and the price crashing weâre seeing a big spike in stakers pulling out their validators. The exit queue is up to 8 minutes!
EthStaker published a blog post to do a call to action for execution client diversity - Nethermind and Besu are ready for adoption in home operators but also for large scale staking operations as yorickdowne, whoâs part of EthStaker, notes with his setup testing for Cryptomanufaktur.
Geth controls ~87% of the network right now a bug would be a catastrophic situation - say a bug happened where Geth produced an invalid block - most validators would follow it and weâd have to resort to one of three choices at the social layer:
Any option we chose would shake peopleâs faith in the immutability of Ethereum. The first one would be a massive amount of capital loss. And this is just one of three types of bugs - the most unlikely type of a bug, a double-signing event caused by a bug in Geth, would cause a total slash of 87% of validators. I mean all of it, people running Geth would lose their entire stake.
Super unlikely bugs but weâre ready for it and Iâm sure that Geth is ready for the people to take the pressure off of them!
đľđť Dissecting the FAKE Orbiter âAirdropâ announcement that u/Dreth warned everyone about earlier on:
â
đ¨ âDue to major success of ourâOrbiter Pilots NFT Seriesâ, we have decided to launch our token $ORBâ â ď¸
đ Grammatically wrong: Missing âtheâ.. As in: âdue to THE major successâ
đ Logically wrong: Why would a company suddenly âdecideâ to launch an airdrop based on the success (?) of an NFT Series?
đ¨ *âWe will be giving away 5,000,000 $ORB tokens, which will be distributed to anyone who claims from June 1st - June 3rdâ*â ď¸
đ when announcing Airdrops, legit projects release extensive information on their token allocation. Usually multiple pages long, filled with all kinds of relevant information. NOT just a plain number..
đ .. and they donât distribute their token to.. âanyone who claims..â
đ¨ âThere is only a limited amount of token so act fast!â â ď¸
đ here they try to create a sense of urgency, to make you act before you think, before you notice all these red flags.. Also, notice the spelling mistake (token instead of tokens)
đ¨ âThose who receive the tokens will be whitelisted to use our newest staking featureâ â ď¸
đ here they are baiting (âwhitelistedâ) you again, trying to shift your attention from all the red flags by promising ânew productsâ that can give you with extra yield/rewards..
đ¨ âAny gas spent on claiming the tokens will be refunded via Orbiter Financeâs Smart Contractâ â ď¸
đ in other words: âDonât worry about high Gas!! Go one and claim NOW!! Weâll refund everything!!â. I.e. donât wait, donât look further into the legitimacy of this! Go ahead and hastily ignore any sense of âdangerâ, and sigh these txs NOW!
đ¨ Claim $ORB here: https://orbiter DOT pm/ â ď¸
đ DOT PM? Using the âorbiterâ brand to lure you into a fake sense of security. But dot pm? WTF is that??
đ¨ PILOTS! Our distribution is now 77% claimed đ¸ â ď¸
đ the number keeps âgoing upâ.. First 66%, then 77%, and so on.. QUICK, ACT FAST (AND DONâT STOP TO THINK) TOKENS ARE RUNNING OUT!!
Thanks a bunch for signaling your support to prevent Lido from harming Ethereumâs decentralization yesterday. Iâm glad to see that this problem is as important to you as it is to me.
Iâve gathered all the information weâve shared so far in a google document that automod prevents me from sharing, so hereâs a pdf.
Feel free to add comments wherever needed and letâs start fighting for this.
Edit: I also tweeted the doc with a new hashtag: #Lidont which has its own logo in the doc.
The document contains quotes from u/hanniabu u/etherenum u/MinimalGravitas
Have to give my public support for Gnosis chain after a few posters recommended I run a node on my spare staking PC.
You can spin up a validating node with just 1 $GNO token. Itâs the base token for the network collateral /staking, but funnily enough you need xDAI to pay fees so make sure to also transfer in $1.0 in dai to your deposit address.
You can stake like a whale too if you wanted, for about $7500 you can run 64 nodes thatâll probably net you 10-20 block rewards per day. Yield is around 16% which is just high inflation rewards, and so far thereâs nothing in block rewards because tx are too cheap and thereâs no MEV boost I donât think. Gnosis Chain also hasnât had their withdrawal fork yet so your locking up a little bit longer than ETH right now, but thereâs no entrance queue either to earning.
The reason for the recommended is it uses the same software clients as ETH (geth, nethermind, lighthouse, prysm, maybe a few others now but not all are supported just yet). Itâs literally a mini-me ETH network with its consensus and execution separated, using the same software clients you just select the Gnosis chain in your startup flags. I used Somer Esat guides to do all this, and just cross referenced the official setup guide from the Gnosis website (below).
If you are curious about staking at home, or looking to enhance your own Etherum node operating skills, running a Gnosis node is like training or studying using real money. For me that always forces me to take it seriously and even enjoy the process more, in addition to leveling up my own skills. You just get a good a feel for how the clients interact with eachother, and also how well your node links up to the network and other nodes. If you really mess up, then you are only out $116 per node rather than $60k. Plus, you are helping to decentralize transactions on a low cost Etherum aligned EVM sidechain. This further broadens the reach of EVM smart contract developers and gives you something constructive to do during đŚ szn.
Yaâll probably already heard about the reddit api pricing drama, but for those who didnât: Reddit is getting greedy and is going to charge a ridiculous amount of money for the use of their API, thereby driving third party clients out of business.
Thereâs not much information about who will have to pay for what etc., but assuming that every API request will have to be paid for, this is the calculation Iâm making for the u/nitter_not_twitter bot:
Iâm currently checking the subreddit 6x per minute. I could reduce this to something like once every 5 minutes and I suppose it would still provide a good UX.
Thatâd be 12 requests per hour, 288 per day and 8640 per month.
The bot answered 170x in the past month as well so weâre at 8810 requests per month, or ~106k requests a year.
According to what we know, reddit wants to charge $12k for 50 million requests. Thatâs $0.00024 per request or ~$25 for the 106k/year.
25$/year for running a very small bot at 12 checks per hour instead of the current 360 checks per hour (which would be insanely costly).
I can afford that without a problem, assuming reddit will offer packages that small and at the same price.
But this still shows how insane the API pricing is.
Without 3rd party apps Iâll not be here as often as I currently am and this might be true for a lot of people here as well.
Maybe we should also think about joining the prostest: <https://reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/13yh0jf/dont_let_reddit_kill_3rd_party_apps/ > Hereâs a list of already participating subreddits: https://reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/
Alright, well here ya go. Our own little reddit alternative.
Welcome to EVM Lemmy. Our home away from home when we take down reddit on the 12th.
See below, then⌠Play around. Make some shit. Post some shit. Iâll polish it up as we go.
Remember Iâve never adminâd a site in my life so⌠Anything and everything is subject to me trying to fix an issue and accidentally deleting all our data so⌠yeah, screenshot anything important anyone says.
SOME. CAVEATS.
Obviously, youâll notice itâs on http only not https. Because I canât get the damn SSL cert to work. So, NO serious info should be entered here beyond your usual junk email and a junk password. Itâs PROBABLY just me with access to the data but like, idfk, itâs http, trust nothing. Please just meme around and try to break the site, and skip entering your banking information and private keys.
Then if anyone can kindly explain why the http://url works in every browser of mine EXCEPT my main Brave browser, Iâd appreciate it. Edge is fine. Firefox is fine. In fact, I can access it in a Brave Private window, just not the main. Why? What setting is on blocking http? Hell, I can even do it from Brave on my phone, same wifi network and pihole DNS and everything. Confused, I am.
And itâs also not actually federated because itâs 99% me not being able to figure it out yet and 1% apparently thereâs some outbound DNS issue with Lemmy instances the devs are working on. Idk.
tl;dr servers are hard. yall need to be paid more.
Cheers.
UPDATE:
Despite the best efforts of fellow redditors, I have to call it quits for now on the Lemmy instance. Iâm just not smart enough. Perhaps Iâll return to it.
In the meantime, please find our ethfinance alternative at https://kbin.social/m/ethfinance. Itâs all set up and ready to go, and itâs federated. Think of Kbin as the scrappy newcomer ProtonMail to Lemmyâs Gmail.
Iâll leave it at that on here, but Iâm happy to help people tour the fediverse in the Daily on Kbin. Weâll waive the âon topicâ rule for a few days so folks can acclimate.
New ethresear.ch post by mike neuder, francesco dâamato, aditya asgaonkar, and justin drake.
Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE â a modest proposal
Also see their notes on security.
Summarizing briefly, this change would keep the 32 ETH minimum for a validator, but increase the maximum by some factor (possibly 64x to a max of 2048 ETH). Probability of selection for various duties e.g. sync committee would be weighted based on balance. Operators running multiple validators would not have them aggregated forcibly, but could opt in to have their validators merged.
The authors argue the following benefits:
As with any protocol design choice, there are some tradeoffs involved. Already a couple of good criticisms in the replies which are worth a read.
I am feeling quite positive on ETH and Ethereum:
These are uncertain times, I have no idea which branch of the US government lashes out and attacks crypto next, but I am just feeling positive about the non-reaction of the market and the future ahead for Ethereum.
This isnât designed to be FUD, but rather to be realistic about what I expect to happen. Just to be clear, I expect this plan to fail at some stage along the way, because I think they let it run too long and itâs likely no longer stoppable:
Itâs crystal clear theyâre working towards an agenda to shut down crypto as a whole. Tbh I donât give a shit if itâs because âhur dur global banking cabalâ or âoh fuck the USD is going to collapse if we donât try to shut this downâ or âIâm old and fucking stupid and I hate this cryptkeeper blogchain technologyâ, because the reasons are irrelevant; just know that theyâre working with a coordinated plan here and Ethereum is on the hit list. Be realistic about the struggles that are coming.
A few weeks ago I received a reminder to my sale of majority of my BTC to ETH.
At that time in 2022, btc - $30k, eth - $2000, ray - 0.067.
2023 prices, btc - $26k, eth - $1800, ray - 0.067.
So was that decision good for me and my future?
Some quick reflections combined with guesses-predictions on how things might turn out.
Itâs getting pretty long and my flow is a bit off so hereâs a few btc related takes.
And if you made it till here, hereâs my last important point.
Iâm going to end this here, thanks for coming to my imperfect TED Talk.
All the best,
696.eth
Guest appearance by Brendan Shakeshaft and Joe Van Loon, founders of Auditware. Auditware specializes in performing smart contract audits and building security tooling. Their flagship product Audit Wizard (currently in alpha) is the ultimate web3 security tool, allowing you to audit your smart contracts with ease.
Ethereum
$1,889.56
0.0696
Trustless sequencing,
Let data compression sing,
Rollups be dancing.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 78.5k, leaving ~10
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
Volatility so dead I donât even have any memes to post.
With trezor, you can read through their code and understand how they generate seeds.
Someone has already done this: https://medium.com/@brandonarvanaghi/analyzing-trezor-firmware-mnemonic-seed-generation-for-bitcoin-and-ethereum-4b03fbaad24d
Youâll notice that that article calls out that the default ârandom32â isnât suitable for production (and the code itself wanes you of this), so youâll need to find out where Trezor implements ârandom32â. This is my first time looking through their code and it seems that the insecure implementation is the default implementation in their firmware, but I assume they replace that somewhere. Perhaps someone more familiar can point us to the newest RNG code because THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT POINT TO CLEAR UP.
They do have a legacy firmware that has its own ârandom32â implementation: https://github.com/trezor/trezor-firmware/blob/92045275fb79e532a5b9a86732c1b3206ef3bba4/legacy/rng.c#L27
Youâll notice that that code uses a few âRNG_â variables to produce itâs number, so the next step is to find out what those are.
We know that Trezor uses a Cortex-m4 Arm chip, and this is C code, so we can look at the chip datashet to understand what those do, or we can cheat and look at OpenCM docs: https://libopencm3.org/docs/latest/stm32f2/html/group__rng__file.html
Youâd also want to go to the datasheet for the STM32F205xx to see that it has a âtrue random generatorâ hardware module.
That all looks really good, and Iâve heard that the modern Trezor firmware also includes static ram and host device data into itâs RNG, but Iâm not familiar enough with their code to hunt that down at the moment.
Hey guys, lurker here whoâs been working on a project in his free time: https://betonchain.gg/
To keep it brief, I started out running a Chainlink node, deploying jobs and a consumer to update odds and game results data from an API I wrote to aggregate results and odds across various bookies. Eventually the goal became to offer the most competitive betting experience in terms of odds, privacy and transparency, while decentralizing the bookmaker by sourcing house liquidity from a community which receives house profits back. Soon after launch I aim to add support for futures and integrate player friendly tools such as contracts for auto-hedging parlays.
The platform is currently on Sepolia, if anyone is interested in testing the DApp please drop an address and I can send over some test USDC/USDT/DAI to place bets with. Hopefully thereâs not too many bugs! I am considering launching polygonzkEVM but not sure yet.
Appreciate any feedback from you fine gents and ladies!
PS: If anyone has insight into raising funds, please let me know, hope to make this my full time job. Thanks again!
Beijing releases white paper for web3 innovation and development
https://www.theblock.co/post/232404/beijing-web3-white-paper
ââŚDubbed theâWeb3 Innovation and Development White Paper (2023)," the document states that web3 technology is an âinevitable trend for future Internet industry development,ââŚâ
âThe commission aims to construct Beijing as a global innovation hub for the digital economy.â
â The white paper reportedly states that Beijing aims to strengthen policy support and accelerate technological breakthroughs to promote the web3 industry.â
I think weâre hitting an inflection point where staking is the âcoolâ thing to do with Ether. Lots of folks predicted that this would happen but no one really knew when. Iâm basing this on two factors:
The logical interpretation of this is that the supply squeeze delivered by staking & burning is finally upon us.
Does this mean Ethereum is successful?
Nope. Not even close. We saw something similar happen with Dash in 2018 (dash spiked when their staking program reached critical mass), but Dash couldnât keep the gains. The only way Ether will lock in this success is if we build valuable products on top of a credibly neutral and decentralized network. If youâre hearing this, but not acting on it, youâre a bad puppy đ
I took a deep breath and tipped my toes into Ordinals and BRC-20 yesterday. UX is terrible, it took 12 hours (!) to process my bridging transaction from BTC mainnet to Stacks, and depositing into my trading wallet took about 10 minutes. Itâs a very, very long time when youâre used to Ethereum. Xverse wallet is even worse than MetaMask in terms of showing human-readable information, and all swaps are done either via order books or P2P bulk sales.
The experience is not welcoming for a newcomer. Iâve been doing DeFi daily for the last 2 years, and I had to look around for hours before I was comfortable enough to do a transaction.
However, I think BRC-20s and Ordinals have a decent chance of becoming more popular in the next few months. I am not tech-savvy enough to understand the hurdles facing a better UX - until yesterday I thought an ETH NFT collection could be bridged back-and-forth to BTC⌠But I could definitely see how people could pile on Bitcoin DeFi projects.
Ethereum isnât threatened by this, in my opinion. It is so far ahead in terms of development⌠Bitcoin looks like a 28k modem, while Ethereum is 5G. Still, I decided to allocate a small portion of my trading wallet to it. I feel kinda dirty using a PoW chain, but hey, ride the wave, donât fight it, as they say.
Hey ! Seems like Iâm going to be let go at work soonish (Which is a good thing, my job got less and less technical over the years and I miss that part a lot). Iâm a cryptographer with quite good skills in programming in a range of languages, so I was considering having a bit of fun for a couple years working in the ETH ecosystem. What Iâm looking for is technical challenge.
What are my options ? My thoughts so far :
Any other options you can think of ? Iâm just in the process of evaluating my opions right now as the switch wonât be before a couple months.
Just a reminder to everyone if you donât know already.
Both Ledger and Trezor device support Fido U2F, which means you can use your ledger or trezor as a security key (2FA) to login to your online accounts.
Of course if you are not comfortable taking your hardware wallet with you everywhere, maybe consider using it for online accounts youâll only login from your home or in a safe place. But according to your specific threat model you can use HWs as 2FA security partially or fully in your online activities.
You can use them to secure your CEX accounts, email, password manager etc. And if you loose or break your device you can always restore it with the seed phrases in another device and all your 2FA security keys will be recovered as well.
Using a security key as 2FA for your online accounts greatly increases your general security online. And almost impossible to hack into your accounts remotely.
Before you implement that be sure to go through the ledger and trezor articles about using their respective U2F features.
Trezor also supports FIDO2 standard for passwordless login but itâs not as widely adopted yet like U2F.
Edit:- here is trezorâs article on using U2F- https://trezor.io/learn/a/what-is-u2f
Here is the ledgerâs article - https://www.ledger.com/fido-u2f
If youâre moving away from ledger as your hardware wallet, you can atleast use it as a 2FA security key to secure your online accounts.
https://twitter.com/hanni_abu/status/1663605190543523840
I wasnât happy with existing solutions to monitor validator entry/exit queues so I built this https://validatorqueue.com.
This dashboard shows the entry/exit queue, wait times, total active validators, and historical values.
Thank you beaconcha_in for providing the data â¤ď¸
Not sure if posted yesterday, but even if it was itâs worth repeating. HOP bridge now supports rETH, with joint liquidity incentivization by HOP & RocketPool DAOs.
https://twitter.com/HopProtocol/status/1663669978405691392
This is the first liquid staking token bridge (of any protocol) and Iâm hopeful HOP can add more. Anyone who is in a LST community that has shown interest in getting a bridge set up let me / HOP know. When this was being voted on it seemed there was interest in adding more.
The Lido situation:
When Prysm contributed to centralization by having too high of a share in the consensus client market, the community launched an initiative aiming at reducing that.
This worked fantastically and Prysm went from more than 66% to now being second behind Lighthouse.
No real initiative has been launched in the case of Lido yet. There is no real equivalent to clientdiversity.org today, with explanations, educational material, and guides to switch to less centralized options. There is no real pressure by the community.
Are we really passively waiting for the 33% validator share limit to be crossed in order to start doing anything?? Will one more percent really make a difference? As a reminder, Vitalik suggested that no entity should control more than 15% of all validators. Lido already controls twice the stake Vitalik considers to be too much.
On May 22 2022, u/superphiz wrote that community action should start at a 22% share. With its 32%, Lido has now 50% more than that and yet no action has been seen.
To our Ethfinance friend u/hanniabu who created clientdiversity.org (big thanks for that): is there a similar website planned for staking providers? rated.network just doesnât do the education job. Please let me and us know if there is anything we can do to help.
Feel free to share any idea about what we could do to.
This problem wonât just solve itself, there needs to be a community initiative.
Guest appearance by Rhett Shipp from Gravita Protocol, a decentralized borrowing protocol.
Ethereum
$1805
0.068
Tax crypto traders,
The debt ceiling deal breakers,
Rug pulling raiders.
Your daily beacon chain dose.
Pending validators: Joining 72.9k, leaving 0
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
It wouldnât take much volume from Fidelity to cancel out the⌠checks notes⌠negative ETH issuance
Ethereum is the only digital asset in the world that is all of the below:
Traditional finance people and most normies still have not figured this out. I know weâve come a long way since 2015, but I really believe we are super early adopters here. Will be interesting to look back on these threads in 5, 10, 15 years time.
Letâs rearrange that and get a catchy acronym.
Secure Trustless Useful Permissionless Productive Immutable Decentralized
ETH is STUPPID!
Great work everyone, take the rest of the day off.
Imagine an Ethereum spam token as a small piece of land in the middle of the desert that has a big sign planted in it saying â/u/barthib owns thisâ. You have no idea who put the sign there, and the land is obviously worthless, so why would you bother driving out into the desert to try to claim it or to take down the sign?
TL;DR Hide it. Donât interact with it or try to âget rid of itâ.
Conceptually speaking, Ethereum tokens (including NFTs) donât exist âinâ your address like ETH does. They exist âinâ their own token contract that maintains its own separate ledger. This contractâs code is determined entirely by the creator of the NFT.
When your wallet software checks your address for tokens, what itâs basically doing (through a couple levels of indirection) is pinging the smart contract that the token creator published, asking it âdoes this address own any of your token? If so, which one(s) does it own?â The tokenâs creator can, if they wish, tell the contract to respond to this inquiry with literally anything. They could tell your wallet that you own an amount of their token equal to the current block number, or randomize every day the tokens the contract says you own, if they wanted to.
When you interact with a token, your wallet is reaching out to the token contract and running the code defined there by the creator of the token, which can also be anything they want. So a situation like this could occur:
Edit: A classic scam is where they code the contract to revert/fail your transaction with a custom error message that includes the address of their scam website in it, telling you to go there for âsupportâ on their token. You see your failed transaction with their custom error message when you go on Etherscan to check whether your transaction went through. So you visit their website and get on their support live chat, and they feed you some bullshit about you needing to install a wallet upgrade from a dodgy .exe file, or that your wallet is corrupted and you need to send them your seed phrase to fix it. Then they clean you out.
GrĂźezi EthFinance đ
Been away in Japan đŻđľ the last 4.5-weeks or so for vacation. Didnât use the phone much, went camping, did jiu jitsu, was a cornerman for an MMA fighter, went to a baseball game, sumo; just reconnecting and seeing how the ecosystem is.
Iâm always here in the shadows doing my best to secure the Blockchain, provide liquidity, and help along newbies when I can.
Love you all, keep being ambassadors, and keep helping any- and everyone who asks for it!
PrĂśschtli đť
Heads up for everyone using Google Authenticator 2FA app. While this might be old needs, the update was pushed around the end of April, this was new to me, so maybe some fellow EthFinanciers might find this useful.
This morning I opened my Google Authenticator app to find out that is needed an update. The update included a back up of the authenticator codes into my google account.
When I explored this a bit I found this:
âWith this update weâre rolling out a solution to this problem, making one time codes more durable by storing them safely in usersâ Google Account. This change means users are better protected from lockout and that services can rely on users retaining access, increasing both convenience and security.â
Really, how can they think this is save. The whole point is to have a second step besides your standard login option like Gmail. Whatâs the point of storing your 2FA codes in a google account that when it gets compromised, your 2FA codes are compromised as well.
There is still the option to keep using the authenticator without the backup feature.
Remember, when it comes to online security, the ultimate responsibility lies with none other than ourselves. Stay vigilant, take proactive measures, and empower yourself to safeguard your digital presence.
Hi everyoneâŚI just got the final cover for my book back. Iâve written a little book about Ethereum!! Specifically about WHY Ethereum is the future of business. Itâs called (no surprise) âEthereum for Businessâ. If you would like to pre-order it, the paper copy should be in your hands in about 2 weeks as weâre nicely ahead of the official schedule and orders for eBooks on Amazon or Apple will follow in another 2-3 weeks. Iâll do a top-level post on why I wrote the book and what itâs about on the official release day.
There was a meeting planned for Monday but too many people could not make it last minute. A few of us had an unstructured discussion mostly about the costs of setting up and running an oDAO node and necessary archive node. u/haurog calculated some of the costs using on-chain activity and is willing to share a doc once complete and hereâs another great resource (oDAO tab).
Weâd like to maximize participation for those interested in working on the project, so please enter your availability for the next meeting here:
https://www.when2meet.com/?20153310-SNPGH
Enter a name (pw optional) and click Sign In, then select your available meeting times so we can schedule it.
If Discord meetings do not work for everyone we may consider using Zoom or other tool. Whether active on Discord or Reddit-only user, all are welcome and encouraged to join the effort.
With crvUSD finally launching in earnest now would be a good time to at least familiarize yourself with the Curve ecosystem if you havenât. Itâs still the second highest volume DEX and might have just launched a way to double its income.
Thereâs a lot to unpack here:
I do suggest you spend a few hours and familiarize with this system if you havenât because it is the baseline so many other projects derive their tokenomics from.
Not sure if itâs been posted yet, but the delegate week started yesterday. If you own any DAO tokens, itâs a great time reconsider who you are delegating too. Or even better, if you are on the fence about being a delegate might be a good time to jump into it!
Some more info here - https://delegationweek.com/ & if you are looking for a list of r/ethfinance delegates check out the daily doots page here - https://dailydoots.com/#delegates
If you own any HOP, now would be a good time to consider delegating - whether that is to someone new or just re-affirming with the person you already delegate too. They are using some of the grant funds to encourage people to re-delegate (or delegate if they arenât at all) See - https://forum.hop.exchange/t/grant-proposal-delegation-week/878/11. Not a huge amount, and Iâm not sure if those are the final numbers, but at a minimum should cover some gas costs + some beer money.
Crypto wasnât invented to make you richâŚ
Iâve been in Ethfinance for a few years, and every year, I understand this a little bit more. I joined before the big bull, made some profits, but you donât make life-chaging amounts of money by investing spare change as a broke college student. So I obviously didnât sell during the crazy highs. This year is the year in which Iâll be calling myself an âEthereanâ for more than I was calling myself a âBitcoinerâ.
âŚIt was invented to set you free.
Iâve got to say, I âconvertedâ to Eth at a good time. Not a good time financially, but at a time where I was disillusioned with Bitcoin. I had heard about Ethereum much earlier, but ignored it, as it was obvious to me that Bitcoiners would not leave the biggest and best coin with zero improvements over multiple years, riding on the first-mover advantage alone. What a rabbit hole the Ethereum ecosystem was! What an insane potential of improving the way we interact with wealth and capital and as a result the human condition!
âŚBut it will make you rich anyway.
If this part ever comes true, Iâm ready, but I hope itâs not overnight. I donât know if my mental health can take another insane bull, but I suspect that the next one might be even wilder. At least inflation and time have changed my definition of âlife-changing moneyâ. In any case⌠DCA on!
Iâm working on a few crypto beginnerâs tutorials, with the main goal being to simplify information and for a better learning experience. Ideally, a lot of users donât actually need long explanations of how blockchain and dapps work and just want to know how to use them.
Interestingly I wanted to compare simple transacting as copying and pasting an address, and I thought to compare this to being as easy as copying and pasting an IBAN number for digital banking transactions (like in many EU countries). But then it occurred to me that in the US, peer to peer banking transactions are still impossible (which is pathetic), so this reason alone makes explaining this way harder than it should be.
Just a funny observation. What could be a better metaphor for explaining transactions in a âcrypto for dummiesâ kind of way? I was considering using email addresses as a metaphor, but I donât think itâs the best way.
Also, is lack of p2p banking a problem that fednow is trying to solve? It should be a crime how far behind the US is due to lacking simple digital transactions as a standard feature for all bank accounts. Anyway, people generally understand PayPal and Venmo, but trying to explain crypto transactions automatically sounds way more technical if youâre not already familiar with similar concepts.
Iâve taken some work with Supermodular.xyz and Greenpilled via Kevin Owocki!
My role currently will be creating video content for a variety of platforms and help spread the work to Regenerative crypto economics and human coordination. Hereâs couple channels to follow when you get a moment.
Thanks /u/owocki for the amazing opportunity. Onward!
YouTube: https://youtu.be/UShoIJmSNok
Twitter: https://twitter.com/supermodularxyz
There is so much ethos aligned with Ethfinance and I couldnât be happier to have the chance to help contribute to the vision of this incredible community.
Iâve been diving in on the Greenpilled podcast and will be making so much shorts content with great quotes from great minds. Mind blast incoming!
Cheers and Big Hugs from GreenPilled City
Guest appearance by DCinvestor, an early pioneer in the Ethereum community on Reddit and was a huge part of Ethtrader and Ethfinance. You can find him on Twitter, discussing Ethereum, NFTs, AI & more. https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor
Ethereum
$1805
0.067
Doots for yesterday:
So around this time last year I posted a daily update about the beacon chain queue.
So here we go again for round 2!
Pending validators: Joining 50.3k, leaving <100
Some extra stats for when I reference this post at a later time
Active validators - 572,820
Staked ether - 18,330,053
##What is the difference between a BRC-20 token and an ERC-20 token?
Expanded from my comment in /r/ethereum
####TL;DR:
BRC-20 is completely different than ERC-20. It has a similar name, which is very misleading because it works nothing like it.
Both are meant to be fungible.
##What is an ERC-20 token?
An ERC-20 token requires a complete smart contract with a full set of code that describes how the token operates.
All ERC-20 tokens must have these function names and parameters.
Only their names and parameters must match. A functionâs code does NOT have to match the description of its name
I could make a valid (but scammy) ERC-20 token where the âtransfer()â function actually mints tokens, and where the âapprove()â function instead burns a large amount of your transferred Ether. And that would be technically valid as long as the code specifies it.
##What is a BRC-20 token?
First off ⌠documentation on the BRC-20 standard absolutely sucks: https://domo-2.gitbook.io/brc-20-experiment/
I thought it was a joke, but thatâs the full token standard documentation.
Some more info:
BRC-20 is just a short JSON object (a simple data structure) and does not contain any functions. Itâs based on ordinal theory and relies on the ordinal nodes to operate on it and provide it with standard functions.
It only works with ordinal-compatible taproot addresses.
Here is the standard format of a BRC-20 token:
This is what the entire ORDI token deployment looks like:
{
"p": "brc-20",
"op": "deploy",
"tick": "ordi",
"max": "21000000",
"lim": "1000"
}
Here is the format of a Transfer function:
To transfer, it takes 2 steps:
Swaps require an off-chain 3rd-party to complete, so theyâre not safe at the moment. It remains to be seen if you can build trustless DeFi around BRC-20 tokens.
Some other interesting facts about BRC-20 tokens:
Epoch 200,553 only had 40% voting participation!
I canât wait to read the post-mortem for this one. What could it possibly have been?
It wasnât catastrophic, but it easily could have been a serious, but recoverable, issue if it had persisted. Epoch 200,553 only had 40% voting participation, which means only 40% of validators selected at random for block creation were actively confirming new blocks. Normally, the participation rate should be much higher, so this could indicate a problem with the network.
Start of the problem: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200551
Peak of the problem: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200553
Recovery started: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200554
Normalization achieved: https://beaconcha.in/epoch/200556
We need a thorough post-mortem before we can be sure everything is okay though, because a rogue event like this happening for no explainable reason would not be very confidence inducing.
A tiny update on the loss of finality yesterday: The culprit still isnât clear.
Some people have suggested Prysm caused the issue because they were hit hard by lost attestations and high loads, but this is very likely a side-effect of the turbulence rather than a cause. Terence described some optimizations they were making as a result of the turbulence, but thatâs not an admission of fault.
I initially threw shade on MEV-boost because of my distrust for that stack, but thereâs no evidence suggesting they are involved in any way.
The investigation is ongoing and the outcomes will be published in a detailed postmortem.
Terence just posted another update, but keep in mind, that this isnât a finding of fault, theyâre just exploring the incident.
Most clients (except Lighthouse) were hit hard by this, but Prysm stands out because they have a high representation of validators.
Terence just posted another update
, but keep in mind, that this isnât a finding of fault, theyâre just exploring the incident.
Hereâs my best attempt at an ELI5:
CL clients were getting a lot of attestations (which are like votes or confirmations from other nodes) about older transactions that didnât include the latest updates. This is like getting a lot of mail about old news that doesnât include recent important events.
Because the nodes that sent these attestations didnât have all the information for the recent transactions, CL clients had to spend a lot of time and resources to catch up. This is similar to how youâd spend a lot of time and effort researching recent events if you only had old newspapers. This caused the CL clients to work too hard and run out of resources, leading to issues like the system slowing down or even crashing.
During this time, a small problem in the Prysm system (which likely exists in other clients as well) was found that made it use the wrong information when trying to organize transactions. Itâs like sorting mail into the wrong categories because youâre using an outdated list.
The Prysm team is working on improvements to prevent these issues from happening again. Theyâre improving the systemâs memory management, and theyâre going to implement similar logic which right now only exists in Lighthouse CL clients where they filter out unviable attestations (like disregarding old news thatâs no longer relevant). The Prysm dev team plans to release these improvements next week.
So, in summary, the Prysm nodes were overwhelmed with outdated information, which led to system issues and revealed a minor bug. The Prysm dev team is now working on fixes and improvements. I am hopeful other CL clients follow suit and implement similar fixes.
Some analysis threads are starting to come in from the loss of finality event on 5/11/2023, Iâll try to link them here as I become aware of them. (Feel free to share as well)
##Summary/Highlight of US House of Reps session: Future of Digital Assets.
Pleasantly surprised by most of what was discussed. Almost all the guest speakers had excellent ideas and explanations in the discussion. However, each person was allocated only 5 min at a time, so it was somewhat limiting. Please excuse me if some of this is a little raw. It is a 3 hr meeting and I donât have the time atm to format it correctly due to my excessive fiat mining op (work).
Intros of Committee and Guest Speakers:
Mr Johnson: Must be a bipartisan effort for a promising tech/market. Conflict between securities and commodities laws. Most of the G20 countries are ahead of us. We want to be the leader in this tech/industry.
Ms Caraveo: Digital asset activity grows, but so does non-compliance. Any legislation requires increased funding of CFTC.
Mr Hill: Can this industry thrive here in the US? Many Democrats calling for common sense legislation for months (not just a partisan issue). Canât trust offshore exchanges (FTX), so we need to work on laws here for US exchanges.Â
Mr McHenry: We want a collab of CFTC and SEC to make laws and close regulatory gaps to protect consumers.
Guest speakers
Durgee: Iâm the only non-attorney here. Already there are conflicting laws against other existing laws for crypto from the SEC and CFTC. This is a developing tech innovation that happens to be a digital currency as well. Adoption at this stage is not a tech problem, itâs a human conditioning issue. A 13 year old in their lifetime has grown up with BTC and only known a world with crypto in their life.
Mr Santori: Kraken is well established in the US and the world. Europe has more effective rules from tested principles unlike the US. Gaps in US have created litigation that doesnât protect consumers. Mandates needed to protect us: https://www.youtube.com/live/gwJ1QAwP7UE?t=43m21s
Mr Massad: Confusion about commodity/security classification of crypto worsens the gap problem. How can we apply Howey test without this info? We need to pass a compliance law directing CFTC and SEC (or SRO; self regulating agency) to create laws and enforce them, without rewriting commodities and securities laws. Regardless of your stance on crypto we need this framework to protect consumers.
Mr Blaugrand: If investors could have traded digital assets on an exchange that was regulated like the NY Stock exchange, FTX situation wouldnât have happened. We can use the established rules we already have and apply it to crypto with these 4 rules: https://www.youtube.com/live/gwJ1QAwP7UE?t=58m34s
Mr Steil (WI): We still have no path forward for regulation, even after Genslerâs meeting with Congress. Congress is ready to do the job. How do we not miss out vs overseas? W/Shoenberger: Switzerland made it very clear to define security/commodities. It gave them legal security and clarity that allowed them to proceed successfully. This framework that they provided certainly provided the legal certainty to be headquartered there and to have legal clarity around the classification instantly. W/Durgee: The rest of the world has more stability and growth in every avenue of crypto. 3x as much investments vs the US in some markets.
Mr Lucas: US is great because we embrace innovatio. w/Santori: G20 markets are ahead of us and are sophisticated. Kraken is expanding there, but we canât deploy the same resources here in the US due to these regulatory gaps. Lucas: what SEC rules need altering for exchanges to succeed? W/Blaugrand: SEC needs an onramp with regulation so exchanges can grow in the US. They donât because of regulatory vagueness. W/Satori: Flexibility of crypto is a perk. Broker/dealer construct can interact directly with consumers. We could limit exchanges and even close down exchanges after hours.
The negative:
Lynch (Mass): Not regulatory ambiguity; itâs mass non compliance with existing laws. Donât argue security vs commodities, we should instead focus on intermediaries (exchanges, lenders, and wallet users). SEC is clear, consistent, efficient, and prevails in every 140 cases. crypto industry has failed. No separate regulatory regime necessary for crypto. claimed that creating new legislation for digital assets seems âredundant and unnecessaryâ given that the financial systemâs current securities laws have âsustained massive innovation in our financial system for decades.â
Mr Casten: What return would I had if I invested in 12 cryptos during a time vs S&P (60% profit)? Loss 46% of investment, how is this a supposed way to close wealth inequality gap? W/Durgee: accredited vs credited access is important. Mr Casten: Iâm happy to debate truth not lies. Everything stated here beginning to sound like SBF and FTX, whatâs the distinction? Sounds like you want to regulate crypto with the least funded organization.
Mr Sherman: Buttcoin mod? An ignorant personâs lack of ability to learn anything new. Fossil garbage opinion. Uses term âcrypto broâ. questioned whether digital assets should even have a future in the United States. He referred to cryptocurrencies as a âhidden money system that diverts capital investment from useful industries, and whose announced purpose is to defeat sanctions and tax laws. Crypto bros make money literally by making money, and theyâve made over a trillion dollars. Theyâll accuse the U.S. government of making money out of thin air. Maybe we do, but weâre the U.S. government.â
Threaten Web3 Anonymity:
Mr Davidson (Chairman Housing subcommittee): Genslerâs hotel Californiaâs regulation provides no path to exit/leave. Who should have the power of exit from intermediaries (power to have self custody)? w/Santori: Who is best placed to collect KYC info? Kraken is well paced to do that and doesnât require KYC for every transaction, but we could do that if required.
Dr Foster (IL): Estimates of 95% trades are fake or wash trades in derivatives. How can we have a regulated futures market with this fraud and manipulation? What alternative to KYC at all levels is there to avoid fraud? W/Satori: Kraken provides this as a portal. Foster: we canât stop BTC on the dark web with that. At a wallet level we must have mandatory monitoring with licensing like automobiles. Trusted digital identity from the government. W/Kulkin: CFTC had auth it could conduct surveillance under the rules and jurisdiction of the exchange thereby acting as an SRO in addition to the CFTC/NFA.
Conclusion
McHenry: Even if there is nothing of value in crypto, you would still need enforceable rights and protections already found in regulations and laws in the US. Must come together in bipartisan manner to protect investors.
5 days for additional legislation questions and responses granted from the panel. Plans for another hearing this month made.
Last month, McHenry said he expects that the President will have signed some piece of crypto legislation into law within the next 12 months.
Anyone else here whose validators had no problems during the finality issues?
What clients are you running?
What are your hardware specs?
I missed an average of 1 attestation per validator that day and my inclusion distance was around 0-1 as well. Iâm running Nethermind/Nimbus.
But I saw a big increase in CPU and bandwidth use, between 2 and 3x of the usual average, spikes even higher.
Thatâs not a problem for my staking machine, but if others had similar spikes, I can totally see why many had issues.
Respectful criticism:
Iâm a bit disappointed to see that despite the idea of the the ManeNet DAO joining Rocket Poolâs oDAO having emerged from r/ethfinance and having received great support from r/ethfinance, all of the conversation has now moved over to Discord.
I realize that this is a very specific topic and most of the conversation shouldnât happen in r/ethfinance. But it would still be great to discuss ideas in this sub too when needed, and keep the entire community informed of the latest news.
For example, did you know that thereâs a proposal being drafted that has been in the making for a week? Or that a dedicated meeting happened on Friday?
Like many others I donât like Discord, I find it messy and a pain to follow so I donât use it. Maybe Iâm just too old for the âchatâ format.
Would it be possible for one of you Discord guys to keep us informed in here from time to time? Iâm sure many here would love to be kept in the loop and even contribute.
r/ethfinance gave birth to the ManeNet DAO after all, and all EVMavericks were Ethfinancers before becoming lions.
In the spirit of sharing more from EVM Discord to r/ethfinance and about the example that brought it up, I shared my notes from the 1st Discord Call about the oDAO on Discord, but havenât shared them here yet:
I was taking notes for myself and Iâve put that into Pastebin (unlisted) (https://pastebin.com/nrmwEyGg). Iâm sure there are lots of errors, incomplete thoughts, and typos.
Also, I tend to ignore Discord except for something Iâm very interested in (like the oDAO). So I sympathize with the comment poster. As an EVM holder, Iâm loyal to the dailies, but not the Discord. So I miss some EVM things when they donât make it back here. h/t u/Ethical-trade
So while I was gone and there was all that drama with the beacon chain, my Teku node got caught up in it and fatally crashed and was completely offline.
HoweverâŚ. I run a second Ethereum âstackâ with Lighthouse as the consensus client, which the validator process switched over to and was able to carry on with no downtime like nothing even happened.
I was able to recover the Teku node in my own time, and once it was back in sync the validator process automatically switched back over to it as the primary endpoint.
Client diversity is awesome!
Just found this confirmation:
The device sends encrypted shards of your seed to different companies if you decide to use the service. You can of course still choose to backup it yourself.
But 2 days ago the same co-founder said:
Your keys are always stored on your device and never leave it
Thatâs what Ledger has been claiming for years as well.
If we assume the chap wasnât lying 2 days ago, that means the new firmware ( one screenshot shows 2.2.1 for Nano X ) that just rolled out activates the backdoor âabilityâ to extract the seed.
More info: Wired article says:
Ledger is preparing to launch a new service called Ledger Recover that splits a wallet recovery phraseâbasically, a human-readable form of the private keyâinto three encrypted shards and distributes them to three custodians: Ledger, crypto custody firm Coincover, and code escrow company EscrowTech. If somebody loses their recovery phrase, two of the three shards can be combinedâpending an ID checkâto regain access to the locked funds. Essentially, Ledger Recover is an additional safety net; for the price of $9.99 a month, it takes the jeopardy out of cryptoâs version of stuffing dollars under the mattress. Itâll be available in the UK, EU, US, and Canada and come to other territories later in the year.
Ledger CEO Tweeted it out as well.
Why this is an issue - even if Ledger now cancels their new seed cloud backup service (because backlash), and says they will never make a firmware update use this hitherto unannounced âabilityâ, the mere presence of this backdoor means that bad actors/governments may be interested in it. I guess this is what we get for trusting a company that kept its software closed-source.
My next steps:
With ledger (potentially) going full retard again, Iâm updating myself on what hardware wallets are available in the market right now. Looking forward to if anyone has other suggestions, additions or corrections to my high-level assessments below.
Iâve been using this list for discovery (trying to narrow down the list of 387 wallets): https://walletscrutiny.com/?verdict=reproducible&platform=hardware
There is an insane amount of options in the market, but very few can fit these requirements;
Iâve discarded a bunch of products (e.g. ngrave) that have little to no information about their device or the software that runs on it.
What Iâve found that (superficially) gets closest to the requirements (in no particular order);
To those who own governance tokens / participate in governance, you should check out Tallyâs governance-week. They are coordinating with a bunch of DAOs to encourage people to delegate or periodically revisit your delegated tokens. A great place for ethfinancers to start is looking at https://dailydoots.com/#delegates to find out who on this forum is a delegate.
The HOP bridge protocol is one of the partners and will be providing some funds from the grant pool to support Tally on this project. The exact details on how they will incentivize is not finalized yet - initial discussions where subsiding gas fees, but looks like it might be shifting to a distribution to those who participate (the forum discussion is here). Either way, Iâm happy to see HOP providing support!
That all said, whatever governance token you own please consider usings this week as a chance to re-visit your delegated tokens. Itâs an important step for the health of a DAO, as set it and forget delegating can stagnate a DAOâs leadership and create a barrier to entry for new delegates to join in. And if you are looking to become a delegate this may be a great opportunity to jump in!
Announcements
Guest appearance by Daniel, founder of Swell. Swell is a non-custodial liquid staking protocol
â¨Eâ¨tâ¨hâ¨eâ¨râ¨eâ¨uâ¨mâ¨
1900
0.064
Another one comes,
Another bank bites the dust,
More ethers combust.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Of the last 500 verified contracts on ethereum, 86 contains the word pepe. Probably a good sell signal :).
If youâve ever visited EthStakerâs website before, youâll have seen that it was⌠largely unnavigable. Well - we wanted to build a new, open source one, so we put out a call on r/ethstaker to see if we could find someone from the community, familiar with staking, to help us do it. u/hanniabu is awesome and did it!
So now EthStaker has a new open source website!! Feedback would be most appreciated, especially from ethfinanciers. What would help you find the info you want about staking? I didnât love giving people discord and subreddit links when they asked for resources, so Iâm pretty stoked to be able to give them a website where everything is aggregated.
Iâm also gonna post a series of âbeginner guide to stakingâ blog posts over the next couple weeks (at https://ethstaker.cc/blog), would REALLY love feedback on that from someone who sorta knows what staking is but wants to know more. Mostly for readability
I looked into DIVA and wrote a twitter thread about them yesterday.
Hereâs a quick summary for Ethfinance:
The key points is that Iâve learned is that combines liquid staking with DVT. Since it uses a smart contract to pool funds it can be as low as 1E. Honestly, Iâm waiting for a bit more info after their testnet releases to see how it pricesly protects against penalties and bad actors and why 1E would be safe. Also, not enough info on Node Operators and right now you would not be able to run one on the testnet.
Side note. SWISE vaults might be in a similar vein I guess.
Please correct me if I misunderstood something or if you wanna educate me more, this was a new concept for me so it was a bit hard wrapping my head around it when figuring out how diva is planning to make it work not just in a theoretical way.
Itâs the 1920s, youâre starting to see these fancy new self-propelled horseless carriages or âcarsâ pop up everywhere. They look really cool but theyâre also quite dangerous. This is what the kerfuffle is about in the congress at the moment. Everyone knows that we need to protect people from the maniacs on the road. But astute observers also realise that we also need to protect the innovation and economic advantage these new-fangled machines provide.
Lawmakers are split on what to do. Representative Emmer thinks we need new laws. âRules of the roadâ for all to comply with. Rules which all road users must follow specifically designed to create order out of the chaos on the road while still allowing for fast, efficient travel. But senator Warren disagrees. She thinks these new machines should be treated like horses under the ancient 1839 âHorse and Carriage actâ. She doesnât care that horses are slow, living creatures which need to eat, sleep and poop while cars are fast, furious and can run all day. She insists that these roads were built for horses and that makes anything on those roads a horse, dammit!
Donât be like senator Warren.
Edit: If anyone with some clout on Twitter wants to screenshot this and run with it, go for it. Or if you reckon you can take the idea and shorten it down to the Twitter character limit, that would be impressive so go for it.
Chris Blec posted on twitter and called out rocketpool. However⌠hes actually right?
https://twitter.com/ChrisBlec/status/1652498398459699202
I looked into oDAO and it is exactly what he describes it as.
Everything more and more just feels like decentralization theaterâŚ
The fact that it is invite only is despicable and counter to any ethos regarding decentralization.
Ethereumâs consensus layer and execution layer currently donât talk to each other so you need oracles for something like rocket pool. The odao does all the oracle work for rocket pool and upgrades the smart contracts. They can technically collude and cause massive damage so the best way to prevent this is to overpay and only include trusted people. Yes, the work is fairly easy and not worth half a million a year and everyone wants a spot. Thankfully, a lot of the money goes to fund client teams which helps ethereum run and keeps it decentralized. 4 spots are allocated to the rocket pool team to help fund development. Sassal donates all his earnings.
Eventually, there will be less of a need for the odao with upgrades to Ethereum like eip 4788. If anyone has any technical or economic suggestions about the odao they can post in the rocket pool forum or the research section on discord. Please note, it takes very little effort to criticize and substantial amounts of time and coordinated effort to come up with working solutions.
Hey everyone! đŚ buidlathon is officially kicking off and the competition will run for a full 7 weeks starting today! đ If you are interested in participating. head on over to the EVMavericks discord and hop into the đŚâbuidlathon channel and ask to be assigned the Buidlathon role! đââď¸ (No EVM Required)
Projects will be judged on their overall utility/ingenuity/technicals and the potential benefit they bring to web3!
General criteria for projects is as follows:
Upon conclusion of the competition on June 19th 2023, participants will demo/present/showcase their projects to the community and the voting will begin!
A panel of 4 technical/web3 judges đ§ââď¸ along with a DAO-wide snapshot vote (5th judge) will decide who will rule them all and win the grand prize! If you are interested in contributing in other ways (helping promote the buidlathon, being a judge in the competition, other ways) dont hesitate to reach out in the channel!
Hereâs your chance to make your mark in the community and get đ° while doing it! Happy buidling!đ¨
Long term, Iâm very positive that Ethereum will eventually dominate the crypto space and that it will address most major technical challenges, even if it takes another decade or two. Iâm pessimistic about crypto overall though.
Iâm still on the sidelines because Iâm having trouble seeing how crypto overall will achieve true adoption anytime soon. I define âtrue adoptionâ very narrowly as significant demand for ETH to be used for some external purpose other than crypto speculation or facilitating crypto speculation. So for example providing DEX liquidity, staking/validation, and issuing most tokens or NFTs donât count since the demand is mostly based on putting fiat into crypto hoping to get more fiat out. Things that do count include airline or concert ticket NFTs, using ETH contracts for supply chain tracking or audit, and so on. In these cases someone is willing to buy ETH because they can use it to solve an actual problem. I think most other successful technologies were solving real world problems by this stage in their development.
Where can this adoption come from? After all the scams, fraud, and hacks Iâd have trouble convincing any company board to use public blockchains beyond maybe an NFT cash grab offering, if for no better reason than avoiding the reputation risk and liability from using crypto. Even a simple use case like accepting stablecoins as payment is tough because every major stablecoin has depegged at some point.
Though itâs small, I think EVMavericks is an example of true adoption. Demand for most people is based on âIâd like to be a member of a clubâ rather than âIâd like to sell this JPG for a profitâ. Maybe some Reddit avatars count in this category as well?
Is there anything on the horizon that Iâm missing? Financially I want to buy ETH because it has an asymmetric distribution of returns, and I believe Ethereum is one of the only projects in crypto being designed with good intentions and a long term focus. On the other hand Iâm increasingly having trouble seeing where enough new demand will come from to justify a $220B valuation.
Hereâs your new monthly staking update:
Validator overview - total: 619346 validators*
Client diversity numbers**
Pool distribution***
My goal is to show how things develop and answer questions like âHow many validators will secure the network by EOY if net new validators are constantâ, âIs client diversity improvingâ and âHow is the dynamic between centralized pools and decentralized stakersâ.
If you think something very important is missing, let me know and Iâll add it today or tomorrow, so we can work with it in June. Best case share your source, so I know where to find the stats.
This post will contain more information and probably some conclusions in the future, I hope this will be a good summary and help for those who donât check numbers regularly (I basically didnât do it and could not tell you how things are developing right now)
Some comments and sources:
All percentages are rounded, so this is not 100% accurate, but should be good enough to show changes in the coming months.
* https://beaconcha.in/validators#all
** https://clientdiversity.org/#distribution
*** https://beaconcha.in/pools
P.S. I wanted to do this yesterday, cause it was the first of the month, but I had no time cause of the bank holiday and also I was too stupid yesterday⌠So letâs pretend todayâs numbers are those from May 1st.
Hereâs an idea: EVMavericksâ ManeNet DAO becoming a Rocket Pool oDAO member.
Arenât we an ideal and trustworthy partner that highly values decentralization?
Edit: just realized how unwelcoming this post must feel to any new member. So letâs explain a few things for our most recent friends:
A while back r/ethfinance launched its own NFT collection, EVMavericks and used the occasion to launch a DAO, the ManeNet DAO. From its website: âManeNet DAO advances the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem by aligning shared member incentives with funding, developing, and promoting public goods and educationâ
Rocket Pool is a liquid staking protocol, and the oDAO is âthe group of special Rocket Pool nodes that are responsible for the administrative duties required by the protocol that cannot be achieved by Smart Contracts due to technical limitationsâ. The âoâ in oDAO stands for âoracleâ.
So basically the idea here is to have an r/ethfinance native DAO help Rocket Pool with some of its duties. This job pays rather well, and the money could, according to the ManeNet DAOâs mission, be used to advance the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem.
Yesterday, u/Ethical-trade made a post about how the EVmavricks should join Rocket Poolâs oDAO. I loved that post so much, I covered it in todayâs Rocket Fuel - making the case that I strongly support them joining.
I support ManeNet DAO joining the oDAO so strongly that, in the episode, I made the offer of lending the DAO the 1750 RPL needed to cover the bond if they are selected.
Also, I wore my EVMavricks t-shirt especially for this episode!
You can watch it here: https://twitter.com/waqwaqattack/status/1653776527203475458
Meanwhile, in NFT-landâŚ
Blur, the incumbent NFT marketplace, just announced Blend: a peer-to-peer lending and borrowing platform that lets users leverage their NFTs as collateral to borrow ETH. These loans are perpetual (no expiration price or date), at fixed rate. The twist? Lenders can call the loan at any time, triggering a Dutch auction for a new lender to step in and take over the loan.
But wait, thereâs more! Blend also announced a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) feature, enabling users to âbuyâ their favourite NFTs with just a 20% down payment, while the rest is borrowed from a lending pool. I wrote âbuyâ, because until the price is paid in full, the user canât do anything with the NFT, except for listing it in Blurâs marketplace (ie try to sell it back and profit from the move).
As always, with great financialization comes even greater risks. Borrowing ETH to âbuyâ an NFT (BNPL) means going long on leverage (you profit if the price of the NFT rises). Borrowing an NFT and immediately sell it for ETH (Blend) means leveraging short (you profit if price falls). The result: when NFT values fluctuate in the opposite of the âexpectedâ direction, users will quickly face liquidations.
We will soon see the impact of this development on collection prices. While leverage markets can help stabilise price fluctuations, they can also create massive liquidation cascades, so Iâd expect some days of wild rides are ahead.
Announcements
Guest appearance by Evin McMullen, cofounder of Disco. Disco is your personal data backpack, making data and reputation portable across web2 apps, web3 dapps, IRL, and more. Evin is also cofounder of DAO Jones and inkDAO and an advisor to Boys Club, The Melon, and Graph Paper Ventures.
Good blockchain actors,
Suing the regulators,
Stifling detractors.
Famous Crypto Last Words:
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
âThe European Parliamentâs adoption of MiCA today is a pivotal moment for the crypto industry in the region, and the work of European policymakers should be seen as exemplary,â said Tom Duff Gordon, Vice President of International Policy at Coinbase. âThe region is recognising the potential and societal promise that emerging technology can provide. The EU is stepping up to the mark, while other notable jurisdictions are struggling to provide a solid, cohesive regulatory framework that gives clarity to a burgeoning innovative industry.â
https://decrypt.co/137339/european-parliament-approves-mica-law
Lol feel the burn
User Plastic-Resource-989 just posted a fake twitter link on r/cc about Uniswap announcing they experienced a hack.
The visual link was twitter.com, the actual link to twitter.cn.com
They messed up, as the link endpoint didnât work.
It looked like some bots were quickly responding, no one seemed to have noticed the link didnât even work.
Edit: the post has already been removed.
As I mentioned in the previous day it was 1 year in NFTs for me a few days ago and Iâm taking that opportunity to reflect on the last year (& maybe a bit more) and on a variety of topics and experiences. Iâm also going to repost them here and maybe something resonates here and there. Of course, Iâm starting it with Ethfinance!
I start my reflecting on 1 Year in NFTs from Ethfinance.
r/Ethfinance - subreddit that has influenced my Ethereum journey greatly, and thus - my NFT journey.
But how is it exactly connected?
Iâve heard more and more about Ethereum as some of my online internet friends started exploring other chains besides bitcoin. Ethereum was one of the most promising ones. Eventually I ended up hearing more and more about it and I thought it was time to start looking into it. I do not remember exactly how but I did find r/ethfinance sometime in the middle of 2020.
The discussion was amazing compared to the r/ bitcoinmarketâs daily that I had been frequenting for years. Not only people were talking about the tech, it was the majority of the talk there. Quite a contrast compared to only ânumber go upâ in the btc daily.
Fast forward to March 2022, thereâs now talks about this NFT project - EVMavericks. Most active people where whitelisted. I had not. Why? Even though Iâd been quite a frequent visitor - I was a lurker. Luckily, I made a few comments over the few years and that was enough to get on an additional list and then winning a raffle solidified my involvement.
Nowadays I still visit the Ethfinance daily, almost on a daily basis. Sometimes I get too busy with life. Itâs still a wonderful place to ask questions, hear about new developments, be alerted about important topics, see the stories of community members and learn something new everyday.
After being one of the most active members in the EVMavericks discord and being still quite a strong lurker and even turning into a slight poster on Ethfinance, I can share a few of my observations.
I personally prefer the pace of the discord as itâs more of a live chat and closer to a real time conversation. Ethfinance has a higher quality and lower noise. Yet it doesnât do one thing very well for me and Iâd bet especially for the people who are lurking - involving you in being part of the community. You see, sometimes folks like me who are new and not technical have really nothing substantial to contribute. And even though some of us are still asking some questions from time to time which I believe are still valuable contributions, it just does not complete the puzzle. And I believe each of us has something to offer and we can learn something new from each other. And this is where discord comes in and that is what it allows you to do, and I feel that EVMavericks degen chat, in particular, is prime example of bringing folks together. Itâs a glue. Still maybe for some but not others.
Now Iâm not going to go into pros and cons of each platform but one more thing I will mention is that the subreddit is a nice free resource for new folks. And I feel the vibe is especially geared for people who are, hopefully, going to make it financially as well as being the ones who are understanding and embracing many aspects of the technology and tools that we discover and build.
Next up: reflecting on EVMavericks.
1 Year in NFTs: Twitter Followers (4/21/2022-present)
I never really cared about Twitter prior to this point. I created an IRL account like 10ish years ago but never really used it. When it comes to crypto, most of my time was spent on Reddit - r/ethfinance.
Now, Iâm not sure why I created this account, but it seems to be a day after I minted my Maverick. I know thereâs usually lots of excitement during the early days (the honey moon phase), and people were eager to bond together and roar about the lion pride. Anyway, I ended up creating an account and following all the Mavs the EVMavericks account was following. One thing that was still weird to me is that so many web3 or crypto projects use Twitter, which is a full web2 platform that can and has rugged some of my friendsâ accounts before. My account has been locked multiple times for no reason until you add your phone number, etc. to unlock it. One click on their end - you are gone.
Over time, and after getting more into ENS, I started caring more. Iâve changed sides of caring and not caring so many times now that I donât remember all the details, but I do know the important parts. What Iâve come to and what I hold nowadays is that I am able to hold both of the sides of caring and not caring at the same time. I personally donât care about it at all. When Iâm in nature, when Iâm doing things outside, when Iâm engaged in the things that matter, and so on and on and on.
The nuance comes in because part of me does care. It does care for a very noble, specific set of reasons too. In the world where I do have more followers, I would be able to spread my values, educational messages, and even some funny memes to a wider range of people. All of that is nice, and yet itâs important to let go of all of that. Otherwise, it alters my behavior in a way where itâs still geared a bit more towards getting better numbers, while still keeping my true values. But then I wonder, and I like challenging myself with the question, âWhy does a number of followers impact the content?â.
âIf I am doing something good, wouldnât it matter whether one or a thousand people see that?â
Again, there are, at least, two sides to the coin that Iâm holding. And at the end of the day, Iâm still human, and it does get very demoralizing to see all the people doing scammy (all other types of things) having more followers and more impact, which I judge as a net negative.
And why am I building in the first place?
I thought having a personal blog is nice addition that is like a journal, a resume, and basically an on-chain history of your identity. It seems we are not there in crypto, so thatâs why Iâm still using Twitter, as it does matter, but also playing around more with web3 projects like mirror.xyz and paragraph.xyz. Also, building on top of ENS, even something as simple as a site - 696.eth.limo, is a way of doing that.
Honestly, thereâs still so much more to write about followers and how I have figured out some particular nuances, but, again, it doesnât really matter to me at the end of the day.
Although Iâd say I have tried to be consistent on a daily basis for almost a year, maybe missing a bit in the beginning, and have contributed content in a variety of forms, including memes, threads, questions, observations, analysis, videos, news, step-by-step guides, etc and I have gotten to 2275 followers. Thatâs also including all my NFT related communities and ENS.
Iâd like to end it on a note thatâs future-focused. What am I going to do going forward?
Obviously, I donât have enough reach, and thatâs also a good thing for me mentally, as it gives me so much more room to experiment and make mistakes.
The most important to me is to be true to my values and certain things like curiosity, decentralization, community, collaboration, communication, transparency, education, and making people smile and laugh. All of that while being authentic, having a better balance on how this piece fits within my life puzzle. Focusing on my connections with people and on the effort that Iâm putting in, and the content Iâm creating than being a slave to the algorithm.
Next up: Art, creating Art.
Hereâs a Rocket Pool update since Atlas / LEB8 went live.
The minipool (RPâs validator) count went up from shy of 14,000 to 15,329 today. Since 16eth pools can be divided into 2 leb8 pools, total count goes up, not much of a surprise here. Roughly +10% in 5 days.
More interestingly, node count went up as well from 2,291 to 2,393 which is a clear uptick that can be seen in this chart. More nodes is what we decentralization maxis should be all about (and what Iâm all about), so this is absolutely great news. According to Etherscanâs node count, there are currently 9,170 Ethereum nodes.
Rocket Pool now accounts for more than 1/4 of all Ethereum nodes. With a market share of only 2.7% of validators.
I havenât found any reliable chart updated with Atlas but from my observation of the total number of eth staked from the official website, thereâs been roughly 3,000 eth poured into RP daily since the update. Thatâs $5 million per day.
Before Atlas, the deposit pool was continuously full (meaning reth was highly in demand, never available) causing a premium on the price. Today itâs the opposite, there are many minipools waiting so the deposit pool is close to empty. In other words, many node operators are waiting for people to swap to reth. The premium is almost gone.
There are currently 21,870 reth worth $43 million waiting to be picked.
Iâm expecting some whales to swallow a lot soon, and secretly hoping for Vitalik to swap some eth for reth. Would be crazy publicity for RP. Next time he does an AMA Iâd like to ask him what he dislikes the most about Rocket Pool, Iâm very curious to know his opinion.
In other great news, Rocket Poolâs reth is now more profitable than Lidoâs steth, making it the default option to stake from Metamask.
Rocket Pool is currently ranked #11 by TVL on Ethereum with a TVL of $1.37B and it looks like it will enter the top 10 in a few days.
Iâve probably missed some key data and would love to hear more!
Disclosure: Rocket Pool enthusiast here, rpl is my second largest holding after eth and approximately 25% of my total net worth.
Hey, mate, one of the defi saver team members here.
Not sure which protocol youâre considering using there specifically - is it Aave?
If yes, then that means that a position created on a smart wallet using defi saver would not be visible or manageable in the default frontend available att app. aave. com.
Why is that? Well, interacting with all these different protocols directly through an EOA (your standard Ethereum account) is the default approach in most cases (e.g. Aave, Compound, Liquity). This is mostly for simplicity reasons and gas savings.
However, a standard Ethereum account is currently limited in terms of how many smart contract interactions can be called within a single transaction.
This is why we chose to use the smart wallet as default for holding positions of each protocol we integrate at defi saver.
Main reason? The smart wallet provides a new layer of execution that has no limitations that a standard Ethereum account does. Thatâs why we have options such as 1-tx leveraging/deleveraging, collateral and debt swaps, 1-tx moving of active positions between supported protocols, as well as a number of automation options for all protocols.
This short article in our knowledge base has a brief intro to the smart wallet: https://help.defisaver.com/en/general/what-is-the-smart-wallet
If thereâs anything else I can clarify, please do let me know, would be glad to help.
tl;dr: If you open an (e.g.) Aave position on a smart wallet using defi saver, it wonât be accessible through their frontend at aave. com. All exactly same protocol rules and rates apply in both cases, but their frontend only supports positions sitting on EOAs.
Hey folks, just popping in to say: air-gapped QR code-based signers are vastly underrated as a crypto wallet security solution. (Iâll refer to this tech as AGQR for the sake of brevity.)
I finally took the trouble to switch my wallets over to AGQR in the wake of the mysterious wave of wallet drainings that Twitter has been abuzz about.
How do AGQR signers work?
It might sound like a hassle but the whole process takes about one minute when you get used to it.
Why not just use a hardware wallet like Trezor, Ledger, Lattice, etc?
Downsides?
Summary and Conclusion
Iâm aware Iâm maybe honeymooning over it, but Iâm strongly tempted to say the AGQR signer is âthe wayâ: it has basically all the benefits of a hardware wallet and basically none of the drawbacks. Itâs portable, small, and self-contained, without notifying everyone that youâre into crypto, and if it breaks, no big deal, you can get a new one the next day.
Trying to think about it more objectively, I know some people are likely to feel that AGQR on an old phone is a bit too âDIYâ to trust their money with it. Thatâs understandable, but on the other hand, I figure a lot of us here already have a pretty DIY attitude if weâre willing to hold our own keys in the first place.
In conclusion, I think there will always be a market for dedicated hardware wallets, as a âno compromisesâ type, maximum security, industrial-grade solution. However, for most of us, I think AGQR fits the needs of the user so much better that itâs not even close. Especially if you tend to think things should be open source and self-hosted, you owe it to yourself to explore this tech.
TLDR: Iâm loving my AGQR setup and just wanted to let everyone here know about it.
Here is a proposed public good that I think we could bootstrap through this community or EVMavericks.
A curated white-list of trust-worthy smart contract addresses. Plus a browser extension that relies on it and lets you know whenever you are interacting with a smart contract that itâs a know and trustworthy one and warns you when itâs an unknown one.
In the future this whitelist could hopefully be integrated in other wallets, MetaMask, frame.sh, etcâŚ
Thoughts and criticisms welcomed!
Hello everyone! Withdrowls Public Goods Funding Update!đŚ
First off thank you to everyone who participated and celebrated with us this seminal moment in Ethereum history! We look forward to celebrating many more with you to come!đ With that said, we are happy to announce our official Buidlathon!đŞ
Are you a builder or are you LOOKING to build in web3 and just need the extra push/incentive/funding to get the ball rolling?! If so, here is your chance!đŤĄ
As a way to commemorate how far EVMavericks and our community has come, starting today and going through âTBD dateâ (to be announced soon), we will be hosting an open competition for anyone that wants to build infra/tools/public goods/dapps/new services on web3!
The prizes for the competition will be as follows:
1st place: 5 ETH
2nd place: 3 ETH
3rd place: 1.5 ETH
Random participation prize: .05 ETH
Winners will be determined by a âpanelâ of 5 judges, to include 4 individuals and the 5th judge as a âpopularâ snapshote vote amongst EVM holders.đŚ
In order to participate and be eligible to win, builders will have to sign up with their idea/proposal in the the EVMavericks discord and submit at least a working âalphaâ or prototype of their project by the due date.
Also, as a general rule all projects that are already well in progress would not be eligible for this competition as that would be an unfair advantage to start
For more details and or questions please check out the Buidlathon channel in the discord! (If you donât have an EVM just select the Buidlathon role to get in the channel!)
Thank you everybody and happy building! More details to come soon! Looking forward to seeing what projects will be created! đĽ
It feels so good to have fully minted out Withdrowls and start the public goods funding buidlathon! It makes me so happy to see community come together to support a great cause!
Some fun facts about Withdrowls: it was 4 days from idea to mint out. Marketing started the day after we decided this was something we wanted to do, so only 48 hours of marketing before mint. It also only took 24 hours to mint out! Oh, and about 95% of the tweets were automated, that was a lot of fun.
We jammed A LOT into those 4 days so please give u/etheraider a hug next time you see them, and please sign up; all ideas are welcome :)
Feel free to hijack this commentâs replies if you donât have an idea, but would like to team up with a community member!
Iâve written before about crypto and Human Coordination and why it is my favorite leg of The Rabbit Hole. A lot of the work to date on this topic is on deciding relative balances of power between key actors via token distributions, identifying all the necessary actors of a system and ensuring they are fairly compensated and cannot profit from misbehavior (incentive alignment), and creating systems to encourage voter participation such as delegation and bribe systems. There is an implicit step before all of that wherein an organization needs to agree on what it is trying to achieve and critically how it should go about achieving it. This is the value alignment process, it is a never-ending affair, and itâs a predecessor to all other actions of an organization.
Once upon a time in MakerDAO, after a black swan event wiped out many of their early users, the DAO was faced with a decision on whether to reimburse those affected. They decided not to. They then had to decide what was more important between peg stability and decentralization. They chose peg stability and created the Peg Stability Module (PSM). To this day I still disagree with both of those decisions but regardless of how I feel the DAO had to wrestle with controversial values, reach a consensus, and then act. How to enshrine values into a system varies greatly by each system but I think itâs worth reviewing some of the methods weâve seen so far, what is good and bad about them, and how we might be able to improve upon them.
Some systems are able to enshrine their values in code. For example Ethereum, when forced to tackle the scalability trilemma, chose decentralization and security over scalability. These values are encoded in the gas market and block sizes. Solana went the other path. Earlier in its history Ethereum was forced to choose between finality and ethics (look up Ethereum Classic). We chose ethics. Judging by the relative adoption of Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic this was apparently the more widely supported choice by a majority of node owners, app developers, and companies. Behind these decisions is what we commonly call Layer 0. This is one of the most fragile parts of the Ethereum ecosystem and one that we have to maintain constant vigilance on. The value alignment process for Ethereum can basically be described as a vacuum where a process should be. How does one become part of the Layer 0 set of actors? Basically you post in Ethfinance, attend events like Hodlercon, meet/influence the right people, attend core dev calls, write ERCs, etc. You go down The Rabbit Hole and get involved.
In more traditional power structures where value alignment decides the strategy of something but not necessarily its implementation it is more normal for the value alignment process to take place by delegation and hierarchical decomposition. It is infeasible to coordinate an organization the size of a nation state using an open mic system or social media upvotes. So we tackle this complexity using walled gardens and hierarchies. Within a corporation the primary organization of this hierarchy is what I refer to as the pyramid of subordination. This structure prevents bystander syndrome by assigning accountability for each task, ensures each person is qualified for the job using a social attestation system in the local vicinity of the pyramid (interviews), and generally organizes people to act towards a unified goal. It is efficient when done well. The military uses a similar structure for the same reasons. It also doubles as a more efficient value alignment system than Iâve seen in DAOs. When there is disagreement this structure provides an escalation process amongst direct reports, peers, and superiors within the pyramid of subordination. If a matter isnât satisfactorily resolved by those initially involved, it escalates up to the C-level personnel who serve as the ultimate authority for the values of the organization. By the time it reaches them, there are almost certainly multiple valid strategies that could be taken that they are deciding between. This is actually the primary value of C-level personnel; they embody the values of an organization.
So what are the problems with this design? What are we hoping to improve with web3 technologies? Well, the problem begins just above the pyramid of subordination. As weâve seen in the US in the past 50 years, using highly liquid capital as the ultimate authority source in the system has led to the pursuit of short-term profits at the detriment of all other factors. Shareholders care about their share price and dividends above all other factors and so they appoint C-level personnel and structure their compensation to reflect this desire. As a result companies destroy the environment, have little to no regard for their employees well-being, subjugate their local communities, pursue one merger and acquisition after another in order to form too-big-to-fail monopolies, and exploit every financial and political system they can to stifle competition and create power imbalances in their favor. From a game theory perspective this is the expected outcome of this design. It is Moloch in action, as our society increasingly organizes itself into these ever growing capital-hungry behemoths. You would think companies would be beholden to customers but the customer has no influence in this power structure other than to take business elsewhere. Sadly, working to stifle competition and reduce customer choice is often more effective for companies than working to improve the customer experience or provide a better product. So, the first thing to improve is to create structures for value alignment that are able to embody a wider diversity of values without sacrificing organizational efficiency.
The second thing to improve is resilience. This structure is fallible to key-man syndrome. It is optimized for efficiency not resilience. When one person has the full autonomy to do something it becomes ripe for corruption and/or enforcement pressures. The larger the set of people that need to consent to something the harder it becomes to form a conspiracy to make any decision that does not align with the DAO consensus mission.
If we can only succeed at improving these two facets of organizations, crypto would already be a world-altering, indispensable technology. But we are working on so much more than that. We are working on ways to divorce capital from influence, remove the walled garden around the value alignment system, fight any and all forms of coordination failures, and novel ways of incentive alignment that can change human behavior at scale so that our societal values more closely align with those of our dominant power structures. It is basically impossible to be against this ethically once you understand it. The most bullish thing for Ethereum is to be understood.
I have came across an interesting protocol called Sismo enabling users to manage their various digital indentities privately using zk-badges.
As hinted, it uses zero-knowledge proofs. If you are not familiar with these, this video shared multiple times in the daily was very helpful (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c). Basically, it is a mathematical tool allowing to selectively reveal a piece of data. Applying these to digital identity, you can aggregate valuable characteristics from different account (web2) or ethereum wallet without revealing their adresses.
For instance, let say you have a wallet with which you gave a lot to Gitcoin grant and another one with a high degen score. You want to aggregate theses characteristics in a third without giving your history (adresses). Sismo allows you to do this. Practically, you connect your different wallets to their apps, create signatures and mint âzk-badgesâ. A badge is a non-transferable/soulbound token (NT-ERC1155).
From their docs (https://docs.sismo.io/sismo-docs/):
Users aggregate their identity in Sismoâs Data Vault and start accumulating Data Gemsâatomic pieces of data that categorize users into groups. In turn, users can generate proofs to make claims about their data (e.g, I own a specific NFT). These proofs are verified by applicationsâeither on-chain or off-chain. The resulting privacy-preserving attestationsâstored in on-chain smart contracts or off-chain databasesâare utilized by applications for access control and reputation curation.Users aggregate their identity in Sismoâs Data Vault and start accumulating Data Gemsâatomic pieces of data that categorize users into groups. In turn, users can generate proofs to make claims about their data (e.g, I own a specific NFT). These proofs are verified by applicationsâeither on-chain or off-chain. The resulting privacy-preserving attestationsâstored in on-chain smart contracts or off-chain databasesâare utilized by applications for access control and reputation curation.
If you have participated in Gitcoin Round 15, you can mint a ZK-badge curated by their team! https://app.sismo.io/?badge=gr15-gitcoin-contributor-zk-badge
I hope to find a way in the EVM discord to experiment with creating badges for lion minter/holder. Here is the creator section of the app if you are interested https://factory.sismo.io/create-badge
Livestream Recording | POAP Checkout
Guest appearance by Gloria Kimbwala, Principal Engineer at SuperModular.xyz https://supermodular.xyz/
Announcements
Best roast me session,
Security commission,
Gensler obsession.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Dunno if anyoneâs mentioned this yet, but CLWP (EIP-4736) included 2,133 potentially or definitely compromised validators who were racing to set their withdrawal address before a hacker could.
Of those 2133 in the set, 2133 were able to set their address to one controlled by the rightful owner. 100% success rate. Not a single one to a hacker.
Benjamin Chodroff (and Jim McDonald, I shouldnât have omitted that) was the author and did a seriously amazing job after realizing that his own seed for his validators were compromised and, instead of giving up and leaving the space, found a way to save not just his own, but thousands of others. Seriously amazing job.
https://nitter.snopyta.org/ethStaker/status/1646629034715930624
Imagine you go to the Apples and Oranges Store because you need some oranges. But the store owner is quirky and has a rule that goes âThis store will only sell 1000 total items per day. Whether thatâs 1 apple and 999 oranges, or 900 apples and 100 oranges, or a perfect split I donât care. Once I sold my 1000th item Iâm done for the day.â
Also, this storeâs apples are very good. People drive from all over the place to buy them. So naturally since supply is low and demand is high, so the cost of apples go up and the store owner makes a killing selling them. Oranges, on the other hand, arenât as popular. On average, the store owner sells about 980 apples and 20 oranges every day.
You personally donât really care that much about the apples, you want to buy oranges. But due to the storeâs weird rule, you still have to outbid people looking to buy to buy apples. Oranges should be cheap because they are plentiful and in low demand, but every orange you buy is an apple someone else canât buy. After the store sold 999 items that day, why would he sell you an orange for $1 when someoneâs willing to buy an apple for $10? Youâll have to offer at least $10 to get the orange you want.
âThis is really dumbâ, you think to yourself. You talk to the store owner and make him come to his senses, and he agrees to change his stupid rule. Now heâll sell at most 1000 apples per day and at most 100 oranges per day. So now that the two supply/demand markets are separated, an apple can cost $10 and the orange can cost $1 and everybodyâs happy - you get cheap oranges, and the store owner gets more money (1000 x $10 + 200 x $1 gets him more money than the previous system when $10 was the cost of an item and he sold 1000)
Back in Ethereum land the apple represent execution (the gas that affects state, compute stuff in the EVM, etc.) and oranges represent data (the gas that stores stuff in the chainâs history). Rollups do their execution off-chain, so what they need most from Layer 1 is data. Today the cheapest solution is using call data at 16 gas per byte. But if everyoneâs fighting to do EVM stuff, the cost of that 16 gas/bytes goes up as well because thereâs only so much gas in each block. This really shouldnât be the case, since data is a different resource from execution.
So what EIP4844 does is separate those two resources into two distinct markets: The gas market as we know it today stays the same, and thereâs a new âdata gasâ resource with its own pricing that happens separately. Rollups will be happy because now they get to commit their batches on chain in these nifty new things called âblobsâ, and when demand for blobs is low, blobs will be cheap Ââ even if thereâs a huge NFT drop going on that brings gas to 500 gwei
On a technical level it does other cool things in preparation for full danksharding later on, which will allow a significant increase in the size of blobs so that it becomes even cheaper for rollups to commit data to blobs. But even without danksharding, just splitting the markets will help drastically lower fees on rollups, which will be nice.
Yesterday I asked about how EIP 4844 aka proto-danksharding works.
I got some really good answers so decided to sum it up, I put together a thread with an ELI5 on how danksharding works. TL;DR for those that donât want to click into twitter:
Meanwhile, in post-Shapella NFT-land..
The whole point of crypto is trustlessness and code-is-law. As a consequence, NFTs are immutable.
Well, it turns out that sometimes they are not.
Truth Labs, the org behind Goblintown profile picture NFTs, suddenly changed the jpegs of their all NFT collections to a.. middle finger with more middle fingers, with the text: âFuck royalties. Fuck supporting builders and creatives. Flipping is the heart of what makes web3 special. Honor the flipper, fuck the community. Long live the slow rug!â Check for yourselves.
This move is part of their migration to new contracts, probably to enforce royalties on-chain. As you know, the Blur vs OpenSea feud caused a race to the bottom on âoff-chainâ royalties.
Truth Labs still had access to the contracts able to change the metadata of their NFT collections, effectively giving them the power to change the jpeg that the NFT represents. This took many holders by surprise, since they thought their NFTs were immutable.. Well now they need to trust that Truth Labs will change their jpegs back.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Even if a web3 participant understands the underlying technology, and the principles of trustlessness and immutability on which crypto is founded, they still can be caught in a trap. Smart contracts are law, but sometimes this law is not what we think it is.
Any legal people care to give an opinion on what todays ruling means for the SEC?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/us/supreme-court-administrative-state.html
It means that if someone is being charged by the SEC, and that person claims that the SEC is acting unconstitutionally, that person doesnât have to wait until the SEC is done with the enforcement action to appeal in court.
Administrative groups, such as the SEC, are part of the executive branch of the government, but they have a sort of judicial power in enforcing the regulations that they were formed to enforce. So previously, you would have to wait until they were done with their investigation and enforcement action before you could appeal to a court. However, if you are arguing that the SEC doesnât have constitutional authority to enforce whatever it is theyâre trying to do to you, itâs kind of silly to have to wait for them to finish the whole investigation and enforcement action before you can object and appeal.
For the SEC, this means that if, for example, Coinbase was charged in an enforcement action by the SEC and Coinbase wanted to argue that the SEC doesnât have the power to regulate crypto under their grant of power, it could immediately appeal to a federal or state court and have this argument ruled on. This would save a ton of time and money if the court finds that the SEC doesnât have that power.
So thereâs this idea Iâve been wanting to try for a while now.
You guys know how Ethernodes is notoriously bad at showing how many actual execution nodes there are? And so we donât have any real sense of how many there might be? I even see some discussion farther down the daily today on that subject.
I think we here in EthFinance/EthStaker might be uniquely well-placed to answer that question: how many nodes are there on Ethereum? Basically, a bunch of us who run nodes (including execution clients) would go and look up our node by IP address or public key on ethernodes.org. Then weâd each just reply to the comment/thread/whatever with a simple âyesâ or ânoâ, depending on whether Ethernodes knew about our node.
With a big enough sample size, like dozens or ideally a few hundred+, weâd start to get a pretty clear picture of how many actual nodes there are out there.
Example: Ethernodes claims there are 7500 nodes on a particular day. When 100 of us check our nodes that day, only 25% show up on Ethernodes. Conclusion: There are actually 30k nodes, give or take some error bar that Iâm sure the stats majors here could figure out (i.e. not me :P )
Thoughts?
Anyone watch Bill Maher? One his guests wrote an anti-crypto book, and I just found the arguments in their interview funny. I think the interview just furthers my view that Ethereum needs to dissasociate itself from the word cryptocurrency. I would much rather see the word cryptonetwork as it conveys that currency is not a central theme. But anyways I summarized the interview because I think this is a great summary of the mainstream opinion on âcryptoâ.
These are almost verbatim the arguments thrown around. The first thing I notice is that if you replace the word cryptocurrency with Bitcoin, it makes a lot more sense. The arguments are very surface level and lack a ton of nuance because in the maintreams eyes, cryptocurrencies are all like Bitcoin. I think the old saying around here absolutely applies. The most bullish thing about Ethereum is to be understood.
Now that withdrawals are enabled with the successful upgrade of Shapella, Iâm keeping an eye out for institutions and big movers.
Already this year weâve seen Fidelity and Blackrock pouring funds into Blockchain.
NASDAQ in their Digital Assets Business is expected to start providing customer crypto custody by the end of June after receiving approval from the New York Department of Financial Services. Much like Fidelity, the platform will function similar to an exchange with liquidity and execution services.
Just last year Bank of America reported a turning signal for wealthy investors away from the stock market and into Crypto, Real Estate, and Private Equity.
â75% of young investors say itâs impossible to achieve above-average returns solely with traditional stocks and bonds.â
Combine this sentiment with the economic slowdown and credit crisis, crypto investments are in better position this year.
Also, and not the news I expected to see gain traction and excitement, but the Bank of America is reporting some interesting drivers of recent digital asset adoption from gold:
Tokenized gold passed $1 billion in value last month under the market cap pump of stablecoins PAXG and tether gold XAUT.
âTokenized gold provides exposure to physical gold, 24/7 real-time settlement, no management fees and no storage or insurance costs. The low minimum investment increases accessibility and fractionalization enables the transfer of physical gold ownership and value that was not previously possible.â
We could all do with some peace of mind and stability after all the black swans weâve experienced last year. Hereâs to hoping that these large institutions donât exert regulatory and market forces in the wrong direction and fuck it up for the rest of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3DP-40TA4&t=2380s
This is a gem of a channel. He talks about autonomous AI and how Ethereum might play an important role in the future AI economy. Really good.
This is the part where he speaks about AI economy (and Ethereum):
"Now, I will discuss the integration of these AI models into the legacy financial system and Ethereum. These models can function as a central brain and connect to other neural networks, AI systems, and handcrafted intelligence systems like Wolfram Alpha. As the AI assistant interacts with apps and handles tasks for you, there will be a need for it to manage money.
In the first iteration, AI will interact with apps to book flights, for example, and users will confirm and approve transactions. As the AI becomes more effective and trusted, users will want it to handle more tasks autonomously, including financial transactions.
There will be pressure to integrate AI into financial systems, but this may create friction in the traditional financial system. These autonomous AI entities might face difficulties meeting regulatory expectations because the legacy system is governed by regulations designed for humans. Additionally, the traditional financial system is not well-suited for global transactions between AI agents due to regional differences.
Crypto systems like Ethereum, on the other hand, are well-suited for autonomous systems. Ethereum was designed with the idea that autonomous agents might conduct much of the financial activity in the future. It is permissionless, global, transparent, and digital-native, making it an ideal platform for AI agents to manage accounts and interact with smart contracts.
Though most economic activity still occurs in the traditional financial system, friction in that system may push AI agents towards crypto systems like Ethereum. Smart contracts on Ethereum can be used to coordinate AI agents, creating a seamless environment for AI-driven financial transactions."
Patrick McHenry did a FANTASTIC job with Gensler today. I believe he really forced the issue on Ethereum as a Commodity and hope it leads to regulatory movement (but maybe we in the U.S. shouldnât hold our collective breaths just yet with our painfully slow government, sigh). Anyway, great job Rep McHenry!
But damn, also McHenry (and Iâll keep this REALLY brief): votes against Womenâs Health Protection, the Chips Act, the Infrustructure & Jobs Act, multiple bills protecting Queer rights, multiple bills protecting the right to vote, multiple bills to (can we please!) close assault weapon loopholesâŚ
*Okay, back to Ethereum. And yes Iâm flying my âMurica flag here today, so bare with us everyone around the globe :)
Iâve been thinking a lot about how Ethereum can be represented better in U.S. legislative process. Reps like McHenry & Emmer are (let me be mild here) faux âpublic servants.â They have clear records of working against the Common Good. Ethereum deserves better heroes. I donât consider myself politically savvy and work in an unrelated field but am wondering what effective avenues would be worth my time and/or support. I have donated to Coincenter in the past and probably will again, but I need to update myself on what they have been up to. Edited: Coin Center works to educate policy makers. Recent efforts to educate involved the terrible âDigital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act,â the âRESTRICT Act,â and the Treasuryâs DeFi risk assessment. I hope to find out more about specific advocacy they are doing.
Any other coalitions come to mind I need to become aware of? Any ideas perculating on effective organizing or lobbying for those of us who care about good ETH regulation? I would love to donate some time and energy to this, but not sure at this juncture what will make a difference.
P.S. Just so you know Iâm not on some Lib high horse, I canât stand listening to Senator Warren talk either *facepalm. Thanks for readingâŚ
https://bounties.gitcoin.co/coincenter
citation if desired: https://ballotpedia.org/Patrick_McHenry
apologies for all the edits...grammar is hard lol
For anyone worried, here are some wallet tips:
Hereâs a draft letter to the president/legislators/lawmakers from the perspective of a web3 developer. *One* sentence was generated via ChatGPT, the rest are my own words (my letter will be different, as I am not a dev tho I do feel like this effects my career too). Feel free to use and customize. Apologies but Iâm super tired and barely proofread it.
Dear ________________ ,
Iâm writing today because I am concerned about the lack of clear regulation in the blockchain and web3 industry. For many developers in the space, this technology is our pride and livelihood. Most of us recognize that the space has an overabundance of scams and theft. There is a clear distinction between private companies like FTX who offer a product with no transparency and a public ledger built on open source technology.
Blockchains offer a lot more than just being an immutable ledger. Web3 has the potential to transform many aspects of our society, including finance, governance, and data ownership. The United States should be a leader in innovation and adoption of impactful technologies. As someone who grew up in the nineties, it is the closest thing that reminds me of my childhood during the early days of the internet, when America chose to be a leader in household adoption of a technology that advanced communication beyond what we would have ever imagined a century ago.
Although our industry has a lot of problems, there have been some great achievements from development teams and good faith actors in the space. Last year, ethereum had a groundbreaking upgrade that reduced network energy consumption by almost a hundred percent by upgrading to proof of stake and eliminating the need for wasteful crypto mining. Hacked funds are often traced by the community with updates on activities broadcasted through social media and itâs quite common for the community to help its users get stolen funds back. There have also been millions of dollars donated in aid to Ukraine through cryptocurrency.
The web3 and blockchain space, as known as the âcryptocurrencyâ industry, have grown a lot since the inception of bitcoin. Today there are many communities in web3 that make up the collective space and if you were to navigate through them you would find there are many who are excited about this technology. Many of us have put a lot of time, passion, and hard work into the development of this tech and itâs a big part of our lives.
Some of us feel that CEOs of private companies shouldnât be the only representatives of our interests as a growing industry. We are also disappointed by the actions of SEC chairman Mr. Gensler and his hostility to American companies like Coinbase, who actually have gone above and beyond in regulatory compliance. Furthermore, the draft bill of the RESTRICT Act contains alarming implications for the privacy and speech of American citizens.
We hope that our political leaders could do some more community outreach in the space so we can properly educate our legislators about the technology. We especially urge regulatory clarity for developers, stakers, and everyday users. We understand that there shouldnât be rushed legislation to integrate blockchain and crypto assets into our existing financial infrastructure. We just want to do our jobs as software developers and home stakers, who work hard and invest our time and money into developing a revolutionary technology.
Reading many ppl here the last days that claim we are just greedy and only care about pumping our bags. We arenât against regulation, we are against bad regulation. If the SEC got its way, I predict that ETH would be a security that retail canât touch directly, only indirectly from various bank products. Private stable coins might be banned. Private wallets, or what they call them - unhosted wallets, wild wallets or dark wallets will be banned. Defi itself likely banned unless accessed from a bank that charges a fee, âfor our protectionâ.
No other country is stuck on the question, whether ETH is a security or commodity. Crypto regulation in the UK and EU is not perfect but we realize that crypto is here to stay and put out regulation, guidelines and not just 55 litigations. I was positively surprised by how many Defi actions, my Nordic tax authority has provided guidelines on this year. ETH staking (cap. gains, not ordinary income), lending, LPing etc. Meanwhile, the US IRS hasnât even spoken about ETH staking. Most people will likely class it as ordinary income because that is safer than to classify as the lower taxed capital gains.
SECâs actions are embarrassing (even Hester, Genslerâs colleague says so), the IRS is embarrassing, the political dick swinging between agencies, embarrassing. R vs D as well and things like that make me lose faith in society and the democratic process more than any crypto scammer ever did. Scammers do it for the money, above, I think is done for the same or even worse reasons.
Guest appearance by Christopher Whinfrey, Co-Founder of Hop Protocol! https://hop.exchange/
Announcements
Mister_Eth left to buy some milk đ˘
$2115
0.069
I deposited my ETH into the staking contract 871 days ago. Later, on 1 Dec 2020, Beacon Chain launched, and since then my solo staking rig has been running 24/7 with near perfect uptime. Total downtime amounts to probably less than half an hour. Iâve earned a nice amount in consensus and execution rewards. Operationally it has cost me nearly nothing, about ÂŁ100-150 in electricity over the 2 or so years, and about 12 hours of my time. It runs in a fanless case, so I donât even hear it. I sometimes forget it even exists. It contributes to the Ethereum network and is a source of passive income that has truly no intrusion in my life. And yet, I canât wait to instantaneously exit all of my validators and dump all of my ETH later tonight.
edit: thank you u/superphiz for chadding in with the gold!
Ugrade activates,
One more risk evaporates,
The future awaits.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Hello ethfam,
Iâm going to try not to drag this out. Those of you that know little bits of my life from what Iâve shared here know that I first entered the ethereum space at the beginning of covid. I was supposed to fly from Ireland to the Philippines to finally marry my long term girlfriend of 13 years when covid put a two year halt on it. For those two years I saved like a motherfucker and invested hard into eth and its ecosystem. Initially with a percentage of money that was for a wedding, then ramping up the DCAs more and more over time.
Last May I celebrated my marriage in the Philippines here with all of you. It was a long time in the making.
Three months ago, after a long and arduous (and expensive + paper heavy) process, my wife and I managed to secure a spousal visa for her to come live with me.
And that brings us to about an hour ago - after three days of literally no sleep Iâve secured a property here for us. Iâm not exaggerating when I say in this timeframe none of this would have been remotely possible without this subreddit. Ethfinance is the flame that keeps my passion burning. A massive thanks to Arbitrum for that ridiculous airdrop also.
Iâm proud to say that, thanks to this space, I will be flying out once more to the other side of the world next month for my 1 year anniversary, but this time my wife is finally coming back with me, with my surname, a secured visa and her name on a frankly beautiful and much too big property.
Thank you everyone. Itâs the next chapter for me. Now I can finally start planning for solo staking.
Keep âer lit,
https://i.ibb.co/n8XNjHX/IMG-0790.jpg (wedding photo)
ENS NameWrapper that has been in works for years is going to be activated soon (within 24ish), the vote has passed and there is a 2 day time lock.
Thereâs so much untapped potential in it so Iâm very excited. And thereâs already many cool apps that are building on top or utilizing ENS, maybe Iâll write about them later, big part of them are still in beta phases or are relatively new and small.
But the one cool thing I wanted to share that might be really useful to you now is this:
so you can create a subdomain aka child, so letâs say using mine as an example, evmaverick.696.eth
but what might not be intuitive is that you can create a subdomain of that subdomain!
and thatâs how we get - 337.evmaverick.696.eth (for context, 337 is my token ID of the lion)
and so on and on - đŚ.337.evmaverick.696.eth
Now you can just pick a domain (5 char+ for $5/y) and create subdomains for your vaults, your burner, hot and all other wallets while not paying any extra additional money since subdomains can be free, you only gotta renew your parent, which is 696.eth in my example. Of course, thereâs so much more options going to be available now cause of fuses (thatâs a big topic in itself).
Same thing I told the other sub:
Donât rely on revokes
Itâs good to check your revokes regularly using revoke.cash, but you shouldnât be relying on them.
The SushiSwap hack is one of those cases where a hardware wallet wouldnât have saved you, and revoking wouldâve been too late.
Using Minimum allowance is the Best Practice
The best practice is to approve ONLY the exact amount of tokens you needed to make a swap so that once your swap is complete, the allowance automatically goes back down to 0.
I know it sucks to make a new approvals on L1 Ethereum where gas fees are expensive. But on cheaper networks, you really have no excuse.
Fortunately, many newer tokens allow permits instead of revokes, which combines an approval and transfer into 1 transaction.
u/Diligent-Mouse3679 covers the SushiSwap exploit:
There is a bug in the Sushiswap router that caused Sifu to get 1800 weth drained (a lot of it by white hats). https://twitter.com/peckshield/status/1644907207530774530
Revoke any approvals you have with the sushiswap router now. Addresses for the router on every chain are linked in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/0xngmi/status/1644921265843589120
u/SoNotYo covers Lido validator bribery during the hack:
https://twitter.com/P2Pvalidator/status/1645079096253112322
One of the Lido validator got a 689 ETH bribe during the Sushi exploit. Curious whats going to happen next. Are they going to return it? Should they return it? Where will you as a organisation set the line between âfair MEVâ and âMEV theftâ.
Curious to see what happens next. Expecting to see this spark a new debate about MEV and everything surrounding it.
Edit:
P2P response after become aware of it.
https://nitter.snopyta.org/P2Pvalidator/status/1645162865698000898
UPD: These MEV rewards are associated with the recent Sushi exploit. Like any Lido validator, P2P did not receive or manage the rewards, as they went to the Lido rewards vault. We are talking to Lido and Sushi teams to investigate the issue and explore potential solutions.
u/Maleficent_Plankton warned about this:
Someone from r/CC got 40K Moons stolen due to the SushiSwap exploit.
Sad to see that the thing I warned people about 6 months ago finally happened.
After RCPSwap and SushiSwap first launched, I noticed that 99% of users were setting unlimited approvals and warned the community about it.
Back then, there were no front-end revoke tools for Arbitrum Nova like revoke.cash, and Metamaskâs approval UI was less transparent, so I wrote a guide on how revoke manually using the Moons contract.
I was talking with some family friends today for Easter brunch and, being polite, they asked me about some crypto topics. I ended up explaining the basics of lending in crypto which Iâm going to paraphrase here. This is probably one of those things everyone here already knows but which might be useful if you ever need to explain this to someone outside this space.
There are three ways we facilitate lending in crypto today:
Overcollateralization. You post collateral worth more than what youâre borrowing. In Tradfi this is basically the structure of every mortgage/car loan. You use the property you are buying as collateral for the mortgage itself. This works best for assets that are unlikely to sharply depreciate in value and put lenders underwater. In Defi, that property obviously doesnât hold so we add self-liquidating mechanisms to this system. If your collateral ever falls in value relative to your loan you forfeit the collateral to repay the debt automatically. We mostly use these loans for financial speculation or retaining price exposure to an asset while effectively selling some of it.
Flash Loans. We let you borrow as much money as you want on the condition that you have to repay it instantly. I find this is the most confusing one to people at face value but it makes sense to most people when explained in terms of originating mortgages. Again, mortgages are overcollateralized loans. Without flashloans there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where without the loan you canât buy the property and without the property you canât get the loan. In Tradfi they have an intermediary facilitate this by effectively granting you a short term loan. In Defi, thatâs just involving an unnecessary middleman so we dispense with it.
Leverage. You can use 1 ETH to buy 3 ETH and exaggerated effects as the price goes up and down. This is similar to overcollateralized lending except we donât actually give you the 3 ETH. Itâs held in escrow by some contract so you canât run away with it. In the example above if your collateral falls by 1/3 in value you get margin called and liquidated. This is really no different than how it works on traditional brokerages. The main difference with Defi is while things like naked shorting are illegal in Tradfi brokerages, they are impossible in Defi.
That leads us to the last form of debt most people know: uncollateralized lending based on credit. While there are some teams experimenting with this, we just canât bootstrap these systems effectively until we solve the problem of accountability. IRL it is both difficult and illegal to set up multiple identities. On blockchains it is trivial and there is no such thing as the police. If I am willing to give an anonymous stranger $10 on credit I at least need to know that if they rug me they can only do that once. That at least means I can only get rugged 7 billion times. Identity theft and fraud are already a problem in Tradfi. In Defi, the problem is so much worse that what you take for granted with a credit card today canât even get started. We may see a Tradfi equivalent to credit systems on a blockchain once a government decides to build a system to certify an identity on chain and integrate their legal system with smart contracts for enforcement but weâd really like to see a more decentralized approach.
There are numerous advantages to eventually solving this problem on the blockchain. For people with existing access to credit, a technology called zero knowledge proofs adds privacy protection so Experion doesnât repeatedly leak your personal data to identity thieves. Next, is consumer choice: the market would be free to create a much wider array of credit score services rather than the regulatory captured monopolies we have today. Last, ironically is scalability; not in transaction throughput but in customers. Right now credit services are available to a minority of people, mostly in first world countries. If this becomes solved in Defi in a decentralized way it can be scaled to all of humanity rather than the limited countries credit services exist in today. This is where a company like Visa will actively get involved eventually because it is a Trillion dollar opportunity that will let them expand their user base.
These systems wonât take root in Defi until we have a good system for proving an address belongs to someone and that they singularly claim that address for these credit systems. Once we have that weâll see a variety of credit score DAOs appear in short order. They will essentially act like competing underwriters but unlike Tradfi the performance of each will be public and every app will be free to choose whose opinion they respect and pay for.
Iâm also still curious about alternative credit systems.
OPSEC PSA for Mac users
MacStealer arrives to target macOS systems as an unsigned disk image (.DMG) file. Users are manipulated to download and execute this file onto their systems. Once achieved, a bogus password prompts users in an attempt to steal their real password. MacStealer then saves the password in the affected systemâs temporary folder (TMP).
The malware then proceeds to collect and save the following also within the TMP folder:
- Account passwords, browser cookies, and stored credit card details in Firefox, Chrome, and Brave
- Cryptocurrency wallets (Binance, Coinomi, Exodus, Keplr Wallet, Martian Wallet, MetaMask, Phantom, Tron, Trust Wallet)
- Keychain database in its encoded (base64)form
- Keychain password in text format
- Various files (.TXT, .DOC, .DOCX, .PDF, .XLS, .XLSX, .PPT, .PPTX, .JPG, .PNG, .CVS, .BMP, .MP3, .ZIP, .RAR, .PY, .DB)
- System information in text form
MacStealer also compresses everything it stole in a ZIP file and sends it to remote C&C servers for the threat actor to collect later.
u/etheraider and the EVMavs have done it again! Weâre creating another project similar to EIPandas to celebrate the Shapella hardfork! There are 3240 owls from 20 powlyments minting on Arbitrum for 0.00324 ETH, or 0.0019 ETH for the allOWList https://www.autominter.com/list/withdrowls We plan to hold a virtual mint party using oncyber so we can show off the artwork gallery style. The mint button will even be embedded into the virtual room!
Proceeds will fund the next EVMaverick public goods project. I know thereâs someone out there with an idea here that deserves funding!
We had a lot of fun using the beta of AutoMinterâs new AI Art Generator for this collection! I had so much fun making this project that Iâm raffling away 5 of my EIPandas to those who can use their referral link to get 5 friends onto the list!
And of course, thank you so much to the ethfinance community. I gravitated here when I was new to crypto because of the high level discussion. I âearnedâ my Maverick asking questions here knowing I could always get an informative response. I probably would have lost all my money to shitcoins without this subreddit, but thanks to yâall Iâm staking and having the time of my life making AI owls.
As u/LeagueGreedy mentioned we are excited to celebrate Shapellowl with you!
To commemorate weâve created âWithdrowls!â
They are intended to be fun, punny, celebratory NFTs for the community, AND as a special treat MANY members of our communities (ethfinanciers, daily dooters & EVMâs) will have their own personalized punny owl name in the metadata to be âtheir own withdrowlâ as a special little sentiment to commemorate the momentous occasion.
Bob-Rowlssi, swagtimusprowl, owlexiskef anyone?? :P u/Bob-Rossi, u/alexiskef , u/swagtimusprime
ALL funds (100% of mint & royalties) from the Withdrowls will go towards funding the NEXT public goods project after rocketschool anyone in our community wants to create!
We thought this would be a great way to incentivize people that have an idea to start building and to get people excited and involved in creating public goods/doing something new AND get funded for it!
Check out the Allowl list for additional details! Mint will be .0019 for allowlist and .00324 for public and will be on arbitrum for low fees!
Looking forward to all the Shapellowl celebrations! Will definitely be a hoot ;)
https://twitter.com/Withdrowls/status/1645807814957486082
Edit: if you donât have Twitter and want to be on the list just dm me your public eth address and Iâll add you to the allowl list!
Just stumbled upon a comment I made a few months ago in here:
âAny day could end up being the day thereâs been the most eth in existence ever.â
Happened to be posted less than 10 days from the peak on October 8.
Etherâs supply has been going down since October 8.
Checking ultrasound.money has become part of my daily routine even though no new information is really to be expected, I just find it soothing to look at, to marvel at. The Ethereum community has really created something never seen before: a system with a security thatâs economically self sufficient.
I truly regret that the mainstream understanding of inflation is âprice of things goes upâ instead of what it truly is: âvalue of fiat goes downâ. This simple switch in mental model would be incredibly useful for the masses to realize some of the biggest and inherent problems with the current system.
And at the same time, it would be incredibly useful to understand whatâs so special with eth.
Itâs been 208 days since the merge and thereâs been a net burn of more than 82,000 eth. During a bear market (or well, an eternal crab, hail). Total supply is now 120,438,242 eth, and itâs clear weâll end up below 120,000,000 sooner or later.
Since the merge deflation has been accelerating. But what will this look like during a bull market? When usage, euphoria, and greed go parabolic? When the supply is inversely proportional to the mania?
Witnessing the supply chart take a vertical dive will be absolutely glorious for sure.
Weâll soon visit the abyss.
For those who had some funds on Euler:
Redemptions are live: https://twitter.com/eulerfinance/status/1645964057239855104
This it how the Euler exploiter saga ends.
When the exploit happened a month ago, I would not have expected that weâd reach this step, all the funds I deployed there Iâve written off. The Euler saga is a unique story, full of drama and in my case a happy end.
Those who deployed via a smart contract (e.g. aztec users) need some more patience as those affected users canât claim directly.
Happy Shapella Day and stay safe out there, fellow Ethfinancers!
No stream | No POAP
crickets
$1877
0.067
Woah, did someone just exploit a vulnerability in the ERC-20 standard itself???!!! I am seeing a cascade of the largest ERC-20s like USDT and LINK getting all funds sent to 0x36c9aFAkE324bâŚ. On etherscan.
Meanwhile other ERC-20s like DAI and USDC have frozen transfers in response. Iâm impressed with their reaction times to be honest.
What sort of impact could this have on other EVM based blockchains like BNB? It seems like it will be a scramble for ethical exploiters to take funds before actual hackers do.
Anyway, no doubt April is wasting no time in showing how chaotic things can get on the 1st!
^(Sorry guys, surely Iâm allowed to live up to my username just once a year!)
Network you canât sever,
Open-source is too clever,
Will last forever.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
Beware of the new Stakereum project, itâs a legit scam.
From kanewallmann (Rocket Pool dev):
the docs have all these big words to sound smart but it makes no sense, they are legit scamming ppl with this
you go through their instructions and the last step is to send 32 ETH to an address that theyâve generated
Spread the warning:
https://twitter.com/ethStaker/status/1641322321024524289
https://nitter.snopyta.org/ethStaker/status/1641322321024524289
DeFi News - March 30, 2023
I made a bot that parses DeFi news + Security updates and posts them on reddit. I donât have enough comment karma to make separate threads, so Iâll post them as comments in the daily general threads for now :)
gm r/ethfinance, I had the chance to talk with u/jtnichol yesterday, pretty outstanding guy. He told me to intro myself here and share an idea I have.
My name is Anthony Garrettâ Iâm a college student at Gonzaga and I started Bankless Advisor in the Bankless DAO, a platform to connect financial advisors and clients, but weâre in need of a pivotâ the idea I have is an app.My vision for a BA app is to create a web3 directory for users to send trade proposals to each other. Each account is a web3 wallet for users to trade and comment on other trades. Our market fit would start with the Bankless community and college students (SPAWN).However, my long-term vision for the BA app: We allow users to import their data from other social media networks to their web3 wallet and build smart contracts that pool users data to connect ad buyers to users.
I believe that this project has the potential to do good for the world, and the way we value our data, but I need a passionate dev team to bring this thing to life. So here I am looking for any advice, any groups that you think align with this vision, or anyone who is looking to help. (or if this idea sounds psychotic, Iâm open to anything).
Iâm just a young self taught front end dev (that getâs a lot of help from chat-gpt), but I have experience building trade proposal tech for financial advisors at Defi Steward. Also, I have written further about this decentralized data model in the BA substack (not an advertisement, but here is a link).
If you have read this far and have ANY comments or suggestions as a start this journey I am all ears.
- Thanks, AG
Meanwhile, in the NFT-verse..
Found this interesting development: a real estate agency sold off 20% of a house being rented in Texas, using NTFs as ownership shares.
The property was valued at $235k, NFTs represented $100 of ownership (minimum buy was 5 NFTs, would have been easier to just make $500 NFTs..). In total, $45,600 was raised by the sale to 38 investors, who will then get their fractional part of the rent.
Estimating $1500 rent per month (not in TX so I have no idea of what prices look like over there), that would mean each $100 NFT share accrues $0.65 per month, so a median of $7.8 to each of the 38 investors.
Given these small numbers, the company decided to run this experiment on Solana, citing gas fees in ETH as a deterrent, and bridging difficulties in L2s like Polygon. Letâs hope for these investors that when rent is due, the Solana network is still up :)
âNext week, Iâll be sending a bill to congress to eliminate all taxes (income, property, capital gains and import tariffs) on technology innovations, such as software programming, coding, apps and AI development; as well as computing and communications hardware manufacturing.â - Nayib Bukele
Bill sent: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1641889140273827848
Tax free staking?
(Would like an English version if available!)
People were discussing u/Set1Lessâs post from yesterday in r/CC about the Arbitrum DAO drama but we canât directly link to r/CC because the mods there ban you for it. Surprisingly nobody copied a transcript so itâs probably gone a bit under the radar in this sub. So here I am, shamelessly transcribing u/Set1Lessâs post.
So Arbitrum distributed tokens last week and as per their tokenomics, it seemed that the team and VC allocation is locked for a year.
Well, they just made a proposal to grant themselves another 750 Million ARB tokens, worth almost $1 Billion from the DAO. They claim its for an âAdministrative Budget Walletâ. In reality, it looks like a blatant cash grab. Its the first governance proposal and they arenât even trying to be subtle about siphoning funds out.
Administrative Budget Wallet proposal
Under the disguise of operational and administrative efficiency, they are seeking to transfer 750 million tokens from the DAO to their own pockets, from which they will make âspecial grantsâ and what nots.
In crypto, these things almost entirely mean cashing out for real world riches. We have seen thousands of examples of teams cashing out treasury funds. In Arbitrumâs case, since the team and VC token allocations are locked, they are creating this new channel of funding which they can splurge on while their actual allocations remain locked.
Some groups have already raised alarm against this blatant cash grab.
Blockworks Research is voting against this.
These 750M tokens were supposed to be part of the treasury but now seemingly lay under the centralized control of 3 individuals.
I hate to say it, but these kind of shady activities actually make people like Gensler right - by using shady structures from Cayman Islands, under the disguise of âDAOâ, they are staging a standard insider dumping scam where the team dumps token without any transparency while pretending their original allocations are locked.
Update: Apparently it seems that even before this vote has passed, Arbitrum team has already moved 40m ARB tokens to a new wallet, and then started distributing them to child wallets, and it appears from the transactions that millions have been already sent to Binance .
Transactions: https://arbiscan.io/token/0x912ce59144191c1204e64559fe8253a0e49e6548?a=0xb3f923eabaf178fc1bd8e13902fc5c61d3ddef5b
These tokens were supposed to be âlockedâ but it appears they are not locked, but rather being sent to Binance (presumably to dump).
This is looking like a rug pull of sorts. As we see very often in crypto, plain old fashioned greed and fraud kills everything.
Due to the drama, most delegates are now voting against the proposal. You can follow the vote results here: https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0x3be7368a662d1cf12fa4da768d626edbc013be0dc7b994fef2e24d9a54e4033a
I guess a smidge late considering the threads yesterday and today, but obviously I want to post on it since Iâm an ARB delegate for a decent chunk of people here.
First, I want to speak to AIP-1 as it stands on itâs own as I think itâs important for those delegating to get a feel for what I stand for. So for a second, letâs ignore the now known issue at hand and presume the Arbitrum Foundation had not moved tokens yet / or I had voted before this was know. Maybe a pointless excercise at this point, but I find it important.
I would have still voted âagainstâ in this case, with request for the AIP to be broken into smaller pieces.
I agree strongly with the first set of a DAOâs AIPs being about setting ground rules for the DAO moving forward, especially with one as large as this. Not having a formal process in place can lead to disaster (ominous!), so this is important. However, Iâm against trying to lump in too much at once. The obvious one is the 750M ARB to the Foundation Admin Budget, however frankly things like squeezing in a very loosely defined âSpecial Grantsâ process arenât a great idea either. Those are things that need fleshed out in their own debates / AIPs. It feels like those are things the foundation would assume would be controversial, but hoped to squeeze through due to the need for the overall framework taking priority. This AIP should have been broken into about 3 or 4 separate things.
Now, with that said and as it stands now, Iâm obviously still continuing with my âAgainstâ vote. The issue I had before has only been exacerbated by moving funds before the vote. In reading comments on this daily thread and it seems that the community is largely asking for an âAgainstâ vote as well, so I have an obligation to honor that within my duties as a delegate. Although honestely it does feel moot at this point given recent events⌠Others have surely said it better, but the fundamental issue is we canât accept funds being moved without DAO approval or else what is the point of this process? It should be interesting to see what happens now that we have a scenario where funds have been moved without approval from the DAO. Something I doubt will be resolved cleanly, as even before this was found out I was seeing forum pushback on the amount. I question if it will ever pass even upon a presumed rework / revote.
A final note, those who are delegating to me I donât blame you if this has soured the process⌠this has been sort of a smack in the face to me as well.
Repost Note: Ah crap, reposting below as I forgot about the auto-banning of links⌠I compiled the links on caches - https://caches.xyz/forums/discussion/r-ethfinance-arbitrum-delegate-thread
There was a fascinating MEV âexploitâ this morning to the tune of about $20mil dollars as a result in flaw in how mev-boost relays communicate with validators. There is some discussion below in the daily, and here is a good summary: https://twitter.com/samczsun/status/1642848556590723075
The relay fix to prevent this happening again is here (https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost-relay/pull/330). This does has some significant side effects, the biggest of which is that ~10 sets of relay beacon nodes are now responsible for propagating all new blocks. Our ([u/austonst(https://reddit.com/u/austonst)) relay (https://aestus.live) was taken offline for builders as soon as we became aware of the threat and will update before we come online again. Never a dull day in ethereum.
Itâs been patched, just waiting for a release to be cut.
https://twitter.com/metachris/status/1642862456556130306
From reading this, the issue has been mitigated and was caused by a bad relay that was gamed. From my undestanding -
Before:
After:
Step 4 and step 3 are reversed. And Relay does not send the block if it cannot publish it first.
Edit: fixed slashing comment, slashed later.
Paul Brody has single handedly given me faith in Ethereum as a serious technology again. Iâve been out of the game for about a year but just listened to his episode on bankless and Iâm stupid bullish again. Fuck your monkey pictures and yield farming, enterprise and supply chain management will be huge. Tokenize everything
Greetings, fellow Ethereans!
Weâre excited to announce the upcoming Ethereum âShapellaâ upgrade, Shanghai on the execution layer and Capella on the consensus layer!
This significant milestone introduces withdrawals for staked ETH as well as other upgrades. More info: (https://blog.ethereum.org/2023/03/28/shapella-mainnet-announcement)
To celebrate the upgrade, EthStaker is hosting a livestream event that will bring our amazing community together. And as a special treat, weâre inviting all of you to join us in creating a massive collaborative art piece during the event on a special POAP.art canvas! đ¨
Info:
Who? You! And your whole community! (tell your friends!)
What? Shanghai/Capella âShapellaâ Upgrade livestream and POAP.art party.
When? April 12th, paint party starts at 9:30 PM UTC, Ethstaker livestream starts at 10 (30 minutes later)
Where? https://app.poap.art/ and. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nszB0ZZQrys
How? Anyone can watch the livestream, To join the paint party: hold an eligible entry POAP (check the poap.art page to see if you hold one), or claim the event POAP. [https://checkout.poap.xyz/d39e3416-a26f-41aa-bbca-2ee87781ffea/]
Why? Great fun and exposure for your community!
Spread the word, invite your friends, and letâs make this the most memorable Ethereum upgrade celebration ever! See you at the livestream!
How do you think this would resonate to someone outside of our space?
The internet and information age fundamentally changed how humans interact. Before the internet, blogs were called newspapers, politics & entertainment came through cable TV, and social media was the local bar or a town hall.
Today, there is a quieter, second revolution of the information age taking place. Once again, we are reimagining how humans interact. Just as with the rise of the computers and the internet this new frontier is ripe with opportunity.
The ideas that have captured the minds of these participants may sound as unlikely to you as the internet systems we take for granted today would have in 1990. Eventually this revolution is likely to affect everything money can touch just as the internet did for information. These tools will democratize access to opportunities previously withheld from you and control over these systems will flow to a new generation of tech enthusiasts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Billionaires are already being born of this.
Keep reading and I will introduce you to the new digital scarcity and human coordination tools powering this revolution. I will carve out a landscape of opportunity for you to explore further and help keep you safe while doing so.
Money shapes the world. We are programming our values into our money. By doing so we are reshaping the world.
A post-mortem has been published about the mev-boost-relay incident a few days ago. The attack has been covered here before. But the post-mortem has more details, particularly about the different forms the attack can take, and the mitigations applied.
In general relays are now addressing a whole category of attacks that had been previously overlooked, in which the proposer is able to get access to the transactions in a block to be proposed before theyâre supposed to. Generally this results in the proposer getting slashed but the MEV can more than make up for it. Attacks include:
I assume that now that the post-mortem is out, the people more involved in the fixes (Flashbots, ultra sound, EF) are fairly confident that the main attack vectors are decently well patched up. So hopefully things will start to settle down a bit: itâs been a busy couple of days at Aestus.
Finally, I want to emphasize a few parts of the post-mortem:
It is critical that Ethereum has an MEV marketplace that is democratic and efficient. Vulnerabilities like those detailed in this post undermine the integrity of the MEV marketplace and the experience of its users. We call on the security, research, and open source communities to join us in hardening mev-boost and future enshrined PBS designs.
and
First, weâd like to note mev-boost and the mev-boost-relay both have bug bounty programs. A potentially expanded bug bounty program is being coordinated.
Second, we encourage searchers to think carefully about how much MEV their strategies expose, willingly or inadvertently, given the extremely adversarial nature of the MEV market and to take actions to mitigate potential attacks. In light of recent events, we ask searchers to reevaluate all risks in the marketplace: code risks, networking risks, reorg risks, smart contract risks, etc. and manage their risks appropriately.
Third, we call on the research and security community to carefully study vulnerabilities like these in the context of enshrined PBS, where variants may be applicable.
Finally, this is a call for your contributions, as a community, to ensure a healthy and robust PBS market today and into the future
Please volunteer if you are a validator or a beacon node operator
There have been some legitimate stakers whose keys have been compromised. CLWP has helped verify their legitimacy and came up with a solution to set withdrawal address and front run the hackers. We need your help. Hackers might be trying to set their own withdrawal address for the stolen validators and you can help prevent theft during the upcoming Shapella launch. By volunteering with CLWP, you can help in a coordinated broadcasting of withdrawal address changes, and ensure that the impacted stakers funds are not stolen. For details on becoming a CLWP volunteer, please watch this video -
Itâs really not that complicated. It just takes a few minutes of your time and is needed right now, before the Shapella launch to help the impacted stakers! You can also get one on one assistance on their Discord if needed - https://discord.gg/pwuPA6K4zg
Edit - this works for Prysm, Lighthouse and Lodestar. Teku and Nimbus does not support this
No stream | No POAP
VPN to jail,
Regulation set to fail,
Blockchain jobs to sail.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
Coinbase new lobbying org using snapshot for individuals to sign on to an open letter to congress: https://snapshot.org/#/crypto435.eth/proposal/0xf9628ebee2878f5667aa018537eda2266c085d58772bd6ee562899189657c07e
Edit: more info here
Hey all. Iâm giving a presentation on blockchain, Wordpress, and community tomorrow at WordCamp Phoenix. Live stream link on the homepage: https://phoenix.wordcamp.org/2023/
EVMs, r/ethfinance, hodlercon, caches.xyz will all be talked about! Wish me luck!
Edit: link to my topic https://phoenix.wordcamp.org/2023/session/blockchains-and-wordpress-leveraging-decentralization-for-a-more-user-first-community-driven-and-open-web/
I imagine a lot of people here are interested in keeping up with staking on Ethereum but donât have a ton of time to invest.. I think we have a good system that will help you stay informed about staking in about one minute a day: Weâre creating one minute clips from our content and posting them as YouTube shorts and on our Twitter. Iâd suggest turning on notifications for the EthStaker Twitter and checking them out when itâs convenient for you to click.
Right now the clips are covering the goerli Shapella fork, tomorrow theyâll include the Lodestar call thatâs happening today, and around April 1 theyâll begin preparing everyone for the mainnet Shapella upgrade maybe with a highlight of previous major upgrade calls.
I sincerely believe these short-form clips will take EthStakerâs education reach to the next level and I hope you find value in them.
Hereâs another one: Barney Frank Was Right About Signature Bank. Written by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal
Free-market capitalism canât work if you are afraid of the government seizing your business in the middle of the night because a secret cabal of politicians didnât like your law abiding business. And it looks like Wall Street is slowly waking up to this unprecedented authoritarian shift by the Biden administration.
Today it was a bank serving crypto. Tomorrow it is a bank which has labour unions as itâs customer base, or a bank which provides services to medical companies that include abortion services, or a company which was not ESG friendly enough, or a company which spoke too loudly and too brashly about the President. Seize em in the middle of the night and fire the leadership board and auction off the assets. Hopefully civic society makes enough noise about this and itâs not too late to close the Pandoraâs box that Bidenâs staff opened.
Ive posted a bit about exploiting Large Language Models (such as GPT) before, but Im back with more. Even if you have no interest in this, I believe its important to have an understanding of how the data you input in these kinds of systems can later be used against you.
Definitely start by reading https://blog.forcesunseen.com/jailbreaking-llm-chatgpt-sandboxes-using-linguistic-hacks. Then proceed to https://doublespeak.chat/ to apply these concepts.
As of my last post, there were 9 challenges. Forces Unseen more recently released this reflective post https://blog.forcesunseen.com/llm-sandboxing-early-lessons-learned along with 8 new challenges available at https://doublespeak.chat.
For a demonstration of how language-based exploitation may be combined with traditional computer exploitation, https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/injectgpt-most-polite-exploit-ever/ is ridiculously hilarious.
https://protectai.com/blog/hacking-ai-system-takeover-exploit-in-mlflow reveals a local file inclusion(LFI) which can lead to complete takeover of systems running MLFlow. This has been patched.
Trail of Bits has long been a leader in infosec research and auditing. https://blog.trailofbits.com/2023/03/14/ai-security-safety-audit-assurance-heidy-khlaaf-odd/ âWe Need a New Way to Measure AI Securityâ is an interesting read.
https://blog.trailofbits.com/2023/03/22/codex-and-gpt4-cant-beat-humans-on-smart-contract-audits/ âCodex (and GPT-4) canât beat humans on smart contract auditsâ offers a much deeper dive into this subject.
And in case this has post not been related enough to Ethereum, by chance I just found this article https://blog.trailofbits.com/2023/02/27/reusable-properties-ethereum-contracts-echidna/ âReusable Properties for Ethereum Contractsâ.
EDIT: Just noticed that doublespeak.chat limits the # of queries you can make before having to purchase more. If anyone defeats the Count of Monte Cristo, Id love a second hint haha
Well, I took a good hard look at everything I had put money into in this space over the past 3 years. When I boiled it all down almost all of it seems to fall into the category of a project run by naive people, run by scammers, or artsy crap that I enjoy but should never have spent so much money on.
Some of defi protocols I tinkered with make me feel so stupid now.
Hereâs one. Tokemak. To this day I still donât quite understand it all. I popped into their Discord and the team is spending over a half million dollars a month on basically nothing. $35k+ in one month on âMarketing and Communityâ. At what point do you just outright call projects like this total grifts?
Itâs not that itâs the only one either. Itâs a landscape of just gross misbehaviour, scams, and projects run by people who have NO IDEA what they are doing.
I am SO glad that I only played around in the Defi and NFT ecosystem with total fun money, and left my real stack staked away. I clearly had no business sticking my nose in any of that stuff.
There are a couple decent projects out there, but I feel pretty discouraged about the entire space today. Maybe having my eth unlocked soon is a good thing :(
Future mainstream adoption alert:
Likely for the first time ever, an (unofficial) POAP was created for a WordCamp this last weekend at WordCamp Phoenix 2023.
If unfamiliar, WordCamps are WordPressâ event series that any group of volunteers can create anywhere in the world and get support from the non-profit WordPress Foundation. WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet. đ
I was the only blockchain-focused speaker (talk description) and it was very well received, including by individuals higher up the food-chain and from Wordpress.com itself. The experience has helped clarify for me what lacks and can be done in this particular space, and how I can help. Much more to come from me on this soon.
P.S. the POAP wasnât finalized until the day after my talk, so donât be misled by my finalizing comments about it.
Wow. An r/Technology post where someone not jumping on the crypto hate bandwagon got upvoted into the thousands of upvotes! The post was about Nvidia claiming crypto has no use case. They of course say this now that Ethereum has moved to proof of stake and thatâs exactly what the user said. Naturally, beneath this someone questioned what that meant. Then the top response there was a spot on comment. As soon as I read it I thought to myself âthatâs gotta be an ethfinancier.â And what do you know, I look up to see u/Atyzze a name I recognised.
Every last one of you who are still spreading the good word in other subs get every last drop of my appreciation. Itâs tough work out thereâŚ
Weâve had a little bit of discussion here regarding the RESTRICT Act, which is the legislation drafted with the pretty explicit intent of banning TikTok if necessary. Coincenter just put up a great post about how itâs broad language is problematic. The rub:
we are very concerned that an overbroad interpretation of those powers could be exploited in order to ban Americans from using entire classes of technologies, even when no foreign adversary has an actual proprietary interest in the technology as a whole
A big problem they highlight is that while thereâs already similar legislation that allows the government to block foreign transactions that are against the national interest (RESTRICT grants the powers to the Secretary of Commerce much like the IEEPA grants powers to OFAC), this law as far fewer oversite and review protections, which is particularly problematic for legislation that provides such broad authority:
A broad and discretionary power to ban and disrupt all manner of information technologies should not be wielded without appropriate oversight and opportunity for review. The RESTRICT Act not only fails to ensure these rule of law protections, in many cases it attempts to subvert them.
This problem perhaps clearest when one observes that the IEEPA had amendments (the Berman Amendments) added that act as statutory protections for free speech, but RESTRICT has no such protections/limitations:
Courts have found that the Berman Amendments, in effect, save the statute from potential unconstitutional applications. When plaintiffs challenge a sanctions designation that impacts speech, they can argue that OFAC exceeded its statutory power by contravening the Berman Amendments, rather than making the somewhat more difficult but also more consequential argument that IEEPA, the statute itself, contravenes the Constitution.
In contrast, the RESTRICT Act has no such statutory limitation. Indeed it is deliberately targeted at restraining transactions related to information and information technologies.
A lot of other good stuff in there about how it could impact Crypto directly as well (e.g. that the Secretary could âargue that the entire class of all Bitcoin transactions, for example, is a class of transactions in which U.S. foreign adversaries have an interestâ and should be banned), but all that is to say: call your representatives and tell them they should not support this bill.
The Blockswap folks have released their Proof of Neutrality relay on Goerli and provided some documentation. Iâve been following their project for a while, the ideas are interesting. If it works, itâs actually quite a large step forward in terms of PBS design. They claim relays cannot see the contents of blocks, thereâs a MEV smoothing pool built in, and (like the optimistic submissions being deployed by the ultra sound relay and elsewhere) relays donât have to perform validation before sending a block on. Builders instead post collateral to be used in case they try anything funny.
But while the ultra sound relayâs system has the relay operator holding the collateral themselves, the PoN system is integrated into smart contracts with third party reporters acting as oracles to detect violations and penalize offending actors accordingly. All in all itâs potentially (remains to be seen) an improvement over the current system
I donât find their documentation to be very complete (or even accurate?), and their recently-published GitHub repos contains a fork of mev-boost-relay without attribution to Flashbots or a proper commit history. And the actual meat of the system, centered around Restrictive Partially Blind Signatures, is closed source and undocumented so far. Itâs also concerning that their proposer guide has you input your keystore.json and enter your password (?!). Theyâve confirmed to me that itâs only used locally (not uploaded) to prove that you control the validators youâre registering, but this is not the way to do it.
Itâs something to keep an eye on if youâre following the cutting edge of MEV and block production stuff, or if you have goerli validators and want something to test. Otherwise maybe hold out for more info.
Side note: MEV-Boost Community Call 2 tomorrow at 16:00 UTC. Going to be plenty of boring technical stuff about shapella readiness and optimistic relay rollouts.
Guest appearance by Anthony Bertolino, Head of Growth at POAP, to discuss the release of POAP Drops! https://drops.poap.xyz/
Announcements
crickets
$1814
0.064
I urge anyone who hasnât done so to read through the chapter on digital assets in the Economic Report of the President. Itâs gives a full picture of the deviousness and flippancy of the Biden administration towards crypto. Take this gem on pg 238 for example
crypto assets to date do not appear to offer any investments with any fundamental value, nor do they act as an effective alternative to fiat money, improve financial inclusion or make payments more efficient; instead their innovation has been mostly about creating artificial scarcity in order to support crypto assetsâ prices - and many of them have no fundamental value
Complete horseshit. They do act as a non-inflationary alternative to debasement of fiat money, today. They do act as a self-custodial alternative to money which relies on trusting banks which are literally teetering, today.
They do improve financial inclusion. A kid in rural India or Mexico or Romania can take part in the Ethereum defi ecosystem with just an internet connection, today. Trading securities and treasuries and holding American dollars is a privilege to a tiny fraction of the world, and itâs sad to see the Biden ainistration not see this.
They do make payments more efficient. This is increasingly clear for internet native payments. Buying and selling digital native art and culture, paying members of a DAO, transferring funds to colleagues in the same team but all over the world, making small payments in countries like Nigeria and Lebanon with collapsing local currencies - various crypto solutions do make payments efficient in these instances, today.
And last and most importantly of all, is that even if crypto had no usecase (which isnât true as I pointed out above), even if, that value judgement is still not the business of the federal government. Hereâs a great take by Chervinsky
If youâre tired of this government lying, gaslighting and overreach, a good place to start is to sign up for the crypto advocacy program by Coinbase: https://actnow.io/z31xN5P
Do Kwon arrested,
Arbitrum still congested,
Rewards devested.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
BREAKING NEWS!
EIP-4804 is now an ERC! So like under ERC-4804, internet users have the option to type âweb3://â vs âhttp://â in their browsers to bring up DApps such as Uniswap or onchain NFTs directly! OMMFG Bros! We can now directly run a query to the EVM!
web3://jbmaclemore.eth/
News:
dang. First time Iâve ever fallen for something stupid. I went to check out Arbitrum eligibility and clicked the first link under the announcement. The link did look like a scam to me but I had just read a friend comment that the legit airdrop announcement / video âlooks like a scamâ, so my brain had its defenses down. Only connected and I think it just took whatever already had approvals? Which was all my DAI. feelsbadman.jpg - 5400 DAI is no small sum. It unfortunately looks like they got a few people before the tweet was hidden.
My brain finally went ânopeâ when it asked to approve RPL, but everything before that was just a signature to connect (I think?), not a transaction or approval.
Things I could have done better (that I usually would do!):
Expensive lesson learned! Iâm going to lay down and watch a movie or something, Iâm super bummed that Iâm a dummy.
Another thing learned in this (thanks to /u/Ribilla_ ) - DAI is a special kind of ERC20 that allows transfers that require only a signature (permit
, which is a signature-based approval function) - it doesnât look like your typical approval or transaction. So even signatures when connecting to sites should be treated as potentially dangerous and giving away your assets.
See here: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/11slqjw/daily_general_discussion_march_16_2023/jch9a3s/
I can give a short update regarding the Euler exploiter situation. Itâs still a developing story ⌠if you missed episode 1 and 2, you find them here: link / link
S02E03 - The merciful hacker (cont.)
After the exploiter sent 100 ETH to one affected user, DLNews identified this lucky person. DLnews is actually quite good - I didnât know Defillama has itâs own newspaper! After Swap.defillama.com/ itâs another killer product of the Llama universe âŚ
The interesting part of this episode is: The 100 ETH are actually worth more than what the user lost 78 wstETH (or 86 ETH). Essentially, the user would have profited from the âdealâ. Being now officially doxxed he sent back 12 ETH to the official Euler depositor address. Is this correct? Who knows, weâll see if Euler will push for the full amount to be returned. Itâs a subplot which runs through the entire season. âŚ
For more information on this incident, I refer directly to DLnews:
S02E02 - The maniac hacker
Every morning the hacker gets up, heâs doing something with his freshly earnt money. If you own $200M you can have some fun with it, right?
So, Today morning, he decided to give 100 ETH to the allegedly North Korean and OFAC sanctioned Ronin Exploiter Address, probably Lazarus controlled. Here is the tx: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x202a67d3a1d52e4dd5e1eebe49da511164b6e4a1ebe717dcf4674dd83a2bd457
Is he trying to fool us? Some kind of weird joke of 21 year old hacker? Or is it some kind of attribution to them? What will come next? Sending some to SBF or Alamada?
Or is he just bored and want his warrant level raised like in GTA?
Before he sent the 100 ETH to KimJongUn, he moved 1k ETH between his wallets but itâs sitting there idle. At the moment, in total only 1.5k ETH has been sent to Tornando, the rest still in ETH (85k) or DAI (35 M).
S02E03 - Tornado Cash Activity
I did some tracking of the wallets which have used Tornado Cash recently. The activity has fallen quite a bit after it was hit with OFAC sanction rule. So itâs kind of easy to track the activity even visually and manually. Here is the result:
Iâm a bit surprised that 125ETH (and a batch of 100 ETH) went pretty straight from Tornado into Binance. The other larger chunks were moved into railgun and multiBTC, only some smaller amounts ran over âprivacy orientedâ exchanges.
It seems that the merciful-maniac hacker has not cashed their ETH out yet.
Okay Okay â Heres the official Post-Mortem thread for the Euler hack: https://twitter.com/TraversaJulian/status/1636782111616122881
I reposted an earlier draft of it yesterday but I think the conversation here should really be around how safe people felt Euler was.
It was generally considered âas safeâ as Compound, Aave, Maker, etc., and having a loss of ~$200m kind of breaks many previous assumptions about safetyâŚ
So my only conclusion is that we need to move towards more resilient mechanisms, mechanisms that cost significantly more to execute but are necessary to move forward effectively.
It really goes on, but these can only be effectively done if we all move towards L2âs.
With the arb airdrop, now is the time to push for L2 adoption and the security that we really need to move DeFi forward.
At the encouragement of u/TheCryptosAndBloods yesterday, I drafted a letter to my US representative, who happens to be among the 100+ member Congressional Progressive Caucus. I took the perspective that crypto is well aligned with progressive principles so they should engage. Including here for crowdsourcing feedback to improve it and/or for others to cut and paste from it especially if you too have a CPC representative:
=======================
Dear Representative xxx:
[removed doxxable intro]
I am writing to you today to encourage you and CPC to engage actively in policymaking around digital assets (aka, crypto).
As one of the 20% of Americans who own digital assets, I have used much of my recent time to teach myself about digital assets and the broader domain of blockchain technology. This is a highly technical field, requiring me to learn about such areas as cryptography, finance, decentralized networks, computing, and others. This knowledge has yielded practical benefits in that I have learned how to join thousands of others to stake ether on the Ethereum blockchain which now provides me with a steady income.
This knowledge has also allowed me to cut through the hype, misinformation, and disinformation surrounding cryptocurrency in the popular discourse to conclude that in fact, the crypto ecosystem of digital assets, smart contracts, and public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has value and will disrupt economic and business systems around the world. For instance:
⢠Decentralized financial protocols allow everyday people to instantly make payments around the world and make loans and other financial transactions without commercial middlemen
⢠Immutable and transparent records on the public blockchain can protect intellectual property and assure fair and transparent management of royalties
⢠Public blockchains can serve as a permanent store of critical personal events including birth, death, graduation, etc.
⢠Assignment of unique non-fungible tokens can help manage ownership and transfer of collectibles, valuables, artwork, etc.
⢠Blockchain has potential business uses such as on-line gaming, supply chain management or carbon credit system.
⢠The crypto ecosystem can transform the internet business model from allowing dominant internet platforms (eg, Facebook, Google, Apple) to own and profit from personal information to a âweb3â model where the user controls their own data on the blockchain.
I have also been struck by the fact that there is significant alignment between the principles underlying cryptocurrency and the progressive agenda. The essence of the crypto ecosystem is that data and open-source computer code distributed and synchronized around the world can replace reliance on institutional middlemen (eg, banks, internet platforms) with a decentralized transparent system available to all whose trust comes from the decentralized crypto ecosystem in which users can directly take custody of their own assets and personal data. These features can directly support the progressive agenda and its commitment to sweeping, transformative change:
⢠Income inequality can be reduced by helping underserved populationsâwho under legacy systems often cannot get a loan, buy a house, or start a businessâto build wealth and carry out financial transactions without needed to rely on gatekeeping banks that may have institutional biases that disadvantage them.
⢠Facilitating crypto use can help advance racial justice and equity. A 2019 FDIC survey found that 14% of African American households and 12% of Hispanic American households were unbanked compared to only 2.5% of white households. A recent Harris Poll found that 30% of Black Americans and 27% of Hispanic Americans owned crypto compared to 17% of white Americans.
⢠Replacing banks with self-custody and a fully transparent accounting on a public blockchain will reimagine the role of institutions that exacerbate injustice and inequality.
Congress must and will create a policy framework for digital assets in the US; it will be important to help shape this policy to promote progressive principles. Now is the time to act. Congress will likely see a number of bills introduced this session on such issues as rights to self-custody, defining digital asset taxonomy, and clarifying regulatory oversight. Discussion on such legislation has already begun in the new Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee which has recently expanded its scope to include cryptocurrency. This Subcommittee includes two CPC membersârepresentatives Torres of NY and Sherman of CA. The CPC can utilize its subcommittee membership and other opportunities to actively engage in shaping this legislation to reflect progressive priorities.
Moreover, engaging on this issue provides a great opportunity for bipartisanship. The need for regulation has bipartisan agreement. A number of Republican members have been actively supportive of addressing policy in this area (eg, representative Emmer of MN, Davidson of OH, and others). It would be remarkable, yet natural, to join forces with the other party on this issue to demonstrate its importance to the American people.
In addition to legislation, progressive congressional oversight is needed. I have been dismayed at the administrationâs actions that, in the context of overall banking system failures and under the guise of consumer protection, are inhibiting the development of a regulatory environment that would allow the digital asset sector to prosper. There are those who believe that the administration is responding to entrenched interests that are threatened by the transformative change that crypto may catalyze, taking advantage of the current banking crises to squash crypto, such as by discouraging banks from holding crypto or servicing crypto clients.
I hope you and the CPC will take on this important issue to both support the progressive agenda as well as keep Americaâs leadership in this new sector. Blockchain and crypto are borderless by nature. If the US cannot provide a fertile environment for innovation, the developers will go elsewhere and will not be serving the country or its people.
Thank you very much.
================
Revised/finished post from the other day.
DID (Decentralized ID) systems are a hot topic right now. They are needed for everything from free to play games, social media networks, and airdrops to governance systems like OPs Citizens House. There is (rightly so) a lot of buzz and various takes on how to approach this topic. I think this is one of the existential risks of Defi and Iâve written about that before (that sure aged well). Iâm personally in favor of the Gitcoin Passport framework that enables each user to define their own calculation for Sybil Resistance by identifying their stamps and then having an attestation system like I proposed awhile ago compress long form off-chain calculations into simple on-chain maps. The focus of these systems ends at being a proof of humanity per address. They are specifically attempting to solve Sybil-resistance.
However, I think there is the potential to layer reputation systems like credit scores on top of Sybil-resistance and I think the potential of this is largely unexplored. For the sake of this discussion Iâll limit reputation to being a purely quantitative, monetary history of honesty rather than history of competence, impact, or ideology. In that context reputation is synonymous with trust. If we want to keep this purely quantitative, what can we objectively measure about something (e.g. code, people, institutions, etc) that makes people trust it? Here are what I think are the three primary pillars of trust:
Social Attestation. When someone signs off on a code review, they are making an attestation. Systems like BrightId and Proof of Humanity are entirely social attestations. These systems are inherently subjective and usually gameable so are unreliable on their own but much of the world is entirely built upon attestation layers (your government ID for example).
Time. The longer something has been there the more time attackers have had to inspect it, identify a vulnerability, and attack it. The longer a person has been around the more opportunities have arisen that might lure them to dishonesty. In a permissionless system, time proves doubts to be illusory in the same way that a $20 bill on a busy street is probably fake or glued to the floor the longer it sits there.
Opportunity Cost of Honesty. Watch carefully how trust is used once granted. Any position of trust is exploitable to some degree. Otherwise what are you trusting? Honesty is the degree to which an actor is suboptimal at exploiting that trust. Yes, Iâm aware how unintuitive that definition of honesty sounds but thatâs as close as Iâve come to a formal definition. Your unexploited trust value (UTV) is your maximum exploitable trust - exploited trust.
These pillars stand together to form the base on which a credit system could be built. They are a subset of what Vitalik identified in his post on legitimacy.
The first two are straightforward to measure. The latter is a bit more like measuring carbon deltas for Carbon Credits, Sybil values, or MEV because the maximum exploitable trust term is so subjective. With PoS Sybil-resistance is derived from the money you have. Conversely, your UTV is derived from the money you donât (in a sense). Itâs the money you donât have because you chose to be honest. This is akin to the forgery-resistance score from Gitcoin passport being floored at the amount you have spent/lost.
The fact that this is subjective (and potentially monetizable) will probably lead to competing standards for how to calculate it much like credit agencies today. Your address will have the equivalent of an Experian score from multiple aggregators which combines the three pillars above into a single number that anyone can query. Each Defi protocol could choose to use a different score, a combination of scores, or create their own score. Could this lead to abuse by an agency? Yes, but less than the current system which isnât permissionless.
But how do you bootstrap trust if no one will give you a position of trust you can honor/exploit? You canât bootstrap a system like this based on unsecured loans without first getting robbed by a few ten-thousand Sybilooors. The capital efficient answer today is to get involved in communities until someone is willing to grant you trust based on social attestation and time alone. That lacks a certain scalability element though. I think we can do better, even while remaining permissionless. You have to rely on some form of suboptimality otherwise the system will be gamed for profit. So what forms of permissionless economic suboptimality are already on-chain? The few that come to mind for me are donations to public goods, unrealized losses on airdrops, suboptimal votes in the face of bribes, and delegated credit.
None of these are perfect. The first criteria requires money to bootstrap. The second and third may have ulterior selfish motives the system canât see. The fourth is basically an extension of social attestation and just begs the question. So how do you bootstrap trust on someone with nothing to give and nothing to lose? I have no good answer but the above is the beginning of a formulation.
Why does it matter? Because this value can be integrated into tokenomic systems. I mentioned unsecured lending above, which is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you hear credit system, but I think thatâs actually one of the worst use cases for this. To explain why, we first have to break Defi collateral into two categories. The first category is money used as collateral for good behavior but which doesnât have a credibly neutral recipient. ETH staking is the largest example of this category but there are many others. The only criteria here is that the system has an objective, enforceable slashing condition. In this category the money just needs to be forfeit by the staker but it doesnât need to go anywhere. The second category is money used to reimburse someone. This includes all your money markets, collateralized stablecoins, insurance protocols, etc. It is more viable to use UTV as collateral for the former category. I wouldnât recommend this for the Ethereum base chain because the data to calculate this is on the base chain and this is a subjective score, not credibly neutral.
So where does this get us? Take a PoS system (not DPoS, thatâs dumb). The purpose of this system is to reach consensus on something. There are two necessary economic components to a PoS system. First, you have to be able to reward honest actors to incentivize participation. Second, each actor needs something at stake they can lose by being dishonest so you have entropy of bad actors over time. Iâve never seen a system designed so the failure of the dishonest actors is the main reward driver of the honest ones so I assume any such system has a revenue stream attached to it. Now, could we use reputation credit/UTV for such a system in lieu of capital? It certainly satisfies the something at stake requirement. You just have to be able to prevent collusion in the system and prevent bad actors from joining at a faster rate than the dishonesty entropy.
To prevent collusion Iâll rely what I call Bitcoinâs/Satoshiâs great insight. The failure rate of attacking a network scales super-linearly with the number of anonymous actors in that network. This is because the chance of leaking a secret scales exponentially with the network and there is a common Schelling point to unify against dishonest actors once a secret is exposed. This is the primary value of decentralization. Past a certain threshold it is safe and profitable to be honest and risky and expensive to be dishonest. So the key to preventing collusion is to increase decentralization and protect anonymity of actors. Defi satisfies this.
To solve dishonesty entropy weâre just using a different collateral (which is still a scarce resource). Today we use capital for Sybil-resistance. This does not provably satisfy the entropy condition and so plutocratic attacks on PoS systems today are possible. Given the source of this alternative collateral (historical honesty) UTV may prove out to be a superior selection criteria for identifying honest consensus participants.
This actually creates a beautiful sort of flywheel. By acting honestly you build a reputation score. You can stake your reputation in order to promise certain services. By fulfilling your promise you generate both an income stream and further reputation. This creates a compounding benefit to continue acting honestly. A world in which honest actors can build an income stream predicated on their reputation and potentially bootstrapped through community service is also a basis for UBI. Itâs a step closer to the type of world in which Iâd like to live. A few disclaimers though. First, nothing is ever fully proven to be trustworthy. Second, trust is not monotonically increasing. As systems or the world with which they integrate change trust in them fluctuates.
P.S. Iâve been asked to plug an on-topic game from the EVMaverickâs called Layer Zero. The basic premise of the game is to willingly enter into a contract with a group of people who can all openly rug the contract. Everyone has to put a share of collateral into the pot to join. Anyone in the game can take the pot. If no one takes the pot then everyone is generating UTV at the pot size * participants. Conceptually, a set of non-conspiring participants in a game like this can generate more in UTV than the money at stake. While UTV as defined above is scarce if it can be generated faster than capital it could out-compete capital for shares of revenue streams because of this.
Self-serving link
The DefiLlama team is forking Defillama
According to Oxngmi: âThe person who controls both defillamaâs twitter and domain has decided to launch a token despite everybody in the team not wanting it. That is why we (the DefiLlama team who have built the site you all know and love for the past three years) have decided to fork Defillama and start fresh on llama.fi and @llamadotfiâ
DO NOT TRUST ANY COMMUNICATION OR TOKEN FROM @Defillama or Defillama .com"
I have no idea if this is true, but the accounts seem to be the ones that control the extension. Personally I have not uninstalled it, but be careful until we find out what is actually happening..
I tried to not check prices. I lasted 3 months. I ended up checking because of the SVB news. Good to see ETH up 50% since I left. Makes me a little less worried about my CDP. The $ARB airdrop was a nice surprise too. Glad I didnât miss it while I was gone. The only other thing I was really worried about while I was gone were my non-ETH holdings.
With withdrawals coming I finally gave up on my LINK and swapped them for RPL. More confidence in RPL than LINK. Should have done it long ago. I got too attached to my LINK and waited too long for the ratio to recover. (Iâm a horrible trader). Lesson learned there. But I need an exit plan for RPL. Itâs only 2% of my portfolio though.
Iâve used this drop in the ratio to unload most of my BTC. Now only 3% of my portfolio. 0% at 0.055 if my limit orders go through. A part of me wants to keep a little bit of BTC just for nostalgic reasons but I really donât see the point of BTC. I skimmed some of the recent dailies and see others offloading their BTC. This probably means the ratio will continue to drop âšď¸
So now I am 95% ETH and too heavy in ETHE in my retirement funds. Feels nice (other than the horrible ETHE price: whatâs going on there?). It was kind of nice not checking the price for a few months, but I also missed reading the daily.
Iâll probably stick around to claim my $ARB and maybe until withdrawals are enabled. Anything fun to do on Arbitrum these days? Something that wonât make taxes a mess next year.
Airdrop Ideas?
I recently joked with some friends at work about how the ARB airdrop would be my only work bonus this year and, of course, they got super interested. Last Xmas I gave them all RPL and it has tripled in value, but since then they havenât really done anything with defi or crypto. However, I think airdrop farming might just be the push that gets them swimming!
So, Iâm compiling a list of some of my airdrop farming tasks that I plan on doing every week. For the uninitiated, Iâll provide step-by-step guides on some of the tasks every week if I can. Iâll post all that here in the caches.xyz forum: https://caches.xyz/forums/discussion/airdrop-hunts-checklist/
(Must sign in to see todayâs update)
Here is the shortened version of it. Please let me know if you have any ideas I can add!
*Bonus and super useful if you can add whether or not it is likely to happen, costs involved, or potential gains
[ ] ⢠Attend Swell Discord meeting today on 3/17.
[ ] ⢠Prepare art for Swell memes and articles and post a tweet about it on their Discord Week of 3/19 (deadline Fri?)
[ ] ⢠Create StarknetID (My guide created 3/19)
[ ] ⢠Zksync 1.0 transactions (Use zig zag)
[ ] ⢠Scroll testnet transactions.
[ ] ⢠Matcha.xyz swaps.
[ ] ⢠Continue interacting on Optimism and Arbitrum (Use HOP and VSTA)
[ ] ⢠orbiter.finance (Bridge)
[ ] ⢠starknet testnet (mint NFTs, create blocks NFT, dapps)
[ ] ⢠checkout earni.fi
[ ] ⢠GMX blueberry lottery
[ ] ⢠Use argent wallet (swaps, dapps, and LP)
[ ] ⢠Use Lens (make a post, friend, etc)
If you donât mind, please engage on the caches.xyz forum if you need assistance as Iâm certain that others will have the same or similar questions as you there.
Meanwhile, more NFT shenanigans..
535 DeGods NFTs that had been previously burned in Ethereum, were âressurrectedâ as ordinals in BTC, at 0.333 BTC per mint this past weekend.
They all sold out in a single block.
The project dominated ordinals secondary markets, with over $1M in volume, ahead of YugaLabâs twelvefold ordinals by >7x. It seems ordinals are here to stay, and more so if they are backed by already established brands such as DeGods.
Yesterday some twitter user found out ~2400 compromised accounts all approving ARB. Someone analysed these (actually 2225) wallets and 1791 wallets are elligble for around 3 million ARB total.
https://github.com/ArbitrumFoundation/sybil-detection/issues/3
Many users became victim by following links under the announcement tweet. Suprised Arbitrum didnât provide the link to their website with the annoucement or turn off replies. They are not new to how crypto scams and hacks work.
https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1636352104913666050
Frustrating to see that so much damage is done. Users have personal responsibility sure. But I think the damage wouldnât be this big if Arbitrum guided users to the right place. Maybe I am a bit unreasonable hereâŚ
Stuff like this canât be happening if crypto ever wants to become âmainstreamâ.
I have not been hacked personally and this just an observation.
I will take Balaji seriously when he goes to explain his theory to people who have the intellectual background to ask him the hard questions.
His appearance on Bankless and the Pomp show yesterday were appalling. Those werenât interviews, they were oral presentations. He could have said that Satoshi was going to come down from heaven to wash away our sins and give us eternal life, and the hosts would have nodded their heads and said âwoah.â
Balaji is not the intellectual he claims to be. An intellectual does not choose hosts sold out to his cause to make his point - instead, he will go directly to confront those who disagree. This is the very basis of the scientific method. I also find his tone to be alarmist, dramatic, filled with hyperbole created to capture attention.
Who is he, anyway? He is an engineer who became a multi-millionaire in the early 2010s - he has no expertise in finance, history or politics, beyond what he has read elsewhere. Ironically, he made his fortune from the system he says he wants to escape today. His claim to fame is that he âpredictedâ the pandemic on January 30, 2020. Except that on January 30th, the WHO declared a âglobal health emergencyâ, Wuhan had already been cut off from the rest of the world, there were confirmed cases in dozens of countries⌠He was a bit early, sure, but it is not the feat he claims.
Finally, about his $1M prediction, he has already prepared his exit. In three months he will say, âOh, the bet was just a wake-up call, you shouldnât have taken it at face value, Iâm not sure about the timeline, but hyperinflation will happen soon.â It wonât happen, and heâll push the deadline again and again, until he disappear into irrelevance.
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1638654192138199041
Brian Armstrong: > 1/ Today Coinbase received a Wells notice from the SEC focused on staking and asset listings. A Wells notice typically precedes an enforcement action.
> [âŚ]
> 4/ We are proud to stand up for our customers and the industry in these moments.
Honestly⌠best that Coinbase, whoâs well-capitalized and equipped to handle this, to be the one to go to court with the SEC and set a precedent. A win for crypto against the SEC in court would be a big deal and thereâs no one better poised to do that than CB.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
Now, this is a story all about how
Our lives got flipped-turned upside down
And Iâd like to take a minute
Just sit right there
Iâll tell you how we became gentlemen of a sub called ethfinanciĂŠr:
In Ethereum Trader, born and raised
On the daily was where I spent most of my days
Chillinâ out, meming, tradinâ, all cool
And all buyingâ some shitcoins outside of the school
When a couple of mods who were up to no good
Started making trouble in our neighborhood
We told them donuts are whack and jtnichol got scared
He said, âYouâre movinâ with cutsnek into ethfinancierâ
Neutral referee,
Yet he plays for his own team,
Markets should stay free.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Lol holy crap bunch of dummies over there at NYAG office. At least Genslerâs team understand cryptoâŚ
From: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=XDXIUrIw3tVafxqwEqVfKw==
Under proof-of-work, computers on the Ethereum network competed to answer amathematical puzzle in order to verify transactions on the blockchain and receive in-kind digital asset rewards. Under proof-of-stake, however, validators, pledge or âstakeâ their holdings in ETH and are randomly chosen to verify transactions on the blockchain and receive an in-kind digital asset reward. By shifting to proof-of-stake, ETH no longer relies upon competition between computers, but instead now relies on a pooling method that incentivizes users to own and stake ETH. The shift to proof-of-stake significantly impacted the core functionality and incentives for owning ETH, because ETH holders now can profit merely by participating in staking.
Lol, âmerely by participating in stakingâ holy christ project much? Is this a highschoolers essay?
And why is it a security Ms AG?
the Ethereum Foundation claims on its website that users of Ethereum âsee it as a digital store of value because the creation of new ETH slows down over time.â
Lol just like bitcoin, which even Gensler has clearly stated is the only crypto he views as definitely NOT security? Canât even line up your arguments between agenciesâŚ
But wait thereâs more?
Since transitioning to the proof-of-stake consensus, the value proposition has altered significantly because possession of ETH translates directly to profit potential by earning staking rewards
Hey everyone, did you realize that youâre earning staking rewards just by holding Eth in your hardware wallet!!!!!
I have no idea how any of this will play out, but I can definitely say that NYAG is a fucking clown show compared the SEC when it comes to this stuff.
Stolen from r WSB:
https://i.redd.it/gjolf3latzma1.jpg
97.3% of SVB deposits are not FDIC insured. This means, most of ~$200 bln, that used to belong to many, many tech companies and start-ups, just disappeared. Probably many jobs will fallow.
This truly is a crypto day happening in TradFi.
Hello 2008, my old friendâŚ
According to their latest tweet, Circle stands to lose 8% of the USDC backing at most. It sounds like the most reasonable expectation is that FDIC will be able to recover a decent amount of funds from SVB. Iâm expecting >50% to be returned. But looking at the pessimistic side, we have a 4-8% haircut on USDC. $0.92-$0.96. Weâre seeing that price range now.
The next question is if prices close enough to that range can be sustained long enough for Circle to be able to inject liquidity into the market as needed. I donât know what mechanisms Circle uses to do this, other than promises and market forces. If it comes down to promises and market forces that might not be enough.
Another question is at what point USDC price starts to have knock on effects beyond a simple bank run. A lot of defi is built around USDC. What systems will start to deteriorate if USDC starts to depeg more? At what point do systems start to fall apart?
New drop from Justin Drake on ethresearch âbased rollupsâ that use L1 sequencing. Looks like they would inherently force L1 alignment and sequencer decentralization rather than having to rely on the good faith of L2 teams.
The first town hall for the Summer of Protocols happens tomorrow, about 9 hours from this comment.
If youâre interested in participating, highly recommend attending! I havenât finished reading the Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols (sort of a manifesto for the course) yet but itâs really good so far, very thought-provoking, and Iâm thinking of recording a version to listen to.
edit. quick synopsis of the Summer of Protocols if youâre lazy: itâs basically a brain incubator where some very thoughtful people are going to get together and try to define what a âprotocolâ is, examine existing examples, and how to design one that is future-proof, capable of ossifying to some degree, incentivizes good outcomes, and look at how much stewardship that thing will need.
This is awesome and, in my mind, the kind of philosophical analysis that we need to make sure Ethereum (or any protocol) has a sufficient amount of thought put into it to try to steer away from some of the dystopian outcomes that something like the internet has brought about.
If algorithms on the internet can change peopleâs behaviors to rapidly foster a kind of hatred that causes people to do things they otherwise wouldnât have, why wouldnât we assume that that behavior-changing power also works in the other direction to incentivize willing participants to better coordinate with each other? This is why Iâm here. Because the infancy of Ethereum is the most exciting and malleable part and I think something like this is capable of stewarding it to a place where it actually makes a difference.
Literally how can people outside the âcryptosphereâ look at crypto and not think âscamâ?
A quote from u/geliboy695000 earlier today and I want to repost it here for exposure and discussion because itâs important.
When you look at social media, any time the topic comes up or problems in crypto are brought up, the threads are flooded with bots and scammers shilling whatever shitcoin they get paid to shill. If I were not already in the space and knew what goes on Iâd 100% think cryptocurrency is just scams all the way down. And just to be explicitely clear: Ethereum itself has enabled this too with ERC-20s and the like. Just look at whatâs literal number 4 in market cap among those tokens and then scroll down further for all the less popular bs coins like Dogelon & co.
We need to somehow find a way to exclude the grifters and scammers from the discussions while still being open and true to the crypto ideals, and also welcoming to newcomers and open to new ideas. It seems like mission impossible.
How can legitimate projects be promoted without at the same time giving exposure to the wrong people? How can the general public be educated, because it doesnât seem knowledge of blockchain tech and its uses has increased that much in the mainstream over the past years. The majority of people still doesnât even seem to understand even just Bitcoin, which has been around for 13 years now and is arguably the most basic and among the easiest blockchains to understand in principle.
This matters, because if most people do not understand how this tech can help society and how it works, theyâll think itâs useless and will support legislation that cracks down and hinders crypto adoption. They might cheer the criminalization of private non-KYCed wallets only to find a couple of years down the line to be forced to use CBDC and have banks not only control their money but monitor all their habits as well. Itâs probably not what the majority wants but if we donât help them understand they wonât know anything about it.
GrĂźezi EthFinance đ
Love you all, keep being ambassadors, and keep helping any- and everyone who asks for it!
PrĂśschtli đť
Dear EVMs, EIPandaâs and the ETHFinance community,
I come before you today to genuinely ask for your help. Please take the time to read this, I know it is long but I believe it is important. No jokes this time. Thanks in advance friends.
As you may or may not know, I started a website called âCaches.â If youâve never visited it, I will briefly explain. If you have, then you already know. Caches is a social network/community website focused on Web3 Technology and Ethereum. A place to explore all of the interesting technologies and ideas that are spinning off of this new paradigm that we all love. Itâs completely anonymous, and membership is free and only available via Ethereum wallet login.
I intended for Caches to be somewhere for our community to teach, and share our knowledge outside of the walls of third parties like Reddit or Discord. Something we own, so our voices can be properly heard, and so they canât be muted due to some draconian corporate attack on crypto or something. A place where you could âcacheâ your content and share it with the world anonymously, using identity technology being pioneered by Ethereum. Our mark on the world outside our biosphere. I also hoped we could show the world how you build a community, powered by web3 technology, out here on the old www⌠A home.
Now I have a lot of ideas, but thatâs the gist of it. I have spent a lot of time in this pursuit and I have struggled with it. The platform I chose to build Caches on, WordPress, has absolutely no help, plugins, or extensions for crypto/web3. Really no good CMS platform out there does. Since I am a terrible coder, and I am already familiar with developing websites rapidly using Wordpress, I chose to move forward using it to save time, for better or for worse. This has been an adventure to say the least.
Recently, I spoke with another EVM, /u/juxtanotherposition, and we immediately hit it off. Turns out, just by stroke of luck that on March 24th, 2023 he will be giving a presentation at WordCamp Phoenix on âWordpress, Community and Web3.â Strange how the world works sometimes ⌠Caches is built on Wordpress, it has custom developed Web3 authentication and NFT gating, and it was made for a community⌠his very own community! This was literally a match made in heaven! So with all that said, we agreed to feature Caches during the presentation as an example of community built on Wordpress with web3 tech!
That means we will have eyes from the Wordpress developer community focused on Caches and the EVM! AAAAHHHH! This is why I need your help! Now look, I know Iâm funny, and I make you laugh, and maybe youâve even checked out Caches once or twice to humor me, and then laughed yourself to sleep ⌠but I need them to see the value in this. Not just for me, or Caches, or the EVMs ⌠for Ethereum.
Why is Wordpress important?
Wordpress is a free, open source content management system that powers an astounding 43% of all websites online. I bet you didnât know Caches ran on Wordpress before I told you, did you? A lot of your favorite sites run on it. Itâs free, open source, community developed, and extensible. It also runs on a completely opensource technology stack. Wordpress.org develops the Wordpress software and they are a non-profit entity. Their ethos is very aligned with ours. They want to enable people to have their own platform to share their ideas, and words without having to rely on anyone. You can check out their about us page if you arenât familiar with them.
Why is this important for the community?
Since Caches was built for the EVM/ETHFi community, we have a very unique opportunity to get our ideas, and our community out to potentially thousands of Wordpress developers who will be viewing Caches during @juxtaâs presentation. They will undoubtedly share Caches with other developers. That means we have an opportunity to get web3 ideas and even our community baked into Wordpress! I literally can not think of a bigger opportunity for us, and for Ethereum. If we can get developers to create plugins, extensions, themes and more that enable and integrate web3 technology into Wordpress, we have an opportunity to put this in front of 43% of website owners WORLDWIDE! I can not think of a better group than all of you to guide and usher these people into this new paradigm.
With our help we can get this technology out to the world, and we can foster the Wordpress community during their exploration of this new technology. Give them a place to safely ask questions and get good answers ranging from JBM to Logris level. A place to share ideas, develop friendships and connections ⌠just like we all have done through the sub. This is our opportunity to put the community at the forefront of something big outside our walls and build ourselves as an authority in this space.
Whatâs in it for me?
Juxta has asked if Caches could be a sort of âdevelopmentâ test bed for Wordpress web3 plugins and technology. I like this idea, we get free development work to make Caches the premier web3 community and the developers get a real live site to develop their product. This is a win/win/win! I get to see the thing I started grow and flourish at the hands of people much smarter and more capable than me. Itâs beautiful man! Thatâs really it. I hope to use it to make money, however we decide to do that, just like you.
Whatâs in it for you?
I honestly built this site for our community. I genuinely built it to enable everyone to be heard out here on the web. As I have repeatedly stated, I donât want to own this thing by myself. So I hope you can join me, we can come up with new ways to push Ethereum/web3 forward in the web2 and we can come up with creative ways for everyone in the community to earn some money for themselves without turning into a marketing machine. I want everyone to be a part of that journey, and I want everyone to be able to contribute ideas to that goal, and most importantly I want to work with you to figure out how we can own this thing together in the fairest way possible. I donât have any of that figured out, but thatâs ultimately where I want to be⌠a community owned and operated by the community.
How can I help?
Pop in the EVM discord. If youâre not an EVM, I still want your help. Please. Join the public-channel and DM a mod to have the âCachesâ role added to your account and then youâll be able to see the #caches channel there even if you donât have an EVM. I will use that to try to collaborate and focus our energies best I can. I need you! We have just 10 days to try and make Caches, the community and Ethereum look good⌠but hey⌠this is just the beginning. So donât do it for me. Do it for ETHEREUM.
Sincerely,
JBM đđť
GTP4 apparently knows solidity pretty wellâŚ
I dumped a live Ethereum contract into GPT-4.
In an instant, it highlighted a number of security vulnerabilities and pointed out surface areas where the contract could be exploited. It then verified a specific way I could exploit the contract
https://twitter.com/jconorgrogan/status/1635695064692273161
Ethtrader donuts were key in the formation of this sub. Not just because it triggered the exodus, but because of the type of people it promoted to leave.
The people that hate grifts and cash grabs, the people that see this as more than a way to make money, the people that are in it for the tech, etc.
It distilled the community down to those that believe in the original ethos ethereum was founded on, and we do our best to carry forward.
Announcements
Ethereum
It was $1420 at midnight
0.071 when i looked but thatâs less memey
The stack overflowed,
The memory took a bribe,
On chain you canât hide.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Two guys named Ray walk into a barâŚ
They tell the bartender âThis place sucked until we walked in here.â âWhyâs that?â Says the bartender.
âBecause weâre Rays in the bar!!!â
Meanwhile in the NFT-verse..
Reporting from the trenches of the great marketplace wars of â23. OpenSea has engineered their next move to combat Blurâs rapid ascent into the market. What did they do?
Introduce a new table view! Where the NFT jpg is reduced to a few pixels, just like in Blur. The way art was always meant to be traded!
On a more serious note, this war has already caused some collateral damage, with the royalties race to the bottom. The argument goes that 10k profile picture collections probably should not have royalties, while it makes more sense for 1/1 art pieces.
Well, the royalties paid on ArtBlocks (an NFT platform for curated artists) has now gone from 7.5% to 2.5%. This suggests that the markets for these two types of NFTs may not be so different after all.
Yesterday two things that longterm members posts and that are not connected somehow caught my attention and made me think. The first one was this post by Bob Rossi, the second one was a comment by superphiz in a completely different thread.
Some personal thoughts with regards to Bobs post: I totally feel you. I want to contribute more in the space and think I would be able to add some value here and there, but hell I am just a random anon on the internet thatâs mid bell curve.
But what if superphiz is right (and I think he is)? What if EVMs (which I am going to replace with members of this sub, since not everyone does hold one) will become community guardians? What if this place is something special and if you have established yourself as a valuable and know community member you are highly likely to add value to projects in the ETH ecosystem, hence also hop? What if we used the community we have built here to send people to different DAOs to positively influence decisions made in the ecosystem? What if at one point any EVM and their arguments in a (DAO) discussion are seen with different eyes just because of the NFT?
This was deployed at the EthDenver conference: ERC-4337. Am I right to think that this is a really underrated implementation?
Iâve read from a few sources that this level of account abstraction will eventually allow wallets to operate as programmable smart contracts; which could be used to recover lost private keys. Weâre not there yet, but still exciting!
News articles: msn.com and BusinessInsider
Could allow users to do away with the common practice of backing up a set of words on a piece of paper, enabling new ways to secure wallets. For example, users could set up two-factor authentication to access a wallet via biometric data, or program multi-signature wallets providing shared access to a single account.
Additionally, this:
Vitalik Buterin has stated that ERC-4337 enables a fully decentralized fee market for smart contract wallet operations.
Vitalik posted:
You should be able to send an op into a public mempool, and if it pays enough fees, reliably expect it to get included. This should NOT depend on ANY:
- Centralized actors
- Reputation systems for op senders
- ETH held in a separate EOA
- External services for account creation
With L2 fee structure the fee requirement diminishes.
Iâm not technically skilled/knowledgeable enough to understand why this integration wonât presently allow account recovery, but weâre almost there apparently. Vitalik mentions that it canât be solved by ERC-4337, but EIP-3074 and EIP-5003 would get us there. Very cool shit. Anyone want to chime in on anything I misunderstood?
Really surprised to see the Tornado Cash successor Privacy Pools isnât being discussed in more detail here
https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1632083054272430080
Since anybody can exclude any deposit, it seems it would be difficult to get any type of assurance of your anonymity set.
I also wonder if you can run into a situation where you canât withdraw. For example if a hacker makes a large deposit and then withdraws for others, then there wonât be enough funds for everyone else to withdraw if they all want to exclude the hacker.
And not sure why the subsets are even needed if receipts are provided, which Tornado Cash already did.
BUIDL Week is over here at EthDenver. You may have noticed a lack of a certain u/logristhebard around the subreddit. Thatâs because he has been diligently working on the Logris Vaults. Some of you saw the Alpha that I dropped earlier in the week⌠we are now one step closer to the Double Logris becoming a reality.
Itâs been a long week and Logris has been working flat out to get the project across the finish line. Weâre about to pitch in a little bit here⌠still waiting on our time so I canât tell you that. But, Iâm really excited about what we accomplished and really Really REALLLLLYYYY proud of him.
Logris says heâs proud of this function. What a nerd.
ETHDenver Day 10 (Yesterday)
The final day of ETHDenver! There were no traditional talks from established companies or researchers; today was all about the hackathon teams. Each project was submitted to one of five tracks (DeFi, Impact / Social Goods, DAOs / Community, NFT/Gaming/Metaverse, and Infrastructure) and could also compete for sponsor bounties (big list here).
Projects had to be submitted by 8 AM, then from 10-2 teams showed off what they made. On the regular presentation stages, teams went up to the stage corresponding to their track and gave a 1:30 pitch and demo, with a little time for questions. When they werenât on stage, they were downstairs in the main buidl room where the sponsor bounty judges and random attendees could learn about what they made. Track judges picked the top three of each track to present on the main stage during the closing ceremony at 3 PM, then five final winners were chosen.
Miscellaneous notes: I donât think I can see an overall list of hackathon projects, but each one does have their own page if you know what URL to go to. But for most I donât know the URL so itâs going to be hard to link to them. I also heard that there was a major hiccup where in the midst of planning out judging, a bunch of teams just got missed entirely and werenât scheduled for a pitch slot or a table location. The team worked to resolve it, but with everything happening so fast some teams were just screwed over. Hopefully itâs better next year. Also I finally checked out the arcade area, good collection of imported Japanese arcade games, nice selection of rhythm games in particular.
The following are the finalists who presented at the closing ceremony. These were short talks and it was easy to miss critical details, so this may be quick.
That was actually the last day. Some people are sticking around for the mountain retreat, but thatâs not really something to report on. Iâll assemble a final review tomorrow and thatâll be it!
https://www.veritasanalyticsllc.com/finacial-forensics-news/2023/3/6/law360-op-ed-crypto-is-a-major-question-only-appellate-courts-can-answer
Interesting legal op-ed about the potential future of crypto regulation as the Ripple case progresses through the courts.
TLDR: The conservative supreme court has renewed interest in containing federal agencies to the powers explicitly defined by congress evidenced by WV vs. EPA ruling last year referencing the âmajor questions doctrineâ in the ruling. Regardless of the outcome in lower courts for Ripple vs. SEC, the ruling is likely to be appealed to higher courts and this author at least thinks the SECâs authority over crypto assets falls under the âmajor questions doctrineâ that needs to be decided by congress and could potentially neuter Genslerâs further attempts to destroy the industry in the US.
Aaayo! Itâs ya most annoying boy back with mooaar open source software! Now, if youâre like me, your short term memory is shot due to excessive and repeated blows to the head. If youâre also like me, your wife makes you aware of that fact no less than 10 times a day⌠so you probably take a lot of notes so you donât feel stupid, like me. On your phone, the desktop, on the mirror after a shower ⌠Donât forget to put on pants today!
Notes are personal and often contain personal information, subtle details about your life and your extremely valuable intellectual property like your unreleased raps. Are you going to trust that level of information to Evernote!? OneNote!? You know who just bought Evernote? Bending Spoons. You know what Bending Spoons does? AI⌠yeah. They want your raps bro! Donât even get me started on Microsoft (OpenAI) OneNote! Ahhhhhhh!
So, today I present an open source, self hosted, zero knowledge, end to end encrypted note taking app named Joplin. Joplin is a full featured notes app with markdown support, image/website/screen clip insertion support and so much more! Syncing between your mobile and desktop can be done with Joplinâs paid cloud service but they also support S3, Nextcloud, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive or the local filesystem (syncthing?), so you donât have to pay more for their cloud if you donât want.
They have fully featured, open source apps for Android/iOS and Linux, Windows, Mac and ⌠FreeBSD!? Whoah! So hardcore! Even the Joplin cloud server software is open source⌠ohhh! and ⌠and thereâs a terminal app for my fellow shell dwellers out there. You can really feel the nerd love here. Check it out!
Joplin:
https://joplinapp.org
You all know, this bear is a builder. Here are some newish, not-so-well-known Defi protocols. As they are new, they are not battle-tested and deployed capital are potentially at risk. Donât ape in with your life savings.
Numoen.com - an AMM on Arbitrum which let you access leverage with no liquidation penality, oracleless. Itâs done as a power perpetual ETH^2. But there is a price,you pay relatively high funding rates so itâs rather good for short term trades.
Sturdy.finance - another leverage protocol. Here you can leverage up DEX pool tokens or alternatively lend your ETH/stables to the one using leverage.
Contango.xyz - you can buy or sell a forward contract, and contango borrows on the fixed-rate markets, swaps on the spot markets, and lends back on the fixed rate markets. Sounds complicated, but also fascinating money lego. Be aware: very early stage, in beta with unaudited contracts!
Ondo.finance / fluxfinance.com: Ondo is gate-keeped (100k min. deposit), so Iâm not sure if you manage to get into their pools (Iâve not tried it). But if not, you can get relatively high APY (currently) on stables (USDC,USDT or DAI) by depositing into their partner protocol fluxfinance.
IPOR.io - an Inter-protocol Offered Rate for Decentralized Finance. Itâs too complicated to explain it in simple words by myself, so I refer to their elaborate documentation: https://docs.ipor.io/
Announcements
Ethereum
$1567
0.07
Am I a security?
Yes.
Please report to Gary Gensler for a paddlin
Sequencer karma,
Blockchain inverted comma,
Layer 2 drama.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
In the past, Binance launched its own L1 with the Binance Smart Chain.
FTX launched its own L1 with Solana.
But today Coinbase commits to Ethereum by launching its own L2 on Ethereum.
This means than Coinbaseâs interests are now fully aligned with Ethereum, with bridging of users and capital directly to the Ethereum ecosystem.
This means that marketing made by Coinbase for its chain will now directly benefit Ethereum.
Eth is this L2âs native token, with which gas will be paid.
This fully validates Ethereumâs rollup centric roadmap.
While some may find the Coinbase âBaseâ news underwhelming or would have hoped for something different, the way I see it, this is a huge signal in the crypto space that the number one crypto company in the world is choosing to go all in on building on Ethereum.
Up until now you could argue Coinbase was âimpartialâ in its offerings and did not show favoritism amongst coins, but now it seems they are willing to forego impartiality to build on the project they believe in most.
They couldve chosen to enhance lightning network/build an alternative, or build on solana, or the ânewâ smart contract enabled Cardano, but no they chose Ethereum.
That is something I would consider âsignificant.â
Iâve been screwing around with editing EthStakerâs community calls to podcast-ify them, and I loved Danny Ryanâs post yesterday, so I recorded it. Itâs available in the EthStaker podcast.
Or you can listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2137396/12322923-danny-ryan-s-reflections-2023
*Yes, I know my audio levels processing is poop. Iâm using some auto-process feature in the Descript software. If you want to give me pointers or tell me I suck, please leave a comment in the suggestion box on the desk that I donât have
Yesterdayâs Polygon validator âoutageâ was wild:
It was big enough that:
Background: What happened is that several Polygon validators experienced sync issues, which then lead to giant cascade of outages for most validators. The reason for the reorg is supposedly a bug between their Bor and Heimdall layers, though the team has yet to give details on the bug.
Checkpoint SLAs: Back in Aug 2022, there was a governance proposal, PIP-4, to move towards permissionless validation.
âIn its current state, the PoS validator network is not entirely permissionless in that the previously-selected set of validators has largely persisted since testnet.â
The proposal added an SLA requirement that 95% of median average of last 700 checkpoints are signed by the validator. If the validator fails to meet the SLA, they are placed in a Grace Period have another 700 checkpoints to meet it. Otherwise, they get offboarded from staking. After 2 months, the SLA increased from 95% to 98%.
What happened yesterday concerning the checkpoint SLA:
Due to this rule and validators missing checkpoints yesterday, 25 out of 100 validators were at risk of getting kicked off staking.
The emergency PIP-9 vote to reduce the SLA was passed, saving most of the validators. Only 2 validators got offboarded and 5 more are in the Grace Period.
Itâs good theyâre finally taking the reorg issue more seriously, but I think they shouldâve addressed this a long time ago.
ETHDenver Day 1
Last year, I attended ETHDenver and made a post each day in which I primarily summarized the best talks I heard that day, and also commented a little about my general experiences at the conference. ETHDenver 2023 has now begun, and I intend to do the same this year. As with last year, the first few days are slow: only one stage with talks starting late and ending early. So not too much to cover.
It seems that, also like last year, all talks are recorded to Twitch, one stream per stage. But for a given talk, figuring out which stage and what timestamp is not trivial. Itâs not too hard either, and for today I figured Iâd try tracking down timestamps but Iâm really skeptical that Iâll want to spend the time on that as the days get longer. If thereâs one you really want to see, let me know and I can probably find it pretty quick given that I know what the different stages are and can probably recognize the style of a given talkâs slides at a glance. But in general Iâll link to the schedule page for each talk, which should be enough to point you in the right direction for learning more.
On a personal note, itâs kind of amazing how much I expect my experience at ETHDenver will be different this year. Last year I knew nobody personally and was generally content to fill my days with nothing but listening to talks and occasionally chatting with strangers. But this year? I didnât go half an hour before I started bumping into folks I know. I have a project that I can explain to people who ask what Iâve been working on (and they seem to find it very interesting (!), but I need to stop assuming that everyone knows how staking and MEV work). I tentatively have a hackathon team (with folks from this community) for a project I think will be bite-sized but still quite valuable. And I need to juggle driving back home occasionally for some classes Iâm taking, so Iâve accepted Iâm going to have limited free time this next week. But itâll just be packed so full of fun things!
EDIT: Oh yeah, I also have the EVMavericks t-shirts for those who signed up on Discord. I wonât be lugging around the huge box everywhere I go, but Iâll try to set aside multiple timeslots when I can set up shop in one spot, let everyone know, and hand them out. Got 100 EVMavs stickers to hand out too.
ICYMI: Spotify is piloting token-enabled playlists powered by Ethereum NFTs.
Music streaming Spotify is testing a new service called âtoken-enabled playlists,â which allows holders of non-fungible tokens (NFT) to connect their wallets and listen to curated music.
Currently, the service is available to token holders within the Fluf, Moonbirds, Kingship and Overlord communities. The curated playlists will be actively updated during the three-month testing period and can only be accessed by community members via a unique link.
Canât believe thereâs this many upvotes. Off the top of my head I can think about:
This bear market is honestly so much harder to keep track of developments than the last one. All you could do last bear was take a Maker CDP loan and wait for Michael Saylor to buy Bitcoin. Maybe price action stinks but you can never say crypto is boring.
[Edit] Also just remembered Spotify NFTs, Starbucks Polygon NFT rollout in progress, and some of my Reddit WSB NFTâs getting a nice premium lately.
Money should be boring. The fact that we had exciting money for a few years (bootstrapping/awareness phase of Bitcoin, then of Ethereum) is a marvel in the history of money.
If you think about it, new types of money donât pop up very often. In the history of money, weâve only really had three major types, invented in 6000 BC, 600 BC, and 2008 CE.
You could argue that the jump from gold-backed notes to fiat notes was another fundamental evolution of money, but in any case we have been very lucky to live through this incredibly special decade.
So now begins the long, boring process of executing on the existing roadmap, and integrating Ethereum with the old, boring economy. Weâve had our big bang moment for this three thousand year period - perhaps in another three thousand years civilization will come up with yet another fundamentally new type of money and weâll see another big bang (thousands of years from now, quantum physics may allow us to have conversations with the laws of physics and directly ask those laws of physics to enforce certain constraints on our reality, a.k.a. âmagicâ).
In three thousand years though, if the word âIâ still makes sense to describe me, if I am even aware at that point of the events taking place on planet Earth in the material plane, and humans do invent a fourth type of money, at that point I probably wonât care.
ping u/silentjxhn
Thanks for those of you vigilantly reporting the spam post on the front page. A quick dive into the user posting it and the other user commenting in support of the scam found a history of similar posts with the same free reddit awards. Donât trust any supposed uncollateralised DeFi protocols. Theyâre almost certainly a scam unless basically everyone is talking about such a breakthrough.
Reminder of things to look out for in identifying spam and scams on Reddit:
Spam posts: (if yes itâs probably a scam)
Aside from this, there are some basic rules such as:
Please remember to use the report button! In a sub with active mods multiple reports always signals to the mods that something needs investigating.
For those of you who are interested, this is the user who posted it and take a look and see if you can see the patterns of a scammer in their posts and post history. https://reddit.com/user/SpicateHammer451
Stay safe out there, folks!
My brother: So howâs it going with that secret little thing you are doing with Ethereum, that miner sitting on your desk? You must be very smart how do you manage it? Must be a lot of work.
Me thinking: Oh thatâs right Iâm running a validator I almost forgot.
That thing is still running perfectly turning dust into ETH without looking at it for months. Yes, staking is very hard and mind consuming. All I do is wait for my phone to prompt an update and then I run the ethstaker wizard after a few weeks. I am very sramt!
This week I managed to get my coworker into solo staking without telling him I am one myself, but I think he knows. Dude is already heavily invested in getting the best performance out of his machine. What a nerd (Heâs actually a very nice guy that just loves computers). Tells me he has a lot of unused parts freshly bought just because they were off price. He was flabbergasted about the low specs needed and was kind of disappointed. I guess he was expecting to run some sort of data center in his home?
Maybe Iâll tell him to run a Solana node instead, if he really wants to drown in debt and get no profit at all (even run at a loss). Good thing is that he understands. He immediately linked the correlation about decentralization needing easy hardware to work the most efficient. Canât expect normal people to run data centers right? They have the money, but not the technical knowledge. They do not want a beefy machine taking their electricity and bandwidth away. These were his exact words, and I was astounded by his quick thinking.
I wanted to direct him to the right sources to run a validator but he was already talking about running Geth and Lighthouse and was talking about all sorts of Linux command stuff. He was already smarter then me about validating in one day. I guess heâs going to be just fine.
Coworker, if you manage to cross this post and recognize me. Doxx me and I will tell your mother!!
Announcements
Ethereum
$1645
0.068
Hey fam! Weâre looking for a nomination for âShitpost of the weekâ to be included today in the livestream. Got any suggestions? Reply here with the link! see you soon!
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/11ak2qc/daily_general_discussion_february_24_2023/j9ttyfr/
What is Garyâs mood?
Bailing Sam out was so rude,
Do Kwon just got sued.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
I want to disclose that Iâve contracted with EY to offer community education regarding their Nightfall and Starlight products for a few months. This isnât a full time job, just an agreement to spend more time learning about Nightfall and Starlight, then sharing what Iâve learned.
Let me give you some idea what this means. My credibility to the community is the most important thing I have in crypto, so Iâll never do or say anything that would degrade that credibility. Many people who know and trust me hold that trust because Iâm extremely selective about things I talk about. I focus on highly aligned projects that add value to the whole ecosystem and donât extract value for anyone. You might know that EYâs privacy tools led by Paul Brodyâs team fill that niche for me, and Iâm very confident about that fit after knowing Paul several years.
My intention is to learn more and share more about Nightfall and Starlight and help them find the traction they deserve and I hope youâll join me in this quest. If these tools succeed in the market, Ethereum will be the greatest beneficiary.
I need you to know that I canât be bought. Iâm agreeing to this contract because itâs good for the web3 community, our community, Ethereum, and EY. I believe that any greater knowledge we develop about these products will benefit all parties in the long run.
I will always continue to do my best to earn your trust as I find the best tools and opportunities to share with other Ethfinanciers, but I also need you to put your own judgement first. Ask yourself if Iâm doing things that make sense for all of us or if Iâve lost my way. Follow your own good judgement, not mine. <3
We are always happy and willing to be ambassadors for the benefits of decentralisation and how that can provide a deep benefit for all those involved. So it is with great pleasure that we want to relay that Coinbase Ventures has invested in the protocol. We recently announced their intentions to join the oDAO, so this is just another step in them willing to back a decentralised staking protocol such as Rocket Pool.
âWeâre excited to announce that Coinbase Ventures is deepening its partnership with Rocket Pool via a direct investment into RPL in addition to its proposed entry into the oDAO. Coinbase Ventures also plans to use their RPL and ETH to spin up their own Rocket Pool minipools.â
/- Coinbase Ventures
From the Rocket Pool discord. Pretty impressive evolution of the CB Ventures x Rocket Pool relationship.
Iâm in a discussion with a community member that I respect very much, yet strangely we do not seem to agree on something.
Question for the fam:
If Coinbase would start spinning up Rocket Pool minipools instead of regular validators from today on, would this be good, bad or neutral for decentralization?
Please limit the discussion to this question about decentralization only. I donât want it to be a value judgement on Rocket Pool. Of course any actor can use it as it is permissionless. This is not a fault of the protocol. Also please donât discuss how unlikely or likely it is that Coinbase would do this. It might be very unlikely with all the risks (RPL exposure, regalutory, other). I just want to know if you think my hypothetical question would be good or bad for decentralization
You asked me to post my comment in reply to this thread, but I think it might be worth re-writing it suited for some of the answers I see here. Iâm going to write this as if the LEB-8 (8 ETH minipools) are in effect, because that is the long term goal. For anyone reading this not familiar with Rocket Pool, the current version of minipools instead has 16 ETH from the minipool operator and 16 ETH taken from the rETH pool. This difference doesnât impact the following statements, with the exception of making the barrier-of-entry lower.
Â
Answer: I believe the effect on decentralization is neutral, but in spite of that neutral effect from this factor alone I think it would be actually devastating to Ethereumâs prospects to shut out large entities, due to runaway centralization behind 2-3 broadly used liquid staking tokens. Here are my thoughts.
Â
Â
Â
Some comments here point to the fact that small stakers can obtain a 4x node power âmultiplierâ against large staking entities, and that large staking entities entering the picture defeats this purpose. This is a fallacy, however:
Â
The same scenario effectively plays out if you make the comparison of centralized entities using RP vs. RP not existing:
Â
Considering those two scenarios, node counts for any of these scenarios are irrelevant and are not a factor in comparing any situation for Rocket Pool. The fact is, Rocket Pool will actually give a slight node-power advantage to decentralization, but only by virtue of feature #1 - the reduced barrier-to-entry. There is no scenario where Rocket Pool increases the amount of power a centralized entity has in comparison to Rocket Pool not existing, or locking centralized entities out.
So whatâs the actual strength of Rocket Pool? Itâs specifically item #2, the accessible-to-all staking services pool. The lowered barrier to entry for actual node-operators at 8 ETH is to be frank pretty awesome and amazing, and itâs going to let a lot more people into the ETH staking ecosystem, but the point that people keep missing about the accessible-to-all staking services pool that is provided is that it keeps the biggest liquid-staking token out of the hands of a single entity, or at the very least provides a nearly-unstoppable competitor. If Rocket Pool didnât exist, staking-services users would have nowhere to send their money except centralizing forces, and whatâs more is that small operations wouldnât be able to attract staking-services customers for shit - nobody would use little-known liquid-staking tokens, and the small operations would get crushed on margins by the big operations.
Every centralized entity that joins this accessible-to-all pool makes it that much harder for any centralized entity to monopolize the liquid-staking-token market, and even better, the protocol itself isnât really able to use itâs own dominance of the liquid-staking market to try and shut out competitors except by trying to provide better service to keep people using rETH - so even competitors will still be able to rise up if they make something truly great. The protocol canât blacklist competing liquid-staking tokens on the protocolâs (non-existent) exchange, the protocol canât make back-room deals to give more favorable staking percentages to special, favored customers, the protocol canât lock out small staking providers that the big providers donât like.
Rocket Pool canât actually shut out centralized or large entities by design, and it also shouldnât because doing so is inherently a bad idea. Any centralization of node operators on the Rocket Pool protocol would have existed without Rocket Pool, and if you try and shut them out that money gets transferred right over to external centralized entities anyways. Rocket Poolâs design has likely averted a scenario where a few major exchanges dominated the entire staking services market on the Ethereum chain, which⌠to be honest, I think would have truly killed the decentralization angle and left us with little claim to security.
Heads up, I received an unsolicited call this morning allegedly coming from Coinbase support indicating that my account had been logged into from another country and that they were placing a hold on my account. While on the phone they sent me an email confirming this and a text message with a link to hxxps://issue-coinbase.com/email=?[EMAIL] to reset my account. They then gave me an 8 digit password over the phone with which to login.
I pretty much knew from the start that this was bullshit but the hxxps://issue-coinbase.com domain really sealed it. If you get any unsolicited calls from any exchange please ignore it, and maybe report it here for educational purposes. Stay safe out there.
Anyone with an ounce of understanding about economies knows why a DEFLATIONARY currency could never work as the standard.
As the standard for what? Buying eggs and bread? Paying peopleâs salaries? Investing in stuff? Sure. In that case, a deflationary, value-appreciating currency is bad. Thankfully thatâs not what Ether is.
We need money to lose value over time to deincentivise people sitting on savings.
The first and foremost job of Ether as an asset is to provide economic security to Ethereum. âAnyone with an ounce of understandingâ about that realizes itâd be dumb to devalue this asset on purpose. Ether is collateral money, not debt money. Having the value of your collateral go up gives you more bandwidth to participate in the economy by doing more stuff you otherwise couldnât
Only when money is used does it lube up the economy by providing cash flow for industry.
Again thatâs not really Etherâs job to do that, but even then it still does it well inside the Ethereum economy: itâs deflationary BECAUSE itâs being used. âAnyone with an ounce of understandingâ quickly realizes this cause and effect relationship and doesnât invert it by claiming being deflationary causes people to not use it.
Ethereum sells blockspace and blockspace accessories. This blockspace is worth something, people are willingly paying for it, choosing to burn their precious deflationary ETH in exchange for it. There is no âbad money drives out goodâ when it comes to buying blockspace, thanks to EIP-1559.
Iâm tired of these takes that miss out on all the nuance. âETH deflation bad because deflation encourages hoardingâ is one of them. And yes, âETH deflation good because supply goes down = line go upâ is another one. Itâs a cringe meme responding to Bitcoinâs equally cringe âcapped supply = sound moneyâ meme.
The truth is fundamentally, whether the supply goes up or down doesnât affect the velocity of ETH. Whether supply goes up or down, itâs all just an accounting trick that doesnât change the fact that value ultimately flows from users (paying for blockspace) into the pockets of holders (who are likely to be staking, directly or indirectly). Youâre not magically gonna turn a hoarder into a user if you increase issuance, because that hoarder is already staking anyway.
Good news! I finally completed my quest of remixing 69 EVMavericks and EIPandas with Midjourney. They have all been minted on Polygon and sent to their respective owners. To see the results, here is the OpenSea collection.
I want to thank everybody that participated in my little project. Your amazing reactions to my artworks mean the world to me! If you had a request and didnât receive it, feel free to DM me, I might have missed some messages.
I will mint one last epic remix and put it up at auction in the next few days, and then I will get to work on my sequel to Worthless JPEGs!, my satirical collection.
Thanks again everyone.
Itâs quite a brilliant feature of eip 1559.
If demand for blockspace falls below a certain threshold, ETH issuance goes up while gas prices go down. This has the effect of making it more likely for more people to use ETH, bringing us back to more demand for blockspace.
If demand for blockspace is above a certain threshold, ETH issuance goes ultrasound. More ETH fees are burned instead of given to validators.
If staking becomes extremely desirable, and more and more people stake, staking rewards APY falls, and the threshold of blockspace demand required for fee burns increases.
If staking becomes less desirable and more and more people unstake, staking APY increases and the threshold for fee burning falls.
Itâs a completely automated, decentralized monetary policy which favors equilibrium. Nothing else on earth like it.
Ethereum eip 1559 increases incentive to secure the network in a way that avoids inflating the supply, without being 100% reliant on market forces such as gas fees. Unlike Bitcoin security which will eventually become completely enslaved to the wills and fluctuations of the market, and without sufficient fees (blockspace demand) will become more and more centralized and less and less secure.
Hodlercon 2024 update: BeachBum NFT hodlers can now vote for destinations at https://hodlercon.com/. (Edit: Tickets to Hodlercon 2022 included a BeachBum. If you attended and havenât minted yours, DM me. Others can mint them at https://hodlercon.com/beachbums).
The Twitter Spaces launch from Sunday is recorded at https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MYGNgYljAnJw? (45 minutes with superphiz, Paul Brody, nikola_j, DoubtStars and friends).
The highest vote-getter as of March 17 in each of three cohorts will be thrown to the will of the ETH price gods â Whichever price band weâre in on June 15, 2023, will determine the location of Hodlercon 2024.
Thereâs a blurb on each destination at https://hodlercon.com/#details. Hereâre the candidates, proposed by Hodlercon attendees, EthFinanciers, ethstakers and anyone else who wanted to pitch in:
Mahalo for voting.
Very interesting speech just given by Augustin Carstens, the General manager for the BIS. Pay close attention to the last paragraph/bolded text. They totally understand the power of shared ledgers/opensource/composable. They just want to centralize it and own it.
edit: formatting; summarizing a little bc the kicker comes at the end of a wall of text.
â
A unified ledger is a digital infrastructure with the potential to combine the monetary system with other registries of real and financial claims. It would need to be a public-private partnership with a clear division of roles, and where the central bank is tasked with underpinning the trust in money.
Like smartphone platforms, a unified ledger allows various components to work seamlessly together. But unlike them, it is enabled by open architecture that promotes financial inclusion and greater competition.
Such a ledger allows for the use of smart contracts and composability. A smart contract is a computer program that executes conditional âif/thenâ and âwhileâ commands. Composability means that many smart contracts, covering multiple transactions and situations, can be bundled together, like âmoney legoâ.
With these new functionalities, any sequence of transactions in programmable money can be automated and seamlessly integrated. This reduces the need for manual interventions that delay transactions and reduces dependency on intermediaries, and also allows for simultaneous and near-instant payments and settlement.
Greater interoperability and automated transfers could ultimately benefit consumers through more convenient and cheaper products that are better tailored to their needs, thereby enhancing financial inclusion.
These foreseeable gains may just be the tip of the iceberg of additional transformations. Think about how the smartphone displaced digital cameras. It was not because it takes better pictures, but because itâs easier to share these pictures with friends through the same device.
Importantly, programmability and composability do not require decentralised or permissionless platforms. All the potential benefits I just outlined can be achieved in permissioned platforms with various degrees of centralisation. What really brings the benefits of these projects together is the use of money as a means of payment and settlement. As the provider of the ultimate settlement asset in the economy, the central bank therefore has an important role to play in the governance of a unified ledger. But it would do so in partnership with other public agencies as well as with private sector participants.
I think FOMO is more stressful than losing money
Have you ever boosted a Maker vault at $4500 ETH?
You get to experience both in very short order and learn that the latter is much, much worse.
Special guest VP joins us from Hexagon, a group born out of Golem project. A new app funding Ethereum infrastructure & public goods projects. Rewards from 100,000 staked ETH are powering a sandbox for governance and community funding experiments. Read moreâŚ
Announcements
90s G-funk synth starts playing
Regulators
We regulate any investing of your property
Weâre damn good too
But you canât be any geek off the street
You gotta be able to use the Howey test, if you know what I mean
Earn your keep
Regulatooorssss! Mount up
[Verse 1] It was a February day, some time around noon
Gary G was at his desk, seeing ETH moon
He thought realâ hard then came up with a plan
Hit centralized staking with a nation-wide ban
[Chorus] Regulators in the house, donât you mess around
The SEC and Gary, they got it all locked down
Theyâre coming with the rules and theyâre coming to pound
Gary G and SEC they keep the crypto scene sound
[Verse 2] When the Kraken rose up, with its tentacles wide
The SEC and Gary stood side by side
They slayed the beast together, Howey hammer in hand
Now the crypto world is under their command
[Chorus] Regulators in the house, donât you mess around
The SEC and Gary, they got it all locked down
Theyâre coming with the rules and theyâre coming to pound
Gary G and SEC they keep the crypto scene sound
[Verse 3] When Phiz got the call, he got the smile
Heâd been trying to achieve this for a while
Ethereum staking decentralized and free
Superphiz and me, the Gary to the G
[Outro] Iâm tweaking into a whole new era
Decentralized Finance, I dare ya
Trust on a whole new level
Smart contracts are the rules and the rules immu-table
ETH, code, We brings decentralization, ETH-funk
Where code is law, aligned incentives
If you know like I know, you donât want to step to this
Itâs the Ethereum era, funked out with a unicorn twist
If you smoke like I smoke then youâre high like every day
And if yoâ ass is centralized Gary G will regulate
SEC website,
Staking form still out of sight,
Guidance they wonât write.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
The one sane person at the SEC seems to have little influence - sheâs echoed this sentiment for a few years now and not much has changed. Not a criticism to her, more a comment on the SECâs approach to regulation being firmly entrenched
https://twitter.com/HesterPeirce/status/1623796583807451139
Today, the SEC shut down Krakenâs staking program and counted it as a win for investors. I disagree and therefore dissent.
Kraken operated a service through which its customers could offer their tokens up for staking. The customers earned returns, and the company earned a fee. The Commission argues that this staking program should have been registered with the SEC as a securities offering. Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, the more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible. In the current climate, crypto-related offerings are not making it through the SECâs registration pipeline. An offering like the staking service at issue here raises a host of complicated questions, including whether the staking program as a whole would be registered or whether each tokenâs staking program would be separately registered, what the important disclosures what be, and what the accounting implications would be for Kraken.
We have known about crypto staking programs for a long time. Although it may not have made a difference, I should have called for us to put out guidance on staking long before now. Instead of taking the path of thinking through staking programs and issuing guidance, we again chose to speak through an enforcement action, purporting to âmake clear to the marketplace that staking-as-a-service providers must register and provide full, fair, and truthful disclosure and investor protection.â[1] Using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating.[2] Moreover, staking services are not uniform, so one-off enforcement actions and cookie-cutter analysis does not cut it.[3]
Most concerning, though, is that our solution to a registration violation is to shut down entirely a program that has served people well. The program will no longer be available in the United States, and Kraken is enjoined from ever offering a staking service in the United States, registered or not. A paternalistic and lazy regulator settles on a solution like the one in this settlement: do not initiate a public process to develop a workable registration process that provides valuable information to investors, just shut it down.
More transparency around crypto-staking programs like Krakenâs might well be a good thing. However, whether we need a uniform regulatory solution and if that regulatory solution is best provided by a regulator that is hostile to crypto, in the form of an enforcement action, is less clear.
Reddit employee hacked in sophisticated phishing attack. Backend compromised since Feb 5th.
I definitely imagine JBM as the Mel Gibson character from Lethal Weapon. Heâll let you think heâs a little off his rocker, but thatâs just a ruse to hide a skilled operator.
For those who want to learn how to use APIs: Circle/USD is doing a introduction to API education campaign on StackUp: https://app.stackup.dev/campaign_page/enabling-payments-with-circle
Not every StackUp quest is worth the effort, but this one seems really easy. Itâll walk you through how to use APIs and create a basic web app. The first 3 quests are already up. So far, this one seems pretty basic for anyone who is decently-technical. You donât have to have prior dev knowledge.
Also, there is a monetary reward for completing quest. The rewards are limited, so they can run out.
This is going to be long, sorry.
I think Iâve found an interesting mental model to describe the relationship between Ethereum and civil society, especially with respect to the (sometimes) irrational hatred for the protocol.
I believe that as a public good, Ethereum is like a large public transportation project.
Indeed, every Western city that has decided to invest in such projects has faced absolutely incredible opposition. In Bordeaux, France, the tramway project caused protests, arguments, political riff raff - a non-negligible portion of the population swore that they would never use the tramway, because they were opposed to it from the beginning.
Now, two decades later, Bordeaux is a model for major European cities, and the opposition has disappeared. The ridership of the tramway is extraordinary, which suggests that even the most furious opponents have pounded on their pride and are using the service when they need it.
Itâs the same everywhere. When London wanted to reduce the number of cars in the city center, the anger of the citizens was incredible. Twenty years later, no one would go back. I experienced it personally in Montreal: the current mayor built bike lanes on major commercial arteries, which led opponents to predict the imminent death of downtown. Four years later, the cityâs liveliest thoroughfares are the ones that received new bike lanes, and absolutely no one is calling for a reversal - even the most rabid opponents.
This got me thinking. Why were these citizens so fiercely opposed to a public good? On what arguments was their opposition based?
I went back and read their open letters and angry tweets. Basically, the opponents were concerned that the loss of parking space would hurt business, create traffic congestion, and make the city ugly (!).
Literally none of this has happened. In fact, the exact opposite has happened.
Now, letâs ask ourselves why these arguments overrode the emotions of the opponents. My theory is that it is a âfailure of imaginationâ: an inability to imagine the world differently, to find creative solutions that are outside the current paradigm. They are stuck in the only model they know, and are unable to believe that another world is possible.
There is also, in my opinion, an element of ego. Many of the opponents were at the top of the social pyramid - wealthy businessmen, popular TV hosts, bourgeois, etc. The world as it is has been extremely generous to them, so why change it? Besides, the idea that a revolution could arise from outside the system that brought them into the world is frightening for them. It means that their privileges are not so solid after all.
I believe Ethereum is in a similar situation.
Our protocol is a public good. It belongs to its participants, and literally any human being can deploy an application on it. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea from the outside - have you seen what Vitalik looks like? Itâs impossible that a nerd like that, with no credibility in high society, has come up with something good. So his creation is necessarily a fraud, which must be fought
So these opinion leaders declare Ethereum an enemy to be fought, and the citizens used to following what the top of the pyramid tells them jump on the bandwagon, without asking themselves if their fight is really relevant.
TL;DR : Ethereum will (hopefully) follow the same trajectory as public transit projects.
Good question !
As I understand it, yes the seed will no longer be useful for normal operation:
BUT you would still need it for:
Some of my own research on SEC vs BUSD:
The New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) has told Paxos to stop making its own version of BUSD (a digital currency) âas a result of several unresolved issues related to Paxosâ oversight of its relationship with Binance in regard to Paxos-issued BUSD.â
Paxosâ BUSD product is related to, but separate from, Binanceâs self-issued Binance-pegged BUSD. Binanceâs self-issued BUSD, which is not directly regulated by NYDFS, is independently wrapped and issued by the crypto exchange on blockchains beyond Ethereum. In other words, Binance can take a single Paxos-issued BUSD, create an analogous BUSD on another blockchain (like Binanceâs own blockchain, for example), and freeze a corresponding Paxos-issued BUSD. âThe Department has not authorized Binance-Peg BUSD on any blockchain, and Binance-Peg BUSD is not issued by Paxos.â
So the issue here is not âtrueâ BUSD issued by Paxos. The problem is that Binance was sneakily issuing alternative unregulated BUSD on itâs own blockchain and others, and passing them off as the real, regulated, Ethereum based BUSD issued by Paxos.
Paxos has told its customers that it will end its relationship with Binance for BUSD. The DFS is watching Paxos closely to make sure it can handle redemptions properly, following new safety rules. Itâs important to know that Paxos was allowed to make BUSD on the Ethereum blockchain, but Binance-Peg BUSD is not approved or made by Paxos. There are no restrictions from the DFS for New York companies to list or trade the existing Paxos-issued BUSD.
Looks to me like Binance is to blame here, SEC is just trying to clean up their mess.
Sources:
https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/alerts/Paxos_and_Binance
https://paxos.com/2023/02/13/paxos-will-halt-minting-new-busd-tokens/
Regulatory news aside, Iâve just had a thought. Stakewise v3 would allow node operators to set up vaults with whitelisted addresses for allocators. This in theory allows us to set up vaults where only holders of EVMavericks/EIPandas/etc. are allowed to deposit ETH into. Iâm sure there are others here like myself who have overallocated on the hardware for our own staking rigs or have extra bandwidth. If I were to use swise I would probably set up multiple vaults if I didnât have to provide any collateral to do so. A vault or two to stake for âmembersâ who canât or wonât solo stake free of commission, then however many public vaults I want to run with a commission. This could be an interesting way for communities to drive value to their NFT Collections.
Edit: SWISE staking taking a share of the fees will probably factor into how feasible this is
Hereâs Genslerâs latest chokepoint attempt:
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-30
Hereâs two of his commissioners calling out his bullshit:
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-statement-custody-021523
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/uyeda-statement-custody-021523
Hereâs a statement from the blockchain association on it
https://nitter.snopyta.org/BlockchainAssn/status/1625957398077734913
And hereâs a good thread from Jake Chervinsky on it
https://nitter.snopyta.org/jchervinsky/status/1625947639773552641
Consider donating to crypto lobbying groups this year if you have the means and care about the future of this industry in the US.
Announcements
Ethereum
$1541
0.071
BREAKING NEWS: According to the official Bitcoin Core release notes, the upcoming v23.0 will now allow users to attach files to bitcoin transactions. These attached files will be stored in the segregated witness data of the chain.
Documentation,
Blockchain accommodation,
Build generation.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
By now youâve probably heard that last week was the Edelweiss Interop Workshop (the successor to the Amphora Interop), where Ethereumâs core devs spent a week together in the mountains to work on withdrawals, 4844 (aka proto-danksharding) and EOF.
I was invited to join due to my work on the Protocol Guild, and - even though it still feels like a dream - I wanted to share my experience, especially as someone without a technical background.
Was the workshop a success? Absolutely. To quote a core dev, âwe left with a flawless Capella/Shanghai forkâ, and there was a 4844 testnet with all but one client team! 4844 in July? đ
Iâll admit I was INCREDIBLY nervous going into this event, I couldnât sleep properly for days in advance - I was literally going to meet the majority of my heroes, and I was 100% going to be the dumbest person in the room at all times.
Well, I can happily confirm that âyou should never meet your heroesâ does NOT apply to Ethereumâs core protocol contributors. These are some of the most interesting (and surprisingly funny) people Iâve ever met, and even though there was a lack of diversity, they came from all over the world, with all sorts of different backgrounds. And despite the fact that the price of ETH is never discussed on ACD calls, I can confirm that Ethereumâs core devs are bullish: I heard more than one conversation about ultra sound money, and RatioGang was also strongly represented! Iâm an introvert, but everyone was so incredibly welcoming and kind, I never had any issues talking to people.
Overall, the passion these individuals have for Ethereum is genuine and contagious, and I feel more confident than ever in Ethereumâs ability to execute its roadmap while staying aligned to its values of decentralization, openness and long-term thinking.
Other highlights included organizing a core dev run one morning, and as a pretty hardcore privacy enthusiast, I even had the pleasure of giving privacy tips to Vitalik! Oh and there was that one time that Danny Ryan wasnât allowed at dinner because he was wearing flip flops đ
Iâll end with one note of encouragement for those who need it: if I can end up at this kind of event, then so can you. To quote Danny Ryan, âdoors are wide open at Ethereumâ. My âdoorâ was the Protocol Guild booth at Devcon Bogota, where I asked Trent and Tim if they needed any operational help with the Guild, and turns out they did! (For the introverts, I passed by the booth 3-4 times before I gathered up the nerve to talk to them - donât let shyness gatekeep your passions!). Now I spend my time coordinating / helping with the Guildâs v2 architecture upgrade, fundraising and marketing, all without a technical background.
This comment is already much longer than I expected, so Iâll end it here. TLDR: everything good about Ethereum is reflected in its core devs, and the barriers to entry are probably lower than you think!
Unclear Tax Treatment for Staking (USA): Centralization Vector?
Let me explain. Retail has a choice:
- Staking on, say, Coinbase and it prepares and sends you the requisite tax form every year. You forego a small percentage of your staking rewards in exchange for this service, and you must entrust your ETH with a regulated custodian (centralization risk); or
- per current IRS position, solo stakers must record revenue for each attestation (every 6 min), for each block produced (random) and tips/MEV (random). There is a valid legal argument for staking rewards to be taxed when sold (not when received), but the IRS has dismissed it - https://www.proofofstakealliance.org/12423-posa-response-to-irs-stance-on-staking. So what does this mean in practice.
If you think I just made the case for LSDs, then you understand the problem. Maybe this can easily fixed with more sophisticated tax software? WE NEED TO LOBBY FOR A CHANGE IN THE IRSâs TREATMENT OF STAKING REWARDS FOR SOLO STAKERS.
Note: Iâm not a member of the PoS Alliance and not a tax lawyer or CPA, just a random dude who pays his taxes and truly believes in decentralization and the transformational potential of the Ethereum network.
Iâve been known to come off kind of negative about the state of roll-ups. I do think that long-term they are the absolute best way to scale blockchains. Justin Drake the other day blew the minds of all participants of Bankless Bullcase for Ethereum by saying that the synchronous composability between zk rollups is such that different different rollups can combine their liquidity into a single pool and that Danksharding does not break that composability. Yet the key is long-term. Optimism, the oldest optimistic rollup, has not yet gotten to fraud proofs and neither has Arbitrum. And ZK is a much much more complex technology that requires highly skilled mathematically skilled developers to implement and will roll out slower at least because there is much more potential for bugs (although Justin Drake said Ethereum research team recently figured out how to add âtraining wheelsâ to a rollup). I think this tweet from Scroll zkEVM account is telling about where we are.
I am not saying this to be a downer, but to say that we have to have realistic expectations. Big announcements for âmainnetâ of this or that rollup or some new improvement to one are galore and sometimes I feel like they are borderline disingenuous. I understand their teams - they reach significant personal milestones and they want to share. But a secure decentralized general-puprose rollup of any kind seems to be behind the horizon for now.
Hey fellas, wanted to share something we put together recently at defi saver - a dedicated page for various leveraged ETH staking options that you can check out at: https://app.defisaver.com/recipes/leveraged-staking
We added support for both Aave v3 and the new WETH-based deployment of Compound v3 in the past two weeks and both offered new interesting options for leveraging LSDs vs ETH for amplified staking yield, so we thought this made sense.
For now you can find different (w)stETH/ETH options across Aave v2, v3 and CompV3-WETH in there, as well as the cbETH/ETH combo available in Compound (which is at net negative yield atm because of high pool utilisation).
Next: weâll have a new Morpho-Aave integration live, and after that we expect to see rETH added to Aave v3 on the mainnet *and* wstETH added to Aave v3 on Optimism. So you can definitely expect to see a growing number of options there in the coming weeks and months.
Btw, if you check it out, weâd love to hear what else we could add, so please donât hesitate. I also posted an alternative rundown on this on twitter / nitter (nitter isnât loading this for me atm, did twitter already kill it? :/)
Maybe some hope afterall for us Gemini Earn users. u/jtnichol
Email from Gemini:
Hi there,
Today, Gemini reached an agreement in principle with Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis), Digital Currency Group, Inc. (DCG), and other creditors on a plan that provides a path for Earn users to recover their assets. This agreement was announced in Bankruptcy Court today.
This plan is a critical step forward towards a substantial recovery of assets for all Genesis creditors. In addition, Gemini will be contributing up to $100 million more for Earn users as part of the plan, further demonstrating Geminiâs continued commitment to helping Earn users achieve a full recovery.
We have been working around the clock since November 16, 2022 to reach this milestone. We greatly appreciate your support and patience during this time. It has allowed us to maximize our efforts on your behalf. There is still much work to be done to complete this process, including further due diligence of Genesis financials and judicial approval of this plan, but we are confident that we now have a framework in place to execute on. Thank you for putting your trust in us during this challenging time.
We will continue to update you on how to participate in the recovery, key dates, information, and milestones as they unfold on the Earn status page.
Onward and Upward,
Team Gemini
Zhejiang testnet upgraded to Shapella, BLS changes and full & partial withdrawals processed
https://twitter.com/BarnabasBusa/status/1622975351520481280
And so it begins: Revolut, one of the more popular European neo-banks launches ETH staking (among other cryptos):
Edit: Neo-bank = Digital bank.
Official link: https://blog.revolut.com/staking/
Thanks!
I hope everyone has a great day. The current moment feels like we are caught in a wave of uncertainty due to economic and political constraints and factors but that does not mean you should lose faith in the premise of a decentralized monetary system or this community.
The doldrums of the crab should not deter you from your belief that ETH is the best technological investment at this time. This can obviously change in the future due to a new cryptocurrency/blockchain displacing ETH or quantum technology rendering our keys worthless. However it is my belief we are still on the ground floor of an emerging asset class. I remember when I used to tell my school friends to connect with me online but they didnât even have internet access because they were lacking dial up modems on their Windows 95 desktops. I found so many great communities online and made a great many number of friends on the âworld wide webâ before it became so commonplace as it is now. In the end I honestly do not know if the internet has been a net positive in light of the harmful effects of social media and the ease of scamming.
Sorry for the rambling, but my point is Ethereum and Ethfinance remind me of those mid to late 90s internet moments, which leads me to think that $10k USD is a ridiculously low valuation after withdrawals are enabled. The current period is in the Web 1 phase (Angelfire, Xanga, Yahoo Mail) and not even comparable to Web 2.0. We need some hopium so I am going to prognosticate a low of $15k USD in 2025. Buy now and sell never.
The concept of the âcarbon footprintâ was the brainchild of an advertising firm working for BP.
Same bucket as recycling trash that goes into the same land fills as general waste.
More important things to focus on individually, sorry for the jaded take.
đ Weâve reached 800 unique dooters!
Ethereum
$1644
0.070
Zero-Knowledge Proof: put simply is
and put in even simpler terms:
Do not bloat Bitcoin,
This chain is made for transfers,
The rest is a hack.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
Today we will be investigating the scam that took advantage of our friend who came here looking for help yesterday. My inital intent was to remove this campaign from the internet.
Though, as my investigation progressed, I became more and more conscious of the CFAA. I would not discourage anyone who understands the implications from picking up where I left off.
The Scam
Loading the domain in your browser will instantly prompt MetaMask to connect. Doing so leads to a fake DEX. You are given a 6 digit âIDâ that is displayed on the front page. Below is an example of one of their scam pages.
This is all over the place. USDT-ERC20, output in ETC. They provide various addresses to deposit your funds. At least one of the addresses provided does not even have an ETH balance â without any gas money, these fraudsters were never planning to return any deposits.
I clicked on the button that was a head with headphones, presumably the support button.
You can âEmallâ them at the displayed email address. Visiting the above domain in chrome showed the exact same front end as the scam weâre dealing with.
Frighteningly, they want you to âauthenticateâ.
They ask for your name and email address. Infinitely worse, they want pictures of any forms of your identification, as can be seen below.
Anyone who has completed this form should consider their identity stolen, and contact the appropriate authorities.
Offense
To begin to gain some understanding of a website, using âview page sourceâ in your browser is an extremely effective tool.
The highlighted text is Simplified Chinese for âpage loadedâ. Quite interesting.
As an attacker, this file upload form offers a massive attack surface. Of course, an experienced intruder knows what to do here.
But for any ethfinanciers who would like to learn more about this, here are some resources 123 or just ask ya boi.
When running a black box web application security test, /robots.txt is a critical file to access. This file is used by servers to request that web crawlers such as google not access/archive the list of URLs within the file.
As you might imagine, these often times contain URLs of relative importance. Whether crawlers choose to obey is completely up to them both technically, and legally(not legal advice).
The requested /robots.txt did not directly return any confidential files or directories. Though, it resulted in a fairly signficant information leak.
I unfortunately did not think to translate that Chinese text to English. Do we have any Chinese speaking ethfinanciers who can help out?
Notice that this error leaks a number of file paths on this server.
At the bottom we see that the server uses ThinkPHP 3.2.0, which happens to be vulnerable to a high severity issue.
I will not fix the URL provided in the description to fit this target simply for the safety of those who do not know exactly what theyâre doing. Be very careful before landing yourself in federal prison.
When learning to attack a system, one thing that has to be reinforced is the idea of enumeration. I cannot find a link to an article that accurately articulates what I wish to convey. I would describe it is as the art of testing ideas, taking notes of oddities, and learning everything you can about your target system.
Hereâs an example. Screenshots were not taken, but I found that files requested that lack the the extension â.phpâ resulted in the same error shown in /robots.txt. Is it a vulnerability? No. Is it worth noting if you wish to gain a thorough understanding of your target? Yes.
Iâve seen lots of examples of security researchers bringing down scam websites without facing prosecution, but a number of things made me hesitant in this case.
The true ip address of the scammers is protected by Cloudflare. Finding the ip address of servers behind Cloudflare is an eternal challenge for attackers.
https://scrapeops.io/web-scraping-playbook/how-to-bypass-cloudflare/ seems to be extremely comprehensive and up to date. I tried every technqiue short of signing up for a service that requires an API key. No results, the following provides a fair explanation for that.
As /u/REALJohnBMacLemore previously noted, the website was only created a few months ago. Thats always suspicious. What about the domain listed as the support email address?
This domain is hosted by Alibaba US. That they dont even provide an abuse contact speaks volumes.
In my brief enumeration efforts, I visisted /index.php, which redirected me to /Pc/Index/index.html.
The HTML does not render properly, but this is completely different than what we were dealing with before.
At the bottom of the page we see another support email address. The highlighted text seems to show that the listed website(NOTE: not the scam domain in question) might have been a real company at some point? The registration number certainly does not comply with the new Chinese business registration numbering system, which was in full effect by 2018.
Lets use https://whois.domaintools.com again to find some information about this newly discovered forex exchange domain.
The domain name has been used for at least 16 years.
This scam seems to be masquerading as a possibly real, but defunct Chinese forex exchange. Also doubling as a crypto exchange, depending on their target.
Attribution has always been a touchy subject in the realm of cyber security, with that type of debate usually reserved for large-scale nation state attacks.
When we consider the prevalent usage of the Simplified Chinese language, a Chinese PHP framework, and Alibaba hosting, Im confident in declaring this a campaign of Chinese origin. Of course, given the lack of sophistication on the part of the scammers, and the lack of geopolitical implications, this is virtually meaningless.
Stay safe, RTPP
Kinda crazy with all these announcements this week from big tech companies and their crypto involvement
I wrote up a little thread on some of the developments at these big tech companies. Would love to hear ethfinanceâs thoughts!
For those of you that are regular readers of Logrisâ work and do not know, Logris and I (DoubtStarsAreFire) run Tokenomics Explained together. We are partners in all things. Family, life, the website, and now our consulting business. In the beginning, I would minimize, qualify, and categorize all of the work that we have put into our site as, âoh we run a blogâ. Probably because when we started Tokenomics Explained we didnât have a plan. Increasingly, we do, or at least ambition.
Listen to the Layer Zero Podcast #4 from the EV Mavericks to hear us talk more about Tokenomics Explained, Hodlercon, the Double Logris and our plans for Logris Vaults! Ping us if youâd like to join our BUIDL team at EthDenver.
I felt like we could do a better job explaining the genesis of the blog. Because if you listen we kind of stumble over the answer.
Why am I posting now? The blog has mainly been a space for Logrisâ writing. The main reason that Iâm posting is I joined the Bankless Academy writers guild. Iâll be posting content on the website for the next four weeks. Iâm calling these contributions Stargazing. There were other options for locations to post my thoughts like Mirror or Medium. I really did think about posting there. But, our blog seemed like the best place. Stargazing will be my additions to âLogris the Blogâ.
Visit https://tokenomicsexplained.com/the-story-of-tokenomics-explained/ to see the whole post.
Below is a short excerpt.
Iâve always heard it said, âwrite what you knowâ so for a first topic answering the question âHow did Tokenomics Explained start?â seems appropriate. Logris and I have been asked this exact question several times in interviews or by friends. That is usually a good sign you should write something down.
First, at heart my husband is a writer. When I met him, it wasnât something I knew about him. I just thought he was a cute programmer boy that I was meeting to play board games. Itâs taken years for me to come to the realization that he is a writer as well a programmer. Iâm starting here because it gets to the heart of why we began this venture. He became interested in crypto because it combined his interests of computer science, game theory, and economics. Just like you should write about what you know, you should invest in what you know. Back in 2017, most of the social media about crypto was on reddit. This eventually led him to ethtrader and from there to ethfinance. Me, I was along for the ride. He would talk at me about crypto and I would blink at him and say, âthose were wordsâ.
I watched him ride the bull market of 2017 and then the crash. He survived the crypto winter. Eventually the food coin craze hit. All the while, Logris was riding the waves and I was following along or lurking in reddit parlance. Based on my experience and observations in my own house, I thought everyone was spending hours reading, researching, and writing their posts. Over the years, I have learned differently. Thank you reddit shit posters for disabusing me of this notion.
So why did we choose to make a website? In short, itâs Googleâs fault. Ever since Logris started investing in crypto in 2017, he was a daily visitor and poster to the subreddit. As you know, all the fun in ethfinance takes place in the Daily Discussion Thread. Over the years Logris had made some stellar posts⌠in the daily. But, Google doesnât index the daily. Top level posts are often reserved for announcements from protocols, highly regarded posts from the daily, or noobs that donât know any better.
Why is this important to the story?
TLDR: Itâs all because of Googleâs SEO.
For example: At some point in the past, you may have googled about a question you had. In the search results, there may have been a reddit post with the same question. Youâd click the link and find yourself directed to a subreddit about the topic, where knowledgeable people may have already responded to your exact or similar question.
Since most of the posts on ethfinance happen in the daily thread and not at the top level (as in the example), this content is invisible to Google.
Logris was amassing a treasure trove of content and often wanted to cite it when it became relevant again. This became more pertinent when he came up with the idea for the Double Logris. People started asking about it and wanting to read more about it. His ideas, content, and discussions were disappearing into the ether as it were. So, he started using Google drive to keep track for referral, which was ridiculous. To save time and just generally make the world a better place we decided to create a repository for his writings by making this site.
See the post for the rest of the story where I talk:
Hope this is an acceptable place to ask some questions both for the mods and regulars here.
Last spring I graduated from law school (here in sweden, my degree is an analogue to an LMM) and I wrote my âfinal paperâ on DAO and defi, from a company law and securities law perspective.
I recently saw and read that paper from /u/Pbrody (hope thatâs correct) and EY about how the âbestâ firm classification for DAOâs are as Co-operatives.
And so I thought maybe there would be some interest to see my own research that I spent 6 months on. (Tldr of my conclusion: âProperâ DAOs donât fit any current, swedish, firm classifications and are unable to fit in one even if they wanted to, and securities law is unable to in any way sanction or interactive with fully autonomous swapping protocols such as Uniswap)
So my questions are:
Cheers! I Love this community.
Edit: Thought I should add, I wrote it in english.
Editwo: Just posted it in todayâs daily: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/10oudh1/daily_general_discussion_january_30_2023/j6iwia0/
In yesterdayâs daily I asked about interest for sharing my âfinal exam paperâ from when I graduated law school last year. (After looking into it further, I believe the american term for it is something like âmasters research paperâ)
I got way greater of a response than I anticipated so Iâll be sharing it with you in this comment! I hope a mediafire link is allowed.
Just some heads up that the version Iâm linking you isnât the final handed-in version but the penultimate version so there will be some grammatical and spelling errors but nothing that should affect the content. This is so I donât run afoul of any academic policies about sharing examinated material through the wrong channels. (Should be fine, but donât wanna risk it)
https://www.mediafire.com/file/tyd530ryrjljst2/DAO_and_DEFI_legal_analysis.pdf/file
If anyone has any constructive thoughts I genuinely would love to hear them!
In a comment in response to this one Iâll be posting the âFinal Remarksâ portion, for those that just wants my final take and donât care to trudge through the rest.
EVMavericks Weekly: previous weeks & more!
Other info:
So my wife is working on a post this week on web3 education. On that topic I observe there is a labor to impact mismatch between how web3 education functions today. I see too many tutorials on the basics. Each org like BlueDAO, Bankless Academy, CollectiveShift, BoysClub, etc has their own curriculum. Some of it is even pay gated. Itâs a lot of replicated effort and unless itâs paired with a way of access people outside our ecosystem itâs having no impact. On the other end thereâs highly technical documents on exactly how the Beacon Chain works or the scaling strategy for Ethereum or frontier takes like /u/liberosist writes. These are written for the dozens of us living at the edge of the frontier. In the middle is a desert of content. Once you get past that entry level content you get chucked into places like /r/cryptocurrency and good luck to you. Youâre excited by the potential of what you learnt in the entry level content but youâre not yet proficient enough to spot the scams. Everyone is passionately shilling you something and telling you why itâs the next great thing thatâs going to kill Ethereum etc. Basically, youâre someone elseâs exit liquidity.
It takes a full market cycle to wisen up. By the time you transition from tourist to settler youâve probably lost 90% of your investment into altcoins. Many donât stick around after that and those who leave form a moat of resentment in front of the Rabbit Hole. The abrupt cliff of learning material once you have a Metamask wallet loaded with some ETH is doing a disservice to our space. Itâs suddenly a space with no map and no Sherpa and you werenât taught spelunking. Itâs ultimately discouraging people from joining this space and slowing down the adoption of one of the most promising technologies humanity has ever produced.
In the last year Iâve written a bit more for this entry +1 skill level and a bit less on the frontier but anything I write tends to come off more as entry +3 regardless of my intent or else I donât find it interesting enough to write. My wife is better than me in this regard so I hope web3 does find a space for her to be an educator here. Anything else is a disservice to humanity.
As u/15kisFUD pointed out, the sentiment currently is neutral-ish, so itâs a good time to talk about things that everyone will laugh at in bull times or be depressed over in bear times. Now, both u/No_Fix_1183 and I got a ton of backlash (or as NoFix says, âgot crucifiedâ) over the last couple of days for broaching the inevitability of secular bear market for emerging markets, and how they typically happen on narratives years before actual adoption - but thereâs at least a few people now who are still interested. No one will listen when the bull comes around, so this is our chance. So, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a different topic.
When the ponzis spin back up and the mania happens, the ultrasoundmoney cult will be unbearably loud and youâll see all sorts of absurd projections around the burn, deflation and such. Some of you may remember I was skeptical of the numbers being thrown around in 2021 (having myself fallen for them earlier in 2020) - and even had a little debate with Justin Drake here. It may seem absurd now, but numbers like 20%-70% staking APR, 5% deflation were widely accepted, based off clearly unsustainable usage.
Instead, it would be prudent to form a base case now, and use those numbers instead in the future. The first observation youâll see that in ETH terms, total transaction fees outside of manias are actually relatively constant - which is a big narrative violation of the up-only rhetoric you saw in 2021 and will see again in the next bull. (Yes, the mechanisms have changed since EIP-1559, but itâs in the same order of magnitude) [PS, edit: other data sources like Coin Metrics do account for EIP-1559; however, as I mentioned originally, itâs in the same order of magnitude] The $ tx fees are still going up, of course, with a larger economy and higher ETH price. But remember - burn rates, staking rates, MEV are all denominated in ETH, so it doesnât matter.
Itâs very likely the type of fees in 2020 (when it peaked) and 2021 will never be seen again - for the simple fact that thereâs orders of magnitude more blockspace available across L2s and alt-L1s - and even more coming with EIP-4844. Nevertheless, the âpremiumâ ponzis and âluxuryâ status symbol type NFTs will always be on L1 - so weâll definitely see huge increases in gas prices.
Anyway, getting back to the base case, and what actual sustainable revenue looks like - as mentioned above, it has been relative constant over the years. This comes with the implication that, actually, staking rewards are going to be relatively constant - in the ~1.5%-2.5% range for priority fees + ~1% range for MEV. Meanwhile, issuance is going to reduce over time, so we can safely conclude the long-term staking rewards are going to be somewhere in the ~5% range. Coincidentally, at current staking rate, we should expect very mild deflation, but as more is staked this will revert back to mild inflation.
Now, some will argue âbut there are whole new usecases that will come onlineâ. Sure, and fees will go up over time in $ times, but as 7 years of data suggests, not in ETH terms. Also, as mentioned above, thereâs orders of magnitude more space available on L2s going forward, who will pay relatively negligible fees to L1 post EIP-4844 as thereâll be a dedicated data fee market. So why wonât L1 fees collapse? Because L1 will remain the premiere execution layer - even the perfect L2 wonât be quite as secure and Lindy, and the venue for high-value settlements for the foreseeable future.
Tl;dr: staking rewards are likely going to remain the ~5% APR range long term and inflation will probably tend towards being mildly positive, so when you see absurd projections based on unsustainable mania burns during the bull - remain resolute and sell your ETH to those who are aping in thinking 10%-20% yields and 2% deflation is sustainable.
My final âdo it while neutral sentiment lastsâ rant - Iâve used the phrase âmarkets are forward-lookingâ often. Based on the backlash Iâve received in the last few days, I sense that people misunderstand it as meaning âinvestors can predict the futureâ. Itâs kind of the opposite - in the bull market people will price in a utopia that may be years away; likewise in a bear market people will price in the doom. We have seen this multiple times in crypto. But what we (arguably) havenât seen is a secular peak where the wider market with a majority of institutions/HNWIs will price in a mature Ethereum 5-10 years from now. Itâs very wrong to think ETH price is up-only until âEthereumâs vision is delivered and there is mass adoptionâ - markets have never worked like that, especially emerging markets. There are countless examples to look at with very few exceptions - but the most obvious and relevant one to study is, of course, the dot-com bubble. They priced in the final form of the internet way back in 2000, which took till the 2010s to actually deliver - and yes, many internet companies took 10 years to revisit their 2000 highs. Now, some will argue that Ethereum is not a company - but that doesnât matter, ETHâs value is derived by market forces, and crypto markets follow the same behaviour.
Special guest James Wigginton joins us to discuss DAO/COOP configurations and the benefits over an LLC structure.
Phiz, if you can see this, youâre in yesterdayâs daily. WAKE UP!
Settlement layer,
Immune to any slayer,
Best blockchain player.
On this dayâŚ
In 2022:
In 2021:
In 2020:
In 2019:
In 2018:
In 2017:
In 2016:
Hey friends! As you might have noticed from the many comment threads these past 2-3 days, the Ethereum Foundation has been running (since the beginning of this week and for approximately two more months) something called the KZG Ceremony.
MY noob-friendly eli5 is that this super-easy-to-participate and open-to-everyone ceremony will contribute (via super-fancy-behind-the-scene math) the necessary randomness for the trust assumptions of the upcoming EIP4844, aka ProtoDanksharding.
(The official explanation is: "This ceremony, sometimes called a âTrusted Setupâ, will generate a structured reference string (SRS) which is needed for the commitments to work. An SRS is secure as long as at least one participant in the ceremony successfully conceals their secret.")
The website of the Ceremony has plenty of information on all things ceremony, however, I wanted to share with you all an đ§đĽ excellent podcast episode đĽđ§ with a conversation between Carl Beekhuizen & Trenton Van Epps from the Ethereum Foundation and the host of Epicenter.tv, Friederike Ernst.
The topics the three of them touch on, are:
I certainly do not understand 99% of the math, but this conversation really helped me understand the basic ideas behind the whole process! Enjoy!
Public accountability update on my staking journey w/ u/benido2030
After an appreciated pep-talk last week, I took a few hours this week to continue to familiarize myself with Linux. Namely the terminal - found a random YouTube video to just follow along with and type through some basic commands. I think this has been helpful so far because my first attempt at all this I just jumped into a staking guide with literal zero understanding what was going on with the terminal. It was an unnecessary stressor knowing one deviation from a guide and Iâm screwed.
I am hoping to get a little more familiar with Linux in general before I go further. So if anyone has ideas / videos of things that helped them when they were starting Iâd love to see them. I noticed the CoinCashew Guide has a lot of security best practice type things I need to familiar myself with, so may start focusing on that stuff.
If anyone cares (and to in general share back links myself) someone here gave me this link (sorry, it was awhile ago) â https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php â which was a nice starter read and this was the video I followed along with â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ii48qYBxA â which had a lot of similiar stuff but was easy to follow in video. Both super basic, but I canât stress enough how much of a newbie I am with Linux⌠so it was a comfy start.
Iâd also like to keep this quasi-weekly thing going, so if anyone else is trying going down their staking journey feel free to jump in.
I think the form of NFTs ripe for the next bull cycle will be different. Just as web2 innovated on web1 by adding interactivity, I think weâll see the same occur for the next wave of NFTâs. Gone will be the hype for profile pictures and weâll transition towards NFTs with steady demand and which produce revenue streams.
I donât think the infrastructure will be there next bull market for real world asset NFTs like car or house deeds. Governments already have systems for those and even if it would reduce their costs that isnât a metric they are optimizing for. So, Iâm looking at informatic use cases of the blockchain that can remain in the digital realm to the point of delivery.
Chief among these are live events or NFT ticketing. Live events occur on a regular basis and the total addressable market cap here makes the art market blush. I particularly like this use case because it serves everyone better except the existing parasitic middlemen.
Just from a technical feature perspective, NFTs provide a provenance trail. If you gate NFT transfers to KYCâd customers then the venues which switch to this system can actually know who attended their events. This is obviously useful information which is lost now and it enables entirely new pathways to engagement between performers and attendees. For example there could be exclusive ticket sale rounds to whitelisted addresses based on previous event attendance.
Additionally there are trust and corruption issues with current ticketing approaches such as corrupt release mechanisms and opaque service charge fees. At the very least having the sale logic on the blockchain can add transparency and equal access to the process. Protocols like POAP and Funfair have already demonstrated provably fair lottery mechanisms when demand outstrips supply. Alternatively more market-like initial auction systems have been demonstrated by newer tokens like Gearbox which used 0xCider. Blockchains are demonstrably excellent at executing a provably fair, transparent process.
As to fees, a lot of the service fee charged by Ticketmaster actually goes to middlemen or the venue. Itâs how they were able to grow to their current size: they stopped treating the attendee as the customer. There is a market opportunity here to reduce Ticketmasterâs cut of the fees though. That is still substantial. Ticketmasterâs revenue was $12.3B in 2022. Itâs a rather perfect opportunity for some Defi mullet and weâre already seeing it start to happen even from Ticketmaster themselves[1][2][3]. This is where things like Raribleâs multi-chain protocol would really shine as it is fully indexed and is made to allow numerous frontends, dial their own parameters, and for people to pick whatever chain they want.
Finally, unlike a normal ticket stub or plain digital record an NFT ticket can be associated with extra metadata (even after the event). A system like Ticketmaster could add some type of history system so you can view a collection of your previous events and event highlight reels for each but they havenât in 20 years. By contrast, this is much more normal for NFTs already. Integrate this into a digital picture frame and you can have a place on superfanâs wall that cycles through highlights of the favorite games theyâve attended or that lets them build a digital gallery in something like Decentraland and compete with other fans.
So, thereâs an opportunity here to improve the status quo for venues, performers, and attendees and the only one who stands to lose is a generally reviled middleman. I donât think weâll get as much push-back from the consumers here as weâll see from Gamefi. However, stuff will need to be built.
The UX for buying tickets needs to be tailored to buying tickets. Customers need to see the layout of the venue for the seats being sold, be shown the context of the event, and be offered pathways to deeper engagement with that eventâs community. All of these are UI centric changes that donât require much contract code and are ripe for innovation. Adjacent to the chain, the NFT metadata stored on IPFS could be standardized for easier integration into navigation and viewing software.
Nortonâs âLifelockâ password manager accounts hacked in credential stuffing attack.
Credential stuffing is where an attacker uses usernames and passwords obtained in a previous hack to access other accounts. Phase 4 of my guide addresses this btw.
Stay safe out there!
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/10j5dkj/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023/j5mes6h/
macOS/iOS bros! Stop watching SuperPhiz reruns and update now! Moooaar security updates! Moooaar kernel vulnerabilities patched! macOS 12, macos 13, iOS 15, 16 and ⌠iOS 12!? Yeah⌠12. Weird. So if youâre still using an iPhone 3GS, update it too.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
Edit: Oh and macOS 13 got Yubikey support. About fâing time Apple!
Mainnet shadow fork 1 finalising, according to Marius from the Geth team. đĽł
Assuming devnets run for another month, and then the two public testnets are spaced 3 weeks apart, that would put end March Shanghai. If devnets are run for two weeks and then the two public testnets each spaced two weeks apart, Shanghai date would be early March. Either way Shanghai in March seems increasingly likely (Just my own guessing, nothing official from the core devs on a date yet)
Iâm a long time hodler. At the moment I have most of my ETH staked with CB. With withdrawals coming soon. I figured now is a good time to explore solo staking. Since Iâm not tech savvy. I feel solo staking is a little out of my comfort zone. I looked into using dapenode and rocketpool. After looking at tons of videos and guides. I decided to try the rocketpool route. I followed this guys YouTube video.
I was able to follow along pretty good and now Iâm officially running a node on rocketpools testnet. Iâm surprised itâs actually working. With that said. I feel like Iâm missing so much understanding of what is really happening with my node. All I know is I followed a bunch of copy and paste code into the terminal and got it to work. Did I secure my device enough? Did I set up ssh that I have no idea how to use? Is my firewall setup? What is my computer going to do when I lose power? At this moment Iâm a very dangerous eth staker. Thereâs so much I need to learn in order to trust myself with staking real eth. I wish there was some kind of staking class I could attend. Iâm going to keep learning as much as I can until withdrawals are enabled. Once that happens my eth will go back to the safety of my hardware wallet until I feel 100% comfortable staking on my own. Thanks to everyone of you that help guys/gals like myself. Cheers.
Network density,
Half a million validate,
For security.
Disclaimer: This is a long-winded reflective post. Skip to the end if you would prefer a TL;DR.
Now is the perfect time to reflect on your own personal wins and regrets from the bull market just gone. Itâs quiet, fundamentals are showing strong with Ethereumâs strength above $1,000 and a bottom feels like it may have formed. Donât @ me if I jinxed it.
Personally, Iâd give myself a 5/10. Overall I did ok.
The Good:
My early bull run strategy was good. I sold the last of my Bitcoin after its initial run to $30K/40K as the first part of taking profits. I splashed out on a couple of things Iâd been wanting for a while and I diversified into to physical assets as well as leaving some aside for paying tax (just not quite enough in the end đ). Also, losses which will be covered in âThe Uglyâ were kept to a responsible (enough) % of my stack and I did not double down or try to gamble back shitcoin losses. Losses were accepted and rational portfolio allocations were stuck to. Once the shitcoins went to Goblintown, my precious ETH stack was left untouched.
Finally, I managed to hit my 32 ETH target and run a solo validator node. It was a lot of learning for me but solo staking is very satisfying and worth the effort.
The Less Good:
I sold all of my shitcoins and was full ETH by the time the bear market kicked in to 5th gear. This allowed me to fund quitting my job temporarily to go to Hodlercon and do a long delayed trip with my family in the UK. I should have sold these earlier but I managed to shake these bags before we entered Goblintown.
The Bad:
I had a cash out plan and my target was not hit as I was hoping. My cash out plan evolved after an event I will cover in the next section. The bad thing is that part of my target was hit and I did nothing about it.
The Ugly:
35% of my stack was lost to shitcoins in 2020 and DeFi coins in 2021. Overconfidence from picking out Chainlink in the 2018 bear and then selling the top in late 2019/early 2020 contributed to this greatly. It was a humbling experience but also, unfortunately this loss of 35% of my stack was the reason why my cash out target was not hit. I had a set $ amount I wanted to sell (which would be hit at around a $4.5K ETH) or when a bunch of my favourite indicators on https://www.LookIntoBitcoin.com flashed sell. After losing the 35%, the cash out amount crept up since I had less ETH to sell (it went up to about a $9K ETH). Due to the elongated nature of the late bull run, less than half of the sell indicators I was following flashed sell. I tried to time the peak too close. As a result, the peak I expected never came and I never sold when I should have.
Learnings:
So what have I learned and what can you learn from me? My first piece of advice is never to double down to re-coup losses. After I lost my shitcoin stack I was tempted to double down and I had other coins lined up. But guess what, those coins did terribly. I would have only lost more ETH and wouldnât be solo staking today. Set aside a portion of your stack to leave invested in ETH for the long run. Do not waver from this allocation. If you find that hard, maybe staking is for you. A 16 ETH rETH minipool or 32 ETH solo node cannot be partially sold. Itâs a great way to keep assets locked in for your long term investment thesis, also earn a yield and of course help to decentralise Ethereum!
Secondly, I think itâs important to stick to a cash out plan. Furthermore, I think laddering out is better too. Itâs easy to want to hit a target but this market is too unpredictable to rely on such a hit or miss strategy. Everyone is different, so I donât think this strategy suits everyone but if you are someone with a cash out plan, Iâd recommend sticking to it and Iâd also recommend having multiple targets over a single cash out price.
My final piece of advice is to stay humble and stay cautious. Now that I have experienced the feeling of winning a big bet on one of just 2 altcoins to go on a big run up last bear market and subsequently thinking Iâm a genius and can do it again, I see this attitude everywhere. Look at Do Kwon or any of the has beens last bull run. They think they can make a comeback and are trying to build up their redemption arcs. They got lucky. Then they got overconfident and greedy. Then the market turned and their shenanigans that they thought was proof they were geniuses revealed that they really arenât any better than the rest of us. In fact, theyâre worse. At least I kept my losses limited and didnât keep leveraging up. Keeping my bullishness and self-confidence in check is the only reason I didnât lose it all. There were definitely points where I wanted to go all in on my shitcoins but I didnât because I knew it was irresponsible.
Anyway, I apologise for the long-winded nature of this post. I donât really have the time today to flesh it out into a nice concise ordered write up. I guess Iâll leave you with a TL;DR instead.
TL;DR:
hardware wallet is a MUST if you have more than $2k in crypto and you are not cashing that out right now and leaving.
Transfer your valuable NFTs from hot/burner to COLD (hardware) wallet. While Gas is still quite cheap at night US time/morning EU time. You can bundle (x20 items) thru OS. Yes, you might end up paying like 0.01-0.02e per transfer.
Another good practice is to use revoke . cash âs application and also remove permissions from time to time.
I know to most people itâs a given but I keep seeing people getting hacked here and there and Iâd rather remind again. And your not garbage NFTs are valuable to! so remember that. Trust me, it might suck and feel like unnecessary investment and use of money transferring assets but youâd be happy you still have all your stuff cause for non-hardware wallets itâs not IF itâs WHEN youâll lose it all so act accordingly.
The following will serve as an extremely abbreviated version of my research into the revoke.cash browser extension, focusing as narrowly on privacy as I can.
Obviously weâre taking a different direction here, as this is clearly not a wallet. However, I think its fair to say that this one is particularly relevant to my ethfinanciers.
Revoke.cash was downloaded directly from the chrome webstore
Starting off, the extensionâs privacy tab on the chrome webstore page looks good. No data collection is always good to see.
Immediately upon installation we see this POST request to Amplitude, an analytics platform.
There are a few identifiers, including âuser_idâ, âdevice_idâ, âsession_idâ, and âinsert_idâ. Not so great.
And the keen reader may notice the fields âinitial_referrerâ, and âinitial_referring_domainâ. The values here are âEMPTYâ, but I take massive issue with this in the case that they are ever used to collect that data.
If theyâre going to be collecting your referer header, the least they could do is misspell it as the HTTP spec does haha.
I will go into how the extension functions in a more extensive revision, which will include a review of some crypto scams, and a taste of malware analysis.
But this single request to Amplitude got me wondering what happens when I visit https://revoke.cash using my everyday use firefox installation, with only uBlock Origin and NoScript enabled.
Here we see a request to hxxps://scripts.simpleanalyticscdn.com/latest.js - An obvious tracker, BOOM instantly killed by NoScript
Worth noting that I did not see a request to this domain when using the extension.
Here we see a javascript file trying attempting to force my browser to generate POST requests to 127.0.0.1:8545
Either way, killed by NoScript.
Maybe theres some extension functionality that its trying to interact with?
On the bottom right of the page you can see those connections are refused, even with the extension in use. Odd.
Back to firefox, we see a request to amplitude just as generated by the extension. However, this time uBlock killed that attempt.
I keep harping on the fact that by installing extensions, you allow them to completely bypass protections such as NoScript and uBlock Origin.
Be careful out there, folks
gm gentlemen,
a quick reminder about the KZG ceremony: https://ceremony.ethereum.org/
You can help by contributing your randomness to the whole thing. The more people participate the better, as it only takes one honest person to make the whole thing a success.
Itâs really easy and fast to do. All you need is an Ethereum wallet address with more than 3 transfers, and then itâs just writing some random text and signing a bunch of messages and youâre already done. The whole process takes <2 minutes.
Youâll get a POAP too, so get going and help secure & scale Ethereum! This will be used for the danksharding implementation later on.
To make an analogy, your posts about security analysis, and potentially teaching us to do those kinds of investigations ourselves, play the same role in the broader ecosystem that fraud proofs do on optimistic rollups. If you start with a trusted system, and the system is honest, then all is well and good, but if theyâre not honest, and nobody is checking on them, then they can get away with anything. For such a system to become trustless, you need a sufficient number of capable fraud-checkers who are checking often enough such that thereâs a near-certainty someone would catch malfeasance if it were present. The more people capable of checking ecosystem tools to see if theyâre doing bad things, the more trustless the ecosystem becomes. Itâs really crucial
Beautifully put. To this end, I will be putting together a guide detailing exactly the steps I have been taking, along with resources, and assistance wherever needed. The vast majority of the process is non-technical, just critical thinking with an almost cynical mindset haha.
I previously announced that I will be releasing a more in-depth review of revoke.cash, where this extension will also be used as we explore a variety of interesting crypto scams.
If youâre interested in learning more about infosec in a very easy to digest fashion, I would recommend checking that out when it is released.
I have also promised an analysis of Fire.
No commitment to any particular order can be made, but these are all on my plate.
This is last call for requests, before I leave this up to the community to continue.
Hey Fam
There was a comment a few days ago in the daily about me tweeting about JPEGs, and also the frequent âBankless has too many ads!â Take
I typed out a pretty thorough response, as itâs stuff I hear a lot and also I think is shortsighted. Since the comment was 3 days ago, itâs buried to the depths of Reddit, so I wanted to draw attention to it here:
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/108x76j/daily_general_discussion_january_11_2023/j4d8cqf/
Would love yâallâs thoughts / feedback.
Love you guys
So a little something regarding how my staking experience is going.
Prior to the merge I was running Geth on one SSD and Lighthouse on another SSD.
My attestation performance was fairly good, consistently around 97-98%. Back then you didnât rely on the execution client for attesting, just for block proposals, so it wasnât a huge deal if it couldnât keep up.
Coming up to the merge I moved away from Geth and installed Nethermind on the same drive as Lighthouse, and on the other drive installed Teku-Besu (As a fallback pair).
Now with both a consensus client and execution client on the same SSD, and an execution being a requirement, it canât quite keep up. Attestation performance is averaging around 93-94% and I am seeing the occasional message pop up in my logs stating that the execution engine is not in sync.
Iâve been putting off addressing this for the longest time⌠But I figure better now than never!
Iâve ordered an NVMe that has 10x the read/write speeds and 10x the IOPS of the current SSDâs I have. Hopefully in the next week I will get it and install it and move the primary pair (Lighthouse-Nethermind) across.
If anyone else has been getting poor attestation performance, this may be something to look into.
I wrote a long post about my learnings at the end of 2021. That was (in hindsight) after we had peaked and I think itâs just reasonable to update that post and include my 2022 learnings.
I have some goals for the next 24-36 months and hope that reflecting on my learnings will help me to make stuff happen. Will it be as easy as I think? Def not (but I also donât think it is as easy as it might sound here!). But I want to grow, improve, challenge myself, so we need goals to measure success :)
Free EVMavericks Tees for ETHDenver!
Hope everyone is pumped for the conference!
If you happen to be going and hold an EVM, we will be ordering EVMavericks tees free for anyone that wants one for the conference! (fyi, First come first serve, there will be a max # of tees ordered)
To sign up, just drop your size and pick up your tee at the conference (no doxxing): https://discord.com/channels/963992696387694592/1064925676479729
Weâll also get some laptop stickers made for anybody that wants one! (No EVM necessary)
There will also be a few ethfinance & evmaverick hang outs planned for ETHDenver, so be sure to check those out if youâre going! Details to come!
Greetings allâŚthereâs been great coverage on the Nightfall privacy announcement. Iâve got a consolidate list of the links we hit:
From my POV, a good day here. Made great progress getting everyone at EY on the same page. Much love to the EthFinance communityâŚ
Another night shift,
Review and merge pull requests,
The open-source gift.
The Braskyâs Strike Back Part II
Itâs been over 2 months since my wife lost her job and wanted to share an update. We had both found job opportunities on separate coasts of the US and weâre prepared to live apart for a few months so that we could find the income to keep the house and wait for something permanent to open up back home. I had even readied the house and advertised it for rental hoping to find a tenant while we were gone.
At the last minute we both found jobs in townâŚnot only did she get hired with full time employment but sheâll be making 20% more than her previous job!!! I had been watching our little one as my main trade is in construction and the real money is made on large industrial projects but requires traveling away from home. I had found a part time gig that worked well with our schedules but had to quit as I was going back on the road to work. I got a call right before leaving and a side hustle that I had tried to get started back in August has now just opened upâŚand Iâll be making more than double my previous income while still playing daddy day-care!!!
The last few months have definitely been a trial and has put a lot of stress on our marriage but we came out as better spouses and better positioned than before!! We had enough savings in case of emergencies and I was prepared to start selling my sweet sweet precious ETH if things got worse. We were able to not burn through everything and our ETH stack is still intact earning rewards!! Glad I can share this my ETH fam and anyone else going through the fire. Amazed to have a spouse who can get aggressive and when the bear bites we bite back.
Economist Eric Budish presents a new paper (video) showing skepticism regarding the cost of securing the Bitcoin network. The main criticism boils down to the fact that there is no trust in the system (trustless), in the sense that there is no âmemoryâ to build up trust. A miner is only trusted by spending computing resources right now, but does not get rewarded for building up a good reputation. He argues that although this is a perfectly fine model for security, it getâs very expensive. In the concluding remarks, Budish briefly discusses PoS and says that it could potentially be used in a better way.
I think his arguments for the cost of securing the Bitcoin network is interesting and probably valid (depending on what the attack looks like). People in crypto should not be arrogant and dismiss criticism, but instead try to understand all perspectives to be able to build better systems. Iâm not sure how trust in a decentralized system would look, or even if itâs a good idea (Any Layer0 player comments?). Also, PoS certainly have clear advantages: E.g., the cost of an attack is significantly larger, as the attacker risks losing the capital (not the case with mining). But if the capital required to secure the network needs to be way higher than the transactional value of the network, that could be an obstacle for growth. Are there any attempts to clearly work out the economics for PoS?
Edit:
Thanks for the comments and suggestions to listen to Justin Drake on this, will take a look!
I also found this quite intense twitter discussion on the subject: https://twitter.com/alexoimas/status/1525505965029830656?s=20&t=X2P3CnyeNNKtinMsJCP9Ww
And this blog post: https://hugonguyen.medium.com/a-review-of-budishs-51-attack-theories-what-is-the-fair-price-of-an-old-asic-59a7dcf9ff94 which argues that the scenarios in Budish article are unrealistic. The author also argues PoW > PoS.
For the first time in my 6 years of crypto I am starting to seriously ponder: I do not actually get the âpointâ of bitcoin. Itâs unprofitable to mine it. It pays no yield if you already have it. It doesnât protect you from inflation. It needs a steady supply of greater fools during its cycle because its security costs scale with price (see: boom-bust curve). Its vocal supporters are cringe. Iâve always agreed that bitcoin is pristine collateral while ETH has a place as a programmable crypto asset but things have changed. Iâm at the point where the flippening is not a meme anymore - it is the guaranteed outcome of the supply/demand dynamics that we are witnessing now - just needs more time to play out. ETH is now the pristine collateral imo, and I donât see why in the future ETH canât have flipped Bitcoin multiple times.
I recorded a new Launch Pad episode with /u/sikhsoldiers. Jasper is an extremely popular member of the Rocket Pool community.
In the episode, we talk about how his early crypto journey had him spending time here in ethfinance, his path to the Rocket Pool community, and how he became Rocket Poolâs resident DeFi expect. At the end of the video, we do a run through of his paper âWhy Paradigm Was Wrong: How rETH Will Flip stETHâ.
You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/DwUQMZA9Jus
For those of you who donât know, Launch Pad is an interview series within Rocket Fuel - a daily news show summarising everything happening in the Rocket Pool community.
MEV-Boost relay transaction censorship has gotten a good amount of attention since the Merge, and for good reason. Fortunately, word has gotten around and the trend is improving.
So I think itâs time to emphasize another problem in the relay space: relays who also run builders. Relay-builders as opposed to independent relays? I need a better term for this. This is informed by my time working on the Aestus relay, and while I believe our relay can help with this problem, I hope you can trust that my goal here is not marketing. We donât make any money off this relay anyway.
In a world without relays, proposers and builders would have to trust each other directly: depending on the implementation one would always be able to steal MEV from the other. Relays sit in the middle and take on all that trust. As long as the relay is trusted, proposers and builders each enter a trustless relationship with the other.
However, a malicious relay, working with one side or the other, can execute all the attacks they were supposed to prevent. A relay working with a builder can steal MEV from a proposer or the other builders, and likewise, a relay working with a proposer can steal MEV from a builder.
Now letâs bring relay-builders into this. An entity that is running both a relay and a builder has a clear conflict of interest. Compromising the relayâs neutrality by working together with their builder could immensely improve profitability. Letâs list out some potential attacks that relay-builders could carry out. These are in roughly increasing order of subtlety and with names Iâm making up on the spot, with âyouâ being the relay-builder:
Single-Block Copying: Some third party builder has submitted a block to the relay that is more valuable than the block your builder made. Simply copy all the transactions from the third-party builderâs block, but make it so you keep any value that is not sent to the proposer. Send a bid to the proposer with your block instead of the other builderâs. A competent builder should be able to detect this and trash your reputation.
Ignoring Other Builders: A third-party builder submitted a block more valuable than your builderâs block. You should pass on the third-party bid to the proposer. Instead, pretend you didnât see it. Submit your builderâs bid instead. Done naively like this, the third-party builder should be able to catch it.
Multi-Block Copying: Multiple builders have submitted blocks with valuable MEV. Build your block from the most valuable transactions from each of them. Make sure your bid to the proposer will legitimately win the auction, but keep the rest of the MEV for yourself. I donât know if builders would detect this, might take some analysis and time.
Obfuscated MEV Copying: Same as with the first two copying attacks, but with intent to be subtle about it. For example, if a third-party builder/searcher has a truly novel source of MEV extraction that only they know how to do, theyâd recognize if it were stolen, so only copy MEV that can be identified as a recognizable strategy and is unlikely to come from a private mempool. Implement some fuzzing, make your copied MEV transactions slightly different so as to give plausible deniability that maybe your builder found that MEV on their own. Might be hard to detect.
Auction Manipulation: Anyone can check the best current bid through the relay API, which is a problem in itself, but the relay has particularly low-latency access to this info. In case a third-party builder only very slightly outbids your builder, quickly create a new block with a winning bid and propose that instead. The relay has some wiggle room with timing to make sure your builder can always outbid. Catching this would require long-term analysis and may be covered by plausible deniability or obfuscation.
Block Timing Manipulation: A third-party builder submitted a block more valuable than the one made by your builder. Give your block priority in the relayâs block validation system, or better yet, donât waste time validating it at all (you made it, you trust it). Make your competitorâs block low-priority for validation or otherwise stall it so itâs less likely to be ready when the proposer asks for the best bid. Hard to detect, covered by plausible deniability, and current data APIs donât expose enough timing information to help with detection or can be manipulated. This could be an actual concern.
Builder Colocation: Most builders will make ~1 submission per second, with value increasing over time as more bundles and txâs arrive. Builders that are geographically closer to the relay, with lower latency, will tend to have slightly higher-value blocks because of it. If a relay and builder are running in the same data center, under the same account/project, on a high-speed private LAN, that will give them a competitive edge. This maybe doesnât quite qualify as an attack, but a neutrality concern at least.
I want to be clear that I have no reason to believe existing relay-builders are malicious and carrying out these attacks. But why accept the possibility that they may some day occur? Why connect to relays that require extra trust assumptions when there are alternatives?
Right now, Ultrasound and Agnostic are the only relays not operating their own builders. Aestus is temporarily running a builder, but it doesnât extract MEV, doesnât take any profit, and only operates until we get a reliable set of third-party builders connected (otherwise we might not have any blocks for connected proposers). I would encourage everyone to direct their validators and builders to those relays and to ask existing relay-builders to consider only running one or the other. Iâm grateful to the early relay-builders for getting us off the ground, but now we can start to hold the space to a higher standard.
Iâm going to make some guesses for what might happen on the beacon chain regarding withdrawals. I want to qualify these as âguessesâ, because reality rarely unfolds as we expect and it would overestimate my foresight to call them predictions. Also, since Iâm not making predictions, I acknowledge that itâs difficult to quantify the results of many of these guesses.
BONUS: What our community can do to support this transition:
There was a fairly-notable phishing post on r/CC yesterday where the user mistakenly sent tokens to an address that looked very similar to his actual address (same starting and ending characters). He originally thought he had clipboard malware that changed his address, but it turned out he actually copied to the wrong address.
If you look at his PolygonScan history days before the mistakenly transaction, you can see that he was targeted multiple times.
All these similar-looking address had interacted with his account in the past 2 weeks:
This is known as address poisoning. Attackers send low-value token transactions and receive 0-value token transactions to-and-from your addresses, hoping that you accidentally pick their address in future transactions.
Blockchain explorers and and some wallets will show these transactions. The recommended way to avoid getting tricked is to use an address book of whitelisted addresses. Most wallets and exchanges have an address book feature.
Iâve posted a comprehensive list of crypto scams here along with best practices to avoid getting scammed: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/106lsai/comprehensive_list_of_common_crypto_scams_and/
If youâre active in DeFi, youâll probably come across many scams and random phishing airdrops on your accounts. Especially true on low-fee networks like Polygon PoS and BSC.
We had so much fun in Hawaii weâre going to do it again⌠for those of you that donât know HodlerCon 2024 is currently in the planning stages. Join our Discord to get involved
Luau Dao is submitting a presentation about our Decentralized Layer Zero Vacation at ETH Denver! đ¤Fingers crossed we get accepted. That being said, we had to make a pitch video for the talk. I couldnât keep it to myself because I wanted to share it with you fam! I hope you enjoy!
GM EthFam,
So Iâve been thinking about whether LSDs represent almost a multipolar trap.
A multipolar trap is a situation where participants are incentivized to act in a way detrimental the good of the group, and to themselves in the long run. The most obvious example is the tradgedy of the commons. We each share a piece of land, it can support each of us grazing 10 goats. If I graze 11 goats the quality of the land might deteriorate, but so slowly it wonât matter, whereas I get 10% more goat, itâs an obvious choice. Unfortunately you all make the same obvious choice and so the field is overgrazed and after a few years becomes barren and most of everyoneâs goats starve. If you decide to be the better person and keep to the original limit of 10 goats, then all youâre doing is disadvantaging yourself relative to the rest of us 11 goat havers. We can all afford more turnips than you due to goat inflation and so you end up out competed.
Getting back to ether staking⌠by using a centralized service rather than solo staking you get access to an LSD. This gives you advantages in terms of opportunity access, you can swap into something else if you want to or create leveraged positions or whatever.
Like with the shared field, the disadvantage is on a community level. The decentralization and âlegitimacyâ of Ethereum the network, and by extention, ether the asset is compromized, meaning it is less likely to be as highly valued in the future. Sure, you could take the high ground and not use a centralized service, but then are you disadvantaging yourself with lost opportunity cost. And if you do, and most people chose a centralized service then you still lose out from the loss of perceived legitimacy anywayâŚ
âŚ
Except that entire scenario is not analogous to Ethereum staking today due to another option, that hopefully most of you have been hearing repeat in your heads the entire time youâve been reading. Rocketpool solves the lose-lose coordination failure, by providing an option that gives people the ability to access an LSD without compromising the decentralization of the whole. With it the multipolar trap is easily disarmed, the field doesnât need to be depleated for individuals to gain the advantages.
RocketPool is the G.O.A.T.
Donât underestimate the decentralizing impact Shanghai will have. Lots of people fully aligned with Ethereumâs defining values like me have ETH staked with cexs where we would rather not, for various reasons, who will be empowered by withdrawals to revisit their position and consider going solo.
Iâve run validators on testnet but donât have the skills/confidence to do it with real money right now, but Shanghai marks a big psychological target for me to remedy that and itâs very easy to be inspired by people in this sub, describing how rocketpool, dappnode etc. are very easy to do. Plus ethstaker and all the guides. Itâs taking on a huge financial responsibility but itâs about integrity and aligning oneâs actions with oneâs values and you see that across the Ethereum community and it is inspiring.
It might take 6 months but Iâm really looking forward to watching the transition of ETH from centralized stakers to clean green homegrown (fanless, I recently learned here, so no noise and no fiddly dust hoovering!) validators.
I named my testnet validator raspberry pi âGoldfishâ because I often couldnât leave it alone more than a day without it dying. Even put a little goldfish sticker on it. Iâm looking forward to carrying that bs over onto a nuc; name suggestions welcome.
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/108x76j/comment/j3vp7io/
This brings back memories. I was so systems illiterate that it took me about a week to set up my rig before even syncing the block chains. Almost every step in the guides I had to Google something or pester the kind people in the ethstaker discord. Iâd never used Linux before. Had to actually Google where to find the command prompt in Ubuntu as if âTerminalâ wasnât obvious enough. Didnât know what port forwarding was. Many such examples. Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing, I wiped the entire system and started again from scratch. Then did that a couple more times. Each time getting quicker and more confident. I think by the 3rd try I had got it down to 30 minutes before syncing the blockchains. I ended up validating on testnet for only 1 day, then swapped over to mainnet. I specifically remember phiz telling me to practice on testnet longer but beacon chain launch was imminent. I hesitated due to no withdrawal mechanism but decided there was no way I was missing genesis lol. Itâs been more than 2 years since then, my rig diligently staking 24/7 without any major problems. In a weird way itâs been one of the only constants in my life, as lifeâs events pass by.
Tldr; I agree Shanghai will likely increase decentralisation. if I can do it, literally anyone can, and will. A focus after Shanghai should be towards making the process easier to ensure it.
âMake sure Ethereum winsâ â Steve Newcomb reveals zkSyncâs prime directive
Probably stuff all the gigabrains in ethfinance already know but cool to see zkSyncâs devotion to the Ethereum vision.For him, the end game of Ethereum is security so perfect that no quantum computer can break it and decentralization so good that no nation-state can stop it â in other words, a âprivate internet computer that cannot be hacked by any computer or stopped by any nation-state.â
âI want people to understand that this is more important than technology; this is possibly as important as what comes after capitalism and democracy,â he says.
I have a few Rocketpool validators that are currently pending. They should be active in 3 hours. After I write this comment, Iâm going to bed. Iâm not very active in this sub but I lurk like a mf. Iâm feeling inspired to talk about my journey from an ETH Holder to an ETH Staker.
My new yearâs resolution is to focus more on learning ethereum rather than focusing on price.
Lessons learnt in 2022:
Goals:
This is the second installment of my series of posts regarding the privacy of various Chrome browser crypto wallet extensions.
First entry can be found here, where we analyzed Rabby.
My approach:
This analysis has shown that my previous approach of broadly categorizing findings under âthe ok, the bad, the ugly, and the weirdâ is insufficient, subjective, and does not properly represent what I wish to convey.
Using Kali Linux, I downloaded Google Chrome directly from google.com/chrome.
Analysis of encrypted traffic was completed using BurpSuite + the provided root cert, installed in chromeâs local cert repo. Chrome is then launched with a proxy set to Burpâs listening port.
I will not be doing any sort of transactions whatsoever. I will, however, connect the wallet to a dapp.
On this New Years Day we will be taking a look at Tally Ho!
The Tally Ho extension was downloaded from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tally-ho/eajafomhmkipbjmfmhebemolkcicgfmd
I must start off by giving Tally Ho credit for something that Rabby did not implement. As I went through using the wallet to create a new address, I paid no attention to the seed phrase.
I was hit with a quiz that ensures that the user knows their seed phrase. I reinstalled Tally Ho, created a new address, and passed the quiz this time.
An excellent general security practice that every wallet should implement.
Upon installation, the first request Tally Ho generates is to api.coingecko.com in search of current token prices. Notice crab season in full effect.
Here we see a request for Arbitrumâs token list.
This is a âweb3â wallet, and as such we see many requests destined for chains and defi services that us ethfinanciers wont (admit to, at least) be using much.
An example of such a request, one which is quite demonstrative of the rest, looks like https://imgur.com/AEjA8m1
I dont have a problem with this activity, but it would be great to have a more Ethereum-centric version of this wallet.
api.blocknative.com is used to fetch Ethereum gas fees and block info.
Tally Ho reaches out to Compound Financeâs Github repo âtoken-listâ for a list of, you guessed it, tokens.
For a benign example of why this is not such a great practice, check out this request to Trader Joeâs âtoken-listâ repo.
The response is a 404. Not a huge problem, just a bit sloppy seeming. Could be bad news if an attacker is able to gain access to that repo, which is likely much less heavily protected than Trader Joeâs other assets.
Here is where things get a bit more subjective.
We see Ankrâs API being used to get the ETH balance of my new Ethereum address, notice the value â0x0â in the response.
And for the Alchemy haters, Ive got some bad news:
Alchemyâs API is used to fetch my addressâ balances of various tokens, which are specified by contract address in the POST request body.
You may notice requests to mainnet.infura.io in the above image. No need to worry, these requests were generated strictly by connecting to staking.synthetix.io.
One thing that left me a bit puzzled is this request to resolve.unstoppabledomains.com
My wallet address is sent as a GET parameter. Along with an âAuthorization:â HTTP header.
I have not had much time to look into this service, and would love to know more if anyone has any insight.
Refreshingly, no requests to telemetry services or advertisers were found.
I call upon the great /u/REALJohnBMacLemore. Would you please be willing to do the dirty deed, ser?
Happy New Year, yall!I continue to be amazed by the transparency of Defi sometimes. Just look at the Yearn.finance employee expenses here. Continuously streamed, withdrawn whenever the payee wants. Compare this to your traditional corporate payroll system.
Interesting message from Juno Finance:
Dear User,
This is an important announcement.
Juno doesnât custody crypto assets and relies on crypto partners for providing these services. Due to uncertainty with our crypto partner who is responsible for crypto operations for Juno, we strongly recommend withdrawing your crypto assets into a self-custody wallet. You can also choose to sell these assets for cash and keep them secured in your Juno checking account which is FDIC insured up to $250,000 via Evolve Bank and Trust.
There are daily platform limits for sells and withdrawals and weâre working with our partner to increase them for a smoother transition. Due to current market uncertainty we have also disabled crypto buys on the platform and auto-converted some of the stablecoins (USDC, USDT and mUSDC) to USD. Any fees incurred will be reimbursed. We apologise for the inconvenience and will keep you posted.
All Banking and Card related services continue to operate as usual. We will also transition to a new crypto partner in the coming weeks.
Emphasis mine.
Maybe theyâre shifting around their crypto backend and they arenât sure how assets held by the crypto provider will be handled during the transition. Itâs cool that they advocate for self custody.Heyyo! My Pride! I wanted to bring more attention to this post by Maswasnos further down in the daily.
If you have crypto assets stored with Juno or Wyre, withdrawal them now! The email in that post feels funny to me. The words seem exceptionally well chosen to provide the most warning with the least possible legal consequences. I suggest you heed their warning. If you custody with someone else, be sure they are not using Wyre to custody their assets. IMO, that is who Juno is attempting to warn you about.
Again, nothing confirmed, just my feeling.Heya fam, I need some help collecting more scam examples that are different to those I already have. If anyone has examples, Iâd appreciate a DM with it, a reply to this post with an imgur link or something or a discord DM at dreth#1988 if you have any good examples I havenât listed.
As of right now I have:
Thereâs one notorious scam I know Iâm missing and thatâs fake support people, so Iâd appreciate at least one example of that, not more than one is needed.
If thereâs any meaningfully different or interesting scams you have examples of, please send them my way. Iâd also apprecaite malware or anything that could be misleading to users or put them at risk. Do not post malicious links as a reply to this comment, just DM them to me.
Iâm on the EVMavericks discord and moderate the StakeWise discord, verify my username well if you want to DM me on discord, donât get scammed.
A million thanks to everyone that have helped me out !have a great day my fellow âeth maxisâ.
bear markets are great for buidlers.
while looking for web3/blockchain related jobs, I began working on my own blockchain project : Iâm building (from scratch front-end/back-end, the whole 9 yards) an LSD niche focused DeX liquidity aggregator.
way down the road, Iâm thinking about adding features like evolving the project into a platform that will make it easier for users to participate into liquidity pools, create and run rocketpool minipool, create finance-focused NFTs using oracles and open order books.
even if the project is a total failure and absolutely no one uses it, Iâm still happy to be full hand on on it building everything from UI/frontend to the backend and integration APIs of Uniswap/0x and interacting with Rocketpool/uniswap and building smart contracts.
as a software engineer, itâs an experience that is like a breeze of fresh air to do a fun side passion project that may or may not transform into a ârealâ product.
worst case scenario, no one uses it but it gives me legitemacy when talking about my experience in the web3 with recruiters.
best case scenario, users love it and it becomes my full time job.
âaverageâ scenario, it has some kind of traction, and keep being a fun passion project I will maintain while working full time job somewhere else.
anyway, thank you for reading my post, have a great day and may the force be with youWellâŚI think some records will never be broken.. According to my notes /u/Maleficent_Plankton has the best P/E ratio in the sub.
They have made 111 comments (according to Moderator ToolBox) in Ethfinance and achieved Doot status 16 freakinâ times. Thatâs crazy high.
Just wanted to give a shoutout on that amazing achievement.In an effort to spread awareness of what everyone in the community is working on, below is a list of users and their projects. Working on something cool and not listed? Send a DM to u/hanniabu to get added.
Username | Description | |
---|---|---|
. | 0xdefiant | Banless Advisor Founder - A web3 social trading platform |
. | 404bachee | Creating an LSD DEX and lending app |
. | 696_eth | EVMavericks Weekly - The top EVMavericks events of the week |
. | atleft | Influence - An open-economy, space strategy MMO in which players own all of their content |
. | austonst | Austus MEV-Boost Relay - A neutral, non-censoring block relay for Ethereum proof-of-stake validators and block builders |
. | bbroad25 | â.08 today, easy.â |
. | brambramEth | Working on a seed phrase recovery tool |
. | bullmeza | Bequest - A Dead Manâs switch to distribute your tokens and NFTs to selected recipients |
. | clamchoda | âŕźź 㤠ââ ༽㤠ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ŕźź 㤠ââ ŕź˝ă¤â |
. | corn-potage | Front End Dev as NiceNode |
. | cryptojobsgg | CryptoJobs.gg - The #1 crypto jobs board for employers and future employees |
. | cryptouf | Unofficial Curve Newsletter - A newsletter about whatâs happening in Curve Finance |
. | danceratopz | disCarbon - An app to offset your flight emissions by purchasing carbon credits |
. | davidahoffman | Bankless Co-Founder - A guide for the crypto journey |
. | dmihal | CryptoStats Founder - A community-driven neutral source for crypto metrics |
. | domotheus | EF Researcher |
. | dreth | Writing a book about crypto/defi (hence asking for scam examples recently) and writing in my blog https://dac.ac/ |
. | edmundedgar | An r/ethereum moderator |
. | eetherway | Influence - An open-economy, space strategy MMO in which players own all of their content Part of the core team at Unstoppable Games |
. | ethmaxitard | L2 Cheatsheet - A directory of L2 resources |
. | fc-test | Working on building a web3 game |
. | fly1n_hawaiian | Community Manager at ZkSync |
. | geoffbezos | Crypto opportunities monthly roundup |
. | hanniabu | Îther Îąlpha - Develops open source tools and resources (including DailyDoots.com!) |
. | haurog | disCarbon - An app to offset your flight emissions by purchasing carbon credits |
. | hashtagfuzzmaster | âALL HAIL THE ETERNAL CRABâ |
. | insidethesimulation | RatioGang - A site to track the ETH/BTC ratio and flippening progress |
. | itswhatevermannn | BetOnchain - A permissionless blockchain-based betting platform |
. | jey_s_tears | Daily haikus until weâre at least at 0.178 on the ETH/BTC ratio or highest market cap |
. | jtnichol | Ethfinance Doots Happy Hour - A livestream roundup of the top 10 Doots of the Week Contributor at Supermodular.xyz and Green Pill |
. | juankestein | CryptoNumeris - Pocket-sized stainless steel cold storage solutions |
. | kirill_stakewise | Co-Founder at Stakewise |
. | kudeta | Austus MEV-Boost Relay - A neutral, non-censoring block relay for Ethereum proof-of-stake validators and block builders |
. | lefterisjp | Rotki Founder - An open source portfolio tracker, accounting and analytics tool that protects your privacy |
. | logic_beach | RobotADay - An NFT collection with the goal of creating one robot per day; Coordinates a cohort of solidity learners: https://discord.gg/aVnY7jnJWt |
. | logristhebard | Tokenomics Explained - Explores financial topics related blockchain |
. | midnightonmars | GridPlus CEO |
. | mister_eth | ETHTPS.info - A dashboard to analyze the TPS of Ethereum and layer 2 networks |
. | nikola_j | DeFi Saver - A one-stop dashboard for creating, managing and tracking your DeFi positions |
. | nixorokish | EthStaker - Ethereum Beacon Chain community health consultant |
. | pbrody | EY Blockchain team member |
. | profstrangelove | LimitRanger - A dapp to use limit orders with Uniswap while paying low â or actually earning â fees |
. | pseudotheos | Researcher at Scroll |
. | readreed | POAP Studio team member |
. | realjohnbmaclemore | Caches - A web3 authenticated multi-topic forum on all subjects related to the Ethereum protocol and Web3 technology |
. | rooftopportapotty | Doing security analysis of browser extensions and web3 wallets Reincarnation of u/skidseverywhere |
. | seamonkey82 | The client whisperer |
. | stevieraykatz | Coinlander - An interactive experiment in the design and development of community gaming primitives, including the Seeker characters and The One Coin artifact |
. | superphiz | EthStaker - Ethereum Beacon Chain community health consultant |
. | swagtimusprime | Developer Relations at Scroll |
. | the-a-word | Ethfinance Doots Happy Hour - A livestream roundup of the top 10 Doots of the Week |
. | therocketman_eth | Offchain Labs (Arbitrum) Integration Engineer |
. | toethmooonguy | âTo ETH Mooon!!! â(°0°)ââ |
. | tricky_troll | Trickyâs Daily Doots |
. | unitedterror | Illuminate Founder - A fixed rate lending protocol aggregator |
. | usesbinkvideo | The subscriber countoooor |
. | waqwaqattack | Rocket Fuel - A daily summary of all the happenings in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Reddit, and the DAO forum and Redditâs r/ethfinance daily thread |
. | wholesome_crypto | Wholesome Crypto - A podcast interviewing prominent people in crypto to share what lead them on their current path |
. | wizardofhex | POAP Gated Documents - An app to share POAP-encrypted documents and open to contributors (registered with GitPOAP!) |
. | zerotricks | EthArchive - A tool to view what happened âOn this Dayâ in Ethereum |
Delegate your votes to a member of the EthFinance community. Are you a delegate and not listed? Send a DM to u/hanniabu to get added.
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