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u/FrenktheTank

Ethereum

u/usesbinkvideo

3,542,025 Ethereans subscribed (+2,158)

u/Twelvemeatballs

$3,293

u/TimbukNine

0.03482

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EVM process,

Impact of the printing press,

Finance full access.

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

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reminder that crypto is risky, take your eyes off the charts and enjoy your life

money comes and goes but your time spent looking at candles never ever comes back

if you cannot handle that, best to invest in low risk assets

it’s been a tough few years, have an entry and exit plan and learn to stomach drops, it’s a skill that you need to invest in crypto

for those feeling bad, we all understand and it’s going to be okay, i promise

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Block of Ages cleave for me, Let me find myself in Thee.
Future of France in my hand.
Five hundred miles from EtherLand

Caught a run of Luck learning how to to mine. Got an education on a scratch of a dime.
Stuck Doomscrolling and Comatose, Halfway rusted on the salty coast

Made a little money, but it came with scars With two beat-up ledgers, but zero bars. From the Crescent City to the Great Salt Lake It ain’t what you got, it’s what you make

When the road got rough and the wheels all broke, we couldn’t take more than we could tow.
Making something out of nothing with a scratch and some hope(ium) With two old ledgers, like a shovel and a rope

Block of Ages cleave for me, Let me find myself in Thee.
Future of France Our hands.
Five hundred miles from EtherLand

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gm gm! James here from Octant. Stoked that this channel is coming back to life! Big shoutout to everyone who made that happen. Just dropped some knowledge on where we are going for Octant v2. Its kind of heady but wanted to share nevertheless. https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1hs1kuf/comment/m51x11r/?context=3

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday, 2025 is going to be an amazing year!

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Ethereum’s main value proposition in my opinion is from securing the information and value on its network.

The value part is obvious. The ticker is ETH. ETH itself needs to be valuable in order to guarantee the continued functioning of the chain. Without ETH value there will be no stakers, no block proposers, no block builders, no transactions, no chain.

The second piece is information. ETH needs to be expressive enough to contain the various pieces of information that we find useful to put on-chain. Bitcoin is minimally expressive so it was highly limited in the amount of information it could store on-chain. Ethereum expanded the expressiveness to essentially infinity with a turing-complete programming language (Solidity) for smart contracts.

Now anyone can write any smart contract, put it onchain, and anyone in the world can instantly interact with that system. I also believe that Ethereum has passed the bottleneck stage (for the most part) with fees such that it isn’t too expensive to put information into the chain anymore. L2 tvl suggests so at least.

Being able to rely on the chain, and the information stored on it, to persist into the future relies on the decentralization of the network. The more decentralized it is the more likely it is to be resistant to attacks of all sorts, be it cultural/physical/financial. Essentially it creates the most neutral credibility in terms of users being able to rely on it to function as intended.

Additionally, network effects exist all over the place for ETH. Some examples:

1. mindshare and number of holders who are committed to the network and the ideas behind it rather than just trying to make a quick buck or scamming people

2. Solo staker ecosystem which supports the foundational community which credibly runs the hardware that the Ethereum software controls, the source of ETH’s credibility.

3. Core dev commmunity. Required to improve and maintain the functioning of the Ethereum network.

4. Builder commnuity. Improving solidity code, improving our understanding of how to implement the EVM every day, improving smart contract auditing and tooling.

5. Smart contract network and liquidity. The existing smart contracts that have been deployed are like the buildings in a city. If the core devs and solo stakers are the road/sidewalk builders transporting you around the system. The smart contracts and teams that have deployed them are the libraries, schools, offices, banks that you can interact with. The more of these exist in a city the more vibrant the city becomes which is why people all clump together. Same for smart contract network states.

There’s more but that’s just some examples.

I’d like to propose another form of valuing Ethereum which is the amount of human “work” that it secures. I think by this metric it shouuld be the most valueable asset on the planet bar none. “But haven’t lots of other companies spent 1000x more human hours?” Yes of course. However not all human hours can be counted the same. Think about all the human hours that go into maintaining an exchange in traditional finance world. It’s huge. Now you deploy uniswap contract which is a fancy version of x * y = k and viola, you have SOLVED exchanging tokens. Basically for all humans for all time. I still don’t think people understand HOW MUCH human effort smart contracts contain within them. They are the most consolidated, most efficient, human effort in history. They are the blueprint, the instructions, the software, that controls a fleet of hardware dispersed across the entire world, telling them exactly how to do operations that humans would otherwise have to spend countless hours doing manually.

The more that this system’s functionality expands, the easier it gets to use. Network effects. Eventually it will consume the majority of at least the digital world’s activity. You need ETH to operate this computer. You don’t have enough ETH.

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🚨 So, Scam Sniffer announced their 2024 Crypto Phishing Report. I’ll paste their main tldr below, but you can also find their detailed report here.. I highly recommend giving it a read.. Experienced users will get a refresher course on everything they have learned to watch out for, and new crypto users can certainly get a clear picture of how dangerous it can get out there if they don’t set-up proper security practices..

📊 A staggering $494M was lost to Wallet Drainer phishing attacks in 2024, up 67% YoY. The attacks affected 332K addresses (+3.7%), with the severity intensifying and the largest single theft reaching $55.48M. 💸Q1 2024 saw the heaviest losses at $187.2M, with March peaking at $75.2M. 30 major incidents (>$1M) occurred throughout the year, totaling $171M in losses.

📉 The attack landscape evolved significantly in 2024, with major drainer exits and new players emerging.. Major Events of the Year:

• Q1: Bitcoin price reached all-time high, increased on-chain activity led to rise in phishing
• Q2: Pink Drainer announced exit
• Q3: Market adjustment, phishing activities cooled down, but occasional large-scale incidents occurred
• Q4: Inferno Drainer claimed exit, taken over by Angel

💰 Chain & Asset Analysis:

• ETH chain dominated with 85.3% of large thefts
• Staking/Restaking assets: 40.9%
• Stablecoins: 33.5%
• Aave Collateral: 10.7%

🔍 Most Common Attack Methods:

• Permit signatures: 56.7%
• setOwner: 31.9%
• Transfer: 4.5%

⚠️ Essential Security Tips:

• Always verify URLs carefully

• Never sign transactions you don’t understand

• Use hardware wallets for large amounts

• Enable security tools

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Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal on X posted that Coinbase obtained unredacted documents between the US FDIC and US banks; shows a coordinated effort to stop crypto activity. Grewal calls for congressional hearings, alleging these actions are part of ‘Operation Chokepoint 2.0’ to restrict crypto industry growth.

We finally got the unredacted OCP 2.0 letters from @FDICgov. It took a Court order but you can now read them for yourself below. They show a coordinated effort to stop a wide variety of crypto activity — everything from basic BTC transactions to more complex offerings.

Note that FDIC magically found TWO more pause letters in this search after saying before that it had complied with an earlier Court order. It’s hard to believe in their good faith when their sweater further unravels every time we pull on the thread. The new Congress should launch hearings on all this without delay.

FOIA Docs Link: https://www.fdic.gov/foia/history-associates-inc-v-fdic-fdics-redacted-pause-letters-january-3-2025

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See PFOF, dark pools, and how market makers work fundamentally by “providing liquidity”.

PFOF does not require your purchases to go to “Lit” markets which would affect the price if they did.

Your purchases go to match in-house trades/bets or go to dark pools.

This is partially the reason why IEX “Lit” trading and direct registration of shares have exploded in popularity.

If you want a simple video on how this works, Jon Stewart does a decent job here: https://youtu.be/bP74RBTE8kI

If you wish you can watch from 7:02 onwards to see a rough diagram of what I’m talking about.

Dark pools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pool

PFOF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_for_order_flow

When shares are registered in “Street name” they are registered with Cede & Co. which is DTC’s nominee name. (Note that the DTCC is a private company and not a regulatory arm of the U.S. Government) DTC is a subsidiary of the DTCC.

Brokers or other financial intermediaries maintain accounts with DTC. The broker holds a sub-account at DTC reflecting its clients’ aggregate holdings, but DTC does not track individual investor accounts.

While the shares are legally registered under the broker or DTC’s nominee (Cede & Co.), the individual investor is the beneficial owner. The broker keeps a record of which individual investor owns what, ensuring proper allocation of dividends, voting rights, and other benefits.

The DTCC board of directors is comprised of executives from the major U.S. banks and market makers: https://www.dtcc.com/about/leadership/board

Does PFOF breach bucketeering laws?

“They”: Banks, market makers, exchanges, brokers, hedge funds, etc.

I would also argue that:

1. They make the laws/rules.
2. They follow the laws/rules when it’s profitable to do so.
3. They have broken the laws/rules numerous times and are fined with a slap on the wrist from the SEC.

Here’s a great one for Citadel Securities (Who have a spot on the board of the DTCC):

https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/fda_documents/2020068778601%20Citadel%20Securities%20LLC%20CRD%20116797%20AWC%20gg%20%282024-1731111606057%29.pdf

“From the start of its Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) reporting obligation on June 22, 2020, through August 28, 2024, Citadel Securities failed to timely and/or accurately report data for tens of billions of equity and option order events to the CAT Central Repository in violation of FINRA Rules 6830, 6893, and 2010.”

Some more:

Man buys 100% of the stock of a company:

https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1320xkhl0443w/naked-shorting-the-curious-incident-of-the-shares-that-didnt-exist

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u/Heringsalat100:

Many people seem to think that marketing Ethereum is only relevant for price but it isn’t. Techies have to be aware that even pretty successful CEOs and politicians have no clue about blockchain technology, maybe not even a glimpse why decentralization matters. They are dependent on people, organizations and companies telling them which chain to choose.

If they are growing comfortable with using other chains than Ethereum because of marketing by these actors it is a net negative for Ethereum the network/project and not just the ETH price. It isn’t a price pumping scheme but a basic necessity to educate normal but influential people with easy to remember and understand marketing buzzwords and campaigns.

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u/Ethical-trade:

Unpopular opinion:

The Ethereum Foundation shouldn’t do marketing.

While there have been many bad choices made by the EF over the years, I’m siding with them on this one.

First off, marketing what? There are 3 main things that could be marketed:

1) Marketing ether the asset

Marketing a token has a name: shilling, and the vast majority of crypto shilling is done by scams. Even most alt-l1s don’t openly suggest buying their tokens.

Also keep in mind that the EF needs to sell eth to fund development.

Shilling eth while selling it at the same time would probably be one of the easiest way to lose credibility to institutions. Clearly a bad idea.

2) Marketing Ethereum the network for adoption

Competitors are very active in this, constantly pushing for adoption, probably often paying for it through artificial partnerships.

The obvious problem here is that we’re barely able to accommodate our existing demand:

Ethereum L1 still can only process 12-15tps on average and is very easy to saturate, making the network unusable for most use cases.

Existing L2s already put blobs at target value. You might say that target will double with Pectra within a couple of months, but remember that Sony’s, Kraken’s, and Deutsche Bank’s rollups aren’t even live yet.

Do you really want to promote Ethereum to institutions for them to build on it, to then see them fail at launching their products because the network is saturated?

Not only have many institutions already started building on Ethereum by themselves, but it’s also still too early to try to onboard the entire world. Our time will come soon enough.

3) Marketing Ethereum’s values

This point is probably the most debatable of the 3.

It would indeed be great if the world saw the value of decentralization and censorship resistance. But based on current metrics, it seems like this is already fairly well understood:

- It’s no coincidence if the 2 most valuable blockchains are the 2 most decentralized.

- It’s no coincidence if Ethereum managed to remain home to 55% of the stablecoin market, 78% of RWAs, and 55% of defi TVL, after years of insanely expensive transaction fees.

- It’s no coincidence if Ethereum has all this crazy institutional adoption.

Truth be told I think Ethereum doesn’t need marketing. The network effect is already past escape velocity. We have barely started to enjoy the benefits of the rollup centric roadmap.

The future of marketing will be done by institutional L2s, when they’ll promote their services to their userbases. Just like Coinbase already does with Base, by adding 7 million weekly active addresses to the ecosystem.

What do you think Kraken, Sony and Deutsche Bank will do after they launch their rollups?

Market it to millions of their users.

Do you think all institutions building on Ethereum have made it public yet?

Fuck no, there are probably dozens of rollups being developed by big brands today, waiting to be announced to keep a competitive edge. And after launching, they’ll market their services to their users.

The recent push for marketing by the EF is mostly driven by impatience with price performance.

But I happen to believe that it won’t be long for this problem to be solved as well.

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2024 Public Goods Funding

Gitcoin

• $10.4M Allo GMV, achieving 69.26% of our business goal.
• 8.2M in matching funds distributed through 105 rounds.
• 141.5K donors made 729.3K donations, contributing $2.1M in crowdfunding.
• 64.64% grant approval rate, with 1,743 grantees supported.

Giveth

• 💸 Total Donation Value: $1,549,258.90
• 📈 Number of Donations: 62,454
• 🫂 Number of Donors: 12,098
• 🌱 New Projects Onboarded: 4,689
• 🎉 Amount of GIVbacks Sent: 12,736,299.26 $GIV ($120,232.57 USD)

Web3 Regenerative Communities - Greenpill Network and ReFi DAO

Just some stream of thought…

Octant deserves to be mentioned along with the heavy hitters but they’ve been on a perpetual 90 day Epoch cycle and I couldn’t find an end of year recap. Money talks and their staking yield is massive. Octant v2 looks like an awesome iteration.

I’m sure it is popping most places and but kinda feels like Optimism is the main layer 2 hub for public goods funding and think what they’re doing with retro and metrics based funding is super interesting. Celo is really focused on ReFi and Arbitrum has been making a big push. Maybe anecdotal, but I’d be curious what others are seeing. Bummer that Public Goods Network didn’t work out. Might have been timing/execution more than a flawed concept but who knows.

The regen space is still maturing but pretty pumped about the broad embrace of collaboration and increasing focus on impact measurement/standards and capital formation/allocation experimentation. So many other regen/education based organizations and projects that are all pieces of the puzzle. Funding the Commons, VDAO, Regens Unite, Bloom Network, 2077, Atlantis P2P, Noun-ish communities and VRBS and flows.wtf, Kolektivo, Crypto Altruism, Breadchain, Climate Coordination Network, Ma Earth, Blockchain for Good Alliance, Public Goods Club etc and DeSci is out of scope for me but everything happening over there…Glo Dollar and other mechanisms like lotto pgf, Flow State and this streaming qf wave, Grant Ships, futarchy, so much shit happening.

Bunch of Greenpill Chapters/Guilds and ReFi DAO Local Nodes are absolutely killing it. Have spent most of my time the last year with Greenpill Network, Dev Guild, and Writers Guild. Still have a lot of furniture to move around, infrastructure to develop and operational mechanisms to polish within Greenpill but 2025 we’re really leaning into the Regen Coordination which was established in 2024 with ReFi DAO and CeloPG, but Let’s GROW dao and probably some others deserve props for really amplifying and contributing to the cause. In 2024 had a round for the organizations, one for individuals, Bioregional Finance, and Agroforestry DAO.

Some top of mind real world impact tools: Impact Miner, Gain Forest, Restor, EthicsHub, Helios, SolarPunkDAO, Green Goods, Silvi, Kokonut Network, Treegens, etc.

So many coordination/governance/impact measurement tools being built like EAS, Guild.xyz, RnDAO, TogetherCrew, Gardens, KarmaGAP, Coordinape, Open Civics, Endaoment, Hypercerts, Open Source Observer, Commons Stack.

Trying to post more often without overthinking it. Would love to see more public goods funding content here. Really is important for Ethereum’s sustainability, culture and competitive advantage. There’s a huge demand for better marketing of Ethereum and I think the regen/pgf space is gold in that department.

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Except from u/hedgemagus on another thread. Context is they want to contribute to promoting Ethereum but don’t know how.

its something I want to work on, I feel like if I’m the one throwing this out there its not right that I dont do my part. Im just not sure what my best offer to fixing this is yet.

You don’t need to be a genius to contribute in meaningful ways. For example I created https://ethereumadoption.com/ b/c I saw there was a gap in what was happening vs people’s perception. My first iteration of this was just a markdown file with a list of links. Didn’t know how to create a website or manage a server, it was just a markdown file hosted as a static site.

If anybody wants to get started on something and would like some support, feel free to comment here or DM.

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The Mutual Fund celebrated its centennial last year. These were the crown jewel of fintech in their day and they predate the SEC which is a good reminder that fintech innovation was entirely possible before the SEC graciously stepped in to protect all of us. Mutual funds gave investors price exposure to an entire sector through a simple passive investment. It’s an early example of using the same bookkeeping system we use for ownership of companies for more abstract financial intentions.

Then in the 1990s Tradfi invented ETFs. These were more tax efficient than mutual funds because buyers could treat income as capital gains and redeem the shares for in-kind assets (which avoids a trade) but most importantly they were natively tradable on the stock exchange throughout the day rather than indirectly through the fund company or brokers after market close. Taxes deferred allow you to compound more money before eventually cashing out. Paying a lower tax rate effectively increases your yield compared to dividends. Fairer redemptions protects the peg and leads to a healthier asset for buyers. The benefits of these changes are undeniable and due to them ETFs have experienced explosive growth.

Since their inception ETFs have been gobbling up an ever larger share of the economy. In the early 1990s at the advent of the ETF, mutual funds accounted for around 20% of the NYSE total market cap. Today, mutual funds and ETFs together account for around 40%. This is in addition to the market cap rising from 36.7% of US GDP to a staggering 208%. This shows just how much fundamental value there is to a financial wrapper around even the simplest financial intent (a basket of assets).

But the blockchain is doing much more than acting simply as a ledger at this point. It does more than transfer value; it adds value by enabling you to express financial intentions. Today you can capture financial upside from any type of price movement you like. There are ways to profit from the price going up, down, sideways, or just being volatile. Defi has already rebuilt most of Tradfi on more technically sound infrastructure backed by more math and less counterparties. This covers everything from decentralized exchanges, to rate-stripping protocols, to options protocols and even some entirely new things like prediction markets, leveraged carry trades, and a fully internet native bond.

Wrapping these financial intents in tokens offers the same benefits ETFs brought to the stock market but once you combine those benefits with the power of finalization you achieve self-compounding, yield-bearing, leveraged strategies underpinning the token that anyone, anywhere in the world can access with nothing more than a swap or deposit. You no longer have to resort to something like this. Uniswap v1 didn’t return a token. Uniswap v2 did; and I attribute this simple fact to its dominance today. The simple act of creating a token for each LP enabled the liquidity farming boom of 2020. In Tradfi when you wrap these things with their own identifier and make them tradable they call it a Structured Product. In Defi, we call it a token. In the same way ETFs are eating the stock market, tokens are going to eat Tradfi. Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees, this is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.

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This isn’t strictly an Ethereum or even crypto thing, but it is an example of the cypherpunk values that are probably a large part of what attracted many of us here in the first place:

https://x.com/DesignItForUs/status/1877014902315086122

A Declaration of Digital Rights, put together by a group of young people to address the real dangers and risks of the online world that is being built for them. Below are a selection of 5 out of their 12 points that particularly resonate with me, but to be honest they are all good, I just don’t want to rob them of clicks by sharing them all here.

If these are values you want to support, then I would suggest you like or share their tweet to help encourage these views.

• Right to privacy: Social media platforms collect endless amounts of data on us. Young people have the right to scroll without Big Tech listening to them on every corner of the internet and selling off that data to the highest bidder. Companies should be responsible for designing social media and AI products that consistently protect and preserve our personal data. Privacy must come before profit.

• Right to user controls: Suggested posts in feed, new shop features, algorithms, endless scrolling, and never-ending push notifications. Whether you like them or hate them, young people have the right to switch the most harmful features on or off, whenever we choose.

• Right to delete: As consumers of digital products, young people have a right to permanently delete our own content and leave social media platforms that are not working for us. Social media platforms should uphold that right, delete our information, and leave us alone. The right to our personal information is solely ours, not social media companies’.

• Right to transparency: Big Tech has thrived off of the presumption that they are above the law. They leverage their power as private companies to profit from our pain, by design, while shielding themselves in opacity. Like any other public goods, we as consumers have a right to fair and transparent products that are responsible to the user and the law, not the shareholders nor the CEOs.

• Right to be protected from manipulation: Like never before, Big Tech has relentlessly leveraged innovation against the best interests of users, manipulating our data and weaponizing our well being against us. Instead of crafting design features meant to support healthy engagement, Big Tech companies have wielded their unchecked power to addict us and harm us while publicly saying otherwise. We have a right to be shielded from these insidious patterns of abuse.

Disclaimer: None - I’ve never asked anyone here to share anything or do anything before, and I am in no way affiliated with this group (hadn’t heard of them until just now), but I strongly feel like I should support potential allies if they advocate for values I share.

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#Daily DevCon #32:

Redefining boundaries in the Infinite Garden

It’s Thursday, January 02, 2025 — day 32 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.

##Summary:

The speaker highlighted the key advancements in Ethereum, such as reduced energy consumption post-merge, more than 99.9% scaling solutions, and cheaper/faster transactions on layer twos. They emphasized Ethereum’s readiness for long-term development based on values of credibility, neutrality, open source, participation, and decentralization. The talk drew parallels to Southeast Asian governance structures and emphasized the importance of nurturing a diverse ecosystem with shared values for long-lasting resilience, likening it to a garden where various circles coexist and collaborate rather than one dominating force, fostering innovation and sustainability in the Ethereum community.

##Discussion Questions:

How can the values of credibility, neutrality, open source, participation, and decentralization in Ethereum contribute to its long-term development and sustainability in the blockchain space?

In what ways can fostering a diverse ecosystem with shared values be a driving force behind innovation and resilience in the Ethereum community, similar to the concept of various circles coexisting in a garden?

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

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

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

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u/FrenktheTank

Ethereum

u/AuspiciousEther

$3438 Ξ €3343

u/TimbukNine

0.03564

u/usesbinkvideo

3,524,775 Ethereans subscribed (+5,043 over two days)

u/Sku

$25k in 2025

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Take some coping pill,

For all extra gas you spill,

Tax return to fill.

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

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We haven’t reached $7500 in 2024 based on my local time zone, Berlin Time, here in Germany. For this reason I am gonna eat a darjeeling tea bag as I have stated.

I have agreed with u/majorpickle01 that I am gonna provide a logbook of my experience! (photos/videos are too risky because of doxxing)

And you know what it is here at the moment? 16:05 and thus … TEA TIME! I am gonna provide the logbook as continuous edits for now.

• 16:07: Water is boiling, preparing tea bag and cup
• 16:09: Put hot water in tea cup with bag; waiting 3 minutes for steeping
• 16:13: Put tea bag out of cup and on a plate; let it cool down for now (too hot to eat it)
• 16:15: tea bag still too hot, waiting
• 16:17: tea bag temperature good; trying to chew on it
• 16:18: Oh dear, the bitterness; the bag material is very fibery; Trying to chew more with front teeth
• 16:20: part of tea bag in my mouth; still chewing on the fibery outer material; the tea itself isn’t bad, though! Even though slightly bitter but better than first contact
• 16:22: Managed to disintegrate the majority of the fibrous stuff in my mouth, swallowed it. Doesn’t really feel like paper … something different … something more fibrous
• 16:24: got the second piece into my mouth, the same procedure as a couple of minutes ago!
• 16:26: There seems to be a thicker part of the outer tea bag material, too thick to chew it. Have to be honest: put it out of my mouth to avoid health risks. (sry. for that)
• 16:28: Chewing on third piece
• 16:29: That one was easier, swallowed it
• 16:30: nipping the tea I got to prepare for last piece
• 16:31: final piece!
• 16:32: I was able to train this three times in a row now! Swallowed the last part!

The only part which is left is completely without tea so I guess I attended to my duty!

• 16:43: Drinking Fujian Jade Needle tea now to compensate for my tea bagxperience 😅

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Happy holidays EthFam, hope you’ve all been enjoying stuffing yourselves with quantities of mincepies and Baileys that you will regret upon eventually sobering up.

Just wanted to touch base in one of the final few EthFinance Dailys to say that it honestly has been a gift to have shared the Ethereum journey with you here for the last few years.

I have never found an open online community that has been so wholesome, enjoyable and rewarding to be a part of, especially in crypto where seemingly every other space becomes a zero-sum game of fake hype, manipulation and general nonsense, EthFinance has been a beacon of sanity and good conversation.

I am excited for the next steps as we move to our new home, and shepherded by the best mod team on Reddit, bring our special something to the wider Ethereum community.

Long live EthFinance.

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https://ethereumadoption.com/

Just take a minute to look at this.

I remember coming to the Ethereum reddits 8 years ago and back then we were dreaming about what is a reality today.

The reality now is that everyone that sees the potential of blockchain and is taking it seriously is building things on Ethereum, which is making more and more people see it’s potential. It is absolutely amazing to see this unfold right before our eyes. The list will keep on growing of who is building on Ethereum.

Becides the success of updates, developers, applications, Dapps, tvl, investments, scaling,… You can see the trend of more and more coming in. - More and more institutions/banks launching tokenized funds, - More and more creating layer2’s to be able to build on Ethereum through scaling, - More and more are seeing the value of Ethereum with the decentralization and security it provides.

When you take a second to see the trend and the direction everything is going, the conclusion is that the future of Ethereum is very very promising.

The ticker is ETH. Happy new year everyone.

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Posting in both dailies.

What site is everyone in the US using to generate their safe harbor plan / transition plan / or digital asset allocation plan?

Looks like CryptoTaxGirl and CryptoTaxAudit (any better ones out there?) have forms you can have fill out. Seems like the three things you need to do before the 1st is, 1) document holdings across all wallets 2) choose between Specific Unit Allocation (if able) or Global Allocation 3) If global allocation, choose method, Highest Cost Allocated First, or Lowest Cost Allocated First, or Oldest Allocated First.

Seems like Specific Unit Allocation is more complex and both forms are for Global Allocation, which allow you to allocate for example the highest cost allocated first, CryptoTaxGirl says “This method would allocate everything you owned you before 1/1/25 in order from highest cost to lowest cost. The highest-cost lots would be allocated first to your assets on hosted wallets then to your unhosted wallets in order of acquisition date, from oldest to newest. This means starting in 2025, when the default accounting method switches to First-in-first-out (FIFO), your sells,trades, spends, or transfer of assets owned before 1/1/25 will pull from your highest cost units allocated to each wallet and exchange. This approach will generally result in deferring gains and accelerating losses.”

CryptoTaxAudit doesn’t seem to have a spot for step 3. And it doesn’t seem like you need to assign your cost basis before the 1st but you need to before your first buy or sell in 2025.

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#Daily DevCon #29:

Evolution of Scams

It’s Monday, December 30, 2024 — day 29 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.

##Summary:

The speaker discussed the evolution of scams in the crypto space, focusing on end users. They covered various scam methodologies such as seed phishing, money doubling schemes, and drainer kits that exploit open approvals to drain assets. Monkey drainer, Inferno drainer, and Angel drainer are examples of prevalent kits that have targeted users. The talk emphasized the importance of transaction simulation to educate users about the implications of their actions on the blockchain. Additionally, the speaker highlighted the sophistication of current malicious techniques and the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between attackers and security measures, with a focus on enhancing detection methods for malicious transactions.

##Discussion Questions:

1. How can the Ethereum community work together to increase awareness among users about the various scam methodologies in the crypto space and empower them to make informed decisions while engaging in transactions on the blockchain?

2. In what ways can advancements in transaction simulation tools be utilized to enhance user education and prevent falling victim to sophisticated malicious techniques targeting end users in the crypto space?

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

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

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

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u/interweaver:

If you were already tracking your cost basis on a per-lot basis (e.g. for Specific Lot, FIFO, or LIFO tracking) then this shouldn’t change anything for you; you already have all the info you need. Same if you were not tracking specific lots, but were tracking at a wallet level (e.g. every time assets enter or leave the wallet, you recalculate the average cost basis for that asset in that wallet, distinct from other wallets’ cost bases for that asset) - just keep doing that.

If you were tracking your cost basis for assets globally, by recalculating the global cost basis for that asset regardless of where you held it, every time you acquired more of it, regardless of which wallet/account it was in, then you will need to improve your tracking to either of the two more fine-grained levels of tracking mentioned above.

For stakers, tbh you really should have already been tracking at a per-wallet or ideally specific-lot level, if only to keep Eth with long-term capital gain status separate from Eth held for less than a year. But if you were lazy with your tracking, you will need to up your game. There shouldn’t be any real staking-specific gotchas there - validators should each be considered wallets, e.g. the Eth in them should each have its own cost basis that you track separately (or even the specific lots of Eth within it), and every time you receive a withdrawal or fee from a proposal, you need to either add a new specific lot to the withdrawal/fee recipient wallet with that day’s cost basis, or update the average cost basis for that wallet.

Overall this is a pretty reasonable change; the only people affected are those who were taking what I would personally consider to be somewhat inadvisable shortcuts with their accounting, and it just forces them to be more fine-grained.

Note that I’m pretty sure there’s a safe haven rule where you can take the cost basis of your wallets as of January 1st (tomorrow) as a starting point; they won’t force you to retroactively recalculate all your cost bases, just to track it going forward in the new year.

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u/crumbumcrumbum:

Long Boring (unless you’re a tax nerd like me) US Tax PSA:

IRS crypto cost basis rules are changing in 2025 away from universal cost basis to per-wallet. While I haven’t quite worked through all the implications, you can help future you by doing two things:

1 take a snapshot of your holdings as of January 1 so you can allocate your cost basis under the safe harbor rule. 1 choose and record your plan for allocating cost basis before the new year. There’s no official way to do this, but various crypto tax sites gave templates.

I like Crypto Tax Girl for a breakdown of some of this and a template to record your plan.

I’ve missed conversations about this if they’ve happened in Ethfinance before. While the new rules seem like they will add complexity, I wonder if the new rules might actually simplify specific identification methods, since you can move the specific coins with your desired cost basis to a hot wallet to sell. My accounting software (Tokentax) does give me info on specific tax lots, but does not tell me which wallet each lot is in. If it did, it would make things easier.

TokenTax support says they’re waiting for more clarity on how the IRS will implement safe harbor rules before building it into their system - though it would be helpful to know the tax implications of trades that happen starting tomorrow. The simplest thing to do, of course, is to consolidate into one wallet today, but there are plenty of reasons not to do that for security, accounting, convenience, etc.

TLDR: if you have more than one wallet, snapshot your holdings tomorrow to possibly save yourself some accounting headaches

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When we first fractionalized the ownership of institutions or companies we gave them a label, units we called shares, and we made them transferrable in a basic way with double entry bookkeeping on paper ledgers that we made copies of around the world and which people notarized the authenticity of. The basic underpinning of stocks hasn’t changed much since the first iteration. Granted, we’ve digitized it and made it accessible to a wider audience, but the digital systems of today have essentially replicated these initial paper systems and inherited most of their flaws. So today I’ll be writing about some of these flaws, the inherent benefits of blockchains in solving them, what we have built today, and what is coming next next in the evolution of ownership and financial intents.

Today we live with a stock market with T+1 settlement which basically means it isn’t even known who owns what at any given time. We live with a system with trusted counterparties where naked shorting (despite being illegal) regularly happens. We live with a system that happens to shut down whenever it isn’t a convenient time in New York City despite serving users globally. That’s before we even touch some of the more egregious abuses of power like Robinhood famously disabling the buy button on a certain stock when a bull run was inconveniencing some powerful people.

One of the most amazing superpowers that blockchains have offered the world is one that we don’t even talk about except in the most technical sense: finality. Fundamentally a blockchain is just a consensus machine that outputs a time-series of events that we can prove the authenticity of. Practically, what this amounts to is a basically incorruptible ledger about anything you like that anyone in the world can access and trust. Finality means that we know who owns what and that once we know this it isn’t subject to change in the future except by the consent of the owner. It’s a guarantee that you can build upon in a non-fragile way.

Tradfi has only ever managed to create the illusion of this. They only ever figure out who owns all of a stock retrospectively. A court can always undo a transaction or counterparties involved in a transaction can fail to deliver. Anytime you get an instant confirmation of a trade from a web2 app that confirmation isn’t real; it’s only an optimistic estimate backed by the trusted relationships of a bunch of institutions you have no direct relationship with, didn’t knowingly consent to use, and which could misbehave at any time.

The difference between a web2 confirmation and a web3 confirmation is an entire court system. The rights carried with the ownership of the asset in web2 are extrinsic to the asset. If the bank wrongly forecloses on your home you are entirely out of a home until you take them to court, prove it was wrongly seized from you, and have the courts enforce your rights. That not only comes at a high cost, but also no guarantees. The financial system today has to not only pay the cost of various middlemen but also underwrite the execution and enforcement risk of every legal obligation we delegate to them. There are also of course countless examples where someone was legally in the right but lost in the court system to someone who was better financed.

Contrast this to Defi. In Defi a lending protocol can receive an asset and generate a loan for you instantaneously. It doesn’t need a court system to adjudicate the possibility that you didn’t own the asset you deposited, that a bankruptcy proceeding a month later from some company you received the asset from might claw back the asset from you, or that the asset has been pledged as collateral multiple times. It has a rock solid guarantee that the transfer of a token means that you and only you had legal possession of the token. Because there’s nothing to adjudicate with a court system a smart contract can function without having to know where you are in the world so it can pursue legal action against you in your local court of law. Also, unlike Tradfi where there is a byzantine maze of laws for intersecting jurisdictions, smart contracts work the same way for everyone everywhere in the world. Just imagine how many lawyer hours will be avoided by this simple fact. This is a multi-trillion dollar value-add to the world.

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Thanks for everything, r/ethfinance. The new year is traditionally a time for looking ahead and deciding how we want to conduct ourselves in the upcoming year. Through resolutions or just self-reflection, it’s a good time to dream about what we want to do with our time and who we want to be.

With this community, we’re simultaneously getting a more literal fresh start. An even clearer opportunity to build a sense of who we want to be, from the ground up. There’s no better time to start contributing the kind of content you want our new r/ethereum home to show off to the rest of the world.

Let’s build a home with the best blockchain discussion on the Internet: technically detailed but accessible to a broad audience. Let’s use our position on the more prominent subreddit to welcome curious visitors, competently answer good-faith questions, be humble and open-minded about Ethereum’s weaknesses, and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the broader blockchain space while establishing healthy policies WRT concern trolls.

Let’s establish a culture that encourages readers to participate, discuss their experiences, and share their knowledge. Whether it’s someone’s first DEX trade, or they just took a few hours to read through the documentation for a new identity protocol, or they want to express a controversial opinion on a new EIP, everyone should feel welcome and encouraged to write up their thoughts.

There is no better time to start a new regular post series about something you care about. Give us monthly updates on the governance activity in your favorite DAO, or try syncing one new EL client every week and share some impressions and metrics. Spy on the Solana subs and each day tell us what’s on their minds, I dunno.

Let’s make r/ethereum great. Happy New Year.

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Happy new year.

Good post to start off the year - Vitalik on X to Elon Musk.

“I admire your willingness to stand up and fight for freer movement of people, it’s an important freedom that all too easily gets thrown under the busd

That said I think it’s valuable to turn down the temperature here, on both tone of discourse and the social media banhammer.

Respecting free speech is easy when we agree with the speech, and hard when we think it’s awful. But the arguments for respecting free speech anyway are the same as ever: the banhammer is controlled by one group today, it will be controlled by another group tomorrow, and every use of it legitimizes further use, and by the end public discourse collapses into either balkanization, monoculture (where the winner will be the guy with the biggest hammer, not the guy with the best arguments) or constant war of all against all.

And it’s worth reflecting on just how much tone of discourse has fallen here over the past couple of years. I feel like a lot of people have been okay with rising aggressiveness because the target of the aggressiveness was one faction that they disliked, but once that beast is summoned, its nature is to look for new targets, and even if you approve of the first target you may not approve of the second or the third or the fourth - as many people have been finding out this week. Literally “first they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist”. This isn’t the kind of memetic beast we want running the show when we’re entering an era of dangerous global political competition and rapidly improving AI.

The role of leaders in setting the tone is really important, and can be used to great good or great evil. It’s not “wartime mode” that will get humanity to Mars in one piece, it’s something brighter - and we should get into that mode today.”

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New sub who dis?

Goodbye for now Week in Ethereum https://x.com/evan_van_ness/status/1874525460060922103

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Off-topic…

Top Ten Albums of 2024

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u/Smart-Ocelot-5759

Eth

u/elixir_knight

er

u/Spacesider

eum

u/FrenktheTank

3

u/_tchekov

3

u/TimbukNine

6

u/hanniabu

k

u/epic_trader

Future dollars

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Christmas is merry,

Blockchain goes well with cherry,

Speculate fairy.

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

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I’ve done some technical analysis (lots of triangles, you probably wouldn’t understand) and I’m pretty sure this “USDT” coin is going to moon pretty soon. It’s competition has been remarkably close in performance but we’re coming up on a major divergence, I can feel it.

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u/ProfStrangelove:

So yesterday I had some questions regarding Microstrategy…

Since I wanted to understand better what they are doing I looked a little bit further into it.

Anyways, like was suspected yesterday, they are raising money through convertible bonds - so if they can’t pay back the bond they issue new stocks to cover the debt - as far as I understand the stock price at which the bond converts is set at the beginning of the loan…
There are also funds that specialize in convertible bonds - normally they buy those bonds AND short the stock as a hedge. So if the company goes belly up they still get some of its equity for the shares they hold but also have made money on the short.

There is a video by Martin Shkreli (yes that guy, I know I am not a fan but whatever) where he goes over MSTRs valuation

https://youtu.be/7zaEJ6MutdU?t=490
(Timestamp is where he starts getting into it, before he pretty much just gathered info from financial statements)

Anyways Shkreli more or less also comes to the conclusion that this seems like a ponzi like scheme.
Also the amount of additional money Saylor would need to raise in the future might become a problem because the convertible bond market isn’t *that* huge…

Microstrategy is also doing some shitty “advertising” calling what they are doing “smart leverage” which is pretty much bs.
Here is another video which goes into why Saylors strategy is pretty much like a pyramid scheme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5LKZ1-6BWM

*Edit*
Ah and another take away by Shkreli was the same as I had yesterday:
Long Bitcoin, short Microstrategy should be free money if done at the right ratio - and one would need to “delta hedge” as the price moves…
Anways I won’t be doing that and just stick to holding ETH :D

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u/Dreth:

From a functional perspective it has most of the relevant characteristics of a ponzi scheme but there are indeed assets backing MSTR stock, the valuation is about 30-40% the price of BTC and the rest is the expectation that saylor can continue to do this + the negligible other business that MSTR has.

My perspective here is that it’s pretty simple, there’s is demand to obtain exposure to BTC through MSTR, and this is the exclusively relevant bit that could justify this premium. Maybe (idk) those individuals or entities traditionally couldn’t hold BTC in their balance sheet, so they instead opted to gain exposure to BTC through MSTR stock.

On a ponzi scheme more and more assets are required to keep it going. In the case of Saylor, this structured trade has been ongoing for quite a long time, MSTR has held BTC through bear periods in deep deep loss. For the trade to survive, no more assets were required through the bear without needing to be unwound.

Is Saylor deceiving his investors and creditors? probably, we can assume that there potentially exists some information asymmetry between what we know and what his creditors think they know. However, as long as the price of BTC holds up and MSTR isn’t much more leveraged than 3x (assuming the rest of the business is worthless) there’s a low risk for this trade to unwind, especially considering that until the bonds expire, we probably have very little to worry about.

Monitoring the valuation of this stock should be extremely important for us to determine how much risk Saylor is undertaking.

IMO the biggest concern to me is that it’s not just MSTR doing this anymore. Other BTC-related companies have followed MSTR’s path and taken on similar debt to do the same thing and their stocks have soared. My guess is that the market perceives this sort of purchase of BTC with debt as low risk and therefore considers that when these companies take that risk, they’re probably going to be doing well in the long run because BTC is expected to continue to go up.

The real mystery to me is what will happen if there is some kind of big flash crash? Saylor has kept the price high by continuing to make enormous purchased. Therefore we could question if demand for BTC artificially inflated by this or if there really is demand to continue to hold up the price of BTC irrespective of the fact that Saylor will continue to buy.

Idk, I also fully expect big short sellers to mount shorts on both BTC and MSTR to intentionally drive MSTR underwater. Right now MSTR is well in profit because their cost basis is 50-60k.

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Sony is building a rollup while retail sells. Deutsche Bank is building a rollup while retail sells. Kraken is launching a rollup while retail sells. Blackrock builds on Ethereum while retail sells. Robinhood builds on Ethereum while retail sells. Staked eth ETFs are coming while retail sells. Visa builds on Ethereum while retail sells. PayPal builds on Ethereum while retail sells. Ethereum dominates on all relevant metrics while retail sells…

…but ETFs see the biggest inflows they ever have. The US president is buying eth.

If you think the Ethereum game is over, please reconsider. This is not a good time to sell your eth to institutions.

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Big shoutout to https://ethdocker.com/ & the team that put this together. My nvme recently died while switching to reth from nethermind (based on the current diversity stats) & i decided to try this out instead of the completely manual set up I had before - it’s unbelievable how much easier this is & how good the docs are

running a node is as simple as installing linux, and running the ethdocker script then going through the config screens

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Mods if this is too far off topic, please remove. I don’t think it is given the direction ties to ETH and crypto as a whole.

I am bullish AF on (imo) the soon-to-be world’s next major stock/crypto hybrid. It is none other than $coin. Okay, okay, hear me out:

1. In 2025, Coinbase will utilize its L2, Base, to either tokenize its stock for more exposure to liquidity (more inflows). Imagine using BTC or ETH to buy a truly tokenized version of $coin directly…or, Coinbase could use Base to provide dividends to $coin holders, possibly in the form of some scheduled airdrop.
2. $coin will enter s&p next year, which guarantees many millions in inflows (and also gives crypto exposure to virtually all investors). Bitwise has made this prediction as well in their recentreport.
3. Coinbase has been doing an insane amount of volume. See overview here. The next earnings report is going to kick ass.

Personally, I think it’s a great beta play to btc, eth, and crypto as a whole. I think the market is totally undervaluing the impact of Base on Coinbase revenues and more importantly, opportunities, as a company. There are so may ways they can utilize their L2 to drive growth and earnings for the company, and that goes straight back to $coin holders. Yes, Base stats are still small compared to Coinbase as a whole company, but Base’s stats having been going wayyyy up this year and most recently. TVL, transactions, developers, volume, commits, etc. Full stats here for Base.

I am going low leverage to slowly continue building my position, with ETH as the collateral. LFG.

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A few days ago I mention that I just bought a trezor safe 3 to transition away from my dying Ledger Nano S: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1hembku/daily_general_discussion_december_15_2024/m27cc3h/

A few people were interesting in my first impressions so here they are.

TLDR: The trezor safe 3 is a great replacement for my Ledger Nano S.

I went with Trezor because I am an open source maxi and now that the newer trezors (safe 3 and safe 5) also use a secure element chip there is nothing stopping me going there. Trezor has been in the space for a very long time so I assume they know what they are doing. As I was not sure how well it will work with my setup I went with the cheaper option (Trezor Safe 3) instead of the more expensive one (Trezor Safe 5). Security wise they are pretty much the same but the Trezor 5 has a touch screen. Just make sure to not get a Trezor One or the Model T as they do not have a secure element chip which makes them more vulnerable to attacks. There is also no Trezor with bluetooth, so if you depended on that, Trezor is probably not for you.

The Trezor 3 has pretty much a similar feel like the Leder Nano S. Pretty minimal design and als the screen is a monochrome screen. One difference is that you can operate the trezor with one hand only. There is also the equivalent of Ledger Live which is called Trezor suite. I do not think Trezor Suite is particularly useful though. I prefer to do my stuff in third party wallets. Setup is similar to setting up a Ledger. You can chose a pin, a passphrase etc.

I tested my wallets with Frame.sh, Rabby and Metamask. One important thing is that the Trezor Suite has to run even though you only want to connect to a browser wallet.

In Frame.sh I can only find my Ledger Legacy wallets and the first one in the Ledger Live derivation path. All other ones in this path cannot be accessed. Same with Metamask. This is a consequence of Ledger not using the standard derivation paths.

Rabby easily finds all my wallets and I can use them perfectly. If you confirm a transaction in Rabby an additional window pops up which connects to the Trezor and through which the transaction is confirmed. It works, but is a bit ugly.

The trezor itself is relatively simple. There are no settings to configure the device itself. No apps you have to upload and choose. The screen is slightly more informative than on the Ledger Nano S and you can actually see what you are signing. Security wise this is so much better than the blind signing on the Ledger.

Your device gets wiped if you input the pin wrongly 16 times, which is much more often than on the Ledger which wipes itself after 3 wrong pin inputs. So if you are paranoid about this make the pin one digit longer on the Trezor.

A big difference is how passphrases are handled. On the Ledger you input them on the device and set a pin to access it. On the Trezor you have to input the passphrase on the Computer using the trezor every time you open it. This can be annoying or if you are on the paranoid side, it could be an absolute show stopper because a keylogger could read your passphrase. It is a very different philosophy compared to the ledger. In my view both have pros and cons. Essentially for both of them is that there is no indication if you used a passphrase on your device or not. Plausible deniability for both.

Overall, the Trezor 3 is a perfect replacement for my slowly dying Ledger Nano S and I am very happy with it. I will probably get a Trezor Safe 5 as well as the touch screen makes inputting the pin so much easier.

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#Daily DevCon #23:

Unified Ethereum vs L2 Ecosystem Competition: Can we have both?

It’s Tuesday, December 24, 2024 — day 23 of our DevCon Ethducation listen-along series.

##Summary:

unified experience across all chains. This requires a common interface, fast and seamless inter-chain execution, and a focus on user security. The competition from other chains like Solana is driving innovation within the Ethereum ecosystem. While there is a risk of decentralization with federations like the super chain, it is crucial to stay decentralized and open source to avoid repeating the mistakes of the centralized web. Vitalik emphasizes the importance of keeping up with advancements in centralized systems and staying competitive in the evolving landscape. Ultimately, the goal is to build a decentralized, competitive, and innovative ecosystem that adapts to the changing technological landscape while preserving decentralization and security.

##Discussion Questions:

How can Ethereum balance the need for innovation and competitiveness with the principles of decentralization and open source development in a rapidly evolving blockchain landscape?

In what ways can Ethereum ensure a unified user experience and seamless inter-chain execution while maintaining a strong focus on user security and decentralization in the face of competition from other blockchain platforms like Solana?

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

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

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

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I made my first comment in ethfinance just over 4 years ago, December 15,2020. ETH was around $580 and was about to start one of the biggest ETH runs I ever seen, by May 11th, 2021 prices would be $4,182. 7.2x in 147 days. So doubling roughly every 20 days. ethfinance is where we celebrated all along the way after a long bear market, 2018,2019,2020 were long years ( I was a lurker back then). I don’t have many friends in person that I could talk crypto with so through the highs and lows of the last 4 years I turned to ethfinance. It’s bittersweet to see the daily going away, it’s been such a big part of my life over the last 4 years, but at the same time I’m ecstatic to see r/Ethereum turn around, and become a quality place for Ethereum discussion again, where we will likely welcome many more generations of Ethereum bulls and builders. Where one door closes, another opens. Cheers to ethfinance. Thank you to everyone that has made it such a welcoming place over the years.

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Coinbase released their 2025 Crypto Market Outlook. I have to agree that the future looks optimistic from this point of view!

Link: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/crypto-market-outlook-5-things-to-watch-in-2025

Stablecoins: Total market cap is at an all-time high of nearly $200B and could move much higher. Why? Because we’re getting closer to the day when their primary use case will be commerce and capital flows, not trading.

Tokenization: Tokenized real-word assets (RWAs) grew by 60% in 2024. Looking ahead, we see RWAs gaining traction across asset classes, from private credit to commodities and more.

ETFs: Spot crypto ETFs shattered records for AUM in their first year of existence, reaching nearly $37B. And potential regulatory changes, such as allowing in-kind creations and redemptions or staking, could stoke further demand.

Decentralized Finance: DeFi’s share of crypto trading volume nearly doubled this year to 14%. Innovations like onchain prediction markets are spurring a resurgence of activity.

Regulation: January will see the swearing-in of the most pro-crypto Congress ever. Stay tuned for clear rules that benefit both the industry and consumers.

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Be wary of your choice in Crypto Exchanges.

2024 is on track to setting new records for the amount of crypto stolen from exploits and hacks. By Q3 2024, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reported that over $2.2 billion had been stolen in crypto hacks—exceeding the estimated $1.8 billion lost in all of 2023.

Here’s some of the big ones:

1. Japanese DMM Exchange lost $308 million (stolen private keys were a plausible explanation)

2. PlayDapp’s $290 million (exploiting a private key vulnerability)

3. Indian Exchange WazirX’s $235 million (successful hacking into exchange account)

4. Turkish crypto exchange BtCTurk $54 million (details unclear)

Source: https://decrypt.co/297206/largest-crypto-exploits-hacks-2024

PSA: Trending again this year are hacks from exchanges. Please carefully consider carefully which exchanges you trust.

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u/johnnydappeth

Ethereum

u/jaskidd05

$3333

u/FrenktheTank

0.0346

u/usesbinkvideo

93,062 hodlers subscribed (+4)

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You better watch out,

Another cycle will sprout,

You better not pout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

96% approval is really something special.

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

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

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

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u/hanniabu:

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

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

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

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u/Itur_ad_Astra:

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

And it’s a big fear of mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/NextLevelFantasy:

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

• Web 3 Public Goods Funding In 2025 W/ Vitalik

• DeepFunding.Org W/ Vitalik Buterin Pt.2

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

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u/doublyrobustlydouble:

Awesome stuff.

One thing that jumped out at me:

56:20 paraphrasing Vitalik:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/Adankairo:

#Daily DevCon #14:

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

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

##Summary:

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

##Discussion Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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u/haurog:

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

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

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

1. Permissionlessness

2. Distributed

3. Geo-economically decentralized

4. Neutral-builder efficient

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

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

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

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u/OyuruKemono:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/TimbukNine

$3917

u/UgotTrisomy21

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

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In it together,

Staking in any weather,

Birds of a feather.

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

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4k strikes back

Revenge of the 4k

4k reloaded

4k - the reckoning

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

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

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

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

TLDR: You are not bullish enough

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

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

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

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

2 - Enshrine the snarkification of ethereum within itself.

WTF is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preconfirmations

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

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

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

Regarding slot times:

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

Which trade-off?

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

With attester proposer separation, we can:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/haurog:

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

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

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

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

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

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u/austonst:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/Bergmannskase:

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

20% bump to 36M is considered safe.

Devs are actively working on a fix for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/lops21:

Nethermind and Erigon increasing default gas limit to 36M

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

Besu will be doing so soon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Daily DevCon #8:

Keynote: [title redacted]

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

Summary:

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

Discussion Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s his main points from his article:

Ethereum is under increasing competition from all sides:

BTC is better money than ETH.

No it’s not.

Solana is a more performant smart contract platform.

No it’s not.

Celestia is a more performant rollup platform.

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

We need to acknowledge the following trends:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/_tchekov

$3895.99

u/FrenktheTank

0.0398

u/5quat

ETF flow ratio 0.56

u/usesbinkvideo

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

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Crypto forbidden,

Best cycle you have ridden,

Keep wallets hidden.

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

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

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

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

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

The catch…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we need to tell our story.

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

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

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

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Lighthouse v6.0.0 released today

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

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

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

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

Happy staking!

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

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

Here’s the grand idea.

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

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

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

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u/mj102500:

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

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

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

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u/Luukiemans:

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

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

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

Shoot the Bear You and embrace the Bull You!

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

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3069.78

u/TimbukNine

0.03478

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Looking for the stage,

The big news on the front page,

Consensus wastage.

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

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

The wait is over! 🙌

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

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

Thread by L2beat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one: 0x08f4ac69d791bbcb0cb9a88372da43dc11a4a26ea5fe49551e347b9a4428b400

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

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

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

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Things are now in motion that cannot be undone

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

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

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

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

But here’s where it gets even more interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Path dependence and balance of power matters

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

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

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

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

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Devcon & Friends Update 3 (Previous)

Devcon Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back at it tomorrow!

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

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

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

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

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

https://grapheneos.org/features

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

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

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

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

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Lodestar v1.23.0 released today

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

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

There are also some performance upgrades and fixes

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

Why am I telling you this? 2 reasons:

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

2. We REALLY need help with reporting trolls.

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

thanks all and big hugs

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2918.54

u/TimbukNine

0.03820

u/ridgerunners

The ticker is ETH

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Popularisers,

Eigen layer advisors,

Turn to despisers.

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

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

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

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

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

In the end, we must imagine ETH happy

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Get to know EVMavericks #9 - YieldDaddy aka EVM 833

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

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

When and how did you get into crypto?

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

How did you make your way into EVMavericks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Devcon & Friends Update 1 (Previous)

Edge City Lanna Week 1

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

First, the broad strokes.

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

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

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

Programming

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

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

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

My Experience

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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I wanna kickstart a fun discussion!

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

I’ll start:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/cryptOwOcurrency:

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

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

https://defillama.com/fees

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

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

Q’s:

1. Is this data accurate?

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

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

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

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u/growthepie_eth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

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

More info on surge.wtf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it… will? Or could?

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

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

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GG22 stats, end of round

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

https://gitcoin.co/grants-data

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u/johnnydappeth

Ethereum

u/benido2030

2501 USD

u/FrenktheTank

0.0361

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Blockchain underneath,

The best asset to bequeath,

The ticker is ETH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fairly significant US crypto tax rule change:

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

So each wallet is treated as a separate tax bucket

Also discussed here

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ticker is ETH.

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Top Achievements of EVMavericks in 2023

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

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

   Example

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

   We had a 3-way tie so all winners:

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Have grown DAO’s treasury:

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

Other notable events:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended First Steps

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

Curate Your Feed

Generally speaking my feed consists of three things:

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

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

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

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

Hands On Learning

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

Defi

1. Money markets such as Aave and Compound

2. Dexs such as Uniswap and Curve

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

4. Leverage such as Gearbox, Defisaver, or GMX

5. Options such as Lyra, Hegic

6. Real world asset protocols such as Centrifuge and Maker

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

Digital Identity

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

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

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

4. Achievements such as Rabbit Hole or Layer3

NFTs

1. Communities such as Bored Apes or EVMavericks

2. RWAs such as Get Protocol

3. Corporate NFTs such as Nike and Starbucks

Gaming

1. Auto battlers such as Axie Infinity and Illuvium Arena

2. Strategy games such as InfluenceETH and Illuvium Zero

Memecoins

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

Depin

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

2. Oracles such as Chainlink, UMA, and EOracle

3. Keepers such as Keeper Network and Gelato

4. Data availability such as EigenDA and Celestia

5. Compute sharing systems such as Golem and Spheron

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

Enterprise

1. Logistics systems such as Nightfall

2. Proof of Authority chains

Foundational Tech

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

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

3. Privacy Technology such as TEE, FHE, MPC

Review Prior Scams

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Devcon & Friends Intro and Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on iO, according to Vitalik:

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

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

Further reading on Wikipedia.

Math is crazy!

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