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altcoin nostalgia series, part 01: Oyster Pearl (PRL)
In this series, I want to take you on a trip through some of the most interesting shitcoins from the past.
Oyster Pearl wanted to revolutionize online advertising and give website owners an alternative and private way to monetize their content. The idea was that website owners could insert one line of code, and visitors would contribute their spare computing power and storage space to support the protocol. In return, they would earn PRL tokens. The data would be stored on the iota tangle. There was also a second coin called Shell (SHL).
PRL was extremely hyped in 2017. Right before the binance listing, one of the team members did some insider trading. The anonymous founder bruno block wasnât cool with that and rug pulled the whole project, minting and dumping more PRL coins.
After that, some team members founded Opacity (OPQ) and airdropped tokens to PRL holders, the project also died. Bruno founded a new scammy project called Akoya (AKYE) and airdropped tokens as well. Of course it died. There were some mental health issues involved ($5,000 banana). Apparently, he was caught on a yacht with safes full of gold bars. Amir Bruno Elmaani got 4 years in prison for tax evasion.
u/PhiMarHal shares a deep dive on the Kyber exploit
But, musing about security in the abstract⌠I have to say, I felt for a long while the engineering in Kyber seemed overcomplicated. I once got stuck in one of their farms, and without the team solving it for me, I would have been screwed. This is different from Uniswap or Aave where you can figure out the contracts on your own as an intermediate user.
Complex protocols have greater attack surface.
Sanity checks like 1-block delays on TVL sensitive actions seem like low hanging fruits to avoid catastrophic exploits. Kills flashloan abuse, for starters.
I get that those are tough calls, how do you implement such edge case checks without hurting genuine composability? But surely there must be some threshold of liquidity past which we have reasonable confidence no legitimate use would occur, because of slippage.
but then again, the concentrated liquidity design implies all of the liquidity in one tick can very well be a legitimate swapâŚ
Basic x * y = k as per Uniswap v2 may have been capital inefficient, yet the simplicity was elegant in more ways than one.
Just wanted to let the good folks in here know StakeWiseâs V3 launch is just around the corner. The V2-V3 contract migration proposal is live on their governance forum and the snapshot vote has reached quorum with 100% approval for now.
Their V3 architecture brings some big advantages, e.g. solo stakers can create their own (private if they like) vault and mint an LST against it. If you want to get a feel for what it will look like, I suggest you browse through the testnet vaults at https://testnet.stakewise.io/ .
It took more than a year since their V3 announcement to get to this stage and Iâm proud to have contributed in a small way myself as well by adding remote signer support to their operator service.
Even though this post may feel like it, I am not in any way affiliated with StakeWise, I just appreciate all of the work that went into this and I havenât seen this be discussed in recent days. This gives stakers who canât stake at home a lot more choice and will hopefully help keep Lidoâs power in check.
u/stablecoin answers some questions about Chainlinkâs CCIP
Does this potentially solve liquidity fragmentation?
Basically it should unlock all possible liquidity on all chains if it integrates CCIP into the protocol functions, Synthetix (SNX) is doing just that for helping to launch sUSD liquidity products on top of Base and Arbitrum I believe. Like many things, protocols need to be built from the ground up or upgraded to support it.
Does this effectively move the security from ethereum to chainlink? or would it be better to say it moves security from a lot of shitty bridges to chainlink which is arguably an improvement.
It more or less just replaces bridges and the biggest security improvement is you can remove honeypots that are the bridge contracts. No longer do you need to store all the assets into one place, with one potential vulnerability always looming. If you attack the Chainlink feeds/CCIP features it is going to be more like to having to attack all the ETH nodes to get your unsanctioned blockchain instruction in. Chainlink node distribution will help secure bridging as long as the feeds are also proven to be secure.
In this twitter post https://x.com/nero_eth/status/1728680630773575956, Nero shows how a lido node operator, p2p.org (run by a lido cofounder), has announced it will start waiting to produce blocks. Thereâs a function called âgetheaderâ that the block proposer is supposed to call at time = 0, but node operators have until time = 4 seconds to help home operators who might have latency issues.
By waiting to call that function, they will get up to 4 seconds more of mev into their blocks.
The impact this will have is theyâll further centralise the ethereum network to orgs who have the ability to still produce blocks while waiting the longest amount of time - home operators or decentralised services would not be able to wait so long because theyâre more likely to fail in block production. People will go to services that give them the best yield in LSTs without thinking about the potential impact on the ethereum network.
Lido literally have a golden goose in their possession, but theyâre killing it. Itâs extremely shortsighted, and it might have horrendous impacts for the rest of us stakers.
KyberSwap fell victim to a sophisticated exploit amounting to approximately $50 million on November 23, as reported by rekt.news (https://rekt.news/kyberswap-rekt/) .
This incident involved an in-depth comprehension of the underlying code to exploit it (u/PhiMarHal reported already the technical details). The exploiter displayed a peculiar level of psychopathic behavior, leaving on-chain messages throughout the exploit to explain their actions. The final message they left was:
âDear Kyberswap Developers, Employees, DAO members and LPs,
Negotiations will start in a few hours when I am fully rested.
Thank you.â
KyberSwap chose to extend a 10% bounty to the hacker, with 90% intended for restitution.
What makes this incident even more disturbing is the fact that during the hack, a MEV bot operator was able to capture $5.7 M from Kyber by frontrunning the exploiter.
The deal has now been struck for the return of 90%, with the remaining 10% awarded to the frontrun bot operator (tweet). Morale does not seem to exist in the crypto landscape.
The situation draws parallels to the Euler hack, evoking a sense of dĂŠjĂ vu for those who have experienced similar events. Notably, the exploiter received a message from the origninal Euler Finance Exploiter wallet, shilling some meme coin (I donât link it).
In the midst of difficult circumstances, it is important not to lose hope and to expect the best possible outcome. Christmas is soon. Speaking from the experiance as a victim of the Euler hack myself, navigating the aftermath wonât be easy.
I hope those among our community who have been impacted by the Ethfinancier incident can navigate through their losses with resilience (comments in the daily). Resilience and risk management remains a key virtue in the crypto realm. Remember, donât put all your eggs or ETH in one defi protocol.
u/stablecoin shares news of EthereumGPT and u/johnnydappeth suggests one for ethfinance
Someone built an Ethereum trained ChatGPT for developers and stakers. Looks like you have to have an OpenAI subscription account to use it though, and they are currently paused from new signups.
I built Ethereum GPT, which was trained with the Consensus layer API specifications. If youâre a builder looking to access specific data or just have a question about staking, try my fren:
u/stablecoinâs post today got me thinking about developing an EthFinanceGPT that can answer newcomersâ questions, respond to FAQs, dispel FUDs, and overall encapsulate the spirit of EthFinance to provide unbiased guidance. For those of you who donât know, GPTs are specialized tools capable of retrieving facts from an external knowledge base. This allows LLMs to utilize that information to generate answers. They can also follow instructions provided by the creator and have API access, as well as internet access, including an image generation tool.
We have a plethora of content that can serve as the knowledge base, such as the Daily Doots, the EVMavericks Discord, ETF forums, blog posts by prominent users, educational content, discussions on decentralization, tokenomics, technical analysis, Twitter posts, and even memes. A curated knowledge base can be provided to a community-funded GPT, and perhaps even a Reddit bot could be created to interact with this GPT through posts.
Unfortunately, I only have time to read through the dailies, so I wonât be able to spearhead this effort. However, if someone else is interested in pursuing this, please feel free to do so.
u/ajmonkfish brings very sad news from a long time contributor and later explains how it happened
Welp guys, itâs been fun, looks like my private key was compromised and my wallet was drained. No idea how my key got compromised.
About 7 hours ago (fast asleep at this time) some crook opened up my wallet, drained my aave position and absconded with about 15 eth and 600 dollars worth of shitcoins.
Thank you all very much for your kind words and advice.
In case you missed my earlier post, my wallet got drained by a nasty man and unfortunately I had 15 eth in an aave position and about 800 dollars of shitcoins I had recently fomoed into.
Gone, never to be seen again.
I have a separate PC for crypto stuff and I thought this was enough to keep me safe.
Wrong. So very wrong.
I clicked on a dodgy âupdate chromeâ link on my work laptop yesterday, not realizing that I had sync turned on in chrome, meaning metamask (and my seed phrase vault) were on there.
Thatâs the only way I can think this has happened.
Please, use me as a cautionary tale and be more careful with your crypto.
Hereâs the address that got drained in the wee hours of this morning and when I was getting my kids ready for school/nursery.
Feel free to do some sleuthing, itâs beyond me Iâm afraid.
Peace.
u/timmerwb reminds us how tried and tested cold wallet seed phrases are for security and u/theethmeister shares their own diversification strategy for secure storage
At risk of tediously adding to the security discussion, risk is always an interesting subject. YMMV but in the several years Iâve been involved in crypto, IIRC, among all the countless losses, hacks, exploits, compromises and thefts that have occurred, of between 4 and 9 $figures in value, (and some of which have sadly involved members of our community), I donât believe a single one has involved the loss, discovery or theft of a physical passphrase, including a physical hardware wallet. Itâs worth adding that during the Ledger leak, which included numerous active names and address (lol - itâs still hard to believe), there was mucho concern about wrench attacks. Again, AFAIK, not a single compromise occurred directly because of that leak, and not a single physical theft was attempted (although clearly email addresses got phished to death after that).
As such, the risk of loss is overwhelmingly associated with getting phished, or (usually mistakenly) storing credentials, including CEX accounts, on hot computers. For most people, best practice and good basic digital hygiene will ensure your crypto is safe.
Remember that security is an on-going process. If you create a new wallet, generating the seed or passwords is not the first step. You should already know what the wallet will be used for, the associated risks, how you are going to secure it and how you will maintain that security. Donât be tempted to âjot downâ the seed temporarily etc. Give yourself time to learn and understand the process before committing funds. Stay safe out there.
To add to the discussion below about crypto security, my personal approach is to have about 20% in CEX and the rest split up among several (hardware) wallets, so if any single wallet gets compromised I can somewhat triangulate the cause of the hack. If you use Trezor you can create multiple wallets on one device using the passphrase function which in concept should protect you if your main seed phrase gets leaked or discovered.
If you do need to use Metamask you can create a separate wallet solely for your Trezor and donât have to store your seeds in an online vault. This should maintain the security of the hardware wallet while also allowing interoperability with dapps. Unfortunately Metamask seems to be the most compatible with dapps but because itâs the most popular is a highly visible target for hackers/viruses.
Lastly, as to my CEX allocation I know ânot your keys, not your coinsâ but having a sizeable amount gives me a higher transaction and withdrawal limit. Also if I need to liquidate assets quickly I can do so on my phone without having to tinker with my Trezor. Knocks on wood I havenât had to re-verify my account and perform KYC for the past 4 years. Always make sure to whitelist your withdrawal addresses.
A cryptocurrency is more than just an economic platform. Even though it has properties as some commodities itâs not just a commodity. Ideally there is a purpose, values and culture.
Beside the protocol we need the social consensus. People that keep up the values such as decentralization. In that sense itâs like a religion. People need to believe in it. And in order for people to believe certain properties need to be satisfied. And when you believe in something you naturally start to evangelize.
Whatever Vitalik has said in public was genuine and well thought through. There are so many people that speak for Ethereum and hold up its values. Whenever somebody of these does something harmful the community holds them accountable.
In my view the same standards are not met by other cryptocurrencies, definitely not by Soylano.
Ethereum has a soul. Itâs more than just an ultrasound decentralized smart contract platform.
And for these reasons it has cultural relevance. A tokenized meme very often derives its value from being on Ethereum. And everyone who creates digital art wants to have it issued on the most pristine platform.
Iâm certainly among the worst people to keep up these values. But I do rest assured because I know that there are many other people better than me precisely doing that and theyâre doing it very well.
So all this cultural relevance, this community ethos and these people that have conviction and believe in Ethereum make me bullish long term. Because in the end precisely these values is all we need to succeed. Roar đŚ!
u/DegenKoloToure updates on the Kyber exploit and u/_WebOfTrust shares the latest message>
"Dear Kyberswap Executives, Employees, Token Holders and LPs,
I said I was willing to negotiate. In return, I have received (mostly) threats, deadlines, and general unfriendliness from the executive team. Thatâs ok, I donât mind.
I have prepared a statement concerning our (potential) treaty. I plan to release it on Nov. 30 at Noon UTC, sharp.
Under the assumption that I am treated with further hostility, we can reschedule for a later date, when we all feel more civil. You need only say the word.
OkeyâŚthis is a must read. New message from Kyber exploiter, their demands are not like others we have seen and interested to see how the story developed.
Between Hacker and Kyber, users funds are at stake.
I thank you for your attention and patience during this uncertain time for Kyber (the protocol/DAO) as well as Kyber (the company). Below I have delineated a treaty for us to agree to.
My demands are as follows:
Complete executive control over Kyber (the company)
Temporary full authority and ownership over the governance mechanism (KyberDAO) in order to enact legislative changes. My current wallet address is fine for this.
All documents and information related to company / protocol formation, structure, operation, revenues, profits, expenses, assets, liabilities, investors, salaries, etc.
Surrender of all Kyber (the company) assets. This is both On-chain and Off-chain assets. It includes but is not limited to: shares, equity, tokens (KNC and non-KNC), partnerships, blogs, websites, servers, passwords, code, social channels, any and all creative and intellectual property of Kyber.
Once my demands have been met, I will provide the following:
Executives, you will be bought out of the company at a fair valuation. You will be wished well in your future endeavors. You havenât done anything wrong. A small error was made, rounding in the wrong direction, it could have been made by anyone. Simply bad luck.
Employees, under the new regime your salary will be doubled. It is understandable that many current employees will want to leave regardless. The employees who donât want to stay will be given a 12-month severance with full benefits and assistance in finding a new career, no questions asked.
Token Holders and Investors, under this treaty, your tokens will no longer be worthless. Is this not sweet enough? Iâll go further still. Under my management, Kyber will undergo a complete makeover. It will no longer be the 7th most popular DEX, but rather, an entirely new cryptographic project.
LPs, you will be gifted a rebate on your recent market-making activity. The rebate will be for 50% of the losses you have incurred. I know this is probably less than what you wanted. However, it is also more than you deserve.
This is my best offer. This is my only offer. I require my demands to be met by December 10, otherwise, the treaty falls through.
Additionally, should I be contacted by agents from any of the 206 sovereignties, concerning the trades I placed on Kyber, the treaty falls through. In this case, rebates will total to exactly 0.
Kyber is one of the original and longest-running DeFi protocols. No one wants to see it go under.
To assist with this transition of leadership, I may be contacted on telegram: @Kyber_Director
Just finished a nice run through the woods. It just occurred to me that I am front-running the pounds I am about to put on tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that. Iâm also mulling over my turkey fulfillment thesis and adjusting my risk appetite accordingly.
u/eetherway asks a great question about how we feel about different UXs
To all the experienced blockchain users: As we witness improvements in user experience, particularly in wallet interfaces, do you feel apprehensive when using wallets or dapps that offer a more streamlined, Web2-like account creation and management process?
Iâve noticed that some users, especially in the Influence community, are apprehensive about creating new accounts or using accounts that are set up with an email.
Both Argent and Braavos, the current wallets on StarkNet, that are users interact with, utilize account abstraction, enabling and introducing features that I believe are crucial for bringing the next billion users to blockchain. Yet, this ease of use can sometimes be met with skepticism from existing users. Iâm keen to hear your perspectives on this.
u/Samueth_Peapks is ready to see some non-speculative adoption
Should we be surprised at the speed with which the ecosystem has encountered a new wave of toxic tribal bickering? No, because compared to the end of the last cycle nothing has materially changed. There has been scaling progress but it is not finished by any means, and e.g. UX is as trash as ever etc.
ETFs are said to be around the corner, but the type of demand they represent is the same kind we are familiar with. Speculative, cyclical demand. Only now itâs in a tax free wrapper! Donât get me wrong, the level of incremental increase in demand could be substantial, but i contend it will not change the dynamics of the crypto ecosystem. So if nothing has changed, we should not expect the nature of the next cycle to have changed. One slight difference is that at this time, the remaining market participants are certainly feeling less flush than they were in the heady days of 2021. Hence the rabid zero sum thinking we see amongst us (well, mainly twitter). At this point we all know the drill, some new and useless protocol or project will make 1000x returns for the few people who rolled the dice early, and many more will volunteer themselves as exit liquidity.
Crypto has absolutely nailed the speculative use case; we do not need, and personally I am not interested in, any more. Games, quests, ponzis, whatever it is, it is all ultimately a waste of time, representing only a desperate grab for each others capital. What I think we crave, and what I am sitting here quietly waiting for, is utility. Yes, this is a 2017 era discussion, but nothing has changed since then. Large, non-speculative, non cyclical, fucking boring. Something that you would do anyway, even in a bear market, or if fees have increased a bit. Something that does not require a funny name for people to use. Something that companies or people will use due to economic gravity rather than hoping number goes up.
Are these use cases possible? I believe so, so I guess I was incorrect to say that I am done with speculation. Iâm still hopeful that blockchains can be used for e.g. supply chains, or something else like that. Why? because with something like this, crypto potentially has the ability to translate economies of scale away from large corporations, and to empower small businesses. Fewer bosses - ace! Not zero sum - ace!
Not all problems need to be solved to open up utility. E.g. a business use case will rely less on UX than a consumer use case. The type of demand I am talking about probably only cares about a few things (assuming the chain being used has the requisite functionality), and secure block space is premier amongst them. Ethereum represents the best potential holistic solution to all of these problems, probably via some L2 solution, primarily because of the strength of its network. Network effects are powerful, if they were not then twitter would be 6 feet under by now. These reasons are why I have read the daily most days since early 2021. I am interested in client diversity, network health etc. Things of that nature are the means by which we create fertile soil for the future. And when the time comes weâll be glad that infrastructure has outpaced the current level of demand in the system.
u/superphiz shares the âStake from Homeâ Gitcoin collection for those looking to donate to public goods which keep the beacon chain decentralised
Gitcoin invited me to develop a bundle for Grants Round 19, and I developed the Stake from Home bundle. These 14 projects make contributions that empower individuals to run nodes and stake from home, and I strongly urge you to make a donation on gitcoin to the bundle. Iâm familiar with all of the projects enough to vouch for them (on varying levels), and Iâm excited for each of them to succeed.
If you donât know how gitcoin funding works: Itâs based on a concept called âquadratic fundingâ, the simple premise is that the number of individual donors guides matched funds more than the amount anyone gives. So 100 people who give $1 each gets matched A LOT more than 1 person who gives $100. The moral of the story is that many hands make light work, so please go donate.
u/haurog shares how his opinion on Lido has changed over time
Yes, economic incentives generally favours centralisation and monopols. That is the way things go. Societies try (or not) to find rules and regulations to fight against this general flaw in most modern economic systems. There are a lot of examples where societies failed to do so and have now very few monopolistic suppliers they cannot really break up anymore. There are also examples were societies managed to stop monopolistic set-ups in their track and these then are generally better off compared to societies which did not manage to do that in these specific industrial sectors.
The case with Lido, I did not really have an issue with them for a long time. My simple approach was âIf they can break Ethereum it was meant to be brokenâ. I did not judge them to be a bad actor in the space.
Nowadays I see them as a pretty ruthless actor in the space strategically gobbling up key figures and projects that make them dependent on Lido and do their bidding. At the same time they are spreading false narratives about why they are destined to win. Like âliquidity begets liquityâ which automatically leads to them winning. What actually happens is that in the background they have actors (Karpatkey anyone?) making sure that steth dominance is not really threatened. They preach open and free markets, but actually do backroom deals to achieve their goal.
They also spread the narrative of being the wall against CEX staking and funnily mention a time where CEX staking had more inflow than them as the reason for it. Actually, this was as far as I remember a just a 2 weeks period in spring of 2022 where this was actually true. Again they are gaslighting the community.
They made so much money in the last 3 years, which is understandable because it is a good product. But now they can simply direct their faucet at anyone they want and more or less buy them, or a project. This is especially dangerous during the bear market where everyone is looking for funding.
Same with the current proposal, in the first sentence the state decentralisation is the goal, but the rest of the proposal is a direct attack on the current relatively okayishly decentralised staker landscape. They love decentralisation as long as it is under their controlâŚ
Do I think Lido should be slashed rather today than tomorrow? No, definitely not, but I see them as a threat for the Ethereum ecosystem as they do not even try to hide behind a nice facade anymore.
The last day of Devconnect! The schedule does technically extend through Sunday, but thatâs just the final day of the coworking space and the ETHGlobal hackathon. I had considered doing a little bit of sightseeing in the morning, but it was raining decently hard and I would have been pretty pressured for time, so I decided against it. Instead I just went straight to the dayâs main event: censorship.wtf .
As you might expect, censorship.wtf was all about censorship: what are the problems and potential solutions, particularly as it pertains to Ethereum of course. The day was literally packed: between 11:00 and ~18:00 there were non-stop 20-minute talks scheduled. Not a single break, you just had to pick which talk excited you the least so you could cut out some time for a bathroom break and snacks. Using acronym âcensorship resistanceâ=CR The content was mostly pretty good:
Juan Benet started the day with a high-level overview of factors that help or hinder in the struggle against modern digital totalitarianism. For example, we have surveillance everywhere, propaganda via modern computing, and social credit systems. These could be co-opted to empower a totalitarian society. To stave off totalitarianism we need education, string institutions, tech for secure communications and coordination, and a strong economy. Democracies are aware of the long-term danger, but are facing some actual short-term risks that they need to balance out. IP stack, CA system, app stores, and DNS are risky. ENS, IPFS, libp2p gud.
Vitalik Buterin talked about hardening the Ethereum ecosystem across the stack. Fun fact: one of Vitalikâs addresses is banned from the main Uniswap frontend because it used Tornado Cash once long ago. Alternative frontends gud. Centralized node providers are scary, we need light clients and muliple providers for a nice 1-of-n security model. Attacks against the social layer are possible but instead of being optimizing for an objecting (âconvince everyone that ETH is badâ) itâll be about amplifying the worst voices on both sides to create a toxic culture. A 51% attack is not the cheapest way to break Ethereum; much easier to mess with IP, DNS, etc.
Sreeram Kannan introduced an observability gadget for CR. The question of âhow bad is censorship on Ethereumâ is hard to quantify but one metric is the time to censorship resistance (TCR), e.g. on ETH you usually donât have to wait too long to get a non-censoring proposer and builder, a few slots, so maybe a TCR of 0-40 seconds? But can we make it better? Proposed tx inclusion rule: when a block is proposed it must include txâs from recent uncles which have not already been included. With that as a rule, it follows that if a transaction is censored beyond a certain time, then >1/3 of stake can be slashed.
u/nixorokish of EthStaker explained that solo stakers are valuable for CR. A critical line of defense, even. Solo stakers make up somewhere between 35-75% of nodes on the network (if I heard that right), providing diversity across geography, ISP, hardware, and software. Solo stakers are engaged and fundamentally care about the network, seen in evidence that they run a more diverse set of clients than most. EthStaker working on getting the knowledge DB in more languages too. Kind of preaching to the choir here.
Sebastian BĂźrgel of hopr covered the topic of IP-level privacy. We all trust Infura from time to time to: deliver correct data, not censor, not track. The first two have been okay, tracking is a problem. Uniswap is bad: even on their IPFS deployment they track your device, addresses, and all your clicks, sending them back to their servers. Even if youâre running on a decentralized frontend, if you connect to someone elseâs EL client for data, they can see what youâre doing, link your on- and off-chain identities, and potentially abuse their position to frontrun whatever youâre doing.
Toni Wahrstätter of the EF examined censorship across the PBS stack. Proposers can censor in their own proposals, or take it further and not attest to certain blocks or even try to reorg them. Figment, Kraken, and Celcius are big censoring validators. Relay censorship has gotten quite a bit better since the Merge. Builder censorship on the other hand has gotten very concerning, like 80% censorship. Also examined feather forking on Bitcoin (link below), which lets even a minority miner compel other miners to censor the chain. On Ethereum this attack requires 51% of validators.
In the middle of the day, Mike Neuder of the EF led a breakout workshop where we mostly reviewed forward inclusion lists, discussed the implications, and briefly considered out-of-protocol solutions (e.g. enforced by relays). It was mostly review and getting a deeper understanding of the potential attacks, mitigations, and remaining limitations. I threw a link in the linkydoo. There are some interesting out-of-protocol options too. I covered MEV-Boost+ earlier this week, also possible for relays to enforce proposer-provided ILâs or to just include transactions themselves.
Ed Felten discussed dealine protocols: any protocols that require on-chain transactions to occur before some deadline. These transactions can be censored though a combination of malicious (or bribed via mev-boost) proposers, and reorgs of honest validatorsâ blocks. Censor it until the deadline has passed and you can do some damage. Ed designed a test that looks at the number of missed slots recently and computes with high probability if there has been no censorship.
Mallesh Pai of SMG presented their work on CR in on-chain auctions. They measure CR through the lens of how expensive it would be to censor a transaction. They mathematically model the cost of censorship on a blockchain and analyze the impact on on-chain auctions. In general they think itâs pretty cheap to carry out attacks on them. They suggest that in each slot there should be multiple block proposals, which places the proposers in a sort of n-party prisonerâs dilemma that should discourage censorship.
Justin Drake gave yet another talk, this time on weak censorship. He described his âappend testâ for censorship: if a transaction has been floating around a while and could have been appended onto the previous block, itâs probably censored. Also, the bigger problems than censorship-induced inclusion latency and rollup throughput is the memetic cost. CR gives credible neutrality which gives social legitimacy which gives monetary premium which gives economic security and bandwidth. The idea that Ethereum is easily censored undermines that chain. Heâs optimistic about the combination of encrypted mempools, ILs, MEV burn, and ePBS. Also suggested some application of MEV burn rules to ILs, suggesting that a block would only be valid if it maximizes base fees?
In the final talk, Venkatesh Rao is thinking beyond exit and voice. âCR is completing a transaction someone does not want completed, everything else is yield farming.â When conflict arises, you have the choice to simply exit, or use your voice to participate in debate and discussion. Crypto has had a strong exit bias but CR is primarily a voice problem (not sure I agree?). Exit, taken to the extreme, gives you sovereignty but leaves you alone where youâre no use to anyone. Bitcoin may accept that, but Ethereum probably shouldnât. There is also a tradeoff between efficiency and thoroughness. The Ethereum community can navigate the 2d space there: the exit-voice axis and the efficiency-thoroughness axis. Where do we want to be?
I guess Iâll do a final recap tomorrow. Flying out first thing in the morning back to the other side of the planet. Going to be a long trip.
I think block/mev rewards will be crazy when the next bull starts. If these etfs really are approved, and tradfi money starts flowing in, I want to maximize my chances of winning that lottery. Solo staking I had a 96% chance of getting a proposal every 2 months. Now I have that same chance every 2 weeks. Sure joining the smoothing pool is probably safer, but holding eth as is, is already a lottery ticket to me so why not really play it.
I also re-evaluated the reason Iâm in eth, and thatâs decentralization. I think rocketpool is an essential key to that. By dividing my stake up into as many 8eth pools as I can, Iâm allowing a few hundred eth from other people to also be staked. Looking at reth mints, the demand is definitely there for reth, and with the houston upgrade, I think the demand for node operators will grow. I kinda hate Lido. I think theyâre everything thatâs bad about crypto and capitalism. Un-restrained growth perhaps at the expense of the entire ecosystem. Rocketpool is the opposite of that and I think more people should support it.
The âstake eth on behalfâ thing in Houston is particularly interesting. I can see DAOs finally putting their eth treasuries to work. Also the rpl rewards rework is interesting, because it will hopefully reward/keep those at lower collateral rates above that 10% line.
51% of rpl is staked. The only real sell pressure is from node operators getting out. I thought that cascade would happen weeks ago, but everyone seems content to keep their stake. Even on rewards day it seems like most rpl just gets restaked right back into the systemâŚ
If Iâm interpreting things correctly, most of the remaining un-staked RPL is rpl v1. RPL v1 has basically no liquidity, no movement. These people are just sitting on their rpl, they havenât even converted to v2? That kinda removes a lot more supply from the market in my mindâŚ
u/Itur_ad_Astra thinks weâre stepping into the next era of crypto.
Itâs weird that the market did not move today. Iâd expect one last dump as a farewell. Oh well, thereâs plenty of time for that later. Itâs strange, because I feel what we witnessed today, was the end of the Wild West of cryptocurrency. The Napster Era is over, and soon, with the approval of the ETFs, the banking products, and the inflow of crypto âusersâ, the iPod era will dawn. Nicely packaged, user friendly crypto products, ranging from tokenized stocks (registered and KYCâd strictly, of course) to JPMorgan limited edition Apple^^TM NFTs, barely holding any of the values that make crypto what it is.
The markets will soon start going up, much higher and faster than most anticipate, and I truly believe that Ethereum will be one of the winners. Droves of tourists will soon follow. Most of these people wonât have the slightest idea what âkeysâ are, how you swap on DExes, or even what a smart contract does (Itâs probably something with AI in it).
Those of you that believe in something more than making money, remember why crypto exists. There are some values that are a net good for the world and need to live. The more of those carry over to TradFi, the better weâll all be.
I might be neither a crypto OG or an Ethereum veteran, but it has been an honor going through this bear with you.
Onwards!
u/RickandMowgli shares a collection of thoughts on regulation.
Just a rambling vibes take here. 1) CZ has always been a bad actor in crypto. He proposed rolling back the Bitcoin blockchain (doesnât matter your thoughts on btc, this is a huge red flag of not being decentralization aligned). BNB chain is a centralized scam vessel. Heâs clearly been commingling funds and pumping bnb, been calling it forever and you donât need a lawsuit discovery to see it.
So overall this is a good day for crypto. SBF and CZ characters are hugely damaging to the space. Frankly the CEX world is the 1 place where SEC SHOULD be active and cracking down to make sure FTX like theft of user funds never happens again.
They are also attacking kraken and coinbase for âunregistered securitiesâ which is complete nonsense.
Letâs remember what these securities laws are meant to do. Theyâre meant to provide transparency to protect investors. Instead weâve gotten onerous requirements not at all designed for the modern characteristics of crypto entities that has massively stifled innovation and investment especially in the US.
Everyone remembers ICOs negatively because they were so boom bust but actually tons of innovation came out of them and it democratized access to super early stage investing to the crypto community. Now after the harsh and chaotic securities enforcements pretty much only VCs are getting super early stage tokens. Itâs already a reproduction of the private company market where VC has locked out the huge gains from early stage companies from retail investors.
The best world would be where the SEC protects us from SBF CEX and only comes down on true fraud (bitconnect, luna, etc) in the decentralized space. while allowing more experimental types of daos, etc to exist (especially when they are inherently transparent like many already are).
devconnect istanbul is my first crypto related summit, and due to my location itâs also my first experience meeting with people in crypto community irl
devconnect was huge, filled with people of different backgrounds and interests, startups and independent developers that share their knowledge and vision to different problems. i met many interesting people, such as nice people from zksync (hello jack hamer, albiona, alex gluchowski, sasha vlasov, and many others whose name i didnât ask), cool independent infrastructure builders that iâd rather keep anonymous, ilia polosukhin from near, guys from EF (by the way u/domotheus we didnât even shake hands wtf) and rollups teams. i listened speech of many popular founders and devs - vitalik, kartik talwar, sandy peng, jordi baylina, etc etc
it was so interesting to listen to all these speeches despite the fact that i already knew a lot of what they were about :P itâs all about people that have fire in their eyes and are ready to share all their knowledge to everyone at any cost
i also participated in my first hackathon. unfortunately i got sick in the first day and had to code in the hotel, so i missed many opportunities such as finding help from sponsors (yo zksync your compiler is terrible fix it pls) and generally being inside of this unique work atmosphere, but i still made something. in fact i spent 20 hours straight on coding at my first hackathon ever solo without any sleep while being sick af so i think the fact that i at least impressed judges is already somewhat achievement :)
and all this is in the huge beautiful city of istanbul that charges you with emotions every day and hour. i walked like 25k+ steps there every day before devconnect started and i wasnât even tired. people there are always ready to help you even when you donât ask and donât ask anything in exchange. prices in localsâ shops are always ânegotiableâ if you know your own worth xD public transport is really great with almost perfect coverage, istanbulkart is a great system that helps you to avoid so much brainfuck while travelling
all this showed me how boiling and energetic 24/7 the life in the ethereum community and made me even more confident in that we do everything right. thatâs why iâm bullish!
u/CaptainOfTheGate describes more casual ways of getting privacy on Ethereum
Did you know that there are Ethereum apps that can give you a basic level of anonymity, without having to use a dedicated privacy app? Say you just want to keep people from knowing all your holdings by knowing your ENS name, these would work good. Not so good if you were doing something illegal, as a simple court order could reveal the connection between accounts.
The major apps in this category, I believe, are the StarkEx single-app rollups. You can deposit from one address and withdraw from another. Only the StarkEx operator can see that itâs the same person. For example, see Privacy on rhino.fi for their explanation of how it works.
There may well be other apps in this category as well (let us know if youâre aware of others). For example, Iâve read that ParaSwap allows different deposit and withdrawal addresses, though I donât know if itâs equivalent to the StarkEx rollups in this regard.
You can see all the StarkEx rullups on L2Beat. Use Select stack to filter for just the StarkEx rollups. You can then click through to the individual projects to see how much TVL they have for the token youâre planning to anonymize, e.g. USDC or ETH (I believe dYdX has the most stablecoins and Sorare has the most ether).
Of course, you could use a regular privacy protocol instead. Tornado is sanctioned for US users, however, and others could be in the future, or maybe you just donât want to appear suspicious by using a privacy protocol. I havenât checked, but I assume Tornado still has the most volume. Some other projects Iâve heard about are: Railgun (a lot of mentions here recently), Aztec (highly regarded, but will be deprecated next year as they work on their programmable privacy rollup), Nocturne (new), Firn (sounds terrific but new), and Houdini Swap (seen mentioned here a few times).
Every now and then, I forget how stressful centralization is. Mostly thanks to avoidance. With forgetfulness comes confidence, so I try again, and Iâm quickly reminded of the cons.
I wanted to use Coinbase to hop from a rollup to another without paying bridge fees. Now theyâre holding my outbound transaction hostage, with an enigmatic Pending. Contacting support nets me people escalating my problem to a âspecialist teamâ, which is meant to email me but apparently not in a rush to do so.
Whatâs going on? Who knows. Complete black box. I suppose so are thirdparty bridges, in a sense⌠Yet I find the experience distinctively different. The dynamic changes when you use a protocol with a Discord channel where developers and knowledgeable users will interact with you. Thereâs more visibility into their processes than with a corporate company presenting you with an interface where nothing suggests the exact nature of the problem, and support is outsourced to a call center where employees might do their best but simply arenât equipped to deal with the matter or deviate from a script.
I suppose that will be my booster shot against sending meaningful sums to a CEX, even as transit.
EDIT: followup, the transfer went through a few hours later. Whew!
We are here, we are few but confident. This is crypto and itâs epic. This is generational craziness that is a unique opportunity.
We should be grateful for this gift.
It marches on even as Powell attempts to tighten and restrain.
Itâs astonishing to watch, I am happy to be here. I missed buying many lows, I missed selling many highs. But my god the thesis is the same as before and donât forget itâŚit is written in stone and it will not change for many many eras. It is beautiful and simple.
Insofar as the disintermediation of a middleman will return value to a party and counterparty, then the marketdemandsthat such innovation take place to improve efficiency.
That is why we are here. There will be many scams along the way, there will be lots of trial and error, there will be SBFs and Hoskinsonâs. But we are here to rush gold in a gold rush for digital gold that will upend the traditional social and economic order.
Greetings from Istanbul! Iâm at Staking Summit to start off my week (and change) of Devconnect fun times. Iâm not going to give as detailed a daily summary as Iâve done for ETHDenver, but hope to give a little insight into whatâs happening.
Devconnect is a collection of independent events organized in the same week and in the same city. Thereâs going to be a general coworking space opening up on Monday and available through the week, but most actual events are only 1-2 days long. Staking Summit is getting started a little âearlyâ, but seems to have gotten decent attendance.
Staking Summit has one stage with a series of talks and panels, a breakout area for occasional workshops, a lot of room for projects to set up booths, and a pretty nice spread of snacks. The event is advertised as being about PoS and staking in general, not just about ETH. I get the impression that some attendees are interested in staking as a financial vehicle, just as a place you can put capital to earn yield without caring too much about what it means. But not too much of that. Saw a lot of familiar faces already, met new folks too.
Most talks were kinda simple. A few things of note:
A panel of investors talked about what theyâre looking for when investing in a staking company; a few of their comments: Any good idea can be copied, looking for ability to attract liquidity. Value of staking is ultimately supported by the crypto ecosystem behind the asset, looking for companies aligned with that. DVT and restaking provide additional investor optionality, but for restaking have to consider how much additional leverage theyâre building into the system. Institutions are still talking about Bitcoin, hopefully thereâs a growing awareness of ETH as an asset, and later the full range of staking offerings.
Michael Hua, researcher at 1kx, thinks that the LST market will continue to get more competitive, and Lidoâs dominance may naturally dwindle. 1) Novel infrastructure offerings: Kiln, Stakewise v3, NodeSet, and better DeFi composability. 2) General market forces: Lido is not the best fit for institutions (e.g. KYL/AML) and we could see verticalization from frontends (e.g. wallets and exchanges making their own LSTs). 3) Unique token designs: protocol value accrual, vampire attacks, etc.
Fisher Yu, Founder and CTO of BabylonChain talked about their system for âstaking BTCâ. They imply that their system allows for trustless deposits, ârestakingâ, and slashing. I donât know much else about it: if it works, if there are major caveats, how you can define slashing conditions on the Bitcoin blockchain, etc.
Eugene Pshenichny, Protocol Dev at Lido, discussed their plans for the future of Lido. Staking router (for permissionless NOs) and dual governance (to give stETH holders some power) were things I was already pretty familiar with. Theyâre looking to make use of EIPs 4788, 7002, and 7521 as they become available. Actually not particularly bullish on restaking. Considering a form of semi-ossification in which Lido contracts could only be modified at the same time as ETH hard forks. Thinking about a way to let validators move their stake between LSTs without having to exit and re-enter (would require an EIP).
(Posted this an hour ago, looks like it got deleted somehow? Taking out the links in hope it gets through the filters this time⌠EDIT: Yep, this one worked. Reddit hates links to conference webpages apparently.)
Obviously donât click my link and just start using it. Itâs the right link but practice some safety and look for an official source.
It works by querying multiple DEX aggregators, comparing their quotes and gas costs and allows you to choose the best one.
They charge no fee, so when you make a swap you are getting the exact same result that youâd get from swapping through an aggregatorâs UI directly.
As for MEVs and sandwich attacks, everyone making trades on chain should be using an MEV blocking rpc.
In a thread about blockchain on Hacker News, a place with high level of blockchain skepticism (/u/hanniabu is there too fighting the good fight), somebody asked me:
Can you describe to me what the main point of âblockchain technologyâ is? What is there to innovate in terms of its core function?
I took the challenge to heart and wrote out this little post. I am worried that one cannot be exhaustive enough, but there it is.
* Transaction throughput
* Efficiency - allowing small scale players to participate in verification and block production.* Inter-chain communication - some networks are explicitly designed as connected swarms of chains (Cosmos and polkadot for example) and some are evolving in that direction outside of the protocol level (Ethereum). How one executes transactions that span the networks is an ongoing research topic.
* Privacy - how to execute transactions in private. How to attest that something is true, say that you have a certain credential, without exposing your account information. Blockchain has been why zero knowledge (and now homo-morphic encryption) cryptography are becoming an active field of research.
* Identity, authentication, account recovery. - these tie into cryptography but generally research on applied cryptography with good UX. For example the first time Iâve seen social-recovery accounts with any amount of usage (now a feature in Apple accounts) was in a blockchain application.
* Monetary research - far from everybody involved in crypto believes that a fixed-supply rare item makes for good money. âFiatâ money is basically a âtokenâ with governance attached to it. This has lead to a wave of experimentation with other forms of tokens - ones that are algorithmically tied to other assets, ones that are backed by an organization, local currencies, etc.
* Organizational research - since smart contracts can effectively be transparent community banks thereâs has been a plethora of experiments with building organizations that manage their own treasuries. Horizontalism, organizational transparency and cooperation is something thatâs been at the core of many crypto projects, the idea being that something cannot be both a reliable public good and controlled by a single party. Itâs not an easy task, but some cool organizations have come out of this. For an example look at pocket: https://forum.pokt.network/t/messari-pocket-dao-exploring-proof-of-participation-governance/3857
In general, even if the blockchain experiment will fail it has given the world an ideological and technical boost.
u/SeaMonkey82 is still the unsung hero tinkering on the testnets
Daily Holesky:
Reported a logging bug with Lighthouse and sproul had already created a PR to fix it.
Iâve been playing with the stakelocal grafana dashboard more, and continuing to provide feedback to metanull. One key configuration change I had to do to tone down the spamming of errors in the syslog was to omit the txpool module from ethereum-metrics-exporter for Nethermind and Besu. This is because Besu doesnât support txpool_status and ethereum-metrics-exporter doesnât know how to handle the integer values that Nethermind returns for txpool_status. Iâve created a GitHub issue for this. Another conundrum I ran into was that the external validator and address links were working fine on my mainnet machine, but on my testnet machine, every / in links was being changed to %2F rendering them broken. It took me a while to realize that I had used the .deb install method for grafana on the testnet machine instead of adding the repo where it stays up-to-date, so grafana-server was still on v9.5.1 instead of v10.2.0. Upgrading to the current version fixed the issue.
Something that was brought to my attention once I had the dashboard set up for all supported client pairs is that erigon is failing to honor the --maxpeers flag, so I reported that to their team.
u/Fiberpunk2077 is trying to understand the implications of EIP-4844. and u/djlywtf has a great reply
I hope they donât mind, but I must summon the great minds to help me understand the implications of 4844: u/domotheus u/swagtimusprime u/Liberosist
I asked some questions a few days ago around this, but I still donât understand what 4844 will do to L2 smart contracts and the data they hold with the ~18 day pruning.
To my very basic understanding, once 4844 goes live, rollups will use a new transaction type (blob) to commit the rollup data to L1 (instead of calldata). However, by using the blob transaction, the rollup data may be pruned/purged after ~18 days (whether it actually will or not is another thing). Iâve read that this blob data is meant for data availability, not data storage, but I donât understand what that means practically.
So this leaves me with many questions of what this means for smart contracts on L2âs, and I canât get my mind around it. I think perhaps Iâm getting confused between historical blob data for any given moment in time and storage of the current blockchain state (e.g., does the L2 store the current state?). Hopefully these dumb questions will help clear it up for me:
Post 4844, if I deploy a contract on an L2, will that be committed via a blob transaction? Or will L2âs know itâs a contract and use calldata instead? If it uses the blob transaction, does that mean the entire contract could be purged and not exist anymore?
If the contract does survive pruning, does it mean the data itself may be purged? For example, if I store an address for payment in a contract, could it suddenly be purged after 18 days and then the address is 0x0, effectively sending payment to the burn address?!
If data in contracts do get purged, does that mean the contract could be in some half available/half purged state if data is written to the contract over periods of time?
Somewhat unrelated, but can an L2 call an L1 smart contract?
I know I must be thinking about this incorrectly, because if any of this is true, I feel itâs going to massively hamper L2 adoption and usability; that, or Iâm missing some other big piece of the puzzle to mitigate this.
I also assume with full danksharding, the data pruning will be greatly lengthened, so perhaps this is a temporary issue?
Any clarity you can provide would be very much appreciated!
nothing in rollups state is ever pruned. currently, all transactions (or state diffs) are posted on calldata and thus are stored forever. when you run a rollup node, you can reconstruct the state yourself from this data on L1.
after 4844, you wonât be able to reconstruct the state from L1 data (unless someone stores all blobs). instead, you follow latest merkle root or anything that belongs only to the latest state (even hash of sqlite database), stored in the contract on L1 and updated each proven batch (ZK proved or challenge time ended). you can be sure that this data about current state is accurate, because it was proven in the past when you werenât around from the data which WAS available then. then, you download the state from anyone with a rollup node. youâll get it if at least 1/N rollup node is honest, because its data will match merkle root or db hash or anything
temporary blobs purpose is to be used by sequencers that prove rollup batch and then update current state âsignatureâ (it can be whatever works, most simple example is merkle root). nodes donât need to store all transactions to reconstruct the state, because they can prove if the latest state that they receive from rollups nodes is actually valid on L1
for example, someone on zk rollup proposes the batch with transactions, sending it in the blob storage. now, everyone has all these txs for the next 18 days. sequencer/s start to generate the ZK proof to this batch, and when theyâre done, they send it on L1 contract, it executes this ZK proof using commitment to the blob (fixed size thing that belongs to the blob and that they can access on EVM; donât ask me how it works this is cryptography magic), and updates merkle root based on what state these txs changed. now this data can be safely pruned and nothing will break, but we also have optimistic rollups that have to wait for the challenge time, so we hold it for 18 days instead of say 2 hours
u/Bob-Rossi provides us an Arbitrum delegate update
Using 100M of ARB funds for âStakingâ passed the temperature check on Snapshot. The proposal would take 100m of DAO treasury and pay it out over holders who lock their ARB for 1 year. I voted no for this, as I donât think it adds much value to Arbitrumâs chain and essentially is just paying people not to sell. Any economic value added is temporary, and likely would be out-performed by other projects. We shall see where this goes, as while it passed, there were a decent amount of no votes.
The DAO voted to start an RFP process for security proposals. I voted for this, as I prefer to see these types of things be standardized when people apply to allow for an even playing field.
The âArbitrum Coalitionâ vote failed. This looked to have a group of delegates to be hands on with DAO proposals. Basically coordination and reviewing of proposals at certain stages. I voted no on this, as some of the council also had a large share of voting power. My fear being it would create a centralizing effect. Iâm not opposed to the broad idea, but there needed to be stronger separate of powers here â ideally those on the council had no voting power. I think this failed as a lot of other delegates felt similar to me.
The STIP grants that pass the yes/no voting, but did not meet the 50 million threshold were voted to be backfunded. Honestly, this was a tough one for me. I wasnât a huge fan of back funding projects, especially because of the precedent it will set. However, IMO the DAO really dropped the ball on the first grant round with how it was set up. Iâm not sure punishing the ones that passed, but failed to be as popular, is really great when itâs more the DAOs fault for a poor setup. So in the spirit of the original proposal, I voted to pass but wouldnât be doing this again if a future round finds this issue. Iâll add, the spend was going from 50 million to 71 million. Which didnât seem overly outrageous, and was actually in line with original ARB amounts proposed until it was reduced from 75 Million to 50 Million.
To those possibly concerned, LIDO did fail their yes/no vote so it wouldnât get funded with this round either.
u/MinimalGravitas warns us of the latest scammer tactic
New scammer tactic on an /ethereum staking thread.
Posted a link to a fake staking service (Block Scape) which they immediately upvoted with ~30 bots. I called it out in a reply. So far so normal.
They then deleted their original comment, blocked me so that I canât report them or reply again and then upvoted the new one. Very annoying strategy.
Stay safe out there, and if anyone wants to do a favour and report the scammer then please do!
[Edit, and of course they are now using their bots to downvote my top level comment calling them out.]
A few days ago I made my âLetâs make ETH Finance a Governance Powerhouseâ post. First of all thank you for the positive feedback both with comments and upvotes! I have been thinking some more about it and even though there wasnât a real pushback, I would like to update it and cut it down to three steps.
Coordinate
Delegate
Communicate
After reading my own post a couple of times, I asked myself. âHow would you respond to this if this was posted by someone else?â My gut feeling: Itâs a good idea, but itâs too complex. We need to start with an MVP for governance and coordination. Hence, hereâs a short âMinimum viable coordinationâ (MVC) update:
1) Coordinate
Once an airdrop is announced, we try to coordinate as fast as possible.
We collect potential delegates from this community. Members can both announce their motivation to be a delegate for the protocol and members can suggest other members.
We publish a list of âalignedâ delegates that are close to this community, but not daily active.
We try to focus on a few delegates to make sure âourâ delegates have a lot of tokens delegated and hence governance power.
Obviously everyone is still free to become a delegate, but if we can achieve to agree on e.g. 2-3 âofficialâ candidates that focus on one protocol, this would have a lot of benefits. My suggestion is also to that the âofficialâ delegates should be delegates for one protocol only. My best educated guess is that the time needed for âgoodâ/âprofessionalâ governance will be up only and in the future being a delegate for 2+ protocols will be very hard.
2) Delegate
Well, this part is easy. We delegate our tokens to our âofficialâ delegates.
Why is it an extra step? Just to emphasize that itâs coordination first and delegation second. Or in other words: I think it would be very beneficial if we all be patient. Donât claim on day one since most of the time the delegation is part of the claiming process. Letâs try to make sure we really had some time to agree on candidates.
3) Communicate
This is happening already, but we should do this as much as possible. Tag your delegates if you have question/ feedback. Or as a delegate: Talk to the community, ask for feedback if you are a delegate.
The delegates are our ears and eyes for that protocol. E.g. I would have missed the LDO proposal, but I am very happy it was discussed here. We need this kind of activity to inform the community, align and coordinate even better than before.
â
I think this MVC is way better than the first one. Yeah, reporting sounds cool, but it might be overblown (and corporate?). And yes, preparation for a potential airdrop sure makes sense, but could also be a lot of work for something that never happens. Letâs try to coordinate ad-hoc when there is a need. If that works out, we can always improve and add more steps.
Airdrops are usually a big news and my guess would be that members that are mostly reading here will come to ETHFinance on these days. By definition I will not know what most of those lurkers will think of my suggest or do when we need to coordinate, but allow me to state this: You are the majority of this community and you all - as a group of lurkers - probably have more governance tokens than the active / posting members. I would really appreciate your silent coordination by reading and silent acting by delegating your tokens to a delegate from the community!
u/jtnichol reflects on how EthFinance dodged a bullet with Redditâs community points
Reddit is sunsetting community points across cryptocurrency ethrader, and Fortnite BR⌠I donât know what the next move will be for the project as a whole, but Iâm still very very happy. We did not get involved with such a centralized mess of points and karma
Moon price dumped big time prior to the announcement also which speculated the moderators had inside her information this was going to happen on /r/cryptocurrency and Fortnitebr specifically.
thatâs all speculation based on a tweet Iâve ever had that. Showed the timing of everything. /u/spacesider hear anything like that?
Double edit⌠holy shit looking through those subs and the amount of fighting and pissed off people over something we all knew years ago, was going to ruin the Reddit experience.
passing up that opportunity was the best thing moderators here couldâve done because it is a complete train wreck now over there in those other subs .
also, Reddit red hats have just created such a catastrophe by not seeing this through or figuring out the token mechanics of it âŚ. they basically told the moderators it was going to be over in a month and that was that. They shouldâve just rugged everybody equally the same time but they didnât.
and just donât understand why they didnât put more effort into figuring out the token mechanics. Who knows it was probably because of all the discord pump groups that are being talked about as well with the vote manipulation. Color me shocked. ⌠maybe it was a regulatory thingâŚ. who knows but there was not enough effort to see it through after such a long, hard road of picking out which layer two to use, etc..
Watch those communities evaporate quickly. I have no doubt they will probably see a good 75 to 80% less traffic because of all the click farm activity and Discord vote manipulation tactics.
u/Spacesider explains his perspective of the Reddit Moons rug as an r/CC mod
Basically, we were both privately and abruptly told by the admins that community points are getting killed and they will be no more in just a few weeks. 1 hour later the admins shared this information to the wider community. So /r/CryptoCurrency mods knew about this before everyone else, as well as the mods also over at /r/FortNiteBR and /r/ethtrader too as they also have RCP. (Reddit community points).
This is really not a good look and I have absolutely no idea what (If any) potential consequences of this is going to be. My personal thoughts on the matter?
Many years and countless hours later from everyone involved, I must say that it is still sad to see it go because this could have been a huge opportunity for Reddit to make web 3 way more mainstream than it currently is. So this is probably going to set things back a bit for us. I guess Reddit are only focused on money though and if it initiatives like this canât bring them in more money (Probably due to rumours about how they want to IPO), then they will be axed to make things look prettier for investors. So probably the entire Reddit platform might go in an entirely new direction.
We did ask if the smart contract could potentially get handed over to the mods for us to continue in our own capacity, but the admins havenât said anything back to us about this.
I guess now that upvotes are not monetised anymore there will be a big drop in comments and in theory an increase in quality, as all the people who participated only to farm karma will now (hopefully) move onto other more productive things. I guess time will tell!
u/silentjxhn shares an excerpt from an artist who praises the advantages of NFT art
I find this so fucking weird. The artists that have branched into NFTs love it from what it seems.
I get 100% of the primary sales. Galleries take 50%. For the entire month of July I sold a teeshirt. $20. [Redditâs Collectable Avatar] program allows me to make art every day.
âŚbefore this project I was pretty against NFTs for all the obvious reasons that most people are. Mainly the predatory, mlm scamming structure that turned a lot of people off to them. But people need to know that this project is far more like patreon, your purchase goes right to the artist. You see an artist you like and want to aid them? you throw them a couple bucks. To be honest seeing the resales was even a surprise to me. But I donât see it that different than any other form of investing, itâs all numbers on a screen to me. I would, however encourage people to not get over their heads and play it safe. Please donât gamble your life away.
I actually intend to recycle my earnings into putting on art shows and installations myself. Iâm sick of begging galleries for attention, Iâm just gunna rent out warehouses and do it myself and invite the public to see. Not only did this program free me from the extreme stress of trying to make rent, it allows me to circumvent the dusty old gate keeping artworld and do what I want to: to show the whole world my art. This program is dope as shit.
u/domotheus does an AMA on statelessness and verkle trees
Iâm currently writing an article about statelessness/verkle trees, trying to do the same thing I did for blobspace where I start from the very ground up to explain the problem and the solution.
I guess most ethfinanciers are already familiar with a good chunk of the âfrom the ground upâ section, but it doesnât hurt to see where some confusion remains. So Iâm trying something here: AMA about statelessness and stuff and Iâll try to answer and itâll be mutually beneficial and what not
u/TheCryptosAndBloods finds an excerpt which sums up an all too common occurrence
Excerpt below from a newsletter I get called The Defi Edge - it is uncanny how exactly it describes me and my behaviour in the last 2 cycles. Like he could literally have been writing my story.
Anyone else do this?
Waiting patiently for the next cycle to (I hope) do what I didnât, the first two times:
âHave you ever heard that it takes roughly 3 Crypto cycles before youâmake it"?
Youâre an idiot in the 1st cycle. Youâre figuring out all the basic concepts. You trust influencers a little bit more than you should.
4 years laterâŚ
Youâre smarter in the 2nd cycle, but you become a little too overconfident. You think, âThis time, itâs different.â Youâre not taking profits like you should and mis-time the market cycle.
4 years laterâŚ
The 3rd cycle. You either âmake it,â or you repeat the same mistakes. Notice the 4 years part.
This isnât League of Legends or Chess, where you can play every day if you want to. The bull market tends to come once every 4 years on average. So, your âfeedback loopsâ are slower."
Iâm surprised staking hasnât gotten more degen light. All you see is like 3.7% APR when you solo stake bluh bluh. Yes, thatâs helpful and thatâs too intellectual.
Why wouldnt we just make it intellectual cause we can calc averages etc etc and move on? well thatâs how I did it too but staking isnt just that for humans.
Let me explain a bit more.
Staking has consistent rewards which are quite negligible unless you are a whale but you get some passive income and that feels stable, secure and good and it can even attract the crowd that does FatFIRE and all that stuff in tradfi.
However, thereâs more to staking. Thereâs a sync committee which is again more stable gains while you are there yet the key part is that itâs random occurrence in oneâs process.
And the ultimate form of dopamine rewarding would be a block proposal. Timing of that is random (yes thereâs a probability the same way thereâs a probability in blackjack or roulette) and on top of that - the reward is random! So you are basically having a chance at winning the lottery (also way better chances than in real lottery) and you get to play it for free!! Well, kind of. You have to stake.
So unless you are a big corporate entity or in a smoothing pool (altho that would still apply to some degree but not so much), just the possibility of having stability (thru regular attestations) + some occasional bonus for doing the job well (sync comm) + free lotto tickets that can be lifechanging (block proposals) !!! I feel like if more people knew this was the case instead of just boring APY part they mightâve been staking purely in hopes of degening in a smart way (since you lotto tickets are free) and helping out the decentralization in the process.
Anyways, im curious what has your experience been like? do you feel some excitement staking or at least whenever you get notifications about sync comm + proposing blocks? if not, how does it make you feel then?
u/anderspatriksvensson is withdrawing their stETH and explains the process
I am moving out of Lido and decided to âWithdrawâ instead of trade out my stEth. They say this may take 1-4 days. Anyone build any good way to more accurately predict when my withdrawal will take place and be ready to claim? Iâm patient but just wondering if thereâs a better estimate somewhereâŚ
EDIT: Little more research. So Lido creates an NFT that is minted the second you create a withdraw request. The NFT is then âtransferredâ and burned once the eth is ready to claim and claimed. So with a little bit of guessing, you can see when the last âtransferâ was and how long it took between their mint and the transfer and guesstimate. Example of one that has been minted and transferred. About 5 days and 9 hours from request withdraw to being claimed. Of course it might have been ready at 4 days and it took 1 day and 9 hours for the user to claim it⌠Anyway, I wait patiently :) I feel better doing a withdraw and knowing the stETH is being burned instead of transferred onto someone else.
Guest appearance by Greg Di Prisco, Co-Founder of Ajna, a noncustodialand permissionless lending protocol that requires no governance or external price feeds.
Thoughts on the victory over Lido in Arbitrumâs STIP round (apologies for a bit of a brain dump):
1) Today - We should celebrate, be grateful and allow ourselves the happy vibes of the âgoodâ side winning. Weâve won a battle, but as I said a couple of weeks ago this is going to be a long war. One of the best ways to build resilience to keep grinding is to pay attention to the rewards your brain gives you when you win.
2) Tomorrow - If you harassed a delegate to get them to vote, or to change their vote or whatever then reach back out to them over the next few days. Everyone likes it when you say thanks, and everyone prefers it when they donât feel like you forget about them after youâve got what you wanted.
If delegates voted no after you messaged them, or even if no one contacted them then why not message them to suggest they take a look in EthFinance of Reddit? Sales teams and political lobbying groups take people out to dinner to keep them on side, maybe our equivalent to that would be inviting delegates here⌠I honestly think that The Daily is a more valuable Ethereum community than any Discord or Telegram group, so why not leverage some of that value to buy goodwill from DAO delegates who have shown themselves to be at least somewhat aligned to the cause of protecting Ethereum L1.
3) Next Week - With Lido losing here, being vampire attacked, and the threat they pose being discussed in multiple Ethereum podcasts recently itâs a good time to press the advantage. Up the âsocial pressureâ (which it turns out can be quite useful after all) by calling out their attempts at spin and damage control. u/hanniabu has set a great example of doing this. Their representative who proposed the Arbitrum request was on Twitter claiming the results were ârazor tightâ, so donât let them control the narrative.
In a dogfight one of the ways you beat an opponent is by overwhelming their Cognitive Load, give them too many things to think about to be able to effectively counter all of them. Lido have a lot to think about at the moment so weâd be throwing away an advantage if we let the pressure up too much.
4) The Future - We need to get more coordinated. Weâve got delegates in lots of DAOs but can we find more? Can we start compiling resources of delegates that might not be part of EthFinance but can be relied upon to recognize the threat Lido represents if they come knocking for funds and integrations? Can we start predicting where they might go next and reach out to delegates in other DAOs before any decisions even get put to them?
u/_WebOfTrust has discussed the possibility of changes to constitutions that would prevent these kinds of funding requests for Lido even coming to the proposal stage, what would that look like and what DAOâs might take it up?
How can we keep respected Ethereum media discussing this? Obviously some members (like u/EvanVanNess) are already working on that, Iâm sure we can try to keep the focus on for some others too. The Bankless guys used to frequent here sometimes and have had a recent episode with Danny Ryan as well as promoted Divaâs Vampire attack, lets praise and promote those positive actions to encourage them to do more.
We need to get to grips with how important votes in the ecosystem work, before the final day of their decisions - it was pretty funny the number of different interpretations as to how Arbitrumâs pass/fail was decided, I certainly didnât understand it until yesterday evening. It worked out fine this time, but we can learn from that and do better next time.
Because there will be a next time. Ultimately I believe that competition from other staking protocols is going to be the solution to getting Lido below 22%, but that wonât happen quickly, and Lido will fight hard to grow as much as they can before other options can catch up. The social layer is not the long term way to get this fixed, but is is a tool we have now and may be the best we have to defend our network for the near future - so lets learn from this victory and hone the abilities we have so that we can hold the line and push back for as long as we need to. Iâve never felt more optimistic that itâs possible for us to do so.
u/Tricky_Troll adjusts the personal reputations of delegators
Governance token holders everywhere, particularly ARB holders or even OP and other governance token holders who delegate â now is a good time to ask yourself if you are happy with who you have delegated your tokens to. After the recent Lido ARB proposal, some names I once knew have either gone up or down in my personal reputation. It may be worth checking all protocols which you delegate your tokens on and check your delegateâs track record and change or speak up if necessary.
Changes of who I see as reputable.
Reputation gain: +++
L2Beat
Griff Green
David Mihal
u/Bob-Rossi (like he isnât already top tier)
Basically all of the University blockchain clubs (Princeton, Cornell, Michigan)
Reputation Loss: â
ChainLinkGod
Galxe
Name and shame/praise baby. Whoâd I miss?
u/RooftopPortaPotty updates us on their project PreservationDAO
Piggybacking on all the recent discussions regarding DAOs here, I aim to provide another perspective.
Two years ago I resolved to, along with the invaluable work of other ethfinanciers, launch PreservationDAO. Our aim is to preserve habitat by purchasing land of significant ecological value using funds generated by on-chain donations.
The landscape of Ethereum has obviously changed drastically since then, but our ideas and general plans were compiled by the great /u/haurog, and can be found at https://github.com/preservationdao/preservationdao.
We were quickly met with a wide array of challenges and obstacles. Some of these issues have likely been solved to some extent by this point.
I will assume that any interested members have read the linked github page. The following will be an attempt to address some of these challenges, and to detail solutions where available.
I personally lacked the funds necessary to get this project off the ground. Unfortunately, this has not changed.
We felt it wrong to launch an environmentally-oriented project on a proof of work chain. Post-merge, this is a non-issue. However, we may still want to choose a L2 to avoid high gas fees.
I spent quite a long time trying to find an appropriate law firm to help create a land-owning, on-chain, 501 (c) (3) organization, to no avail.
Ensuring that the meatspace treasury has no ability to embezzle funds is paramount, and I dont see a clear solution.
With a non-transferable ERC-20(or NFT?) that is distributed to donators, who may then vote for lands to purchase, how do we mitigate sybil attacks?
Ensuring that qualified contributors are able to make their donations tax-exempt is a priority. This project must not be limited to properties within the US.
What assets should we accept as donations? There are many downsides to market selling ETH in order to purchase property.
I implore any interested ethfinanciers to contribute in any way possible.
I would love to see this comment receive significant traction. Otherwise, PreservationDAO can be re-shelved until we have a clear path to success laid out.
u/696_eth shares the potential that JP Morgan sees in this space
They have a video and are doing a 4-article series.
The first one - The Big Shift - was released back in 2022.
Letâs see what they understand.
New web - new rules.
New verification methods that are more secure, trustworthy and easier to use.
Prior to the blockchain and even so far, the digital online world has been copying the physical world leading to many issues around identity pieces:
⢠unsecured communication
⢠inefficient and dangerous practices
⢠stolen identities
⢠much more
Web3 - introduces new possibilities.
They clearly understand how web1 changed the world through e-commerce and how web2 sparked innovation through the rise of social networks and user-generated content.
What about web3? It brings the pieces of:
Decentralized system:
⢠Digital ownership of your data
⢠Ownership of your assets
⢠Flips the relationship between companies and users
& many more possibilities
⢠Adds more cross-platform utility
⢠Adds provenance
⢠Adds immutability
That means web3 can bring another magnitude of innovation:
⢠Streamlining online business models (less friction for users)
⢠Saving time (reduce verification times)
⢠Making proving easier, more secure and private
⢠Reducing costs and unlocking more liquidity (faster and transparent public services)
For all of that to work we need to Update our Digital Identity.
Thatâs where Decentralized Digital Identity comes with a range of benefits:
⢠Sovereignty (you have control and choice of your data)
⢠Security (no points of failure)
⢠Immutable and irrefutable (highly trustworthy information)
While all of that sounds good, itâs a very complex challenge to bring all the pieces together.
This leads us to their second article - Assessing Web3âs Identity Building Blocks - was published sometime in 2023.
First of all, they are reiterating their points from the first article.
But now they are getting a bit more specific and tangible.
Starting with an overview of the digital identity landscape and highlighting 4 essential building blocks.
Identifiers aka everyday tags:
⢠Names
⢠Email addresses
⢠Accounts numbers
⢠Social handles
& many more
Web3 ones are:
â Ethereum Naming Service (ENS)
⢠Turns 42-character Ethereum public address into a human-readable name
⢠Represents multifaceted identity
⢠Includes a variety of blockchains
⢠Utilizes offchain information
⢠Includes website URLs (domains)
⢠All other identifiers
All of that is in one name!
â &Lens handle*
⢠A user profile on the social graph of Lenster, Lenstube, etc
â Other naming services as identifiers (Unstoppable Domains and others)
DIDs (Decentralized identifiers) are fundamental blocks of the self-sovereign identity (SSI):
⢠uniqueness (no confusion)
⢠provability (proof of ownership)
⢠portability (owned by an owner and cannot be deleted, cross-platform usage)
Itâs just a sneak peek and more is coming in the next article!
Identity attributes (attestations of facts or data points):
Examples:
Proof of Humanity (PoH) - Ethereum-based social identity verification system
Soulbound tokens (SBT) - public, permanent, non-transferable NFTs that can represent a personâs digital identity attributes onchain.
Verifiable Credentials (VCs) - A W3C data model for sharing and verifying identity credentials that can be stored offchain allowing for privacy and scalability.
Reputation
It is a key part of oneâs identity and makes us who we are.
POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) is a notable example of this.
Digital collectibles and assets
NFTs contributing to oneâs identity:
⢠profile pictures (PFPs)
⢠digital art
⢠in-game items
⢠membership NFTs
& more
Digital Identity can bring all the pieces together.
To gain scale and mass adoption, itâs crucial for wallets to enable a seamless building of oneâs digital identity.
Account Abstraction (AA) solves some of those challenges.
Combining 4 of the essential blocks (Identifiers, Identity attributes, Reputation, and Digital collectibles & assets) with one another, can form a holistic identity.
Onyxâs experience with Decentralized Digital Identity:
⢠observing the DID space from 2017
⢠identified use cases
⢠built concept solutions
⢠explored digital identity for institutions on public blockchains and experimented with VC and DID technology through a collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and SBI Digital Asset Holdings
⢠remain open-minded and continue exploring other methodologies for a variety of use cases
The conclusion of this article leads back to their digital identity part of the site.
They have a range of documents on other web3 and crypto-related topics.
It is obvious, that they are not thinking about Digital Identity in isolation as they are aware of nuance niches within web3 such as metaverse, DeFi, and even real-world assets.
They clearly articulate how it can be helpful for:
In navigating the rich space of Web3, JP Morgan Onyx lays a strong emphasis on the transformative power of Decentralized Digital Identity. Their explorations highlight the potential that comes with blending digital identity with emerging tech realms like metaverse, DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi and the tangible world itself.
What else do you already see that JP Morgan Onyx still doesnât?
u/benido2030 and u/Juankestein share their biggest learnings about investing and their resulting strategy
This is one of my biggest learnings: itâs so easy to spend ETH in a bull market. So many cool narratives. So many people making a quick buck.
And to be fair: you should be experimenting because thatâs how you learn. But you should also keep in mind that every buy diminishes your ETH stack. Your long term bet. The asset that will not go to zero next bear.
So I think a budget for experiments works well. Donât spend more than the budget and youâre good.
In the light of the lido threat and their ARB request this community has shown a brilliant reaction. The topic was heavily discussed, delegates coordinated and a lot of great posts have been made. u/minimalgravitas made this post last week and I would like to add some thoughts with regards to âThe Futureâ since I completely agree that we need to coordinate even more than ever before.
Some assumptions before I start outlining my thoughts
This community has a lot of smart and thoughtful people
This community cares about ETHâs values and has developed a strong sense of community and belonging over years
We have existing infrastructure to coordinate, which is a strong foundation (happens to be reddit right now, but could be something off reddit as well)
This community owns sizeable stacks of governance token (mostly airdropped, some bought on the open market)*
We shouldnât focus on lido, but be agnostic to be able to respond to all threats Ethereum is and will be facing in the future
So how can we coordinate more/ better to become a governance powerhouse? I think we need to be structured and prepared beforehand. I also think that for now (letâs call it âphase oneâ) we should also limit ourselves to the current community. Still this will be a huge change and will probably need people dedicating a good amount of time to make things happen.
Step 1: Analysis/ Identification:
This step needs to be done both internally and externally. These steps should happen regularly to be prepared for e.g. an airdrop, possibly every 3 to 6 months (tbd), but potentially also ad-hoc.Internally: We need to understand our members strengths, interests and availability. Some questions I would ask to identify potential delegates: Who is capable of representing ETH Finance as a delegate? Is the member focussed on a certain topic/ category? Is the member a delegate already? Is the member free and willing to work as a delegate? I think people should both be able to suggest other members, but also apply as a delegate.Externally: We need to understand which protocols / categories of protocols are critical to ETHs health, both direct and indirect. Direct in this case means e.g. relevant for ETHâs security and / or decentralization. Indirect could mean because of a large treasury and its economic power.So let me give you an example:I think the EigenLayer airdrop will happen at one point in time in the future. Letâs assume the token is a governance token. A lot of smart people see Restaking as a potential threat to Ethereumâs security. Hence I think we should try to make sure there is (at least!) one community delegate for EigenLayer.We should identify capable and willing members now to make sure once the airdrop happens we can act fast. Personal opinion to make it even more concrete: I would suggest u/hanniabu for EigenLayer delegate because I believe restaking is critical and believe that they have proven themself in the past couple of weeks both on reddit, but also on twitter.Best case we can identify up to 3 delegates per critical protocol so that we can act fast. Down the road we would basically have a table that serves as an overview of potential delegates per category.
Example:
L2s: Member X, Member Y
Defi: Member Z
(Re)Staking: Member A, Member B
NFTs: Member C
Infrastructure: Member D, Member E
Step 2: Coordination and delegation
This step will usually be helpful after a token launch/ airdrop. It basically formalizes step 1.After a token launch announcement we try to understand our âpowerâ, so try to get a feeling for our power by estimating our token allocation (this will be fun, cause it will be so hard to estimate lurkers and their allocations). Based on this we agree on a number of delegates.After that we ask the potential candidates if they are still interested and confirm 1-x âofficialâ delegates. The process? To be defined! Most likely via reddit, maybe an extra post? The daily?Important: obviously everyone is still free to run as a delegate even if they are not the âofficialâ community delegate. Also everyone is still free to delegate to a completely different delegate. We canât tell people to not run as a delegate and we canât force people to delegate to the communityâs candidate.From my point of view the goal of this step is to delegate as many tokens as possible to the âofficialâ candidate to make sure our representatives have power. I think itâs better to have 3 candidates with 1M tokens each than to have 30 candidates with 100k tokens (or even less because people choose external candidates).But why would you do that? This is where step 3 comes in:
Step 3: Collecting feedback
I think we have a big advantage over other delegates: We can crowdsource feedback. Or in other words your delegates will usually understand your position (because you post it or upvote those comments that summarize your position in the best way possible) and will best case act based on the feedback.So what should the process look like? I think there are two possible ways.Delegate driven: The delegate will usually be aware of important topics, discussions and votes. They could either publish their position on a certain topic in the daily or they could ask for feedback if they have no idea/ position yet. I think this is the best scenario, but this might not work all the time. Delegates might not see a certain vote as critical as the community, might not have enough time to check all discussions proactively etc.Community driven: So the community members could tag the delegate to express their view on a certain issue. I think this has already worked pretty well the past couple of weeks and is already part of the community DNA.Based on the feedback the delegate forms their opinion and votes. Important: The delegate is of course (?) free to make the decision they think is best. The community feedback is a suggestion on how to vote, but not binding. If people are unhappy with the delegate they are free to redelegate (see step 5).
Step 4: Reporting
I think it would be beautiful if there was some kind of âreportingâ back to the community. This could be a summary of the votes of the past, feedback the delegate got in the process (cause the delegate will likely be in touch with other delegates), information about other delegates that have a similar stance as we are and generally things the delegate thinks are important.The goal would be to learn what delegates have learned and allow for some âbehind the scenesâ for interested members. This reporting could be a written report, but maybe some delegates would also be open to join the weekly EVM meeting in Discord.
Step 5: Evaluation and (re)delegation
The last step is evaluating the delegateâs actions and potentially redelegation. In a best case scenario the evaluation just results in⌠nothing. People are happy, feel that the delegate did a great job and represented this community well. But we obviously have to accept that this wonât be true all the time. Redelegation could happen if a member goes inactive, votes/acts against the communityâs values/ interest, etc.To be honest I donât know how often this should be done, maybe once a year and whenever there are big decisions? In the end this is what some members have been documenting the past couple of days with external delegates and changes in reputation.
u/_WebOfTrust shares Vitalikâs message to those watching his every action
âRegular reminder:
If you see an article sayingâVitalik sends XXX ETH to [exchange]â, itâs not actually me selling, itâs almost always me donating to some charity or nonprofit or other project, and the recipient selling because, well, they have to cover expenses.
I havenâtâsold" ETH for personal gain since 2018."
A snapshot of all LST holders listed above, any that get added, and current Restakers will be taken on Oct 20th.
Each wallet gets 1 vote for every $USD worth of tokens staked.
LST teams will showcase their merits, declare pre-commitments, and campaign over the next week.
LSTs that accumulate more than 15k ETH in votes will be added to EigenLayer for restaking in the subsequent months, added by the number of votes from highest to lowest.Key Dates:đŤ°Snapshot: Oct 20thđ Submissions by LSTs: Oct 20th-25thđłď¸ Voting by LST holders: Oct 25th - Nov 1
LSTs currently included and whether they are decentralized or not:
wBETH (no)
sfrxETH (no)
SETH2 (yes wen v3)
swETH (no)
AnkrETH (mixed)
LsETH (no)
mevETH (no)
EthX (mixed)
vETH (unsure)
oETH (mixed, index)
It seems the one we should support the most is Stakewiseâs SETH2, so if anyone has that you should set a reminder to vote starting October 25th. Unfortunately thereâs only a supply of 85k ETH since their old v2 implementation has been paused, so thereâs limited voting power.
But the good thing is that you can also vote if you have any ETH restaked. Iâve reached out to Diva to petition for their inclusion.
As for voting - you decide the stage! Decide on which L2 the competition should take place. Cast your vote now!đłď¸ Deadline: October 20th before the contest launches.
How Uniswap Labs (the VC funded company) is adding a 0.15% fee to the (primary) frontend it controls, as well as their wallet app? Itâs 3x the long awaited fee switch for UNI token holders, going entirely to benefit the company.
And they have announced it the day after they pushed through a vote approving $50 million in funding (by dumping the UNI token) for the Labs company by the Uniswap Foundation/DAO - with zero explanation of what it is for or what itâll be used for - just an opaque ($46 million for 2 years please - weâll use it well, pretty please).
Itâs just incredibly brazen. Uniswap is a fantastic product but my god the incentive misalignment between the team and VCs (who want to drive value to the company equity which they own more of and which has fewer regulatory hassles) and token holders is crazy (team and VCs also own a ton of UNI of course but they own more of the company and would prefer to monetize the company, especially since it doesnât have regulatory hassles for them like the token - BUT, they will use their voting power to block any attempts to turn the fee switch on for UNI holders, to avoid aforesaid regulatory hassles for them - all while disingenuously talking about how UNI holders can vote to turn on the fee switch if they want).
Why do people hold UNI anymore after the relentless screwing of token holders by the team/VCs/company?
Like I said - Uniswap is a great product but the team/VC/founders leave awful taste in the mouth with their greed and screwing of token holders. Also there were some very unpleasant allegations about Hayden screwing over early investors and people who helped him bootstrap and not giving them the equity they were promised etc last year - think there was a long Twitter thread by Ric Burton? I think I need to emphasize that we only heard Ric Burtonâs side of the story and every story has two sides, but it all sounded quite plausible and in line with the kind of ethos that Uniswap Labs has now..
u/superphiz self-examines Ethereumâs current situation
Self-examination is critical for long term success. Everyone has been in the dumps about the ratio, but instead of lamenting it we ought to be asking what we can do to improve Ethereum.
Maybe itâs not our fault. Doesnât matter.
Maybe bitcoin just had the first mover advantage. Doesnât matter.
Maybe the value is flowing into bitcoin because theyâll have the first spot etf. Doesnât matter.
What DOES matter is what the Ethereum community and developers are doing in the face of that. Ethereum is 10x more technically sound than bitcoin, so what can we do to stop suffering through the leak?
We can celebrate our victories and focus on the path forward.
Our L2 capacity strategy is really paying off with a rich garden of successful L2 chains like arbitrum, optimism, polygon, zksync, base.. all of which are developing their own ecosystems that feed growth back to Ethereum.
We have quickly moved on from the success of the merge, but let me remind you that we hotswapped our consensus mechanism to improve the operation of the network AND we reduced energy consumption by 99.99%. We ought to be writing this with sharpie markers in every bathroom stall in the world.
The EIP 1559 fee burn mechanism is a complete success. Sure, weâre not ultrasound right now but that burned Ether is gone forever and the exercise in implementing EIP 1559 solidified our ability to develop and improve sound monetary policy.
WE are the chain of innovation and new growth. Practically everything new thatâs happening is happening on Ethereum. The Eth killers have all passed away and bitcoin doesnât have the technical ability to do the things that a smart contract platform can do.
Weâre slowly moving closer to a US legal framework that supports the foundations of cryptocurrency. I acknowledge that itâs slow af, but itâs definitely moving in a favorable direction.
Now. What are you celebrating? What have I missed? What can we do better? THESE are the questions we need to ask as we accept agency over our current situation.
To punish Ethereum, Moloch created a woman named TheCommunity, molded to look like the beautiful goddess Aphrodite.
Zeus brought her to Earth to be Ethereumâsâ wife. He was taken with her beauty and wanted to marry her, despite his developerâs warnings of the godâs trickery.
As a wedding present, Zeus gave TheCommunity a box, telling her never to open it. But as Zeus knew, TheCommunity was degen, she couldnât stay away from the box and the urge to open it overcame her. Terrible things flew out of the box: centralization, MEV, scams, Bitcoin maxis, disinformation, LSTs, charlatans, and exploits. All of lifeâs miseries let out into the world.
As quick as she could, TheCommunity slammed the lid of the box back down. The last thing remaining inside of the box was Hope.
Ever since, Ethereans have been able to hold onto this hope in order to survive the wickedness that TheCommunity had let out.
u/TheHansGruber shares their last week of validating on the Holesky testnet
1 week of holesky testnet operations. 50 thousand genesis validators split across 15 or so giga nerds from the rocketpool discord. I have several thousand running on a Ryzen 5 5560U, 32GB @ 3200, 2TB NVME. CPU is tuned to 25W in the bios. Iâve got the wattmeter hooked up now and will be monitoring total system usage and see what it averages out to. Goal is to tune as low as possible without borking something. Current usage is about 37w, but it just booted back up and is syncing. Mainnet NUCs are around 15w. Still, kinda crazy to think one could secure $150,000,000 worth of the ethereum networkâŚfor 37 watts. Itâs likeâŚa medium sized solar panel and battery/inverter setup could do this for years. Greenpeace eat your heart out.
Something I didnât consider before operating this node was the time it takes to load keys. Itâs basically instantaneous with a couple validators. With several thousand it takes 30+ mins. Gotta reboot? Itâs 30+ mins before everything is kosher again. Ethstats not reporting? A quick eth docker down/up cycle takes 10 seconds. But then 30+ minutes to load the keys. Actually, this makes me think I should try just restarting the execution container instead of the whole shebang and see if that works for ethstats. I am still learning the ins and outs of ethdockerâŚbut it is definitely one of the easiest ways to run a node at home.
Sync aggregation is climbing and nearing 90%. It was hanging out in the 70âs last week.
I have started tracking the data usage now as well. With 1.4 million + total validators on the network, rx and tx is way, way up. Initial estimates are several TB per month, even with not a lot of activity on the network yet.
Mainnet nodes are around or under 1TB/month, depending on max peers and whatnot.
Random side note: about an hour ago one of /u/superphizâs validators proposed a 3 eth blockâŚ.straight to the smoothie pool. Thanks phiz! My non proposing, freeloading minipools appreciate the help.
u/Bob-Rossi urges ARB token holders to vote on a slef-interested Lido proposal
I know DAO governance isnât very sexy, but itâs really just going to take 2 minutes of your time for something I know the majority of this sub feels strongly about. The TL;DR is that Lido is looking to get ARB from one of the grant programs running. They are requesting 4 Million ARB - which is about $3.6 million dollars worth today. Essentially to use it to increase liquidity of the their liquid staking token on the Arbitrum chain. I am voting no (I listed why on the forum, Iâd link but itâs blocked on Reddit), for reasons Iâm sure you can all guess. But Iâll also add their request is for 8% of the entire grant program (was 10%, they lowered it after a ton of negative feedback).
Also, reposting a request from earlier in the week - here. Simply wanted to get it at a different time of the day / before the weekend in case it was missed before due to timing.
u/mikkeller shares their ETH thesis in a standalone post
Has anyone read the new Zeke Faux (Bloomberg reporter) crypto book? Number Go Up?
Judging by the blurb (calling crypto a $3 trillion delusion) and the kind of people praising it on Twitter (lot of mainstream media reporters and anti crypto activists), my tentative feeling is that itâs just a masturbatory fantasy for the âI always knew crypto is scam and Iâm glad itâs finally deadâ crowd.
Can anyone tell me if it is actually worth reading, and if it is just a polemic anti crypto rant (fair enough the guy is entitled to his opinions) or if there are actually factual inaccuracies and misleading content?
For what itâs worth, he did not sound anything like the mindless critics that point to FTX, Celsius, and 3AC as representative of crypto values. I think he raises the very real issues that anyone in this daily thread would gladly acknowledge. The difference is that he thinks theyâre intractable issues, and we think solving them is inevitable.
u/LogrisTheBard describes economic coercive systems
Iâve written several times about economic coercive systems before. Iâm trying to polish a more simple way to introduce this concept and how blockchains help form these systems.
To start with, letâs create an evil smart contract whose only goal is to grow the set of participants in it. The only thing we need for this to work is a way of turning money into something universally unpleasant to a target actor. In the simplest case Iâll just suggest an assassination contract. Next, we create an evil conspiracy of initial participants to fund this contract. All the contract has to do is target some unlucky sap who isnât in the contract yet, inform them of a pending assassination contract, and tell them to join us or die. Joining us includes streaming money to the contract so that the contract can grow faster. If the target dies, then the ratio of participants to non-participants still marginally increases. Now we run this until everyone remaining is in compliance with the contract rules.
This describes a minimum viable memetic rule system. The penalty obviously doesnât have to be assassination. It just has to be enough that for whomever the current target is, they are incentivized to join according to their objective function. The penalty I describe in my human coordination post is economic isolation rather than assassination.
The initial participants expose themselves to economic pain from the fees they pay to the contract. This is the cost of expanding the size of the network and punishing defection. The value-add of this cost depends on the value of each new participant of the network. Due to Metcalfeâs Law we expect a super-linear value-add for each new participant as the network grows. Therefore, there is critical mass of initial participants required to bootstrap such a solution, but once that is reached the stable equilibrium of the system is to dominate.
Contrast this to networks that tend to fall apart or fail to achieve their goals because there is no leverage against defectors. For example, boycotts fail to work because all the negative consequences are directed at the seller, not at anyone defecting from the boycott. Strikes fail when scabs are brought in whom the strikers have no leverage against. A blockchain solution can have universal leverage because it acts on the unified monetary rail, which is quite unique.
Now, in this simple evil smart contract, there is no inherent value to the network (Metcalf value f(n) = 0). But in economic systems, there is. We can layer other rules into this base memetic rule system that can result in a net positive situation for the initial actors on a long enough horizon. The rules can include things like environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, or UBI.
Once widely adopted, the result is a class of fail-deadly system that punishes both those that disregard the coercive rules and those who donât participate in punishing said defectors. There will always be some players like North Korea who choose to try to go it alone. The goal of an economic coercive system is to try to make them as poor and disconnected as possible to either minimize the harm they can do or compel them to join the coercive network and play by its rules.
Btw, if my evil contract sounds insane, itâs basically just taxation + the police that enforce taxation by throwing you in jail instead of killing you. If you say youâd never join such as system, you already have joined such a system.
u/MinimalGravitas has an important Arbitrum delegate update relating to Lido
Thanks to my delegate u/bobrossi for voting already. Ethereum ecosystem OG Griff Green has voted ânoâ as well.
If your delegate hasnât yet voted then get in touch with them. Some of the biggest delegates (like L2Beat and Olympio) havenât voted yet, so there is still a chance this gets passed - which would mean 4 million ARB tokens being used to incentivize Lidoâs LSTs.
Also shout out to u/hanniabu who has probably put the most work into pushing back on this one.
A few days ago I shared Divaâs vampire attack against Lido and someone asked what my incentives were. It got me thinking why people are skeptical of my motives when the things I share seem so obvious to me. It causes me to realize that the criteria I evaluate projects with may not be as clear to everyone as they are to me, and I wanted to de-mystify that by sharing the ways I look at staking projects. Iâve been developing these ideas since around 2018, so theyâre old hat to me, but I want you to have the same framework I have.
Alignment - Is the product aligned with the success of Ethereum, or is it a âbusiness propositionâ? This can be REALLY hard to figure out, but I pretty much listen to the first words out of a project leadâs mouth: Are they talking about improving Ethereum or maximizing TVL & profit? The answer to these questions tell whether a project is a public good or a windfall opportunity for investors. I DO support investor rewards, but they ought to be within reason, and the ultimate benefactor should be the network and its users.
Longevity - I look for projects that have been around long enough to know what theyâre getting into. This is why Iâm a terrible angel investor. Young projects donât have this acumen, and Iâm not smart enough to determine whether theyâll develop it in time. Longevity is one of the reasons I continue to support Stakewise - theyâve continued to grow and develop their product over many years.
Permissionless Node Operation - This is a HUGE requirement for me. Growth of the Ethereum network requires that as many as people as possible run validators and nodes, and I only support projects who allow any person who is willing to put up a bond, or split a Decentralized Validator Technology (DVT) validator to participate. I believe that successful staking platforms should encourage home node operation and provide multi-client support so that the operator can choose from any consensus or execution client pair.
Operators must have a stake - Operators need to have skin in the game, this means that if theyâre staking for an Liquid Staking Derivative (LSD) they ALSO need to have their own Ether on the line. This is because staking is actually a voting process on the network. If an operator doesnât have any stake, theyâre getting paid regardless of whether the network thrives or fails, but if they have Ether locked in that validator theyâre far more likely to make decisions that benefit the network.
Self-Limiting - Any project I get excited about must support a self-limit to 22%. I donât care if theyâll never get there, this is basically a commitment to say, âWeâre going to put the success of Ethereum above all else.â
Minimal Complexity - Iâm deterred by extreme complexity, and adding complexity increases smart contract risk and lowers the odds that people will figure out how it works. Now, to be honest, some projects APPEAR to be complex because theyâre doing something new, but they may be doing this in the most simple way possible. I have to confess that if I hear inclusion of an NFT in a staking pool scheme Iâm generally turned off due to complexity.
Fully Trustless - Staking funds need to be controlled end-to-end by a smart contract, not any form of multisig. This means that when you enter as a permissionless validator, your funds are received and managed by smart contract logic that delegates other peopleâs Ether to you, and when you exit, those Ether need to be returned to a smart contract that distributes them fairly. This process ought to be as transparent as possible. This DOES add REAL smart contract risk, but itâs superior to human controlled wallets.
Open Source - Staking platforms should release code for public audit and as a public good. Our core values include open source software and we must adhere to this as we grow.
So, yeah. These are my values and the ways I evaluate a staking platform. Itâs why my list is so short, currently I support Rocket Pool, Diva, and Stakewise v3. You may be right to point out that my high standards have enabled shady operators to expand more quickly than quality operators can proliferate, but if weâre going to build a healthy network the community and stakeholders must choose the best providers.
u/nixorokish is watching the contentious Arbitrum grants proposal by Lido
Thanks u/hanniabu for making noise about it. i had to go remember if i even have tokens and then had to go check who my delegate was. u/bob-rossi so, uh, which way you votin? youâre my delegate :D
Last cycle peaked in November 21. itâs October 23. almost 2 years. Obviously we didnât know immediately at that time the top was in, but in the end itâs been 2 years of pain, crab and more pain and more crab. A lot of people have left and I can understand them.
I donât know when things will change. I donât even know what needs to change. If we knew it would be too easy, but we all know itâs not. But I am sure that something will change at some point in the future and those days will be rewarding.
I guess those who are left here have survived at least one cycle and learned a lot. I was thinking about a âmy learnings from last bull runâ post. Are people interested? I would be grateful if some experienced people shared their thoughts and learnings cause we probably all make different mistakes and I think that would help me a lot!
u/cheeky-gorilla shares a cool new thing for genesis stakers
This was developed by Personae Labs as a way to âbring more verified pseudonymity into the worldâ, and to help âonchain actors make use of their cloutâ.
I.e. demonstrate your qualifications before wading head-first into the spicy LSD debate :P
Check out Personaeâs Twitter (Nitter) threads on their proof system here:
Guest appearance by James Carnley from EVM File System (EFS), an onchain database allowing trustless access to collaboratively built data and applications. View presentation â
In 1732 the worldâs most populous city* was Ayutthaya in what is now Thailand, with a population estimated at 1 million. It was the seat of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, which reigned from 1351 to 1767.
The city could support such a large population because of the prodigious rice production just up the Chao Phraya River. The kingdom was a maritime power that traded surplus grain for luxuries and finished goods, establishing itself as one of the three great powers of Asia alongside Vijayanagar and China.
By 1732, however, its political power was in a slow decline and the capital was destroyed after a 14-month seige by the Burmese. Today, Phra Nakhom Si Ayutthaya is home to 50,830 people and a UNESCO world heritage site in the old city.
World urban macrodynamicist George Modelski estimated Ayutthayaâs population at 1 million in 1700. Itâs not universally accepted or even knowable what would have been the most populous city in 1732.
May it be remembered, NAY written, that upon the 5th of October 2023, thine fellow Ethfinanciers banded together and struck upon thy holiest of dailies a communal post of shits. A shitty post that shall only be shat every now and then, yet still necessarily be shat. For it was written. And if it was written, then it must be so. And for everyone who wrote thine holiest of words, may you be blessED for all of Ethternity.
In the name of Vitalik, Dencun, And the holy trilemma
Diva has launched two community votes that will have a great bearing on their future:
Self-limiting Diva - Should DIVA self-limit to 22%? As a living network, most aligned parties recognize the value in maintaining a healthy balance of operators. This stewardship reduces the viability of attacks and increases the long term resilience of the network. Providers who adopt self-limiting signal their alignment with Ethereum.
You may also be interested to know that DIVA is in the process of vampiring stake away from the largest LST as Danny Ryan suggested in this very valuable talk with /u/evanvanness. Because of my own desire for conflict avoidance, I wonât say much about it, but you can find details here and I believe that /u/nixorokish is eager to talk about it.
Diva, the ETH staking protocol, initiated an interesting vault a few days ago, where you can deposit ETH, or even better, stETH, and accumulate diva as well as the underlying rewards thatâs included in stETH. When diva officially launches the stETH will be converted to divaETH ,or whatever they decide to call it, hopefully not dETH :). Itâs a sort of vampire attack on stETH, which we obv need more of. So if you sit on stETH, wash off your sins with this one simple trick. The protocol hasnât officially launched yet and there is no UI which shows your farming rewards and such. The short story is, stakers are divided in tranches based on how early they are, and the earlier tranches receive more diva per ETH/stETH staked than the later. This is obviously risky, it is a novel protocol, but at least the staking is done through enzyme, which has existed several years already.
I just read this post thanks to the daily doots. I was expecting something like it, cause it was basically announced in the Empire podcast episode 2 days ago.
I know there is a high chance relays at one point will be gone, cause they will be enshrined. But this will not happen any time soon. So we need relays for some more years, but they donât make any money.
In my opinion relays = public goods. Public goods need funding. Who can we turn to to get some grants to make sure we can keep or even increase the number of relays? Which protocols have (retroactive) public goods funding? Which delegates do we have to pressure to get funds? What else can we do to improve the situation?
I agree - relays are probably here to stay in some form for years. While enshrined PBS would be great, itâs worth reiterating Austonâs point: making it unbypassable by design is a highly desirable goal.
MEV is a latency game, and centralised MEV platforms like relays are likely to always have a latency advantage over an in-protocol gossip network. This delta in latency is a delta in profit, and so if ePBS canât ever compete with out of protocol PBS (relays, SUAVE, etc), excepting significant adoption by staking pools (etc) seems unrealistic. At that point itâs utility in the protocol is somewhat compromised.
My sense is that the EF and community are unlikely to move forward until we find a design that meets this unbypassability requirement. It may well be that the current line of research has truly reached a dead end and a fresh approach is required. Unfortunately, It also creates problems for related ambitions such as MEV-burn.
Central public goods funding in the relay space is fraught with administrative and political complexity. Views over censorship are particularly tricky and fundraising is a bit of a nightmare.
On one hand, Aestus is a relatively baby relay - on the other, we are regularly responsible for ~3% of Ethereum blocks. Who should pay to keep our lights on? It may be that relays need to form a market and charge a modest fee to validators. Iâd be intrigued to know what ethfinance think about that.
u/SeaMonkey82 is going hard testing on Holesky, not all heroes wear capes
Manually configured remote keystores in nimbus v23.9.1 appear to be broken. Log states that the validator is loaded, but it never begins attesting.
--network holesky on ethereumjs now uses the correct genesis, but still seems to be failing to serve deposit logs.
I ended up deleting and recreating the slashing protection database for web3signer in postgres. Having already configured the same validators using web3signer on Holesky v1, none of my validators were able to start attesting when they became active.
Spotted a bug on beaconcha.in. In the Attestation Assignments mouseover for the validator, Executed includes the two Scheduled slots. This was easy to spot when several of my Holesky validators have yet to attest.
I will eventually need to upgrade my storage array for Holesky, but more pressingly, I probably need to upgrade my CPU. With 30 client pairs, the 15 minute load average on my Threadripper 3960X is consitently well above the recommended one-per-thread of 48.
A lot has happened in the last ~36 hours, and there are probably several notable things Iâm forgetting right now. I need a nap.
I really believe in this community. Itâs my favorite place and I love the people writing and reading. But I feel we can do more, if we improved coordination. There is so much (financial, vocal, emotional) power that we are not really using yet.
So what are relays and why are they important? Relays are important for PBS aka proposer builder separation, MEV capturing and specifically for MEV-boost. MEV is every everywhere. Users make transactions and generate MEV opportunities. These transactions are analyzed by searchers, who insert (e.g. add before or after the tx) their own transactions and forward them to builders. Builders collect all tx (from searchers, but also the public mempool) and build blocks with the highest value. Builders then basically forward the blocks to validators (via MEV-boost, a solution outside of the protocol) including the ETH denominated reward they are willing to pay if there block is chosen/ proposed. This is where relays come into play. They relay the blocks and make sure the validator gets paid and the network canât be attacked. As basically always in Ethereum, decentralization is key, so we need multiple relays. PBS doesnât work without relays, but there are no revenues, no revenue share, no nothing for relay devs/ operators. Searchers, builders and validators make money, relays are basically the only infra in the MEV supply chain that we expect to work without getting paid.
There are some theories why a small fee wouldnât work (builders would only use free relays, hence relays with a rev-cut would be excluded most of the time etc.). So in my opinion (retroactive) public goods funding (PGF) is the best way to get it done.
Hereâs where this sub comes in! I would like to
- use this communities knowledge to identify potential sources for PGF
- see if we as a community can influence how funding/ grants are distributed (e.g. if governance tokens we all own can vote for an application)
- use our voices to spread the word about the importance of relays and why funding is essential
â
For example there is Optimismâs RPGF. If Ethereum doesnât work, OP as an ETH L2 doesnât work. In my opinion itâs a nobrainer that u/austonst and u/kudeta (who run the aestus relay) should receive OP funding, but we all know thatâs not how it works. But if our OP delegates (u/liberosist, u/_weboftrust, u/minimalgravitas, u/pseudotheos and more) coordinated, I am sure their voices can make a change.
I have no idea how the EVM treasury is doing, but maybe we as EVMs can come together and think about ways to support relays in general and the aestus relay specifically.
u/kudeta: You said yesterday that applying for all these grants and funding was complex and a lot of effort. If you want me to help, I am more than happy to e.g. sign-up in the name of the aestus relay for the OP RPGF round 3 and / or gitcoin grants. I have never done something like that, so it might not be perfect but of course I would coordinate with you to make sure the aestus relay is presented in the correct way (on every level). Obviously this would be completely free for you.
u/MinimalGravitas wants to see some more community pushback and comments on the Lido Arbitrum grant proposal
Iâm interested in seeing some commentary from EthFinanceâs representatives over on the Arbitrum governance forum with regards to the request from Lido for 5 million ARB tokens to, as hanniabu so perfectly puts it, bankroll Lidoâs attack on the network.
Using the influence we have across different DAOs seems like a simple no-brainer way we can help protect Ethereum from capture. We held off their proposal on Optimism last year, I would love to see the same again this time.
If you donât want your DAO to pay to incentivize the growth of Lido then now is the time to say so.
This is a moment when governance can really matter. When the social layer actually has a decent amount of power. When you can make a difference to the future of this ecosystem.
It takes some courage to put yourself in the firing line, to voice an opinion against one of the most powerful entities in Ethereum. It maybe feels like a foolhardy risk to stand in the way of a juggernaut worth billions of dollars, but the alternative is that everyone rolls over and lets the credible neutrality of our network be stolen away, and with it will go the possible future of Ethereum as the base layer for not just the financial system but for global coordination.
We must not let Moloch win.
The cold war with Lido will be long and hard, and this is just one of many battles, but it is the one we can impact now, and it is one we can win.
Ultimate victory depends on us not losing every battle. It depends on us not giving up anything without a fight. And we must be victorious, because in the long run, without victory there can be no survival for the dream of a future that Ethereum represents.
[Music reaches crescendo, screen fades to black and soundtrack rolls into roaring Merlin Spitfire engines tearing past and into the distanceâŚ]
Damn. Eip 7503 burn and remint sounds amazing for privacy. I donât know how govts are gonna react to this thoughâŚ.. I think the correct answer is âWho gives a f@ckâ âŚâŚ. interesting times though
It is even better, almost any address can be a burn address. You just have to proof that you know a short number whose hash is equal to the public address. This means there is no possibility for the sender to be sanctioned as there is no on chain proof that the address you sent ETH to is a burn address. The receiver side is a different story, there it is as far as I know obvious that the funds received used this scheme. The last all core devs call had a longer discussion about it and one person advocated to be more cautious and not to use these kind of zk circuits on L1 just yet as they are rather untested and previous iterations of similar schemes had bugs. In the longer run this scheme is definitely so amazing and I am a big believer that privacy needs to be part of the base layer.
I was just SIM swapped and robbed of 22 ETH via @friendtech
The 34 of my own keys that I owned were sold, rugging anyone who held my key, all the other keys I owned were sold, and the rest of the ETH in my wallet was drained.
If your Twitter account is doxxed to your real name, your phone number can be found, and this could happen to you.
Earlier today I started getting spammed with phone calls every minute, which caused me to put my phone on silent (which I guess was the point) so I did not see the text from Verizon telling me that someone was trying to access my account. It happened very quickly, Verizon barely gave me any time to respond.
I opened FriendTech and thought there was a bug because my Chat was empty, I tried looking at Octav and then saw someone elseâs tweet about SIM swapping on FT and thatâs when I realized what had happened.
Tagging anyone who held my key here, Iâm so sorry about this, I know that it looks like I rugged you all, and Iâm not sure how to prove that I did not. I am devastated.
For those confident weâll have another bullrun, what will drive the eth price up? Previously we had ICOs, then defi/yield farming and then NFTs. Is there anything left? Also fees will be lower due to L2s which may actually be negative for the eth price unless L2 activity goes 100x.
u/2Nice4AllThis has a motivational speech for us on our digital voyage
Hear ye, hear ye, valiant ethfinancers and mavs alike!
In the age where brave explorers charted unknown seas and distant shores, pioneers sought realms untraveled and dreams untold. So too do thee, devoted custodians of Ethereum, navigate a bear most relentless and the intricate dance of the crab market.
But be of stout heart! Though the bear casts shadows and the crab sidesteps, Ethereumâs beacon shines unwavering. As history reminds: after the stormiest nights, dawnâs embrace is most warm. Thus shall the Ether rise, unyielding and proud, amidst these tempests.
Stand firm, intrepid ethereans! Let not the marketâs capricious winds sway thy resolve. As a new horizon beckons, Ethereumâs legacy shall illuminate the ages, its tale a beacon for all who venture in the digital realm.
ethfinance activity seems to be in a bear market as well and the crab gets to some people. Nevertheless, I still am very positive about the next few months in Ethereum. Here are a few things I am looking forward to:
Holesky testnet. This is a replacement for the Goerli testnet. It will have 1.4 million genesis validators to start and individuals can spin up their own ones later on. Genesis is tomorrow (Friday) at 14:00 UTC. I set up my 2 nodes and distributed my 2500 genesis validators to them. One is running nethermind/nimbus on an ARM minicomputer with 100 validators, The other one is a much more powerful ASUS PN51 running besu/teku with 2400 validators. I am curious if these 2 machines are able to manage the heavy load of the larger validator set and contribute to a stable holesky testnet. I am only slightly nervous.
Diva testnet. Diva is a DVT (distributed validator technology) liquid staking protocol and they are testing their stuff on the Goerli testnet at the moment. I have a node up for a few weeks now, but they needed to improve their software to get rid of some bottlenecks. Waiting until the new release drops for dappnode users and then I can finally play around with it. It is an alpha testnet, so I am not expecting Diva to have a market ready product this year, but I think it is one of the more promising LST projects out there.
Gnosis Pay: Waiting for my debit card to be sent out. Hopefully in a month or two I will get it. I just like the idea having a direct channel between my tokens and the real world to buy stuff and send fiat onto the chain. I am really interested how the UX will be and if they managed to create a seamless experience. I am a bit worried about all my purchases being tracked on chain for everyone to see. I personally am curious if the self âcustodial bank accountâ or the âprivacy nightmareâ narrative will win for me here.
Dencun upgrade. Massively reducing the cost of transactions on rollups is gonna be quite interesting to see. At first probably the most stupid but fun dapps will dominate. With time, new applications will come out to truly take advantage of the cheaper blob space on Ethereum. The upgrade will not happen in the next few weeks, but there is steady progress. Some last minute additions are still being considered, but to me it looks like people are heads down working on it. Hopefully by the end of this year we will have it.
Rollups/L2 will rule the world. We have seen quite a few new rollups in the last few months: Linea, Base, zkSync Era, zkEVM, mantle, zora, public goods network, worldcoin. There are now over 30 L2s lised on L2Beat. But not only new rollups pop up. Existing chains switch to an optimistic rollup: Celo pretty much decided to become an optimistic rollup, fantom started a similar discussion. Also gnosis chain is looking into ways to become an L2 (a validium, not a rollup) to Ethereum. It looks like the next narrative might be having the best rollup/L2 on top of Ethereum and not so much an creating another Ethereum killer. I am really looking forward to what the rollup/L2 landscape will look like in a year.
Eigenlayer: In a few months we will probably see if Eigenlayer is more than just a bunch of convincing powerpoint slides and a charismatic speaker. We will see if they have actual product market fit and enough demand for their ideas. There are already some interesting developments with the espresso sequencers and the already started mantle L2. Even though I am not sure how mantle can use EigenDA if Eigenlayer is not much more than a restaking smart contract at the moment. In a few months we will see. I am also curious how Eigenlayer will tackle centralisation issues.
u/nixorokish breaks the news of the staking deposit churn limit EIP being included in the next hard fork
The decision was made during the ACD call today to include EIP-7514 in Dencun, which sets a max churn limit for the activation queue (note: does not affect the exit queue).
This keeps the network stable and makes the size of the validator set somewhat predictable. Since the validator set has been growing a lot since Shapella, this number is getting bigger and bigger and the network is growing faster and faster. EIP-7514 caps the number of validators that can be added each epoch at 8.
I believe that there could be some controversy about this over the next few days because it was created and added quickly but Dankrad published a post today on why he supports it and he says everything more eloquently and with more context than I could, so have a read of his post here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@dankrad/churn-limit
Base layer privacy is definitely something thatâs needed for adoption imo. Especially as forensic tools and tracking get better over time and transaction data remains on-chain forever it will be easier to dox and link wallets. Hard to see regular people wanting to use Ethereum if thatâs the case.
Private ETH defs a good thing but maybe this EIP will introduce some additional risk (minting and burning ETH at base layer might have previously unthought of attack vectors). Iâm not big brained enough to interrogate the code.
Anyone here have some thoughts on this EIP?
u/LowieVR starts a discussion about Ethereumâs long term future regarding ETH issuance and gets some great replies
Anybody got some wise predictions on gas fees in the future? Seems right now that gas fees are low, which makes eth inflationary, which makes it not a âsound businessâ anymore according to https://tokenterminal.com/leaderboards/earnings in past 7 days.
u/cryptOwOcurrency warns of the latest trend in Twitter scams
Twitter scams are getting more and more elaborate.
The latest one is where they create a fake @MetaMask twitter account, then take a whole month to build up their post history by copying every post of the real MetaMask account. During this month, they also gradually build their follower count through bots. Of course, Twitter does not detect any of this activity as suspicious because they have entirely lost the plot.
If you were to glance at the twitter account, youâd see an account with tens of thousands of âfollowersâ and a post history that scrolls on and on for many pages. Looks pretty damn close to the real MetaMask account.
Gary Gensler is what is wrong with America. Here we have a man, who clearly has a good grasp on blockchain as evidenced by his history teaching it at MIT. Yet despite this, he decides to completely contradict his previous teachings in favour of at best furthering his own personal political ambitions and at worst outright corruption in an effort by an invisible hand to stamp out crypto.
Classic 4th turning and fall of empires stuff right here. The ubiquity of wealth and excess surrounding him and his generation throughout their lifetime has left those that wish to participate in politics and influence devoid of values upon which his once great nation was built. In place of these values are the primal instincts of greed, power, pleasure and self preservation which are the fruits which can be attained from corrupting such rich and powerful institutions. These people are devoid of morals and will lead us down the path towards authoritarianism and collapse as seen time and time again throughout history, Rome and Weimar Germany being the most obvious.
In short, fuck you Gary, this is all your fault.
^(Obviously there is a degree of hyperbole here as there are other factors at play too like demographics, but at the same time the writing is on the wall and despite having learned from history, I canât wait to watch it play out in a very similar way again thanks to those who havenât learned from history. While that may be a call for me to step up and try to be one of the great men in history, Iâm not convinced that my qualifications are up to scratch. I shouldâve studied politics or something.)
Yo ETH fam! Iâve been away from crypto for a few months, but not like I expect you to remember me. Today Iâve been scanning L2 landscape changes, DeFi and airdrop hunting possibilities.
Base took off fast, my golly. First in TPS today, third in TVL. How did that come about? Did they mention an airdrop? How stable is it? I get that fraud proofs are not developed yet.
Iâm a fan of single-side LPing. No impermanent loss for me, thank you very much for offering. I see there are some new possibilities for it on zkSync Era: EraLend, Reactorfusion, ZeroLend. Cool! APY on ETH and USDC is <2%, but itâs nice to park some spare tokens, waiting for an airdrop.
Rhino.fi surprised me pleasantly. 10% APY on ETH in one pool. Left some ETH there a few months ago - Iâm not disappointed.
Iâd like to use this opportunity to thank Optimism!
I see itâs a bit gloomy in here. As somebody whoâs been in the game for quite a while now - this is the easiest bear ever! We are above 2018 ATH ^^if ^^you ^^ignore ^^inflation. But most importantly, development is phenomenal! L1s becoming L2s on Ethereum! You mentioned Canto, Celo, Fantom, Gnosis yesterday. Just waiting on Solana and Cardano to pull the trigger. Ethereum has become what it promised to be. Front page of L2beat is a thing of beauty! We are cemented, baby! This may very well kill ETH killer narrative in the next bull.
u/LogrisTheBard continues his detailed discussion of governance tokens
I wrote recently about multicameral governance designs. The responses that have come up in response to that post have taken 2 forms:
Isnât this going to devalue the governance token? What is the point of a governance token that only has a minority power over governance? I talk about that here.
Voter participation sucks and we need to concentrate power to make anything work around here. Letâs dive in to that.
Most DAOs today have a voter participation rate of less than 20%. Even when delegation is supported the delegates themselves arenât all particularly great at participation and need a cat herder to get much done. The exceptions to this rule are DAOs where there are regular votes and where voters get paid extra by voting.
Two examples that come to mind for this are Kyber Network and Curve. Kyber Network directly rewards voter participation. You can see the rewards for current and past votes here. Curve is a bit more indirect in that only a subset of governance decisions come with monetary compensation and that compensation is indirect through bribes. This one is a more complicated topic I dive into a bit here.
An interesting footnote about the Curve participation is the ve system and admin fees that are optimized by pairing veCRV with liquidity has led to liquid lockers (yCRV, sdCRV, cvxCRV, etc) to optimize revenue. These liquid lockers have a side effect of concentrating voting power. As a consequence of that Curve has outstanding voter participation amongst its tokens but a relatively low Nakamoto coefficient.
One clear lesson that stands out from both of the above examples is voters participate better if there are regular votes that they are paid to show up and participate in. Outside of the obvious incentive alignment that comes with compensating voter participation, voter participation increases when:
Voting is cost-minimized
Their vote is perceived as being more impactful on the outcome
They have something to lose
Drawing a parallel to elections to nation states. US voters are more active when:
Their state supports voting by mail and other mechanisms to make voting more convenient
They live in a swing state or a state without first-past-the-post electoral college rules
They are voting on an issue that affects them more personally (e.g. women vote more actively when abortion is a hot topic). Bribery is seasonal along the same lines (e.g. the NRA donates more when gun rights are a hot topic).
For blockchains, cost minimization is a matter of off-chain message signatures rather than L1 transactions like Maker has. Thereâs not much we can do for the second point without concentrating power and sacrificing voter participation but contentious votes having higher participation is a natural phenomenon.
The last thing we can do is create something to lose for each vote. This comes in two flavors. First, we can use bonded KPIs to attach something at stake to each vote. The basic concept of a bonded KPI is simple. You bond your influence against a prediction during a commit round each cycle (e.g. quarterly, yearly, etc). The bonded influence is the only influence eligible to vote. Your vote goes into effect immediately but your prediction is kept secret during the cycle. At the end of the cycle, everyone reveals their prediction by posting a decryption key. Then a decentralized one-shot oracle like UMA provides a value for the metric. The bonded influence is redistributed based on the relative accuracy of everyoneâs predictions. Finally everyone claims their influence from the bonded KPI and the next cycle begins. The result is that influence will trend towards those best at making predictions. I suggest the skill of making accurate predictions is correlated with competence at voting well. When combined with a value-aligning selection criteria for initial influence to bond, we end up solving the stated goal of selecting a rational, informed, value-aligned set of voters that vote on the most important issues of the day.
This system breaks down where someone can have enough influence over the metric to predict that very bad things will happen, ensure they do, and be rewarded for doing so. This is similar to how âassassinâ prediction markets work or why we donât let athletes bet to lose their own match. In that case Iâd suggest the DAO might just have to dissolve that governing body and form a new one without that bad actor. Itâs a thorny problem for sure.
The second flavor is an inactivity leak for not voting. For tradable tokens this isnât viable unless you somehow ensure all forms of LP token (e.g. Uniswap NFTs, Aave aTokens, etc) are also eligible to vote. However, this system is more viable when influence is not an ERC-20 token. In that case, getting influence in a governing body is a bonus perk of something external to the governing body. Once youâre in, unless youâre doing active work for the governing body your relative influence should decay. In broad terms the active work of a governing body is to continually do the things the issuance selection criteria select for and to vote well. I think itâs therefore fair that if someone is voting poorly (see KPI above) or not using their voting power regularly they should lose that influence. A DAO is ill-served by having a large voter base of inactive/inattentive voters, even if they delegate. Measuring voting activity is much easier than measuring vote quality.
An implementation of inactivity could resemble something like Ethereumâs where the higher the percentage of the existing voters are inactive the higher the turnover of influence should be. This creates something of a market-based approach to encourage voter participation. The end result is create higher turnover of the governing body to one consisting of active participants and then to pay them for the hard work of voting well. By the numbers we have, this is how you actually build a DAO and not just a fundraising mechanism.
u/ajmonkfish shares an article from our very own u/pbrody
no CEX is in the run to dominate staking. Data doesnât support that theory. To assert it as fact is gaslighting.
if a winner-takes-most structure is inevitable, why is Lido spending enormous LDO bribes through the entire ecosystem to this day?
The data here is even more damning than for CEXes. No LSD is a credible competitor to the tune suggested (a winner-takes-most scenario does not merely imply a competitor would catch up, it would also suggest that competitorâs size towers over Lido at least to the current extent Lido towers over the competition).
As long as those logical inconsistencies are core points of the Lido thesis, there is a problem with Lido.
Vitalikâs twitter account was hacked. Itâs all over. Everyone please start panicking.
This is lesser-known, but Ethereumâs consensus mechanism depends on a Twitter integration with Vitalikâs account, so itâs likely the Ethereum chain will halt within a few hours. I donât know if the client teams will be able to implement a workaround for the Twitter dependency in time - Ethereumâs Twitter integration was supposed to be removed as a vestigial feature in the Merge fork but I guess the devs didnât get around to it.
I really hope Charles Hoskinson still has access to the manual override key and is willing to use it to recover the chain. The only other person I know of with the Ethereum admin key is Sam Bankman-Fried, and he wonât be able to save us this time for obvious reasons.
If we canât get either of those admin keys, weâll have to ask Elon Musk to go into Vitalikâs account to turn Ethereum off and back on again for us. Please send thoughts and prayers everyone. â¤ď¸
u/SikhSoldiers points out that Lido is going against one of its core principles set forth by Paradigm
It boils my blood that @LidoFinance thinks fit to go against one of the founding lido principles set forward by @paradigm.
Governance is and always has been the existential risk that Lido presents. Dual governance is a bandaid solution, not any kind of permanent one and is very fallible.
As long as LDO governance can control the validator registry, LDO should not exceed roughly 33% of the network. There is no hard line here because the threat isnât based on any hard line.
The threat is that LDO slowly gains a subversive power over Ethereum due to its ability to threaten node operators with the boot, a very powerful threat that @gakonst rightfully points out all those years ago.
The staking router and the coming forced exits upgrades will further exacerbate the issue. Both will increase the power of LDO token holders over the node operators. Forced exits especially worries me as it has been touted as their solution for keeping their permissioned node operators in line.
Governance is a weakness, the existence of a threat is the problem itself. We cannot rely on LDO holders to be good stewards, not even with stETH veto power.
The apathy and bureaucracy of DAO governance is too powerful a deterrent for vetos to reliably work. The only solution is to remove the threat completely.
Georgios goes on to write âIf said pool is sufficiently governance-minimized, it could possibly win the entire market without causing any systemic risk for Ethereum.â
Whereâs the minimization frens???
ln April of 2022 I published a now deleted thread called âA Case against stETHâ where I explained why neither DVT nor social scores for permisionless node operators would work to scale their node operators set fast enough for the rate that they were growing their stake.
The entire thread stands true today. The recent @NethermindEth report suggests using a Kleros court to judge Sybil cases. Thatâs a joke when nation states are out here human trafficking and dedicating billions to hacking/exploits/evading Sybil detection. If Lido messes up their Sybil implementation, we could find ourselves with 10-15% of all Eth staked sitting in North Korea in a Sybil farm of node operators with 0 capital bond.
Lido should self limit not because of any consensus attacks, they should self limit because $stETH is growing faster than they can decentralize and research ways to safely introduce permisionless nodes without jeopardizing the network.
Donât let their campaign fool you, @LidoFinance has not shed any of its governance functionalityâin fact it plans on growing it.
+++ Benidoâs favorite podcasts episodes +++
Some weeks ago I started publishing some podcast recommendations featuring interesting episodes. Since I enjoy podcasts I thought it might be a service to the community to highlight those I really liked (or maybe disliked? Letâs see what the future brings). Itâs not a real summary, so if my thoughts make you curious, you might want to jump in to listen to the full episode. They are always linked in the headline.
Here is a list of all the past posts:
Now here are the new ones I really liked from the past couple of weeks. Interestingly they are all very technical and let me be honest⌠I sometimes couldnât really follow the guests/ hosts. I think they are all great, but in these cases I would really recommend taking some dedicated podcast time with 100% focus.
Maybe you remember a post from u/liberosist talking about the different types of zkEVMs there are (I tried to find it but couldnât). This podcast basically talks (partially) about this. Since this is fairly technical topic, itâs moderated by Justin Drake and RSA is more or less downgraded to listener.
This includes how L1 might become a zkEVM in the future based on some of the developments in the L2 landscape and the positive side effects this might have (e.g. lower hardware reqs for validators).
I think this episode is pretty good and a great addition to the sci-fi roadmap episode from ethcc since itâs very forward looking, but in the end this is why we are here, right?
This episode is a pretty good one if you are into MEV. Stephane Gosselin was one of the flashbots founders and has left the project some months ago. In this episode he talks a little about the MEV landscape, his impact and how he would rate it (interesting answer here!). On top he gives some insights into his new venture âFrontier Researchâ.
One major topic is RFQ = request for quotes and intents, but they also tackle PBS, MEV burn etc.
I think you need a pretty decent understanding of MEV to be able to follow this episode. If you do, this is 60 minutes+ of very good content, especially since Stephane knows flashbots, but is not 100% aligned, but going down a new (and much needed?) experimental road.
PBS or proposer builder separation has been around since a year or so. This episode features Mike Neuder (from the EF) and Chris Hager (from Flashbots), which is a pretty good panel since it the main parties involved came together.
The first hour or so is a discussion, the second part is a followup discussion with only Hasu and Jon. My take away: PBS is a design philosophy/ space. What does this mean? When I first learned about it I basically thought PBS was designed, the scope was clear and we only needed implementation. I think the conclusion after this episode is that this is not the case. There are a lot of different implementations possible and itâs not even clear if ePBS (enshrined PBS) is the way to go.
u/eth10kisfud since we talked about MEV burn yesterday. This is the episode that led to my answer.
Benido, this sucks, this is all so technical, why didnât you include a podcast I can just listen to on my way to work or in the gym and if I blink I can just continue listening? Well I am glad you asked, because I got you covered!
This Chopping Block episode is a pretty good summary about âThe SEC vs Crypto and Coinbaseâ. I liked it a lot because I think Paul Grewal is a pretty cool guest (Paul is Coinbaseâ Chief Legal Officer) and he pretty transparently explains why Coinbase acts in the way it does.
I am not sure the speculation about Gary Genslerâs motivation is the best approach, but the rest of it is a very good summary and includes some industry insights that I think are a very interesting and if you didnât follow as closely this episode is the one you wanna listen to.
â
This is it for today, but I already have picked one podcast episode for the fifth edition! Letâs go!
u/Newman513 talks about methods to mitigate issues from the ever growing validator set
See some chatter in here today about the late-stage proposal to limit the validator churn limit for inclusion in Deneb. Iâve been following this relatively closely since I think that this has the potential to brew into a CAT5 storm for the 250 of us that are terminally online and plugged into Ethereum development drama.
I first became aware of âthe issueâ during ACD 113 (bad news always comes on the 13th) - tl;dr on the issue (parroting Christine Kim, because she can summarize better than I can):
A large validator set size is undesirable because this increases the computational burden on validator nodes and creates complications for implementing future code changes such as single slot finality.
Without a countermeasure in the next 9-10 months to address validator set size growth, @mkalinin2 said that the computational load on nodes could increase 3x with the increased volume of messaging on the networking layer.
What are some possible solutions?
Reduce rewards - incentives will reduce the number of validators joining / motivate some to exit
Cap the # of validators
Cap the churn limit
Implement longer-term solutions that actually solve the problem, but require more R&D to design and vet
Looks like option 3 is being pursued in the short-term, if only to buy more time. I think that this is a phenomenal example of just how fragile Ethereum is, and why even 7+ years in itâs critical to be mindful of introducing systems on top of the protocol that bring with him considerable unknown unknowns! Think Eigenlayer - love the potential innovation, but a stage-gated slow rollout to understand the intricacies of the interdependencies that new primitives introduce is preferable to me, and Iâd argue responsible, particularly when building on top of something so unsteady thatâs managed to command as much economic importance as Ethereum has since itâs inception.
Will get off my soap box - yâall are on the same page. Hopefully the summary & sources are helpful!
I wrote recently about multicameral governance designs. The responses that have come up in response to this post have taken 2 forms:
Voter participation sucks and we need to concentrate power to make anything work around here. Iâll address that a bit in a different post.
Isnât this going to devalue the governance token? What is the point of a governance token that only has a minority power over governance?
Iâd like to take a few paragraphs to discuss what I think the rights and responsibilities of permissionlessly tradable governance tokens should be in a multicameral governance structure.
Among most modern DAO designs there is usually a singular governance token. This token usually serves two purposes. The first, as the name implies, is it acts as a force in governance. The second is it serves as a fundraising tool potentially by multiple mechanisms such as ICO, bond, inflation schedules, or call options. There are a few other minor uses as well that I go into here. When people buy this token they do so with the expectation that they have a claim upon the future profit of the system the DAO governs. Ultimately, greed fueled speculation is what gives governance tokens most of their tradable value.
The abysmal governance participation we see for most DAOs today is a strong indication that the governance power of governance tokens is not the primary source of their demand. Therefore, adopting a multicameral governance structure and diluting this governance power should not overly affect the usefulness of a governance token as a fundraising mechanism.
That said, care must be taken to protect the contractual rights of the governance token for its primary purpose. If clarity on this is not provided, investor confidence will wane, and the DAO will quickly find itself unable to raise funds by issuing tokens. At that point the DAO either must have a self-sufficient product, rely on charity from necessary participants, or watch as necessary participants stop doing their necessary work and the system fails.
One guarantee the DAO can provide to the governance token holders is to escrow the treasury funds directly within the governance token governing body (the capital module). System profit should be automatically sent to the treasury. At minimum, since each governing body controls its own state, this gives the token holders the ability to revoke token approval to these funds to the parent DAO. This guarantees those token holders a contractual right to the treasury should the DAO dissolve or they want to revolt. All they have to do is pass a policy to pay out the treasury to themselves.
Another guarantee the DAO can provide the governance token holders is to make it very difficult for the parent DAO to change any fund flow related policies without their approval. The capital module needs to have confidence that their power over the purse canât be whimsically revoked. Different types of proposals in the parent DAO can potentially have different rules required to ratify them. This is also consistent with granting governance power over topics to those it affects the most. The governance token holders are those most affected by changes to monetary flows and should have a greater say on changing certain parameters related to that than other governing bodies. This satisfies a design goal of fairness.
The last guarantees all come from the ability of each governing body to maintain its own internal state. The parent DAO can only invoke functions on the governing body contract that it allows. Any control over these matters the capital module grants to the parent DAO are inherently revocable. This gives the capital module ultimate control over the issuance of the governance token and all matters dependent on that such as how to incentivize liquidity depth for the token, how to structure bonds, its inflation schedule, etc.
In summary, it is my belief that so long as the governance token holders have faith in the future revenue of the system and their claim right to it the token should retain value. So long as it has value it can serve its primary purpose as a fundraising mechanism. I donât believe diluting the governance power of these tokens will destroy their value, but I do think it can lead to a DAO that is more resilient and likely to succeed in the long term for reasons stated in my previous post. The main ingredient weâre missing to try this somewhere is a guinea pig and a fairly small software package. I think itâs a much better direction than what Rune is doing to Maker with âneural tokenomicsâ for example.
u/somedaysitsdark starts a discussion after a recent block proposal
I posted this to the EVM discord, but figured it would be healthy to blast here too:
I proposed my fourth block recently đĽł. But because my mev-boost min-bid is set to .05, if I donât receive any bids higher than .05 my client builds the block itself. That is working fine, so far 3/4 of my blocks have been homemade. But, my most recent block had my first tornado cash transaction in it.
Iâm just annoyed by regulatory lack of clarity on whether or not I should care as a US operator.
I could run mev-boost with no min-bid and point it at only ofac compliant relays is what the government might say in the future?
What happens eventually once we have proposer builder separation? Thatâs the plan right? Iâm not super familiar with how that works.
If US validators âcurrentlyâ arenât held to KYC regulations- which I believe is accurate, then we shouldnât care at all even if someone wants to transact with an OFAC-list address? Maybe that is a bad assumption.
If I need to be OFAC compliant, then I need to know for sure. That way I can either just do it, or move my server out of the country? Would that even be sufficient? Even Coinbase still validates non-compliant transactions, or so Iâve heard, I havenât actually confirmed this. Iâm gonna go look.
Iâm here. Venue is awesome, probably a little bigger than necessary but itâs better to have the space then not. The main talks havenât had any real alpha so far, lots of wagmi and âdown bad, hahaâ talk. The regulatory panel was fun to watch, but again, no pertinent info was learned. It was inferred that for any reasonable change in the regulatory situation, Gary would litteraly have to just wake up on the âright side of the bedâ one day. And no one on the panel suggested they thought it was likely. Legislation (in the US) needs to be passed. Rep. Emmer was hopeful on this.
Swag game has not been as good as ethdenver or devcon. But we are in the depths of the bear, soâŚ..
Rainey street crawl was last night. Iâm not a bankless citizen so I didnât go to their closed event. Had a Hella good waygu smash burger at a place across the street though.
Overall, itâs still fun to be spending a few days with so many like minded people in a fun town. Bear market conferences are the best for this reason. Only the real degens are here. If any actual news or info is discovered Iâll be sure to drop it in here.
Next yearâs permissionless is on the books for October 9th-11th 2024 in salt lake city.
Hanging out with u/the-A-word and u/jtnichols at Permissionless II. Taste testing some early offerings from JTâs smoker and talking DAOs, solo staking, and the history of r/ethfinance. No reason to go to the main event like I planned, too much fun.
đ Iâm a đ¨đŚ and longtime ETH community member currently building sobol.io Also am early contributor to BanklessDAO plus tons of other DAO communities (total DAO need).
Nice to find the daily because my Twitter feed is pure noise. Thanks for the gift of gud BBQ and good vibes today đ
u/asdafari12 comments on the pros and cons of possible government actions
I would rather the US not allow spot ETFs than red-tape defi, which is basically what is happening with the proposed rules that are perhaps impossible to follow. ETFs are probably great for price action but they arenât crypto.
I remember how excited I was in 2020 about synthetic stocks, defi, insurance, gambling and other use cases happening on Ethereum. Now we know that synthetic stocks are a massive regulatory no-no. I am overall happy about what is possible in defi but it looks like all frontends will require KYC in the future (for US users at least). We are lucky that an exception was made for validators. They wanted KYC of all TXs, which is obviously not possible. Thatâs one of my issues, it has become obvious that regulation doesnât come from a fair, logical and neutral point. Itâs a bit of a circus and impossible to guess what will come.
MetaMask Snaps allows users to customize their MetaMask wallet. But what is a Snap? Individual Snaps are features and functionalities created by third-party developers that you can install directly into your wallet.
Metamask says that: All Snaps available in the directory today have been audited by the Metamask team and third parties. Our decision to have an allowlist was made both out of an abundance of caution, and because we have ideas for how to add additional safety for a permissionless model that will take longer to implement. Over time, we plan to open up the auditing process to create a fully permissionless platform."
Some time ago we had a discussion here about gnosis chain and its future. Today I watched two talks from DAPPCON23 by two gnosis developers/researchers. They seem to look into possibilities of becoming a validium L2 to Ethereum. This is all very exploratory and nothing has been set in stone. As far as I understand they could write checkpoints to Ethereum and keep the validators as is for data availability. This seems to need a lot of more work and especially making it trustless seems to be a bit tricky. The approach they are looking into now seems to be more taxing to the validators as they would need also need to be able to verify the Ethereum chain at the same time. There seems to be some ways around it though. Ethereums future looks quite good to me, everyone thinks about becoming a rollup/L2.
Guest appearance by Lantern Finance, a KYC American-based staking provider.
Upcoming Guests
October 20th - Greg Di Prisco from Ajna Labs, a noncustodial, peer-to-pool, permissionless lending, borrowing and trading system that requires no governance or external price feeds to function
Have never posted anything in the âproperâ Ethereum forums before, and so feeling very intimidated. Thank you to those who gave me confidence that itâs possibly not a completely moronic concept!
My biggest issue with this is they could get rich quicker, then flip to control ethereum quicker and or after something goes wrong for them
You need to add something that stops that possibility imo
Something like locking in some or all of these mega validators stake for that extra reward, so that they are basically in service to eth in order to continue earning rewards to make back their locked stake.
And even with that, that semi only puts the problem back 20-50 years imo
Mostly thinking about 3% apr (y?) and also they would likely have to pay back their customers?
u/tricky_troll my man has it been 10 days?
u/Set1Less shares MakerDAOâs latest questionable move and u/hanniabu adds on by criticising the move
Maker is a husk of its former self. Rune canât help but introduce more and more centralization. The endgame is value capture.
The most important reason for why NewChain is needed, is that it will allow the ecosystem to use hard forks to gracefully recover from the most severe form of governance attacks or technical failures.
Ah yes, lets move to a LESS SECURE chain to protect against governance attack đ¤Ą
The second reason is that the Solana ecosystem has proven its resilience
This keeps getting better, all that downtime really prove ReSiLiEnCe
The third reason is that there already exists examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adapted to act as appchains
There already exists examples of rollup codebases being forked and adapted to act as appchains
u/Syentist explains why he is surprised that there hasnât been more eyebrow raising in response to Makerâs recent move which effectively made them an unregistered money market fund
Maker has deposited north of $1.2 billion of the $ backing DAI into US treasuries. The yield on the US treasuries is paid back to DAI holders who have deposited to the DSR contract. That is a near text book definition of a money market fund, except an unregistered version.
âBut KYC is inherently evil. We should fight it when we canâ. Ethereum already allows for two people to send and receive ETH with each other (=to transact) without intermediaries and without KYC. But if you are literally investing in a financial instrument offered by the US government, itâs hard to understand why we can or should bypass clear cut laws which exist for the rest of the members of society.
And the absence of KYC is only a small part of the problem to me. The bigger part is the pure unregulated nature of this enterprise. Rune is one acid trip in the Himalayas away from suddenly deciding the solution to world inequality is to arbitrarily donate half the USG bonds to some charity. Iâm not joking - the Maker core team is, at best, chaotic neutral, with emphasis on chaotic. Itâs insane for a $4.5bil stablecoin to rely on a group of centralized chaotic actors. And this is where registration of money market funds comes into play. You have designated legal responsibilities to core organisational members whoâs details are known to the feds, you have clear auditing rules and what can and canât be done with customer funds, and customers have clear legal recourse if or when the custodians behave outside of these narrow rules. Right now, DAI holders get ZERO of those clear cut protections.
And lastly, NONE of this fits within the original ethos nor objective of Maker, as an Ethereum centric decentralised stablecoin. Nothing in todayâs Maker is decentralised nor fitting the core ethos of Ethereum, despite the team and the project having leached off credibility from the Ethereum ecosystem to bootstrap themselves to the current position as a major defi protocol. For example if Jump or Binance came up with a protocol with similar shenanigans to that exhibited by Rune and Maker today, it would at best, be a short term pump and dump excercise, not a protocol which attracts and retains billions in TVL over a long term. The only reason Maker manages to do that is because it managed to successfully leach credibility from the Ethereum ecosystem, before pivoting into the present circus. /end rant
u/coinanon updates us on account abstraction standards
Iâm trying to understand the current state and the near future of account abstraction. From what I understand, there are two competing standards: the Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) architecture and the newer ERC-6900 architecture. Having one standard seems important because it will enable dapps and developers to create plugins/modules for AA wallets (automatic DCA, freeze certain assets, spending limits per âsession keyâ, etc).
Itâs very cool and I believe that it has a future (especially on L2s with cheaper fees soon), but which architecture will win? The Safe team is well-respected, but it sounds like ERC-6900 has some advantages.
Does anyone know the latest? Is the developer mindshare leaning one way right now?
The counter-argument here is of course that threatening to throttle and/or fork out Lido, if it doesnât adhere to the will of a handful of core devs/researchers/influencers, is the surest way to kill any notion of better and safer property rights
Psyops to convince people that the âwill of the peopleâ is to hand over governance to Lido DAO when not even a supermajority of LDO token holders really want this (https://twitter.com/DrNickA/status/1697610036841726414) - the delegates who vote with the most LDO just overshadow everybody else
Sacha is trying to paint âa handful of core devs/researchers/influencersâ as an elite group trying to maintain power. In reality, these are the hundreds of people who are building the Ethereum protocol layer and are trying to make it impossible for anyone to capture the Ethereum consensus layer. Like I said, psyops.
My personal perspective here is that it would be extremely irresponsible for Lido to gain a dominant market share without first significantly improving its resilience to long-term tail-risks â and reducing the impact of those tail-risks on the Ethereum protocol
âYeah for sure Lido in its current form shouldnât control Ethereum. But I think it eventually should and will, it just needs some tweaking before itâs readyâ
I think it bears repeating here that Lido is not a single entity. It is a co-ordination layer between a multitude of stakers and node operators.
It is 31 operators who can be removed at any point by one entity: the Lido DAO. Which is swung by a few majority delegates. Many operators receive a significant portion of their income from being Lido operators - the threat of losing this income is a source of influence you canât ignore.
Sachaâs whole deal is coming up with long-winded posts that masquerade as research to justify Lido DAO governance expansion. Start with a conclusion and build arguments to meet up with it. He writes in a way that often impresses people into thinking it might be a good argument but he never actually gives us new information - heâs not looking for an answer or doing research, heâs just finding new ways to say âItâs okay for Lido to eventually become the middleman between you and Ethereum.â
u/696_eth made a big step in their solo staking journey - they made a beacon chain deposit!
Iâm proud to say that Iâm officially a Beacon chain depositor!
I started my journey in late November, early December last year. After researching and getting all the parts and setting up NUC I took quite a long pause. It was still on my mind even though I wasnât following through with that. As I finished addressing more critical priorities in my life earlier this year I knew it was the time to do it. It looked honestly impossible but I trusted that with the help of this community, EVMavericks and my friends that I would be able to achieve the feat! Staking aligns with my long-term financial goals as well as with with the future of Ethereum that I want to see and I wanted to do my part. Running minority clients too to promote the health of Ethereum.
Big thanks to Haurog for basically handholding me, thanks to everyone here and EVMavericks discord for answering my many newbie questions, shoutout to Ethstaker for helping me out too, also to a few of my friends from the Dopest private chats and to so many other people who were willing to lend a hand but I already had enough support. I took my time to understand, learn, experiment and to feel relatively comfortable. Iâm sure itâs not fully done yet as I might be sweating when I pass the entry queue but so far everything has been looking good. Thereâs still a few things to set up bandwith wise for me and in terms of how to monitor (so far I have grafana and just look at beaconchain site).
Not sure what else to add but if I remember something Iâll add later. if you also have questions, lmk!
Canât wait for my money printer to go brrrr and print me blocks w 69E rewards!!!
Google lets scammers buy adspace and makes no effort to moderate this.
Twitter is letting spambots run free as long as they pay $8 for a blue checkmark or $1000 for a gold one.
Discord is adding a feature to let you hide links so they redirect to a different place.
There is a fundamental incentive problem with the law ruling big service providers should have no accountability whatsoever for the content they host. Let criminals use your platform AND get paid for it? Why shouldnât they take that deal.
This is especially inane when said platforms do take moderation actions for various ideological or political motives. Youâre either a neutral service provider, or you have administrative rights and exercise editorial content. Canât have both. In the latter case, you should be help responsible for your content, and sorry but not sorry if this doesnât play well with big-tech business model of harvesting value generated by user content while running only minimum human intervention.
There is an obvious answer here. If these platforms were run as credibly neutral infrastructure, as part of distributed ledgers nobody can unilaterally censor⌠Those laws regarding lack of accountability would make sense.
The mainstream Internet as it exists today makes no sense as web2 whereas it would be sensible as web3.
u/ThatGuyThatGuyThagay brainstorms some solutions to the Lido problem and u/cryptOwOcurrency adds to it with a great reply
Reduce the advantage of pooling by burning MEV - all validators, get equal beacon chain rewards. Solo validators have advantage over pool, because of LST fee.
Protocol level smoothing of block proposals or similar, same way in PoW, people use pools not because it gets the bigger rewards, but because they get them more consistent.
Make solo staking more accessible. (how comes there is still no double-click executable on windows that get you staking in no time? Even shitcoins have them).
Protocol level smoothing of block proposals or similar, same way in PoW, people use pools not because it gets the bigger rewards, but because they get them more consistent.
Block proposals themselves really donât earn a lot of consensus income - only about two weeks worth of attestations.
Once the impact of MEV is removed from proposal income (due to MEV smoothing pools and/or MEV burn), I donât think block proposals will need smoothing. Thatâs a good thing!
Make solo staking more accessible. (how comes there is still no double-click executable on windows that get you staking in no time? Even shitcoins have them).
I agree on this. Back in the early days of Bitcoin, I used to keep my Bitcoin client running in the background to help provide bandwidth to the network (and keep my wallet in sync!). You would just double-click the Windows executable and then forget it in the system tray. GPU mining was like that, too.
It should be just as easy to stake on Ethereum. The process should go like this:
Double click installer exe. Install.
Run. Wizard prompts you to choose consensus and execution clients, with a short blurb about each one and a note about client diversity.
You get kicked out into the main UI. Your clients are now syncing. Thereâs a little progress bar that shows how long till theyâre synced enough to be staking-ready.
When sync is done, you click the little âplusâ button at the corner of the main UI, to add new validators.
(For first time adding validators only) - Wizard generates staking seed phrase, prompts you to write it down, forces you to retype it.
Wizard prompts you to enter the amount of validators you wish to add, previews how much ETH you need.
Wizard prompts you for the withdrawal address you want to use for these validators.
Wizard generates deposit data json file, prompts you to upload it and deposit ETH using the Staking Launchpad.
Wizard reads the blockchain directly and recognizes your Staking Launchpad deposits. Kicks you back out into the main UI where you can see the pending status of your validators, along with an estimate of when they will be through the queue.
Once theyâre through the entry queue, the app basically acts like a native version of beaconcha.in, showing your attestations and effectiveness, proposals, income graph, stuff like that.
u/cryptOwOcurrency explains a cool little defensive measure in the Ethereum protocol which protects against 51% attacks
Hey it just occurred to me - a 51% attack is not actually profitable to Lido in terms of ETH, at least in the short term. I forgot about this little quirk (smart design decision) in the Ethereum protocol:
The reason why no validators receive attestation rewards during an inactivity leak is once again due to the possibility of discouragement attacks. An attacker might deliberately drive the beacon chain into an inactivity leak, perhaps by a combination of censorship and denial of service attack on other validators. This would cause the non-participants to suffer the leak, while the attacker continues to attest normally. We need to increase the cost to the attacker in this scenario, which we do by not rewarding attestations at all during an inactivity leak.
So by 51% attacking Ethereum, LST pool providers would be hurting the LSTâs own holders (and their reputation for making profit) by forgoing staking rewards for the duration of the attack. People would obviously rush to try to pull their money out, or at least they should.
An attacker could avoid this mechanism by attacking with 66% of the stake. 66% is the point at which an attacker can attack the chain without forgoing short-term staking rewards.
I just wanted to share this, because itâs a factor I had forgotten about, and it throws a curveball at any 51-66% attacker.
Donât believe Lidoâs lies (see doots for details)
Upcoming Guests
September 8th - Lantern Finance, a KYC American based staking provider
October 20th - Greg Di Prisco from Ajna Labs, a noncustodial, peer-to-pool, permissionless lending, borrowing and trading system that requires no governance or external price feeds to function
Example 1: Peggy plays a simple game with two colored balls.
Example 2: Peggy plays with a Whereâs Waldo book.
Example 3: Peggy calculates the solutionâs hash in the last round; i.e., H(914783256) = 0515. She then rewrites it as a decimal number, i.e., 0515 = 1301, and applies the mapping; i.e., 1301 mod 27 = 5. She proceeds to translate 5 to row i = 6 for the next query and adds the solution of row i = 6, i.e., 256391478, to the proof string. Last, she attaches the hashes of the Merkle tree nodes needed to check whether the result matches the commitment to P.
u/haurog doesnât accept the Lido narrative and u/nixorokish reiterates the kind of threat Lido poses
I find it the most interesting that the Lido narrative: ´there will only be one LST and because of that it is better it is us (Lido) than any even more centralized player´ is so readily accepted by many people. This narrative enables Lido to aggressively grow through dubious means like the karpatkey partnership. Karpatkey manages many large DAO treasuries and apparently karpatkey bought steth with these treasuries and blocked adding other LSTs. Only after public outcry some DAOs intervened and now hold a more diverse LST portfolio.
In my opinion, accepting this narrative makes people complacent and fall in line behind Lido, because the alternative, e.g. binance dominating the staking market, is obviously a worse outcome. Lido propagates this statement because it helps them to justify their means. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy which again helps Lido. It is not surprising that Lido now aggressively spreads this narrative again on various platforms like bell curve podcast, bankless and twitter. Lido is well connected and they can place their narrative quite effectively in the space.
Does the narrative actually make sense? At the core the narrative is ´The dominant LST has the most integrations and the largest network effect´ and due to this all ETH will flow to it. In essence it reduces the complexity of staking products to one or two quantities and argues the end state lies at the edge, i.e. one dominating LST. This pushes people into becoming convex thinkers, which in this case helps Lido to divide up the market âYou either support us or you support big centralized exchangesâ. The simplicity of the narrative to me is similar to some very simplified arguments by (hobby) economists which are then surprised that actual market data contradicts them. They then argue that people are not ârationalâ actors. But what actually happens is they dumbed down the complexity of a system to a level which makes it easily calculable but the outcome of this simplified system does not match reality anymore because they unknowingly removed some essential mechanics.
Even the market itself does not support the Lido narrative If you look at market data, like the recent glassnode insights report. Lido grew by 54% since January 2023, and rocket pools rETH grew by 157%. How is this even possible because I thought according to their narrative they would win automatically because of network effects. rETH is by pretty much all quantifiable means an inferior product: Lower network effect, lower liquidity, fewer integrations, lower yield. People now even pay a premium to own rETH. Is it because people are stupid? I would argue that the simple convex thinking of the Lido narrative removed a lot of the actual complex decision making of market participants and that is why the Lido narrative should at least be questioned or even rejected outright.
But why does Lido dominate. They were the first LST. Making staking accessible for everyone. They are less centralized than Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. They did not really have any competition in the market until about 1 year after the Beacon chain launch when Rocket Pool started. And now there are alternatives, some better, some worse and new entrants will come. Sure, due to historical reasons Lido will be the larges LST for years to come, but I am personally not convinced that they will inevitably reach 90% market share because of network effects alone.
And now to a more personal note. Does it make a difference for me to buy an LST from an established player compared to a new entrant? Yes definitely. Storing my ETH in a tested smart contract has its value. Having access to degen plays is great. Being able to borrow money against my LSTs is necessary. But does it make a difference if the established player has over 30% dominance or 3%. Not really. rETH has enough liquidity and integrations for me with just about having 4% of the staking market share. The marginal utility of network effects of a larger LST protocol is already pretty close to zero and other parameters, like systemic risks, become more important.
TL;DR: The Lido narrative of âThere will only be one LSTâ has been spread quite efficiently by Lido. This simple narrative leaves out nuance and makes the community complacent. Even the market itself does not seem to support the narrative. Be careful accepting or spreading it further.
to reiterate something that seems confusing to casual users:
Lidoâs threat is not a threat on top of Ethereum. Itâs not about centralizing the economy running on top of it, itâs not about a widespread smart contract risk (though it does add that, too).
Solo staking will trend down to <1% of the network
Liquid staking is the superior form of staking and all staking will migrate there
LSTs will converge to a single LST
The result of this is that 99% of Ethereumâs validators are controlled by Lido. That means that Ethereum is governed by the Lido DAO. The Lido DAO can choose to censor, blacklist, or finalize whatever they want on the chain. They become vulnerable to government pressure or human corruptibility to do these things. They can pressure their very small operator set to do these things in the shadows (especially once forced exits are implemented).
This fundamentally changes what Ethereum is. It becomes the Lido DAO chain. Might as well use BNB chain at that point. Ethereumâs validator set is absolutely core to its decentralization, permissionlessness, and credible neutrality.
u/alexiskef educates us on EIP-4844 with u/domotheusâs latest blog post on blob space
Copy/pasting the authors own intro: âthis article aims to approach the concept of blobspace, from the ground up. We will go through a quick overview of the problem of scaling a blockchain and how the concept of blobspace is the answer that Ethereum is betting on. Then we will delve into the more technical aspects of blobspace, first from the perspective of EIP-4844, since itâs about to roll out, and then weâll quickly look into what âfull dankshardingâ will entail in the future."
u/SikhSoldiers comments on comparisons made between Lido and Bitcoin mining pools
This was a response lower but I think it merits a full text. Lido situation often gets compared to the bleak bitcoin mining pool situation where 3 pools account for >75% of all hashpower.
I think the lido situation is actually worse than bitcoin mining pools.
Switching hashpower between pools is easy, switching stake from one LST to another requires the entry and exit queues which are multiple months long and thus entrench one lst. Eg. If lido went corrupt and starting doing reorgs to steal MEV then the rate at which they lose stake is limited by Ethereum consensus. Further, thereâs actual economic irrationality to switch away since lido earns more in this paradigm (assuming no user activated slash).
The point being is that there are no economics that inhibit mining pools and this has been proved through voluntary self limitations.
Ethereum is struggling with this.
u/bagogel12 created a dystopian Ethereum/Lido theatre script
(Scene: A bustling virtual realm resembling Ethereumâs landscape. Characters Lido, Operator A, Operator B, and DSA Representative are present.)
Lido: (Addressing the audience) The enigma of the future looms over Ethereum like a shadow. The path ahead is hazy, as we navigate uncharted waters.
Operator A: (Whispering to Operator B) Have you heard the rumors about DSAâs interference?
Operator B: (Nodding) Yes, word is they want to certify operators with their software. Itâs like handing control to a new sheriff.
(Enter DSA Representative)
DSA Representative: (Authoritatively) Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the new era of certified staking. The Divided State of America demands compliance with our guidelines. Only those who bear the badge of âcertified operatorâ shall stake and govern the network.
Act 2: Compliance and Consequences
(Scene: Lidoâs assembly hall. Lido and a group of Operators are in discussion.)
Lido: (Addressing the Operators) We stand at a crossroads. DSAâs decree is clear, and we must decide how to respond.
Operator A: (Raising a hand) What about those of us who donât wish to comply with DSAâs terms?
Lido: (Serious) Dissent is a luxury we canât afford. Compliance is the path weâve chosen, for now.
Operator B: (Angrily) So, we relinquish our autonomy to become mere pawns?
Lido: (Solemnly) Our choice is stark, yet we must weigh the consequences.
(Operators mumble among themselves.)
Act 3: The Shadows of Cartelization(Scene: Ethereumâs digital realm, depicting bustling stakers and traders.)
Operator A: (Defiantly) I canât ignore my principles. Iâm unstaking.
Operator B: (Worried) But the queue to restake is overwhelming, not to mention the enticing profits weâd be leaving behind.
Lido: (Observing with a sinister grin) As DSAâs grip tightens, chaos unfolds.(Operators reluctantly withdraw, some out of principle, others due to sheer inconvenience.)
Narrator: (Voiceover) The Ethereum ecosystem stands at a precipice, as Lidoâs influence swells, furthering the consolidation of power.
(Lidoâs dominance continues to grow, its ominous shadow looming larger over Ethereum.)
Operator A: (Resolute) We canât let this tyranny persist. A fork is our last resort.
Operator B: (Doubtful) But Lidoâs stranglehold is formidable, and with DSAâs supportâŚ
(Lido faces a pivotal decision: Embrace cartelization or confront dissent.)
Lido: (Calculating) The road ahead is murky, but our grip on power is undeniable. Ethereum shall bend to our will.
(Curtain falls, shrouding Ethereumâs future in an unsettling darkness of cartelization and control.)
u/Tricky_Troll defends of Gitcoin while u/STRTRD brings in the context behind the post along with some of their own thoughts
This comment was a reply made on a comment with little attention at the end of yesterdayâs daily so I am sharing it now. Basically, in light of people complaining that âGitcoin lost its wayâ, often pointing to the use of money from Shell in one funding round and another controversy around funding for minority groups in the ecosystem, here is my counter argument.
One could argue that Gitcoin is doing what it was designed to as a protocol. Itâs supposed to be modular for many different types of funding rounds with many different organisations. Funding from Shell, funding for minority demographics etc. This is all controversial due to your subjective opinion on what you want Gitcoin to be. Well the Gitcoin vision was for it to grow up and become a protocol for all, not to remain a niche technical Ethereum native app. Much like how there are many Linux distros for whatever niche you want, this is a feature and not a bug.
Just because I donât like the fact that Ubuntu exists and adds telemetry to an ecosystem which is generally much more private than other operating systems, doesnât mean I see Ubuntu or Linux as a failure. Of course not, Ubuntu invites newbies into the ecosystem and if they want to progress from there they can. Meanwhile, there are privacy focused distros and ones which stick to core OG Linux community values. Same goes for Gitcoin.
I do not know what OP thinks but if you want to focus on the negative I have a few points:
Took them a year to revamp their website which only now is usable again.
They spent a lot of effort to have gitcoin rounds on Fantom which barely had anything useful to support instead of integrating L2s. The last rounds were therefore super expensive to contribute. Only now they support optimism.
The last few rounds were invite only, which probably hurt new devs and teams because they were excluded from gitcoin.
At the start of this round all DAI contributions failed. People lost quite a bit of money with failed transactions and the website said Ëdonation successfullË. I you looked at the earliest failed transactions they were probably from the gitcoin team. They knew about the problem and still enabled DAI contributions. No idea why.
Why waste developers time on running your own L2, the PGN networks? It does not make sense to me, We have enough very good L2s by now why make your own.
The whole Shell collaboration was a PR disaster.
There was also a diversity round in spring where one of the judges also had a project in the round. This round was special and the judges had extra power over who gets the money. This judge was a very controversial figure in the space already and they nevertheless took her on. The whole situation was as also a pr disaster.
All these points above tell me there is a lack of control, oversight and quality standards in the gitcoin organisational structure.
With all the list of negative points I have to say I personally still love gitcoin rounds. The website now is so much better than last year. They are in my view a pillar of our space and I love donating to projects I use.
Iâd like to touch on Gitcoin and their passport with which they are trying to become decentralised proof of human/anti-sybil standard while constantly changing stamps to accomodate whatever new KYC-grab your ETH shady project they partner with like Proof of humanity, Civic etc.
Other stamps are connect your social networks, like sybils have problems with that.
One of the stamps is GTC staking, stake our coin to prove you are human?
Complete antithesis to web3 and it is getting a lot of praise.
u/lanternfinance shares their project for thosewho find solo staking a bit too daunting
SHOUT OUT TO EV Maverick /u/lanternfinance because his team is building something I think many would and should be interested in if solo staking scares the shit out of you.
If you live in any of these states, would you be open to chatting with a team called Lantern Finance? Staking as a Service. Pure play staking service provider.
They are launching October and looking for early people in these states to talk to about participating in a feedback session.
Right now, though, they want to talk to some folks about their journey and history and get feedback on their current experiences/struggles with staking.
They are doing SAAS using KYC through Persona, custody through BitGo for custody with insurance, and are building a simple and effective U.S. based service complete with tech support/phone support etc. They have onboarded a team of around 8 iirc.
Super easy to talk to and I hope some of you can line up a quick meeting. Highly recommend even if you arenât from these states. Iâm planning on joining the early feedback cohort in October and I hope some of you can too. (this meeting isnât about investing! Just about experience with staking in general they want to know what features to focus on)
If you want to reach out: prince@lantern.finance and jung@lantern.finance
California
Pennsylvania
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Massachusetts
Tennessee
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Colorado
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Utah
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Montana
Wyoming
Prince was at Hodlercon Super nice fella!
From the team: âLantern Finance is a US-based, pure-play ETH staking solution. Weâre focusing on security, peace of mind and ease of use for staking. Weâre looking to do ~30 minute user research interviews where we get insights on what an ideal staking solution looks like for them. We also want to understand their crypto journey, what they like/dislike about their existing platforms, and feedback on what weâre building.â
u/coinanon breaks the good news and u/Papazio adds some detail
An important distinction between the smart contracts deployed by Uniswap and the actual token contracts and pools launched by the scammers. The judge concluded that Uniswapâs contracts cannot be inherently illegal, the issue is with whomever made a scam token and then scammed people with it. Watch out SEC, this is coming your way.
Hereâs some choice bits:
Judge Faliaâs decision said that smart contracts underlying the exchangeâs core functions should be viewed separately from code underpinning liquidity pools, which are drafted by token issuers and enable newly created tokens to trade.
âThese foundational contracts are distinctive from the token contracts unique to each pool and drafted by issuers,â Judge Falia wrote. âThe contracts relevant to Plaintiffsâ claims are not these overarching codes provided by Defendants, but rather the pair or token contracts drafted by the issuers themselves.â
u/cryptOwOcurrency becomes a full on FUD-fighter, rebutting some claims made in a podcast
Here are the claims made about Ethereum between those time stamps, and my rating for each one.
JP Morgan owns a lot of crucial Ethereum infrastructure - MOSTLY FALSE
While JP Morgan does have some financial ties to Ethereum infrastructure, they donât âown a lotâ. JP Morgan owns less than 10% of Consensys (Consensys is the parent company for Metamask, Infura, Besu and Teku). Of course while Metamask and Infura are both influential and widely used, they are not the only games in town and they are not âcrucialâ to Ethereumâs survival. And while 10% may be enough to demand a board seat and sway some close votes, itâs a far cry from âowning infrastructureâ in the sense that itâs under their thumb.
JP Morgan dollarized the Ethereum network - FALSE
Circle (USDC) and Tether (USDT) did the most to dollarize Ethereum, imo. Circle is owned in part by the venture capital arms of several big banks, but I could not find JP Morgan Chase listed as one of them in any VC announcement. Tether is privately owned by 4 rich dudes.
Stablecoins represent more value on the Ethereum blockchain than ETH itself - FALSE
By roughly adding up the top dozen stablecoins on CoinGecko, Ethereumâs stablecoin market cap is less than $150B. Compare this to ETHâs market cap of $204B.
JP Morgan and Citigroup basically own the NY Fed - MOSTLY FALSE
There is no ownership in a corporate sense. While banks are required to âownâ shares of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve answers to their Board which is directly accountable to Congress, and profits are never distributed to shareholders. Itâs a strange corporate structure, but thatâs government agencies for you. Many consider Congress to be bought and paid for by private interests though in the end, so thatâs why this only earns a rating of âmostlyâ false.
Cowswap is awesome. You generally get the best price for execution and you have gas abstracted away. Itâs so good that uniswap is more or less copying them for univ4
However, the Coincidence of Wants that CoW is famed for is an off chain matching system. If we have the largest dex in the space move liquidity / market making off chain, we will be making a huge shift towards a lunarpunk ethos in perhaps a negative way.
Onchain liquidity numbers have been super transparent and is the basis for most risk analysis. Iâve gotten reth accepted as collateral on many different lending platforms and have read through a number of analyses. The one common point across all of these platforms has been proof of lasting liquidity. In fact, it was this consistent request across protocols for probable liquidity that formed the basis for reth having liquidity incentives to begin with - we needed to prove reth was liquid.
Back to the issue at hand, when market makers move off chain they will no longer be sourcing from onchain LPs. There was a tweet a few days ago (if I wasnât banned Iâd find it) that showed only a small handful of people provided most of the ETH/usd liquidity on uni. If these people decided to become searchers in the cowswap or univ4 system, then they wouldnât have public liquidity and slippage would become hard to predict.
I am very favorable towards privacy in certain cases; public liquidation levels is dumb as fuck. However, onchain liquidity is like a global proof of reserves. The whole world benefits by being able to have reasonable ideas about slippage.
Perhaps we can get the best of both worlds. Itâs not unreasonable for these off chain market makers to have to post zk proofs of their holdings on chain somehow. It doesnât have to be individualized since we only care about the picture globally. This system would also warn people when liquidity vanishes which is an issue otherwise.
Not to mention SUAVE makes this whole problem worse by abstracting liquidity at the block building level
u/ethacct celebrates their cake day by reflecting on the last 7 yearsâŚ
seven years ago I realized I was posting too much crypto stuff on my main account, so i decided to make an âethereum accountâ instead. these days my main account is long gone, and i have fully become ethereum account đŤĄ
bear market things + life changes mean i havenât been around as much, but still lurking here from time to time, and still shitposting on twitter/X/whatever itâs called now. Iâll be back when thereâs exciting stuff to talk about again (pricewise or techwise or both).
u/pa7x1 shares a mental model of scaling via L2s vs scaling the L1
A few days ago someone asked on /r/ethereum whatâs the advantage of scaling via L2 vs L1. I started drafting my response but life got in the way and couldnât give a timely answer. I will instead post it here, most of you will understand well this topic. But it might benefit someone that didnât think about the problem in these terms or give you another way to explain it to newcomers.
Here is a very simple mental model to understand the scalability trilemma, or why blockchains donât scale in a trivial/naive manner.
The scalability trilemma basically states that from the following 3 properties; decentralization, security, scalability. A blockchain can only pick two. The moment you try to attain the other, you start to give up some of the other properties.
The easiest way to see why is to understand the two trivial/naive ways to scale a system. They are called horizontal and vertical scalability. Horizontal scalability is, in essence, adding more instances of the machine to solve the problem in parallel. For instance, your CPU has multiple cores to scale it horizontally. Vertical scalability is about adding more resources to a single instance, to make it able to process more per unit of time. More memory, faster CPU, faster internet connectionâŚ
The thing is that these 2 techniques are directly at odds with the other 2 properties of the trilemma. Vertical scalability is at odds with decentralization. And horizontal scalability is at odds with security.
In essence, if you make the requirements to run a node bigger (vertical scalability) you make it harder and harder for anyone that wants to run an instance. Instead of being able to run it in a consumer grade PC, you will have to run in an AWS intance, or a mainframe. Or whatever ridiculous machine you need to validate Solana. So if you simply increase the resources needed to run a node you end up centralizing the network. This is what Avalanche, Solana, and various other alt-L1s that promised to have solved scalability did. They are just giving up decentralization for scalability.
And horizontal scalability essentially requires splitting the network in shards, each of which validates different sets of transactions, so you can validate in parallel. But if you do this in a naive manner, itâs obvious that the security of the network suffers because the cost to attack each shard is proportionally smaller as there are less validators verifying the transactions.
The roll-up roadmap is a non-naive way to scale the network. It uses sophisticated cryptographic techniques to build compressed proofs of computation, that basically enable to scale the same blockspace by many orders of magnitude, as many transactions can be batched together and posted in a compressed form. It also enables parallel (sharded) execution, you can have multiple roll-ups each of which executes transactions in parallel, without sacrificing the security of the network.
u/PhiMarHal, u/superphiz, and u/Tricky_Troll share their different takes on friend.tech
Every good ponzi, by lasting long enough, hits a moment of capitulation. At that point, initial haters are swayed by its resilience, and join in despite their misgivings.
If the ponzi is especially good, this moment is properly enhanced by an announcement. Lever capitulation into full-blown FOMO.
I believe we hit that moment yesterday with friend.tech. The Paradigm stuff, airdrop points. My timeline is filled with otherwise reasonable people hopping on board.
âBut why, Phi, why do you call friend.tech a ponzi? Iâm having fun. Theyâre going to release more features. Social tokens are the future.â
My own perspective comes down to simple math.
The price curve for shares is supply squared. Goes up fast, goes down faster. You get that high initial growth, tricking your brain into extrapolation, even though in reality itâs pricing people out; then once sentiment turns and people dump, youâll get a catastrophic fall, with everyone and especially late buyers scrambling to get out.
Platform fees are 5% on every trade. Open up your calculator app and type $1000. Multiply it by 0.95. Then do that same operation again and again. See how much money you have left after 3 trades, 5 trades, 10 trades; see how much value is extracted from the userbase by the developers.
You add these two together, you have a recipe for a heavily negative sum game. The money is siphoned away from the system no matter what, a minimum of 10% (in + out), and more the longer you stay in and trade.
Iâm a reckless gambler myself. Iâm not going to tell you you canât have fun in a ponzi, Iâm not going to talk to you about morality. But I would tell you this is one of those times where donât-put-any-money-youâre-unwilling-to-lose should apply strongly. It will come crashing down, and there will be many more losers than winners; the math makes this inevitable.
Any money you put in friend.tech is a greaterâs fool theory bet where the odds are stacked against you.
In 2013 I was part of a local bitcorn group. We had this one member, âTammyâ [not his real name], who attended every meeting and always contributed to really insightful discussion. The thing was, Tammy never bought bitcorn or any of the altcoins that were springing up the time. He explained that if he never bought coins he could never get scammed. He prided himself on understanding the fundamentals of every coin, and he was very sharp at identifying potential weaknesses of different coins. But he never bought in. To this day, Iâm still not sure he has every held crypto.
My point is that itâs no fun to participate in crypto if you avoid new things. Itâs no fun to sit on the sidelines and point out flaws. I donât want anyone to blow their stack, and Iâm very honest about what I believe are valuable tools, and what I think are fads, but itâs OKAY to check out fads. Could you imagine still being unwilling to hold jpg NFTs because theyâre just pictures? Pretty much anyone who holds that view is still living in 2019.
So I urge EthFinance to relax a little bit, stop being so scared of things that are likely to be fads and just check them out with care and caution. I have a group of fad enthusiasts and weâve explored three fads this month and all of them have been a ton of fun.
Give yourself time to grow if you need it. Skip this one, no harm, but commit to sticking a pinky toe in the next thing just so you can enjoy the ride.
Not going to lie, Iâm getting pretty sick of the nuance free takes about Friend.tech. It seems like everyone either convinced it is the future and super disruptive or a basically just a ponzi scheme. Can we please get some nuance in here?
IQBellCurveWojakMeme.jpeg
Low IQ end of the curve: Woah I can buy shares in my favourite influencers! This is the future!!!11!!1!!!!
Mid curve normie take: âiTâs jUsT a PonZi ScHemEâ
Big brain take: âThis is both an innovative platform and an app with major hurdles and design flaws to adoption. It has unique utility like token gated chat rooms which will almost certainly be valuable in the future on some kind of future platform but it might not be this one. Friend.tech has many weaknesses and in particular it uses a highly volatile uniswap V1/2 based curve for pricing of influencer shares. As a result prices fluctuate wildly and will leave many users with a sour taste in their mouth when they get dumped on. This is a big hurdle to mainstream adoption and the price dumps are why all the normies leave and talk shit about crypto in a bear market. 95% of people donât want to speculate on this shit. Furthermore, there is also an enormous 5% fee on all trades which quickly bleeds users of their investments if they trade regularly.â
Edit: I agree with a lot of your takes in the replies, my point isnât that any one of them is wrong, just that your nuanced takes are what I have been wanting more of and less one sentence posts whining about it or shilling it.
u/Fheredin is interested in a hypothetical decentralized Wikipedia and u/OkDragonfruit1929 has some great thoughts
TL;DR? Wikipediaâs expenses are roughly a third of their revenues; the difference goes to âcharitiesâ which have some strange political ties.
I wasnât born yesterday. A defacto information platform like Wikipedia donating 2/3rds of its revenue to political entities is going to end with Wikipedia itself censoring opinions to protect their donation streams, and perhaps to curry favor with politicians.
Things get even worse when you consider Lundukeâs previous financial investigation. Mozilla gets most of its revenue fromâdrumroll, pleaseâGoogle. I swear, Big Tech has monetary incest problems which make FTX look solvent.
Any Ethereum L2 based decentralized Wikipedia alternative should focus first and foremost on censorship resistance. Financial incentives are secondary.
Censorship resistance should be the top priority to prevent the platform from censoring opinions and information based on pressures from outside entities purchasing the right to edit articles. Without proper censorship resistance, the alternative Ethereum L2 based Wikipedia alternative will quickly fall into the same issues as Wikipedia, where donations and political ties influence what information is allowed or promoted on the platform.
Wikipedia donates 2/3 of its revenues to outside organizations, many with concerning political connections. This creates a dangerous incentive for Wikipedia to censor information to protect donation revenue streams or curry political favor. The power to control information is far too valuable enough as it is without adding the possiblity of profiting if some sort of cookie-cutter financial DeFi game is uesd and applied to a wikipedia alternative on an Ethereum L2.
If the alternative platform relies on tokenizing as a way to weight one userâs edits over another, the incentives could lead to censorship and conflicts of interest around what information is allowed or promoted. Financial rewards or incentives for users should be secondary to creating a platform resistant to all forms of censorship and bias. Rewards based on âtruthfulnessâ could easily turn into subjective censorship.
Any form of censorship, no matter how well-intentioned, can be exploited to silence dissenting opinions and shape narratives. Maintaining censorship resistance should be the highest priority.
Without proper incentives and protections, all platforms, even L2 Ethereum dApps, are vulnerable to becoming tools of censorship. The alternative must be designed from the ground up to resist this.
u/benido2030 is structuring the community made EthFinance Bull Case for Ethereum.
As stated last Friday, this week I have started to structure all of your feedback for a potential âEthFinance Bull Case for Ethereumâ post, which could also be used for a short video.
Ethereum the network
No competition for decentralized blockspace
Only credible neutral blockchain/ network
Ethereum is green since Proof of Stake
Ethereum still number 1 for developers
Ethereum is the only blockchain/ with multiple clients
The EVM is lindy
Ethereum is scaling via L2s / there is enough blockspace/ âinfraâ now / cost per tx will go down with 4844
ETH (and Layer2) is home to native stablecoins
ETH continues to attract big companies developing payment solutions (VISA/ PayPal) and even nation states introducing CBDCs (on EVM and not ETH?)
Ether the asset
ETH as a triple point asset
ETH as Store of Value
ETH is needed for transactions plus collateral plus money
ETH has a risk free yield via staking (narrative)
deflationary asset (âsupply go down, number go upâ) // supply shock
Multiple nation states and corporations buying and staking ETH to ensure the decentralization of the network
only with ETH you can build a decentralized stablecoin?
Demand from developed countries
Some comments:
These are obviously just bullets, so Iâll add detailed thoughts once we all agree on the structure and I am not sure this is the best structure yet. For example you could add a third a third category with âNarrativesâ which could include the âETH is greenâ or âRisk free yieldâ bullets. Also something like âUse Casesâ probably could be its own category as well. Looking forward to your thoughts and potential changes you would like to see!
I have tried to write about Ethereum and ETH, so in a way thatâs not comparing it to any other network/ asset. I really liked these statements made on Friday, but have rephrased them.
I have added my own points, so some bullets are "new.
If you feel your points are not fully covered or inadequately worded in these bullets, feel free to drop a comment and suggest a change
Next steps (from my point of view, but also happy to receive feedback when it comes to the process!) would be to collect your feedback, change the structure/ reorganize all arguments, enhance every bullet or even split them to make sure everything is covered. After that I will start drafting short paragraphs for each point, but also encourage all of you to draft a bull case yourself or at least pick your favorite point(s) and draft a small text for those.
u/Set1Less shares some sad news for another Tornado Cash dev
The power and integrity of sanctions derive not only from OFACâs ability to designate and add persons to the SDN List but also from OFACâs willingness to remove persons from the SDN List consistent with the law. The ultimate goal of sanctions is not to punish but to bring about a positive change in behavior.
Lol. When does the Treasury think they will see âa positive change in behaviorâ on the part of the immutable EVM code that resides at 0xd90e2f?
u/stevieraykatz shares a quiet win for the ecosystem
how to move crypto through a CEX when you usually just transact onchain:
Do a test transaction to your newly generated CEX address (donât reuse old ones!). Check to see if balance has updated. Forget that CEXs take a while to see the transaction. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
Stare at screen for 30 seconds and then move on to something else while you wait
Remember 6 hours later that you were doing something when you come across the window in your tabs
We know the Rocket Pool team shares this belief and weâre delighted to support them via active participation in their Oracle DAO and using ETH from our corporate balance sheet to operate several hundred nodes on the Rocket Pool network alongside our friends Unit_410.
u/_WebOfTrust thinks new Safe feature could be the future of wallets
not only we can create new social wallet but we can also migrate existing wallet, no seed phrases hassle and could help onboard folks with limited technical knowledge.
From proposal âMany hardware and software solutions use this elliptic curve as signing algorithms, such as TLS, DNSSEC, Appleâs Secure Enclave, Passkeys, Android Keystore, and Yubikey, which can be used in the EVM.â
Lot of math and havent digested the whole thread but future of wallet management looks bright.
u/etheraider has a call to action for the latest EVM project!
For those who didnt see 2 days ago EVMavericks kicked off a novel idea to create a community sourced decentralized art collection around a central theme!
To my knowledge this would be the first of its kind, right now we have close to 40 people/artists that have committed to creating art for the project. Would be awesome to hit 100 and showcase a unique robust collection in Ethereum!
Any and all funds raised from it would go towards whatever initiative the artists decide on.
One of the members just suggested a broad theme, âDecentralizationâ, so that or something like it may be what we go with!
I personally am excited to see all the different takes/art styles/perspectives on something abstract like âdecentralizationâ, would make for a pretty compelling artistic experiment!
If youre interested in participating and contributing art join the discord (dont need an EVM)and head over the public untitled art channel and hit the thumbs up on the first message!
u/OkDragonfruit1929 just had a bunch of firsts worth sharing!
Just wanted to share my excitement - todayâs been full of firsts for me! I used the Arch User Repository for the first time to build frame-eth from source, and successfully used the Frame Wallet and managed to bridge to Base. But wait, thereâs more⌠I also minted my very first Base NFT! đ¨đĽ
Iâve been hearing a lot about Frame wallet, and I figured with the official launch of Base, I could use this as an opportunity to test out two new tech innovations at the same time. Finally took to the Arch User Repository and installed the latest Frame wallet from source and itâs genuinely a feeling I canât quite put into words. The whole process was much smoother than I expected, and Iâm really excited about the potential of decentralized tech.
For anyone still on the fence, just dive in! The waters are fine, and the learning experience is invaluable. đ
Cheers to firsts! đĽ
u/Nomadic8893 critiques the current state of L2s and u/PhiMarHal replies with coming solutions
From a user experience standpoint and someone who identifies as both a ânormieâ but also has slightly bit above average knowledge of crypto/blockchains, imma just say it: L2s UX is a mess.
Youâre expecting the TikTok/plug and play/ iPhone and iPad generation to know how to setup Metamask, to bridge over ETH to one of 10+ L2s, do DeFi/NFT with fragmented liquidity amongst the layer 2s and 8 versions of AAVE/Uniswap/Sushiswap/Blur/OpenSea, wait 8 days to bridge back to mainnet, and keep up with whats possible to do on different L2sâŚ.? Donât even have to get the point about lack of decentralization on the L2s.
It seems to me the current structure of the Ethereum blockchain enforces favorable tokenomics on the layer 1 (capped blockspace and throughput, deflationary issuance, hardening of ETH) while giving users an option to opt into a low gas fee/high throughput environment, which on the face of things, is ideal, best of both worlds. But in reality, I feel that it severely degrades the user experience, creates multiple friction points, and ultimately deters Ethereum from any sort of mass adoption, mainly catering to the crypto-crowd. Hope Iâm wrong and Ethereum thrives, but this user complexity is, for me, is one of the largest issues that Ethereum has to contend with for long term expansion and adoption.
Personally, I expect most people to experience blockchain through account abstraction, and for the driver to be a dapp rather than a blockchain/rollup.
i.e. youâre on Base mainnet because youâre playing words3.xyz, but really you donât even need to know youâre on Base mainnet. You hold a Reddit NFT but you donât even know itâs a NFT, or where it exists.
Even in the EOA world of today, this is smoothed out on wallets like Rabby handling the network switching quite smoothly.
As for those dapps existing on different places, I think that existence is pretty fungible. It doesnât matter to me if Uniswap liquidity is fragmented when I can technically get the same execution price within 0.1% of general market price. More exotic assets will have to pick and choose, but then I wouldnât expect normal people to invest in esoteric tokens.
To me, getting to subcent fees while maintaining essential decentralization, security and credible neutrality properties is more important. Perceived user complexity is mostly a consequence of the space exploring many venues to this day.
u/the_swingman shares their thoughts on a few things
Hope everyone is hanging in there and keeping your heads up. Bearish/crabish times can sometimes feel like an extended hunger pit in your stomach. This too shall pass and brighter days will come, rest assured.
I started up my weekly buys again back when we last touched the 1700s and will continue to do so for better or worse, until we are out of the crab range above 2k with solid seeming resistance.
Fam and friends who hold ETH will periodically check in, fishing for price predictions from me.. I tell them the same thing over and over, that I donât expect any meaningful positive price action (anywhere near ATH) to happen until US inflation is tamed, fed fund rates are cut down to a more normal rate, and not during any sort of recession because of rate cuts. We need to be out of those woods before I feel the sentiment will change with risk assets.
Tall order but that order will be filled. And as some have speculated here, the soonest I think thatâs going to happen would be sometime in 2025. Obviously just a best guess and honestly, an optimistic guess in my point of view. Time passing without catastrophic events happening in crypto would be a blessing. We need time to heal the wounds of the great Terra/Luna collapse and all the subsequent fallout that was left in the aftermath. Weâre already starting to see some closure type things happening.. Mashinsky arrest, SBF back to jail, some blockfi funds are being returned, etc.. while we still have far to go, Gemini still in the lurch with Earn, SEC drama and so forth. Time will sort all of these things out and I believe for the better.
Meanwhile, growth is ongoing in our space, another time dependent variable. Mistakes will be learned from, innovation is inevitable all in good time.
Personally, somewhat recently, Iâve been working on some lifestyle changes.. which started with getting a check up at the doctors. Blood pressure, cholesterol, diet, exercise.. all very important to keep up on. I even grabbed an oura ring to help monitor sleeping habits. I feel as though Iâm training mentally and physically for the next bull run lol. But in all seriousness, it feels great to trend in a healthy direction. I work for myself, so keeping motivated and energy levels up are a persistent goal. Iâve also been traveling with more frequency and doing my best to travel with friends. The times I get to vacation a bit with friends, I realize they need it just as much as I do. Anyways..
Lastly, I might not chime in here much but I certainly read the daily everyday and have since long before the migration to r/ethfiance . I very much appreciate this community and the effort of those who do take the time to post in here. Thank you all!
u/magnushansson looks back on a recent big achievement of theirs
As summer draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the incredible journey Iâve taken this season. Iâm thrilled to share that I have successfully defended my PhD thesis titled âDecentralized Finance and Central Bank Communicationâ, with a primary focus on the market microstructure of DEXes. This achievement was by no means a solo endeavor, and I owe a significant debt of gratitude to this community.
Throughout the research process, the insights, discussions, and support from r/ethfinance have been invaluable. Many of the comments here have enriched my understanding and shaped my perspectives on the evolving landscape of decentralized finance.
Iâm excited to start a new chapter as an Assistant Professor at Stockholm Business School. In this role, I will continue to dive deep into the intersection of market microstructure and DeFi, fueled by the passion and knowledge Iâve gained from this community.
In essence, I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to every member who posed challenging questions, shared enlightening resources, or simply offered words of encouragement. Thank you! / Magnus
u/nixorokish noticed a shift in Ethereum âcompetitorsâ and u/LogrisTheBard shares insights into system design
this is an interesting shift - weâve moved on from serious competitors trying to replace Ethereumâs L1 and now weâre looking at entities trying to become Ethereum on top of Ethereum. the provider that becomes ubiquitous and that people build on top of - Eigenlayer, Lido v2, DVT protocols creating their own spec - theyâre all trying to become the dominant layer that people must use
Lido v2 believes that all liquid staking will eventually happen with stETH because defi markets want to converge to a single liquid staking token, so any staking protocol will just need to use Lido to open up a pool (âmoduleâ) and they can optionally issue their own token in addition to stETH. Eigenlayer wants to be the layer that protocols use to bootstrap services. SSV, Obol - they want to build a DVT protocol that every other provider conforms to (multi client architecture, but clients must use their spec).
but all of them are doing it in a way thatâs antithetical to the reason (imo) for Ethereumâs success - its credible neutrality and the fact that no one is the overlord here. In the example with DVT - multi client architecture is good, but not if the parent structure is centralized or not credibly neutral. Theyâre all trying to capture what wasnât captured when Ethereumâs model was developed. Humans are corruptible - DAOs are not the answer that makes something decentralized - does a serious competitor to Lido develop something that looks like Lido v2 (and Stakewise V3) but actually decentralized?
In my consulting work I bring up these topics a lot when I encounter any type of hostage collateral in system design. If the service is chain-adjacent I usually bring up Eigen Layer. If itâs an L1 I bring up running their L1 as an L2/L3 on Ethereum. Iâve done this for over a dozen projects. If itâs an app on chain I bring up LST collateral. I have never received a sound technical argument against this suggestion. Their argument is predictably about retaining token utility because they own a bag and want it to be worth more. When I bring up vampire attacks, the usual and sole response is that a social moat will protect them. This feels like wishful thinking to me. These approaches are going to devour the crypto space in the next decade. When we see the first vampire attack of something like Chainlink succeed where an attacker just forks their code and changes the collateral it will send off a tidal wave of copycats just like YFI did to liquidity farming with Sushi, Curve, Harvest, Aave, Kyber Rainmaker, etc. Eventually, layers of interest bearing collateral with different risk tradeoffs will be the only hostage collateral and every chain but the top few that can pay for their own security will settle on those few top chains.
I think the LST space is actually fragmenting and isnât likely to consolidate. It will look like the stablecoin space where there are dozens/hundreds of LSTs. Ideally Lido will be subject to repeated and sustained vampire attacks and will just service as a gateway into staking. I do think there will be actually decentralized LSTs but I think itâs too late in the game for them to dominate. That ship has sailed, Rocketpool was our best chance and they blew the opportunity by not using the oDAO RPL rewards for liquidity farming to bootstrap themselves to massive adoption.
u/OkDragonfruit1929 is shocked by a recent big step towards mainstream adoption
So⌠I just minted a âStand with cryptoâ NFT with my VISA debit card and I finally understand why VISA letting you pay gas fees with your VISA card is such a big deal!
No need for anyone to create an exchange account and buy ETH, it just works in the background!
I am absolutely stoked about the convenience of using a VISA debit card to directly mint an NFT without the need for creating an exchange account and purchasing ETH (Ethereum) separately. This approach makes the process more user-friendly and accessible to individuals who might not be familiar with cryptocurrency exchanges or the technical aspects of buying and using Ethereum.
Using a debit or credit card to directly mint NFTs simplifies the process by abstracting away the steps involved in acquiring cryptocurrency like Ethereum and then using it to pay for minting fees or NFT creation.
Itâs a step towards mainstream adoption by reducing the barrier to entry and allowing more people to participate in the NFT space.
u/superphiz stands up for himself in front of a disingenuous accusation
it really guts me to come here and find myself getting shit on. You donât have to know me, you donât have to trust me, but Iâm proud to say that every action Iâve ever taken has been in the best interest of promoting greater security and decentralization of the beacon chain. I have never acted in any way contrary to these values and itâs offensive that the same people keep dragging my name. YES, I accepted the role of oDAO member for Rocket Pool, a role that I am STILL very proud of, and YES, I got a lot of money for it, just like the other 18 odao members who participated in the protocol the way it was designed. YES, I voted to reduce that and have encourage further development of RP in a way that doesnât require an oDAO at all. You know what else I did? I proudly promoted a platform that has onboarded over 3000 nodes to the Ethereum network. And Iâll do it again if I can. Iâm not going to get shit on like a little bitch by people who havenât done shit to bring success to our network. I would STILL accept fair money for my time to support and promote other projects that are highly aligned with our goals, and Iâll never mince words about projects who risk our future. Sorry. Getting a little heated here.
Consider this: The SEC (Securities and Exchange Consideration) Consideration deliberating on whethere they should once again reconsider their previous considerations considering to consider reconsidering ETH ETF for deliberation and consideration.
I held my tongue back in that thread, but I found that sentiment bizarre too. If ETH development were basically dead like Bitcoin I could maybe understand the logic of the market capping out soon, but ETH is still a rapidly developing and improving technology, and still has a lot of not only adoption but simple low-hanging improvements in market efficiency in front of it. Even if core Ethereum development completely halted today, ETH would still have at least another market cycle worth of juice in it.
There still arenât any ETFs in the US. Big brokerages only just launched crypto custody less than a couple months ago. Roll-ups and zk tech still arenât mature yet. The general public still thinks NFTs are an environmental nightmare. Itâs been less than a year since the last PoW block was mined on Ethereum, and barely three months since its literal consensus system was completed! The queue isnât even clear yet, for godâs sake!
These are probably a lot of the same people who called for $10k last cycle. Now that weâve been crabbing for a while, they get all depressed and doom-and-gloom. When the bull market picks up again, theyâre probably going to start calling for $20k+. Then weâll top out at like $16k and theyâll watch their generational paper gains slip through their fingers again.
u/Set1Less has an update on the struggling US stablecoin bill
That seems to have died today too. The law just created a legal structure for stablecoins (with actual legal protection) and allowed businesses to use stablecoins, but the bill has died
Mullvad frustrates that effort by not having any user data.
A little over a month later Mullvad is forced to withdraw their forwarded-ports service, which Iâm sure some of you know is what you want to have if youâre trying to run a node over a VPN:
Not privy to the exact details of course, but it isnât rocket science to anyone who has been online for any length of time and relates to controversial political content, you poison the well. Suddenly somebody starts using a forwarded port for child porn, the complaint is made, and now the police come back to Mullvad asking for proof they werenât they werenât the ones who produced it. Or something like that.
Result? Anyone here who was using Mullvad as their VPN for staking now has to a) find another VPN and b) wonder how long it will be before the same proposition is made to that vendor.
u/pr0nh0li0 points out the wrong ETH supply values on major websites
None of Coingecko, Coinmarketcap, Coinmetrics, or Bitinfocharts have the right supply listed for ETH. They seem to be either accounting for new issuance but not burns, and/or they may be double counting ETH that has been withdrawn (as technically the ETH doesnât ever actually leave the staking deposit contract, but is instead re-minted at a 1-1 rate when âwithdrawnâ). Itâs almost been a year since the merge and almost 4 months since withdrawals were enabled. How have they not addressed this? Each of these sites has supply listed somewhere between ~120,700,000 and ~120,800,000.
CryptoQuant seemingly has the opposite problemâaccounts for burns but not new issuance under PoS (supply is under 119MM according to them).
Etherscan and Ultrasound.Money seem to get it the most correct (although it could also be noted that Etherscan has a slightly lower total supply than Ultrasound.Money).
Would be nice if we could get some consistency here. To be fair, the set up for the withdrawal contract and BeaconChain make it a bit of a mess of accounting, but I feel like there should be some more urgency to address this issue at the big metrics sites.
u/Syentist complains about the SEC and u/edmundedgar has a fair balancing take
Some unelected fuckface sitting in a federal agency with no legislative backing from Congress is able to threaten private service providers to cut out a legitimate American industry, using the full weight of the American government to back his threats. Raw, unelected power.
Just as with the FDIC shutting down some banks because they are associated with crypto services, and deciding to save others which are not. Just as with Operation Chokehold 1.0 and 2.0. Unelected, authoritarian power from the Administrative State, trampling on American rights.
Watching the Supreme Court castrate these federal agencies ruling by ruling is one of the few bright spots in politics rn.
Weâve had some really shady cases like the Tether attestations where theyâve engaged auditing companies to do âattestationsâ that are deliberately designed to make people think their money is safe, while leaving loopholes so they donât have to actually keep the money safe. With Tether they literally wired the money from Bitfinex into a bank account, had the auditor certify that it was all there, then wired it right back out. Tether made a bunch of statements to make people think theyâd been audited, and we only found out about it because the New York regulator figured out what was happening and got the information into a public filing. This is the SEC saying, if you do an attestation that isnât an audit, you have to be honest about what it proves, and if the client starts lying about what it proves then you have to speak up about it or you could have legal liability too.
I know itâs complicated to have to fight on two fronts because we need to defend ourselves against the regulators as well as the scammers but can we please stop reflexively taking the side of the scammers who keep trying to scam people all the time?
u/Kallukoras breaks news of the Curve hack. Then u/skythe4 and u/bagogel12 outlines some of the collateral damage. Finally, u/LogrisTheBard gives us an ELI5 on how it happened.
PSA: Vyper versions 0.2.15, 0.2.16 and 0.3.0 are vulnerable to malfunctioning reentrancy locks. The investigation is ongoing but any project relying on these versions should immediately reach out to us.
Peckshield Twitter has some info. Itâs a bug with certain versions of the Vyper compiler. Main victim right now are certain ETH based Curve pools. Newer pools (like most LST pools) are unaffected just because the Vyper compiler was newer at that time. Iâm surprised that when Vyper changed this code they didnât see a bug in the old code and notify people.
This is why I check r/cc from time to time, that and sometimes the âstoryâ posts interest me. Their knowledge of crypto is very superficial but they are often on-track with general news.
So apparently âprotect self-custodyâ passed in a committee (every republican voted in favor and every democrat against). I am not from the US so didnât understand how the process works and I see few do on reddit, but it is basically like this. After a committee approval, it then needs to be passed in Congress, by a majority. Then in the Senate by 60% and then Biden needs to actually sign it. He can veto and it would then take a 2/3 vote to overturn, vetoes are rare (Biden has 6).
The regulation side probably interests me more than most here. So far, Ethereum is mostly only used for Defi today, not gaming, betting, insurance, tokenization of real world assets etc. NFTs is maybe the second use case but doesnât interest me. If defi were banned or I thought it would be, I wouldnât hold ETH anymore since I thought other assets would appreciate more. For example, I never bought any Monero, itâs a regulatory nightmare imo. The US market is the most important because it has the most capital, being a large country and a lot of foreign investments. We buy stock in your companies (mostly tech), I doubt you invest much in foreign companies.
Very often, the western world also try to follow, or even copy US regulation. I used to be interested in flying drones and in 2021 my country (Sweden), introduced new laws that were an exact copy of the US rules. You have the nice round number 400 feet as height limit, we have 120 meters, which is the equivalent in feet and we adopted the rest too. If you sanction Iran, our companies have to comply, if you close your country due to Corona, we do the same (which I think was the correct decision). There are so many things we would never do first, but if you do it, we do it too. You lose a little bit of faith in your politicians when you become aware of this. We have clear and decent crypto rules, but they could change quickly from outside pressure. We are still a progressive country with few âbackwards thinkersâ, so that compensates a bit though.
I donât think the US will ban defi, I think it is more likely than in 2020, but I think more red tape is coming and some of it can be impossible to live up to for Americans. Like KYC on all defi protocols, making private wallets (sometimes called unhosted/dark wallets) illegal, whitelist/blacklist of dapps. I am not seeing good regulation be passed in the US that will prevent the next FTX, the next stable coin crash, clarify uncertainties or allow companies to use defi. Imo, the Ds are against good regulation that is passed by Rs and in favor of bad regulation that will hurt defi. âYou want to vote on a bill to make stablecoins less of a blackbox? Fuck no, every D go out of the room so we donât have quorum and canât vote on itâ - itâs a clown show. A couple of days ago the Senate (D majority) passed a really bad bill that would make controllers or large investors of protocols responsible for what happens on them and require bank-like AML. If North Korean hackers used Uniswap, there are no controllers but they could go after Uniswap labs, if it passes. The Rocketpool oDAO be responsible over their products. Maybe a dapp gets hacked, they could probably go after the devs working on it and punish them.
Hopefully this might lead to something good and make Defi more anonymous and less centralized than today. As Voorhees said, if there are controllers, itâs not defi. But yea, if Blackrock enters, even with a defi ban in practice, maybe none of this âmattersâ, price wise.
Bloomberg Opinion article on whether index funds should be illegal discussed Richard Heart and his alleged fraud if anyone is interested in reading below:
Hex
Here is an economic system, or a system anyway:
I make up a crypto token called MattCoin. I can issue an unlimited amount of MattCoins, since I made them up.
I sell them to people for money.
You can use MattCoins to make term deposits, with me: You can give me back your MattCoins and I will keep them for some specified time period (say, a year), and at the end of the period I will hand them back to you with interest.
The interest is paid in MattCoins.
The interest rate is high, say, 38% per year.
This is the only thing you can do with the MattCoins. Theyâre not useful for payments, they donât run smart contracts on a blockchain, all you can do is trade them on crypto exchanges and deposit them for a 38% yield paid in kind.
So you pay me $100 for 100 MattCoins, you deposit them with me for a year, and at the end of the year I give you back 138 MattCoins.
At the end of the year, how much would you expect your 138 MattCoins to be worth? I think the main options are [1] :
$138. You put in $100 for 100 MattCoins, meaning that they are worth $1 each, and in a year you get back 138 MattCoins. If they are still worth $1 each, then 138 MattCoins are worth $138.
$100. You put in $100 for some MattCoins, absolutely no economic activity happened, and in a year you get back 138 MattCoins. This is like a stock split: You had 100 shares of a pot worth $100, now you have 138 shares of a pot worth $100, each share is worth less but the pot hasnât changed.
$0. You put in $100 for some MattCoins, absolutely no economic activity happened or will ever happen, in a year you get back 138 MattCoins, but I keep the $100 and you donât get to exchange your 138 MattCoins for real money again. There is not actually a pot with $100 in it; I just took the $100! You put in $100 and got back a pile of magic beans that are not redeemable for anything. The pile grew bigger over the year, but it remains worthless.
More than $138. You put in $100 for 100 MattCoins, those MattCoins offered a 38% yield, other people see that 38% yield and said âI want some of that,â they buy some MattCoins, the price of MattCoin rises, still other people see the rising price and say âooh I want some of that,â the price rises further, itâs a virtuous cycle, eventually each MattCoin is worth like $10,000 and your 138 MattCoins make you a millionaire.
I think that Answer 3 is the standard answer that traditional financial analysis would give you: You bought an electronic token with no cash flows ever, so itâs worth zero. I am drawn to this traditional analysis, but it has not really worked all that well for understanding crypto.
I think that Answer 4 is the standard answer that crypto would give you. This is a completely accepted mechanism of crypto finance: You have some token, the main thing that the token does is generate more tokens, you call those additional tokens âyield,â people are attracted to the yield, they buy the token and its price goes up. The âyieldâ does not come from any economic activity in the real world; it just comes from printing more tokens. âPonzinomics,â people sometimes say. Loosely speaking, this is the thought process behind crypto âPonzicoinsâ like OlympusDAO and Wonderland. Loosely speaking, it is the thought process behind many algorithmic stablecoins like TerraUSD. Loosely speaking, it is the thought process that Sam Bankman-Fried once described to me on Odd Lots: âYou start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol thatâs gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. Itâs just a box.â
u/hanniabu has a call to action for the EVMavericks
Something Iâd love to see and I think EVM is aptly positioned for is to fill a gap Iâm constantly seeing mentioned: digestible updates on whatâs happening in the ecosystem.
Map out the various different sectors (defi, NFTs, L2s, modular chains, RWAs, social, gaming, infrastructure, staking, development, security, etc)
Assign 2-3 people to each sector (some may need sub-sectors)
Those people will focus on monitoring whatâs going on in that spaceâŚ.new projects, updates, airdrop potential, etc
Have a separate channel for each sector/sub-sector to drop these updates
Have an additional person per sector/sub-sector to organize and condense those feeds and assign pre-defined metadata to each of the updates (new project, project update, airdrop, etc)
Have another 2-3 people collate that info into weekly summaries
From here you can monetize it to create an revenue stream which can then be used to pay contributors, grow the treasury, and fund more projects. How to monetize?
Start out offering this newsletter for free, this will help gain exposure/following as you get the process down and subsequent steps
Move to a freemium service similar to Bankless, where you offer more basic info for free and have the rest behind a paywall. Substack can be used for this.
This platform can then be used to:
Use as a launchpad for EVM projects
Use to push certain initiatives (such as various decentralization/diversity efforts)
Creating this DEX appears to be the culmination of years of hard research, study, and academic achievement. It pays to take your time to do things right the first time without rushing.
Sometimes I wish we had DEXes on Ethereum. They sound like a really neat technology.
u/haurog discusses Gnosis chainâs recent developments and future roadmap
u/shiftly linked to a gnosis chain talk yesterday by Frederieke Ernst, a gnosis co-founder were she talked about L2s, Rollups and Sidechains. I watched it on livestream yesterday as I am generally interested in the gnosis ecosystem and their chain. Shiftly mentioned being surprised by the vision of gnosis chain as they have thought it being more like an incentiviced testnet.
I am financially and technically invested by being a solo validator on gnosis chain. So take any positive sentiment I have with a grain of salt. The history of gnosis chain is quite an interesting one. It was born as xdai chain as one of the earlier EVM compatible alt L1 chains. The interesting thing they did was not having their own coin, but using xDAI, bridged DAI, as the base token to pay for gas. No own token meant no speculative frenzy in the last bull run. They developed rather quietly the only bigger deal they made was with POAP in 2020, that is why all our POAPs life on there now. And thanks to xDAI chain POAPs can often be minted for free as the gas costs are pretty negligible and are being paid by POAP. I still remember the pre xDAI chain POAPs which sometimes would have cost me $50 to mint.
In Summer 2021 Gnosis got interested in xDAI chain and took them over. xDAI chain rebranded to Gnosis chain. They started changing the consensus layer from a more permissioned set to a permissionless Ethereum approach. For this they started using the GNO token as a mandatory staking token. One validator costs 1 GNO, which is about $120. Much cheaper than Ethereum. There are about 130000 validators on Gnosis chain, about 6 times less than on Ethereum, but the economic security is obviously much lower due to only 1 GNO being staked per validator compared to 32 ETH for a single Ethereum validator. There are some large staking as a service providers, but nevertheless there are a substantial number of solo stakers, making the gnosis chain pretty decentralized. Unfortunately, I do not have any statistics available, as the websites I used before are defunct since a few months ago.
Now to the vision. The following description is how I understand it and is from public sources I read over the last 2 years. Generally, I think it is very hard for any alternative L1 to have a value proposition as Rollups most probably will eat their lunch sooner or later. At the same time the Gnosis founders have been in the crypto space for so long, I assume they know what they are doing and how hard it is to have a value proposition. At first, their idea was for Gnosis chain to be like an incentivized testnet, like Kusama is to Polkadot. The idea was to first test hard forks on Gnosis chain and then deploy to mainnet. Reality threw a wrench in that idea, the merge on Gnosis chain was a few months after the Ethereum merge, same with the shapella hard fork which will be in 2 weeks on Gnosis chain.
This brings me to the talk linked by u/shiftly yesterday, which describes the new vision I have not seen described before. I definitely have seen more critical talks by Gnosis chain people aginst rollups in the last few months but did not really know why. The Gnosis team pivoted Gnosis chain to being more of Cosmos like ecosystem around Ethereum. They build a trustless bridge to and from Ethereum. And also gnosis pay will make jumping from the various chains as simple and trustless as possible.
Will it work out? I have no idea. Rollups for me have been the big disappointment of 2021 and 2022 and still are far away from the final version of being as trustless and decentralized. On the other hand Optimism and Arbitrum have become pretty reliable for everyday use and various ZK rollups are coming out left and right. Nevertheless, for me Gnosis chain is a hedge against the Rollup vision not working out as fast as necessary. Gnosis chain might be able to get some more usage in the coming years. Will Gnosis chain end up as a rollup on Ethereum? Maybe. But even then, due to the decentralized validator base, they might have a headstart for sequencer decentralization compared to othe rollups which first have to achieve that.
Tldr: Gnosis chain, formerly known as xDAI chain, pivoted in the last few months to a more Cosmos like vision for the Ethereum space consisting of EVM chains connected to each other by trustless bridges. Will it work out? Who knows.
u/Bob-Rossi has some delegate updates on Arbitrum and HOP
Little Arbitrum DAO update for everyone as a delegate. Iâm assuming ARB links are still shadow-banned, but want to get the picture across regardless.
There has been push over the last month or so to get some type of grants framework started with the DAO. Two of the big proposals were Plurality Labs and Questbook.
Plurarlity Labs is looking to start a grants program over multiple phases. Initially running the program, but with an end goal of phasing themselves out once a way to run grants on-chain is solved. I voted âForâ this proposal (Snapshot) and it has narrowly passed. The DAO has been slow to start and somewhat directionless, so Iâm hoping this will help with that. While grants will be handed out with this project, the scope is more about the big picture process that develops over the long term.
Questbook was originally tied in with Plurality Labs, but split off into itâs own request. It has a similar goal - a method to run grant programs - albeit with a more focused approach. They have a system they have implemented with other projects they are looking to bring to the ARB DAO. I have been, I guess, âsponsoring (?)â Questbook as I have been working with them to post the Snapshot / Tally votes. Snapshop has passed (Snapshot) and the Tally Vote (Tally) has just started up. Iâve voted âForâ on this, as once again I think the grant projects are good for the space and like to see different ideas take a stab at growing the Aribtrum space. Having talked to the people there it seems like a good project!
An additional note. If Questbook passes, keep an eye out if you want to get involved. There will be a two week window where knowledgably crypto-ians can apply to be a Domain Allocator. Essentially, you would take over 1 of 4 target grant domains (Gaming / Developer Tooling on NOVA / New Protocol Ideas / Education, Community Growth and Events) to help decide if projects can get grant money. It is a paid role, so something to think about if your into that. There are details in the votes.
Itâs been a minute since I made any HOP updates too! Not too much since I last posted, a lot of housekeeping votes (multisig refills, sybil hunter airdrops). Of note tho:
Liquidity discussions continued with a Temperature Check on providing liquidity for the HOP token. Ultimately âfailedâ to no change. It is a small-cap so a lot of debate on how much of it is simply the marketcap. Regardless, as a temperature check I did vote in favor of incentivizing HOP/ETH. I honestly donât lean one way or the other on this type of thing. I do see the value and think slippage is high, but I also see the argument against throwing money after market forces of a low-cap. I voted in favor as a signal Iâm open to the discussion.
The minimum delegate threshold to get pay-outs for contributing to the DAO was voted down to 30,000 HOP with HIP-35. I voted for 30,000 out of the options (30k, 40k, 50k, no change). Iâd like to see more voices join, so we are hoping lowering the threshold might attract more activity. We shall see!
u/hanniabu is drumming up support for getting Lenster to add Reddit-like threads and mod tools
What feature do you want if u/lenster have communities đĽ?
If you have an account itâd be great to show support for reddit-like threads and mod tools. You probably wonât be able to comment on this post but thereâs a few comments that say something similar that you can like to give a sentiment boost such as this one: https://lenster.xyz/posts/0x1d6e-0x092a-DA-0563fbdf
u/Syentist explains a potential use case to send ETH and OP skyward
Im not fully sold on an eye ball scanning billionaire, but itâs undeniable that Sam Altman is one of the hottest names in tech at the moment, and him using a very ethereum-centric product for a digital identity solution coupled to a financial system (literally what we have been harping about for years) is prettyâŚinteresting. For eg they are not just simply using the OP Superchain, they are even spending effort on shipping 4844 along with Base
Itâs also screamingly obvious that online presence (social media, financial txs etc) need to be tied to some form of identity to prevent bot spam, and even worse, AI powered bot spam. So if this triggers a gradual âahaâ moment among the tech zeitgeist, that decentralised and interconnected identity + social media + financial systems running on Ethereum are a very elegant solution to the problems of todayâŚit could be unbelievably bullish for ETH and OP.
Or it could be one of those retrospectively ridiculous ideas which were born and died in the depths of bear markets. We shall see soon enough.
Edit: big V dropped a blog post on biometric proof of person hood today!. Worldcoin team is listed in the acknowledgement line so some synchrony there. Reading through it, Iâm more convinced than ever that Proof of Person hood/decentralised identity will cross the Rubicon and get recognized as an important âlegitimateâ mainstream usecase of public ledgers (and of Ethereum, specifically).
u/benido2030 shares their latest favourite podcast episodes
+++ Benidoâs favorite podcasts episodes +++
Some weeks ago, someone here asked for podcast recommendations and interesting episodes. Since I enjoy podcasts I thought it might be a service to the community to highlight those I really liked (or maybe disliked? Letâs see what the future brings). The first edition was okay I think, so hereâs the second Top3. Bell Curve: Is Liquid Staking a Winner-takes-all market? feat Hasu
This episode is interesting. Itâs part of the âLST Seasonâ of Bell Curve and the first episode after the kickoff. As most of you are probably aware Hasu is a advisor to Lido and was not really in favor of self limiting when the discussion popped up last year (or beginning of this year? I canât remember).
Whatâs interesting here is that Hasu explains his arguments and assumptions about the staking/ LST market (e.g. CEXes and how they could capture a massive share withouth necessarily being ETH aligned, because itâs just one business for them). I followed the discussion back in the days, but didnât really understand where he was coming from and understand him better now. I think we have to distinguish between his comments with regards to the market (âstaking/ liquid staking is a winner takes all market) and specific LST providers/ protocols. He made a very interesting comment (apparently for the first time) where he basically saysâits crucial ETH stays decentralized and the criticism towards Lido is correct".
LSTs will be huge, listening to this one is a good time investment, even if you donât agree with Hasu in the end.
Donât worry, this one is not so much about Hasu :) Itâs the first episode of Uncommon Core after 1.5 years, this time featuring Jon Charbonneau instead of Zhu Su (who apparently couldnât make it).
Jon is also front and center in this episode. He is introduced and interviewed, his CV is interesting (though his statement that heâs in crypto âsince just one yearâ is kind of funny, since he had been interested before, but now heâs full time. But if full time is a req, most of us arenât into cryptoâŚ).
Jon is an interesting guy, since he is not really part of any crypto tribe, but seems to be rather ETH focussed. Since he is rather new and neutral, his point of view is interesting. I made some comments the past couple of days about L2 (de)centralization and most of those were inspired by this episode. I think he is not idealistic and I also donât see him as a âdecentralization maxiâ, hence some of his positions will probably clash with some of us, but I also think itâs good to discuss counter arguments. Mostly because of this I highly recommend this episode (and probably also to follow Jon on Twitter).
This guest doesnât need an introduction. I picked this episode, cause itâs from EthCC, so last week, and probably VBâs latest thoughts.
Itâs a good interview, nothing too crazy (though there was one comment that I didnât understand, but canât recall what the topic was and hence also canât ask you to explain to me, FML), but still a very good interview.
I also picked it, cause I made a comment in the daily some time ago asking if there shouldnât be a protocol that allows you to borrow against your validator. I even stated that âItâs probably way trickier than I make it seem?â⌠and yes, thatâs the case. And the issue is not tech, itâs an attack vector with regards to security. Since you could basically borrow against your validator, setup more validators (repeat) and/ or basically attack the network âfor freeâ (youâll be slashed, but you have like 80% of the ETH value back in USD or so). Vitalik mentions this in a slightly different context, but this was a crazy moment (and I have to say I should have thought about this back when I made the comment 2 months ago).
â
So⌠this is it, these were in my opinion the best podcast episodes of the past weeks. The XRP case/ decision was also a very important topic and picked up in a lot of podcasts, but I donât think it was as good as these 3.
I think Iâll be back mid August with 3 new episodes, since then Iâll be back from vacation and will listen to more podcasts on the way to work.
Nice compilation of info on this site looking into the world of CBDCs. Interesting to see World economic dominance and powers changing gears around trade and the implications it might have for the US dollar. The article states that it is important to note that some countries build CBDCs in order to attempt to limit the United Statesâ ability to track cross-border flows and enforce sanctions. In the long term, the absence of US regulations and standards setting can have large geopolitical consequences, especially if China and other countries maintain their first-mover advantage in the development of CBDCs.
Russia just cemented their plans to create a digital national currency Digital Ruble. They were one of the last of the BRICS economic markets group to legislate and finalize a CBDC project; South Africa now being the last to implement plans and is still trialing different models before committing to a project. Under the above mentioned bill, Russians will be able to make payments and transfers from their digital wallets, which would be within the central bankâs platform or that of one of its partner banks. On the other hand, the CBDC can only be used for payments or transfers, not loans or deposits, according to the central bank. Testing will begin next month.
Brazil still hasnât released their CBDC although it should come out sometime later next year in 2024.
Indiaâs pilot program is ramping up. The India central bank aims to reach a target of one million CBDC transactions per day by the end of this year from 5000-10,000 currently. e-Rupee Article
Chinaâs digital Yuan coin hits $249 Billion in transactions so far this year. LINK
Currently 130 countries, representing 98 percent of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020, only 35 countries were considering a CBDC. A new high of 64 countries are in an advanced phase of exploration (development, pilot, or launch).
u/accidental_green created an open source tool for client migration!
I created an open source tool that allows anyone running Geth to instantly swap to a minority client with 0 configuration or effort. Just 1 click, new client.
Switch to/from any execution client (Geth, Besu, Nethermind) to any other, as well as remove and reinstall a broken client. Instructions on Github and more info in the ethstaker post.
Feel free to check out my other open source Ethereum projects:
Instant Validator - Install a full validator from fresh Ubuntu in minutes Validator Updater - Instantly update your Execution and Consensus client to latest version
I plan to do more projects like this, so let me know if you have any ideas to help improve the staking experience!
from Syncswap twitter "We would like to inform you of a security incident with EraLendu/Era_Lend a lending platform on zkSync Era.The EraLend team has detected and confirmed a cyber attack on their platform at (UTC) 2023/07/25 09:27:21.
The attack has already been contained, and the threat actor is no longer able to continue their actions, as per the official announcement from EraLend. The EraLend team is currently collaborating with cross-chain bridge partners and zkSync to prevent any further potential asset outflows.
Only USDC deposits on EraLend were affected by this incident.All other assets remain secure and unaffected, including SyncSwap USDC/ETH LP supplied on EraLend. However, itâs recommended to withdraw your supplied LP on EraLend if any until things are sorted out to avoid further issues. There is no need to withdraw from SyncSwap protocol as itâs not involved in the incident.
TL;DR - EraLend has been attacked and caused certain losses for EraLend USDC depositors. SyncSwap protocol is not involved; SyncSwap LP supplied on EraLend remains secure but you should withdraw them from EraLend.
Please follow updates from EraLendâs official Discord server and Twitter to keep up-to-date, and beware of scams! We hope everyone can stay SAFUďżź"
u/logic_beach shares his 365th daily robot artwork NFT
When I first started drawing Logic_Bots, I was working in a regular 9-5 job and wanted to break into the web3 ecosystem. So I took the plunge, quit my job, and started focusing on Ethereum (etc.) full time. Since that first bot drop, I have found a solid footing in web3 and donât plan on leaving anytime soon! I have learned a ton and have still lots to learn/build.
Thank you to the awesome web3 community who have supported me and everyone else who put up with me!
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u/RooftopPortaPotty explains Googleâs latest plans to try and monopolise the internet
To start off, I have not heard of this before you shared it. This is going to be a long rambling of my thoughts and opinions.
This idea seems to be an absolute desecration of privacy on the internet. How would this even work when using an anonymizing service such as tor?
Google does have a long history of introducing new things that are not actual HTTP specs, purely as a way of forcing users to switch to chrome as their web browser.
Of course there are already solutions such as captchas, javascript checks, and services such as cloudflare which attempt to detect and prevent bots from interacting with web servers. That said, Web Environment Integrity seems to completely obliterate the usual flow of the world wide web.
Having such a centralized service(however the attesting API is implemented) is a devastating breach of trust of the client(though, servers should never trust clients). Who even controls this API? Google?
It seems that this idea could be utilized by servers regardless of infrastructure, which in some cases(such as enterprise intranet), may provide enhanced server-side security.
I absolutely agree with vivaldi that this is nothing more than DRM forced by web servers onto clients. Much more troubling is their note of the following,
It is also interesting to note that the first use case listed is about ensuring that interactions with ads are genuine
which leads me to believe that this has been created solely for Googleâs ad business(after all, they are nothing more than a giant advertiser).
With chromiumâs market dominance, widespread implementation of this monstrosity would most certainly lead to the demise of competing browsers.
The github link states âDonât enable new cross-site user tracking capabilities through attestation.â as a goal. This is completely contradictory to the goal of Web Environment Integrity, which is to gain as much information about a client as possible, and share it with servers.
Another goal is âAllow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representationâ honest lmao yeah fucking right google is honest.
âContinue to allow web browsers to browse the Web without attestationâ they just admitted that there is no point to this service. If it is avoidable, then whats it for?
âEnforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions.â They know damn well that it will interfere with any functionality that doesnt play by their rules.
Every one of their âexample use casesâ are laughable.
âDetect compromised devices where user data would be at riskâ is especially ridiculous, as protecting the client is the opposite of WEIâs intended purpose. How would they even detect compromised devices where the compromised device is making a seemingly normal request?
The âhow it worksâ section is completely devoid of substance. Consider the following:
The website of a dapp uses googleapis, gstatic, etc for their operations.
Google retains an innumerable amount of data points regarding a user and their browser.
Google blacklists a âbrowserâ(still not sure how that would work, and neither do the authors of this trash idea, as is apparent) for interacting with anything crypto related.
Ok I honestly cant take this any longer. Whoever whipped this up clearly knows enough to know that this idea is evil.
I only see 4 goals of this project:
Make google ads inescapable.
Gain as much information of users of competing browsers as possible
Blacklist those users, and force them to use chrome
Ensure that google is the final arbiter of internet-worthiness
> new interface layout, looks significantly less janky
> go to copy my account address so I can paste it into some web3 site
> the copy address function doesn't work now
> "okay, I'll just open the explorer page and copy the address there"
> "oh, metamask removed the explorer page link and replaced it with a link to its own portfolio app, which doesn't display the address by default and just asks me to connect my wallet"
seriously, the metamask team seems to possess a special kind of stupid
Iâve put it off for too long⌠my new task is to abandon metamask completely
u/Tricky_Troll asks for othersâ experiences after some recent ChatGPT developments
I use chatGPT for hours everyday and can say 100% itâs been nerfed over the last month or so. As an example it canât solve the same types of css problems that it could before. Imagine if you were talking to someone everyday and their iq suddenly dropped 20%, youâd notice. People are noticing.
A few general examples are an inability to do basic css anymore, and the copy it writes is so obviously written by a bot, whereas before it could do both really easily. To the people that will say youâve gotten lazy and write bad prompts now, I make basic marketing websites for a living, i literally reuse the same prompts over and over, on the same topics, and itâs performance at the same tasks has markedly decreased, still collecting the same 20 dollars from me every month though!
Is this the beginning of AIâs descent into the trough of disillusionment just like 2018 crypto? Whether it be due to OpenAI making changes for safety or cost savings, or increasing pollution of the data set with AI generated data leading to a kind of AI inbreeding, itâs hard to say whatâs causing it but Iâd love to hear if others have also noticed the same thing.
Hereâs an expanded and fixed version that should help clarify.
One validator is randomly assigned to propose during a particular 12-second slot.
This validator proposes a block, either generated by them or a relay. (If they donât propose a block, no one else gets to. The slot is âmissedâ with no block in it. Because there is only one validator assigned to each slot, there can never be 2 competing blocks. If a single validator proposes more than one block during their assigned slot, they are slashed.)
All nodes, both staking and non-staking, verify for themselves that the block is valid. After verification, they pass the block on to yet more nodes, and so on through the gossip network until every node on the network has a copy of the block.
Other validators attest the block is valid. These votes are counted/aggregated by yet other validators. The block reaches 2/3 votes, and is finalized. These messages echo back through the network, updating staking and non-staking nodes alike as to what the most recent finalized block is.
With this in mind, please rephrase any additional questions you have, and I can do the best to help answer them!
u/Set1Less covers a couple of the newer web 3 wallets
Re-installed Frame wallet to give it a spin, vs my main wallet now Rabby extension. Using both via a Ledger HW Wallet. Embarked on this mainly since another user had mentioned that Rabby was tracking wallet installs, so I wanted to explore another wallet that didnt track users, but still offered the same functions.
As compared with an earlier install, now Frame seems to connect well with most apps. However it still lacks a lot of features .
Rabby is still way more functional for someone like me who makes many txn every day, on multiple chains/L2s. From wallet security perspective, it has inbuilt transaction simulation results which show the changes to your wallet. (example for a dex swap txn it would show 0.1 eth out, 185 usdc in etcâŚ) So you can visualize exactly what your transaction is doing before approving it. Rabby also has many other security features like warnings when interacting with a new contract for the first time, approval limit warnings, inbuilt approval revoke interface etc. Compared to this, Frame seems rather bare bones
On the downside Rabby is clearly tracking users via an identifier number given to each install of the extension, without any opt out. As reported by u/RooftopPortaPotty
The hunt for the best wallet continues. If Frame can add these security features, it would beat Rabby hands down for me
u/LogrisTheBard educates us on the tragedy of the commons
Today Iâd like to talk about another tool from Molochâs Toolbox. This one is like the inverse of first-mover disadvantage and itâs probably the best known pattern of coordination failure. Of course Iâm talking about Tragedy of the Commons. Formally, there is a known Pareto Optimum but each actor is free to defect from that strategy and personally profit by doing so at the expense of all other actors. Common outcomes from this coordination failure are things like nature ecosystem collapses from activities like overfishing, market collapses from raced selling into a price inelastic market, and famine.
By this definition, there are many examples of things that are not commonly considered âCommonsâ that nevertheless fall into this category of problem such as the famous Prisonerâs Dilemma. The âcommonsâ in this case is reduced jail time. In this scenario each actor is free to defect from the optimal solution and snitch to the police and reduce their personal prison time while increasing the total prison time. The net result is all actors inevitably defect and the system collapses to the worst possible value (what is the antonym of Pareto optimum called?).
To correct the incentives you have to change the local calculus of each actor. Recognizing that each actor is likely to locally optimize, you have to add external incentives for complying or external penalties for defecting from the Pareto Optimum. Typical solutions to this problem resemble fail-deadly deterrence systems which admittedly isnât a source of optimism for humanity. A less seemingly insane variation of this requires that all actors submit to an common arbiter such as a government that makes defecting illegal but this solution breaks down when they donât share a nationality.
Letâs look at fixing the prisonerâs dilemma as an example. If, prior to the crime, each criminal had to put up a hostage then their local optimum is to risk the longer prison sentence to protect their hostage. They would be willing to do this because they also know this is true of the criminal in the other room so they can rest assured that the other criminal will also comply rather than defect. After they get out of prison with their minimum sentences they can have their hostage back so it ultimately cost them nothing to enter this agreement (the hostage experience notwithstanding).
What I like about this solution is that it can be applied as a layer on top of existing systems without having to otherwise change those systems. For example, the criminals can enter this agreement without changing the dynamics between the criminals and the police and can do so without the consent of the police.
The example above breaks down in two situations:
There are actors outside the contract system. In the prisonerâs dilemma, what do the criminals do to secure the cooperation of an outside witness? How do you prevent overfishing from countries that refuse to pass or enforce laws preventing ships from their nation from overfishing?
The actors have nothing to use as a hostage.
To address the first case, the hostage you stake has to be something you can weaponize. For example, the criminals could stake a large sum of capital instead of a loved one. As long as the stake can be used to apply negative incentives against external actors somehow, you can use it to fix local incentives. For example, the criminals could make a conditional assassination contract against any witnesses and leak the information about this contract to the witness before they speak to the police or testify in court. This solution can be combined with a dead manâs switch so no active actions are required by the criminals to enforce it.
In the second case, you have to find some kind of negative outcome to enforce. The most common stake-of-last-resort example is the safety or life of the defector. For example, in The Dark Knight, The Joker made each criminal literally implant bombs into themselves. Assuming we can bootstrap reputation systems, reputation is a much saner collateral for less extreme use cases. Thatâs basically all your credit score is when Visa grants you a credit line without collateral. I like the idea of using reputation collateral better than having to implant oracle controlled bombs into everyone before we would have a chance at fighting climate change in any case.
u/wolfparking shares their RocketPool staking experience
After waiting 49 days in the queues (Rocketpool and then Beaconchain) my mini-8s were scheduled to go active online at 1am this morning. During the entire day I checked my logs several times and felt confident everything looked good to go. Set an alarm and I slept right through it. Woke up 2 hours later and logged in to see how things looked. Failure. No attestations. Losing Eth. Fortunately, the friendly people in the Rocketpool discord immediately identified the problem and I was up and running within an hour. Fast forward to just a bit ago and I got a proposal! Not a huge amount, but still my APR is at 42% on one of my minis. Day 1! So tired, but gawdamn I feel like Iâve won a little lottery!
Anyway, no one really here to share this with, except you fantastic people!
Crazy update! I saw an open position on crypto-twitter and messaged for shits and giggles. Got an interview off it, hit off really wellâŚand told the interviewer I am a node operator, read ethfinance, fan of the green pill, and watch youtube videos of MEV.
Few days laterâŚreceived an offer with a 20% pay rise, a fully remote role, working on blockchain infrastructure!
Just wanna let you all know that I am so grateful for all of you! I absolutely would not have gotten the job without learning from you all, so thank you for this awesome community!
u/Dray11 is finally releasing their new NFT project!
Not sure if trolling since Iâve seen you around for a while, but just in case someone comes around with no idea of MEV:
MEV = maximum extractable value is the reward a block builder can get by ordering transactions in a way that profit them.
Example: Someone makes a buy transaction on uniswap with up to 5% allowed slippage (bad idea). A bot will see this and create two further transactions. One to buy the same token (increases the price) and one to sell it again.
The the bot will submit a transaction bundle containing their buy transaction (increasing price), the victims buy transaction (increasing price) and their sell transaction (profiting from increased price) in this exact order.
This is called a sandwich attack and will earn them some money.
But other bots will be doing the same thing, so in order to actually be the one included in the block, theyâll also promise some money to whoever builds the block.
The money extracted by the bot and the reward for the validator is called MEV.
There are a lot of different kinds of MEV. Bad MEV like sandwich attacks, âgoodâ MEV like DEX arbitrage which result in efficient markets.
In order to profit from MEV you could a) build a MEV bot (very very high effort) b) solo stake ETH (reasonable effort, high capital investment), buy LSDs like rETH.
This is very simplified, there are a lot of nuances around MEV. Feel free to research proposer-builder separation (PBS) and flashbots.
u/Yeopaa covers a major change in Google Play store policy regarding NFTs
Remember that even a small donation matters! Clr.fund uses quadratic funding to allocate funds from the matching pool to projects, meaning projects with many small donations get more from the matching pool than projects with fewer, larger donations!
18 days left to participate, gas prices are relatively low again so might be a good time to contribute! đŤś
u/Set1Less explains Coinbaseâs latest move in their lawsuit with the SEC
Dismissal is not realistic right away, but Coinbase still makes compelling arguments.
Mainly centered around the fact that even in 2021 confirmation hearing, Gensler says SEC doesnt have legislative authority to regulate crypto exchanges. Before SEC, even as a professor Gensler has said the same thing many times. Pre- gensler, Hinman speech is cited where SEC indicates even an ICO coin though a security at the time of issuance can eventually become decentralised and no longer a security
Then out of nowhere in 2022, contrary to Genslers own testimony and SECâs earlier position, the SEC came up with the âcome in and registerâ mandate, that every token is a security, and started suing various exchanges without even once engage in any rule making. All of this without any new law from Congress. Coinbase bring up Major questions Doctrine which means significant unresolved questions are not down to agency interpretation but require actual lawmaking
There is an outside chance that the judge decides to throw SECâs case out. But even otherwise, I fully expect Coinbase to litigate this to circuit appeal and then to SCOTUS where the SEC is on a much weaker footing and Coinbase can win a lot of key battles
u/Syentist and u/pr0nh0li0 discuss US supreme court cases
With todayâs Supreme Court decision on the student loan relief plan (which, for the record, I find unfortunate, so spare me the downvotes), itâs extremely likely that the SEC case against Coinbase would be dismissed if it escalated to the supreme court, under their Major Questions Doctrine
The administrative state is being gutted by this Supreme Court, for better or for worse (depending on which side of the aisle your views are). If Gensler had any sense, he would push his party members in Congress to work with the Repubs to have some form of regulations passed, instead of watching the agenciesâ jurisidictipm eroded by the courts bit by bit. But political ambitions mask common sense, so no chance of that happening sadly.
Lotta big news out of the SCOTUS today but just want to point out something lesser noticed that was just announced that could have big implications for crypto (and a ton of other things for that matter). They announced they would hear Jarkesy v. SEC in the fall session.
It raises a few issues, but one of the most important elements of this case is that the plaintiff alleges that his constitutional right to fair trial was violated, or as the fifth circuit put it when it opined in favor of the plaintiff:
The SEC âoften acts as both prosecutor and judge, and its decisions have broad consequences for personal liberty and propertyâ ⌠that âflies in the face of âthe Constitution,â which âconstrains the SECâs powers by protecting individual rights and the prerogatives of the other branches of government.â
I actually have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I think yes, itâs clear the SEC and some other agencies overreach and make some decisions outside of their purview. On the other hand, this could have HUGE implications for all federal agencies, and could make a lot of important federal organizations like the FDA, EPA and FCC pretty toothless. Not to suggest that these institutions are perfect or even particularly good by any means, I just have a fear of how things could look if we neutered them even further and relied on the courts to adjudicate every single violation. No system is perfect but the latter system would be incredibly bogged down and inefficient.
I would like to beg every one of you to stick it out here on Reddit. Iâm a boomer who doesnât add value, but Iâll be staying put. I joined Reddit in 2014 to participate in r/bitcoin (lol) and I feel like this is my home, with our family. reddit on the browser, letâs give it a chance? Pretty please?
To all Android users who are unsatisfied with the official Reddit app or the RiF hack:
RedReader is a very usable open source Reddit client for Android that got a ânon-commercial accessibility exemptionâ and continues to work for the time being. Itâs available on Play Store and also F-Droid, if you prefer to avoid google.
u/Tricky_Troll starts a discussion about the concerning UK online safety bill
Do any Brits want to weigh in on the Online Safety Bill which is getting closer and closer to passing? Thereâs a good outline of it here if youâre out of the loop: https://proton.me/blog/online-safety-bill
TL;DR:
The Online Safety Bill is currently working its way through the UK parliament, and itâs expected to be passed into law this autumn. This wide-reaching piece of legislation would force any âuser-to-user serviceâ (such as TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter) or search engine thatâs available online in the UK to protect all its users from illegal content and children from potentially harmful content.
Clause 110 of the Online Safety Bill would allow the UK government to require any âuser-to-user serviceâ to use âaccredited technologyâ to identify and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or terrorist content âwhether communicated publicly or privately by means of the serviceâ.
In plain English, clause 110 would give the UK government broad powers that would allow it to require any online service available in the UK to monitor all user-generated content on its platform, including its usersâ private messages.
This is a problem for end-to-end encrypted services, which canât access their usersâ content.
While UK lawmakers have stated they donât want to ban end-to-end encryption, the only ways an end-to-end encrypted service could comply with the bill are:
Remove its end-to-end encryption
Weaken its end-to-end encryption
Install client-side scanning
Cease providing service in the UK
UPDATE March 6, 2023: Removed a reference to the Online Safety Bill applying to âlargeâ companies. In fact, it would apply to companies of all sizes, placing a large technical burden on many medium-sized and small businesses.
I find this extremely concerning. Apps like Signal and WhatsApp have pledged not to weaken their encryption for such legislation and Signal will straight up leave the UK.
Regarding my personal situation, my lovely girlfriend lives in the UK and I am finishing a degree in NZ for the next year. After that, I plan to move to live with her since she isnât really able to move to NZ in the next few years but long term is a different story. But I genuinely donât want to move to the UK if this goes in to force and itâs either illegal to use encrypted messaging apps or not possible to privately communicate with Brits. I know that might seem extreme and I realise that it would be naive to assume such legislation would never come to NZ but for now thatâs not the case. Plus of course it seems like Apple and Google want to implement client side scanning anyway.
But for me, privacy is a hill worth dying on (well not literally but itâs worth fighting hard for and moving to a quiet place in the middle of nowhere for). The way I see it, you cannot have a free democratic society without privacy. Though there may be a slight caveat for if the surveillance tools involve open source client side scanning with transparent and effective detection software but letâs face it, thatâs not how it will be done. There are already too many stories of false positives and cases of guilty until proven innocent and itâs clear that legislators are either too stupid to understand the technical problems with backdooring encryption or are malicious and just want more surveillance.
Iâve got nothing to hide. If you visit me in person youâre more than welcome to go through all of my private messages and emails as long as youâre only looking at them with your own eyes. I genuinely donât care. But I do care about people being able to hide perfectly normal things if they need to- itâs human nature. Plus, in a democracy, there will be things you need to hide to prevent malicious capture of the government by bad actors. This means privacy is worth it even if it means criminals will hide things too (though theyâll do that regardless of if there is mass surveillance or not- only normal people lose if legislation like this passes).
Am I going insane or is the average Joe too distracted, complacent and/or stupid to realise how big of an issue such legislation is?
Oh, and if you disagree with me, Iâd love to hear why. Having strong opinions is pretty stupid if youâre never open to criticism and dissent.
u/ecguy1011 reminds us that itâs our last chance to contribute to the KZG ceremony
"announcing the final round of of contributions to the KZG ceremony.
if you havenât contributed yet, nowâs the time: - the minimum number of transactions has been lowered to 8 - the blacklist was just cleared - contribtutions will close 23-07-23"
There is a disadvantage to this great improvement though: you stop receiving your rewards every 5 days. If you want to extract your yield periodically, you have to unstake and sell and restake regularly.
With all the delays implied, during which you get 0 APR, is it worth compounding? You can already compound by buying rETH or using an exchange, without locking your rewards nor unstaking.
Due to this drawback, will whales and exchanges really use this new system ? I doubt it , so I doubt that the number of validators will significantly decrease (which is the goal).
Iâm afraid that we will end up with either rotating validators (the first idea suggested long ago to solve the problem) or a simple onboarding halt at 1M validators: the system stops processing the entry queue which grows and is only advanced each time an active validator exits.
u/bagogel12 has a PSA for anyone affected by the Orbiter Finance discord hack
Orbiter commits to refund some losses of their discord hack some weeks ago. Probably not a full compensation but something you could get. (I have not checked their discord, am on mobile I assume the tweet is honest and not another scam)
I remember some of this community were victim of the hack. If you remember the name, can we tag them?
Get your Gnosis nodes ready for Shapella (withdrawals)! Happening Aug 1 (UTC) according to Lighthouse.
Priest Witherspoon Latest
Summary This is a low-priority release for Mainnet, Goerli and Sepolia users. >However, this release schedules the Capella upgrade for Gnosis (#4433) on UTC Tue 01/08/2023, 11:34:20, therefore this release is high-priority for Gnosis users.
Guest appearance by Gravning Amundsen, Co-Founder of Firn Protocol, a zero-knowledge privacy platform.
Announcements
Octant announces their pre-launch event called Epoch Zero. Epoch Zero will jump-start the platform by giving the active community members an opportunity to distribute $1M worth of ETH among ten high-impact Ethereum public good projects.
[original comment deleted by user đ˘, pls stahp et]
Gameplay preview:
From ZombieBP on Discord:
Hey everyone, if anyone is interested. my EVMavericks Origins level is now live and available to play on Unity Play!
Couple things;
I temporarily removed the Metamask login, I have to fix a couple bugs there on the WebGL build. But I thought Iâd launch the game without it so you guys can play now.
This is a demo release. Iâm sure there might be a couple bugs or some things might not look right on your screen vs others. If you find any bugs or UI issues in the game, let me know and iâll fix them and update the game on the next version.
This game isnât Mobile compatible yet. I havenât programmed any Mobile controls so if you try to play using your phone right now youâll probably die in the game and wonât get very far. So please use your Desktop or Laptop to play
I forgot to put a controls section in the game (this is another thing I have to add), but its A = move left, D = Move right or left, right arrow keys and Space bar to jump
Press Enter to skip beginning cutscenes
Have fun, I hope you can beat my level haha. There are exactly 32 Ethereum (in-game) tokens in the game level. See if you can collect them all.
Running behind schedule, but at the same time, I think the pieces are falling into place. We need better integration of smart wallets across L2s and their apps, and thereâs progress being made there. One area where thereâs been very little progress in the last couple of years is in the application layer - but that might be OK, even with the existing applications and usecases live or in development thereâs plenty to grow as UX improves to whatâs described in that post.
u/benido2030 appreciates the hidden talents in this community
You know whatâs one of the best part about this community, at least for me? There is not only a lot of knowledge, but also so much talent. I donât stalk people (really, I donât⌠or do I?), but when you follow EVMs on twitter and check their bios⌠oh my⌠so many cool projects in the bios, big names etc.
So some time ago I started following this account on twitter, because despite not having an EVM PFP the name sounded familiar. Turns out I was right, itâs u/heyheeyheeey
So they started posting pics and we started DMing, because I love the art. Some posts are about NFTs from another collection, but they started experimenting with generative art themselves and imo they are very very talented. Apparently I am not the only one that loves it and soon (August 7th) heeey will launch their collection âbrightâ on Art Blocks. Yes, you read that right, Art Blocks.
So, save or buy some ETH cause we are going to mint some jpgs in August. And if we donât, then I am even happier cause that means heeeyâs art was so in demand that they are rich now because of a rather high mint price. In any case just being featured on Art Blocks is a great achievement, so congratz heeey!
Wanna know more and see why I am so exciting? Follow them on twitter or check their new homepage: https://heeey.art/
u/LogrisTheBard reminds us of the long term vision
The most beautiful thing about mankind isnât his ability to understand the world as it is, it is to imagine the world as it isnât and shape it. The denizens of the deepest parts of The Rabbit Hole, the areas furthest from common understanding, are dreamers. They can imagine a world where you are in control of your data instead of monopolistic companies, where identity theft is practically impossible, and where your data isnât monetized and weaponized against you. They can imagine a world where you can contribute to common efforts, at whatever cadence you want, and receive fair rather than predatory compensation by doing so. They can imagine a world where honesty is rewarded, where reputation carries more weight than money on deciding things that matter, and where the best amongst us are elevated and empowered to maximize their potential. They can imagine a world where those harming us are held accountable, where violence is only required as a response to violence, and where there is always a pathway to redemption for those willing. They can imagine a world where coordination seems easy, where the actions of humanity are in alignment with our values, and where we are free to act together to shape the world of our dreams without asking permission to do so.
I can cite specific teams, projects, and people who are imagining all these things and shaping the world in small and large ways to bring their imagination to life. There is technology behind all of these things. It is developing right here, right now, even in the bear market when sentiment is at its lowest. They are making it real as much as they are able to in a largely uncaring and cynical world where every incentive is aligned to enshrine the status quo. In the face of active hatred from the willfully ignorant, in the face of oppression, threats, and violence by the government, the best amongst us are doing these things anyway.
To those of you sticking it out right now after seeing a Tornado Cash dev get locked up without charges for over a year, after seeing the SEC work with SBF but sue Coinbase, and seeing scams proliferate and society turn against you, you are heroes too. The institutions all want us to have to ask permission. They want that so they can say no, grant control to their donors, and protect the status quo. I dislike the status quo; thatâs what makes me a dreamer. So I say no thank you to them. This technology cannot be bottled and stolen by Nestle and the like. It cannot be captured by a court order or an unelected bureaucrat somewhere. In the game we are playing, every country has a chance to defect from a strategy of oppression and reap economic rewards for doing so. The impacts of what we are building today will be realized over many generations, but society grows great when people plant trees they will never live to sit in the shade of. So we are dreaming of forests⌠and planting trees.
u/Papazio is not impressed with a major shortfall of most centralised exchanges
How has no CEX yet enabled a full history statement?!
Coinbase allows you to generate a report of all transactions in a nice pdf with your account details, but cannot include deposits and withdrawals.
Kraken allows you to download a full ledger of all kinds of transactions/deposits/withdrawals etc, but only as a spreadsheet without account details.
Another one I use is similar to Kraken but cannot do a full account history, only up to one year at a time.
How is it so hard for these companies to put together an account statement function that can include all of the above?!
Edit: WOW! Holy fuck the incompetence.
Speaking with Coinbase chat support, they send me a link to a document⌠a gain/loss report of ANOTHER PERSONâS account! Including their full name and email address. Presumably that person has my details now too. WTAF!
Edit 2: As soon as I pointed out what had happened, the initial customer service agent did not respond and passed me to someone else. The second agent tried to ignore the data breach but eventually said that as far as they could see my data was not shared. They provided some further advice to find my deposit/withdrawal history which entailed logging out of my account⌠that ended the secure chat (which I suspect was a ploy to get rid of me). So I began another chat with a third agent who looked into the issue and asked for the name of the userâs data I was sent, they then escalated it and Iâm awaiting next comms from Coinbase. In the meantime I have contacted a law firm to discuss whatâs happened, Iâm not normally one to pursue mistakes by customer service agents but this is a serious data breach and it was initially handled extremely poorly.
u/etheraider shares the EVMaverick buildathon results
We actually finished with an unprecedented 3-way tie between rETH Skimmer, Lidont, and EVMavericks Origins (the game)! Each project has received a little over 3 ETH each to help build out their vision!
Of course this is just the beginning for these projects, if you are looking to get involved/give input please reach out to the builders!
The entire goal of the competition was to encourage builders to take the leap and build something new and Im happy to say we accomplished that mission!
Congratulations to the winners!
u/Yeopaa explains the difference between EYâs â____fallâ products
EYâs Starfall responds to privacy concerns on the public blockchain. This transition is enabled by EYâs open-source contributions, Nightfall and Starlight. Nightfall enables confidential transfers of tokens between companies, while Starlight allows enterprises to implement unique business logic on the blockchain; the source code for both is available publicly. In addition, EY announced Starfall, which ties both open-source contributions together. It aligns smart contracts with transactions in Nightfall, enabling a single privacy environment while allowing unique business rules for each relationship. Interestingly, Starfall is proprietary to EY; itâs EYâs secret sauce.
Hi everyone, can understand if this post maybe ends up being removed but Iâve posted a couple updates here on it during the last few months about a charity motivated project I had been working on; a small collection of NFTs where all proceeds recieved from the mint and subsequent royalties will go towards charities voted on entirely by the holders.
If ok with the Mods and thereâs any interest from people in this sub then will post some links for further details on the the mint and the project.
EDIT
Seems to be at least a little interest so adding some details here:
Project name is Duck x Pop
Will be Minting on Polygon via Autominter here on July 10th
You can see more details and a sneak peak of the artwork on twitter here
Additionally, if you are in EVMavericks discord, we have a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.
Itâs convenient because the daily thread is where the action is but the link is different every day (u/superphiz will always be on the right page now)
If the community ends up moving to another platform due to these Reddit changes, youâll be able to find out where we are from this URL
If we eventually end up going with a protocol-based solution, this URL can serve as a directory for the various frontend options
While I believe most of us here already deduce that Ethereum is not a security. Iâll share some of my thoughts and thought process on the matter.. sorry in advance if this is a bit scattered and long..
Ethereum is in a constant state of evolution. Sounds obvious to us, but that concept probably isnât so obvious to people not as well versed in the functionality of Ethereum. When I say this, I am thinking of a court room full of jurors, lawyers, a judge, etc. I am thinking about law makers, house of representatives and the senate; congress. Just listening in on recent hearings lets us know that there are a lot of people in powerful positions who are either un/ill informed or just flat out have a different agenda when it comes to cryptocurrency, let alone Ethereum. Etheruemsâ constant state of evolution is important to note because while I believe Ethereum can get close to a final form, even then, there will be new frontiers and boundaries that I think Ethereum can explore and expand on to.
Each stage of evolution in Ethereum has attracted different collectives of people. In the beginning, the idea of Ethereum in its simplest form, thought to be a programable Bitcoin-like entity; a decentralized smart contract platform that extended the capabilities of blockchain technology. If you read Vitaliks whitepaper, a lot of eye opening ideas were conceptualized, and the first question on your mind if you wanted to be involved/interreact was, how do I acquire some Ethereum. In the early groups of Ethereum enthusiasts, you had builders/creators, investor/speculators, researchers and general crypto enthusiasts who saw that whitepaper as groundbreaking.
I donât believe it was as black and white as:
A. I am an investor.
B. I invest to make money.
C. If I invest in Ethereum, I expect to make a profit.
The intial ICO wasnât a VC pitch, or promoted to a room full of investors with the promise of profit. It was however, a way to start funding projects on this new platform in exchange for giving people a way to interact with the network/platform by holding/using ETH as well as the potential for growth in value.
Society/Capitalism would argue that a profit expectation was present, especially if you were to compare the scenario to Bitcoin and Bitcoins historical growth in value at the time. While that may be inherent, it would be very difficult to prove that expectation as an absolute.
Eventually, when a court is deciding on how to classify ETH, and the court is reviewing the intital allocations of Ethereum and the intent behind those allocations, although probably more centralized in nature than weâd all prefer it to have been, I believe there will be enough transparancy to make strong arguements against the criteria of the howey test. Especially if the current environment of Ethereum is to be considered.
With all of the latest developments of Ethereum; Defi, NFTs, DApps, DAOs, Tokenization/Crowdfunding, Supply Chain Management, Web3, etc. Todays Ethereum attracts a new collective of people, while fulfilling the initial vision of Ethereum. I personally know people who are indirectly involved with Ethereum and didnât purchase ETH with an expectation of direct profit, but were more interested in acquiring a loan or an NFT. Point is, there is a rather large and expanding ecosystem and community in Ethereum, one that makes the ETH token a utility in order to move about/participate within said ecosystem and community. As Ethereum continues to scale and more dApps and use cases come to surface, it will be increasingly difficult to classify Ethereum as a security.
Basic principles of that would signal a non security are: Ethereum has always prioritized decentralization and is decentralized. Ethereum has always been developed open-source and has been community driven and the ETH token was primarily designed as a utility token to interact with smart contracts and is still used that way today.
The regulators can try to apply old tests and laws to Ethereum, but I believe the outcome will be adapted tests and perhaps new laws likely favorable to Ethereum. I am as much an investor as I am someone who just uses Ethereum for utility at this point. I have open defi loans, I have NFTs, I have contributed to DAOs and use dApps. These law suits were a long time coming (it seems like the markets feel this way too) and my (our) real hope we end up with actual framework and clarity with path forward for innovation in the US and to finally be rid of regulation by enforcement that triggers these nasty FUD headlines.
Hi all and welcome to kbin and m/ethfinance, our temporary-and-maybe-someday-more home while reddit learns its lesson.
I didnât get a chance to reply to everyone in the previous thread, but I did read. Please feel free to ask me any questions about kbin, Lemmy, the fediverse, and Iâll try to answer. Iâve spent quite a few days now exploring it. I also encourage fediverse users to chime in, whether itâs from Mastodon experience or somewhere else.
The dev (@ernest@kbin.social) is lovely, responsive, and working hard right now. Feel free to chip in with suggestions at m/kbinmeta or if you have web dev experience, maybe consider reaching out directly to help.
No doubt youâre all noticing kbin is slow. Itâs good to remember that the beauty of federated (decentralized) servers is also in the initial brutality. Servers can be run by anyone (great!) but servers must be run by someone (oof). Ernest is one guy, spinning up a server for refugees of a global conglomerate. Itâs partly why I tried â and will keep trying â to open a server of our own.
Iâd encourage everyone to have a little patience, be extra kind and gracious, and at worst, take a little time away from the screen if itâs crawling. Theyâre planning a large infrastructure change next week. In the meantime, try to enjoy the brave new world here. We havenât had a truly ânewâ website to explore in many years. Itâs kinda exciting!
Now back to the memes, lines, and triangles.
@Chromes takes decentralization seriously and is now a solo staker!
Checking in after my post about taking the plunge the other day. Spun up my validator and deposited. Took me, in total, about 10 hours (yes, really). Iâm âPendingâ on beaconcha.in.
I wrote down a lot of what I felt and did while trying to get it all together. Iâm still kind of shell-shocked by the whole experience and Iâm sure Iâll talk a lot more about it later. What Iâll say for now is that even the âfor dummiesâ version of setting up a validator is significantly more intimidating and intense than most people think it is.
Iâm proud of myself for (hopefully) successfully doing it, but even doing it on easy mode (dappnode) had a lot of issues, things that I didnât fully understand, or things that almost had me giving up (I gave up about 3 times and then went right back to it after 5 minutes of having given up).
To be absolutely clear, thatâs no oneâs fault but mine. Iâm absolutely tech illiterate, but, sadly, Iâm actually probably more tech-y than most people. So I do think we have a long way to go before this sort of thing becomes something non-tech can just pick up and do. Things that I think most here take for granted are very scary or even indecipherable to someone like me.
That actually brings me to something that this whole reddit fiasco has me thinking about. One of the great strengths of crypto and eth in particular is the layer 0 stuff. It leads to great communities like this or Ethstaker. We have Reddits and Discords which are filled with people willing and eager to help. The problem is that it seems like it may have led to less focus on delivering a user-manual that makes sense to a new user who has no idea what theyâre doing. Communities are great for fixing problems, but it seems like we rely on a nebulous social network to teach the basics. Even the best guides I found seemed to assume a lot of knowledge and I generally had 3-5 â1 stop shopâ guides open at once as I did this.
The good thing with how tough it was was that, if everything works out and I start validating in a month and a half (thanks Celsius), Iâll really feel like I earned it.
@minimalgravitas calls out Ripple exec on misleading through omission
An incredibly simple example of how to mislead by omissionâŚ
A Tweet by Stuart Alderoty, Chief Legal Officer at Ripple.
10/ On June 4, Hinman wrote that he didnât see a âneed to regulate ETH as a securityâ and would call Buterin later that week to confirm âour understanding.â
Emphasis is added by me, because that section is one of the things causing the XRP bagholders to tweet about â#ETHGateâ.
It is clearly written to imply a shady agreement between Hinman and Buterin. However, in context the quote from the e-mail reads:
We also have a call with Buterin later this week to confirm our understanding of how the Ethereum Foundation operates.
So what this bellend is insinuating indicates some dodgy deal, is actually just a reference to a call checking some information.
I really do hate the way spreading disinfo is seen as a perfectly acceptable tactic by assholes to get what they want. If you donât strive for truth then you do not deserve to have people listen to you, but so many people donât really want truth, they just want feel special for knowing about a conspiracy and to believe things that will pump their bags.
@kingleo23 is glad the Prometheum nonsense got called out in the US house hearing
I get all the drama around Reddit API, but I want to point out something : so far, Reddit is by far the social network that is the most crypto-friendly. They onboarded millions of normies eith their Vault, community tokens and Digital Collectibles.
Just something to keep in mind while our community ponder its options.
Tech is more solid than ever. Rollups make great strides, each in their own direction. Transactions get cheaper, design space extends.
AI is complementary with crypto. AI is the content engine. Crypto is the curation engine. An abundance, an infinity of content makes curating this content for relevance that much more important.
Innovation is happening at the app layer. Uniswap v4 was announced yesterday. Autonomous worlds is picking up as a concept.
We are right where we were in 2019. With everyone declaring crypto dead, and usecases ânobodyâ expected about to mature in a couple of years.
In a vacuum, I would add that however, we canât be sure this will be reflected in the price as the last ATH went quite high. But this is where the real hopium shot comes in: great future multipliers are forged in the despair of many. When perception hits maximum pain while reality speaks of fundamental soundness still, those are the times of asymmetric opportunities.
In the end Iâm just another wanker on the Internet, but I bought ETH today. I wasnât a buyer for the past 3 months. This is financial advice.
For those who missed itâŚregarding Crypto Clarity in the US:
Hearing Entitled: The Future of Digital Assets: Providing Clarity for the Digital Asset Ecosystem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr9GD8hdD_U) Opening Statements occur at -Time Stamp: 41:39.
Some observed discussion points I found of interest:
The numerous times that stable coin legislation was mentioned and the importance, for the US Dollar to maintain its dominance as the worldâs reserve currency.
New consumer protection of imposed Individual Blockchain investment limits of approx. 5% of Net Income.
Rules for Categorization of Blockchain projects for the purpose of Jurisdiction for SEC or CFTC, with a grace period for projects to become decentralized
Regarding the testimony of Mr. Kaplan, Co-CEO of Prometheum, an SEC approved exchange. It became obvious that he represented the Crony System (Supported by GG and a certain political party affiliation). It was interesting that certain members read perfectly scripted questionsâŚthat allowed for perfectly scripted answers. Which were undone by the following (note the body language): (5 min. each)
Guest appearance by Matt Finestone, former lead of Gamestop NFT and currently head of Taiko.xyz, a decentralized and Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup.
Announcements
r/EthFinance is considering participating in the Reddit blackout June 12-14 in protest of their API changes. See this thread for details and discussion on possible Reddit replacements, such as the EVM Discord and Kbin.social
-Entry queue +900 from yesterdayâs number - New entry queue ATH. -It will take just over 45 day and a half days for the entry queue to clear -In just under 24 days the amount of daily validators that can both enter or exit will be increased from 2025 to 2250.
These figures are based on the entry and exit queue at the time of posting
Oh dear gang, with all the drama around Binance and the price crashing weâre seeing a big spike in stakers pulling out their validators. The exit queue is up to 8 minutes!
EthStaker published a blog post to do a call to action for execution client diversity - Nethermind and Besu are ready for adoption in home operators but also for large scale staking operations as yorickdowne, whoâs part of EthStaker, notes with his setup testing for Cryptomanufaktur.
Geth controls ~87% of the network right now a bug would be a catastrophic situation - say a bug happened where Geth produced an invalid block - most validators would follow it and weâd have to resort to one of three choices at the social layer:
Penalize and slash 87% of validators
Exit 87% of validators
Go with an invalid chain
Any option we chose would shake peopleâs faith in the immutability of Ethereum. The first one would be a massive amount of capital loss. And this is just one of three types of bugs - the most unlikely type of a bug, a double-signing event caused by a bug in Geth, would cause a total slash of 87% of validators. I mean all of it, people running Geth would lose their entire stake.
Super unlikely bugs but weâre ready for it and Iâm sure that Geth is ready for the people to take the pressure off of them!
đľđť Dissecting the FAKE Orbiter âAirdropâ announcement that u/Dreth warned everyone about earlier on:
â
đ¨ âDue to major success of ourâOrbiter Pilots NFT Seriesâ, we have decided to launch our token $ORBâ â ď¸
đ Grammatically wrong: Missing âtheâ.. As in: âdue to THE major successâ
đ Logically wrong: Why would a company suddenly âdecideâ to launch an airdrop based on the success (?) of an NFT Series?
đ¨ *âWe will be giving away 5,000,000 $ORB tokens, which will be distributed to anyone who claims from June 1st - June 3rdâ*â ď¸
đ when announcing Airdrops, legit projects release extensive information on their token allocation. Usually multiple pages long, filled with all kinds of relevant information. NOT just a plain number..
đ .. and they donât distribute their token to.. âanyone who claims..â
đ¨ âThere is only a limited amount of token so act fast!â â ď¸
đ here they try to create a sense of urgency, to make you act before you think, before you notice all these red flags.. Also, notice the spelling mistake (token instead of tokens)
đ¨ âThose who receive the tokens will be whitelisted to use our newest staking featureâ â ď¸
đ here they are baiting (âwhitelistedâ) you again, trying to shift your attention from all the red flags by promising ânew productsâ that can give you with extra yield/rewards..
đ¨ âAny gas spent on claiming the tokens will be refunded via Orbiter Financeâs Smart Contractâ â ď¸
đ in other words: âDonât worry about high Gas!! Go one and claim NOW!! Weâll refund everything!!â. I.e. donât wait, donât look further into the legitimacy of this! Go ahead and hastily ignore any sense of âdangerâ, and sigh these txs NOW!
Thanks a bunch for signaling your support to prevent Lido from harming Ethereumâs decentralization yesterday. Iâm glad to see that this problem is as important to you as it is to me.
Iâve gathered all the information weâve shared so far in a google document that automod prevents me from sharing, so hereâs a pdf.
Feel free to add comments wherever needed and letâs start fighting for this.
Edit: I also tweeted the doc with a new hashtag: #Lidont which has its own logo in the doc.
Have to give my public support for Gnosis chain after a few posters recommended I run a node on my spare staking PC.
You can spin up a validating node with just 1 $GNO token. Itâs the base token for the network collateral /staking, but funnily enough you need xDAI to pay fees so make sure to also transfer in $1.0 in dai to your deposit address.
You can stake like a whale too if you wanted, for about $7500 you can run 64 nodes thatâll probably net you 10-20 block rewards per day. Yield is around 16% which is just high inflation rewards, and so far thereâs nothing in block rewards because tx are too cheap and thereâs no MEV boost I donât think. Gnosis Chain also hasnât had their withdrawal fork yet so your locking up a little bit longer than ETH right now, but thereâs no entrance queue either to earning.
The reason for the recommended is it uses the same software clients as ETH (geth, nethermind, lighthouse, prysm, maybe a few others now but not all are supported just yet). Itâs literally a mini-me ETH network with its consensus and execution separated, using the same software clients you just select the Gnosis chain in your startup flags. I used Somer Esat guides to do all this, and just cross referenced the official setup guide from the Gnosis website (below).
If you are curious about staking at home, or looking to enhance your own Etherum node operating skills, running a Gnosis node is like training or studying using real money. For me that always forces me to take it seriously and even enjoy the process more, in addition to leveling up my own skills. You just get a good a feel for how the clients interact with eachother, and also how well your node links up to the network and other nodes. If you really mess up, then you are only out $116 per node rather than $60k. Plus, you are helping to decentralize transactions on a low cost Etherum aligned EVM sidechain. This further broadens the reach of EVM smart contract developers and gives you something constructive to do during đŚ szn.
Yaâll probably already heard about the reddit api pricing drama, but for those who didnât: Reddit is getting greedy and is going to charge a ridiculous amount of money for the use of their API, thereby driving third party clients out of business.
Thereâs not much information about who will have to pay for what etc., but assuming that every API request will have to be paid for, this is the calculation Iâm making for the u/nitter_not_twitter bot:
Iâm currently checking the subreddit 6x per minute. I could reduce this to something like once every 5 minutes and I suppose it would still provide a good UX.
Thatâd be 12 requests per hour, 288 per day and 8640 per month.
The bot answered 170x in the past month as well so weâre at 8810 requests per month, or ~106k requests a year.
According to what we know, reddit wants to charge $12k for 50 million requests. Thatâs $0.00024 per request or ~$25 for the 106k/year.
25$/year for running a very small bot at 12 checks per hour instead of the current 360 checks per hour (which would be insanely costly).
I can afford that without a problem, assuming reddit will offer packages that small and at the same price.
But this still shows how insane the API pricing is.
Without 3rd party apps Iâll not be here as often as I currently am and this might be true for a lot of people here as well.
Alright, well here ya go. Our own little reddit alternative.
Welcome to EVM Lemmy. Our home away from home when we take down reddit on the 12th.
See below, then⌠Play around. Make some shit. Post some shit. Iâll polish it up as we go.
Remember Iâve never adminâd a site in my life so⌠Anything and everything is subject to me trying to fix an issue and accidentally deleting all our data so⌠yeah, screenshot anything important anyone says.
SOME. CAVEATS.
Obviously, youâll notice itâs on http only not https. Because I canât get the damn SSL cert to work. So, NO serious info should be entered here beyond your usual junk email and a junk password. Itâs PROBABLY just me with access to the data but like, idfk, itâs http, trust nothing. Please just meme around and try to break the site, and skip entering your banking information and private keys.
Then if anyone can kindly explain why the http://url works in every browser of mine EXCEPT my main Brave browser, Iâd appreciate it. Edge is fine. Firefox is fine. In fact, I can access it in a Brave Private window, just not the main. Why? What setting is on blocking http? Hell, I can even do it from Brave on my phone, same wifi network and pihole DNS and everything. Confused, I am.
And itâs also not actually federated because itâs 99% me not being able to figure it out yet and 1% apparently thereâs some outbound DNS issue with Lemmy instances the devs are working on. Idk.
tl;dr servers are hard. yall need to be paid more.
Despite the best efforts of fellow redditors, I have to call it quits for now on the Lemmy instance. Iâm just not smart enough. Perhaps Iâll return to it.
In the meantime, please find our ethfinance alternative at https://kbin.social/m/ethfinance. Itâs all set up and ready to go, and itâs federated. Think of Kbin as the scrappy newcomer ProtonMail to Lemmyâs Gmail.
Iâll leave it at that on here, but Iâm happy to help people tour the fediverse in the Daily on Kbin. Weâll waive the âon topicâ rule for a few days so folks can acclimate.
u/austonst shares a recent EthResearch post about beaconchain security
Summarizing briefly, this change would keep the 32 ETH minimum for a validator, but increase the maximum by some factor (possibly 64x to a max of 2048 ETH). Probability of selection for various duties e.g. sync committee would be weighted based on balance. Operators running multiple validators would not have them aggregated forcibly, but could opt in to have their validators merged.
The authors argue the following benefits:
BLS signature aggregation is a big part of the consensus protocol. Producing, verifying, and aggregating signatures for the various committees leads to some significant compute overhead which could be reduced with fewer, larger validators.
Current proposals for single-slot finality (SSF) depend on aggregating signatures from every validator every slot. Reducing the validator set size, and with it the number of signatures needed, would reduce the computational cost of doing so, speeding up SSF development.
SSF is a prerequisite for in-protocol proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and MEV burn, so reducing the validator set size helps speed those along too.
Anyone with stake below the maximum will have their consensus-layer rewards auto-compound, as the increased validator balance smoothly leads to higher attestation rewards and proposal chances. The current lack of this is a big downside to solo staking compared to staking pools.
Partial withdrawals incur a large withdrawal load every epoch. If validators switch to the larger cap with auto-compounding, there will be 1) fewer validators in total to process partial withdrawals for, and 2) many who stay below the upper limit and donât need regular partial withdrawals in the first place. Ultimately reduces withdrawal queue length.
As with any protocol design choice, there are some tradeoffs involved. Already a couple of good criticisms in the replies which are worth a read.
The most powerful government in the world goes on a full frontal attack on the largest centralized exchange in the world and the overall crypto market cap drops by less than 5% and is now down only 3.5%. Price fluctuation wise, this is just a normal day in crypto. It looks like most people who are non-believers or are over-invested left or reduced their investment.
Every time the SEC does not call ETH a security it will get harder to claim it being one later on. Kind of like a Lindy effect.
Many alt L1 coins have been called a security now. I would prefer if the various approaches to building a modern blockchain would compete on a technical level and not a government restricting new entrants in the space by relative arbitrary and archaic regulations. But all in all this is positive for Ethereum, as I think the number of new âEthereum killerâ VC chains will go down.
Making it harder for newer chains to do an ICO could end up being extremely positive for ETH as projects will think hard on how to secure their chain and probably a rollup settling on Ethereum using ETH as the payment token will be the way to go for many of them.
For other non-rollup type projects they will have to find a way to secure their project without issuing tokens. Here comes Eigenlayer, which again uses Ethereum.
These are uncertain times, I have no idea which branch of the US government lashes out and attacks crypto next, but I am just feeling positive about the non-reaction of the market and the future ahead for Ethereum.
This isnât designed to be FUD, but rather to be realistic about what I expect to happen. Just to be clear, I expect this plan to fail at some stage along the way, because I think they let it run too long and itâs likely no longer stoppable:
The SEC is not governing in good faith, theyâre definitely orchestrating an attack on crypto. Itâs real easy to see âattacksâ where attacks donât exist, but watching the SEC chief do everything possible to not define Ethereum as a commodity or a security during the congressional hearings made it extremely obvious that theyâre acting with intent.
With the fact that theyâre acting with intent in mind, consider the recent lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, specifically the parts regarding securities: some in here believed that it was a positive sign that Ethereum wasnât named. It is not.
The SECâs problem is that if they try to get Ethereum declared a security right now, theyâre very likely to lose that lawsuit. Their game plan in this case is to go after other coins - especially ones that are in fact much closer to a security, and after securing a win on these, they intend to try to use that to nail Ethereum next. Thatâs the only reason Ethereum wasnât included in the list, is due to prior SEC comments and actions regarding it. As soon as they lock in any victories on similar assets, they will try to use this as support for attacking Ethereum.
Bitcoin users arenât safe either. Iâm pretty sure an additional facet of this plan is that any coins (including Bitcoin) that use Proof-of-Work mechanisms will be targeted by âgreen / environmentalâ legislation designed to shut them down / make mining them illegal. They canât attack those via the SEC, so theyâre going to try co-opting environmental legislation to shut this side down. With these two prongs, both Proof of Stake and Proof of Work assets will both be covered. Although Iâm pretty sure this will be an aspect of the attack plan, I donât know if it will run concurrently with the SEC attacks above, or if theyâll wait until itâs known if those will succeed.
While these plans are in motion, they will continue to attack exchanges in any way they can - âprotectingâ consumers by making accessing exchanges harder or more onerous, legislation to make self-custody illegal, etc. Weâve seen a few older and smaller US-servicing exchanges get shut down over the last year, and I expect them to start attacking Kraken and Gemini soon as well.
Itâs crystal clear theyâre working towards an agenda to shut down crypto as a whole. Tbh I donât give a shit if itâs because âhur dur global banking cabalâ or âoh fuck the USD is going to collapse if we donât try to shut this downâ or âIâm old and fucking stupid and I hate this cryptkeeper blogchain technologyâ, because the reasons are irrelevant; just know that theyâre working with a coordinated plan here and Ethereum is on the hit list. Be realistic about the struggles that are coming.
u/696_eth reflects on a one year old ratio reminder
A few weeks ago I received a reminder to my sale of majority of my BTC to ETH.
At that time in 2022, btc - $30k, eth - $2000, ray - 0.067.
2023 prices, btc - $26k, eth - $1800, ray - 0.067.
So was that decision good for me and my future?
Some quick reflections combined with guesses-predictions on how things might turn out.
Due to prices and ratios being really similar, the trade has ended up being neutral. However, thereâs taxes, hence I ended up loosing like 20%ish and it will probably end up being around 30-35% long term.
So one of the cool things for me right now is that I can borrow against my assets on Ethereum, even my ENS digits! I couldnât do that on Bitcoin, I would have needed to wrap it which wouldâve been a tax event, so while it was possible, it was not practical. Borrowing my end up saving me 5-10% long term, weâll see.
On top of my Ethereum assets. I have an option to get yield now. The yield is really crucial because it means I have an option of getting something without sacrificing my stack and cashing out.
This leads me to my next point. My latest variation of the initial crypto plan was to cashout into USD or stocks, just away from the bitcoin, cause I needed to have money somehow to pay for stuff. They were not many bitcoin developments. Yes, it started being accepted here and there, mostly digitally. Anyways, thatâs not the point. But the most useful use case to me was being able to send money quick and fast and relatively cheaply.
Well, now I donât have to live. Quite on the opposite. It has also been cool cause thereâs so many things going in the Ethereum ecosystem or around it. Iâm sure waaaay more people used Ethereum than Bitcoin.
Thereâs actually something here than just pure money and just waiting for the next halving and next bull run in hopes of more money. In the years before, I actually had people IRL ask me âwhy would they buy Bitcoin and what utility it had?â. And for the decent amount of recent years, bitcoin communityâs proposition wasnât for P2P, which initially was soo cool for me, but more just to hodl this to have more money and thatâs it lol.
This bear market has the most fun. Somewhat stressful too compared to other ones where you just zone out cause there was not much going in btc. But yeah, itâs pretty cool. I get to learn a lot and try out things I wanted to do in my life before. For example, I wanted to write before but I didnât like college essays cause of word limit bs. I wanted to write but I didnt really know where to put âwritingâ into my life, I did write a few things here and there, mostly psychology and mental health related but thatâs about it. And since becoming involved in the communities here and in the ecosystem, I can do some writing and it works for me. And thereâs so much room for growth too.
Itâs getting pretty long and my flow is a bit off so hereâs a few btc related takes.
Iâm really interested seeing what happens when for the first time after halving when btc doesnât hit new ATH. It would be a heavy downfall to many holders, I donât think it will go to 0 but I think the main narrative of up only being broken would be a hard pill to swallow.
Prob one of the hottest hot takes: I think btc doesnât hit $100k next bull run. But my takes are not know to be correctđ
And if you made it till here, hereâs my last important point.
Iâve been trying to figure out the differences between my experiences within bitcoin and ethereum communities. To me it was mostly coming down to some social related movements. For example, seeing snippets of btc conferences during 2021 was so criiinge that I didnât wanna be related with that sorta people in any way. On the other hand, thereâs so many builders, artists, creators, degens and users in Ethereum that I resonate with. Itâs kinda funny but I met some people who are still not a fan of Ethereum yet they work on some projects that are built on Ethereum and contribute to the ecosystem. I mean they can hold whatever assets they want but if they are spending their energy contributing to this ecosystem rather than contributing to the ecosystem the asset they believe of - maybe it says something. So I was looking for a short simple and best way to describe this whole social thing to start quantifying it someway so I can communicate with people better and pass on my excitement and passion about the space and I have realized that the term already exists - Layer Zero. That social layer. Itâs the actual difference that drives things here, creates collaboration and unity rather than division.
Iâm going to end this here, thanks for coming to my imperfect TED Talk.
Guest appearance by Brendan Shakeshaft and Joe Van Loon, founders of Auditware. Auditware specializes in performing smart contract audits and building security tooling. Their flagship product Audit Wizard (currently in alpha) is the ultimate web3 security tool, allowing you to audit your smart contracts with ease.
Youâll notice that that article calls out that the default ârandom32â isnât suitable for production (and the code itself wanes you of this), so youâll need to find out where Trezor implements ârandom32â. This is my first time looking through their code and it seems that the insecure implementation is the default implementation in their firmware, but I assume they replace that somewhere. Perhaps someone more familiar can point us to the newest RNG code because THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT POINT TO CLEAR UP.
Youâd also want to go to the datasheet for the STM32F205xx to see that it has a âtrue random generatorâ hardware module.
That all looks really good, and Iâve heard that the modern Trezor firmware also includes static ram and host device data into itâs RNG, but Iâm not familiar enough with their code to hunt that down at the moment.
u/Itswhatevermannn shares the cool new project that have been building
Hey guys, lurker here whoâs been working on a project in his free time: https://betonchain.gg/
To keep it brief, I started out running a Chainlink node, deploying jobs and a consumer to update odds and game results data from an API I wrote to aggregate results and odds across various bookies. Eventually the goal became to offer the most competitive betting experience in terms of odds, privacy and transparency, while decentralizing the bookmaker by sourcing house liquidity from a community which receives house profits back. Soon after launch I aim to add support for futures and integrate player friendly tools such as contracts for auto-hedging parlays.
The platform is currently on Sepolia, if anyone is interested in testing the DApp please drop an address and I can send over some test USDC/USDT/DAI to place bets with. Hopefully thereâs not too many bugs! I am considering launching polygonzkEVM but not sure yet.
Appreciate any feedback from you fine gents and ladies!
PS: If anyone has insight into raising funds, please let me know, hope to make this my full time job. Thanks again!
u/asus_wtf has the China news and itâs not a ban?!
ââŚDubbed theâWeb3 Innovation and Development White Paper (2023)," the document states that web3 technology is an âinevitable trend for future Internet industry development,ââŚâ
âThe commission aims to construct Beijing as a global innovation hub for the digital economy.â
â The white paper reportedly states that Beijing aims to strengthen policy support and accelerate technological breakthroughs to promote the web3 industry.â
u/superphiz thinks we are hitting a staking inflection point
I think weâre hitting an inflection point where staking is the âcoolâ thing to do with Ether. Lots of folks predicted that this would happen but no one really knew when. Iâm basing this on two factors:
The deposit queue is growing at an accelerating rate despite long wait times.
The price of Eth is beginning to inch up against the flow of other assets.
The logical interpretation of this is that the supply squeeze delivered by staking & burning is finally upon us.
Does this mean Ethereum is successful?
Nope. Not even close. We saw something similar happen with Dash in 2018 (dash spiked when their staking program reached critical mass), but Dash couldnât keep the gains. The only way Ether will lock in this success is if we build valuable products on top of a credibly neutral and decentralized network. If youâre hearing this, but not acting on it, youâre a bad puppy đ
u/busterrulezzz experiences the Bitcoin BRC-20 and Ordinals user experience
I took a deep breath and tipped my toes into Ordinals and BRC-20 yesterday. UX is terrible, it took 12 hours (!) to process my bridging transaction from BTC mainnet to Stacks, and depositing into my trading wallet took about 10 minutes. Itâs a very, very long time when youâre used to Ethereum. Xverse wallet is even worse than MetaMask in terms of showing human-readable information, and all swaps are done either via order books or P2P bulk sales.
The experience is not welcoming for a newcomer. Iâve been doing DeFi daily for the last 2 years, and I had to look around for hours before I was comfortable enough to do a transaction.
However, I think BRC-20s and Ordinals have a decent chance of becoming more popular in the next few months. I am not tech-savvy enough to understand the hurdles facing a better UX - until yesterday I thought an ETH NFT collection could be bridged back-and-forth to BTC⌠But I could definitely see how people could pile on Bitcoin DeFi projects.
Ethereum isnât threatened by this, in my opinion. It is so far ahead in terms of development⌠Bitcoin looks like a 28k modem, while Ethereum is 5G. Still, I decided to allocate a small portion of my trading wallet to it. I feel kinda dirty using a PoW chain, but hey, ride the wave, donât fight it, as they say.
u/BramBramEth is thinking about take on the next part of their web 3 journey
Hey ! Seems like Iâm going to be let go at work soonish (Which is a good thing, my job got less and less technical over the years and I miss that part a lot). Iâm a cryptographer with quite good skills in programming in a range of languages, so I was considering having a bit of fun for a couple years working in the ETH ecosystem. What Iâm looking for is technical challenge.
What are my options ? My thoughts so far :
CL Client teams : Very new codebase (which is nice) - Mainly about implementing EIP specs, seems to be that challenge here is âlowâ as the heavy lifting is done at the research level.
EL Client teams : Older codebase - Mainly about improvements of various existing parts - a bit more challenge because thereâs design/engineering tasks to improve stability and speed/latency/footprint of the clients.
Research teams : Way more focused on design / cryptography / game theory - Something Iâm very good at, but I fear I will miss the coding part of it, which is somthing I enjoy.
A Layer 2 : I would probably prefer a ZKR since itâs more fun to work on, but I kinda think that OR are so ahead in terms of maket share that itâs an uphill battle to win as a ZK rollup.
Some protocol : Probably some game theory involved, but I donât think I like the risk of being part of a project which has a chance of not taking off.
Do my own thing with a high probability it wonât be used : I would love to code some kind of ZK prover in GPU assembly for instance - This is probably the most fun for me, but also the most risky.
Flavor of the month : Work for a hardware wallet manufacturer with good open source values :)
Any other options you can think of ? Iâm just in the process of evaluating my opions right now as the switch wonât be before a couple months.
u/nightfallsh4 reminds us of another cool use for your hardware wallets
Just a reminder to everyone if you donât know already.
Both Ledger and Trezor device support Fido U2F, which means you can use your ledger or trezor as a security key (2FA) to login to your online accounts.
Of course if you are not comfortable taking your hardware wallet with you everywhere, maybe consider using it for online accounts youâll only login from your home or in a safe place. But according to your specific threat model you can use HWs as 2FA security partially or fully in your online activities.
You can use them to secure your CEX accounts, email, password manager etc. And if you loose or break your device you can always restore it with the seed phrases in another device and all your 2FA security keys will be recovered as well.
Using a security key as 2FA for your online accounts greatly increases your general security online. And almost impossible to hack into your accounts remotely.
Before you implement that be sure to go through the ledger and trezor articles about using their respective U2F features.
Trezor also supports FIDO2 standard for passwordless login but itâs not as widely adopted yet like U2F.
Not sure if posted yesterday, but even if it was itâs worth repeating. HOP bridge now supports rETH, with joint liquidity incentivization by HOP & RocketPool DAOs.
This is the first liquid staking token bridge (of any protocol) and Iâm hopeful HOP can add more. Anyone who is in a LST community that has shown interest in getting a bridge set up let me / HOP know. When this was being voted on it seemed there was interest in adding more.
No real initiative has been launched in the case of Lido yet. There is no real equivalent to clientdiversity.org today, with explanations, educational material, and guides to switch to less centralized options. There is no real pressure by the community.
Are we really passively waiting for the 33% validator share limit to be crossed in order to start doing anything?? Will one more percent really make a difference? As a reminder, Vitalik suggested that no entity should control more than 15% of all validators. Lido already controls twice the stake Vitalik considers to be too much.
To our Ethfinance friend u/hanniabu who created clientdiversity.org (big thanks for that): is there a similar website planned for staking providers? rated.network just doesnât do the education job. Please let me and us know if there is anything we can do to help.
Feel free to share any idea about what we could do to.
This problem wonât just solve itself, there needs to be a community initiative.
Ethereum is the only digital asset in the world that is all of the below:
decentralized
productive
secure
useful
immutable
permission-less
trust-less
Traditional finance people and most normies still have not figured this out. I know weâve come a long way since 2015, but I really believe we are super early adopters here. Will be interesting to look back on these threads in 5, 10, 15 years time.
Imagine an Ethereum spam token as a small piece of land in the middle of the desert that has a big sign planted in it saying â/u/barthib owns thisâ. You have no idea who put the sign there, and the land is obviously worthless, so why would you bother driving out into the desert to try to claim it or to take down the sign?
TL;DR Hide it. Donât interact with it or try to âget rid of itâ.
Conceptually speaking, Ethereum tokens (including NFTs) donât exist âinâ your address like ETH does. They exist âinâ their own token contract that maintains its own separate ledger. This contractâs code is determined entirely by the creator of the NFT.
When your wallet software checks your address for tokens, what itâs basically doing (through a couple levels of indirection) is pinging the smart contract that the token creator published, asking it âdoes this address own any of your token? If so, which one(s) does it own?â The tokenâs creator can, if they wish, tell the contract to respond to this inquiry with literally anything. They could tell your wallet that you own an amount of their token equal to the current block number, or randomize every day the tokens the contract says you own, if they wanted to.
When you interact with a token, your wallet is reaching out to the token contract and running the code defined there by the creator of the token, which can also be anything they want. So a situation like this could occur:
You try to send the token to the null address.
By doing so, your wallet calls the âtransferâ function on that random token contract.
The âtransferâ function is malicious, and tries to trick you into sending the attacker other tokens out of your wallet, or even just reverts (fails) your transaction causing you to lose your gas fee.
Edit: A classic scam is where they code the contract to revert/fail your transaction with a custom error message that includes the address of their scam website in it, telling you to go there for âsupportâ on their token. You see your failed transaction with their custom error message when you go on Etherscan to check whether your transaction went through. So you visit their website and get on their support live chat, and they feed you some bullshit about you needing to install a wallet upgrade from a dodgy .exe file, or that your wallet is corrupted and you need to send them your seed phrase to fix it. Then they clean you out.
Been away in Japan đŻđľ the last 4.5-weeks or so for vacation. Didnât use the phone much, went camping, did jiu jitsu, was a cornerman for an MMA fighter, went to a baseball game, sumo; just reconnecting and seeing how the ecosystem is.
Japan just hosted the G7 Summit in Niigata đŻđľ where the topic of cryptographic commodities was brought up. There seems to be a $3000 USD threshold put on commodities so anything above that amount is reported by the exchange/bank/etc. Seems a bit low relative to what⌠hedge funds do⌠âŠď¸ đ´
Fun Fact. Iâve spent some time with some cryptographic security people here in Tokyo đŻđľ and Iâve been informed something like 33% of all crypto theft occurs to Japanese people. Sure enough, hereâs an article with most of those details to back it up đĽˇ
Iâm sure youâve all heard about the recent Tornado.Cash protocol take over. Hoping anyone here affected is alright đŞď¸
Seems weâve been hovering at $1825 with a spike to $2000 not too long ago đ
A lot of you are aware of recent Ledger/Hardware Wallet hacking. Hereâs a video from Hak5 over 1.5 years ago cracking these wallets. I tried getting people to flash the alarm but I think these types of attacks will slowly become more common; that and juice jacking / wire jacking đ
Iâm always here in the shadows doing my best to secure the Blockchain, provide liquidity, and help along newbies when I can.
Love you all, keep being ambassadors, and keep helping any- and everyone who asks for it!
PrĂśschtli đť
u/FrenktheTank shares a PSA for Google Authenticator users
Heads up for everyone using Google Authenticator 2FA app. While this might be old needs, the update was pushed around the end of April, this was new to me, so maybe some fellow EthFinanciers might find this useful.
This morning I opened my Google Authenticator app to find out that is needed an update. The update included a back up of the authenticator codes into my google account.
When I explored this a bit I found this:
âWith this update weâre rolling out a solution to this problem, making one time codes more durable by storing them safely in usersâ Google Account. This change means users are better protected from lockout and that services can rely on users retaining access, increasing both convenience and security.â
Really, how can they think this is save. The whole point is to have a second step besides your standard login option like Gmail. Whatâs the point of storing your 2FA codes in a google account that when it gets compromised, your 2FA codes are compromised as well.
There is still the option to keep using the authenticator without the backup feature.
Remember, when it comes to online security, the ultimate responsibility lies with none other than ourselves. Stay vigilant, take proactive measures, and empower yourself to safeguard your digital presence.
Hi everyoneâŚI just got the final cover for my book back. Iâve written a little book about Ethereum!! Specifically about WHY Ethereum is the future of business. Itâs called (no surprise) âEthereum for Businessâ. If you would like to pre-order it, the paper copy should be in your hands in about 2 weeks as weâre nicely ahead of the official schedule and orders for eBooks on Amazon or Apple will follow in another 2-3 weeks. Iâll do a top-level post on why I wrote the book and what itâs about on the official release day.
There was a meeting planned for Monday but too many people could not make it last minute. A few of us had an unstructured discussion mostly about the costs of setting up and running an oDAO node and necessary archive node. u/haurog calculated some of the costs using on-chain activity and is willing to share a doc once complete and hereâs another great resource (oDAO tab).
Weâd like to maximize participation for those interested in working on the project, so please enter your availability for the next meeting here:
Enter a name (pw optional) and click Sign In, then select your available meeting times so we can schedule it.
If Discord meetings do not work for everyone we may consider using Zoom or other tool. Whether active on Discord or Reddit-only user, all are welcome and encouraged to join the effort.
u/LogrisTheBard thinks now is a good time to familiarise yourself with Curve
With crvUSD finally launching in earnest now would be a good time to at least familiarize yourself with the Curve ecosystem if you havenât. Itâs still the second highest volume DEX and might have just launched a way to double its income.
Thereâs a lot to unpack here:
Curve issuance. How much is being emitted? When are the scheduled emission reductions? Who is sucking it up?
Bribes. This is basically a way of reallocating liquidity from a trading fee optimal allocation to a CRV holder revenue optimal allocation. This takes a bit to get your head around.
Curve v2 pools. These are largely misunderstood. Unlike Uniswap or Balancer Curve v2 pools have a volatility instrument in there that flexes liquidity depth to minimize IL and adjust the target peg over time. This is a seriously undermarketed feature.
crvUSD. A new CDP style stablecoin that uses a gradual liquidation system so you get less wrecked. Lower risk for borrowers, no need for keepers to liquidate you, and it enables high LTV ratios. This is my favorite DAI-style replacement so far. LUSD puts your collateral at risk even pre-liquidation. RAI famously isnât stable. crvUSD is just an improved design of the liquidation system and the peg can be backed by the entire DEX revenue for a stronger coupon bond failsafe than DAI could ever offer.
I do suggest you spend a few hours and familiarize with this system if you havenât because it is the baseline so many other projects derive their tokenomics from.
Not sure if itâs been posted yet, but the delegate week started yesterday. If you own any DAO tokens, itâs a great time reconsider who you are delegating too. Or even better, if you are on the fence about being a delegate might be a good time to jump into it!
If you own any HOP, now would be a good time to consider delegating - whether that is to someone new or just re-affirming with the person you already delegate too. They are using some of the grant funds to encourage people to re-delegate (or delegate if they arenât at all) See - https://forum.hop.exchange/t/grant-proposal-delegation-week/878/11. Not a huge amount, and Iâm not sure if those are the final numbers, but at a minimum should cover some gas costs + some beer money.
u/Itur_ad_Astra reflects on a famous crypto saying
Iâve been in Ethfinance for a few years, and every year, I understand this a little bit more. I joined before the big bull, made some profits, but you donât make life-chaging amounts of money by investing spare change as a broke college student. So I obviously didnât sell during the crazy highs. This year is the year in which Iâll be calling myself an âEthereanâ for more than I was calling myself a âBitcoinerâ.
âŚIt was invented to set you free.
Iâve got to say, I âconvertedâ to Eth at a good time. Not a good time financially, but at a time where I was disillusioned with Bitcoin. I had heard about Ethereum much earlier, but ignored it, as it was obvious to me that Bitcoiners would not leave the biggest and best coin with zero improvements over multiple years, riding on the first-mover advantage alone. What a rabbit hole the Ethereum ecosystem was! What an insane potential of improving the way we interact with wealth and capital and as a result the human condition!
âŚBut it will make you rich anyway.
If this part ever comes true, Iâm ready, but I hope itâs not overnight. I donât know if my mental health can take another insane bull, but I suspect that the next one might be even wilder. At least inflation and time have changed my definition of âlife-changing moneyâ. In any case⌠DCA on!
u/2Nice4AllThis is trying to explain Ethereum for dummies
Iâm working on a few crypto beginnerâs tutorials, with the main goal being to simplify information and for a better learning experience. Ideally, a lot of users donât actually need long explanations of how blockchain and dapps work and just want to know how to use them.
Interestingly I wanted to compare simple transacting as copying and pasting an address, and I thought to compare this to being as easy as copying and pasting an IBAN number for digital banking transactions (like in many EU countries). But then it occurred to me that in the US, peer to peer banking transactions are still impossible (which is pathetic), so this reason alone makes explaining this way harder than it should be.
Just a funny observation. What could be a better metaphor for explaining transactions in a âcrypto for dummiesâ kind of way? I was considering using email addresses as a metaphor, but I donât think itâs the best way.
Also, is lack of p2p banking a problem that fednow is trying to solve? It should be a crime how far behind the US is due to lacking simple digital transactions as a standard feature for all bank accounts. Anyway, people generally understand PayPal and Venmo, but trying to explain crypto transactions automatically sounds way more technical if youâre not already familiar with similar concepts.
Iâve taken some work with Supermodular.xyz and Greenpilled via Kevin Owocki!
My role currently will be creating video content for a variety of platforms and help spread the work to Regenerative crypto economics and human coordination. Hereâs couple channels to follow when you get a moment.
Thanks /u/owocki for the amazing opportunity. Onward!
There is so much ethos aligned with Ethfinance and I couldnât be happier to have the chance to help contribute to the vision of this incredible community.
Iâve been diving in on the Greenpilled podcast and will be making so much shorts content with great quotes from great minds. Mind blast incoming!
Guest appearance by DCinvestor, an early pioneer in the Ethereum community on Reddit and was a huge part of Ethtrader and Ethfinance. You can find him on Twitter, discussing Ethereum, NFTs, AI & more. https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor
Only their names and parameters must match. A functionâs code does NOT have to match the description of its name
I could make a valid (but scammy) ERC-20 token where the âtransfer()â function actually mints tokens, and where the âapprove()â function instead burns a large amount of your transferred Ether. And that would be technically valid as long as the code specifies it.
BRC-20 is just a short JSON object (a simple data structure) and does not contain any functions. Itâs based on ordinal theory and relies on the ordinal nodes to operate on it and provide it with standard functions.
It only works with ordinal-compatible taproot addresses.
Here is the standard format of a BRC-20 token:
Protocol: Specifies the type of ordinal transaction. Always âbrc-20â.
Operation - One of 3 different operations
Deploy: Deploys the BRC-20 token
Mint: Mints new tokens as long as itâs not past the max supply or mint limit
Transfer: Mints a transfer function
Ticker symbol: A 4-letter ID
Max supply
Mint limit: Limit per ordinal transaction that users can mint themselves
Decimal precision
This is what the entire ORDI token deployment looks like:
Protocol: Specifies the type of ordinal transaction. Always âbrc-20â.
Operation: Transfer
Ticker symbol: A 4-letter ID
Amt: The amount to transfer
To transfer, it takes 2 steps:
Inscribe the transfer function to yourself
Send the inscription from your wallet to the other address
Swaps require an off-chain 3rd-party to complete, so theyâre not safe at the moment. It remains to be seen if you can build trustless DeFi around BRC-20 tokens.
Some other interesting facts about BRC-20 tokens:
BRC-20 tokens rely on ordinals and inscriptions to work. This uses the prunable witness section of a Bitcoin transaction that costs 4x fewer sats per byte.
BRC-20 tokens are so small (in terms of weight) that Bitcoin TPS has actually doubled over the past month. This is not due to more demand, but because the average transaction size has gone down (due to fewer batch transactions), so they can pack more Txs into each block.
u/cryptOwOcurrency breaks the news on finality issues and u/OkDragonfruit1929 adds details
It wasnât catastrophic, but it easily could have been a serious, but recoverable, issue if it had persisted. Epoch 200,553 only had 40% voting participation, which means only 40% of validators selected at random for block creation were actively confirming new blocks. Normally, the participation rate should be much higher, so this could indicate a problem with the network.
We need a thorough post-mortem before we can be sure everything is okay though, because a rogue event like this happening for no explainable reason would not be very confidence inducing.
u/superphiz updates on the loss of finality the other day, u/OkDragonfruit1929 gives an ELI5, and phiz follows up with more analysis
A tiny update on the loss of finality yesterday: The culprit still isnât clear.
Some people have suggested Prysm caused the issue because they were hit hard by lost attestations and high loads, but this is very likely a side-effect of the turbulence rather than a cause. Terence described some optimizations they were making as a result of the turbulence, but thatâs not an admission of fault.
I initially threw shade on MEV-boost because of my distrust for that stack, but thereâs no evidence suggesting they are involved in any way.
The investigation is ongoing and the outcomes will be published in a detailed postmortem.
, but keep in mind, that this isnât a finding of fault, theyâre just exploring the incident.
Hereâs my best attempt at an ELI5:
CL clients were getting a lot of attestations (which are like votes or confirmations from other nodes) about older transactions that didnât include the latest updates. This is like getting a lot of mail about old news that doesnât include recent important events.
Because the nodes that sent these attestations didnât have all the information for the recent transactions, CL clients had to spend a lot of time and resources to catch up. This is similar to how youâd spend a lot of time and effort researching recent events if you only had old newspapers. This caused the CL clients to work too hard and run out of resources, leading to issues like the system slowing down or even crashing.
During this time, a small problem in the Prysm system (which likely exists in other clients as well) was found that made it use the wrong information when trying to organize transactions. Itâs like sorting mail into the wrong categories because youâre using an outdated list.
The Prysm team is working on improvements to prevent these issues from happening again. Theyâre improving the systemâs memory management, and theyâre going to implement similar logic which right now only exists in Lighthouse CL clients where they filter out unviable attestations (like disregarding old news thatâs no longer relevant). The Prysm dev team plans to release these improvements next week.
So, in summary, the Prysm nodes were overwhelmed with outdated information, which led to system issues and revealed a minor bug. The Prysm dev team is now working on fixes and improvements. I am hopeful other CL clients follow suit and implement similar fixes.
Some analysis threads are starting to come in from the loss of finality event on 5/11/2023, Iâll try to link them here as I become aware of them. (Feel free to share as well)
##Summary/Highlight of US House of Reps session: Future of Digital Assets.
Pleasantly surprised by most of what was discussed. Almost all the guest speakers had excellent ideas and explanations in the discussion. However, each person was allocated only 5 min at a time, so it was somewhat limiting. Please excuse me if some of this is a little raw. It is a 3 hr meeting and I donât have the time atm to format it correctly due to my excessive fiat mining op (work).
Intros of Committee and Guest Speakers:
Mr Johnson: Must be a bipartisan effort for a promising tech/market. Conflict between securities and commodities laws. Most of the G20 countries are ahead of us. We want to be the leader in this tech/industry.
Ms Caraveo: Digital asset activity grows, but so does non-compliance. Any legislation requires increased funding of CFTC.
Mr Hill: Can this industry thrive here in the US? Many Democrats calling for common sense legislation for months (not just a partisan issue). Canât trust offshore exchanges (FTX), so we need to work on laws here for US exchanges.Â
Mr McHenry: We want a collab of CFTC and SEC to make laws and close regulatory gaps to protect consumers.
Guest speakers
Durgee: Iâm the only non-attorney here. Already there are conflicting laws against other existing laws for crypto from the SEC and CFTC. This is a developing tech innovation that happens to be a digital currency as well. Adoption at this stage is not a tech problem, itâs a human conditioning issue. A 13 year old in their lifetime has grown up with BTC and only known a world with crypto in their life.
Mr Santori: Kraken is well established in the US and the world. Europe has more effective rules from tested principles unlike the US. Gaps in US have created litigation that doesnât protect consumers. Mandates needed to protect us: https://www.youtube.com/live/gwJ1QAwP7UE?t=43m21s
Mr Massad: Confusion about commodity/security classification of crypto worsens the gap problem. How can we apply Howey test without this info? We need to pass a compliance law directing CFTC and SEC (or SRO; self regulating agency) to create laws and enforce them, without rewriting commodities and securities laws. Regardless of your stance on crypto we need this framework to protect consumers.
Mr Blaugrand: If investors could have traded digital assets on an exchange that was regulated like the NY Stock exchange, FTX situation wouldnât have happened. We can use the established rules we already have and apply it to crypto with these 4 rules: https://www.youtube.com/live/gwJ1QAwP7UE?t=58m34s
Mr Steil (WI): We still have no path forward for regulation, even after Genslerâs meeting with Congress. Congress is ready to do the job. How do we not miss out vs overseas? W/Shoenberger: Switzerland made it very clear to define security/commodities. It gave them legal security and clarity that allowed them to proceed successfully. This framework that they provided certainly provided the legal certainty to be headquartered there and to have legal clarity around the classification instantly. W/Durgee: The rest of the world has more stability and growth in every avenue of crypto. 3x as much investments vs the US in some markets.
Mr Lucas: US is great because we embrace innovatio. w/Santori: G20 markets are ahead of us and are sophisticated. Kraken is expanding there, but we canât deploy the same resources here in the US due to these regulatory gaps. Lucas: what SEC rules need altering for exchanges to succeed? W/Blaugrand: SEC needs an onramp with regulation so exchanges can grow in the US. They donât because of regulatory vagueness. W/Satori: Flexibility of crypto is a perk. Broker/dealer construct can interact directly with consumers. We could limit exchanges and even close down exchanges after hours.
The negative:
Lynch (Mass): Not regulatory ambiguity; itâs mass non compliance with existing laws. Donât argue security vs commodities, we should instead focus on intermediaries (exchanges, lenders, and wallet users). SEC is clear, consistent, efficient, and prevails in every 140 cases. crypto industry has failed. No separate regulatory regime necessary for crypto. claimed that creating new legislation for digital assets seems âredundant and unnecessaryâ given that the financial systemâs current securities laws have âsustained massive innovation in our financial system for decades.â
Mr Casten: What return would I had if I invested in 12 cryptos during a time vs S&P (60% profit)? Loss 46% of investment, how is this a supposed way to close wealth inequality gap? W/Durgee: accredited vs credited access is important. Mr Casten: Iâm happy to debate truth not lies. Everything stated here beginning to sound like SBF and FTX, whatâs the distinction? Sounds like you want to regulate crypto with the least funded organization.
Mr Sherman: Buttcoin mod? An ignorant personâs lack of ability to learn anything new. Fossil garbage opinion. Uses term âcrypto broâ. questioned whether digital assets should even have a future in the United States. He referred to cryptocurrencies as a âhidden money system that diverts capital investment from useful industries, and whose announced purpose is to defeat sanctions and tax laws. Crypto bros make money literally by making money, and theyâve made over a trillion dollars. Theyâll accuse the U.S. government of making money out of thin air. Maybe we do, but weâre the U.S. government.â
Threaten Web3 Anonymity:
Mr Davidson (Chairman Housing subcommittee): Genslerâs hotel Californiaâs regulation provides no path to exit/leave. Who should have the power of exit from intermediaries (power to have self custody)? w/Santori: Who is best placed to collect KYC info? Kraken is well paced to do that and doesnât require KYC for every transaction, but we could do that if required.
Dr Foster (IL): Estimates of 95% trades are fake or wash trades in derivatives. How can we have a regulated futures market with this fraud and manipulation? What alternative to KYC at all levels is there to avoid fraud? W/Satori: Kraken provides this as a portal. Foster: we canât stop BTC on the dark web with that. At a wallet level we must have mandatory monitoring with licensing like automobiles. Trusted digital identity from the government. W/Kulkin: CFTC had auth it could conduct surveillance under the rules and jurisdiction of the exchange thereby acting as an SRO in addition to the CFTC/NFA.
Conclusion
McHenry: Even if there is nothing of value in crypto, you would still need enforceable rights and protections already found in regulations and laws in the US. Must come together in bipartisan manner to protect investors.
5 days for additional legislation questions and responses granted from the panel. Plans for another hearing this month made.
Last month, McHenry said he expects that the President will have signed some piece of crypto legislation into law within the next 12 months.
u/T0Bii starts a discussion about different client pairs and the finality issues
Anyone else here whose validators had no problems during the finality issues?
What clients are you running?
What are your hardware specs?
I missed an average of 1 attestation per validator that day and my inclusion distance was around 0-1 as well. Iâm running Nethermind/Nimbus.
But I saw a big increase in CPU and bandwidth use, between 2 and 3x of the usual average, spikes even higher.
Thatâs not a problem for my staking machine, but if others had similar spikes, I can totally see why many had issues.
u/Ethical-trade comments on the communication between EVMavericks and EthFinance and u/juxtanotherposition shares some notes from EVMavericks oDAO meeting
Iâm a bit disappointed to see that despite the idea of the the ManeNet DAO joining Rocket Poolâs oDAO having emerged from r/ethfinance and having received great support from r/ethfinance, all of the conversation has now moved over to Discord.
I realize that this is a very specific topic and most of the conversation shouldnât happen in r/ethfinance. But it would still be great to discuss ideas in this sub too when needed, and keep the entire community informed of the latest news.
For example, did you know that thereâs a proposal being drafted that has been in the making for a week? Or that a dedicated meeting happened on Friday?
Like many others I donât like Discord, I find it messy and a pain to follow so I donât use it. Maybe Iâm just too old for the âchatâ format.
Would it be possible for one of you Discord guys to keep us informed in here from time to time? Iâm sure many here would love to be kept in the loop and even contribute.
r/ethfinance gave birth to the ManeNet DAO after all, and all EVMavericks were Ethfinancers before becoming lions.
In the spirit of sharing more from EVM Discord to r/ethfinance and about the example that brought it up, I shared my notes from the 1st Discord Call about the oDAO on Discord, but havenât shared them here yet:
I was taking notes for myself and Iâve put that into Pastebin (unlisted) (https://pastebin.com/nrmwEyGg). Iâm sure there are lots of errors, incomplete thoughts, and typos.
Also, I tend to ignore Discord except for something Iâm very interested in (like the oDAO). So I sympathize with the comment poster. As an EVM holder, Iâm loyal to the dailies, but not the Discord. So I miss some EVM things when they donât make it back here. h/t u/Ethical-trade
u/Spacesider shares how his node dealt with the beacon chain finality issues
So while I was gone and there was all that drama with the beacon chain, my Teku node got caught up in it and fatally crashed and was completely offline.
HoweverâŚ. I run a second Ethereum âstackâ with Lighthouse as the consensus client, which the validator process switched over to and was able to carry on with no downtime like nothing even happened.
I was able to recover the Teku node in my own time, and once it was back in sync the validator process automatically switched back over to it as the primary endpoint.
Client diversity is awesome!
u/maninthecryptosuit explains the big Ledger drama
The device sends encrypted shards of your seed to different companies if you decide to use the service. You can of course still choose to backup it yourself.
Your keys are always stored on your device and never leave it
Thatâs what Ledger has been claiming for years as well.
If we assume the chap wasnât lying 2 days ago, that means the new firmware ( one screenshot shows 2.2.1 for Nano X ) that just rolled out activates the backdoor âabilityâ to extract the seed.
Ledger is preparing to launch a new service called Ledger Recover that splits a wallet recovery phraseâbasically, a human-readable form of the private keyâinto three encrypted shards and distributes them to three custodians: Ledger, crypto custody firm Coincover, and code escrow company EscrowTech. If somebody loses their recovery phrase, two of the three shards can be combinedâpending an ID checkâto regain access to the locked funds. Essentially, Ledger Recover is an additional safety net; for the price of $9.99 a month, it takes the jeopardy out of cryptoâs version of stuffing dollars under the mattress. Itâll be available in the UK, EU, US, and Canada and come to other territories later in the year.
Why this is an issue - even if Ledger now cancels their new seed cloud backup service (because backlash), and says they will never make a firmware update use this hitherto unannounced âabilityâ, the mere presence of this backdoor means that bad actors/governments may be interested in it. I guess this is what we get for trusting a company that kept its software closed-source.
My next steps:
Immediately stop using Ledger Live
No more firmware updates
Hope and pray that my ancient Nano S devices didnât have this backdoor
u/FriedChickenTrailer compares the best, most secure Ledger alternatives
With ledger (potentially) going full retard again, Iâm updating myself on what hardware wallets are available in the market right now. Looking forward to if anyone has other suggestions, additions or corrections to my high-level assessments below.
Iâve been using this list for discovery (trying to narrow down the list of 387 wallets): https://walletscrutiny.com/?verdict=reproducible&platform=hardware
There is an insane amount of options in the market, but very few can fit these requirements;
open source everything, including firmware and hardware
has a display that shows information about what youâre signing
been around for ages so its been battle-tested (plenty of fixed side-channels issues etc) and its weaknesses are somewhat well understood (limited physical security etc)
To those who own governance tokens / participate in governance, you should check out Tallyâs governance-week. They are coordinating with a bunch of DAOs to encourage people to delegate or periodically revisit your delegated tokens. A great place for ethfinancers to start is looking at https://dailydoots.com/#delegates to find out who on this forum is a delegate.
The HOP bridge protocol is one of the partners and will be providing some funds from the grant pool to support Tally on this project. The exact details on how they will incentivize is not finalized yet - initial discussions where subsiding gas fees, but looks like it might be shifting to a distribution to those who participate (the forum discussion is here). Either way, Iâm happy to see HOP providing support!
That all said, whatever governance token you own please consider usings this week as a chance to re-visit your delegated tokens. Itâs an important step for the health of a DAO, as set it and forget delegating can stagnate a DAOâs leadership and create a barrier to entry for new delegates to join in. And if you are looking to become a delegate this may be a great opportunity to jump in!
@2Yeahyeahdiscusses the the trade-offs of different staking options, concluding best return likely coming from wstETH or rETH synthetics, or staking directly with Rocket Pool.
ETHâs clamshell reads $2857 and âż0.07416 on the sides.
In 2021:
After issuing bond tokens on the public Ethereum blockchain, the European Investment Bank calls the technology revolutionary.
With ETH at $2952, or âż0.05213, Eth2âs deposit contract locks in $10 Billion.
If youâve ever visited EthStakerâs website before, youâll have seen that it was⌠largely unnavigable. Well - we wanted to build a new, open source one, so we put out a call on r/ethstaker to see if we could find someone from the community, familiar with staking, to help us do it. u/hanniabu is awesome and did it!
So now EthStaker has a new open source website!! Feedback would be most appreciated, especially from ethfinanciers. What would help you find the info you want about staking? I didnât love giving people discord and subreddit links when they asked for resources, so Iâm pretty stoked to be able to give them a website where everything is aggregated.
Iâm also gonna post a series of âbeginner guide to stakingâ blog posts over the next couple weeks (at https://ethstaker.cc/blog), would REALLY love feedback on that from someone who sorta knows what staking is but wants to know more. Mostly for readability
u/696_eth discusses a new entrant in the decentralised liquid staking game
I looked into DIVA and wrote a twitter thread about them yesterday.
Hereâs a quick summary for Ethfinance:
Diva is a decentralized way of staking
Distributed Validation staking thru Distributed Validator Technology (DVT). Trustless. Resilient. Secure. Cause of fully distributed network of validators. Entrance as low as 1E.
Liquid staking. You would stake to get divETH, which operates kinda like stETH. You can wrap into wdivETH which operates like rETH/wstETH. This can be tax advantageous depending on your preference of incoming vs capital gains.
You would have an option to run a node for extra rewards (split 50% between stakers and node runners in the final Phase 2 version on the mainnet). Thereâs some minimum hardware requirements.
Itâs currently on the testnet. Should be live on mainnet in Q2
The key points is that Iâve learned is that combines liquid staking with DVT. Since it uses a smart contract to pool funds it can be as low as 1E. Honestly, Iâm waiting for a bit more info after their testnet releases to see how it pricesly protects against penalties and bad actors and why 1E would be safe. Also, not enough info on Node Operators and right now you would not be able to run one on the testnet.
Side note. SWISE vaults might be in a similar vein I guess.
Please correct me if I misunderstood something or if you wanna educate me more, this was a new concept for me so it was a bit hard wrapping my head around it when figuring out how diva is planning to make it work not just in a theoretical way.
u/Tricky_Troll makes an analogy about crypto legislation
Itâs the 1920s, youâre starting to see these fancy new self-propelled horseless carriages or âcarsâ pop up everywhere. They look really cool but theyâre also quite dangerous. This is what the kerfuffle is about in the congress at the moment. Everyone knows that we need to protect people from the maniacs on the road. But astute observers also realise that we also need to protect the innovation and economic advantage these new-fangled machines provide.
Lawmakers are split on what to do. Representative Emmer thinks we need new laws. âRules of the roadâ for all to comply with. Rules which all road users must follow specifically designed to create order out of the chaos on the road while still allowing for fast, efficient travel. But senator Warren disagrees. She thinks these new machines should be treated like horses under the ancient 1839 âHorse and Carriage actâ. She doesnât care that horses are slow, living creatures which need to eat, sleep and poop while cars are fast, furious and can run all day. She insists that these roads were built for horses and that makes anything on those roads a horse, dammit!
Donât be like senator Warren.
Edit: If anyone with some clout on Twitter wants to screenshot this and run with it, go for it. Or if you reckon you can take the idea and shorten it down to the Twitter character limit, that would be impressive so go for it.
u/keystrokesinyourhead shares a RocketPool criticism while u/Datacruncha explains RocketPoolâs oDAO
Ethereumâs consensus layer and execution layer currently donât talk to each other so you need oracles for something like rocket pool. The odao does all the oracle work for rocket pool and upgrades the smart contracts. They can technically collude and cause massive damage so the best way to prevent this is to overpay and only include trusted people. Yes, the work is fairly easy and not worth half a million a year and everyone wants a spot. Thankfully, a lot of the money goes to fund client teams which helps ethereum run and keeps it decentralized. 4 spots are allocated to the rocket pool team to help fund development. Sassal donates all his earnings.
Eventually, there will be less of a need for the odao with upgrades to Ethereum like eip 4788. If anyone has any technical or economic suggestions about the odao they can post in the rocket pool forum or the research section on discord. Please note, it takes very little effort to criticize and substantial amounts of time and coordinated effort to come up with working solutions.
u/etheraider kicks off the EVMavericks buildathon!
Hey everyone! đŚ buidlathon is officially kicking off and the competition will run for a full 7 weeks starting today! đ If you are interested in participating. head on over to the EVMavericks discord and hop into the đŚâbuidlathon channel and ask to be assigned the Buidlathon role! đââď¸ (No EVM Required)
Projects will be judged on their overall utility/ingenuity/technicals and the potential benefit they bring to web3!
General criteria for projects is as follows:
Has to use some aspect of web3
Need to have a product or service that is useable for alpha test release
Need to provide a statement on how your project benefits public goods/what does your project provide to the community
Valid project must be anything technical/non-technical that further advances ethereum education/utility/infrastructure/services
Projects >1 month in progress are not eligible to participate.
Upon conclusion of the competition on June 19th 2023, participants will demo/present/showcase their projects to the community and the voting will begin!
A panel of 4 technical/web3 judges đ§ââď¸ along with a DAO-wide snapshot vote (5th judge) will decide who will rule them all and win the grand prize! If you are interested in contributing in other ways (helping promote the buidlathon, being a judge in the competition, other ways) dont hesitate to reach out in the channel!
Hereâs your chance to make your mark in the community and get đ° while doing it! Happy buidling!đ¨
u/MerkleChainsaw is looking for real adoption and u/silentjxhn makes a great list of examples
Long term, Iâm very positive that Ethereum will eventually dominate the crypto space and that it will address most major technical challenges, even if it takes another decade or two. Iâm pessimistic about crypto overall though.
Iâm still on the sidelines because Iâm having trouble seeing how crypto overall will achieve true adoption anytime soon. I define âtrue adoptionâ very narrowly as significant demand for ETH to be used for some external purpose other than crypto speculation or facilitating crypto speculation. So for example providing DEX liquidity, staking/validation, and issuing most tokens or NFTs donât count since the demand is mostly based on putting fiat into crypto hoping to get more fiat out. Things that do count include airline or concert ticket NFTs, using ETH contracts for supply chain tracking or audit, and so on. In these cases someone is willing to buy ETH because they can use it to solve an actual problem. I think most other successful technologies were solving real world problems by this stage in their development.
Where can this adoption come from? After all the scams, fraud, and hacks Iâd have trouble convincing any company board to use public blockchains beyond maybe an NFT cash grab offering, if for no better reason than avoiding the reputation risk and liability from using crypto. Even a simple use case like accepting stablecoins as payment is tough because every major stablecoin has depegged at some point.
Though itâs small, I think EVMavericks is an example of true adoption. Demand for most people is based on âIâd like to be a member of a clubâ rather than âIâd like to sell this JPG for a profitâ. Maybe some Reddit avatars count in this category as well?
Is there anything on the horizon that Iâm missing? Financially I want to buy ETH because it has an asymmetric distribution of returns, and I believe Ethereum is one of the only projects in crypto being designed with good intentions and a long term focus. On the other hand Iâm increasingly having trouble seeing where enough new demand will come from to justify a $220B valuation.
My goal is to show how things develop and answer questions like âHow many validators will secure the network by EOY if net new validators are constantâ, âIs client diversity improvingâ and âHow is the dynamic between centralized pools and decentralized stakersâ.
If you think something very important is missing, let me know and Iâll add it today or tomorrow, so we can work with it in June. Best case share your source, so I know where to find the stats.
This post will contain more information and probably some conclusions in the future, I hope this will be a good summary and help for those who donât check numbers regularly (I basically didnât do it and could not tell you how things are developing right now)
Some comments and sources:
All percentages are rounded, so this is not 100% accurate, but should be good enough to show changes in the coming months.
P.S. I wanted to do this yesterday, cause it was the first of the month, but I had no time cause of the bank holiday and also I was too stupid yesterday⌠So letâs pretend todayâs numbers are those from May 1st.
Hereâs an idea: EVMavericksâ ManeNet DAO becoming a Rocket Pool oDAO member.
Arenât we an ideal and trustworthy partner that highly values decentralization?
Edit: just realized how unwelcoming this post must feel to any new member. So letâs explain a few things for our most recent friends:
A while back r/ethfinance launched its own NFT collection, EVMavericks and used the occasion to launch a DAO, the ManeNet DAO. From its website: âManeNet DAO advances the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem by aligning shared member incentives with funding, developing, and promoting public goods and educationâ
Rocket Pool is a liquid staking protocol, and the oDAO is âthe group of special Rocket Pool nodes that are responsible for the administrative duties required by the protocol that cannot be achieved by Smart Contracts due to technical limitationsâ. The âoâ in oDAO stands for âoracleâ.
So basically the idea here is to have an r/ethfinance native DAO help Rocket Pool with some of its duties. This job pays rather well, and the money could, according to the ManeNet DAOâs mission, be used to advance the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem.
u/waqwaqattack proposed EVMavericks joining the oDAO to the RocketPool community on RocketFuel
Yesterday, u/Ethical-trade made a post about how the EVmavricks should join Rocket Poolâs oDAO. I loved that post so much, I covered it in todayâs Rocket Fuel - making the case that I strongly support them joining.
I support ManeNet DAO joining the oDAO so strongly that, in the episode, I made the offer of lending the DAO the 1750 RPL needed to cover the bond if they are selected.
Blur, the incumbent NFT marketplace, just announced Blend: a peer-to-peer lending and borrowing platform that lets users leverage their NFTs as collateral to borrow ETH. These loans are perpetual (no expiration price or date), at fixed rate. The twist? Lenders can call the loan at any time, triggering a Dutch auction for a new lender to step in and take over the loan.
But wait, thereâs more! Blend also announced a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) feature, enabling users to âbuyâ their favourite NFTs with just a 20% down payment, while the rest is borrowed from a lending pool. I wrote âbuyâ, because until the price is paid in full, the user canât do anything with the NFT, except for listing it in Blurâs marketplace (ie try to sell it back and profit from the move).
As always, with great financialization comes even greater risks. Borrowing ETH to âbuyâ an NFT (BNPL) means going long on leverage (you profit if the price of the NFT rises). Borrowing an NFT and immediately sell it for ETH (Blend) means leveraging short (you profit if price falls). The result: when NFT values fluctuate in the opposite of the âexpectedâ direction, users will quickly face liquidations.
We will soon see the impact of this development on collection prices. While leverage markets can help stabilise price fluctuations, they can also create massive liquidation cascades, so Iâd expect some days of wild rides are ahead.
EthStaker is accepting funding in the current Gitcoin Grant round, all funds go towards initiatives that help decentralize staking
Guest appearance by Evin McMullen, cofounder of Disco. Disco is your personal data backpack, making data and reputation portable across web2 apps, web3 dapps, IRL, and more. Evin is also cofounder of DAO Jones and inkDAO and an advisor to Boys Club, The Melon, and Graph Paper Ventures.
âThe European Parliamentâs adoption of MiCA today is a pivotal moment for the crypto industry in the region, and the work of European policymakers should be seen as exemplary,â said Tom Duff Gordon, Vice President of International Policy at Coinbase. âThe region is recognising the potential and societal promise that emerging technology can provide. The EU is stepping up to the mark, while other notable jurisdictions are struggling to provide a solid, cohesive regulatory framework that gives clarity to a burgeoning innovative industry.â
As I mentioned in the previous day it was 1 year in NFTs for me a few days ago and Iâm taking that opportunity to reflect on the last year (& maybe a bit more) and on a variety of topics and experiences. Iâm also going to repost them here and maybe something resonates here and there. Of course, Iâm starting it with Ethfinance!
I start my reflecting on 1 Year in NFTs from Ethfinance.
r/Ethfinance - subreddit that has influenced my Ethereum journey greatly, and thus - my NFT journey.
But how is it exactly connected?
Iâve heard more and more about Ethereum as some of my online internet friends started exploring other chains besides bitcoin. Ethereum was one of the most promising ones. Eventually I ended up hearing more and more about it and I thought it was time to start looking into it. I do not remember exactly how but I did find r/ethfinance sometime in the middle of 2020.
The discussion was amazing compared to the r/ bitcoinmarketâs daily that I had been frequenting for years. Not only people were talking about the tech, it was the majority of the talk there. Quite a contrast compared to only ânumber go upâ in the btc daily.
Fast forward to March 2022, thereâs now talks about this NFT project - EVMavericks. Most active people where whitelisted. I had not. Why? Even though Iâd been quite a frequent visitor - I was a lurker. Luckily, I made a few comments over the few years and that was enough to get on an additional list and then winning a raffle solidified my involvement.
Nowadays I still visit the Ethfinance daily, almost on a daily basis. Sometimes I get too busy with life. Itâs still a wonderful place to ask questions, hear about new developments, be alerted about important topics, see the stories of community members and learn something new everyday.
After being one of the most active members in the EVMavericks discord and being still quite a strong lurker and even turning into a slight poster on Ethfinance, I can share a few of my observations.
I personally prefer the pace of the discord as itâs more of a live chat and closer to a real time conversation. Ethfinance has a higher quality and lower noise. Yet it doesnât do one thing very well for me and Iâd bet especially for the people who are lurking - involving you in being part of the community. You see, sometimes folks like me who are new and not technical have really nothing substantial to contribute. And even though some of us are still asking some questions from time to time which I believe are still valuable contributions, it just does not complete the puzzle. And I believe each of us has something to offer and we can learn something new from each other. And this is where discord comes in and that is what it allows you to do, and I feel that EVMavericks degen chat, in particular, is prime example of bringing folks together. Itâs a glue. Still maybe for some but not others.
Now Iâm not going to go into pros and cons of each platform but one more thing I will mention is that the subreddit is a nice free resource for new folks. And I feel the vibe is especially geared for people who are, hopefully, going to make it financially as well as being the ones who are understanding and embracing many aspects of the technology and tools that we discover and build.
I never really cared about Twitter prior to this point. I created an IRL account like 10ish years ago but never really used it. When it comes to crypto, most of my time was spent on Reddit - r/ethfinance.
Now, Iâm not sure why I created this account, but it seems to be a day after I minted my Maverick. I know thereâs usually lots of excitement during the early days (the honey moon phase), and people were eager to bond together and roar about the lion pride. Anyway, I ended up creating an account and following all the Mavs the EVMavericks account was following. One thing that was still weird to me is that so many web3 or crypto projects use Twitter, which is a full web2 platform that can and has rugged some of my friendsâ accounts before. My account has been locked multiple times for no reason until you add your phone number, etc. to unlock it. One click on their end - you are gone.
Over time, and after getting more into ENS, I started caring more. Iâve changed sides of caring and not caring so many times now that I donât remember all the details, but I do know the important parts. What Iâve come to and what I hold nowadays is that I am able to hold both of the sides of caring and not caring at the same time. I personally donât care about it at all. When Iâm in nature, when Iâm doing things outside, when Iâm engaged in the things that matter, and so on and on and on.
The nuance comes in because part of me does care. It does care for a very noble, specific set of reasons too. In the world where I do have more followers, I would be able to spread my values, educational messages, and even some funny memes to a wider range of people. All of that is nice, and yet itâs important to let go of all of that. Otherwise, it alters my behavior in a way where itâs still geared a bit more towards getting better numbers, while still keeping my true values. But then I wonder, and I like challenging myself with the question, âWhy does a number of followers impact the content?â.
âIf I am doing something good, wouldnât it matter whether one or a thousand people see that?â
Again, there are, at least, two sides to the coin that Iâm holding. And at the end of the day, Iâm still human, and it does get very demoralizing to see all the people doing scammy (all other types of things) having more followers and more impact, which I judge as a net negative.
And why am I building in the first place?
I thought having a personal blog is nice addition that is like a journal, a resume, and basically an on-chain history of your identity. It seems we are not there in crypto, so thatâs why Iâm still using Twitter, as it does matter, but also playing around more with web3 projects like mirror.xyz and paragraph.xyz. Also, building on top of ENS, even something as simple as a site - 696.eth.limo, is a way of doing that.
Honestly, thereâs still so much more to write about followers and how I have figured out some particular nuances, but, again, it doesnât really matter to me at the end of the day.
Although Iâd say I have tried to be consistent on a daily basis for almost a year, maybe missing a bit in the beginning, and have contributed content in a variety of forms, including memes, threads, questions, observations, analysis, videos, news, step-by-step guides, etc and I have gotten to 2275 followers. Thatâs also including all my NFT related communities and ENS.
Iâd like to end it on a note thatâs future-focused. What am I going to do going forward?
Obviously, I donât have enough reach, and thatâs also a good thing for me mentally, as it gives me so much more room to experiment and make mistakes.
The most important to me is to be true to my values and certain things like curiosity, decentralization, community, collaboration, communication, transparency, education, and making people smile and laugh. All of that while being authentic, having a better balance on how this piece fits within my life puzzle. Focusing on my connections with people and on the effort that Iâm putting in, and the content Iâm creating than being a slave to the algorithm.
Next up: Art, creating Art.
u/Ethical-trade reviews RocketPoolâs Atlas upgrade in the days since it went live
Hereâs a Rocket Pool update since Atlas / LEB8 went live.
The minipool (RPâs validator) count went up from shy of 14,000 to 15,329 today. Since 16eth pools can be divided into 2 leb8 pools, total count goes up, not much of a surprise here. Roughly +10% in 5 days.
More interestingly, node count went up as well from 2,291 to 2,393 which is a clear uptick that can be seen in this chart. More nodes is what we decentralization maxis should be all about (and what Iâm all about), so this is absolutely great news. According to Etherscanâs node count, there are currently 9,170 Ethereum nodes.
Rocket Pool now accounts for more than 1/4 of all Ethereum nodes. With a market share of only 2.7% of validators.
I havenât found any reliable chart updated with Atlas but from my observation of the total number of eth staked from the official website, thereâs been roughly 3,000 eth poured into RP daily since the update. Thatâs $5 million per day.
Before Atlas, the deposit pool was continuously full (meaning reth was highly in demand, never available) causing a premium on the price. Today itâs the opposite, there are many minipools waiting so the deposit pool is close to empty. In other words, many node operators are waiting for people to swap to reth. The premium is almost gone.
Iâm expecting some whales to swallow a lot soon, and secretly hoping for Vitalik to swap some eth for reth. Would be crazy publicity for RP. Next time he does an AMA Iâd like to ask him what he dislikes the most about Rocket Pool, Iâm very curious to know his opinion.
Hey, mate, one of the defi saver team members here.
Not sure which protocol youâre considering using there specifically - is it Aave?
If yes, then that means that a position created on a smart wallet using defi saver would not be visible or manageable in the default frontend available att app. aave. com.
Why is that? Well, interacting with all these different protocols directly through an EOA (your standard Ethereum account) is the default approach in most cases (e.g. Aave, Compound, Liquity). This is mostly for simplicity reasons and gas savings.
However, a standard Ethereum account is currently limited in terms of how many smart contract interactions can be called within a single transaction.
This is why we chose to use the smart wallet as default for holding positions of each protocol we integrate at defi saver.
Main reason? The smart wallet provides a new layer of execution that has no limitations that a standard Ethereum account does. Thatâs why we have options such as 1-tx leveraging/deleveraging, collateral and debt swaps, 1-tx moving of active positions between supported protocols, as well as a number of automation options for all protocols.
If thereâs anything else I can clarify, please do let me know, would be glad to help.
tl;dr: If you open an (e.g.) Aave position on a smart wallet using defi saver, it wonât be accessible through their frontend at aave. com. All exactly same protocol rules and rates apply in both cases, but their frontend only supports positions sitting on EOAs.
u/ArcadesOfAntiquity discusses an underrated type of cold wallet
Hey folks, just popping in to say: air-gapped QR code-based signers are vastly underrated as a crypto wallet security solution. (Iâll refer to this tech as AGQR for the sake of brevity.)
I finally took the trouble to switch my wallets over to AGQR in the wake of the mysterious wave of wallet drainings that Twitter has been abuzz about.
How do AGQR signers work?
Similar to dedicated hardware wallets, you create a new seed on the signer device itself. (You can also import an existing seed.) You store a backup of the seed you created in the same way you usually would/should: always by writing it down, never by printing/screenshotting.
Your private key is held on the signer deviceâin my case Iâm using an old Android phone running the free, open source Airgap.it Vault software. (I know, it might sound risky to keep your private key on a phone, but if youâre cautious enough not to trust airplane mode, you could physically shield, remove, or otherwise disable the wifi, bluetooth, and cellular radios.)
On a separate, networked device (PC/laptop/tablet/other phone), wallet software such as Metamask suggests a transaction in the way weâre familiar with, but when you click âAcceptâ, instead of signing the transaction itself, it displays a QR code containing the parameters of the transaction.
You scan this code using your AGQR signer device, and then authorize signing on the device itself, using whatever security features the device hasâPIN number, pattern drawing, fingerprint, etc. Again this is similar to dedicated hardware wallets, but here there is no physical connection between the two devices. (Hence the term âair-gappedâ⌠which is probably a rather old security term, and makes less sense now that wireless networking is pervasive, but I digress.)
After you authorize, your AGQR device signs the transaction data and displays it on-screen in the form of a QR code.
You then hold the screen of the AGQR device up to a webcam attached to the networked device that first suggested the transaction, and it reads the QR code and broadcasts the signed transaction to the Ethereum network.
It might sound like a hassle but the whole process takes about one minute when you get used to it.
Why not just use a hardware wallet like Trezor, Ledger, Lattice, etc?
Owning a hardware wallet makes it obvious that youâre into crypto. For those of us who would rather keep it discrete, an old phone wins hands down. The hw wallet companies seem to really disregard this segment of the market. Case in point, the new âfashionâ Ledger wallets that you wear on a chain around your neck. Thanks but no thanks.
Personal information exposure risk. Buying a hardware wallet potentially creates a record of your name/address/phone number/credit card number being associated with cryptocurrency. This could be no big deal, or it could be a huge deal in the case of the Ledger customer data leak. Buying a phone creates no such risk. In factâŚ
You probably already own an old phone. If not you can buy one cheaper than you can a hw wallet.
Phones are mass-produced consumer technology. We could argue that hardware wallets have become this too, but which is easier to quickly replace, repair, or troubleshoot? Definitely the phone, in my opinion.
No custom firmware/drivers. It seems like every few weeks there are new headaches and incompatibilities based on faulty or late firmware/drivers.
Downsides?
Since itâs just (free) software that runs on a phone, it doesnât create any revenue for the people that make it. Therefore if there are future changes to Ethereumâs transaction data format, updates to the AGQR signer software could be slow or even, worst-case, non-existent. However, the software Iâm using is open source, so I wouldnât expect it to be a problem for long, if at all.
For the same reason, the supported range of phones might not be the best. The software installed on my old Galaxy S6, but wouldnât launch properly.
For the same reason, customer service/support might also be bare-bones or non-existent. I havenât checked yet.
Not many people are using it, as far as I know, so you wonât be able to Google for answers as easily. But hopefully as awareness of how effective this tech is, this situation will change! Indeed, thatâs part of the reason Iâm posting this.
Summary and Conclusion
Iâm aware Iâm maybe honeymooning over it, but Iâm strongly tempted to say the AGQR signer is âthe wayâ: it has basically all the benefits of a hardware wallet and basically none of the drawbacks. Itâs portable, small, and self-contained, without notifying everyone that youâre into crypto, and if it breaks, no big deal, you can get a new one the next day.
Trying to think about it more objectively, I know some people are likely to feel that AGQR on an old phone is a bit too âDIYâ to trust their money with it. Thatâs understandable, but on the other hand, I figure a lot of us here already have a pretty DIY attitude if weâre willing to hold our own keys in the first place.
In conclusion, I think there will always be a market for dedicated hardware wallets, as a âno compromisesâ type, maximum security, industrial-grade solution. However, for most of us, I think AGQR fits the needs of the user so much better that itâs not even close. Especially if you tend to think things should be open source and self-hosted, you owe it to yourself to explore this tech.
TLDR: Iâm loving my AGQR setup and just wanted to let everyone here know about it.
u/pa7x1 is brainstorming a project for the community
Here is a proposed public good that I think we could bootstrap through this community or EVMavericks.
A curated white-list of trust-worthy smart contract addresses. Plus a browser extension that relies on it and lets you know whenever you are interacting with a smart contract that itâs a know and trustworthy one and warns you when itâs an unknown one.
In the future this whitelist could hopefully be integrated in other wallets, MetaMask, frame.sh, etcâŚ
Thoughts and criticisms welcomed!
u/etheraider wants you to build and win prizes! Meanwhile, u/LeagueGreedy sheds some light on the creating Withdrowlst
Hello everyone! Withdrowls Public Goods Funding Update!đŚ
First off thank you to everyone who participated and celebrated with us this seminal moment in Ethereum history! We look forward to celebrating many more with you to come!đ With that said, we are happy to announce our official Buidlathon!đŞ
Are you a builder or are you LOOKING to build in web3 and just need the extra push/incentive/funding to get the ball rolling?! If so, here is your chance!đŤĄ
As a way to commemorate how far EVMavericks and our community has come, starting today and going through âTBD dateâ (to be announced soon), we will be hosting an open competition for anyone that wants to build infra/tools/public goods/dapps/new services on web3!
The prizes for the competition will be as follows:
1st place: 5 ETH
2nd place: 3 ETH
3rd place: 1.5 ETH
Random participation prize: .05 ETH
Winners will be determined by a âpanelâ of 5 judges, to include 4 individuals and the 5th judge as a âpopularâ snapshote vote amongst EVM holders.đŚ
In order to participate and be eligible to win, builders will have to sign up with their idea/proposal in the the EVMavericks discord and submit at least a working âalphaâ or prototype of their project by the due date.
Also, as a general rule all projects that are already well in progress would not be eligible for this competition as that would be an unfair advantage to start
For more details and or questions please check out the Buidlathon channel in the discord! (If you donât have an EVM just select the Buidlathon role to get in the channel!)
Thank you everybody and happy building! More details to come soon! Looking forward to seeing what projects will be created! đĽ
It feels so good to have fully minted out Withdrowls and start the public goods funding buidlathon! It makes me so happy to see community come together to support a great cause!
Some fun facts about Withdrowls: it was 4 days from idea to mint out. Marketing started the day after we decided this was something we wanted to do, so only 48 hours of marketing before mint. It also only took 24 hours to mint out! Oh, and about 95% of the tweets were automated, that was a lot of fun.
We jammed A LOT into those 4 days so please give u/etheraider a hug next time you see them, and please sign up; all ideas are welcome :)
Feel free to hijack this commentâs replies if you donât have an idea, but would like to team up with a community member!
Iâve written before about crypto and Human Coordination and why it is my favorite leg of The Rabbit Hole. A lot of the work to date on this topic is on deciding relative balances of power between key actors via token distributions, identifying all the necessary actors of a system and ensuring they are fairly compensated and cannot profit from misbehavior (incentive alignment), and creating systems to encourage voter participation such as delegation and bribe systems. There is an implicit step before all of that wherein an organization needs to agree on what it is trying to achieve and critically how it should go about achieving it. This is the value alignment process, it is a never-ending affair, and itâs a predecessor to all other actions of an organization.
Once upon a time in MakerDAO, after a black swan event wiped out many of their early users, the DAO was faced with a decision on whether to reimburse those affected. They decided not to. They then had to decide what was more important between peg stability and decentralization. They chose peg stability and created the Peg Stability Module (PSM). To this day I still disagree with both of those decisions but regardless of how I feel the DAO had to wrestle with controversial values, reach a consensus, and then act. How to enshrine values into a system varies greatly by each system but I think itâs worth reviewing some of the methods weâve seen so far, what is good and bad about them, and how we might be able to improve upon them.
Some systems are able to enshrine their values in code. For example Ethereum, when forced to tackle the scalability trilemma, chose decentralization and security over scalability. These values are encoded in the gas market and block sizes. Solana went the other path. Earlier in its history Ethereum was forced to choose between finality and ethics (look up Ethereum Classic). We chose ethics. Judging by the relative adoption of Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic this was apparently the more widely supported choice by a majority of node owners, app developers, and companies. Behind these decisions is what we commonly call Layer 0. This is one of the most fragile parts of the Ethereum ecosystem and one that we have to maintain constant vigilance on. The value alignment process for Ethereum can basically be described as a vacuum where a process should be. How does one become part of the Layer 0 set of actors? Basically you post in Ethfinance, attend events like Hodlercon, meet/influence the right people, attend core dev calls, write ERCs, etc. You go down The Rabbit Hole and get involved.
In more traditional power structures where value alignment decides the strategy of something but not necessarily its implementation it is more normal for the value alignment process to take place by delegation and hierarchical decomposition. It is infeasible to coordinate an organization the size of a nation state using an open mic system or social media upvotes. So we tackle this complexity using walled gardens and hierarchies. Within a corporation the primary organization of this hierarchy is what I refer to as the pyramid of subordination. This structure prevents bystander syndrome by assigning accountability for each task, ensures each person is qualified for the job using a social attestation system in the local vicinity of the pyramid (interviews), and generally organizes people to act towards a unified goal. It is efficient when done well. The military uses a similar structure for the same reasons. It also doubles as a more efficient value alignment system than Iâve seen in DAOs. When there is disagreement this structure provides an escalation process amongst direct reports, peers, and superiors within the pyramid of subordination. If a matter isnât satisfactorily resolved by those initially involved, it escalates up to the C-level personnel who serve as the ultimate authority for the values of the organization. By the time it reaches them, there are almost certainly multiple valid strategies that could be taken that they are deciding between. This is actually the primary value of C-level personnel; they embody the values of an organization.
So what are the problems with this design? What are we hoping to improve with web3 technologies? Well, the problem begins just above the pyramid of subordination. As weâve seen in the US in the past 50 years, using highly liquid capital as the ultimate authority source in the system has led to the pursuit of short-term profits at the detriment of all other factors. Shareholders care about their share price and dividends above all other factors and so they appoint C-level personnel and structure their compensation to reflect this desire. As a result companies destroy the environment, have little to no regard for their employees well-being, subjugate their local communities, pursue one merger and acquisition after another in order to form too-big-to-fail monopolies, and exploit every financial and political system they can to stifle competition and create power imbalances in their favor. From a game theory perspective this is the expected outcome of this design. It is Moloch in action, as our society increasingly organizes itself into these ever growing capital-hungry behemoths. You would think companies would be beholden to customers but the customer has no influence in this power structure other than to take business elsewhere. Sadly, working to stifle competition and reduce customer choice is often more effective for companies than working to improve the customer experience or provide a better product. So, the first thing to improve is to create structures for value alignment that are able to embody a wider diversity of values without sacrificing organizational efficiency.
The second thing to improve is resilience. This structure is fallible to key-man syndrome. It is optimized for efficiency not resilience. When one person has the full autonomy to do something it becomes ripe for corruption and/or enforcement pressures. The larger the set of people that need to consent to something the harder it becomes to form a conspiracy to make any decision that does not align with the DAO consensus mission.
If we can only succeed at improving these two facets of organizations, crypto would already be a world-altering, indispensable technology. But we are working on so much more than that. We are working on ways to divorce capital from influence, remove the walled garden around the value alignment system, fight any and all forms of coordination failures, and novel ways of incentive alignment that can change human behavior at scale so that our societal values more closely align with those of our dominant power structures. It is basically impossible to be against this ethically once you understand it. The most bullish thing for Ethereum is to be understood.
I have came across an interesting protocol called Sismo enabling users to manage their various digital indentities privately using zk-badges.
As hinted, it uses zero-knowledge proofs. If you are not familiar with these, this video shared multiple times in the daily was very helpful (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c). Basically, it is a mathematical tool allowing to selectively reveal a piece of data. Applying these to digital identity, you can aggregate valuable characteristics from different account (web2) or ethereum wallet without revealing their adresses.
For instance, let say you have a wallet with which you gave a lot to Gitcoin grant and another one with a high degen score. You want to aggregate theses characteristics in a third without giving your history (adresses). Sismo allows you to do this. Practically, you connect your different wallets to their apps, create signatures and mint âzk-badgesâ. A badge is a non-transferable/soulbound token (NT-ERC1155).
From their docs (https://docs.sismo.io/sismo-docs/):
Users aggregate their identity in Sismoâs Data Vault and start accumulating Data Gemsâatomic pieces of data that categorize users into groups. In turn, users can generate proofs to make claims about their data (e.g, I own a specific NFT). These proofs are verified by applicationsâeither on-chain or off-chain. The resulting privacy-preserving attestationsâstored in on-chain smart contracts or off-chain databasesâare utilized by applications for access control and reputation curation.Users aggregate their identity in Sismoâs Data Vault and start accumulating Data Gemsâatomic pieces of data that categorize users into groups. In turn, users can generate proofs to make claims about their data (e.g, I own a specific NFT). These proofs are verified by applicationsâeither on-chain or off-chain. The resulting privacy-preserving attestationsâstored in on-chain smart contracts or off-chain databasesâare utilized by applications for access control and reputation curation.
I hope to find a way in the EVM discord to experiment with creating badges for lion minter/holder. Here is the creator section of the app if you are interested https://factory.sismo.io/create-badge
Scroll Tech raises $30 Million in Series A funding and announces zkEVM-based zk-rollup Scroll.
EU officials talk about banning Bitcoin: âIf Ethereum is able to shift to PoS, we could legitimately request the same from BTCâ.
An arbitrage MEV bundle buys a Moonbird NFT for 44 ETH, to resell it for 223 ETH in the same transaction.
Ridley Scott is announced to produce Ethereum movie The Infinite Machine.
ETH deadpan talks about $3079, $2988 and âż0.07373.
In 2021:
Raoul Pal struggles âto not sell all my BTC to move my entire core position to ETHâ.
Wyoming approves a law recognizing DAOs as a new type of LLC.
Archer Swap is launched, a proof of concept for Uniswap and SushiSwap traders to avoid being front-run, by allowing 0% slippage trades that are only executed if successful.
Dunno if anyoneâs mentioned this yet, but CLWP (EIP-4736) included 2,133 potentially or definitely compromised validators who were racing to set their withdrawal address before a hacker could.
Of those 2133 in the set, 2133 were able to set their address to one controlled by the rightful owner. 100% success rate. Not a single one to a hacker.
Benjamin Chodroff (and Jim McDonald, I shouldnât have omitted that) was the author and did a seriously amazing job after realizing that his own seed for his validators were compromised and, instead of giving up and leaving the space, found a way to save not just his own, but thousands of others. Seriously amazing job.
Imagine you go to the Apples and Oranges Store because you need some oranges. But the store owner is quirky and has a rule that goes âThis store will only sell 1000 total items per day. Whether thatâs 1 apple and 999 oranges, or 900 apples and 100 oranges, or a perfect split I donât care. Once I sold my 1000th item Iâm done for the day.â
Also, this storeâs apples are very good. People drive from all over the place to buy them. So naturally since supply is low and demand is high, so the cost of apples go up and the store owner makes a killing selling them. Oranges, on the other hand, arenât as popular. On average, the store owner sells about 980 apples and 20 oranges every day.
You personally donât really care that much about the apples, you want to buy oranges. But due to the storeâs weird rule, you still have to outbid people looking to buy to buy apples. Oranges should be cheap because they are plentiful and in low demand, but every orange you buy is an apple someone else canât buy. After the store sold 999 items that day, why would he sell you an orange for $1 when someoneâs willing to buy an apple for $10? Youâll have to offer at least $10 to get the orange you want.
âThis is really dumbâ, you think to yourself. You talk to the store owner and make him come to his senses, and he agrees to change his stupid rule. Now heâll sell at most 1000 apples per day and at most 100 oranges per day. So now that the two supply/demand markets are separated, an apple can cost $10 and the orange can cost $1 and everybodyâs happy - you get cheap oranges, and the store owner gets more money (1000 x $10 + 200 x $1 gets him more money than the previous system when $10 was the cost of an item and he sold 1000)
Back in Ethereum land the apple represent execution (the gas that affects state, compute stuff in the EVM, etc.) and oranges represent data (the gas that stores stuff in the chainâs history). Rollups do their execution off-chain, so what they need most from Layer 1 is data. Today the cheapest solution is using call data at 16 gas per byte. But if everyoneâs fighting to do EVM stuff, the cost of that 16 gas/bytes goes up as well because thereâs only so much gas in each block. This really shouldnât be the case, since data is a different resource from execution.
So what EIP4844 does is separate those two resources into two distinct markets: The gas market as we know it today stays the same, and thereâs a new âdata gasâ resource with its own pricing that happens separately. Rollups will be happy because now they get to commit their batches on chain in these nifty new things called âblobsâ, and when demand for blobs is low, blobs will be cheap Ââ even if thereâs a huge NFT drop going on that brings gas to 500 gwei
On a technical level it does other cool things in preparation for full danksharding later on, which will allow a significant increase in the size of blobs so that it becomes even cheaper for rollups to commit data to blobs. But even without danksharding, just splitting the markets will help drastically lower fees on rollups, which will be nice.
Yesterday I asked about how EIP 4844 aka proto-danksharding works.
I got some really good answers so decided to sum it up, I put together a thread with an ELI5 on how danksharding works. TL;DR for those that donât want to click into twitter:
ETH txns vary across âcomplexityâ (complexity measures gas)
Txn âcomplexityâ is split between âexecutionâ vs. âdataâ
Currently âexecutionâ and âdataâ are sold via the same gas market
Danksharding splits up these up so thereâs a âdata gasâ market
âData gasâ market sells âdataâ via âblobsâ
L2s benefit since the txns they post to mainnet have a lot of âdataâ complexity
The implication is that L2 txn costs wonât be as impacted by ETH mainnet activity (big NFT mint, airdrop claim event)
u/Ender985 shares some NFT drama that reminds us about the importance of immutability
The whole point of crypto is trustlessness and code-is-law. As a consequence, NFTs are immutable.
Well, it turns out that sometimes they are not.
Truth Labs, the org behind Goblintown profile picture NFTs, suddenly changed the jpegs of their all NFT collections to a.. middle finger with more middle fingers, with the text: âFuck royalties. Fuck supporting builders and creatives. Flipping is the heart of what makes web3 special. Honor the flipper, fuck the community. Long live the slow rug!â Check for yourselves.
This move is part of their migration to new contracts, probably to enforce royalties on-chain. As you know, the Blur vs OpenSea feud caused a race to the bottom on âoff-chainâ royalties.
Truth Labs still had access to the contracts able to change the metadata of their NFT collections, effectively giving them the power to change the jpeg that the NFT represents. This took many holders by surprise, since they thought their NFTs were immutable.. Well now they need to trust that Truth Labs will change their jpegs back.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Even if a web3 participant understands the underlying technology, and the principles of trustlessness and immutability on which crypto is founded, they still can be caught in a trap. Smart contracts are law, but sometimes this law is not what we think it is.
u/Dont_Waver explains the recent Supreme Court ruling for u/ProductDude
It means that if someone is being charged by the SEC, and that person claims that the SEC is acting unconstitutionally, that person doesnât have to wait until the SEC is done with the enforcement action to appeal in court.
Administrative groups, such as the SEC, are part of the executive branch of the government, but they have a sort of judicial power in enforcing the regulations that they were formed to enforce. So previously, you would have to wait until they were done with their investigation and enforcement action before you could appeal to a court. However, if you are arguing that the SEC doesnât have constitutional authority to enforce whatever it is theyâre trying to do to you, itâs kind of silly to have to wait for them to finish the whole investigation and enforcement action before you can object and appeal.
For the SEC, this means that if, for example, Coinbase was charged in an enforcement action by the SEC and Coinbase wanted to argue that the SEC doesnât have the power to regulate crypto under their grant of power, it could immediately appeal to a federal or state court and have this argument ruled on. This would save a ton of time and money if the court finds that the SEC doesnât have that power.
So thereâs this idea Iâve been wanting to try for a while now.
You guys know how Ethernodes is notoriously bad at showing how many actual execution nodes there are? And so we donât have any real sense of how many there might be? I even see some discussion farther down the daily today on that subject.
I think we here in EthFinance/EthStaker might be uniquely well-placed to answer that question: how many nodes are there on Ethereum? Basically, a bunch of us who run nodes (including execution clients) would go and look up our node by IP address or public key on ethernodes.org. Then weâd each just reply to the comment/thread/whatever with a simple âyesâ or ânoâ, depending on whether Ethernodes knew about our node.
With a big enough sample size, like dozens or ideally a few hundred+, weâd start to get a pretty clear picture of how many actual nodes there are out there.
Example: Ethernodes claims there are 7500 nodes on a particular day. When 100 of us check our nodes that day, only 25% show up on Ethernodes. Conclusion: There are actually 30k nodes, give or take some error bar that Iâm sure the stats majors here could figure out (i.e. not me :P )
Thoughts?
u/BuyETHorDAI discusses an anti-crypto podcast which reminds us that the most bullish thing for Ethereum is to be understood.
Anyone watch Bill Maher? One his guests wrote an anti-crypto book, and I just found the arguments in their interview funny. I think the interview just furthers my view that Ethereum needs to dissasociate itself from the word cryptocurrency. I would much rather see the word cryptonetwork as it conveys that currency is not a central theme. But anyways I summarized the interview because I think this is a great summary of the mainstream opinion on âcryptoâ.
Cryptocurrencies arenât currencies and never will be (defined as store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account)
Centralized exchanges should be regulated like banks
If money is trust, then the term trustless money is nonsense. Itâs like saying a government-less government, or religion-less religion.
cryptocurrencies are not money, they are investments for higher returns which makes them a security
The only people that use them are crminals and gamblers because its inherently a zero-sum game because cryptocurrencies donât do anything. Usually a security is a share of a stock, but with crypto thereâs no product, thereâs no good, or service, which is why itâs a zero sum game where for someone to win, someone has to lose
Crypto is a ponzi scheme because a million people canât access their money out of FTX
If you lose your âpin numberâ in crypto, then youâre just fucked and thereâs nothing you can do which is why people use exchanges so that someone else is reponsible for your shit
Most centralized exchanges are fake and eventually collapse
NFTs are a ponzi scam / right click save / jpgs / wash trading / goodluck selling your bored ape
The amount of energy for âblockchainsâ is ridiculous. In 2021, Bitcoin and âother cryptocurrenciesâ mined a ton of energy.
These are almost verbatim the arguments thrown around. The first thing I notice is that if you replace the word cryptocurrency with Bitcoin, it makes a lot more sense. The arguments are very surface level and lack a ton of nuance because in the maintreams eyes, cryptocurrencies are all like Bitcoin. I think the old saying around here absolutely applies. The most bullish thing about Ethereum is to be understood.
u/wolfparking covers the large institutions moving in to the space
NASDAQ in their Digital Assets Business is expected to start providing customer crypto custody by the end of June after receiving approval from the New York Department of Financial Services. Much like Fidelity, the platform will function similar to an exchange with liquidity and execution services.
Just last year Bank of America reported a turning signal for wealthy investors away from the stock market and into Crypto, Real Estate, and Private Equity.
â75% of young investors say itâs impossible to achieve above-average returns solely with traditional stocks and bonds.â
Combine this sentiment with the economic slowdown and credit crisis, crypto investments are in better position this year.
Also, and not the news I expected to see gain traction and excitement, but the Bank of America is reporting some interesting drivers of recent digital asset adoption from gold:
Tokenized gold passed $1 billion in value last month under the market cap pump of stablecoins PAXG and tether gold XAUT.
âTokenized gold provides exposure to physical gold, 24/7 real-time settlement, no management fees and no storage or insurance costs. The low minimum investment increases accessibility and fractionalization enables the transfer of physical gold ownership and value that was not previously possible.â
We could all do with some peace of mind and stability after all the black swans weâve experienced last year. Hereâs to hoping that these large institutions donât exert regulatory and market forces in the wrong direction and fuck it up for the rest of us.
u/Jin366 digs up something from YouTube covering AI and Ethereum
This is a gem of a channel. He talks about autonomous AI and how Ethereum might play an important role in the future AI economy. Really good.
This is the part where he speaks about AI economy (and Ethereum):
"Now, I will discuss the integration of these AI models into the legacy financial system and Ethereum. These models can function as a central brain and connect to other neural networks, AI systems, and handcrafted intelligence systems like Wolfram Alpha. As the AI assistant interacts with apps and handles tasks for you, there will be a need for it to manage money.
In the first iteration, AI will interact with apps to book flights, for example, and users will confirm and approve transactions. As the AI becomes more effective and trusted, users will want it to handle more tasks autonomously, including financial transactions.
There will be pressure to integrate AI into financial systems, but this may create friction in the traditional financial system. These autonomous AI entities might face difficulties meeting regulatory expectations because the legacy system is governed by regulations designed for humans. Additionally, the traditional financial system is not well-suited for global transactions between AI agents due to regional differences.
Crypto systems like Ethereum, on the other hand, are well-suited for autonomous systems. Ethereum was designed with the idea that autonomous agents might conduct much of the financial activity in the future. It is permissionless, global, transparent, and digital-native, making it an ideal platform for AI agents to manage accounts and interact with smart contracts.
Though most economic activity still occurs in the traditional financial system, friction in that system may push AI agents towards crypto systems like Ethereum. Smart contracts on Ethereum can be used to coordinate AI agents, creating a seamless environment for AI-driven financial transactions."
u/bbqcaramelbrulee goes over the Gensler grilling in detail
Patrick McHenry did a FANTASTIC job with Gensler today. I believe he really forced the issue on Ethereum as a Commodity and hope it leads to regulatory movement (but maybe we in the U.S. shouldnât hold our collective breaths just yet with our painfully slow government, sigh). Anyway, great job Rep McHenry!
But damn, also McHenry (and Iâll keep this REALLY brief): votes against Womenâs Health Protection, the Chips Act, the Infrustructure & Jobs Act, multiple bills protecting Queer rights, multiple bills protecting the right to vote, multiple bills to (can we please!) close assault weapon loopholesâŚ
*Okay, back to Ethereum. And yes Iâm flying my âMurica flag here today, so bare with us everyone around the globe :)
Iâve been thinking a lot about how Ethereum can be represented better in U.S. legislative process. Reps like McHenry & Emmer are (let me be mild here) faux âpublic servants.â They have clear records of working against the Common Good. Ethereum deserves better heroes. I donât consider myself politically savvy and work in an unrelated field but am wondering what effective avenues would be worth my time and/or support. I have donated to Coincenter in the past and probably will again, but I need to update myself on what they have been up to.Edited:Coin Center works to educate policy makers.Recent efforts to educate involved the terrible âDigital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act,â the âRESTRICT Act,â and the Treasuryâs DeFi risk assessment. I hope to find out more about specific advocacy they are doing.
Any other coalitions come to mind I need to become aware of? Any ideas perculating on effective organizing or lobbying for those of us who care about good ETH regulation? I would love to donate some time and energy to this, but not sure at this juncture what will make a difference.
P.S. Just so you know Iâm not on some Lib high horse, I canât stand listening to Senator Warren talk either *facepalm. Thanks for readingâŚ
Keep your funds seperated if you have a lot of money. There have been plenty of cases of people accidentally signing fraudulent transactions even with a hardware wallet, because their PC was compromised. So donât mix your 100 Eth retirement money with your wallet containing dickbutt NFTs. Also if you interact with dodgy or untested contracts, use a seperate wallet for that too.
For best security use a multisig wallet/social recovery or a hardware wallet
Wallet â wallet. Do your research, the more funds you have the more careful you should choose the wallet. Theyâre all developed by different teams with different philosophies
No, HW wallets are not unhackable as some seem to think. There can be and have been plenty of bugs found in the code. The same goes for any wallet. There is no perfect security, know the risks.
Revoke permissions!
Hackers aside, another maybe even more common way ppl lose funds is by their own error. Make sure you have the keys/recovery phrase properly backed up. There are a lot of different ways you could do that, spend some time reading up on it. Never upload it to any online machine or expose it to a camera connected to the internet. No cloud storage, no smartphone etc. Your private key must never get close to the internet! Obviously physical theft can also be a concern, although lesser. There are ways to greatly mitigate the risks of self custody, look into it.
If youâre relatively new to all of this Andreas Antonopoulos has some great videos on wallet security etc. on Youtube. He mostly talks about Bitcoin but itâs same same for beginners. Itâs important to know the basics.
u/2Nice4AllThis shared a template for you to contact your US representatives
Hereâs a draft letter to the president/legislators/lawmakers from the perspective of a web3 developer. *One* sentence was generated via ChatGPT, the rest are my own words (my letter will be different, as I am not a dev tho I do feel like this effects my career too). Feel free to use and customize. Apologies but Iâm super tired and barely proofread it.
Dear ________________ ,
Iâm writing today because I am concerned about the lack of clear regulation in the blockchain and web3 industry. For many developers in the space, this technology is our pride and livelihood. Most of us recognize that the space has an overabundance of scams and theft. There is a clear distinction between private companies like FTX who offer a product with no transparency and a public ledger built on open source technology.
Blockchains offer a lot more than just being an immutable ledger. Web3 has the potential to transform many aspects of our society, including finance, governance, and data ownership. The United States should be a leader in innovation and adoption of impactful technologies. As someone who grew up in the nineties, it is the closest thing that reminds me of my childhood during the early days of the internet, when America chose to be a leader in household adoption of a technology that advanced communication beyond what we would have ever imagined a century ago.
Although our industry has a lot of problems, there have been some great achievements from development teams and good faith actors in the space. Last year, ethereum had a groundbreaking upgrade that reduced network energy consumption by almost a hundred percent by upgrading to proof of stake and eliminating the need for wasteful crypto mining. Hacked funds are often traced by the community with updates on activities broadcasted through social media and itâs quite common for the community to help its users get stolen funds back. There have also been millions of dollars donated in aid to Ukraine through cryptocurrency.
The web3 and blockchain space, as known as the âcryptocurrencyâ industry, have grown a lot since the inception of bitcoin. Today there are many communities in web3 that make up the collective space and if you were to navigate through them you would find there are many who are excited about this technology. Many of us have put a lot of time, passion, and hard work into the development of this tech and itâs a big part of our lives.
Some of us feel that CEOs of private companies shouldnât be the only representatives of our interests as a growing industry. We are also disappointed by the actions of SEC chairman Mr. Gensler and his hostility to American companies like Coinbase, who actually have gone above and beyond in regulatory compliance. Furthermore, the draft bill of the RESTRICT Act contains alarming implications for the privacy and speech of American citizens.
We hope that our political leaders could do some more community outreach in the space so we can properly educate our legislators about the technology. We especially urge regulatory clarity for developers, stakers, and everyday users. We understand that there shouldnât be rushed legislation to integrate blockchain and crypto assets into our existing financial infrastructure. We just want to do our jobs as software developers and home stakers, who work hard and invest our time and money into developing a revolutionary technology.
u/asdafari12 reminds us that we arenât against regulation itself
Reading many ppl here the last days that claim we are just greedy and only care about pumping our bags. We arenât against regulation, we are against bad regulation. If the SEC got its way, I predict that ETH would be a security that retail canât touch directly, only indirectly from various bank products. Private stable coins might be banned. Private wallets, or what they call them - unhosted wallets, wild wallets or dark wallets will be banned. Defi itself likely banned unless accessed from a bank that charges a fee, âfor our protectionâ.
No other country is stuck on the question, whether ETH is a security or commodity. Crypto regulation in the UK and EU is not perfect but we realize that crypto is here to stay and put out regulation, guidelines and not just 55 litigations. I was positively surprised by how many Defi actions, my Nordic tax authority has provided guidelines on this year. ETH staking (cap. gains, not ordinary income), lending, LPing etc. Meanwhile, the US IRS hasnât even spoken about ETH staking. Most people will likely class it as ordinary income because that is safer than to classify as the lower taxed capital gains.
SECâs actions are embarrassing (even Hester, Genslerâs colleague says so), the IRS is embarrassing, the political dick swinging between agencies, embarrassing. R vs D as well and things like that make me lose faith in society and the democratic process more than any crypto scammer ever did. Scammers do it for the money, above, I think is done for the same or even worse reasons.
Thereâs a free POAP for anyone that participated in the Shapellaâs POAP.art canvas and placed more than 42 pixels. Once you claim you become elligible to enter the Shapella Pixel Placer - LogicBot Raffle for a chance to win a LogicBot!
I deposited my ETH into the staking contract 871 days ago. Later, on 1 Dec 2020, Beacon Chain launched, and since then my solo staking rig has been running 24/7 with near perfect uptime. Total downtime amounts to probably less than half an hour. Iâve earned a nice amount in consensus and execution rewards. Operationally it has cost me nearly nothing, about ÂŁ100-150 in electricity over the 2 or so years, and about 12 hours of my time. It runs in a fanless case, so I donât even hear it. I sometimes forget it even exists. It contributes to the Ethereum network and is a source of passive income that has truly no intrusion in my life. And yet, I canât wait to instantaneously exit all of my validators and dump all of my ETH later tonight.
edit: thank you u/superphiz for chadding in with the gold!
Having onboarded 75% of new stakers last month, Lido finance proposes Distributed Validator Technology and Node Operator Scores in a quest towards more decentralisation.
The U.S. Treasury Department alleges that North Korean hacking group Lazarus is behind the $600 Million theft on Axie Infinityâs Ronin bridge.
TrueFi releases dapp development framework useDapp v1.0, with multichain and WalletConnect support and restructured documentation.
Arbitrum holds the first poll on projects to be included in the Arbitrum Odyssey.
@Jasper_ETHargues Lido Financeâs measures to decentralize are not enough, advises the staking pool to commit to not taking more than 50% of all ETH staked.
Leo Glisic explains stakers yielding higher returns via staking pool tokens and their derivatives.
ETH should prepare for a Muskian crypto-twitter, at $3116 to $3020, or âż0.07562.
In 2021:
/r/wallstreetbets decides to allow discussions about BTC, ETH and DOGE.
Paul Brody brainstorms about a DAO-based analogue of the S&P500 in the Ethereum ecosystem.
ETHâs pockets bulge with $2309, $2421, âż0.03623 and âż0.03856.
In 2020:
Prysmatic Labs launches the Topaz test network, representing the full Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 mainnet configuration.
The Ethereum Foundation updates the community on R&D progress made by EF-supported projects.
Etherscan announces ETHProtect, a detection tool to identify if incoming funds are tainted, tracing the tainted funds down to its origin.
Andreessen Horowitz raises $450 million for a second crypto fund, aiming to invest more in Bitcoin and Ether.
MakerDAO users file a class-action lawsuit against the Maker Foundation after losing funds on Black Thursday.
ETH is just another way to say âOK computerâ, at $158, or âż0.023.
In 2019:
ETH updates its coordinates to $168, âż0.03256.
In 2018:
ETH steadily resides at $501, aka âż0.06277.
In 2017:
The DAO Ethereum Classic refund deadline gets extended.
Iâm going to try not to drag this out. Those of you that know little bits of my life from what Iâve shared here know that I first entered the ethereum space at the beginning of covid. I was supposed to fly from Ireland to the Philippines to finally marry my long term girlfriend of 13 years when covid put a two year halt on it. For those two years I saved like a motherfucker and invested hard into eth and its ecosystem. Initially with a percentage of money that was for a wedding, then ramping up the DCAs more and more over time.
Last May I celebrated my marriage in the Philippines here with all of you. It was a long time in the making.
Three months ago, after a long and arduous (and expensive + paper heavy) process, my wife and I managed to secure a spousal visa for her to come live with me.
And that brings us to about an hour ago - after three days of literally no sleep Iâve secured a property here for us. Iâm not exaggerating when I say in this timeframe none of this would have been remotely possible without this subreddit. Ethfinance is the flame that keeps my passion burning. A massive thanks to Arbitrum for that ridiculous airdrop also.
Iâm proud to say that, thanks to this space, I will be flying out once more to the other side of the world next month for my 1 year anniversary, but this time my wife is finally coming back with me, with my surname, a secured visa and her name on a frankly beautiful and much too big property.
Thank you everyone. Itâs the next chapter for me. Now I can finally start planning for solo staking.
ENS NameWrapper that has been in works for years is going to be activated soon (within 24ish), the vote has passed and there is a 2 day time lock.
Thereâs so much untapped potential in it so Iâm very excited. And thereâs already many cool apps that are building on top or utilizing ENS, maybe Iâll write about them later, big part of them are still in beta phases or are relatively new and small.
But the one cool thing I wanted to share that might be really useful to you now is this:
so you can create a subdomain aka child, so letâs say using mine as an example, evmaverick.696.eth
but what might not be intuitive is that you can create a subdomain of that subdomain!
and thatâs how we get - 337.evmaverick.696.eth (for context, 337 is my token ID of the lion)
and so on and on - đŚ.337.evmaverick.696.eth
Now you can just pick a domain (5 char+ for $5/y) and create subdomains for your vaults, your burner, hot and all other wallets while not paying any extra additional money since subdomains can be free, you only gotta renew your parent, which is 696.eth in my example. Of course, thereâs so much more options going to be available now cause of fuses (thatâs a big topic in itself).
u/FluffayPenguin has some critical wallet security advice
Itâs good to check your revokes regularly using revoke.cash, but you shouldnât be relying on them.
The SushiSwap hack is one of those cases where a hardware wallet wouldnât have saved you, and revoking wouldâve been too late.
Using Minimum allowance is the Best Practice
The best practice is to approve ONLY the exact amount of tokens you needed to make a swap so that once your swap is complete, the allowance automatically goes back down to 0.
For example, if you approve 300 tokens and swap 250 tokens, your allowance for a particular spender goes down from 300 to 50 tokens after the swap
So if you approve of 300 tokens and swap exactly 300 tokens, the allowance goes down to 0 and that router canât spend anymore.
I know it sucks to make a new approvals on L1 Ethereum where gas fees are expensive. But on cheaper networks, you really have no excuse.
Fortunately, many newer tokens allow permits instead of revokes, which combines an approval and transfer into 1 transaction.
u/Diligent-Mouse3679 and u/SoNotYou cover the SushiSwap exploit that u/Maleficent_Plankton warned about
One of the Lido validator got a 689 ETH bribe during the Sushi exploit. Curious whats going to happen next. Are they going to return it? Should they return it? Where will you as a organisation set the line between âfair MEVâ and âMEV theftâ.
Curious to see what happens next. Expecting to see this spark a new debate about MEV and everything surrounding it.
UPD: These MEV rewards are associated with the recent Sushi exploit. Like any Lido validator, P2P did not receive or manage the rewards, as they went to the Lido rewards vault. We are talking to Lido and Sushi teams to investigate the issue and explore potential solutions.
Sad to see that the thing I warned people about 6 months ago finally happened.
After RCPSwap and SushiSwap first launched, I noticed that 99% of users were setting unlimited approvals and warned the community about it.
Back then, there were no front-end revoke tools for Arbitrum Nova like revoke.cash, and Metamaskâs approval UI was less transparent, so I wrote a guide on how revoke manually using the Moons contract.
u/LogrisTheBard talked crypto with the family at Easter
I was talking with some family friends today for Easter brunch and, being polite, they asked me about some crypto topics. I ended up explaining the basics of lending in crypto which Iâm going to paraphrase here. This is probably one of those things everyone here already knows but which might be useful if you ever need to explain this to someone outside this space.
There are three ways we facilitate lending in crypto today:
Overcollateralization. You post collateral worth more than what youâre borrowing. In Tradfi this is basically the structure of every mortgage/car loan. You use the property you are buying as collateral for the mortgage itself. This works best for assets that are unlikely to sharply depreciate in value and put lenders underwater. In Defi, that property obviously doesnât hold so we add self-liquidating mechanisms to this system. If your collateral ever falls in value relative to your loan you forfeit the collateral to repay the debt automatically. We mostly use these loans for financial speculation or retaining price exposure to an asset while effectively selling some of it.
Flash Loans. We let you borrow as much money as you want on the condition that you have to repay it instantly. I find this is the most confusing one to people at face value but it makes sense to most people when explained in terms of originating mortgages. Again, mortgages are overcollateralized loans. Without flashloans there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where without the loan you canât buy the property and without the property you canât get the loan. In Tradfi they have an intermediary facilitate this by effectively granting you a short term loan. In Defi, thatâs just involving an unnecessary middleman so we dispense with it.
Leverage. You can use 1 ETH to buy 3 ETH and exaggerated effects as the price goes up and down. This is similar to overcollateralized lending except we donât actually give you the 3 ETH. Itâs held in escrow by some contract so you canât run away with it. In the example above if your collateral falls by 1/3 in value you get margin called and liquidated. This is really no different than how it works on traditional brokerages. The main difference with Defi is while things like naked shorting are illegal in Tradfi brokerages, they are impossible in Defi.
That leads us to the last form of debt most people know: uncollateralized lending based on credit. While there are some teams experimenting with this, we just canât bootstrap these systems effectively until we solve the problem of accountability. IRL it is both difficult and illegal to set up multiple identities. On blockchains it is trivial and there is no such thing as the police. If I am willing to give an anonymous stranger $10 on credit I at least need to know that if they rug me they can only do that once. That at least means I can only get rugged 7 billion times. Identity theft and fraud are already a problem in Tradfi. In Defi, the problem is so much worse that what you take for granted with a credit card today canât even get started. We may see a Tradfi equivalent to credit systems on a blockchain once a government decides to build a system to certify an identity on chain and integrate their legal system with smart contracts for enforcement but weâd really like to see a more decentralized approach.
There are numerous advantages to eventually solving this problem on the blockchain. For people with existing access to credit, a technology called zero knowledge proofs adds privacy protection so Experion doesnât repeatedly leak your personal data to identity thieves. Next, is consumer choice: the market would be free to create a much wider array of credit score services rather than the regulatory captured monopolies we have today. Last, ironically is scalability; not in transaction throughput but in customers. Right now credit services are available to a minority of people, mostly in first world countries. If this becomes solved in Defi in a decentralized way it can be scaled to all of humanity rather than the limited countries credit services exist in today. This is where a company like Visa will actively get involved eventually because it is a Trillion dollar opportunity that will let them expand their user base.
These systems wonât take root in Defi until we have a good system for proving an address belongs to someone and that they singularly claim that address for these credit systems. Once we have that weâll see a variety of credit score DAOs appear in short order. They will essentially act like competing underwriters but unlike Tradfi the performance of each will be public and every app will be free to choose whose opinion they respect and pay for.
MacStealer arrives to target macOS systems as an unsigned disk image (.DMG) file. Users are manipulated to download and execute this file onto their systems. Once achieved, a bogus password prompts users in an attempt to steal their real password. MacStealer then saves the password in the affected systemâs temporary folder (TMP).
The malware then proceeds to collect and save the following also within the TMP folder:
- Account passwords, browser cookies, and stored credit card details in Firefox, Chrome, and Brave
u/etheraider and the EVMavs have done it again! Weâre creating another project similar to EIPandas to celebrate the Shapella hardfork! There are 3240 owls from 20 powlyments minting on Arbitrum for 0.00324 ETH, or 0.0019 ETH for the allOWList https://www.autominter.com/list/withdrowls We plan to hold a virtual mint party using oncyber so we can show off the artwork gallery style. The mint button will even be embedded into the virtual room!
Proceeds will fund the next EVMaverick public goods project. I know thereâs someone out there with an idea here that deserves funding!
We had a lot of fun using the beta of AutoMinterâs new AI Art Generator for this collection! I had so much fun making this project that Iâm raffling away 5 of my EIPandas to those who can use their referral link to get 5 friends onto the list!
And of course, thank you so much to the ethfinance community. I gravitated here when I was new to crypto because of the high level discussion. I âearnedâ my Maverick asking questions here knowing I could always get an informative response. I probably would have lost all my money to shitcoins without this subreddit, but thanks to yâall Iâm staking and having the time of my life making AI owls.
As u/LeagueGreedy mentioned we are excited to celebrate Shapellowl with you!
To commemorate weâve created âWithdrowls!â
They are intended to be fun, punny, celebratory NFTs for the community, AND as a special treat MANY members of our communities (ethfinanciers, daily dooters & EVMâs) will have their own personalized punny owl name in the metadata to be âtheir own withdrowlâ as a special little sentiment to commemorate the momentous occasion.
ALL funds (100% of mint & royalties) from the Withdrowls will go towards funding the NEXT public goods project after rocketschool anyone in our community wants to create!
We thought this would be a great way to incentivize people that have an idea to start building and to get people excited and involved in creating public goods/doing something new AND get funded for it!
Check out the Allowl list for additional details! Mint will be .0019 for allowlist and .00324 for public and will be on arbitrum for low fees!
Looking forward to all the Shapellowl celebrations! Will definitely be a hoot ;)
Just stumbled upon a comment I made a few months ago in here:
âAny day could end up being the day thereâs been the most eth in existence ever.â
Happened to be posted less than 10 days from the peak on October 8.
Etherâs supply has been going down since October 8.
Checking ultrasound.money has become part of my daily routine even though no new information is really to be expected, I just find it soothing to look at, to marvel at. The Ethereum community has really created something never seen before: a system with a security thatâs economically self sufficient.
I truly regret that the mainstream understanding of inflation is âprice of things goes upâ instead of what it truly is: âvalue of fiat goes downâ. This simple switch in mental model would be incredibly useful for the masses to realize some of the biggest and inherent problems with the current system.
And at the same time, it would be incredibly useful to understand whatâs so special with eth.
Itâs been 208 days since the merge and thereâs been a net burn of more than 82,000 eth. During a bear market (or well, an eternal crab, hail). Total supply is now 120,438,242 eth, and itâs clear weâll end up below 120,000,000 sooner or later.
Since the merge deflation has been accelerating. But what will this look like during a bull market? When usage, euphoria, and greed go parabolic? When the supply is inversely proportional to the mania?
Witnessing the supply chart take a vertical dive will be absolutely glorious for sure.
When the exploit happened a month ago, I would not have expected that weâd reach this step, all the funds I deployed there Iâve written off. The Euler saga is a unique story, full of drama and in my case a happy end.
Those who deployed via a smart contract (e.g. aztec users) need some more patience as those affected users canât claim directly.
Happy Shapella Day and stay safe out there, fellow Ethfinancers!
Woah, did someone just exploit a vulnerability in the ERC-20 standard itself???!!! I am seeing a cascade of the largest ERC-20s like USDT and LINK getting all funds sent to 0x36c9aFAkE324bâŚ. On etherscan.
Meanwhile other ERC-20s like DAI and USDC have frozen transfers in response. Iâm impressed with their reaction times to be honest.
What sort of impact could this have on other EVM based blockchains like BNB? It seems like it will be a scramble for ethical exploiters to take funds before actual hackers do.
Anyway, no doubt April is wasting no time in showing how chaotic things can get on the 1st!
^(Sorry guys, surely Iâm allowed to live up to my username just once a year!)
Italyâs main news agency ANSA launches Ethereum-based news tracking system ANSAcheck.
ETH dodges mullets from $170 to $165, at âż0.02301.
In 2019:
Nothing etheresting happens from $166 to $175, at âż0.03362.
In 2018:
Chileâs national energy regulation organization, ComisiĂłn Nacional de EnergĂa de Chile, launches an Ethereum-based pilot for recording data from the energy sector.
ETH turns greener than grass from $370 to $385, at âż0.05593.
In 2017:
Buterin asks how Ethereum Research can be more welcoming to newcomers.
I made a bot that parses DeFi news + Security updates and posts them on reddit. I donât have enough comment karma to make separate threads, so Iâll post them as comments in the daily general threads for now :)
u/0xdefiant introduces himself to the sub and shares his project idea!
gm r/ethfinance, I had the chance to talk with u/jtnichol yesterday, pretty outstanding guy. He told me to intro myself here and share an idea I have.
My name is Anthony Garrettâ Iâm a college student at Gonzaga and I started Bankless Advisor in the Bankless DAO, a platform to connect financial advisors and clients, but weâre in need of a pivotâ the idea I have is an app.My vision for a BA app is to create a web3 directory for users to send trade proposals to each other. Each account is a web3 wallet for users to trade and comment on other trades. Our market fit would start with the Bankless community and college students (SPAWN).However, my long-term vision for the BA app: We allow users to import their data from other social media networks to their web3 wallet and build smart contracts that pool users data to connect ad buyers to users.
I believe that this project has the potential to do good for the world, and the way we value our data, but I need a passionate dev team to bring this thing to life. So here I am looking for any advice, any groups that you think align with this vision, or anyone who is looking to help. (or if this idea sounds psychotic, Iâm open to anything).
Iâm just a young self taught front end dev (that getâs a lot of help from chat-gpt), but I have experience building trade proposal tech for financial advisors at Defi Steward. Also, I have written further about this decentralized data model in the BA substack (not an advertisement, but here is a link).
If you have read this far and have ANY comments or suggestions as a start this journey I am all ears.
Found this interesting development: a real estate agency sold off 20% of a house being rented in Texas, using NTFs as ownership shares.
The property was valued at $235k, NFTs represented $100 of ownership (minimum buy was 5 NFTs, would have been easier to just make $500 NFTs..). In total, $45,600 was raised by the sale to 38 investors, who will then get their fractional part of the rent.
Estimating $1500 rent per month (not in TX so I have no idea of what prices look like over there), that would mean each $100 NFT share accrues $0.65 per month, so a median of $7.8 to each of the 38 investors.
Given these small numbers, the company decided to run this experiment on Solana, citing gas fees in ETH as a deterrent, and bridging difficulties in L2s like Polygon. Letâs hope for these investors that when rent is due, the Solana network is still up :)
u/WILL_DANCE_FOR_COINS shares Bukeleâs latest pro technology move
âNext week, Iâll be sending a bill to congress to eliminate all taxes (income, property, capital gains and import tariffs) on technology innovations, such as software programming, coding, apps and AI development; as well as computing and communications hardware manufacturing.â - Nayib Bukele
People were discussing u/Set1Lessâs post from yesterday in r/CC about the Arbitrum DAO drama but we canât directly link to r/CC because the mods there ban you for it. Surprisingly nobody copied a transcript so itâs probably gone a bit under the radar in this sub. So here I am, shamelessly transcribing u/Set1Lessâs post.
So Arbitrum distributed tokens last week and as per their tokenomics, it seemed that the team and VC allocation is locked for a year.
Well, they just made a proposal to grant themselves another 750 Million ARB tokens, worth almost $1 Billion from the DAO. They claim its for an âAdministrative Budget Walletâ. In reality, it looks like a blatant cash grab. Its the first governance proposal and they arenât even trying to be subtle about siphoning funds out.
Administrative Budget Wallet proposal
Under the disguise of operational and administrative efficiency, they are seeking to transfer 750 million tokens from the DAO to their own pockets, from which they will make âspecial grantsâ and what nots.
In crypto, these things almost entirely mean cashing out for real world riches. We have seen thousands of examples of teams cashing out treasury funds. In Arbitrumâs case, since the team and VC token allocations are locked, they are creating this new channel of funding which they can splurge on while their actual allocations remain locked.
Some groups have already raised alarm against this blatant cash grab.
Blockworks Research is voting against this.
These 750M tokens were supposed to be part of the treasury but now seemingly lay under the centralized control of 3 individuals.
I hate to say it, but these kind of shady activities actually make people like Gensler right - by using shady structures from Cayman Islands, under the disguise of âDAOâ, they are staging a standard insider dumping scam where the team dumps token without any transparency while pretending their original allocations are locked.
Update: Apparently it seems that even before this vote has passed, Arbitrum team has already moved 40m ARB tokens to a new wallet, and then started distributing them to child wallets, and it appears from the transactions that millions have been already sent to Binance .
I guess a smidge late considering the threads yesterday and today, but obviously I want to post on it since Iâm an ARB delegate for a decent chunk of people here.
First, I want to speak to AIP-1 as it stands on itâs own as I think itâs important for those delegating to get a feel for what I stand for. So for a second, letâs ignore the now known issue at hand and presume the Arbitrum Foundation had not moved tokens yet / or I had voted before this was know. Maybe a pointless excercise at this point, but I find it important.
I would have still voted âagainstâ in this case, with request for the AIP to be broken into smaller pieces.
I agree strongly with the first set of a DAOâs AIPs being about setting ground rules for the DAO moving forward, especially with one as large as this. Not having a formal process in place can lead to disaster (ominous!), so this is important. However, Iâm against trying to lump in too much at once. The obvious one is the 750M ARB to the Foundation Admin Budget, however frankly things like squeezing in a very loosely defined âSpecial Grantsâ process arenât a great idea either. Those are things that need fleshed out in their own debates / AIPs. It feels like those are things the foundation would assume would be controversial, but hoped to squeeze through due to the need for the overall framework taking priority. This AIP should have been broken into about 3 or 4 separate things.
Now, with that said and as it stands now, Iâm obviously still continuing with my âAgainstâ vote. The issue I had before has only been exacerbated by moving funds before the vote. In reading comments on this daily thread and it seems that the community is largely asking for an âAgainstâ vote as well, so I have an obligation to honor that within my duties as a delegate. Although honestely it does feel moot at this point given recent events⌠Others have surely said it better, but the fundamental issue is we canât accept funds being moved without DAO approval or else what is the point of this process? It should be interesting to see what happens now that we have a scenario where funds have been moved without approval from the DAO. Something I doubt will be resolved cleanly, as even before this was found out I was seeing forum pushback on the amount. I question if it will ever pass even upon a presumed rework / revote.
A final note, those who are delegating to me I donât blame you if this has soured the process⌠this has been sort of a smack in the face to me as well.
There was a fascinating MEV âexploitâ this morning to the tune of about $20mil dollars as a result in flaw in how mev-boost relays communicate with validators. There is some discussion below in the daily, and here is a good summary: https://twitter.com/samczsun/status/1642848556590723075
The relay fix to prevent this happening again is here (https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost-relay/pull/330). This does has some significant side effects, the biggest of which is that ~10 sets of relay beacon nodes are now responsible for propagating all new blocks. Our ([u/austonst(https://reddit.com/u/austonst)) relay (https://aestus.live) was taken offline for builders as soon as we became aware of the threat and will update before we come online again. Never a dull day in ethereum.
Paul Brody has single handedly given me faith in Ethereum as a serious technology again. Iâve been out of the game for about a year but just listened to his episode on bankless and Iâm stupid bullish again. Fuck your monkey pictures and yield farming, enterprise and supply chain management will be huge. Tokenize everything
u/logic_beach shares the upcoming POAP.art Shapella livestream!
To celebrate the upgrade, EthStaker is hosting a livestream event that will bring our amazing community together. And as a special treat, weâre inviting all of you to join us in creating a massive collaborative art piece during the event on a special POAP.art canvas! đ¨
Info:
Who? You! And your whole community! (tell your friends!)
What? Shanghai/Capella âShapellaâ Upgrade livestream and POAP.art party.
When? April 12th, paint party starts at 9:30 PM UTC, Ethstaker livestream starts at 10 (30 minutes later)
How? Anyone can watch the livestream, To join the paint party: hold an eligible entry POAP (check the poap.art page to see if you hold one), or claim the event POAP. [https://checkout.poap.xyz/d39e3416-a26f-41aa-bbca-2ee87781ffea/]
Why? Great fun and exposure for your community!
Spread the word, invite your friends, and letâs make this the most memorable Ethereum upgrade celebration ever! See you at the livestream!
u/LogrisTheBard prepared an enthralling introductory paragraph for newcomers
How do you think this would resonate to someone outside of our space?
The internet and information age fundamentally changed how humans interact. Before the internet, blogs were called newspapers, politics & entertainment came through cable TV, and social media was the local bar or a town hall.
Today, there is a quieter, second revolution of the information age taking place. Once again, we are reimagining how humans interact. Just as with the rise of the computers and the internet this new frontier is ripe with opportunity.
The ideas that have captured the minds of these participants may sound as unlikely to you as the internet systems we take for granted today would have in 1990. Eventually this revolution is likely to affect everything money can touch just as the internet did for information. These tools will democratize access to opportunities previously withheld from you and control over these systems will flow to a new generation of tech enthusiasts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Billionaires are already being born of this.
Keep reading and I will introduce you to the new digital scarcity and human coordination tools powering this revolution. I will carve out a landscape of opportunity for you to explore further and help keep you safe while doing so.
Money shapes the world. We are programming our values into our money. By doing so we are reshaping the world.
u/austonst covers the post-mortem on the MEV exploit
A post-mortem has been published about the mev-boost-relay incident a few days ago. The attack has been covered here before. But the post-mortem has more details, particularly about the different forms the attack can take, and the mitigations applied.
In general relays are now addressing a whole category of attacks that had been previously overlooked, in which the proposer is able to get access to the transactions in a block to be proposed before theyâre supposed to. Generally this results in the proposer getting slashed but the MEV can more than make up for it. Attacks include:
The original form of the attack, in which the proposer signs and submits an invalid block, which the relay accepts, returning the tx contents and giving the proposer a chance to modify bundles as they see fit. Patched (but with some potential side-effects).
A follow-up to the first form. After the patch, the relay wonât return the txâs directly, but a savvy attacker could try to peer a beacon client as close as possible to the relayâs nodes, and watch for the block as it begins to propagate around the network. If they can very quickly grab it, modify bundles, create a new block, and use a fast block distribution network to propagate it faster than the original, they might be able to pull off a similar attack. Not entirely solved, still an open question about how to make sure relays will always win the race.
A form of multi-block attack; /u/t0bii just about figured this one out. If a validator has two slots in a row, then in slot 1 they deliberately call getPayload late, knowing that theyâre going to miss the slot. But the relay still reveals the txâs, and since slot 1 is going to be missed, the proposer can modify the bundles and instead include them in slot 2, stealing all the value. Patched, but itâs not a perfect fix and may have some serious side effects.
I assume that now that the post-mortem is out, the people more involved in the fixes (Flashbots, ultra sound, EF) are fairly confident that the main attack vectors are decently well patched up. So hopefully things will start to settle down a bit: itâs been a busy couple of days at Aestus.
Finally, I want to emphasize a few parts of the post-mortem:
It is critical that Ethereum has an MEV marketplace that is democratic and efficient. Vulnerabilities like those detailed in this post undermine the integrity of the MEV marketplace and the experience of its users. We call on the security, research, and open source communities to join us in hardening mev-boost and future enshrined PBS designs.
and
First, weâd like to note mev-boost and the mev-boost-relay both have bug bounty programs. A potentially expanded bug bounty program is being coordinated.
Second, we encourage searchers to think carefully about how much MEV their strategies expose, willingly or inadvertently, given the extremely adversarial nature of the MEV market and to take actions to mitigate potential attacks. In light of recent events, we ask searchers to reevaluate all risks in the marketplace: code risks, networking risks, reorg risks, smart contract risks, etc. and manage their risks appropriately.
Third, we call on the research and security community to carefully study vulnerabilities like these in the context of enshrined PBS, where variants may be applicable.
Finally, this is a call for your contributions, as a community, to ensure a healthy and robust PBS market today and into the future
u/gethwethreth has a call to arms for all staking node operators!
Please volunteer if you are a validator or a beacon node operator
There have been some legitimate stakers whose keys have been compromised. CLWP has helped verify their legitimacy and came up with a solution to set withdrawal address and front run the hackers. We need your help. Hackers might be trying to set their own withdrawal address for the stolen validators and you can help prevent theft during the upcoming Shapella launch. By volunteering with CLWP, you can help in a coordinated broadcasting of withdrawal address changes, and ensure that the impacted stakers funds are not stolen. For details on becoming a CLWP volunteer, please watch this video -
Itâs really not that complicated. It just takes a few minutes of your time and is needed right now, before the Shapella launch to help the impacted stakers! You can also get one on one assistance on their Discord if needed - https://discord.gg/pwuPA6K4zg
In âFive ducking digitsâ, Arthur Hayes gets rid of all his previous scepticism on Ethereum, and explains his believe Ether is an infinite duration bond.
The EU Parliament votes on privacy-busting crypto rules, forcing KYC regulations on all transactions and self-custodial wallets.
After high-profile hacks via Poly Network, Wormhole and Ronin bridges, pseudotheos concludes cross-chain technology is a dead-end, with the future being mostly secured on Ethereum with rollups, or multi-chain.
Yield market protocol Element Finance launches the Element DAO, with a privacy-preserving zk-proof based token distribution to Ethereum Core Devs and DeFi ecosystem projects.
In âGet Smart on Smart Contract Platformsâ, Grayscale compares Ethereum to New York City: âit is vast, expensive, and congested in certain areas, but also features the richest application ecosystem with over 500 apps that command a total value of over $100 Billionâ.
Zachary Holden explains the BoredBunnyNFT slow rug pull and breaks down where the 6339 ETH went.
Commercial MakerDAO-powered lender 6s Capital closes a $7.8M real estate financing deal for Tesla.
ETH explores the curvature between $3386 and $3282, at âż0.07207.
In 2021:
Aave starts exploring new scalability frontiers by integrating Ethereumâs sidechain Polygon.
OpenSea plans to integrate Layer 2 protocol Immutable X.
1 in 4 Ethereum miners is onboarded to MEV-reaping flashbots.
Yearn Finance presents Coordinape, a decentralized payroll management system for DAOs.
Flashbots explores MEV on Eth2: âMEV will significantly boost validator rewards but may reinforce inequalities among participantsâ.
ETH industrialises $1849 into $1918, âż0.03135 into âż0.03256.
ETH2 multi-client testnet Schlesi goes live, with Prysm and Lighthouse as first active clients.
The Ethereum Foundation kicks off the Eth2.0 Spec bug bounty.
Blockchain game MLB Champions removes Ethereum as its base layer, in favour of MongoDB.
ETHâs lenses are multi-focal at $134 and âż0.02075.
In 2019:
DaiPrice.info displays stats to find best prices for Dai.
Lane Rettig asserts that if decisions cannot be rendered on things like ProgPoW and funds recovery then there is zero chance of having nice things like Eth1x and Eth2.
ETH investigates $142 and âż0.03453.
In 2018:
r/ethtrader switches to ZWD as the official currency, ETH still counts $396, or âż0.05718.
In 2017:
OKCoin is rumoured to list ETH âat the appropriate timeâ.
Ethereum gets quantum computing support with new EVM opcode âTERMINATEâ that facilitates new compute operations not previously possible.
Hey all. Iâm giving a presentation on blockchain, Wordpress, and community tomorrow at WordCamp Phoenix. Live stream link on the homepage: https://phoenix.wordcamp.org/2023/
EVMs, r/ethfinance, hodlercon, caches.xyz will all be talked about! Wish me luck!
I imagine a lot of people here are interested in keeping up with staking on Ethereum but donât have a ton of time to invest.. I think we have a good system that will help you stay informed about staking in about one minute a day: Weâre creating one minute clips from our content and posting them as YouTube shorts and on our Twitter. Iâd suggest turning on notifications for the EthStaker Twitter and checking them out when itâs convenient for you to click.
Right now the clips are covering the goerli Shapella fork, tomorrow theyâll include the Lodestar call thatâs happening today, and around April 1 theyâll begin preparing everyone for the mainnet Shapella upgrade maybe with a highlight of previous major upgrade calls.
I sincerely believe these short-form clips will take EthStakerâs education reach to the next level and I hope you find value in them.
u/Syentist shares an article on the dangerous precedent by the Signature bank fiasco
Free-market capitalism canât work if you are afraid of the government seizing your business in the middle of the night because a secret cabal of politicians didnât like your law abiding business. And it looks like Wall Street is slowly waking up to this unprecedented authoritarian shift by the Biden administration.
Today it was a bank serving crypto. Tomorrow it is a bank which has labour unions as itâs customer base, or a bank which provides services to medical companies that include abortion services, or a company which was not ESG friendly enough, or a company which spoke too loudly and too brashly about the President. Seize em in the middle of the night and fire the leadership board and auction off the assets. Hopefully civic society makes enough noise about this and itâs not too late to close the Pandoraâs box that Bidenâs staff opened.
u/RooftopPortaPotty is back to educate us more on AI
Ive posted a bit about exploiting Large Language Models (such as GPT) before, but Im back with more. Even if you have no interest in this, I believe its important to have an understanding of how the data you input in these kinds of systems can later be used against you.
EDIT: Just noticed that doublespeak.chat limits the # of queries you can make before having to purchase more. If anyone defeats the Count of Monte Cristo, Id love a second hint haha
u/tutamtumikia looks back at all the projects they have invested in over the past few years
Well, I took a good hard look at everything I had put money into in this space over the past 3 years. When I boiled it all down almost all of it seems to fall into the category of a project run by naive people, run by scammers, or artsy crap that I enjoy but should never have spent so much money on.
Some of defi protocols I tinkered with make me feel so stupid now.
Hereâs one. Tokemak. To this day I still donât quite understand it all. I popped into their Discord and the team is spending over a half million dollars a month on basically nothing. $35k+ in one month on âMarketing and Communityâ. At what point do you just outright call projects like this total grifts?
Itâs not that itâs the only one either. Itâs a landscape of just gross misbehaviour, scams, and projects run by people who have NO IDEA what they are doing.
I am SO glad that I only played around in the Defi and NFT ecosystem with total fun money, and left my real stack staked away. I clearly had no business sticking my nose in any of that stuff.
There are a couple decent projects out there, but I feel pretty discouraged about the entire space today. Maybe having my eth unlocked soon is a good thing :(
u/juxtanotherposition has some under the radar mainstream adoption
If unfamiliar, WordCamps are WordPressâ event series that any group of volunteers can create anywhere in the world and get support from the non-profit WordPress Foundation. WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet. đ
I was the only blockchain-focused speaker (talk description) and it was very well received, including by individuals higher up the food-chain and from Wordpress.com itself. The experience has helped clarify for me what lacks and can be done in this particular space, and how I can help. Much more to come from me on this soon.
P.S. the POAP wasnât finalized until the day after my talk, so donât be misled by my finalizing comments about it.
u/Tricky_Troll spotted an EthFinancier in the wild spreading the good word
Wow. An r/Technology post where someone not jumping on the crypto hate bandwagon got upvoted into the thousands of upvotes! The post was about Nvidia claiming crypto has no use case. They of course say this now that Ethereum has moved to proof of stake and thatâs exactly what the user said. Naturally, beneath this someone questioned what that meant. Then the top response there was a spot on comment. As soon as I read it I thought to myself âthatâs gotta be an ethfinancier.â And what do you know, I look up to see u/Atyzze a name I recognised.
Every last one of you who are still spreading the good word in other subs get every last drop of my appreciation. Itâs tough work out thereâŚ
u/pr0nh0li0 shares CoinCenterâs coverage of the very alarming RESTRICT act
we are very concerned that an overbroad interpretation of those powers could be exploited in order to ban Americans from using entire classes of technologies, even when no foreign adversary has an actual proprietary interest in the technology as a whole
A big problem they highlight is that while thereâs already similar legislation that allows the government to block foreign transactions that are against the national interest (RESTRICT grants the powers to the Secretary of Commerce much like the IEEPA grants powers to OFAC), this law as far fewer oversite and review protections, which is particularly problematic for legislation that provides such broad authority:
A broad and discretionary power to ban and disrupt all manner of information technologies should not be wielded without appropriate oversight and opportunity for review. The RESTRICT Act not only fails to ensure these rule of law protections, in many cases it attempts to subvert them.
This problem perhaps clearest when one observes that the IEEPA had amendments (the Berman Amendments) added that act as statutory protections for free speech, but RESTRICT has no such protections/limitations:
Courts have found that the Berman Amendments, in effect, save the statute from potential unconstitutional applications. When plaintiffs challenge a sanctions designation that impacts speech, they can argue that OFAC exceeded its statutory power by contravening the Berman Amendments, rather than making the somewhat more difficult but also more consequential argument that IEEPA, the statute itself, contravenes the Constitution.
In contrast, the RESTRICT Act has no such statutory limitation. Indeed it is deliberately targeted at restraining transactions related to information and information technologies.
A lot of other good stuff in there about how it could impact Crypto directly as well (e.g. that the Secretary could âargue that the entire class of all Bitcoin transactions, for example, is a class of transactions in which U.S. foreign adversaries have an interestâ and should be banned), but all that is to say: call your representatives and tell them they should not support this bill.
u/austonst has the latest development in the MEV relay ecosystem
The Blockswap folks have released their Proof of Neutrality relay on Goerli and provided some documentation. Iâve been following their project for a while, the ideas are interesting. If it works, itâs actually quite a large step forward in terms of PBS design. They claim relays cannot see the contents of blocks, thereâs a MEV smoothing pool built in, and (like the optimistic submissions being deployed by the ultra sound relay and elsewhere) relays donât have to perform validation before sending a block on. Builders instead post collateral to be used in case they try anything funny.
But while the ultra sound relayâs system has the relay operator holding the collateral themselves, the PoN system is integrated into smart contracts with third party reporters acting as oracles to detect violations and penalize offending actors accordingly. All in all itâs potentially (remains to be seen) an improvement over the current system
I donât find their documentation to be very complete (or even accurate?), and their recently-published GitHub repos contains a fork of mev-boost-relay without attribution to Flashbots or a proper commit history. And the actual meat of the system, centered around Restrictive Partially Blind Signatures, is closed source and undocumented so far. Itâs also concerning that their proposer guide has you input your keystore.json and enter your password (?!). Theyâve confirmed to me that itâs only used locally (not uploaded) to prove that you control the validators youâre registering, but this is not the way to do it.
Itâs something to keep an eye on if youâre following the cutting edge of MEV and block production stuff, or if you have goerli validators and want something to test. Otherwise maybe hold out for more info.
Side note: MEV-Boost Community Call 2 tomorrow at 16:00 UTC. Going to be plenty of boring technical stuff about shapella readiness and optimistic relay rollouts.
Guest appearance by Anthony Bertolino, Head of Growth at POAP, to discuss the release of POAP Drops! https://drops.poap.xyz/
Announcements
POAP has released POAP Drops, a brand new interface for easily creating and distributing your POAPs where you can also browse past POAP drops, manage existing drops, and much more!
Shapella upgrade POAP.art party on April 12 9:30 UTC+0 (5:30am EST), more details to come
Thereâs a new Delegates section where you can find members of the EthFinance community to delegate votes to
Upcoming guests:
March 31 (cancelled): Gloria Kimbwala from SuperModular.xyz
I urge anyone who hasnât done so to read through the chapter on digital assets in the Economic Report of the President. Itâs gives a full picture of the deviousness and flippancy of the Biden administration towards crypto. Take this gem on pg 238 for example
crypto assets to date do not appear to offer any investments with any fundamental value, nor do they act as an effective alternative to fiat money, improve financial inclusion or make payments more efficient; instead their innovation has been mostly about creating artificial scarcity in order to support crypto assetsâ prices - and many of them have no fundamental value
Complete horseshit. They do act as a non-inflationary alternative to debasement of fiat money, today. They do act as a self-custodial alternative to money which relies on trusting banks which are literally teetering, today.
They do improve financial inclusion. A kid in rural India or Mexico or Romania can take part in the Ethereum defi ecosystem with just an internet connection, today. Trading securities and treasuries and holding American dollars is a privilege to a tiny fraction of the world, and itâs sad to see the Biden ainistration not see this.
They do make payments more efficient. This is increasingly clear for internet native payments. Buying and selling digital native art and culture, paying members of a DAO, transferring funds to colleagues in the same team but all over the world, making small payments in countries like Nigeria and Lebanon with collapsing local currencies - various crypto solutions do make payments efficient in these instances, today.
And last and most importantly of all, is that even if crypto had no usecase (which isnât true as I pointed out above), even if, that value judgement is still not the business of the federal government. Hereâs a great take by Chervinsky
If youâre tired of this government lying, gaslighting and overreach, a good place to start is to sign up for the crypto advocacy program by Coinbase: https://actnow.io/z31xN5P
GameStop launches its NFT Marketplace in beta, in partnership with zk-Rollup based Ethereum Layer 2 Loopring.
ETH injects zeroes in numbers like $3030, or âż0.0707.
In 2021:
Uniswap presents v3, up to 4000x more capital efficient and featuring Concentrated Liquidity positions, allowing liquidity providers to set price ranges.
Ethworks introduces framework for rapid DApp development useDApp.
Coinbase Pro announces support for ANKR, CRV and STORJ.
ETH counts the beans at $1679, or âż0.03067.
In 2020:
Uniswap v2 is launched on all testnets, with pure ERC20 pairs, price oracles and flash swaps.
ZenGo sounds the alarm on âbaDAPProveâ, or how attackers can abuse approved, but highly excessive privileges to steal users tokens.
ETH rediscovers its wings from $124 to $135, at âż0.021.
In 2019:
As if ETH needs stablecoins at $138, or âż0.03429.
In 2018:
Basic Attention Token is the first ERC-20 token to become an Apple verified virtual currency.
Ethereum Improvement Proposal site eips.ethereum.org goes live; automatically generated from all merged EIPs.
ETH flails at $538, or âż0.06156.
In 2017:
Storj plans to migrate its decentralized storage from Bitcoin-based Counterparty to Ethereum.
Brave announces it will launch an ICO for Ethereum-based ad token BAT.
Coinbase receives the approval to trade Ether and Litecoin in New York.
ETH cajoles traders for $42.7 to $43.8, or âż0.04066 to âż0.04221.
In 2016:
Engineers at BitGo create Ethereum multis-sig wallet Ether.li.
Japanese Bitcoin exchange Coincheck starts trading Ether.
No malice found in ETH going from $11.3 to $12.4, or âż0.02709 to âż0.02964.
EIP-4804 is now an ERC! So like under ERC-4804, internet users have the option to type âweb3://â vs âhttp://â in their browsers to bring up DApps such as Uniswap or onchain NFTs directly! OMMFG Bros! We can now directly run a query to the EVM!
dang. First time Iâve ever fallen for something stupid. I went to check out Arbitrum eligibility and clicked the first link under the announcement. The link did look like a scam to me but I had just read a friend comment that the legit airdrop announcement / video âlooks like a scamâ, so my brain had its defenses down. Only connected and I think it just took whatever already had approvals? Which was all my DAI. feelsbadman.jpg - 5400 DAI is no small sum. It unfortunately looks like they got a few people before the tweet was hidden.
My brain finally went ânopeâ when it asked to approve RPL, but everything before that was just a signature to connect (I think?), not a transaction or approval.
Things I could have done better (that I usually would do!):
Matched the twitter handle from the tweet to the actual account
Found the link elsewhere (verified it) before connecting my wallet, especially in their discord
Generally slow down and read when signing things from my wallet.
Expensive lesson learned! Iâm going to lay down and watch a movie or something, Iâm super bummed that Iâm a dummy.
Another thing learned in this (thanks to /u/Ribilla_ ) - DAI is a special kind of ERC20 that allows transfers that require only a signature (permit, which is a signature-based approval function) - it doesnât look like your typical approval or transaction. So even signatures when connecting to sites should be treated as potentially dangerous and giving away your assets.
I can give a short update regarding the Euler exploiter situation. Itâs still a developing story ⌠if you missed episode 1 and 2, you find them here: link / link
S02E03 - The merciful hacker (cont.)
After the exploiter sent 100 ETH to one affected user, DLNews identified this lucky person. DLnews is actually quite good - I didnât know Defillama has itâs own newspaper! After Swap.defillama.com/ itâs another killer product of the Llama universe âŚ
The interesting part of this episode is: The 100 ETH are actually worth more than what the user lost 78 wstETH (or 86 ETH). Essentially, the user would have profited from the âdealâ. Being now officially doxxed he sent back 12 ETH to the official Euler depositor address. Is this correct? Who knows, weâll see if Euler will push for the full amount to be returned. Itâs a subplot which runs through the entire season. âŚ
For more information on this incident, I refer directly to DLnews:
Is he trying to fool us? Some kind of weird joke of 21 year old hacker? Or is it some kind of attribution to them? What will come next? Sending some to SBF or Alamada?
Or is he just bored and want his warrant level raised like in GTA?
Before he sent the 100 ETH to KimJongUn, he moved 1k ETH between his wallets but itâs sitting there idle. At the moment, in total only 1.5k ETH has been sent to Tornando, the rest still in ETH (85k) or DAI (35 M).
S02E03 - Tornado Cash Activity
I did some tracking of the wallets which have used Tornado Cash recently. The activity has fallen quite a bit after it was hit with OFAC sanction rule. So itâs kind of easy to track the activity even visually and manually. Here is the result:
Iâm a bit surprised that 125ETH (and a batch of 100 ETH) went pretty straight from Tornado into Binance. The other larger chunks were moved into railgun and multiBTC, only some smaller amounts ran over âprivacy orientedâ exchanges.
It seems that the merciful-maniac hacker has not cashed their ETH out yet.
I reposted an earlier draft of it yesterday but I think the conversation here should really be around how safe people felt Euler was.
It was generally considered âas safeâ as Compound, Aave, Maker, etc., and having a loss of ~$200m kind of breaks many previous assumptions about safetyâŚ
So my only conclusion is that we need to move towards more resilient mechanisms, mechanisms that cost significantly more to execute but are necessary to move forward effectively.
Rate limiting
Explicit / Limited Upgradability
Built in diversification
Circuitbreakers
Isolated custodial modules
It really goes on, but these can only be effectively done if we all move towards L2âs.
With the arb airdrop, now is the time to push for L2 adoption and the security that we really need to move DeFi forward.
u/Kukai_walker drafted a letter to their representative and shared the template for you. YES YOU
At the encouragement of u/TheCryptosAndBloods yesterday, I drafted a letter to my US representative, who happens to be among the 100+ member Congressional Progressive Caucus. I took the perspective that crypto is well aligned with progressive principles so they should engage. Including here for crowdsourcing feedback to improve it and/or for others to cut and paste from it especially if you too have a CPC representative:
=======================
Dear Representative xxx:
[removed doxxable intro]
I am writing to you today to encourage you and CPC to engage actively in policymaking around digital assets (aka, crypto).
As one of the 20% of Americans who own digital assets, I have used much of my recent time to teach myself about digital assets and the broader domain of blockchain technology. This is a highly technical field, requiring me to learn about such areas as cryptography, finance, decentralized networks, computing, and others. This knowledge has yielded practical benefits in that I have learned how to join thousands of others to stake ether on the Ethereum blockchain which now provides me with a steady income.
This knowledge has also allowed me to cut through the hype, misinformation, and disinformation surrounding cryptocurrency in the popular discourse to conclude that in fact, the crypto ecosystem of digital assets, smart contracts, and public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has value and will disrupt economic and business systems around the world. For instance:
⢠Decentralized financial protocols allow everyday people to instantly make payments around the world and make loans and other financial transactions without commercial middlemen
⢠Immutable and transparent records on the public blockchain can protect intellectual property and assure fair and transparent management of royalties
⢠Public blockchains can serve as a permanent store of critical personal events including birth, death, graduation, etc.
⢠Assignment of unique non-fungible tokens can help manage ownership and transfer of collectibles, valuables, artwork, etc.
⢠Blockchain has potential business uses such as on-line gaming, supply chain management or carbon credit system.
⢠The crypto ecosystem can transform the internet business model from allowing dominant internet platforms (eg, Facebook, Google, Apple) to own and profit from personal information to a âweb3â model where the user controls their own data on the blockchain.
I have also been struck by the fact that there is significant alignment between the principles underlying cryptocurrency and the progressive agenda. The essence of the crypto ecosystem is that data and open-source computer code distributed and synchronized around the world can replace reliance on institutional middlemen (eg, banks, internet platforms) with a decentralized transparent system available to all whose trust comes from the decentralized crypto ecosystem in which users can directly take custody of their own assets and personal data. These features can directly support the progressive agenda and its commitment to sweeping, transformative change:
⢠Income inequality can be reduced by helping underserved populationsâwho under legacy systems often cannot get a loan, buy a house, or start a businessâto build wealth and carry out financial transactions without needed to rely on gatekeeping banks that may have institutional biases that disadvantage them.
⢠Facilitating crypto use can help advance racial justice and equity. A 2019 FDIC survey found that 14% of African American households and 12% of Hispanic American households were unbanked compared to only 2.5% of white households. A recent Harris Poll found that 30% of Black Americans and 27% of Hispanic Americans owned crypto compared to 17% of white Americans.
⢠Replacing banks with self-custody and a fully transparent accounting on a public blockchain will reimagine the role of institutions that exacerbate injustice and inequality.
Congress must and will create a policy framework for digital assets in the US; it will be important to help shape this policy to promote progressive principles. Now is the time to act. Congress will likely see a number of bills introduced this session on such issues as rights to self-custody, defining digital asset taxonomy, and clarifying regulatory oversight. Discussion on such legislation has already begun in the new Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee which has recently expanded its scope to include cryptocurrency. This Subcommittee includes two CPC membersârepresentatives Torres of NY and Sherman of CA. The CPC can utilize its subcommittee membership and other opportunities to actively engage in shaping this legislation to reflect progressive priorities.
Moreover, engaging on this issue provides a great opportunity for bipartisanship. The need for regulation has bipartisan agreement. A number of Republican members have been actively supportive of addressing policy in this area (eg, representative Emmer of MN, Davidson of OH, and others). It would be remarkable, yet natural, to join forces with the other party on this issue to demonstrate its importance to the American people.
In addition to legislation, progressive congressional oversight is needed. I have been dismayed at the administrationâs actions that, in the context of overall banking system failures and under the guise of consumer protection, are inhibiting the development of a regulatory environment that would allow the digital asset sector to prosper. There are those who believe that the administration is responding to entrenched interests that are threatened by the transformative change that crypto may catalyze, taking advantage of the current banking crises to squash crypto, such as by discouraging banks from holding crypto or servicing crypto clients.
I hope you and the CPC will take on this important issue to both support the progressive agenda as well as keep Americaâs leadership in this new sector. Blockchain and crypto are borderless by nature. If the US cannot provide a fertile environment for innovation, the developers will go elsewhere and will not be serving the country or its people.
Thank you very much.
================
u/LogrisTheBard finishes his post on decentralised identity
DID (Decentralized ID) systems are a hot topic right now. They are needed for everything from free to play games, social media networks, and airdrops to governance systems like OPs Citizens House. There is (rightly so) a lot of buzz and various takes on how to approach this topic. I think this is one of the existential risks of Defi and Iâve written about that before (that sure aged well). Iâm personally in favor of the Gitcoin Passport framework that enables each user to define their own calculation for Sybil Resistance by identifying their stamps and then having an attestation system like I proposed awhile ago compress long form off-chain calculations into simple on-chain maps. The focus of these systems ends at being a proof of humanity per address. They are specifically attempting to solve Sybil-resistance.
However, I think there is the potential to layer reputation systems like credit scores on top of Sybil-resistance and I think the potential of this is largely unexplored. For the sake of this discussion Iâll limit reputation to being a purely quantitative, monetary history of honesty rather than history of competence, impact, or ideology. In that context reputation is synonymous with trust. If we want to keep this purely quantitative, what can we objectively measure about something (e.g. code, people, institutions, etc) that makes people trust it? Here are what I think are the three primary pillars of trust:
Social Attestation. When someone signs off on a code review, they are making an attestation. Systems like BrightId and Proof of Humanity are entirely social attestations. These systems are inherently subjective and usually gameable so are unreliable on their own but much of the world is entirely built upon attestation layers (your government ID for example).
Time. The longer something has been there the more time attackers have had to inspect it, identify a vulnerability, and attack it. The longer a person has been around the more opportunities have arisen that might lure them to dishonesty. In a permissionless system, time proves doubts to be illusory in the same way that a $20 bill on a busy street is probably fake or glued to the floor the longer it sits there.
Opportunity Cost of Honesty. Watch carefully how trust is used once granted. Any position of trust is exploitable to some degree. Otherwise what are you trusting? Honesty is the degree to which an actor is suboptimal at exploiting that trust. Yes, Iâm aware how unintuitive that definition of honesty sounds but thatâs as close as Iâve come to a formal definition. Your unexploited trust value (UTV) is your maximum exploitable trust - exploited trust.
These pillars stand together to form the base on which a credit system could be built. They are a subset of what Vitalik identified in his post on legitimacy.
The first two are straightforward to measure. The latter is a bit more like measuring carbon deltas for Carbon Credits, Sybil values, or MEV because the maximum exploitable trust term is so subjective. With PoS Sybil-resistance is derived from the money you have. Conversely, your UTV is derived from the money you donât (in a sense). Itâs the money you donât have because you chose to be honest. This is akin to the forgery-resistance score from Gitcoin passport being floored at the amount you have spent/lost.
The fact that this is subjective (and potentially monetizable) will probably lead to competing standards for how to calculate it much like credit agencies today. Your address will have the equivalent of an Experian score from multiple aggregators which combines the three pillars above into a single number that anyone can query. Each Defi protocol could choose to use a different score, a combination of scores, or create their own score. Could this lead to abuse by an agency? Yes, but less than the current system which isnât permissionless.
But how do you bootstrap trust if no one will give you a position of trust you can honor/exploit? You canât bootstrap a system like this based on unsecured loans without first getting robbed by a few ten-thousand Sybilooors. The capital efficient answer today is to get involved in communities until someone is willing to grant you trust based on social attestation and time alone. That lacks a certain scalability element though. I think we can do better, even while remaining permissionless. You have to rely on some form of suboptimality otherwise the system will be gamed for profit. So what forms of permissionless economic suboptimality are already on-chain? The few that come to mind for me are donations to public goods, unrealized losses on airdrops, suboptimal votes in the face of bribes, and delegated credit.
None of these are perfect. The first criteria requires money to bootstrap. The second and third may have ulterior selfish motives the system canât see. The fourth is basically an extension of social attestation and just begs the question. So how do you bootstrap trust on someone with nothing to give and nothing to lose? I have no good answer but the above is the beginning of a formulation.
Why does it matter? Because this value can be integrated into tokenomic systems. I mentioned unsecured lending above, which is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you hear credit system, but I think thatâs actually one of the worst use cases for this. To explain why, we first have to break Defi collateral into two categories. The first category is money used as collateral for good behavior but which doesnât have a credibly neutral recipient. ETH staking is the largest example of this category but there are many others. The only criteria here is that the system has an objective, enforceable slashing condition. In this category the money just needs to be forfeit by the staker but it doesnât need to go anywhere. The second category is money used to reimburse someone. This includes all your money markets, collateralized stablecoins, insurance protocols, etc. It is more viable to use UTV as collateral for the former category. I wouldnât recommend this for the Ethereum base chain because the data to calculate this is on the base chain and this is a subjective score, not credibly neutral.
So where does this get us? Take a PoS system (not DPoS, thatâs dumb). The purpose of this system is to reach consensus on something. There are two necessary economic components to a PoS system. First, you have to be able to reward honest actors to incentivize participation. Second, each actor needs something at stake they can lose by being dishonest so you have entropy of bad actors over time. Iâve never seen a system designed so the failure of the dishonest actors is the main reward driver of the honest ones so I assume any such system has a revenue stream attached to it. Now, could we use reputation credit/UTV for such a system in lieu of capital? It certainly satisfies the something at stake requirement. You just have to be able to prevent collusion in the system and prevent bad actors from joining at a faster rate than the dishonesty entropy.
To prevent collusion Iâll rely what I call Bitcoinâs/Satoshiâs great insight. The failure rate of attacking a network scales super-linearly with the number of anonymous actors in that network. This is because the chance of leaking a secret scales exponentially with the network and there is a common Schelling point to unify against dishonest actors once a secret is exposed. This is the primary value of decentralization. Past a certain threshold it is safe and profitable to be honest and risky and expensive to be dishonest. So the key to preventing collusion is to increase decentralization and protect anonymity of actors. Defi satisfies this.
To solve dishonesty entropy weâre just using a different collateral (which is still a scarce resource). Today we use capital for Sybil-resistance. This does not provably satisfy the entropy condition and so plutocratic attacks on PoS systems today are possible. Given the source of this alternative collateral (historical honesty) UTV may prove out to be a superior selection criteria for identifying honest consensus participants.
This actually creates a beautiful sort of flywheel. By acting honestly you build a reputation score. You can stake your reputation in order to promise certain services. By fulfilling your promise you generate both an income stream and further reputation. This creates a compounding benefit to continue acting honestly. A world in which honest actors can build an income stream predicated on their reputation and potentially bootstrapped through community service is also a basis for UBI. Itâs a step closer to the type of world in which Iâd like to live. A few disclaimers though. First, nothing is ever fully proven to be trustworthy. Second, trust is not monotonically increasing. As systems or the world with which they integrate change trust in them fluctuates.
P.S. Iâve been asked to plug an on-topic game from the EVMaverickâs called Layer Zero. The basic premise of the game is to willingly enter into a contract with a group of people who can all openly rug the contract. Everyone has to put a share of collateral into the pot to join. Anyone in the game can take the pot. If no one takes the pot then everyone is generating UTV at the pot size * participants. Conceptually, a set of non-conspiring participants in a game like this can generate more in UTV than the money at stake. While UTV as defined above is scarce if it can be generated faster than capital it could out-compete capital for shares of revenue streams because of this.
According to Oxngmi: âThe person who controls both defillamaâs twitter and domain has decided to launch a token despite everybody in the team not wanting it. That is why we (the DefiLlama team who have built the site you all know and love for the past three years) have decided to fork Defillama and start fresh on llama.fi and @llamadotfiâ
DO NOT TRUST ANY COMMUNICATION OR TOKEN FROM @Defillama or Defillama .com"
I have no idea if this is true, but the accounts seem to be the ones that control the extension. Personally I have not uninstalled it, but be careful until we find out what is actually happening..
u/0xBOBA hasnât been checking price for the last 3 months and checks in with us
I tried to not check prices. I lasted 3 months. I ended up checking because of the SVB news. Good to see ETH up 50% since I left. Makes me a little less worried about my CDP. The $ARB airdrop was a nice surprise too. Glad I didnât miss it while I was gone. The only other thing I was really worried about while I was gone were my non-ETH holdings.
With withdrawals coming I finally gave up on my LINK and swapped them for RPL. More confidence in RPL than LINK. Should have done it long ago. I got too attached to my LINK and waited too long for the ratio to recover. (Iâm a horrible trader). Lesson learned there. But I need an exit plan for RPL. Itâs only 2% of my portfolio though.
Iâve used this drop in the ratio to unload most of my BTC. Now only 3% of my portfolio. 0% at 0.055 if my limit orders go through. A part of me wants to keep a little bit of BTC just for nostalgic reasons but I really donât see the point of BTC. I skimmed some of the recent dailies and see others offloading their BTC. This probably means the ratio will continue to drop âšď¸
So now I am 95% ETH and too heavy in ETHE in my retirement funds. Feels nice (other than the horrible ETHE price: whatâs going on there?). It was kind of nice not checking the price for a few months, but I also missed reading the daily.
Iâll probably stick around to claim my $ARB and maybe until withdrawals are enabled. Anything fun to do on Arbitrum these days? Something that wonât make taxes a mess next year.
I recently joked with some friends at work about how the ARB airdrop would be my only work bonus this year and, of course, they got super interested. Last Xmas I gave them all RPL and it has tripled in value, but since then they havenât really done anything with defi or crypto. However, I think airdrop farming might just be the push that gets them swimming!
So, Iâm compiling a list of some of my airdrop farming tasks that I plan on doing every week. For the uninitiated, Iâll provide step-by-step guides on some of the tasks every week if I can. Iâll post all that here in the caches.xyz forum: https://caches.xyz/forums/discussion/airdrop-hunts-checklist/
(Must sign in to see todayâs update)
Here is the shortened version of it. Please let me know if you have any ideas I can add!
*Bonus and super useful if you can add whether or not it is likely to happen, costs involved, or potential gains
[ ] ⢠Attend Swell Discord meeting today on 3/17.
[ ] ⢠Prepare art for Swell memes and articles and post a tweet about it on their Discord Week of 3/19 (deadline Fri?)
If you donât mind, please engage on the caches.xyz forum if you need assistance as Iâm certain that others will have the same or similar questions as you there.
535 DeGods NFTs that had been previously burned in Ethereum, were âressurrectedâ as ordinals in BTC, at 0.333 BTC per mint this past weekend.
They all sold out in a single block.
The project dominated ordinals secondary markets, with over $1M in volume, ahead of YugaLabâs twelvefold ordinals by >7x. It seems ordinals are here to stay, and more so if they are backed by already established brands such as DeGods.
Yesterday some twitter user found out ~2400 compromised accounts all approving ARB. Someone analysed these (actually 2225) wallets and 1791 wallets are elligble for around 3 million ARB total.
Many users became victim by following links under the announcement tweet. Suprised Arbitrum didnât provide the link to their website with the annoucement or turn off replies. They are not new to how crypto scams and hacks work.
Frustrating to see that so much damage is done. Users have personal responsibility sure. But I think the damage wouldnât be this big if Arbitrum guided users to the right place. Maybe I am a bit unreasonable hereâŚ
Stuff like this canât be happening if crypto ever wants to become âmainstreamâ.
I have not been hacked personally and this just an observation.
I will take Balaji seriously when he goes to explain his theory to people who have the intellectual background to ask him the hard questions.
His appearance on Bankless and the Pomp show yesterday were appalling. Those werenât interviews, they were oral presentations. He could have said that Satoshi was going to come down from heaven to wash away our sins and give us eternal life, and the hosts would have nodded their heads and said âwoah.â
Balaji is not the intellectual he claims to be. An intellectual does not choose hosts sold out to his cause to make his point - instead, he will go directly to confront those who disagree. This is the very basis of the scientific method. I also find his tone to be alarmist, dramatic, filled with hyperbole created to capture attention.
Who is he, anyway? He is an engineer who became a multi-millionaire in the early 2010s - he has no expertise in finance, history or politics, beyond what he has read elsewhere. Ironically, he made his fortune from the system he says he wants to escape today. His claim to fame is that he âpredictedâ the pandemic on January 30, 2020. Except that on January 30th, the WHO declared a âglobal health emergencyâ, Wuhan had already been cut off from the rest of the world, there were confirmed cases in dozens of countries⌠He was a bit early, sure, but it is not the feat he claims.
Finally, about his $1M prediction, he has already prepared his exit. In three months he will say, âOh, the bet was just a wake-up call, you shouldnât have taken it at face value, Iâm not sure about the timeline, but hyperinflation will happen soon.â It wonât happen, and heâll push the deadline again and again, until he disappear into irrelevance.
u/nixorokish has the deets on Coinbaseâs Wells notice from the SEC
Brian Armstrong: > 1/ Today Coinbase received a Wells notice from the SEC focused on staking and asset listings. A Wells notice typically precedes an enforcement action.
> [âŚ]
> 4/ We are proud to stand up for our customers and the industry in these moments.
Honestly⌠best that Coinbase, whoâs well-capitalized and equipped to handle this, to be the one to go to court with the SEC and set a precedent. A win for crypto against the SEC in court would be a big deal and thereâs no one better poised to do that than CB.
All Bored Ape NFTs from NFT fractionalizing service NFTX are temporarily borrowed via a flash loan to claim 60000 APE worth over $1 Million.
Valued at $1.65 Billion, Optimism completes a Series B fundraise of $150 Million, led by A16z and Paradigm.
Polygon integrates the Simba Chain to scale and build new infrastructure for Web3, starting with the launch of a white-label NFT marketplace.
Tokenized Vault Standard ERC-4626 becomes final, allowing for uniformity between yield-bearing tokens, to be used by many DeFi projects.
ETH exists in the reality of $2815 and âż0.06874.
In 2021:
Meitu buys another $28 Million in ETH and $22 Million in BTC.
Terraform Labs launches the decentralized UST stablecoin, undermining DDoS attackers in the process.
Bitfly launches a MEV beta program to increase mining rewards via transaction sequencing/frontrunning, compensating for EIP-1559.
Vlad Zamfir sues Casper Labs Inc. over improper use of the Casper name.
AMD refuses to limit Ethereum mining: âwe will not be blocking any workloadâ.
Jonty Wareing finds that most NFTs reference URLs or IPFS hashes which are bound to break in the future.
The Harris Poll claims ~7% of Americans used funds from Stimulus Checks to buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether.
ETH returns a lost wallet containing $1823 and âż0.03097.
In 2020:
Prysmatic Labâs Ivan Martinez explains what Eth2 improves on Eth1, apart from staking and sharding: minimum viable issuance, statelessness, account abstraction and execution environments.
MKR holders accept USDC as a third collateral asset in the Maker Protocol, after ETH and BAT.
Opera allows U.S. users to buy BTC and ETH directly from its in-built crypto wallet, via Apple Pay and debit cards.
ETH eats the crypto crumbles between $111 and $114, at âż0.02178.
Under proof-of-work, computers on the Ethereum network competed to answer amathematical puzzle in order to verify transactions on the blockchain and receive in-kind digital asset rewards. Under proof-of-stake, however, validators, pledge or âstakeâ their holdings in ETH and are randomly chosen to verify transactions on the blockchain and receive an in-kind digital asset reward. By shifting to proof-of-stake, ETH no longer relies upon competition between computers, but instead now relies on a pooling method that incentivizes users to own and stake ETH. The shift to proof-of-stake significantly impacted the core functionality and incentives for owning ETH, because ETH holders now can profit merely by participating in staking.
Lol, âmerely by participating in stakingâ holy christ project much? Is this a highschoolers essay?
And why is it a security Ms AG?
the Ethereum Foundation claims on its website that users of Ethereum âsee it as a digital store of value because the creation of new ETH slows down over time.â
Lol just like bitcoin, which even Gensler has clearly stated is the only crypto he views as definitely NOT security? Canât even line up your arguments between agenciesâŚ
But wait thereâs more?
Since transitioning to the proof-of-stake consensus, the value proposition has altered significantly because possession of ETH translates directly to profit potential by earning staking rewards
Hey everyone, did you realize that youâre earning staking rewards just by holding Eth in your hardware wallet!!!!!
I have no idea how any of this will play out, but I can definitely say that NYAG is a fucking clown show compared the SEC when it comes to this stuff.
u/MrVodnik and u/KotMyNetchup on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and USDC backing shortfall
97.3% of SVB deposits are not FDIC insured. This means, most of ~$200 bln, that used to belong to many, many tech companies and start-ups, just disappeared. Probably many jobs will fallow.
According to their latest tweet, Circle stands to lose 8% of the USDC backing at most. It sounds like the most reasonable expectation is that FDIC will be able to recover a decent amount of funds from SVB. Iâm expecting >50% to be returned. But looking at the pessimistic side, we have a 4-8% haircut on USDC. $0.92-$0.96. Weâre seeing that price range now.
The next question is if prices close enough to that range can be sustained long enough for Circle to be able to inject liquidity into the market as needed. I donât know what mechanisms Circle uses to do this, other than promises and market forces. If it comes down to promises and market forces that might not be enough.
Another question is at what point USDC price starts to have knock on effects beyond a simple bank run. A lot of defi is built around USDC. What systems will start to deteriorate if USDC starts to depeg more? At what point do systems start to fall apart?
u/KingLeo23 shares Justin Drakeâs EthResearch post on "Based Rollups
New drop from Justin Drake on ethresearch âbased rollupsâ that use L1 sequencing. Looks like they would inherently force L1 alignment and sequencer decentralization rather than having to rely on the good faith of L2 teams.
The first town hall for the Summer of Protocols happens tomorrow, about 9 hours from this comment.
If youâre interested in participating, highly recommend attending! I havenât finished reading the Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols (sort of a manifesto for the course) yet but itâs really good so far, very thought-provoking, and Iâm thinking of recording a version to listen to.
edit. quick synopsis of the Summer of Protocols if youâre lazy: itâs basically a brain incubator where some very thoughtful people are going to get together and try to define what a âprotocolâ is, examine existing examples, and how to design one that is future-proof, capable of ossifying to some degree, incentivizes good outcomes, and look at how much stewardship that thing will need.
This is awesome and, in my mind, the kind of philosophical analysis that we need to make sure Ethereum (or any protocol) has a sufficient amount of thought put into it to try to steer away from some of the dystopian outcomes that something like the internet has brought about.
If algorithms on the internet can change peopleâs behaviors to rapidly foster a kind of hatred that causes people to do things they otherwise wouldnât have, why wouldnât we assume that that behavior-changing power also works in the other direction to incentivize willing participants to better coordinate with each other? This is why Iâm here. Because the infancy of Ethereum is the most exciting and malleable part and I think something like this is capable of stewarding it to a place where it actually makes a difference.
u/RevolutionarySoil11 thinks about the publicsâ perception of the cryptosphere
Literally how can people outside the âcryptosphereâ look at crypto and not think âscamâ?
A quote from u/geliboy695000 earlier today and I want to repost it here for exposure and discussion because itâs important.
When you look at social media, any time the topic comes up or problems in crypto are brought up, the threads are flooded with bots and scammers shilling whatever shitcoin they get paid to shill. If I were not already in the space and knew what goes on Iâd 100% think cryptocurrency is just scams all the way down. And just to be explicitely clear: Ethereum itself has enabled this too with ERC-20s and the like. Just look at whatâs literal number 4 in market cap among those tokens and then scroll down further for all the less popular bs coins like Dogelon & co.
We need to somehow find a way to exclude the grifters and scammers from the discussions while still being open and true to the crypto ideals, and also welcoming to newcomers and open to new ideas. It seems like mission impossible.
How can legitimate projects be promoted without at the same time giving exposure to the wrong people? How can the general public be educated, because it doesnât seem knowledge of blockchain tech and its uses has increased that much in the mainstream over the past years. The majority of people still doesnât even seem to understand even just Bitcoin, which has been around for 13 years now and is arguably the most basic and among the easiest blockchains to understand in principle.
This matters, because if most people do not understand how this tech can help society and how it works, theyâll think itâs useless and will support legislation that cracks down and hinders crypto adoption. They might cheer the criminalization of private non-KYCed wallets only to find a couple of years down the line to be forced to use CBDC and have banks not only control their money but monitor all their habits as well. Itâs probably not what the majority wants but if we donât help them understand they wonât know anything about it.
u/JayPeaEm has some updates on all the banking shenanigans
Signature Bank looks to have fallen just moments ago. Bank Run feedback loops are not funđĽđŚđĽ
So it looks like SVB gets no bailout, yet all the depositors get their money back. I think the Federal Reserve Printers are tired from Covid but⌠đŹ
Nothing political, but just saw US Treasury Secretary was just in Kiev assuring US Aid will keep flowing⌠yet is only monitoring the deposits of all the small businesses in trouble by SVB? đ¤
USDC & DAI pegs are now stabilized. Made a killing in fees as LP, but I think Iâll keep it all parked in stablecoins for the foreseeable future; I get sea sick easy from all the rocking đĽď¸đ
Glad to see everyone active here and on Discord. Saw quite a few fellow whales help stabilize the stablecoins depegging and act really quick. Thereâs much more resilience in the ecosystem than many can understand. Hopefully the âgainsâ stay put for now.
Love you all, keep being ambassadors, and keep helping any- and everyone who asks for it!
Dear EVMs, EIPandaâs and the ETHFinance community,
I come before you today to genuinely ask for your help. Please take the time to read this, I know it is long but I believe it is important. No jokes this time. Thanks in advance friends.
As you may or may not know, I started a website called âCaches.â If youâve never visited it, I will briefly explain. If you have, then you already know. Caches is a social network/community website focused on Web3 Technology and Ethereum. A place to explore all of the interesting technologies and ideas that are spinning off of this new paradigm that we all love. Itâs completely anonymous, and membership is free and only available via Ethereum wallet login.
I intended for Caches to be somewhere for our community to teach, and share our knowledge outside of the walls of third parties like Reddit or Discord. Something we own, so our voices can be properly heard, and so they canât be muted due to some draconian corporate attack on crypto or something. A place where you could âcacheâ your content and share it with the world anonymously, using identity technology being pioneered by Ethereum. Our mark on the world outside our biosphere. I also hoped we could show the world how you build a community, powered by web3 technology, out here on the old www⌠A home.
Now I have a lot of ideas, but thatâs the gist of it. I have spent a lot of time in this pursuit and I have struggled with it. The platform I chose to build Caches on, WordPress, has absolutely no help, plugins, or extensions for crypto/web3. Really no good CMS platform out there does. Since I am a terrible coder, and I am already familiar with developing websites rapidly using Wordpress, I chose to move forward using it to save time, for better or for worse. This has been an adventure to say the least.
Recently, I spoke with another EVM, /u/juxtanotherposition, and we immediately hit it off. Turns out, just by stroke of luck that on March 24th, 2023 he will be giving a presentation at WordCamp Phoenix on âWordpress, Community and Web3.â Strange how the world works sometimes ⌠Caches is built on Wordpress, it has custom developed Web3 authentication and NFT gating, and it was made for a community⌠his very own community! This was literally a match made in heaven! So with all that said, we agreed to feature Caches during the presentation as an example of community built on Wordpress with web3 tech!
That means we will have eyes from the Wordpress developer community focused on Caches and the EVM!AAAAHHHH! This is why I need your help! Now look, I know Iâm funny, and I make you laugh, and maybe youâve even checked out Caches once or twice to humor me, and then laughed yourself to sleep ⌠but I need them to see the value in this. Not just for me, or Caches, or the EVMs ⌠for Ethereum.
Why is Wordpress important?
Wordpress is a free, open source content management system that powers an astounding 43% of all websites online. I bet you didnât know Caches ran on Wordpress before I told you, did you? A lot of your favorite sites run on it. Itâs free, open source, community developed, and extensible. It also runs on a completely opensource technology stack. Wordpress.org develops the Wordpress software and they are a non-profit entity. Their ethos is very aligned with ours. They want to enable people to have their own platform to share their ideas, and words without having to rely on anyone. You can check out their about us page if you arenât familiar with them.
Why is this important for the community?
Since Caches was built for the EVM/ETHFi community, we have a very unique opportunity to get our ideas, and our community out to potentially thousands of Wordpress developers who will be viewing Caches during @juxtaâs presentation. They will undoubtedly share Caches with other developers. That means we have an opportunity to get web3 ideas and even our community baked into Wordpress! I literally can not think of a bigger opportunity for us, and for Ethereum. If we can get developers to create plugins, extensions, themes and more that enable and integrate web3 technology into Wordpress, we have an opportunity to put this in front of 43% of website owners WORLDWIDE! I can not think of a better group than all of you to guide and usher these people into this new paradigm.
With our help we can get this technology out to the world, and we can foster the Wordpress community during their exploration of this new technology. Give them a place to safely ask questions and get good answers ranging from JBM to Logris level. A place to share ideas, develop friendships and connections ⌠just like we all have done through the sub. This is our opportunity to put the community at the forefront of something big outside our walls and build ourselves as an authority in this space.
Whatâs in it for me?
Juxta has asked if Caches could be a sort of âdevelopmentâ test bed for Wordpress web3 plugins and technology. I like this idea, we get free development work to make Caches the premier web3 community and the developers get a real live site to develop their product. This is a win/win/win! I get to see the thing I started grow and flourish at the hands of people much smarter and more capable than me. Itâs beautiful man! Thatâs really it. I hope to use it to make money, however we decide to do that, just like you.
Whatâs in it for you?
I honestly built this site for our community. I genuinely built it to enable everyone to be heard out here on the web. As I have repeatedly stated, I donât want to own this thing by myself. So I hope you can join me, we can come up with new ways to push Ethereum/web3 forward in the web2 and we can come up with creative ways for everyone in the community to earn some money for themselves without turning into a marketing machine. I want everyone to be a part of that journey, and I want everyone to be able to contribute ideas to that goal, and most importantly I want to work with you to figure out how we can own this thing together in the fairest way possible. I donât have any of that figured out, but thatâs ultimately where I want to be⌠a community owned and operated by the community.
How can I help?
Pop in the EVM discord. If youâre not an EVM, I still want your help. Please. Join the public-channel and DM a mod to have the âCachesâ role added to your account and then youâll be able to see the #caches channel there even if you donât have an EVM. I will use that to try to collaborate and focus our energies best I can. I need you! We have just 10 days to try and make Caches, the community and Ethereum look good⌠but hey⌠this is just the beginning. So donât do it for me. Do it for ETHEREUM.
Sincerely,
JBM đđť
u/Savage_X shares news of the newest version of GPT-4 and its Solidity prowess
In an instant, it highlighted a number of security vulnerabilities and pointed out surface areas where the contract could be exploited. It then verified a specific way I could exploit the contract
Ethtrader donuts were key in the formation of this sub. Not just because it triggered the exodus, but because of the type of people it promoted to leave.
The people that hate grifts and cash grabs, the people that see this as more than a way to make money, the people that are in it for the tech, etc.
It distilled the community down to those that believe in the original ethos ethereum was founded on, and we do our best to carry forward.
Reporting from the trenches of the great marketplace wars of â23. OpenSea has engineered their next move to combat Blurâs rapid ascent into the market. What did they do?
Introduce a new table view! Where the NFT jpg is reduced to a few pixels, just like in Blur. The way art was always meant to be traded!
On a more serious note, this war has already caused some collateral damage, with the royalties race to the bottom. The argument goes that 10k profile picture collections probably should not have royalties, while it makes more sense for 1/1 art pieces.
Well, the royalties paid on ArtBlocks (an NFT platform for curated artists) has now gone from 7.5% to 2.5%. This suggests that the markets for these two types of NFTs may not be so different after all.
Community: u/benido2030 ponders on building on a greater purpose for this community
Yesterday two things that longterm members posts and that are not connected somehow caught my attention and made me think. The first one was this post by Bob Rossi, the second one was a comment by superphiz in a completely different thread.
Some personal thoughts with regards to Bobs post: I totally feel you. I want to contribute more in the space and think I would be able to add some value here and there, but hell I am just a random anon on the internet thatâs mid bell curve.
But what if superphiz is right (and I think he is)? What if EVMs (which I am going to replace with members of this sub, since not everyone does hold one) will become community guardians? What if this place is something special and if you have established yourself as a valuable and know community member you are highly likely to add value to projects in the ETH ecosystem, hence also hop? What if we used the community we have built here to send people to different DAOs to positively influence decisions made in the ecosystem? What if at one point any EVM and their arguments in a (DAO) discussion are seen with different eyes just because of the NFT?
This was deployed at the EthDenver conference: ERC-4337. Am I right to think that this is a really underrated implementation?
Iâve read from a few sources that this level of account abstraction will eventually allow wallets to operate as programmable smart contracts; which could be used to recover lost private keys. Weâre not there yet, but still exciting!
Could allow users to do away with the common practice of backing up a set of words on a piece of paper, enabling new ways to secure wallets. For example, users could set up two-factor authentication to access a wallet via biometric data, or program multi-signature wallets providing shared access to a single account.
Additionally, this:
Vitalik Buterin has stated that ERC-4337 enables a fully decentralized fee market for smart contract wallet operations.
You should be able to send an op into a public mempool, and if it pays enough fees, reliably expect it to get included. This should NOT depend on ANY:
Centralized actors
Reputation systems for op senders
ETH held in a separate EOA
External services for account creation
With L2 fee structure the fee requirement diminishes.
Iâm not technically skilled/knowledgeable enough to understand why this integration wonât presently allow account recovery, but weâre almost there apparently. Vitalik mentions that it canât be solved by ERC-4337, but EIP-3074 and EIP-5003 would get us there. Very cool shit. Anyone want to chime in on anything I misunderstood?
Ecosystem: u/hanniabu discusses Privacy Pools, the successor to Tornado Cash in response to the OFAC regulation
Since anybody can exclude any deposit, it seems it would be difficult to get any type of assurance of your anonymity set.
I also wonder if you can run into a situation where you canât withdraw. For example if a hacker makes a large deposit and then withdraws for others, then there wonât be enough funds for everyone else to withdraw if they all want to exclude the hacker.
And not sure why the subsets are even needed if receipts are provided, which Tornado Cash already did.
Community: u/DoubtStarsAreFire has some great news about Logris building the double Logris into Alchemix
BUIDL Week is over here at EthDenver. You may have noticed a lack of a certain u/logristhebard around the subreddit. Thatâs because he has been diligently working on the Logris Vaults. Some of you saw the Alpha that I dropped earlier in the week⌠we are now one step closer to the Double Logris becoming a reality.
Itâs been a long week and Logris has been working flat out to get the project across the finish line. Weâre about to pitch in a little bit here⌠still waiting on our time so I canât tell you that. But, Iâm really excited about what we accomplished and really Really REALLLLLYYYY proud of him.
Logris says heâs proud of this function. What a nerd.
The final day of ETHDenver! There were no traditional talks from established companies or researchers; today was all about the hackathon teams. Each project was submitted to one of five tracks (DeFi, Impact / Social Goods, DAOs / Community, NFT/Gaming/Metaverse, and Infrastructure) and could also compete for sponsor bounties (big list here).
Projects had to be submitted by 8 AM, then from 10-2 teams showed off what they made. On the regular presentation stages, teams went up to the stage corresponding to their track and gave a 1:30 pitch and demo, with a little time for questions. When they werenât on stage, they were downstairs in the main buidl room where the sponsor bounty judges and random attendees could learn about what they made. Track judges picked the top three of each track to present on the main stage during the closing ceremony at 3 PM, then five final winners were chosen.
Miscellaneous notes: I donât think I can see an overall list of hackathon projects, but each one does have their own page if you know what URL to go to. But for most I donât know the URL so itâs going to be hard to link to them. I also heard that there was a major hiccup where in the midst of planning out judging, a bunch of teams just got missed entirely and werenât scheduled for a pitch slot or a table location. The team worked to resolve it, but with everything happening so fast some teams were just screwed over. Hopefully itâs better next year. Also I finally checked out the arcade area, good collection of imported Japanese arcade games, nice selection of rhythm games in particular.
Logris Vaults: A good place to start off the list. DoubtStars has been talking about this project so I donât really need to. I didnât find the team on the buidl floor, but I can throw it on here anyway because itâs cool.
ChainRep: A project to put security audits and reports (or at least links and a general rating) on-chain. Reviews point to the smart contract in question, and are written by reviewers who are issued certificates by trusted entities like the EF or something. So you could potentially make a DeFi protocol that generally works with any ERC20 token, but checks ChainRep and only allows tokens with positive reviews from certified reviewers.
MintUI: A library of React components for web3 that share information between one another to make web3 programming easier. Main example (as the name would imply) is NFT minting.
Composooor: Would appreciate more insight into this. The team was saying something about how itâs hard to build composable dapps/protocols using other protocols that rely on off-chain data. So this is a MetaMask snap (bounty hunting ho!) that simplifies this composability and significantly reduces the amount of code you need to create a clean integration.
Dual Rollup: Cartesi is an existing platform Iâm only just learning about for developing optimistic rollups whose execution environment is literally a Linux VM on RISC-V. This project uses that to run a ZK prover on Cartesi, or ultimately a ZK rollup on an optimistic rollup. I get the concept but I feel like Iâm barely able to grasp the implications. The team suggested you may be able to implement a universal (or at least cross-EVM) ZK bridge.
Aliceâs Ring: A project for proof of solvency. With it, tenant Alice can prove to landlord Bob that she has enough assets to cover rent, notably without revealing the actual address to Bob. Then, if Alice later uses zkBob to actually pay her rent, Bob may never actually have to see Aliceâs actual assets. The team says that the proof must be computed over multiple blocks or something in order to prevent someone from proving solvency after taking a flash loan. But nothing is stopping Alice from generating the proof then immediately selling, transferring, or gambling it away.
Artist Hunger Games: A pretty wild project in which artists get paid to participate in a hunger-games style game. A DAO of NFT holders have the ability to vote on which artists get removed from the game each round, and can also do silly votes on things like telling the artists where to live or eat. Make it a reality show kind of thing. I was reminded of MarkMerrill, who famously sold off shares of himself.
CryptoTaco: A point-of-sale tool for merchants to accept crypto for payments without having to worry about keys or wallets or whatever. Uses Magicâs tools to onboard merchants using their email addresses. These guys had a lot of enthusiasm, but Iâm not sure theyâre fully aware of how busy this space is. Hasnât bitpay been doing this since 2013 or something?
QuestGPT: Basically AI Dungeon implemented as a Discord chatbot, using DALL-E to create images related to the story which are then minted as NFTs. Pretty nice user experience in the end. Not quite the same degree of control as AI Dungeon gives you though. I was told they use multiple AIs (all GPT?) working together to keep track of context/worldstate and regularize the story.
Factorial: Modular libraries/tools for building DeFi protocols, one example being a âliquidation moduleâ for any time you may need to do something analogous to liquidating a userâs position.
The following are the finalists who presented at the closing ceremony. These were short talks and it was easy to miss critical details, so this may be quick.
Sesame (Winner!): Allows you to use Ethereum on your phone without internet by sending data over SMS. Has a little wallet interface that can update ETH market price and portfolio value, and lets you send simple transactions.
FundPG (Winner!): A no-loss donation pool that allows users to specify some percentage of their yield to go to public goods.
Krypto Kredit: Some sort of credit score platform using Huma. Kind of missed the details.
Bitcoin Vitalikâs Vision: Fork of the OP stack to post data on Bitcoin, inspired by ordinals of course. Team answered a question about their experience by saying âit sucks to build on Bitcoinâ.
Swappy (Winner!): Token swaps using natural language queries. You type in âSwap 5 USDC on Ethereum for MATIC on Polygonâ and it parses it with GPT, prompts you if youâre missing anything, constructs the actual details of the swap, lets you visualize and confirm it, then executes.
Rhinestone: My notes on this literally say âsomething something account abstractionâ sorry.
Slang: Lets you write a single command to generate code to integrate with Ceramic (decentralized data storage) as if it were a web2 database.
Inheritable: Web3 wills for inheritance. Puts inheritances in a Merkle tree for verifying claims. Lets you establish a group of Witnesses who attest/vote that youâre dead to start the inheritance process.
BaZaarK (Winner!): I believe this was about selling an NFT but using ZP proofs to do so without revealing all of its traits. May find some specialized use cases.
MyMule: Virtual pet game with a 3D environment where the pets are NFTs. If you interact with it regularly and keep it happy, it prints some ERC20 tokens for you. If you let its happiness bar go to zero then it dies.
Synesthesia: Collecting music NFTs isnât as fun as JPEG NFTs because of the difference in medium. This project creates generative art for each piece of music based on its metadata to make catchy pictures to go along with them.
ZKpoEx (Winner!): This provides a way for auditors to create a ZK proof that an exploit (generally agnostic to the type of exploit) exists, without revealing the specific details of how it works. Good way to do responsible disclosure. Probably my favorite out of the finalists.
Tribe.Credit: P2P lending protocol. You can deposit some capital, then it connects to your phoneâs contact list and you can say how much youâd be willing to lend that person. If they borrow from you, you donât get to see who exactly it is or how much. If they donât repay you then identity gets revealed and they get kicked out.
GasPay (listed as Gasly elsewhere): Simple token swap tool that just adds the ability to pay for gas in whatever token you want.
Denoted: A medium/hackmd/notion kind of writing site that integrates with all sorts of crypto data and analytics tools to create graphs and visualizations embedded in the posts. Generated dynamically so can update over time.
M3mber: I think this is a way to mint an NFT that represents a membership in something with an expiry date (pitched as a way for DAOs to bring in recurring money like a subscription rather than just the one-off token sale). They use ENS domains, with NameWrapper to accomplish this; is it only because ENS domains already have expiry built in so they donât have to code it from scratch?
GovBlocks: DAO management platform. Modular design, has useful things you would expect like DAO members being able to start a vote to change a governance parameter.
That was actually the last day. Some people are sticking around for the mountain retreat, but thatâs not really something to report on. Iâll assemble a final review tomorrow and thatâll be it!
Ecosystem: u/KingLeo23 has more on the fight between crypto and the SEC
Interesting legal op-ed about the potential future of crypto regulation as the Ripple case progresses through the courts.
TLDR: The conservative supreme court has renewed interest in containing federal agencies to the powers explicitly defined by congress evidenced by WV vs. EPA ruling last year referencing the âmajor questions doctrineâ in the ruling. Regardless of the outcome in lower courts for Ripple vs. SEC, the ruling is likely to be appealed to higher courts and this author at least thinks the SECâs authority over crypto assets falls under the âmajor questions doctrineâ that needs to be decided by congress and could potentially neuter Genslerâs further attempts to destroy the industry in the US.
OPSEC: u/REALJohnBMacLemore has another amazing private, free and open source app
Aaayo! Itâs ya most annoying boy back with mooaar open source software! Now, if youâre like me, your short term memory is shot due to excessive and repeated blows to the head. If youâre also like me, your wife makes you aware of that fact no less than 10 times a day⌠so you probably take a lot of notes so you donât feel stupid, like me. On your phone, the desktop, on the mirror after a shower ⌠Donât forget to put on pants today!
Notes are personal and often contain personal information, subtle details about your life and your extremely valuable intellectual property like your unreleased raps. Are you going to trust that level of information to Evernote!? OneNote!? You know who just bought Evernote? Bending Spoons. You know what Bending Spoons does? AI⌠yeah. They want your raps bro! Donât even get me started on Microsoft (OpenAI) OneNote! Ahhhhhhh!
So, today I present an open source, self hosted, zero knowledge, end to end encrypted note taking app named Joplin. Joplin is a full featured notes app with markdown support, image/website/screen clip insertion support and so much more! Syncing between your mobile and desktop can be done with Joplinâs paid cloud service but they also support S3, Nextcloud, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive or the local filesystem (syncthing?), so you donât have to pay more for their cloud if you donât want.
They have fully featured, open source apps for Android/iOS and Linux, Windows, Mac and ⌠FreeBSD!? Whoah! So hardcore! Even the Joplin cloud server software is open source⌠ohhh! and ⌠and thereâs a terminal app for my fellow shell dwellers out there. You can really feel the nerd love here. Check it out!
You all know, this bear is a builder. Here are some newish, not-so-well-known Defi protocols. As they are new, they are not battle-tested and deployed capital are potentially at risk. Donât ape in with your life savings.
Numoen.com - an AMM on Arbitrum which let you access leverage with no liquidation penality, oracleless. Itâs done as a power perpetual ETH^2. But there is a price,you pay relatively high funding rates so itâs rather good for short term trades.
Sturdy.finance - another leverage protocol. Here you can leverage up DEX pool tokens or alternatively lend your ETH/stables to the one using leverage.
Contango.xyz - you can buy or sell a forward contract, and contango borrows on the fixed-rate markets, swaps on the spot markets, and lends back on the fixed rate markets. Sounds complicated, but also fascinating money lego. Be aware: very early stage, in beta with unaudited contracts!
Ondo.finance / fluxfinance.com: Ondo is gate-keeped (100k min. deposit), so Iâm not sure if you manage to get into their pools (Iâve not tried it). But if not, you can get relatively high APY (currently) on stables (USDC,USDT or DAI) by depositing into their partner protocol fluxfinance.
IPOR.io - an Inter-protocol Offered Rate for Decentralized Finance. Itâs too complicated to explain it in simple words by myself, so I refer to their elaborate documentation: https://docs.ipor.io/
Lattice1 Giveaway: The drawing for a chance to win a Lattice1 and 2 packs of Safecards ($480 value) will be happening on todayâs stream using POAP Raffle: https://poap.fun/2079
It took a large investment of money to birth and raise you to adulthood.
In a common enterprise between your parents and you
Who had the expectation of profit in terms of fulfilling a basic human drive to procreate, entertainment, companionship, care in old age, etc. which all have existing markets and value.
UkraineDAO buys an NFT of the Ukraine flag for 2258 ETH.
UniSwap adds a âdonate to Ukraineâ feature which automatically exchanges a usersâ token to ETH for donation.
A CryptoPunk is used as collateral for an $8 Million loan.
A lucky ETH is found in the crawlspace between $2950 and âż0.06717.
In 2021:
Amazon announces the general availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain.
Coinbase takes a deep dive into Ethereumâs economy: âmore than digital money, itâs the foundation of a $200 billion-plus economyâ.
Evolve files for an Ether ETF with Canadian regulators.
Ethereum-based derivative trading platform CloseCross gets a European Union MIFID license.
ETH smashes the cash from $1566 to $1493, at âż0.03085.
In 2020:
Hudson Jameson explains the history, pro and cons of ProgPoW, and adds: âProgPoW isnât worth it and is dead based on overwhelming evidence of community dissent.â
ETH chugs along, from $218 to $231, at âż0.02599, while SteemIt experiences a hostile takeover.
In 2019:
Ethereum Core developers discuss the ProgPOW audit from Cat Herders and are looking for a new hard fork coordinator.
A $3 Million real estate transaction is settled on Ethereum by Swiss companies blockimmo, Elea Labs and Swiss Crypto Tokens..
Vlad Zamfir and Vitalik Buterin discuss blockchain politics.
Some sources say ETH goes at $134, or âż0.03478.
In 2018:
Smart contract-powered retirement planning platform Auctus goes live on Ethereum testnet Rinkeby.
ETH is one with everything but especially with $857 (at âż0.07995 - âż0.07766).
In 2017:
Ethereum makes it to FastCompanyâs list of â10 Most Innovative Companies In Finance 2017â.
ETH is coming of age between $17 and $19, or âż0.01388 and âż0.01521.
In 2016:
Ethereum reaches 10% of Bitcoinâs market cap as it moves from $7.6 to $8.5, or âż0.01755 to âż0.01994.
While some may find the Coinbase âBaseâ news underwhelming or would have hoped for something different, the way I see it, this is a huge signal in the crypto space that the number one crypto company in the world is choosing to go all in on building on Ethereum.
Up until now you could argue Coinbase was âimpartialâ in its offerings and did not show favoritism amongst coins, but now it seems they are willing to forego impartiality to build on the project they believe in most.
They couldve chosen to enhance lightning network/build an alternative, or build on solana, or the ânewâ smart contract enabled Cardano, but no they chose Ethereum.
That is something I would consider âsignificant.â
Community: u/nixorokish makes Danny Ryanâs post available in the EthStaker podcast
Iâve been screwing around with editing EthStakerâs community calls to podcast-ify them, and I loved Danny Ryanâs post yesterday, so I recorded it. Itâs available in the EthStaker podcast.
*Yes, I know my audio levels processing is poop. Iâm using some auto-process feature in the Descript software. If you want to give me pointers or tell me I suck, please leave a comment in the suggestion box on the desk that I donât have
Ecosystem: u/Maleficent_Plankton goes into detail on the Polygon outage
Many validators (at least 25) went out of sync and continued to have issues syncing for 12-24 hours.
It was big enough that:
Polygon rushed out a new governance proposal, PIP-9, and passed it within 12 hours. This proposal reduced validator SLA requirements from 98% back to 95% in order to save 18-23 validators from getting offboarded due to missing their checkpoints SLA.
Background: What happened is that several Polygon validators experienced sync issues, which then lead to giant cascade of outages for most validators. The reason for the reorg is supposedly a bug between their Bor and Heimdall layers, though the team has yet to give details on the bug.
Checkpoint SLAs: Back in Aug 2022, there was a governance proposal, PIP-4, to move towards permissionless validation.
âIn its current state, the PoS validator network is not entirely permissionless in that the previously-selected set of validators has largely persisted since testnet.â
The proposal added an SLA requirement that 95% of median average of last 700 checkpoints are signed by the validator. If the validator fails to meet the SLA, they are placed in a Grace Period have another 700 checkpoints to meet it. Otherwise, they get offboarded from staking. After 2 months, the SLA increased from 95% to 98%.
What happened yesterday concerning the checkpoint SLA:
Due to this rule and validators missing checkpoints yesterday, 25 out of 100 validators were at risk of getting kicked off staking.
The emergency PIP-9 vote to reduce the SLA was passed, saving most of the validators. Only 2 validators got offboarded and 5 more are in the Grace Period.
Itâs good theyâre finally taking the reorg issue more seriously, but I think they shouldâve addressed this a long time ago.
Random: u/austonst is doing the ETHDenver daily recaps
Last year, I attended ETHDenver and made a post each day in which I primarily summarized the best talks I heard that day, and also commented a little about my general experiences at the conference. ETHDenver 2023 has now begun, and I intend to do the same this year. As with last year, the first few days are slow: only one stage with talks starting late and ending early. So not too much to cover.
It seems that, also like last year, all talks are recorded to Twitch, one stream per stage. But for a given talk, figuring out which stage and what timestamp is not trivial. Itâs not too hard either, and for today I figured Iâd try tracking down timestamps but Iâm really skeptical that Iâll want to spend the time on that as the days get longer. If thereâs one you really want to see, let me know and I can probably find it pretty quick given that I know what the different stages are and can probably recognize the style of a given talkâs slides at a glance. But in general Iâll link to the schedule page for each talk, which should be enough to point you in the right direction for learning more.
Rick Lamanna, Founder of OpenQ (video) talked about crypto hackathons. Gave some general advice on how to best participate and pursue bounties, and then mentioned some trends such as the prevalence of bounties meaning that hackathon teams are starting to say âif you donât pay a bounty for us to use your tool, weâre not going to use itâ.
u/DoubtStarsAreFire and u/htimsk of Luau DAO (video) talked about Hodlercon, which needs no introduction here. It was a fun talk about a fun event, good vibes all around. I personally would have been interested in some more of the behind-the-scenes about what it takes to form a Wyoming DAO (and why to do so) and organize a group vacation while maintaining participant pseudonymity, but the conference organizers surprised them last minute with this day-1 timeslot so I know there were some serious time constraints.
Brian Wilkes (video) gave a nice overview of zero knowledge proofs as applied to Ethereum scaling. Nothing particularly new to me, but I think it could be a nice overview or refresher for many.
Josh Forman of ShapeShift DAO (video) covered ShapeShiftâs experience operating as a DAO, and in particular how they fared during a period of serious bear market financial woes. There are some good general insights into DAO structure and operation that I found myself able to relate to the EVMavericks DAO. Some of his main lessons: be clear about your governance process, donât try to figure out too much ahead of time, keep open and transparent communication, leadership and hierarchy can exist but should be delegated (and can be revoked) by the community.
On a personal note, itâs kind of amazing how much I expect my experience at ETHDenver will be different this year. Last year I knew nobody personally and was generally content to fill my days with nothing but listening to talks and occasionally chatting with strangers. But this year? I didnât go half an hour before I started bumping into folks I know. I have a project that I can explain to people who ask what Iâve been working on (and they seem to find it very interesting (!), but I need to stop assuming that everyone knows how staking and MEV work). I tentatively have a hackathon team (with folks from this community) for a project I think will be bite-sized but still quite valuable. And I need to juggle driving back home occasionally for some classes Iâm taking, so Iâve accepted Iâm going to have limited free time this next week. But itâll just be packed so full of fun things!
EDIT: Oh yeah, I also have the EVMavericks t-shirts for those who signed up on Discord. I wonât be lugging around the huge box everywhere I go, but Iâll try to set aside multiple timeslots when I can set up shop in one spot, let everyone know, and hand them out. Got 100 EVMavs stickers to hand out too.
Ecosystem: u/cryptOwOcurrency has details on Spotifyâs new token gating NFT implementation
Music streaming Spotify is testing a new service called âtoken-enabled playlists,â which allows holders of non-fungible tokens (NFT) to connect their wallets and listen to curated music.
Currently, the service is available to token holders within the Fluf, Moonbirds, Kingship and Overlord communities. The curated playlists will be actively updated during the three-month testing period and can only be accessed by community members via a unique link.
Random: u/silentjxhn is finding crypto boring but u/stablecoin and u/cryptOwOcurrency disagree
Canât believe thereâs this many upvotes. Off the top of my head I can think about:
Finalizing the Merge Event end of March kicking off a major staking reshuffling for probably the first and last time in the networks history. Every single LSD that has a shot need to make their move in the next 2-6 months or possibly never gain share again. Keeping an eye on RPL, BTRFLY, FXS, SWISE for possible shorter term catalysts.
Upcoming Arbitrum token event, huge amount of new protocols launching on Arbitrum daily lately.
ZK Sync onboarding dapps getting ready for their main net launch (soon tm)
Blur passing Open Sea in volume for many days now, currently lots of active farming possibilities for useless JPGS
Yuga Labs announcing new NFT project with Bitcoin Ordinals
Sensible EU stablecoin and defi adoption
SEC fights against everyone claiming itâs a security
This bear market is honestly so much harder to keep track of developments than the last one. All you could do last bear was take a Maker CDP loan and wait for Michael Saylor to buy Bitcoin. Maybe price action stinks but you can never say crypto is boring.
[Edit] Also just remembered Spotify NFTs, Starbucks Polygon NFT rollout in progress, and some of my Reddit WSB NFTâs getting a nice premium lately.
Money should be boring. The fact that we had exciting money for a few years (bootstrapping/awareness phase of Bitcoin, then of Ethereum) is a marvel in the history of money.
If you think about it, new types of money donât pop up very often. In the history of money, weâve only really had three major types, invented in 6000 BC, 600 BC, and 2008 CE.
Physical barterable commodities as monies (backed by physical utility, 6000 BC)
Trust-based monies (backed by their utility in abstracting away the trade of these cumbersome physical commodities by instead trading surrogate notes representing promises made by a trusted authority, 600 BC)
Self-sovereign monies (monies that exist nowhere and everywhere as information that polices itself as it floats around, backed by their utility in eliminating the need for surrogacy or trust in creating abstract monies, 2008 CE).
You could argue that the jump from gold-backed notes to fiat notes was another fundamental evolution of money, but in any case we have been very lucky to live through this incredibly special decade.
So now begins the long, boring process of executing on the existing roadmap, and integrating Ethereum with the old, boring economy. Weâve had our big bang moment for this three thousand year period - perhaps in another three thousand years civilization will come up with yet another fundamentally new type of money and weâll see another big bang (thousands of years from now, quantum physics may allow us to have conversations with the laws of physics and directly ask those laws of physics to enforce certain constraints on our reality, a.k.a. âmagicâ).
In three thousand years though, if the word âIâ still makes sense to describe me, if I am even aware at that point of the events taking place on planet Earth in the material plane, and humans do invent a fourth type of money, at that point I probably wonât care.
Thanks for those of you vigilantly reporting the spam post on the front page. A quick dive into the user posting it and the other user commenting in support of the scam found a history of similar posts with the same free reddit awards. Donât trust any supposed uncollateralised DeFi protocols. Theyâre almost certainly a scam unless basically everyone is talking about such a breakthrough.
Reminder of things to look out for in identifying spam and scams on Reddit:
Spam posts: (if yes itâs probably a scam)
Did they gain a lot of upvotes in the first 20 mins and then stop gaining traction?
Does the user history have lost of similar posts or low effort comments about the same product posted by different users?
Does the post have lots of low tier Reddit awards with relatively few upvotes?
Does the user have low karma or karma farming indications like having a history of posting in random or low effort subs?
Does the user and other users commenting in support of the post have a generic usernames with a shared pattern such as âAmazingReindeer123â or âGlowingPancake4679â?
Aside from this, there are some basic rules such as:
If someone you donât know DMâd you itâs probably a scam. Even if you want to be polite and respond to an unexpected DM, donât reveal any info or click any links until youâre sure they are legit.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
If something raises even just one of the above flags, do some googling and delve into who else is talking about it. If youâre seeing no organic looking chat about it then itâs probably a scam.
Please remember to use the report button! In a sub with active mods multiple reports always signals to the mods that something needs investigating.
For those of you who are interested, this is the user who posted it and take a look and see if you can see the patterns of a scammer in their posts and post history. https://reddit.com/user/SpicateHammer451
My brother: So howâs it going with that secret little thing you are doing with Ethereum, that miner sitting on your desk? You must be very smart how do you manage it? Must be a lot of work.
Me thinking: Oh thatâs right Iâm running a validator I almost forgot.
That thing is still running perfectly turning dust into ETH without looking at it for months. Yes, staking is very hard and mind consuming. All I do is wait for my phone to prompt an update and then I run the ethstaker wizard after a few weeks. I am very sramt!
This week I managed to get my coworker into solo staking without telling him I am one myself, but I think he knows. Dude is already heavily invested in getting the best performance out of his machine. What a nerd (Heâs actually a very nice guy that just loves computers). Tells me he has a lot of unused parts freshly bought just because they were off price. He was flabbergasted about the low specs needed and was kind of disappointed. I guess he was expecting to run some sort of data center in his home?
Maybe Iâll tell him to run a Solana node instead, if he really wants to drown in debt and get no profit at all (even run at a loss). Good thing is that he understands. He immediately linked the correlation about decentralization needing easy hardware to work the most efficient. Canât expect normal people to run data centers right? They have the money, but not the technical knowledge. They do not want a beefy machine taking their electricity and bandwidth away. These were his exact words, and I was astounded by his quick thinking.
I wanted to direct him to the right sources to run a validator but he was already talking about running Geth and Lighthouse and was talking about all sorts of Linux command stuff. He was already smarter then me about validating in one day. I guess heâs going to be just fine.
Coworker, if you manage to cross this post and recognize me. Doxx me and I will tell your mother!!
Lattice1 Giveaway: During the March 3rd livestream there will be a POAP drawing for a chance to win a Lattice1 and 2 packs of Safecards ($480 value). You will need a EthFinance Doots Happy Hour POAPs from a February livestream to entry. Giveaways by Gridplus exclude mainland China, Russia, and Vietnam due to regulations.
Hey fam! Weâre looking for a nomination for âShitpost of the weekâ to be included today in the livestream. Got any suggestions? Reply here with the link! see you soon!
I want to disclose that Iâve contracted with EY to offer community education regarding their Nightfall and Starlight products for a few months. This isnât a full time job, just an agreement to spend more time learning about Nightfall and Starlight, then sharing what Iâve learned.
Let me give you some idea what this means. My credibility to the community is the most important thing I have in crypto, so Iâll never do or say anything that would degrade that credibility. Many people who know and trust me hold that trust because Iâm extremely selective about things I talk about. I focus on highly aligned projects that add value to the whole ecosystem and donât extract value for anyone. You might know that EYâs privacy tools led by Paul Brodyâs team fill that niche for me, and Iâm very confident about that fit after knowing Paul several years.
My intention is to learn more and share more about Nightfall and Starlight and help them find the traction they deserve and I hope youâll join me in this quest. If these tools succeed in the market, Ethereum will be the greatest beneficiary.
I need you to know that I canât be bought. Iâm agreeing to this contract because itâs good for the web3 community, our community, Ethereum, and EY. I believe that any greater knowledge we develop about these products will benefit all parties in the long run.
I will always continue to do my best to earn your trust as I find the best tools and opportunities to share with other Ethfinanciers, but I also need you to put your own judgement first. Ask yourself if Iâm doing things that make sense for all of us or if Iâve lost my way. Follow your own good judgement, not mine. <3
u/SikhSoldiers covers the RocketPool x Coinbase Ventures partnership
We are always happy and willing to be ambassadors for the benefits of decentralisation and how that can provide a deep benefit for all those involved. So it is with great pleasure that we want to relay that Coinbase Ventures has invested in the protocol. We recently announced their intentions to join the oDAO, so this is just another step in them willing to back a decentralised staking protocol such as Rocket Pool.
âWeâre excited to announce that Coinbase Ventures is deepening its partnership with Rocket Pool via a direct investment into RPL in addition to its proposed entry into the oDAO. Coinbase Ventures also plans to use their RPL and ETH to spin up their own Rocket Pool minipools.â
/- Coinbase Ventures
From the Rocket Pool discord. Pretty impressive evolution of the CB Ventures x Rocket Pool relationship.
u/15kisFUD asks if Coinbase spinning up RocketPool nodes is good, bad or neutral for decentralization
Iâm in a discussion with a community member that I respect very much, yet strangely we do not seem to agree on something.
Question for the fam:
If Coinbase would start spinning up Rocket Pool minipools instead of regular validators from today on, would this be good, bad or neutral for decentralization?
Please limit the discussion to this question about decentralization only. I donât want it to be a value judgement on Rocket Pool. Of course any actor can use it as it is permissionless. This is not a fault of the protocol. Also please donât discuss how unlikely or likely it is that Coinbase would do this. It might be very unlikely with all the risks (RPL exposure, regalutory, other). I just want to know if you think my hypothetical question would be good or bad for decentralization
You asked me to post my comment in reply to this thread, but I think it might be worth re-writing it suited for some of the answers I see here. Iâm going to write this as if the LEB-8 (8 ETH minipools) are in effect, because that is the long term goal. For anyone reading this not familiar with Rocket Pool, the current version of minipools instead has 16 ETH from the minipool operator and 16 ETH taken from the rETH pool. This difference doesnât impact the following statements, with the exception of making the barrier-of-entry lower.
Â
Is it good, bad, or neutral for major staking entities to use the Rocket Pool protocol?
Answer: I believe the effect on decentralization is neutral, but in spite of that neutral effect from this factor alone I think it would be actually devastating to Ethereumâs prospects to shut out large entities, due to runaway centralization behind 2-3 broadly used liquid staking tokens. Here are my thoughts.
Â
Important Note: What does Rocket Pool do to help decentralize the network?
It lowers the barrier to entry for a solo staker from 32 ETH, down to 8 ETH + a portion of collateral (roughly a 70% reduction in initial capital required).
It gives parties interested in acquiring staking services access to a service pool that isnât monopolized by a single entity (it is permissionless).
Specifically note that âgives more nodes to smaller stakersâ isnât in this list. This will be addressed below.
Â
Fallacy 1: Comparing centralized entity Rocket Pool use to centralized entities not using Rocket Pool
The protocol is permissionless, and you cannot prevent any size staker from using it.
The permissionless feature is non-negotiable, as otherwise centralization is a factor and the protocol is pointless.
Desire to deny large entities from using it is pointless, and large entities staking in RP should be considered a likely outcome.
Are features #1 and #2 outlined above compromised by large entities using the protocol? I believe these features are not compromised.
With that in mind, the comparison of centralized entities using Rocket Pool vs. not using it results in a net neutral comparison minus a concern addressed in the next section.
A much more important comparison when thinking about Rocket Pool usefulness is âHow does this compare to the situation without any Rocket Pool?â
Â
Fallacy 2: Increased node counts for centralized entities using Rocket Pool
Some comments here point to the fact that small stakers can obtain a 4x node power âmultiplierâ against large staking entities, and that large staking entities entering the picture defeats this purpose. This is a fallacy, however:
If you could engineer a Rocket Pool protocol where you could magically keep out large-entity stakers, you could then tout âincreased node counts for small stakersâ as a decentralization-increasing feature of Rocket Pool, but that feature would only function up to the number of small node operators you would have available in the pool. Once that pool of small stakers runs out however, no further rETH could be created.
Any demand for staking services beyond what rETH capacity exists would then likely flow over to centralized staking entities outright. Meaning that they would be spinning up more nodes, just as if they had spun them up from rETH-provided funds. It would literally just end up a 1:1 conversion.
The end result of this hypothetical scenario where you block out large stakers, is that you have lost:
The permissionless feature, and more importantly,
youâve seriously handicapped the value your accessible-to-all staking services access pool due to the low ceiling of possible funds, and the fact that you just forced a huge number of customers over to centralized entities providing liquid staking tokens.
Â
The same scenario effectively plays out if you make the comparison of centralized entities using RP vs. RP not existing:
In this scenario where Rocket Pool doesnât exist, itâs once again a very, very safe assumption that people whom are already comfortable delegating their funds for staking on the network, would instead use centralized services for their staking instead.
This means that itâs safe to assume that all funds flowing into rETH in the centralized-entities RP scenario would instead just be⌠with those centralized entities youâre concerned with.
Now, in this scenario, there isnât an accessible-to-all staking services market at all, and itâs almost 100% guaranteed that one staking service is going to become popular on a runaway level purely due to the convenience of having a single liquid staking token. Lido almost did this on accident purely by being early to market and being able to expand rapidly.
Â
Considering those two scenarios, node counts for any of these scenarios are irrelevant and are not a factor in comparing any situation for Rocket Pool. The fact is, Rocket Pool will actually give a slight node-power advantage to decentralization, but only by virtue of feature #1 - the reduced barrier-to-entry. There is no scenario where Rocket Pool increases the amount of power a centralized entity has in comparison to Rocket Pool not existing, or locking centralized entities out.
The actual strength of Rocket Pool decentralization
So whatâs the actual strength of Rocket Pool? Itâs specifically item #2, the accessible-to-all staking services pool. The lowered barrier to entry for actual node-operators at 8 ETH is to be frank pretty awesome and amazing, and itâs going to let a lot more people into the ETH staking ecosystem, but the point that people keep missing about the accessible-to-all staking services pool that is provided is that it keeps the biggest liquid-staking token out of the hands of a single entity, or at the very least provides a nearly-unstoppable competitor. If Rocket Pool didnât exist, staking-services users would have nowhere to send their money except centralizing forces, and whatâs more is that small operations wouldnât be able to attract staking-services customers for shit - nobody would use little-known liquid-staking tokens, and the small operations would get crushed on margins by the big operations.
Every centralized entity that joins this accessible-to-all pool makes it that much harder for any centralized entity to monopolize the liquid-staking-token market, and even better, the protocol itself isnât really able to use itâs own dominance of the liquid-staking market to try and shut out competitors except by trying to provide better service to keep people using rETH - so even competitors will still be able to rise up if they make something truly great. The protocol canât blacklist competing liquid-staking tokens on the protocolâs (non-existent) exchange, the protocol canât make back-room deals to give more favorable staking percentages to special, favored customers, the protocol canât lock out small staking providers that the big providers donât like.
Rocket Pool canât actually shut out centralized or large entities by design, and it also shouldnât because doing so is inherently a bad idea. Any centralization of node operators on the Rocket Pool protocol would have existed without Rocket Pool, and if you try and shut them out that money gets transferred right over to external centralized entities anyways. Rocket Poolâs design has likely averted a scenario where a few major exchanges dominated the entire staking services market on the Ethereum chain, which⌠to be honest, I think would have truly killed the decentralization angle and left us with little claim to security.
u/edrews99 reminds us that exchanges will not call you if they detect something suspicious
Heads up, I received an unsolicited call this morning allegedly coming from Coinbase support indicating that my account had been logged into from another country and that they were placing a hold on my account. While on the phone they sent me an email confirming this and a text message with a link to hxxps://issue-coinbase.com/email=?[EMAIL] to reset my account. They then gave me an 8 digit password over the phone with which to login.
I pretty much knew from the start that this was bullshit but the hxxps://issue-coinbase.com domain really sealed it. If you get any unsolicited calls from any exchange please ignore it, and maybe report it here for educational purposes. Stay safe out there.
u/domotheus demolishes the deflationary FUD on r/Buttcoin
Anyone with an ounce of understanding about economies knows why a DEFLATIONARY currency could never work as the standard.
As the standard for what? Buying eggs and bread? Paying peopleâs salaries? Investing in stuff? Sure. In that case, a deflationary, value-appreciating currency is bad. Thankfully thatâs not what Ether is.
We need money to lose value over time to deincentivise people sitting on savings.
The first and foremost job of Ether as an asset is to provide economic security to Ethereum. âAnyone with an ounce of understandingâ about that realizes itâd be dumb to devalue this asset on purpose. Ether is collateral money, not debt money. Having the value of your collateral go up gives you more bandwidth to participate in the economy by doing more stuff you otherwise couldnât
Only when money is used does it lube up the economy by providing cash flow for industry.
Again thatâs not really Etherâs job to do that, but even then it still does it well inside the Ethereum economy: itâs deflationary BECAUSE itâs being used. âAnyone with an ounce of understandingâ quickly realizes this cause and effect relationship and doesnât invert it by claiming being deflationary causes people to not use it.
Ethereum sells blockspace and blockspace accessories. This blockspace is worth something, people are willingly paying for it, choosing to burn their precious deflationary ETH in exchange for it. There is no âbad money drives out goodâ when it comes to buying blockspace, thanks to EIP-1559.
Iâm tired of these takes that miss out on all the nuance. âETH deflation bad because deflation encourages hoardingâ is one of them. And yes, âETH deflation good because supply goes down = line go upâ is another one. Itâs a cringe meme responding to Bitcoinâs equally cringe âcapped supply = sound moneyâ meme.
The truth is fundamentally, whether the supply goes up or down doesnât affect the velocity of ETH. Whether supply goes up or down, itâs all just an accounting trick that doesnât change the fact that value ultimately flows from users (paying for blockspace) into the pockets of holders (who are likely to be staking, directly or indirectly). Youâre not magically gonna turn a hoarder into a user if you increase issuance, because that hoarder is already staking anyway.
u/busterrulezzz minted 69 AI generated variants of EIPandas and EVMavericks dropped to random holders!
Good news! I finally completed my quest of remixing 69 EVMavericks and EIPandas with Midjourney. They have all been minted on Polygon and sent to their respective owners. To see the results, here is the OpenSea collection.
I want to thank everybody that participated in my little project. Your amazing reactions to my artworks mean the world to me! If you had a request and didnât receive it, feel free to DM me, I might have missed some messages.
I will mint one last epic remix and put it up at auction in the next few days, and then I will get to work on my sequel to Worthless JPEGs!, my satirical collection.
Thanks again everyone.
u/OkDragonfruit1929 explains the mechanics behind why ETH has been deflationary
If demand for blockspace falls below a certain threshold, ETH issuance goes up while gas prices go down. This has the effect of making it more likely for more people to use ETH, bringing us back to more demand for blockspace.
If demand for blockspace is above a certain threshold, ETH issuance goes ultrasound. More ETH fees are burned instead of given to validators.
If staking becomes extremely desirable, and more and more people stake, staking rewards APY falls, and the threshold of blockspace demand required for fee burns increases.
If staking becomes less desirable and more and more people unstake, staking APY increases and the threshold for fee burning falls.
Itâs a completely automated, decentralized monetary policy which favors equilibrium. Nothing else on earth like it.
Ethereum eip 1559 increases incentive to secure the network in a way that avoids inflating the supply, without being 100% reliant on market forces such as gas fees. Unlike Bitcoin security which will eventually become completely enslaved to the wills and fluctuations of the market, and without sufficient fees (blockspace demand) will become more and more centralized and less and less secure.
u/Hawaii_Facts has a HodlerCon 2024 update. BeachBum hodlers vote on your favourite locations!
Hodlercon 2024 update: BeachBum NFT hodlers can now vote for destinations at https://hodlercon.com/. (Edit: Tickets to Hodlercon 2022 included a BeachBum. If you attended and havenât minted yours, DM me. Others can mint them at https://hodlercon.com/beachbums).
The highest vote-getter as of March 17 in each of three cohorts will be thrown to the will of the ETH price gods â Whichever price band weâre in on June 15, 2023, will determine the location of Hodlercon 2024.
Thereâs a blurb on each destination at https://hodlercon.com/#details. Hereâre the candidates, proposed by Hodlercon attendees, EthFinanciers, ethstakers and anyone else who wanted to pitch in:
$0-$1,400
Camping with JT around Kansas City
Goblintown Creek, Virginia
Orlando, Florida
Smoky Mountain Glamping, Tennessee
Los Cabos, Mexico
$1,401-$4,800
Puerto Rico
Bermuda
Iceland
Thailand
Portugal
$4,801-$31,250
Greece
Hoi An, Vietnam
Fiji
New Zealand
Ireland
Mahalo for voting.
u/HolyFlatulence shares an excerpt from the incumbents
Very interesting speech just given by Augustin Carstens, the General manager for the BIS. Pay close attention to the last paragraph/bolded text. They totally understand the power of shared ledgers/opensource/composable. They just want to centralize it and own it.
edit: formatting; summarizing a little bc the kicker comes at the end of a wall of text.
â
A unified ledger is a digital infrastructure with the potential to combine the monetary system with other registries of real and financial claims. It would need to be a public-private partnership with a clear division of roles, and where the central bank is tasked with underpinning the trust in money.
Like smartphone platforms, a unified ledger allows various components to work seamlessly together. But unlike them, it is enabled by open architecture that promotes financial inclusion and greater competition.
Such a ledger allows for the use of smart contracts and composability. A smart contract is a computer program that executes conditional âif/thenâ and âwhileâ commands. Composability means that many smart contracts, covering multiple transactions and situations, can be bundled together, like âmoney legoâ.
With these new functionalities, any sequence of transactions in programmable money can be automated and seamlessly integrated. This reduces the need for manual interventions that delay transactions and reduces dependency on intermediaries, and also allows for simultaneous and near-instant payments and settlement.
Greater interoperability and automated transfers could ultimately benefit consumers through more convenient and cheaper products that are better tailored to their needs, thereby enhancing financial inclusion.
These foreseeable gains may just be the tip of the iceberg of additional transformations. Think about how the smartphone displaced digital cameras. It was not because it takes better pictures, but because itâs easier to share these pictures with friends through the same device.
Importantly, programmability and composability do not require decentralised or permissionless platforms. All the potential benefits I just outlined can be achieved in permissioned platforms with various degrees of centralisation. What really brings the benefits of these projects together is the use of money as a means of payment and settlement. As the provider of the ultimate settlement asset in the economy, the central bank therefore has an important role to play in the governance of a unified ledger. But it would do so in partnership with other public agencies as well as with private sector participants.
Special guest VP joins us from Hexagon, a group born out of Golem project. A new app funding Ethereum infrastructure & public goods projects. Rewards from 100,000 staked ETH are powering a sandbox for governance and community funding experiments. Read moreâŚ
Announcements
EthStaker: On Friday February 17 (today) @ 2pm EST (7pm UTC) EthStaker is hosting a call with Lodestar
Regulators
We regulate any investing of your property
Weâre damn good too
But you canât be any geek off the street
You gotta be able to use the Howey test, if you know what I mean
Earn your keep
Regulatooorssss! Mount up
[Verse 1] It was a February day, some time around noon
Gary G was at his desk, seeing ETH moon
He thought realâ hard then came up with a plan
Hit centralized staking with a nation-wide ban
[Chorus] Regulators in the house, donât you mess around
The SEC and Gary, they got it all locked down
Theyâre coming with the rules and theyâre coming to pound
Gary G and SEC they keep the crypto scene sound
[Verse 2] When the Kraken rose up, with its tentacles wide
The SEC and Gary stood side by side
They slayed the beast together, Howey hammer in hand
Now the crypto world is under their command
[Chorus] Regulators in the house, donât you mess around
The SEC and Gary, they got it all locked down
Theyâre coming with the rules and theyâre coming to pound
Gary G and SEC they keep the crypto scene sound
[Verse 3] When Phiz got the call, he got the smile
Heâd been trying to achieve this for a while
Ethereum staking decentralized and free
Superphiz and me, the Gary to the G
[Outro] Iâm tweaking into a whole new era
Decentralized Finance, I dare ya
Trust on a whole new level
Smart contracts are the rules and the rules immu-table
ETH, code, We brings decentralization, ETH-funk
Where code is law, aligned incentives
If you know like I know, you donât want to step to this
Itâs the Ethereum era, funked out with a unicorn twist
If you smoke like I smoke then youâre high like every day
And if yoâ ass is centralized Gary G will regulate
Marvel artists add 25 NFTs to Ethereum-based art- and collectable marketplace Portion.io.
ETH finds a message in a $1781 bottle, cryptically mentioning âż0.0362.
In 2020:
ETH resides at $260, or âż0.02615, as all the fun happens at ETHDenver 2020.
In 2019:
Parityâs Afri Schoedon wants to remove Ethereumâs difficulty bomb.
ETH lives in the present at $123, or âż0.03397.
In 2018:
Cosmos, OmiseGo, Golem, Maker, Global Brain and Raiden put together $100 Million to create the Ethereum Community Fund, to support Ethereumâs ecosystem infrastructure.
372 Ether is paid to build the starting foundation of a Doge-Ethereum bridge.
The ETH boat captain steers at $944, or âż0.09261.
Consensys-backed VariabL introduces StabL, a derivatives market with stable tokens on the public Ethereum blockchain.
MyEtherWalletâs new release v3.5.0 allows directly swapping ETH, BTC and REP via Bity.
Peter Vessenes forms a partnership to consult and invest in Ether projects, stating that âthe combination of an incredibly insular core dev community with a toxic minority of the broader community has killed Bitcoinâ.
The ethricacies of ethimacy rule at $12.9, or âż0.01255.
In 2016:
Ethereum wallet Mist v0.4.0 is released, supporting pre-sale ETH import.
Some say ETH is a craptocurrency as it moves from $5.3 to $4.3, or âż0.0133 to âż0.01059.
The one sane person at the SEC seems to have little influence - sheâs echoed this sentiment for a few years now and not much has changed. Not a criticism to her, more a comment on the SECâs approach to regulation being firmly entrenched
Today, the SEC shut down Krakenâs staking program and counted it as a win for investors. I disagree and therefore dissent.
Kraken operated a service through which its customers could offer their tokens up for staking. The customers earned returns, and the company earned a fee. The Commission argues that this staking program should have been registered with the SEC as a securities offering. Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, the more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible. In the current climate, crypto-related offerings are not making it through the SECâs registration pipeline. An offering like the staking service at issue here raises a host of complicated questions, including whether the staking program as a whole would be registered or whether each tokenâs staking program would be separately registered, what the important disclosures what be, and what the accounting implications would be for Kraken.
We have known about crypto staking programs for a long time. Although it may not have made a difference, I should have called for us to put out guidance on staking long before now. Instead of taking the path of thinking through staking programs and issuing guidance, we again chose to speak through an enforcement action, purporting to âmake clear to the marketplace that staking-as-a-service providers must register and provide full, fair, and truthful disclosure and investor protection.â[1] Using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating.[2] Moreover, staking services are not uniform, so one-off enforcement actions and cookie-cutter analysis does not cut it.[3]
Most concerning, though, is that our solution to a registration violation is to shut down entirely a program that has served people well. The program will no longer be available in the United States, and Kraken is enjoined from ever offering a staking service in the United States, registered or not. A paternalistic and lazy regulator settles on a solution like the one in this settlement: do not initiate a public process to develop a workable registration process that provides valuable information to investors, just shut it down.
More transparency around crypto-staking programs like Krakenâs might well be a good thing. However, whether we need a uniform regulatory solution and if that regulatory solution is best provided by a regulator that is hostile to crypto, in the form of an enforcement action, is less clear.
OPSEC: /u/REALJohnBMacLemore Reddit employee hacked in sophisticated phishing attack
I definitely imagine JBM as the Mel Gibson character from Lethal Weapon. Heâll let you think heâs a little off his rocker, but thatâs just a ruse to hide a skilled operator.
Analysis: /u/maleficent_plankton For those who want to learn how to use APIs
Not every StackUp quest is worth the effort, but this one seems really easy. Itâll walk you through how to use APIs and create a basic web app. The first 3 quests are already up. So far, this one seems pretty basic for anyone who is decently-technical. You donât have to have prior dev knowledge.
Also, there is a monetary reward for completing quest. The rewards are limited, so they can run out.
Random: u/busterrulezzz found an interesting mental model to describe the relationship between Ethereum and civil society
I think Iâve found an interesting mental model to describe the relationship between Ethereum and civil society, especially with respect to the (sometimes) irrational hatred for the protocol.
I believe that as a public good, Ethereum is like a large public transportation project.
Indeed, every Western city that has decided to invest in such projects has faced absolutely incredible opposition. In Bordeaux, France, the tramway project caused protests, arguments, political riff raff - a non-negligible portion of the population swore that they would never use the tramway, because they were opposed to it from the beginning.
Now, two decades later, Bordeaux is a model for major European cities, and the opposition has disappeared. The ridership of the tramway is extraordinary, which suggests that even the most furious opponents have pounded on their pride and are using the service when they need it.
Itâs the same everywhere. When London wanted to reduce the number of cars in the city center, the anger of the citizens was incredible. Twenty years later, no one would go back. I experienced it personally in Montreal: the current mayor built bike lanes on major commercial arteries, which led opponents to predict the imminent death of downtown. Four years later, the cityâs liveliest thoroughfares are the ones that received new bike lanes, and absolutely no one is calling for a reversal - even the most rabid opponents.
This got me thinking. Why were these citizens so fiercely opposed to a public good? On what arguments was their opposition based?
I went back and read their open letters and angry tweets. Basically, the opponents were concerned that the loss of parking space would hurt business, create traffic congestion, and make the city ugly (!).
Literally none of this has happened. In fact, the exact opposite has happened.
Now, letâs ask ourselves why these arguments overrode the emotions of the opponents. My theory is that it is a âfailure of imaginationâ: an inability to imagine the world differently, to find creative solutions that are outside the current paradigm. They are stuck in the only model they know, and are unable to believe that another world is possible.
There is also, in my opinion, an element of ego. Many of the opponents were at the top of the social pyramid - wealthy businessmen, popular TV hosts, bourgeois, etc. The world as it is has been extremely generous to them, so why change it? Besides, the idea that a revolution could arise from outside the system that brought them into the world is frightening for them. It means that their privileges are not so solid after all.
I believe Ethereum is in a similar situation.
Our protocol is a public good. It belongs to its participants, and literally any human being can deploy an application on it. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea from the outside - have you seen what Vitalik looks like? Itâs impossible that a nerd like that, with no credibility in high society, has come up with something good. So his creation is necessarily a fraud, which must be fought
So these opinion leaders declare Ethereum an enemy to be fought, and the citizens used to following what the top of the pyramid tells them jump on the bandwagon, without asking themselves if their fight is really relevant.
TL;DR : Ethereum will (hopefully) follow the same trajectory as public transit projects.
Ecosystem: u/mgr37 explains the use of the validator mnemonic after the withdrawal address is set
As I understand it, yes the seed will no longer be useful for normal operation:
once withdrawal address set, it canât be changed
partial withdrawal will be automated to the withdrawal address.
exit is triggered with validator keys (the one used to run the validator client) and actual full withdrawal will be automated to the withdrawal address.
BUT you would still need it for:
derivating new validator keys from the same seed (not compulsory, you could use a new seed for new validators, but might be handy -> see next point)
re-generate your validator keys in case they got lost (i.e. staking rig hard drive crash). I think thatâs the main reason to keep the seed (and use the same seed when rolling new validators). You could backup the keys instead but itâs easier to keep a seed backup than keys backup IMO.
Ecosystem: u/Blueberry314E-2 does some research on the SEC vs BUSD
The New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) has told Paxos to stop making its own version of BUSD (a digital currency) âas a result of several unresolved issues related to Paxosâ oversight of its relationship with Binance in regard to Paxos-issued BUSD.â
Paxosâ BUSD product is related to, but separate from, Binanceâs self-issued Binance-pegged BUSD. Binanceâs self-issued BUSD, which is not directly regulated by NYDFS, is independently wrapped and issued by the crypto exchange on blockchains beyond Ethereum. In other words, Binance can take a single Paxos-issued BUSD, create an analogous BUSD on another blockchain (like Binanceâs own blockchain, for example), and freeze a corresponding Paxos-issued BUSD. âThe Department has not authorized Binance-Peg BUSD on any blockchain, and Binance-Peg BUSD is not issued by Paxos.â
So the issue here is not âtrueâ BUSD issued by Paxos. The problem is that Binance was sneakily issuing alternative unregulated BUSD on itâs own blockchain and others, and passing them off as the real, regulated, Ethereum based BUSD issued by Paxos.
Paxos has told its customers that it will end its relationship with Binance for BUSD. The DFS is watching Paxos closely to make sure it can handle redemptions properly, following new safety rules. Itâs important to know that Paxos was allowed to make BUSD on the Ethereum blockchain, butBinance-Peg BUSDis not approved or made by Paxos. There are no restrictions from the DFS for New York companies to list or trade the existing Paxos-issued BUSD.
Looks to me like Binance is to blame here, SEC is just trying to clean up their mess.
Regulatory news aside, Iâve just had a thought. Stakewise v3 would allow node operators to set up vaults with whitelisted addresses for allocators. This in theory allows us to set up vaults where only holders of EVMavericks/EIPandas/etc. are allowed to deposit ETH into. Iâm sure there are others here like myself who have overallocated on the hardware for our own staking rigs or have extra bandwidth. If I were to use swise I would probably set up multiple vaults if I didnât have to provide any collateral to do so. A vault or two to stake for âmembersâ who canât or wonât solo stake free of commission, then however many public vaults I want to run with a commission. This could be an interesting way for communities to drive value to their NFT Collections.
Edit: SWISE staking taking a share of the fees will probably factor into how feasible this is
Ecosystem: u/KingLeo23 has the latest of Gary Genslerâs shenanigans
BREAKING NEWS: According to the official Bitcoin Core release notes, the upcoming v23.0 will now allow users to attach files to bitcoin transactions. These attached files will be stored in the segregated witness data of the chain.
Optimism discloses a critical, unexploited and fixed bug in its Geth fork, found by Jay Freeman, that made it possible to create ETH on the Layer 2.
MakerDAO launches a $10 Million bug bounty on Immunefi.
ETH, take my energy, for $3241 to $3078, or âż0.07309 to âż0.07064.
In 2021:
Ethereum-based social media project Unite pulls the plug due to high gas prices.
The Eth2 staking contract holds over 3 million ether, currently worth more than $5.3 billion.
Celebrity-supported art collective Ethernity launches its first NFT collection.
ETH at $1742, or âż0.0388: a Musk have.
In 2020:
Trenton Van Epps lists the top 5 misconceptions about Ethereum: âEth2 will never launchâ, âEth2 makes Eth1 immediately deprecatedâ, âThere will be 2 ETH tokens from the forkâ, âAll Eth2 decisions are made by Vitalikâ, âEth2 is a catch-all fix for Eth1â.
Paul Hauner runs 100k Eth2 Lighthouse validators on 12x low-spec servers.
ETH backs its tracks from $229 to $220, at âż0.02266.
In 2019:
ETH really whips the llamaâs ass from $120 to $125, or âż0.03255 to âż0.03384.
In 2018:
Coinbase launches Coinbase Commerce, a payment plugin for e-commerce sites allowing customers to pay directly in Ethereum and a few other cryptocurrencies.
The public beta of AKASHA Emergence is launched, a decentralized social network on Ethereum and IPFS.
/u/aerotrader writes a brief introduction on how to leverage a long ETH position with Maker.
ETH plays the requiem for a lambo from $882 to $859, at âż0.10105.
Aragon, a platform for creating companies on top of the Ethereum blockchain, is launched in alpha stage.
ETH short squeezes $11.3, from âż0.0111 to âż0.01139.
In 2016:
Nick Szabo: âEthereum can solve any problem a computer can solve: but with far greater reliability and security and far less performance and efficiency.â
ETH tickles the amygdala from $3.9 to $4.4, or âż0.01043 to âż0.01163.
By now youâve probably heard that last week was the Edelweiss Interop Workshop (the successor to the Amphora Interop), where Ethereumâs core devs spent a week together in the mountains to work on withdrawals, 4844 (aka proto-danksharding) and EOF.
I was invited to join due to my work on the Protocol Guild, and - even though it still feels like a dream - I wanted to share my experience, especially as someone without a technical background.
Was the workshop a success? Absolutely. To quote a core dev, âwe left with a flawless Capella/Shanghai forkâ, and there was a 4844 testnet with all but one client team! 4844 in July? đ
Iâll admit I was INCREDIBLY nervous going into this event, I couldnât sleep properly for days in advance - I was literally going to meet the majority of my heroes, and I was 100% going to be the dumbest person in the room at all times.
Well, I can happily confirm that âyou should never meet your heroesâ does NOT apply to Ethereumâs core protocol contributors. These are some of the most interesting (and surprisingly funny) people Iâve ever met, and even though there was a lack of diversity, they came from all over the world, with all sorts of different backgrounds. And despite the fact that the price of ETH is never discussed on ACD calls, I can confirm that Ethereumâs core devs are bullish: I heard more than one conversation about ultra sound money, and RatioGang was also strongly represented! Iâm an introvert, but everyone was so incredibly welcoming and kind, I never had any issues talking to people.
Overall, the passion these individuals have for Ethereum is genuine and contagious, and I feel more confident than ever in Ethereumâs ability to execute its
